- The village in the park had started some years ago with a number of shacks where some crunchy, back to nature types had set up shop, wanting to live off the grid in the middle of the city. They were mellow and welcoming and various younger punks who were out of a home or trying to avoid their folks would crash around the encampment. This set up what would be the burgeoning punk scene that eventually had its own little community. The type who stayed longest tended to be the more extreme types, the genuine outcasts, either regulated to that status or, as time went by, choosing that status and dressing and body modifying to make a point of it. As the various cliques merged, one tended more and more to find those with the most radical body modifications hanging out and living in the park’s shanty town.
Tatoo artists were always available and eventually a couple cybermodifyers set up shop there. Whatever digital body enhancements that existed beneath a certain price bracket or under a certain legal radar could be acquired. Eventually their infamy became so widely regarded that they appealed to a select crowd. Not always a rich one, but ones that were truly committed to a life outside the system of normality.
Thus the shanty town was an incredible mix of neo futurist hippies, crunchy cyperpunks and transfuturist modification junkies, with the more daring and curious of New Albion’s hipster circuit always checking in and out
- There’s a young woman named Outi who dropped out of design school because she disagreed vehemently with the styles they were holding up as essential and which she was being pressured into emulating. It was before Zander’s time, and she and her friend liked to hang out in the shanty town, smoke chronic, and listen to the weird new beats a talented young musician named Colic was making.
She became obsessed with having cyber eyes, capable of seeing a spectrum far beyond human eyesight. She got one of the cyber artists, a brash young man called Bristo who bragged often that he was the best cyber artist in the park, to agree to replace her eyes with robotic ones. As is sometimes the case however, the louder the braggart, the more they’re compensating for something, and in Bristo’s case, he was compensating for not being nearly as good as he thought he was. He screwed up the job and while the eyes do show many ranges out side of human range, the human range is exactly what they don’t show. Outi is not exactly blind, but her sight is oddly limited, although she learned how to get around nicely seeing the spectrums she could. She can also see scent, though, which is helpful as you can read many things into the recent past based on scent perception. Her night vision is stunning.
A hacker and tech tinkerer named Isiah figured out how to plug her eyes into the Wifi network, and she can see human range using the cameras in any device within 50 yards of her person. This allows her to see a wide area, though it was still awkward to get around until someone suggested the obvious. Now, whenever she wishes, she walks around holding a tablet at chest level which she sees out of. Isiah calls her Modok which she doesn’t get, but enjoys never the less.
- Some of the people with cyber enhancements have them because of a handicap. A man named Gimmel had his throat cut while engaged in military activities for a foreign city and lost his voice. He became a drifter once he got out of the service and eventually wound up in New Albion. He came up a creative way to have a voice. he procured a particular device and got one of the biomodifiers to install it in his throat. Its original purpose was as the audio part of targeted advertisements in cutting edge shopping malls. Ads that would scan and identify you, and offer products and deals based on information collected about you from the net. His voice is the ad voice, which switches from male it female randomly and uses adspeak to form sentences. It’s awkward, but he can make sense if you know how to roll with it.
- The houses are made out of metal, wood and in some cases lined with mother boards and discarded computer guts. The old computer bits were just considered a cool, aesthetic affectation until a pair of sisters started living at the park. The twins had lost their dad to leukemia, after which their mother’s opioid use started to spike. She’d be out of it most of the time and some weekends would bring a few people over and they’d sit in the living room on a 3 day bender. The type who were hanging around the house were thus hardly the most… savory and some of them would eye the girls lustfully. The girls spent all of their time after school in cafes and game parlors, until a boy one of them had a crush on brought them to the park to hang out. Within a week they stopped going to home. It was they who came up with the idea that they could line the walls of a shack with old computer parts and have it actually be a functional computer. The computer would be the wallpaper itself. This caught on and soon everyone who had a shack was doing this.
- Not all who live at the park are tech obsessed. Some still reflect the back to the earth philosophy of the original pack who founded the encampment. The hippies. Their shacks are the nicest, all made out of wood, warm and homey, and two of them are treehouses. Three of the hippies serve as the community’s nurses, with extensive tea and herb collections some of it hand picked, which can treat a range of maladies. They have pots with different types of mud, and five baskets containing various types of mushroom. One of these mushroom types is a superfood, you could live off of it for years if you had to. They often recommend a diet of this mushroom, honey and vegetables from their garden.
The community has several gardens and many people sign up for shifts. If you want to be fed, you can either do some gardening shifts or make an acceptable trade with someone who has extra produce. Yes, one of the mushroom types are “that” type, but the hippies will not sell them, only give them freely to permanent residents on holidays, special occasions, or for depression. Because some junkies or shady types looking to party their way through life often pass through the shanty town, the hippies with the mushrooms have had their place broken into, and it has angered the entire community. Because of this, the hippies have the most dogs in the community including the beloved robodog.
- Robodog: Robodog was a police dog for several years, until he was involved in a plutonium battery bust. One of the perps shot him and then, once down, took out a knife and personally stabbed and sliced the poor canine up. He was considered unsaveable. The veterinarian, a man named Matt, insisted extra resources be given to save the dog, but was told it was impossible and to let it go. Matt quit then and there and ran off with the dying dog. He took it to the park where Zander was living by then. Matt, Zander, and a brilliant tech tinkerer named Isiah, who had could get pretty messed up without his meds, but otherwise was the go to guy for building odd tech toys, got together to save the dog. The three of them took the dog into Zander’s tent and themselves inside for 12 hours. They saved the dog, but the dog had so many little tech bits that he was forever after known as robodog. The dog became the community’s protector and was especially renowned for spotted types who would go on to cause trouble. He was so good at it that eventually the residents stopped waiting for trouble. If you came to the shanty town and Robodog didn’t like you, you were politely asked to leave immediately. Once however, a man came with some buddies to get some tech enhancements, organic penis jobs are popular, and robodog started whimpering and shaking. It freaked out some of the residents as robodog was a badass and scared of nothing. Matt and Isiah exchanged a knowing look. No one knows what happened to that man. One of the kids started trying to tell people at dinner that there was a big new mound in the garden but the adults shushed her.
- In the early days of the encampment, back when it was just the hippies, a few traveling tattoo artists had camped out with them and stayed. They set up a couplet tents which offered cheap tatooing, and this is how the enacampment first attaracted the non hippy element.
This had eventually led to cybermodifyers joining and setting up tents of their own and currently there are a row of tents with both makeshift tattoo and cybermodification parlors. The tattoo aspect has never left and is actually intergral to the biomodification. As long as you have a new tail, why not decorate it? Because truth be told, human tails are ugly. They’re just a long stick of flesh. For a long time fur was impossible, so either you had to tattoo something cool onto it, or use hair implanting methods to stick little hairs on it, hair by hair which was time consuming and painful if you had enough nerves on your new appendage.
Zander eventually got around this by adding small bits of animal DNA into the grow process so tails could have natural hair. Once this caught on, they realized they could create fur for other parts of the body, and Zander started wondering what they could accomplish by added other bits of animal DNA to other things like eyes and ears and whatnot. Granted, you could create crazy new eyes that could theoretcially see all sorts of new spectrum and install them, but you had to make sure the human brain could process the new information. Isiah could design chips to assist the brain, and this was how they accomplished a range of enhancements, but Zander was always trying to find solutions that relied on pure biology with little to no tech assistance. It was their dream.
- To say cat bits were the fashion rage of bio enhancement is a vast understatement. To be fair, the first actual long, silly cat tails that Zander successfully installed on bodies were amazing. Other biopunks in the city had put on tails, crafted eyes to look catty, ears, etc, but Zander’s were not only pure, organic and real, they actually worked. Your new cat tail looked gorgeous, was soft, and actually swished. It was what put him on the map.
After he made a couple of these tails for ecstatically pleased clients and sent them off, young people with money started showing up at the park looking for enhancements. His cat eyes actually saw in the dark and were sexy af. It was no surprise that catbits became all the rage, it’s just that after awhile, for the park denizens, it became passé. As soon as some girl named Karen showed up with her designer accessories and two friends with make up that left not a millimeter of real skin showing, they didn’t even have to ask where to go, the residents would just just mumble “catshit”and point to a couple tents. By this point Zander didn’t even do cat stuff anymore. It bored them, and Zander hated being bored with their work. They taught the other bioartists how to do all the cool stuff so that they could do it and Zander could move on to more engaging things.
- A couple lived in the shanty town who were sentient holograms. Sentient holograms are of course an impossibility, and therefore everyone knew faerie magic had to be involved somehow, but no one knew quite how.
The couple was actually on the lam. They were wanted for a string of robberies across the city. Before they had gained sentience, one of them had been a mostly naked woman vaping on the top of a skyscraper, and the other had been ecstatically drinking a can of cola. After becoming woke, they had declared war on capitalism and pulled a string of high profile robberies in order to wake the citizens of the city up. They had discovered sadly, that no one had any intention of rising up in a society that met their materials needs pretty decently and where everyone was actually rather grateful to be living in a period without any major upheaval. Major upheaval aside from the faerie persecutions elsewhere on the continent, but it was easier to just be outraged over the growing faerie oppression online.
The couple also discovered that life on the run, especially when you were an easily identifiable hologram, was a very cruddy life indeed and so, after a string of lonely, cramped safe houses, they ended up in the Park where they settled down and enjoyed life in a community of fellow outliers and outcasts.
- A girl named Luna Smith lived in the park and definitely had a little bit of faerie blood. Her father had once lived back in Avalon back when it was Victoria several decades ago. He should have been older then he ever looked and considering his drug problem should have been crappy looking and dead, but her mother once confided in Luna that that her father was a changeling. As far as Luna knew, her dad was somewhere in Avalon, but Avalon was a long ways away, difficult to get into, very weird to deal with if you did, and now with the tensions flaring up between it and nearby city state Tristovan maybe better altogether if you stood clear of. Her mother, a bit too friendly with drugs herself, had drifted around with Luna until they reached New Albion. Her mom was crashing elsewhere in the city, but when Luna visited the shanty town in the park, she knew she had found her home. On their travels, under the growing anti faerie climate, her mother had warned her sternly against doing any kind of fairy stuff. Luna wasn’t even able do any serious magic anyway, just little stuff, but she had resented having to stifle it. In the park though, she could be a bit more free with it. Her powers were mostly just making little sparkly lights, making objects shiny, and she was working really hard at making small things levitate, which she could actually do and was trying to work up to something as big as a bowl. If anyone was smoking anything and needed a light, Luna would always be the one asked to pass them one in so that she could do her levitating lighter thing.
Her real superpower though was dreams. If she walked by you while you were sleeping, she could touch your forehead and give you really good or really bad dreams.
Luna’s best friend was a girl near her age named Dawn Chatterlaine, who had learned the art of tarot reading from her grandmother and who also lived in the park. The girls loved to get into mischief together, sneak into parties in the city, and come up with bizarre things for Luna to do with her powers, like change the color of lights. Dawn had come up with the idea that they should train Luna to do a delayed nightmare curse, where Luna could touch somebody and then hours later when they went to sleep they’d have nightmares. Dawn had discovered several years ago that a species of people existed called “assholes” and she refused to accept that such a species was allowed to go about being such as they were without retribution.
