Rockfall
Apr 30, 2023 20:30:50 GMT -5
Post by L△LIA on Apr 30, 2023 20:30:50 GMT -5
Placeholder for Rockfall general overview?
And/or a sub-neighborhood overview?: The Cad, The Dugout, Granite Vista, and Monsterblock. Link to each neighborhood header post for easier navigation. (Shear Hill, Highland, and Lower Highland have gotta have their own threads if info gets posted about them. Too confusing to shove Rockfall-adjacent stuff in here.)
Each location within a neighborhood probably needs its own post, so that there can be sub-info about descriptions, culture, residents, etc. There's too much otherwise. Cad Park alone is already such an info dump.
Tbh this all needs a wiki at this point, but shoving it here anyhow.
Granite Vista
Rockfall economic upper class.
New build neighborhood (built on pasture land that once surrounded the quarry perimeter), it started as a small gated community for H8ERADE executives, but has since expanded to include the wealthy "tourist" families of Rockfall Public as the school gained notoriety for its athletics programs. McMansion suburbia hellscape.
Locations:
- Very Fresh grocery store (aka The V Fresh): On Old Quarry Road, right on the border of The Cad.
- Gated residential community: aesthetic inspiration is the McMansion Hell blog.
- Entrance guardhouse: Bish Godsick is one of the security guards lol.
- Golf course: Lots of dead grass spray painted green. Driving range cliff (the balls are hit into the Dugout).
- Park
- The Wrenley house: an old farm house that the gated residential community was built around when the Wrenley's sold their land to pay off debts/avoid the house being seized. Does not look like the other (nearly identical houses). HOA hates it.
- Marijuana Dispensary?
Culture:
- Exy rec league team: Granite Vista Gremlins
- Tourists™: families that move to Rockfall for the school's high ranking athletics teams and move back to wherever they came from the second the kids graduate.
- The wall around the gated community is frequently graffitied. Keep Rockfall shitty!
People:
- Ilyich Ames [Aya] + family: Coach Q & Dr. Ames [NPC]
- Axel Whiskeyjack [Lalia] + family
- Wilder & Zim Zombi [Lalia] + family
- Odd Fawkes [Lalia] + family
- Rageon & Jett Wrenley + family: Nikki [NPC]
- Ramona Garcia + family [NPC]
The Cad
Rockfall economic upper middle class.
The city center and oldest part of Rockfall, built when the quarry was still active by workers who didn't want to commute back and forth from Shear Hill. A lot of the infrastructure is falling into disrepair, because if a business is going to put money into their location at this point, then they're going to try to make that location Granite Vista. There's an increasing number of abandoned storefronts and apartment buildings.
Locations:
- Rockfall Public School: Brutalist architecture. Concrete, more concrete, and rusted metal. Graffiti. Immaculate athletics facilities; everything else is borderline condemned. (Architecture references: George Pepper Middle School, St. Stephen's College (China), School of Planning and Architecture Vijayawada.) Tessera may be signed over to the school to support the lunch program, in exchange for free meals for participating students. Breakfast program funded by the Rat City Vanguard Party. The mascot is Gritty.
- Community home
- Abandoned parking garage
- Training Center: Offers merit scholarships only and very few of them. Training center kids are primarily Tourists; enrollment CAN be bought and frequently is (particularly by students struggling to qualify for Rockfall Public teams). Has a dormitory.
- Thrift story
- Movie theater
- Stairway to Hell
- The Old Rail Depot
- Cadmium Park
- Pawn Shop: full of old junk, not even cool junk. The owner got stabbed a year or two back. It happens.
- Laundromat: Smells weird. People are always washing bizarre things. Not the worst place you could pick for a date spot tbh. Movie tickets cost money; watching people wash weird stuff is free.
- King Joe's Exotic Pets: Exotic pet store. Definitely a front for something. Reptiles, amphibians, fish. Scrap metal/garbage reptile sculptures crawling on the walls/ceiling. (Art reference: Natsumi Tomita.) Neon signs throughout. Burnt out fluorescent lighting, but it's kept pretty dark in there anyhow. Busted up tile flooring, full of cracks and missing chunks. Sells "reptile dysfunction" merch: t-shirts, stickers, etc. Actually sells some pet care supplies, just not any of the animals. Obese basset hound naps on the floor mat by the register.
- Rockfall Liquor Mart: on the corner of the intersection with Old Quarry.
- Corner Value Store: Best instant ramen selection in Rockfall
- Rat City Arcade: Located on Packer's Corner. Owned/run by the Von Hell family. "NO REFUNDS" signage throughout the establishment; sometimes aesthetic (cute neon signs), but mostly just prominent. Ban wall/wall of shame (like liquor stores putting fake IDs on the wall): Mostly it's just Sevyn's ex. Off-brand coin-ops (Back Alley Beatdown: a fighting game with weird animal characters. The leaderboard has been virtually all Hatchet and Leo since the summer before 7th grade.), air hockey, pinball, skee-ball, dance dance communist revolution, antique fortune teller machine (these fortunes are kinda fucked up. Sometimes they're just blank or say "no" or "NO REFUNDS". Other times they're punishingly intricate and cryptic… isn't that just an excerpt from Sevyn's tabletop RPG rule book??? (yes.)), photo booth (Might be haunted; no one is really sure why there're blurry marks or sometimes you don't show up in your own photos. (No refunds.)), ticket exchange prize booth (console-ation prizes), claw machines (Primarily contains homemade garbage. Defective plushies with too many eyes and mouths. Ephialtes of the Damned figurines. Expired candy. Knives (better hope it's not one from the lost and found; sometimes they get lost here on purpose). Promo copies of Rageon's zombie movies. If you see a Shear Hill peacekeeper here, they're probably trying to win back evidence. The claw machine doubles as the Lost and Found. If you didn't want to pay to win back the left shoe you left in laser tag, you shouldn't've signed the waiver.)
- Rat City Arcade Laser Tag: The laser tag arena is hacked together out of so much random junk. It's just two or three stories of a bunch of bullshit. You never know what you're going to find. Must sign a personal injury waiver to play.
- The Garage: Hosts meetings of the Rockfall Machinists Collective on Tuesdays and open shop times on Saturdays. Connected to a Bike/skate shop + chop shop?
- Rockfall General Hospital: Right on the border of Granite Vista. A small medical center that's mostly concerned with emergency care, primary care, and referring people to places outside of Rockfall if they can afford it.
Culture:
- Mystery Casserole Monday (Rockfall Public): All of the previous week's leftovers get mixed together along with whatever started to spoil over the weekend. Sometimes they cover it with cheese, but usually it's gravy. Features a lot of ketchup.
- Potato Boat Day (Rockfall Public): A slice of fried bologna with a scoop of instant mashed potatoes on top, with shredded generic yellow cheese melted over it. Mmm. It's lowkey a holiday, especially for the history teacher — who wears a Potato Boat Day hat made of newspaper and makes students sing the Potato Boat Day song as he marches them to the lunch room. Enthusiastic students also make their own hats.
- Ridiculous bike antics. Who can make the wildest bike? 10 feet tall? Victorian style with the one giant wheel? Must be functional; they actually ride them around Rockfall.
- Exy rec league team: Cadmium Park Creatures
- Rockfall Ratmas: the best stuff is in The Cad
- Drinko: everyone's favorite party game. A fusion of Bingo and Truth or Dare which exists to facilitate getting fucked up!
- Black Market, Ink.: Run out of the Von Hell arcade basement, it's an underground gamer collective, based around a homemade MMO (Animal Crossing meets Diablo; 16-bit graphics) that connects players via radio wave internet. Player tech setup varies wildly, as it's all made from scavenged parts, but there's always a telltale antenna set up on their home. Rulebreakers may be punished with the Banhammer. An actual hammer used to smash up their antenna connection (and any other gaming equipment that might be accessible).
- Cad park in the winter: For sure has a crazy amount of snow dumped along the quarry wall from Shear Hill getting plowed.
People:
- Leo Wordriff [Aya] + parents
- Astraea Eldritch-Valentfyre [Lalia]
- Sevyn Von Hell [Lalia] + father
- King Joe (King Joe's Exotic Pets) [NPC]
- Tank, Diesel, Welda (The Garage) [NPC]
Monsterblock
Rockfall economic lower middle class.
Very small, but extremely population-dense "neighborhood" (it is primarily a single monstrosity of a high rise building that swallows up multiple city blocks). Built when the H8ERADE factory moved into Rockfall, to house incoming workers. There was a coordinated effort between H8ERADE and the more affluent neighborhoods of District 2 to offer Rockfall jobs/housing to the homeless population, in order to secure cheap and disposable labor while also "cleaning up the streets".
Locations:
- Most street level units have been converted into business storefronts. Some have been converted better than others. This infrastructure is scary.
- Several people sell food out of their apartment kitchens: vats of mystery soup, tamales and flan, etc. A lot of the food is chicken/egg heavy, due to how common it is for Monsterblock residents to keep chickens. The roof of the building has numerous chicken coops.
- Rockfall House of Waffles (R-HOW): Their waffles aren't very nice :( but their pancakes are good, especially if you're drunk. Open 24/7. They make most of their money between midnight and 7am.
- The senior center: Primarily a gambling hall (high rollers ONLY). You might win big. You might get stabbed with a cane sword. It might be both. Dominoes, cards, mahjong, checkers, chess. Quilting, if you're bad.
- The Wick house: A holdout house (small Queen Anne Victorian style cottage) that Monsterblock was built around. Owned by the same slumlord that owns Monsterblock, to hide his secret second family. He lives in Highland.
- H8ERADE factory: Geese swim in the runoff and it turns them colors. (Orange is their favorite; they don't like green.)
- The Pool: An old community pool that wasn't maintained and ended up being closed down. For a long time it was full of old eviction furniture and random fallen garbage, but a while back it was cleaned out by a bunch of teenagers who wanted to skateboard in it. Now it's an actual skatepark and — ironically — one of the better maintained spaces in Rockfall.
- Liquor store (on South Quarry Road)
Culture:
- Exy rec league team: Monsterblock Monsters
- Annual Monsterblock Monster Block Party (first weekend in October)
- Keeping chickens in Monsterblock apartments: rooftop and exterior walkways
- Rockfall Ratmas: the most stuff is in Monsterblock
People:
- Nox Godsick [Lalia] + family: Bish [NPC] + mom/dad (2nd floor)
- Salem Wick [Lalia] + family: Arcadia [NPC] + mom (holdout house)
- Noe & Navillera Fear [Lalia] + family: mom/dad (12th floor)
- Becky "Collateral Damage" Haversmith + family (2nd floor) [NPC]
The Dugout
Rockfall economic lowest class.
Initially The Dugout was a small scattering of random homes (trailer park-ish?). It didn't truly build up into a "neighborhood" until Monsterblock began making routine yearly evictions. Those people were forced further down into the quarry, left to improvise shelter from whatever makeshift materials they could find. This quickly developed into a shanty town. Frequent flooding and fires. Zero regulations. Even moreso than the rest of Rockfall, law enforcement isn't coming down here unless something is bad enough to make national news.
Locations:
- MYcelium: mushroom cult in a stripmall. Runs a monthly newsletter that gets delivered throughout Rockfall. Spontaneous praise puppet parades throughout the city streets and parks. Pretty chill for a cult, they just really like shrooms.
- Playground: half playground for kids, half playground for adults. Home to the Thunderdown and mini golf.
- Thunderdome: Playground equipment cage fights aka Dugout Daycare.
- Homemade mini golf course: Someone just dug up holes and put some solo cups in them. Major junkyard bullshit vibes, including an exhaust fan acting as a windmill, holes inside old toilet bowls, rusted ducting, etc. A lot of the courses can only be completed via cheating or with wildly improbable hits. All of the clubs are badly misshapen. They get rage-bent out of shape very often. You wanna play mini-golf? You gotta bend the club back. Them's the rules. The clubs are also made out of random junk like pipes or a bundle of yardsticks taped together. True enthusiasts bring their own set of custom clubs. There are an abundance of golf balls bc the Granite Vista driving range overlooks the Dugout. You can always find a ball to play. It's like an easter egg hunt.
- Graffiti Mile: a stretch of densely graffiti'd cliffside, stretching even further up than it is wide. (Reference: Quincy Quarries)
- The Station: A three-story stack of decommissioned railcars. Each railcar is an apartment unit. Don't make any sudden movements. You'll make the whole complex unstable. 42 units total (16 on bottom, 14 in the middle, 12 on the top). Probably has a really dumb numbering system bc someone just went and did it one day. Either that or there's no numbering system. Very little insulation. Yet another reason why the ground floor units would be better. One shared "yard" common area in front of the apartment. A small fence wall of sandbags (useful during the rainy season) around the perimeter of this dirt lot. There's a couple clotheslines for drying your laundry (get it fast or it will get dumped! theft is a risk too of course but who wants your dirty dugout rags. no one knows what color that t-shirt used to be, but it's virtually tie-dyed with dirt, grease, and rust now. you'd have to be pretty desperate to take it, but wouldn't you know it, most people around here are.) Community fire pit. It turns into mud wrestling during the rainy season and is used for cookouts in the summer. The annual barbecue is a highlight, just don't ask what animal you're eating. Electricity (the train cars were already wired) but it's obviously very sketchy. No plumbing. There's a big rain barrel out back.
Culture:
- Exy rec league team: Dugout Demons
- Majority of the area is a shanty town. People live in rusting vans on cinder blocks, tents, sheds, trailer homes, self-constructed buildings with nightmare plumbing and electrical situations. Lots of "yards" that look like mini junkyards, outdoor couches, etc.
- child gangs: beware middle schoolers
- The Rainy Season (typically July through early September): Everything is prone to flooding. A lot of Dugout dwellers need to move to higher ground. The school gym is generally opened as a temporary shelter.
People:
- Hatchet Laveau [Lalia] + family: Bong Ripper (MYcelium) [NPC]
- Bruiser (Sáoírse) Ó Dálaigh [Lalia] + family: Aislín, Érskíne, Niámh, and Shiv (Siobhán) [NPCs]
- Hey Kid (The Station) [Aya]
- Ratbite (The Station) [NPC]
- Jack Shit Basterd & Twitch (The Station) [NPC]
- Old Man Ramshackle (The Station) [NPC]
- Mrs. Johnson (The Station) [NPC]
- Slate Stone [NPC]