One of Khalid's Boys, Sayyid is responsible for the district in which BTC has its offices. As a convert to Islam, he is much less pleased by unKoranly goings-on like women holding jobs, women walking around with their faces hanging out, women drinking alcohol... okay, so he's a misogynist as well as religious. He knows better than to explicitly lean on anyone the Sheikh wouldn't want leaned on (ie, law-abiding taxpayers, regardless of sex or clothing), but he can be obnoxious entirely within the bounds of his mandate.
Sayyid is a largish orc, about 6'6" and 350lbs, some of it still muscle. He dresses in expensive suits which wrinkle immediately (an orcish genetic trait) and traditional headgear. His skin is green, his hair sparse, and one of his tusks bronze.
His personal stats are probably not important, since he has plenty of goons to do things for him.
Third Eye provides the actual official police services for Sheikh Khalid's domain (as opposed to the unofficial enforcement performed by Khalid's Boys). Khalid is only one of their clients, but a major one, so they will generally show him every courtesy.
Third Eye agents have, naturally enough, a third eye tattooed on their forehead. This appears to grant some actual extrasensory perceptiveness, which contributes to Third Eye's reputation. On junior agents, the eye is closed, or nearly so, and does not appear to be very useful. As the agent rises in the organization, the eye opens farther, and grants greater insight. (It is not clear which way causality runs, here.) Senior Agents, with eyes almost completely open, universally wear dark glasses, although they do not seem to be blind. The uniform of the agency is a plain tan military-style outfit, with copper, silver, or gold Horus-eye insignia, although agents often operate undercover.
Chief Agents, with completely open eyes, are apparently all crazed. Chief Agent Cziller, the final authority on the Khalid account, is a scrawny bald coot about ninety years older than God. Instead of a uniform, he wears ragged, faded blue robes with an eye finger-painted on the breast, and a rag tied around his eyes. He cackles a lot, mocks those of less mystic perception than himself, leches at younger women (okay, *all* women are younger to him), and is always right.
Many of Third Eye's other agents envy Khalid for having such a personable and lucid Chief Agent assigned to his account.
It's not called the House Of Death because Jones is a walking, talking skeleton with an eerie green glow in his eyesockets (although he is). It's because there is no better place anywhere to pick up lethal objects of all kinds. There are merchants who exceed Jones's selection in a particular area, like swords or laser smallarms, but where else can you find entire cases full of poison-injecting umbrellas, dehydrated venomous spiders (just add beer), or ancient Manchurian shamanistic curse-sticks?
The House is very atmospheric, being a poorly-lit maze crammed to overflowing with lethal stuff. The danger of tripping and killing oneself is considerable (although it rarely materializes), and even if the stock doesn't get you, the unfinished wooden floor and walls (allegedly assembled from bargain-basement coffins) are always ready to grant the Death of a Thousand Splinters.
Jones's real name is a deeply-buried secret, but he's called Damnable for his all-purpose adjective, applied to anything that displeases him.
Anything that can be called a dragon is for sale here: big lizards, pterodactyls, dinosaurs, fire-breathing bat-winged monstrosities, ancient and dignified Oriental storm spirits now fallen on hard times, you name it. Service and repair are also available, at least for anything purchased there.
Even the owner is technically for sale, in adherance to some over-the-top capitalistic ideal, although his price tag reads, "Greater Azure Wyrm, mint condition, with great command of magic: 17.5 million gAu". When asked if he feels any remorse about selling his fellow dragons like dry goods, Makrindiol replies that he never sells anyone against their will; moral concerns are apparently not a concern.
Attempted theft is punished by breakfast.
Gully is a Victorian-era street rat-- literally. After the terrible accident that got the Moreau & Co factory shut down in '73, people in the East End started being born... different. A Nexan trader saved many of them from the Anti-Darwin Riots of '86, but then promptly went broke, leaving them on the streets of Nexus (only arguably an improvement).
Almost as good a housebreaker as she thinks, Gully made a passable living as a burglar until she ran afoul of McCallog while trying to liberate a few cases of Altairian brandy from the Blofeld loading docks. Moved by her tale of poverty and woe, McCallog took Gully in, cleaned her up, and put her to work. Currently just a gofer, she hopes to work her way up to receptionist, since that will mean she's learned to pass in polite (moneyed!) society. That will have to wait until she can go more than thirty seconds without slipping into cant or commenting on the value of people's portables, though.
Gully's overall shape is human (and might even be noticeably female in future years), but she is covered head to ankles in short grey fur, has long clever pink fingers, long clever pink toes, a long sinuous pink tail, and enormous round pink ears. Her face is about halfway between rat and human, with big black eyes and cute buck teeth. She still dresses like an 1880s London boy, although now that she has a job she can afford clean intact clothes. She sometimes even wears shoes.
Gully still has much of her street urchin attitude, including a profound lack of respect for other people's dignity and property rights; it's just that now "other people" means "not Blofeld people". She is fiercely loyal to McCallog, who she thinks doesn't know about her crush on him; being fourteen, she is prone to crushes on other named characters as well.
McCallog doesn't talk about his past much, so it's not clear what the transforming event was, but it must have been something pretty overwhelming to turn "Kneecapper Joe" into a devout Christian and pacifist.
He's still got all his old skills: able to shoot the wings off a fly at thirty yards, eyes in the back of his head, shrugs off the mightiest blows. He just doesn't use them to whack people anymore. He still carries a gun, but only uses it for an Intimidation bonus.
McCallog is officially Mr Blofeld's bodyguard, but since Blofeld lives at the office, he is de facto head of building security (with a couple of underlings to cover the few hours a day he's asleep, at church, or accompanying Blofeld out of the office). Having spent his formative years on the other side of the game, he is very good at what he does.
McCallog is a large, imposing man of some indeterminate but weathered age; it is plainly obvious that he's been around, and has come back from places where others haven't. He dresses in a somewhat Western style (duster, Stetson, cowboy boots), but is clearly not an actual cowboy, and has probably never ridden a horse.
Although he understands that a scary reputation is essential in his line of work, McCallog is in fact a reasonable approximation of a good person. Although he attends church regularly, gives to the poor, and so forth, he keeps his religion to himself. He is (now) both chaste and a teetotaler, but doesn't hassle other people about not being so. For obvious reasons, he has a special sympathy for people who have grown up or are growing up bad and want to reform (eg, Gully).
Catane (lit. "Eleven-six", or 138) is an example of that rare sort of suburb: the empty world.
So far as amateur archaeology is able to determine, the sapient inhabitants of Catane were wiped out by plague about 3200 years ago. Even at their height, they never occupied more than a small fraction of the world, and with their passing Catane has become unsullied and eminently human-compatible wilderness.
Unsullied until the Catane Park and Wildlife Corporation set up business, at least, although their depredations are quite minor and responsibly handled. The interface to Catane is the basement of the CPWCo building, which is also the basement of a ruined fortress on Catane. The wooden parts of the fortress apparently burned at the time of the plague, and erosion and earthquakes have tumbled down the stone walls, leaving a picturesque ruin halfway up the side of a mountain valley. The valley, which includes a good-sized stream with plenty of fish and raftable rapids and a couple square kilometers of lake suitable for boating and swimming, is equipped with cleared campsites, well-marked hiking trails, guardrails on drop-offs, filtered running water, rangers to keep away dangerous predators and rescue damnfool tourists, outhouses, and all the other amenities city people expect to find on weekend camping trips.
Outside the clearly-marked boundaries, however (with the exception of a few scheduled and escorted group tours to local attractions), you're on your own. This is not particularly harsh: the few local predators avoid strange-smelling and weird-acting creatures like humans, the climate is warm and the weather mild, and the mountains full of clear streams and small game. The lower valleys and plains are covered in man-tall or even troll-tall grass, which feeds huge herds of huge, horned, tusked, proboscidean creatures. Although there are many species of these creatures, and hunters and gourmets are well aware of the differences, most people refer to them generically as "theriums". Therium feet are the second most common way for damnfool tourists to come to bad ends, surpassed only by rock-climbing without proper precautions.
In addition to camping, CPWCo runs safaris for big-game hunters who want to bag theriums. To the disgust of some, their regulations keep things sporting and at a level that has minimal impact on the therium population: no machineguns, no high-energy weapons, no hunting from helicopters, strict bag limits, etc. The CPWCo guides are quite fervent about keeping their clients' activity to an ecologically sustainable level; there are persistent rumors that hunters who engage in wantonly destructive misbehavior come home in body bags.
Standard gunpowder doesn't work on Catane, but there are known substitutes for it, as for gasoline and natural gas. Simple electrics (up through vacuum tubes) work, but only platinum and iridium seem to be good conductors, so Catane-compliant radios are *very* expensive. Catane has substantial mana flows, and suspiciously smug though inarticulate nature spirits, but no natural gods nor associated demiplanes. None of the local microbes seem to have any taste for alien metabolisms, although most of the biosphere is nutritionally compatible with humans. Both ways.
Although they come from a completely different reality and have no history in common, never mind a traditional rivalry, the orcs formerly of Femur Pass couldn't let elves get all the grog-shop revenue. They bought the building across the street from Club Avalon, gutted it, glopped on concrete for the proper cavernous appearance, named it in honor of their late chief, and started selling rotgut.
The ambience of Pig Knife is decidedly primitive: drum and horn music, leaping fires, meat roasted while-you-wait, arm-wrestling matches and brawls. It's not actually dangerous, but it does have a reputation for getting one's date's pulse pounding, and it's a good place for letting go and reveling boisterously.
The owner-of-record of Pig Knife, and the leader of the exiled Femur Pass clan, is the shaman Fire Horn, who seems to draw mana or life energy of some kind from revelry and fun. The magic power he gets from Pig Knife is used to ensure the safety of his people, and any excess gets turned into hard cash through provision of confidential magical services.
The Subway consists of a long subterranean tunnel, twelve meters wide and ten to the top of the gracefully arched roof. A spiderwebby pattern of green-gold metal forms two tracks along the length of the tunnel, the pattern tighter at the edges of the tracks and looser along the middle. At each end is a fifty-meter circular room with a complex maze of tracks that forms the equivalent of a switching yard. The whole thing is lined with some white, marble-like stone.
The four original stations are large, airy, decoratively-columned places lying across and above the tunnel, with a broad staircase leading down to a boarding platform on each side of the tracks, and another leading up to the surface. With considerable effort, another three stations have been gouged into the fantastically durable stone; despite half-hearted attempts, their esthetic quality is far inferior.
There are twenty-three cars, each originally a four-by-ten meter slab of the same white stone, with a spiderweb on the bottom that keeps it magnetically suspended approximately a meter (depending on load) above the track. Colonel Oligarth (who operates the subway under charter from Prester John's Nexan viceroy and daughter, Mary), has had superstructures attached by means of the holes in the edges, making them more comfortable for passengers and more convenient for freight. Ducted fans propel the cars along the track at up to thirty kilometers an hour.
The truly interesting thing about the Subway, however, is that although the tunnel is only twenty-five kilometers long, the two end stations are 340 kilometers apart as the winged Nexan native in a hurry flies. Furthermore, although the line connecting the stations runs through several underground complexes, at the same depth as existing caves and catacombs, it does not intersect any of them. Digging down from the surface reaches whatever would normally be expected to be there; only digging upward from the Subway makes a new entrance. The distance ratio of 13.6 appears to hold for the whole length, judging by the above and below positions of the stations.
In her native reality, Dame Cleo was a special investigator for the Duke of Grand Sussex. In Nexus, she puts those skills to use as a confidential agent (which seems to be like the exciting bits of being a private investigator). Although she is for hire, she maintains the standards of chivalry, and has been known to refund the money of a client who has conned her into doing something unknightly... to the client's next of kin. She doesn't claim to be infallible, but those on the wrong end of her wits frequently accuse her of false modesty.
Dame Cleo is a tall, well-built woman in her forties but looking ten years younger, with close-cropped blonde hair and black eyes. She is cheerfully practical and occasionally cheerfully ruthless, and is never at a loss for what to do. She has adapted well to Nexus in an idiosyncratic sort of way; when armed for war, she wears plate armor of ceramic composite (and has barding to match for her enormous white gelding, Seagull) and carries the elf-forged titanium sword Sunrise. Normally she approximates her native costume with Tshirts and lycra tights, but rumors credit her with at least one spectacularly scandalous evening gown. She still walks or travels on horseback everywhere, but has been learning to ride a motorcycle now that Seagull is getting on in years.
Dame Cleo's arms are: a seagull, argent, flying above the upper half of a sun, or, all on a field of sky blue. Her armor and Seagull's barding are both sky-blue, with her arms blazoned on the thickest part of the breastplate of each.
The tangle of pipes, tanks, and pressure vessels that forms the Perfect Organics plant occupies the whole of a kilometer-wide zone adjacent to Khalid's domain; capped-off lines at the edges suggest that it was pulled from the middle of an even larger installation. Even if not as great as it once was, Perfect Organics supplies a huge section of Nexus with such essentials as gasoline and gunpowder, as well as a wide variety of less obvious but equally important commercial and industrial chemicals.
The inhabitants of Perfect Organics come in three varieties, which all look approximately like horse-sized bugs covered in loose-fitting reptile hide (though they have complex eyes, proper lungs, and all the other requirements of animals that size), called for obvious reasons Fats, Skinnies, and Worms. Although their insectile appearances makes people think of hives and caste systems, there does not appear to be any systematic division of labor or responsibility among the three types. Few details are known, however, as the Organics rarely leave their plant nor allow outsiders further than the loading yard.
The Organics communicate among themselves by pheromones and color changes; despite a wide variety of somewhat alarming vocalizations, they neither use nor understand speech. They do have the concept of writing, and are fluent in the written forms of a great many languages. No one has ever seen them use their native writing, if it even exists.
The Organics have a regrettable lack of faith in currency and credit: they accept coinage at its metal value, bills at their processed-wood-pulp value, and electronic credit not at all. At the main gate is posted a list of what goods and services they currently desire, the amounts they want, and how much they'll trade for them. Deuterium, helium, and dysprosium are always on the list, and other actinides, lanthanides, and miscellaneous heavy elements are usually listed unless a large shipment has been received recently. The rest varies, although steel, fluorine, and complex hydrocarbons are common.
In addition to bulk chemicals, Perfect Organics produces a small selection of more complex compounds such as pharmaceuticals and biotech tools. Persistent rumor has it that the Organics use the still-living bodies of sapients as feedstocks for them, but such a request has never been posted on the price list.
No community would be complete without a coterie of self-righteous busybodies, and the ladies of the Temperance Society provide that essential function to Sheikh Khalid's domain. The Chairwoman of the society, the eminently respectable widow Delia Jones, gives six-times-weekly harangues on the Great Evils of drink, gambling, wanton behavior, sex education in schools, taxation of clergy, and atheism. These lectures are well-attended by the society members and anyone they can rope in (typically friends and family, plus anyone in the shelter; see below); anyone convinced by Mrs Jones's arguments then goes out to promote the cause of the day. This usually consists of picketing some Offender Against Morality And Decency, but might only require writing a strongly-worded letter to the Proper Authorities.
The work that actually justifies the society's existance happens around back, where Mrs Jones doesn't have to see it. Caribald Archer, a former Person Of Low Morals, since Redeemed From His Fallen State by Mrs Jones, runs a combination detox center/runaway shelter/soup kitchen, staffed by the more functional residents and a few volunteers from the community and supported by charitable donations. Anyone who has such a problem that they can't take care of themself is welcome, and will be cared for as best as possible, but for both practical and philosophical reasons, Mr Archer encourages the needy to turn to their families if at all possible, and will mediate in disputes or flat-out implore families to take back their lost sheep.
Mr Archer has enough medical knowledge to sustain the unfortunates through drug withdrawal, and can treat wounds, diagnose various diseases and administer antibiotics. More serious problems he refers to the nuns of St Setsuko, which is always a point of friction with Mrs Jones (a good Albian).
Mrs Jones is every inch the proper upper-class Victorian matron, from gold-shod hooves to polished, curling horns (most of what's between is properly hidden by a gown of modest and ostentatiously unostentatious cut). Her Sadly-Departed husband, a colonel of flamers who Died Heroically in Darkest Stygia, left her a considerable fortune which she devoted to the raising of their twin daughters. When the Ungrateful Trollops ran off to become not only Fallen Women but members of the working class, Mrs Jones disowned them and turned her efforts and finances to Good Works, that other mothers might not be so bereft.
Mrs Jones is such a Pillar of Rectitude that gossip irresistably links her name with that of every gentleman above the age of twelve, but there is not the slightest shred of evidence to suggest that she is a hypocrite.
Mr Archer is a saurian, but from one of the realities which has an almost exact duplicate populated by primates, so he is quite at home in human society. Small and fine-boned, he sports the exaggerated dewclaws typical of the Windsors, and manages to look dapper even in shirtsleeves. He doesn't discuss his past much, but seems to have been a corpsman in some colonial war; speculation diverges on whether he is a gentleman fallen on hard times, or the bastard offspring of royalty. Either way, he definitely has a dark past he is trying to atone for, and brooks no interference in his good works. In a soft-spoken, conciliatory, they'll-never-find-the-bodies sort of way.
The Hall itself is a small building with a large facade in the classical style. It does have seven pillars across the front, each crowned with an angel or grace or somesuch allegedly demonstrating one of the seven virtues. The front part of the building is the lecture hall, which is also done in the classical (ie, simple) style and contains only a podium, a screen for an overhead projector, and a bunch of uncomfortable wooden chairs (to encourage the lectured-to to go out and do Good Works).
The rear of the building is Mr Archer's domain. It contains his tiny apartment, three small dormitories for Men, Women, and Others, a large room used as the cafeteria, soup kitchen, and assembly room, a few private closets for those too unwell to stay in the dorms, and the necessary rooms. The residents keep the place spick and span, but there's not much to be done about the whitewashed walls and institutionally sturdy carpeting.
Simple geometric shapes (cylinders, cones, pyramids) of clear or translucent crystal about as tall as a human, the Crystals of Vothe can be found widely distributed across Nexus, representing one of the most peculiar known interfaces with a suburb.
The strange people (and sometimes other things) that wander out of and into the Crystals correspond to the virtual personas of players of an online game running on a network in a suburb reality (or possibly multiple realities; descriptions vary quite widely). The Players perceive Nexus in whatever way corresponds to their usual computer interface; to them, there is no difference between Nexus and a "real" virtual environment. Players generally retain the belief that they are just playing an extremely large and well-done game; even the best explanations of what is really happening are admired as pinnacles of AI programming but not actually believed. Only the most suspicious and well-educated Players suspect that the "Nexus Game" is beyond the capacity of any computer system existing in their world.
Some convenient degree of timeslip brings Players to about the same speed as the ordinary inhabitant of Nexus; even if they are really typing slowly on a QWERTY keyboard, they appear to move and react at normal speeds. Players with slow interfaces may appear to think very quickly as a result.
The physical bodies of Players usually behave normally enough, although they may display great innate powers or wield highly effective and portable technology if appropriate to their character. They can be destroyed, although not necessarily easily (again, combat-oriented Players may be extremely powerful in a variety of ways), but rarely feel much in the way of pain, and are prone to reappearing for another "game session". Slain Players usually vanish, but not always. When they don't, their belongings are regarded as prime salvage, and often spark more intensive fights than their living presence.
Needless to say, Players often have extremely obnoxious attitudes and are in general not well-liked, even if they appear pleasant or reasonable.
About two hundred years ago, some clever soul got the notion to skimp on the safety measures for disposal of the byproducts of certain magical procedures. Over time, the bad juju seeped into the surrounding environment, pieces of which vanished one by one as is the Nexan way. This being magic and not chemistry, the virulence was concentrated instead of diffused, until the last remaining place, Freerman Park, had all of it and then some. Even that might not have been so bad, had not a well-meaning local magician placed strong wards around the park to protect the children who played there.
Confined by the wards, the waste power festered and mutated, as magic is wont to do, until it found a way (although attributing it with conscious intent would be horribly misleading) to affect the lives of those unfortunate enough to be inside the wards.
When the locals found out that their children weren't growing older, they were very upset, but there wasn't a lot that could be done about it. The park was fenced off to keep anyone else from falling prey to the curse, but no one could cure the children already afflicted. They grew to just below the age of puberty and stopped there. Forever.
Even in Nexus, never growing up was weird enough to socially divide the afflicted children, especially as their minds grew older and wiser and more cynical. Like other groups of similar freaks throughout Nexus, they banded together against the rest of the world, forming their own tribe and taking as their territory the one place no one else wanted but that they were perfectly safe in.
The original hundred Furimmerzicklein ("Forever Kids") have dwindled to forty or so, but those are the smartest, fastest, luckiest forty percent, and they have two centuries of Nexan experience behind those twelve-year-old faces. Over the years, they have added to their ranks by luring runaway children to live with them in the park -- a week of nights sleeping in the contaminated zone is all the curse needs to take hold -- so their total numbers have remained about the same, but the original 'zicklein are definitely in charge.
The 'zicklein look like perfectly normal children of whatever species they once belonged to, of an age just below the start of puberty. Most of the 'zicklein are human, but there are saurians, skrill, and stranger things among their number. Although they are not strong, they are as well-coordinated as anyone of their true age (which can be "extremely" for the older ones) and have had time to become impressively skilled. Although the curse does not make them unkillable, it does make them extremely death-resistant and quick-healing, and free from the ravages of disease and similar unpleasantness.
Needless to say, having their virtues dismissed because of their appearance has fairly thoroughly embittered most of the 'zicklein. Ironically, this often leads them to display an entirely child-like cruelty to outsiders, sometimes in ways obviously intended to repudiate any impression that they are children.
The leader of the Furimmerzicklein is chosen by ballot when there is sufficient dissatisfaction with the previous one, but is currently and has usually been Riller, a tough-looking blond human boy with a fondness for rocket launchers and adult women. Under Riller's regime, the 'zicklein have achieved fairly respectable status as a gang, controlling not only Freerman park but much of the surrounding territory, including the important and profitable Mazert Municipal Cemetary crossing.
The park itself is a fairly ordinary-looking city park, half a dozen flattish, grassy hectares with groves of trees here and there, and the dry bed of a brook that used to run through the center. By the brook is what used to be an assortment of playground equipment for children descended from brachiators but is now a fortress of scavenged lumber, sheet metal, and assorted whatnot. It doesn't need to be very sturdy, because few are willing to enter the park, but it's enough to keep the rain off and low-caliber rounds out. On the inside, the fortress is barbarously luxurious, but quite cramped, and has little in the way of accomodations for visitors.
A narrow strip of ground only a hundred meters wide but more than three kilometers long, the cemetary is impassable to vehicular traffic due to being covered with large marble tombstones and larger concrete tank traps. There is one road across, which came pre-equipped with a fortified checkpoint, to the unending delight and profit of whatever gang happens to own it. Although normally the cemetary and its toll gate would be easy enough to detour around, at one end of the strip is a large zone with unpleasant natives whose totem spirits object to motor vehicles, and at the other is a kilometer-long arcology. That checkpoint is therefore the only way to drive across a front of almost ten kilometers. The utility of the route is counterbalanced by the fact that it would not really be that hard to create another crossing, so although the stream of revenue from tolls is constant, it cannot be too large. Still, it beats working for a living.
Machine City is a suburb, connected to Nexus in two places about forty kilometers apart. Although the distance between the two interfaces in Machine City is closer to sixty kilometers, travelling that way bypasses some quite unpleasant zones, so the Machine Citizens do a good business on their toll road. They also export high-temperature superconductors, and take in return rare and precious elements, and industrial diamond and other high-tech materials.
The Machine Citizens are intelligent robots, of course, although their technology is not in general at the level where such things would be expected. In fact, with two exceptions, they are only at about level 6 on the usual scale. Those two exceptions are the previously-mentioned high temperature superconductors, which they export, and the peculiar crystals which apparently hold their minds or souls, which they take great pains to keep out of the hands of others.
Although the Machine Citizens come in a wide variety of shapes, none of them are particularly humanoid. Wheels are the most common form of locomotion; tracks, ground-effect skirts, and helicopter rotors are also popular. Walkers are very rare in Nexus, although apparently are used more heavily in Machine City itself. The soul crystals are small, but the sensors, superconducting power supply, and locomotion and manipulatory systems add up to about a hundred kilos for a minimal Citizen, and many of them are much larger.
Radar is the primary sense of most Citizens, and radio their standard method of communication, but they can and do use many other senses and faculties, including speech, and can add or modify them at will. In Nexus, most Citizens equip themselves with guns (electromagnetic rather than chemical) and chainsaws or inert blades, just in case.
Popular fiction to the contrary, Machine Citizens are fully sapient, as capable of dealing with the complexity and ambiguity of the real world as any proteinaceous brain. Asking one for the last digit of pi will only get you laughed at. (Yes, they do have senses of humor, and a full if somewhat odd range of emotions.)
The two entrances to Machine City are undecorated brown concrete boxes about the size of three-story office buildings, which the Citizens built over the interfaces in a single night. Although the blockhouses are well-guarded by heliraptors and doom buggies, passage back and forth is not strictly regulated, and traffic is heavy at all hours.
Machine "City" is of course an entire world, but the part relevent to the ordinary Nexan is a dry valley between two ranges of low, scrubbily-forested mountains near the ocean. The entire valley is covered with square concrete buildings, which appear soul-killingly identical and boring to vision but have the data and code of the Machine Civilization blazoned across them in variable radar reflectivity.
There is a free trade zone around each blockhouse, with wide plazas for moving freight, buildings for private negotiations, and even accomodations for visitors, but high concrete walls keep them isolated from the bulk of the city. A broad highway runs between the free trade zones, but it too is walled off. Only at the top of a particularly high overpass can visitors get a glimpse of the swarming activity of the Machine Civilization.
Some Nexans refer to Machine City as Roboville, but that name more properly, or at least more commonly, belongs to a zone well to the north, inhabited by the android survivors of a human-exterminating plague.
The signs over the door of this modest storefront announce it as "A family concern" and "In the trade since 581", but don't say anything about which trade that might be.
Inside, the store is a high, long barn of a place, with sparse lights suspended from bare rafters. Shelves line the side walls, but the greater part of the store is occupied by double rows of stoneware bins, small ones on racks and large ones on the floor, each with a ceramic scoop. The shelves hold a remarkable range of dry goods, from safety-green duct tape to 1-cm-mesh chicken wire, from phosphorescent spray-paint to coyote poison, from 100m rolls of aluminum foil to screwdrivers labelled in MÅ.
Many locals shop at G&S for these sorts of strange items not findable in normal establishments, but the bulk of the store's sales seem to come from the bins. Strange people from distant parts can be found here at all hours, browsing the bins knowledgeably and sometimes scooping the contents into paper sacks or canvas bags. Those substances are variously lumpy, granular, or powdery, but always of unwholesome appearance and frequently noisome odor. The bins are labelled in strange angular characters corresponding to no known alphabet or syllabary, and the peculiar customers are cryptic and defensive about their purchases.
Glaaki & Spawn is open twenty-three hours a day, closing only between four and five in the morning. That hour is allegedly set aside for restocking, and indeed the shelves and bins are full again when the store reopens, but no deliveries are ever seen to arrive.
The only employee ever seen at G&S is a lovely young woman with black hair cut in a flapper bob and huge dark eyes. The Storeclerk of Glaaki is apparently on-duty twenty-three hours a day; it's not clear what she does during the restocking period. The metallic gold and bronze pattern of her straight flapper dress is sometimes seen to be different, and she is always neat and well-groomed, but she does not seem to spend any time achieving that state. She is always cheerful, polite, and ostensibly helpful, but gives evasive answers or polite refusals to answer to the really interesting questions, like the whereabouts of Mr Glaaki, the source of the store's strange stock, or her own name. She will translate the labels on the bins, but the results are unhelpfully on the order of "selkhid granules" or "ground merrizen".
The Storeclerk of Glaaki is never seen outside the store, and does not appear to have a life of any sort. Offers of socialization, whether innocent or prurient, are cheerfully and politely declined on the grounds that she never gets off work. Some people claim to know someone who witnessed "Lipreader" Sauks talk her into the back room, but no one was there personally, and no one's seen Lipreader to ask him.
This file was last modified at 1635 on 22Jun99 by trip@idiom.com.