Hideee ho all! It is that time once again to sit and write a whole bunch of little snapshot of New Albion in order to have something to use for fodder for New Albion 9.
As usual i could sit and write this stuff all day. In fact, i will have to continue tomorrow because although i just sat here and kept writing and writing, i didn’t actually write any of the kind of stuff i can use for little vignettes in the song. I’ll have to do this again tomorrow and focus a bit more diligently on usable mini vignettes.
In any case, here is the first installment of Snapshot of New Albion for the Atompunk Era:
-Some of the tunnels beneath new Albion have become quite fortified and developed. They exist in the area where the Albino Tribe live. Access to them is gained by only a few locked iron doorways and trespassers are killed instantly. Inside the tunnels cover several kilometers and are quite lavish. The tribe does good trade with the aboveground world and the vast majority of their money is made by providing a very popular drug called Tansan, a rust colored powder that produces euphoria and is a mild hallucinegenic.
– In years past there was quite an effort by several criminal parties to obtain control of the drug. The albinos tribe, which had been living under New Albion for centuries, were threatened by such intense interest and things occasionally got rather bloody, but eventually peace was made when a red haired man finally brokered a deal with the tribe.
– His granddaughter, the red haired albino girl, effectively runs the criminal organization which controls the drug and is one of the most powerful criminal bosses in the city.
– After the civil war the 8 districts remained independent although over time ceded a small amount of power to the central Parliament, mostly for defense and basic infrastructure. The Parliament and Major’s office has long tried numerous attempts to gain more power but the districts have stubbornly resisted.
– The Voodoopunks gained popularity very quickly, as they were backed by the Major’s office as an attempt to establish a city wide religion that would bring the districts together and run in close, albeit secret, cooperation with the Central Office.
– This strategy allowed the Voodoopunks to expand rapidly but didn’t quite produce the results the Major’s office was looking for. The Voodoopunks had their own agendas and didn’t return the backscratching to any appreciable extent.
– When Avalon Corp came along promising exciting new technologies and sleek visions of the future, the Major’s office chose to back them, hoping to use technology to create a homogenized culture. This worked also to some extent, especially after a generation and certain events had passed. The tax shelters and favoritism Avalon Corp received allowed them to develop and market a slew of new technologies, transforming New Albion fairly quickly into a City Of The Future.
– However, Avalon Corp has deep secrets of their own. Their work on what we would call a personal computer was revolutionary and utterly undreamed of in the world New Albion exists in. The stages they had planned would culminate in the Mascot 3000 series of personal tablet interfaces. Very much like Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy type of devices, but interactive personalities.
– The Mascot 3000 had purposes beyond this of course, but that is a secret for another day.
– The vast amount of Avalon Corp’s resources eventually went into the Infraspace Exploration Project and an enormous amount of the city’s economy became inadvertently tied to it.
– With the sudden collapse of Avalon Corp (also a story for another time) the personal computer industry fell overnight. A few businesses managed to reverse engineer some basic computers and thus the great automation of every aspect of personal life in New Albion continued, although in much simpler form.
– Only one working Mascot 3000 actually exists. You will meet it soon enough.
– A species of mutant crickets lives in the ventilation system of the High Rise Park. Their song has been slowed down to a speed comprehendable to human ears. There is a subculture of residents who crawl into the ventilation system in the evening and even assemble in groups in makeshit room deep in the high rises infrastructure to sit and listen to the cricket song for hours as if attending a concert. The drug Tansan is quite popular with them.
– Jet packs were invented, put on the market and immediately taken off. However, since the Mayor’s offce possesses only a fraction of actual power, the central ban on them has been very ineffective. Accidents while operating jet packs are currently the number one cause of death in New Albion.
– There are alas, no robots. Avalon Corp would have done it had they had another generation or two to keep working. The Mascot 3000 is the closest they got.
– A series of floating agricultural cloud stations were proposed and one was built in order to conserve space and grow plants in the sky. After the sudden collapse of Avalon Corp threw the city into economic disarray, the project was abandoned and the station forgotten about. There is however still a man living there who chose not to leave. He is up there in the clouds alone, growing his food, living out a quiet life and watching from high above the world go about around him.
– The designs he uses to decide where to grow each plant and the path formations have grown more and more complex over the years. This has a bit to do with his ever increasing knowledge and mastery of agriculture, but it also has to do with the rather occult like relgion he has slowly developed over his long, lonely years up there. The plants form an elaborate sigil meant, among other things to attract the 6 disciples he believes will one day appear to join him, 3 men and 3 women. He believes they will over time give birth to a new race of cloud dwellers who will live in accordance with a great Scripture he believes will be revealed to the Group once it assembles.
– During the immense housing boom following the end of the civil war and culminating in the height of the Voodoopunk Era, a number of incredibly visionary and creative housing areas were built. After the sudden population decline however, many sit abandoned. Or at least, officially abandoned.
– The homogenization of culture and the dominance of the new era of “responsibility, productivity and serenity” brought about as a direct reaction to the passing of the incredibly dynamic Voodoopunk Era has created a much more calm and stable society. However with such stability there is a certain percentage who cannot live in such structure and monotony. Thus there are groups of younger citizens who are abandoning the comforts of the sleek high rises, houses and apartments that “do it all for you” and forming tribes who live in the many abandoned housing areas. It is from these that the new music and art trends which will come after the Atompunk Era is slowly beginning to simmer and surface.
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