Downtown

One of the many views downtown

If you’re not careful, the bright city lights will blind you. By day, the crowded plazas and broad streets are home to flashy super-stores and tourist attractions. When the sun sets, the real illumination reveals itself: from neon signs to jumbo screens, passers-by are bombarded with fluorescent light and mesmerizing commercial messages. The smoky side streets are laden with theaters, clubs, and bars, their signs flashing in the dark. Downtown never really takes a break, so it often seems to blur into a high-exposure time-lapse of days and nights.

What really happens in the shadows of the neon signs? From mad preachers raising support for their cause to pushers selling designer drugs with a mysterious logo, Rifts with big aspirations often operate here. If you’re a legend trying to get at the masses, downtown is your place.

But there’s a deeper side to that. There is something in this dark marketplace, in the subliminal urges pumped into unaware minds. All these people so frantically seeking relief generate a lot of angst. Who’s profiting from it? Is there someone behind all the reckless hedonism and blind consumerism, painting the night in colorful strokes of ‘want’ and ‘have’?

# **AREAS OF INTEREST**

## The Smoky Jazz Club:

Music coaxes you in as you pass by the Smoky Jazz Club; it sounds like a tune you once heard, a long time ago. It evokes a warm and familiar feeling which compels you to enter. There, amidst wafts of cigarette smoke, a mixed crowd of well-off enthusiasts and bohemian artists listen to the switchbacking improvisations of a small band of suited musicians, accentuated by the husky voice of a singer in a flowing evening gown. Unexpected help or a fateful meeting may emerge from the smoke. Then again, it can always be that you were dreaming, or drunk, and when you leave this place you’re still just as depressed as you were when you came in.

## THE SCIENCE HUB

The Science Hub is a cluster of privately owned labs and medical facilities. It is here that corporations run intensive research in a race to find the next miracle drug or technological gamechanger. The staggering worth of the minds working in these facilities combined with the corporations’ mutual distrust drives them to keep their own security details as well as some very creative intrusion countermeasures. Each security force not only tackles threats to the company’s interest on the premises but also actively investigates, pursues, and shuts down possible risks across the City. One of the most heavily-guarded facilities in the complex is indirectly owned by Helix Labs, a pharmaceutical giant more publicly known through its many subsidiaries, such as Global Genetics or Particle Core. Needless to say, the police have no effective authority here; the scrubbed white walls reek of lawyers and payoffs.

## THE THEATER AVENUE

The Theater Avenue glitters with stardust. The City’s oldest and indeed largest theaters and opera houses line this expansive avenue, while smaller and more obscure establishments scuttle along the side streets. Spectacular productions succeed one another at a staggering pace, vying for the fickle audience’s attention and money. Behind the scenes, actors strain to achieve greatness while hard-working stage crews put together grandiose sets and complex lighting and stage effects, only to take it all apart again after a few shows.

One of the longest-running shows in town, The Sad Tale Of, can be found in the established but obscure Old Orphanage theater. Hidden in a side street, the theater is visited mostly by those savvy to its existence, but has gained a steady following over the years. People describe this show as touching and remarkably life-like, but almost too wistful to watch. Some have seen it dozens of time, claiming that each performance is completely different than the other, but words fail those who try to explain. “You simply must see it,” is all they’ll manage.

## Run-down Apartments

Run-down Apartments is all some can afford if they want to live downtown. Usually situated in an inconvenient location, such as just above the subway railway or a noisy restaurant, this apartment suffers from all manners of pollu�tion. During the day, the dust and sunlight filtering through the blinds make the air here hazy and dense, almost dreamlike. At night, the neon sign attached to the side of the building casts an eerie glow on the place, topped by electrical crackle.

Still, despite crumbling paint on the walls and bad plumbing, it’s a good enough place to put your head down, for a while. The fridge is usually empty, except for a bottle of cheap alcohol. The rolled up wad of money under the exposed stained mattress is gone. But it’s a shelter and it’s safe. That is, until that night when you’ll hear someone fiddling with the lock on the door and you’ll wish you had installed another one.