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Pipemen: A Million-Mile-High City RP [Interest Check / Signups / Discussion]

COLORFUL MOHICOLORFUL MOHI
edited 2014-10-27 22:54:43 in Roleplay & Games
The Million-Mile-High City is a setting of mine. It is our planet, Earth, and our solar system, many, many, many years into the future. Long enough that the inner planets out to Mars have been cannibalized into The City, a single, monolithic metropolis where uncountable people live uncountable, relatively ordinary, lives. The populace is, by and large, generally happy, and I must stress that this is not typical dystopian sci-fi.

You, while probably also generally content with your lot in life, live a bit more on the edge. You're a pipeman, the archaic but still-used name for the City's maintenance crew, responsible for maintaining a system of wires, antennae, cables, and yes, piping that spans half a solar system. That should not be taken to mean that you know how the infrastructure works, you just know that your tools fix things that need to be fixed, and that's all you need to know, you assume, of course, that someone higher up on the food chain than you do probably knows how this stuff works. Right?

If this all sounds a little nebulous, I'm going to ask you to trust me on this one. Aiming for more Drink The Moon than Dungeoncrawler's Academy here.

I have been loathe to divulge details of the City's setting, but for the purposes of this RP I have little choice, but I will keep things as vague as possible.

You should be educated on the following:

The Structure of the City: The City is made up of hundreds of thousands of asteroid-sized spheres that are connected via a network of space elevators, as well as the planets of Old and New Earth (which was at one point known as Mars). If you could look at it at all at once, it'd look like a giant bronze spiderweb. Despite this size, it is possible to traverse the City from end to end in a matter of a few hours.

Cybernetics: Most people have as much machine as man in them nowadays, that's not unusual and is rarely worth discussion. It is unusual to make one's mechanical parts outwardly look as such, and the phenomenon is known as "gleaming". Gleamers have a reputation not dissimilar to people who have a lot of tattoos in our time.

Language & Naming: The City speaks a single unified language--Metropolitan--with minor but present dialect difference. Metropolitan is so far disassociated from any language we recognize that characters should absolutely not have names that are identifiable as being contemporary in any way. Look at the story thread linked above for some examples of Metropolitan names. 

Flora & Fauna: Animals are extremely rare outside of designated Nature Preserve Spheres, which come in two variants: those that accept tourists, and those that do not. Plants are more common, though finding anything larger than a tomato plant is as rare as finding an animal.

The Internet: The Internet as we know it now is long gone. In its place is the City Communication System, which functions more or less like our contemporary Internet.

History: Most people do not know anything about the history of The City. The exact reasons for this will be explored in the RP itself. In general, Metropolitans have very little concept of large timescales. Most people are aware that things like months and years exist, but they do not track them, and few Metropolitans are used to thinking outside of timescales longer than a week. It would take a chronology expert to tell you what year it is by any given reckoning.

Religion: There are a bevy of faiths in The City, these will be explored in the RP itself, simply because I'd prefer such things to largely be left to the players.

That's about all.

For your singup sheet, I need your character's name, a rough age (see above about not tracking large timescales), and a short description of their appearance.
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