Rat Monsters Attack A Circus

…film at 11

Secret Cities: San Francisco

Ok, as promised, I’m going to mostly (but not totally) open this up for your discussion and suggestions. Don’t be shy.

The basic concept behind this is that every large city has a second, secret city existing inside it…sort of underlying it or existing in a dimension that overlaps ours. This secret city does not register on most peoples consciousness. To them, that bakery on the corner is just a bakery like any other.

But for a select group of folks, that bakery looks different. The name is different…the products it sells are decidedly more upscale…the interior is laid out differently…and they also sell handguns that you won’t find in your average gun store.

The people who can interact with the secret city come in several flavors: Noobs, who have only just become aware of the different city. Tourists, who know about it and use it as a sort of playground/vacation spot. Splitters, who can and do interact in the secret city just as easily as they can with the city everyone knows. Steppers, who are native to the secret city, but spend some of their time in the public city. Finally, there are Citizens, the people who are native to the secret city and for whom the “real” San Francisco doesn’t exist.

I have previously said that this setting is like Over The Edge and it’s great setting, Al Amarja. Well, it is and it isn’t. It is, in that the other San Francisco has some decidely strange shit going on that the original doesn’t (and that’s saying something:), like people who aren’t 100% homo sapiens any more or weird science or the occult or, possibly, people with low level superpowers. On the other hand, unlike OTE, the really big power groups aren’t there. Neither is the big brother government with it’s Peace Force. Secret San Francisco doesn’t need them, because it has The Mayor.

The Mayor is the heart and soul of San Francisco made flesh. Well, at least partly flesh. Originally, The Mayor took the form of Emperor Norton, but later incorporated aspects of everyone from Mark Twain to a Chinese shopkeeper to a socialite to Herb Caen to a hippie and more. He (or sometimes she) is everything that is good and decent and fun and goofy about the City By The Bay.

If you want everything bad, nasty, serious and disgusting about The City, that would be The Boss. Never quite as strong or as focused as The Mayor, The Boss is still a power to be reckoned with. You could call him (never her) a Criminal Mastermind, but that would be rather limiting. The Boss has too many interests to be just a mere criminal.

As far as size goes, the secret city is maybe 25% the size, both populationwise and areawise, of the public city. There is a whole lot more parkland and undeveloped land there, altho only Citizens, Splitters and Steppers will ever see them. Curiously, or maybe not so curiously, animals can see both cities, which goes a long way towards explaining those times when your dog or cat seems to be looking intently at something you can’t see.

Ok, that’s it so far. I await your comments.

Oh, by the way, the word count on all this (not counting notes) is a measly 612 words, so far. But more are coming tonight.