Montauk-1 Allende-18 Mods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
montauk_mods) wrote2016-09-30 04:07 am
montauk_mods) wrote2016-09-30 04:07 am
Maps, Area Descriptions, and Location List
Below are detailed descriptions of all locations that characters have explored or are immediately likely to explore within the city, and maps of every part of Seattle proper. The areas further south (Burien, White Center, Tukwila, Bryn Mawr-Skyway, Normandy Park, and SeaTac) that are also accessible do not have maps yet, and we're currently also looking for a map of SeaTac International Airport that includes the 1973 renovations but (for obvious reasons) not the ones that began in the 1980s.
MAGNOLIA
Discovery Park
Briarcliff
Area
If ventured inside of, the homes speak of former habitation by the wealthy and well to do. The furniture, though damp and molding in many places, stuffing spilling forth like entrails, is costly and finely made. It also has a distinctly 1970s feel to it. There is an abundance of wood paneling and glass accenting.
All the homes are in disarray. Animals and other scavengers have clearly been through them. Whoever left this place left without most of their belongings. In every house the story seems to be the same: people lived here, happily and normally, until suddenly they were gone.
On Dravus, between Viewmont and 38th, is a hardware store. The shelves have been mostly picked clean, but there is a modest assortment of plumbing fittings remaining, along with a few stray spools of twine and paracord, some lengths of chain, and a few boxes of small screws and nails here and there, alongside cracked plastic containers and rusting cans of roach spray and air freshener. All of the tools are gone, though investigation beneath the shelves (some still standing, some already overturned) might still yield a few useful - albeit rat-piss-coated - items: a few wrenches and channel locks, a couple hammers, a hacksaw. Much of the rear of the store has been redecorated with a liberal coating of paint from long-ago smashed and overturned cans, and a profusion of shoe prints remain on the floor.
At the corner of Barrett there is a small convenience store, goods torn open and grown stale, or long devoured by animals of some sort. Dried scat litters the aisle floors. The ever-bubbling pot of convenience store coffee was silenced long ago, fragments of the glass pot lying on the floor in a patch of mold.
At the corner of Viewmont and Armour there is a post office, its delivery trucks standing (those that haven't been tipped) on empty rims, their internal workings home to God alone knew what now. Beside it, a gas station. The plate glass window walls are all broken and the shelves have been picked clean.
The gas station is in sorry shape. The pumps are dry and rusted, useless. The awning that sheltered them has half fallen in, the result of an impact by something large and heavy, though there are no scars or flakes of paint left at the site of impact to indicate that it was an automobile. The fluorescent signs that once bore the station’s name have been completely shattered. Rusted hulks of stripped automobiles sit beside the gas station shop, metallic skeletons that wouldn't move even if pushed. The shop itself is a small open room with a counter at the back end. The display shelves are toppled, and only trash can be found amongst them. The shelves on the walls still stand, and even boast a handful of overlooked cans of ready-to-cook ravioli and spaghetti. Plenty of empty plastic containers can be found, as well as odd bits of clothesline rope, leather polish, car wax and old, stale air fresheners.
The liquor cabinets have been emptied entirely.
The counter boasts what one would expect from a gas station shop counter: a few old sunglasses, dead lighters, an empty 'take a penny' dish. The cash register is gone. An ancient coffee maker sits on its side, corroded and long since dry. Strange stains have long since sunk into the floor behind the counter, dark brown and odorless. Mildewing paper trash has collected there as well.
On the eastern portion of Armour Street, near where it intersects with 34th, is a public library - a two-storey wood-framed building that must have been quite elegant before most of its massive windows and skylights were shattered. Graffitoed on the wall behind the reception desk is the phrase, “THE WORDS OF THE PROPHETS ARE WRITTEN ON THE SUBWAY WALLS.” Nearly all of the free-standing shelves are overturned, and most of the books are missing; the ones that remained have largely succumbed to mildew, though some have legible sections here and there. The most recent copyright date any of them bears is 1973. A few tables and chairs remain, none of them intact enough to use as anything other than firewood. On the lower floor, there was a foot of standing water; it’s frozen now, though not entirely solidly.
Viewmont is named so for a reason. From here, the skyline of Seattle stands out clearly against the horizon. It's hard to see, from here, the dilapidation which has seized the city. But the heavy, dirty layer of monstrous cobwebs swathing the Space Needle can be seen even at so great a distance.
South on Viewmont from the post office and gas station, just a few lots, an old pizzeria. The marquis is empty and the plaster statue of a smiling Italian woman offering a fresh hot pizza has been toppled, gaping holes in her dirty face and torso.
To the north, where Viewmont dead ends into Emerson, the pavement is cracked, tree roots and plants pushing up through it and bare vines forming a lattice across the asphalt as Discovery Park expands its boundaries aggressively southward; the chain link fence that used to border it has all but been pushed over under the weight of the vegetation. When the wind is blowing just right, sometimes the scent of ash and carrion can be detected beneath the loamy smell of the park.
At the south end of town, at McGraw Street and 36th Avenue, a small church not only stands, but seems to have been used as a refuge by others before you. Some of the broken-out windows have been boarded up, and there’s a stack of heavy furniture near the main door. However, it’s long empty now, save for the graffiti on the walls - strange symbols that make your eyes itch if you stare at them for too long - and, on the altar, the stack of bones - human, animal, and some that defy ready identification as either - lashed together into a grotesque, chthonic shape, still darkly stained by blood.
Adjacent to the church is what seems to have once been a preschool; a few of the thin, pressed heaps of paper and cardboard mildewing to the floor and shelves still bear fragments of bright colors marking them as children’s books, and simple toys - colors faded and paint peeling - litter the floors. A few badly faded vinyl banners with cartoon illustrations accompanying the letters of the alphabet and numbers from 0-9 still hang partially on the walls - or, more commonly, lie on the floors, forming havens for spiders and centipedes. The floor is stained here and there from what were (hopefully) puddles of standing water, but those seem to be only from broken windows, and the roof appears to have yet to develop any real leaks. In the bathrooms, however, the pipes have burst, and the floor is covered with murky ice.
At Wheeler and 35th is an establishment whose fluorescent lettering, still clinging to the side of the building, proclaims as “Annie’s Bar.”
The homes that litter the street have suffered all manner of damage. Nearly every single window is shattered, walls are sagging, some of the buildings are leaning with huge scrape marks down their sides, interior walls are torn through and every single basement shows signs of flooding, including standing water in many; even a few roofs are caved in. In many cases excrement lines the floors of would-be refuges. One large victorian on Magnolia Blvd W near the intersection with Dravus seems to be in the best condition.
Annie's Bar
At the back of the barroom sits a lonely pool table, the felt worn and scratched. The billiard balls are all missing, but the rack and a few broken cues remain. Behind it, at the very end of the barroom, are the restrooms: two stalls and two sinks in each, a pair of broken urinals in the men's room. There were mirrors in each, but only the frames remain, despite a lack of glass beneath them. The condom and sanitary napkin dispensers are still hanging askew on the walls.
Behind the bar is the door to the office, the back of which has been rendered little more than rubble by a fallen tree. Half of a desk and a single chair remain.
Victorian House
The crumbling private home is one of the few buildings still relatively intact. Though the windows are broken and the roof slumps and shows bare patches, its sagging walls are still upright. It may have been white once, but rain and weather and lack of paint have left it a peeling, dirty gray color.
The yard is tangled and overgrown and the porch has begun to lean into itself. The steps and boards of the porch itself show signs of beginning to rot. But they still stand, and the heavy wooden front door closes properly in its frame.
The front hall is hard wood, warped but otherwise what damage it shows is superficial. A litter of dead leaves and paper trash that have blown inside have gathered in the front hall. Old picture frames, the pictures swathed in mildew, have fallen and lay broken like skeletons along the baseboards. A table covered in molding, wet-soft magazines - too mildew ravaged and color-run to tell anything about them - sits beside the door. Its drawers are empty save for a letter opener made of thin metal, already heavily speckled with rust. An empty umbrella stand rests beside the door to the main hall of the house, the door separating them once bordered with stained glass decor - it has cracked and fallen from its frame. Shards of wood shrapnel litter the doorway.
The Great Hall is expansive, the floor black and white checkered tile that has begun to warp. It is mostly empty and the eye is drawn to the double staircase directly opposite the door. Once, it must have been beautiful, with its curving carved wooden banisters - now chipped and scratched and missing chunks of the dark reddish wood. The wide white stairs are now bent and in some cases sagging alarmingly. But the stairs should hold.
Whatever furniture was in the great hall was moved long before anyone came looking for a place to take shelter. Marks on the floor show evidence of many pieces of furniture being dragged, either toward or away from the door. A crystal chandelier, dirty and dull, hangs over the center of the room.
To the left of the stairs is a pair of double doors. They lead to the dining room. The wallpaper is peeling and spotted with black mold, only the faint smudges of flowers offering a clue to its design. The large wooden table remains, though no chairs. Underneath it is a molding oriental carpet. A pair of candlesticks coated in dust and grime lay on their sides on the tabletop, as well as a fungus covered wooden pepper mill.
Through the dining room is the kitchen, the door dividing them the type that swings back and forth at a touch, like a restaurant kitchen’s door. Its hinges are well rusted, however, and it takes a bit of force to make the door move. The kitchen itself is spacious and was obviously built to be used frequently. There is an island in the center, and counter space that runs along two walls. The third is taken up by a large metal sink and a line of built in cabinets. The oven with its useless stovetop is a simple box, once a dull lime green now simply the color of grime. Its door is broken. However, tucked into the corner at the back of the room is a pot bellied pellet stove. There is even a wooden chest filled with a few days worth of foul smelling fuel pellets in the cabinet next to it. The aged fire poker is hanging on the wall beside the stove.
There are a scattering of pots and pans left in the various cupboards and cabinets, all of them old and showing signs of flaking, chipping and corrosion. Some are caked with mold. An odd assortment of chipped and dusty dishes and plates and cutlery are left. A teapot without a lid sits in the sink. Moth eaten dishtowels and potholders remain in drawers.
The kitchen has one other door, leading to a small pantry with stairs down to the basement and a door that leads to the back porch and yard. The pantry shelves are bare, and the washer and dryer set into the wall look as though they haven’t been used in years.
The yard is overgrown and wild, any lawn furniture or ornaments grown over by wild grass and bushes. The back porch is as warped and rotting as the front. A set of filthy looking wicker chairs sits at the end.
The basement stairs are rickety and wooden, and begin to fall away a few steps down. All that can be seen from the final useable step is a tangle of junk - old chairs, a broken wooden rocking horse, a folded tarp. While it may be possible to reach the basement, it would take a good deal of careful creativity.
The only way to go from here is back to the Great Hall, and through the second door - to the right - to reach the living room. More moldy furniture, a couch and two wingback chairs angled towards one another near the center of the room, once white. A coffee table, low and dark wood. A beautifully carved fireplace is built into the righthand wall, but it is choked with debris and detritus wedged tightly into the fireplace and chimney shaft. The couch and chairs are facing it. Beside the fireplace, on either wall, are ceiling high bookshelves. A few ruined tomes still sag and lean on the shelves, and the case on the left is home to an old globe. There is a silent grandfather clock beside the door from the Great Hall.
Through the living room - an open arch separating them - is the library. The windows were left open and the rain has made a mess of the place. Soggy pages of magazines and books cover the floor, and the pictures that hung on the walls have fallen and cracked, their canvases joining the vaguely paper mache mess that lays mouldering on the dull red carpet. If cleaned, there is little of use or interest in the room, save that the windows can be shuttered to keep out the chill.
Behind the stairs, tucked politely out of obvious sight, is a door to a half bath. A cracked toilet and a white porcelain sink are wedged beside one another at the far end, and a mirror obscured with spiderweb cracks hangs on the wall. The tile is loose, the same dull grime color as the rest of the white surfaces of the house.
Upstairs is a long hallway, stretching the length of the house. The long runner is bunched and twisted and full of holes. Empty planters line the hallway, a few brittle and dried dead sticks the only remainder of whatever plants they had homed. Here, too, the wallpaper is faded and peeling and bulging with moisture.
Eight doors lead off of the hallway, the wood upstairs in better condition than the rest of the household. The doors actually close and rest in their frames, though they wail and moan with rust and grit.
Four of the rooms are bedrooms. The master is at the far left end of the hall. The large canopied bed looks eerily intact, save for the strange stains and what could be fungus on the comforter and pillow, as well as the moth-eaten gauze that hangs from the canopy rafters. At the foot of the bed is a backless couch, a thick puff of stuffing sticking out of its middle. Red once, it has faded to pink. Two large windows, framed in faded yellow curtains, look out over the side yard. A few panes of glass are missing from each. Between them is a fireplace, the mantle cracked. There are no fire tools beside it.
In the corner is the doorway to the master bath: this bathroom boasts a cracked, claw foot tub with unsavory rings inside of it, a toilet and a pair of sinks. The towel racks still hold the remnants of towels, scraps of blue and pink terrycloth. Moths have eaten the rest.
Across from the bed is a vanity table, the mirror snapped off and lying on the floor beside it in a mess of wood splinters. There is a silver backed hairbrush on the vanity, a few curls of dark hair still clinging to the bristles. Inside the partially-stuck drawer are cases and tubes of makeup, all of it stale and chalky. A painting hangs over it, still in its frame. At first glance it appears a normal landscape, mountains and a lake and swirling clouds above. But close inspection reveals the impression of images in the purple and black clouds, hints and allusions of twisted limbs and screaming mouths...
Also along that wall is a large dresser, the drawers empty. A few candlesticks remain on top, an empty blue vase, a tarnished picture frame with the faded photo of a baby in christening wear.
The next room in the hallway is a nursery. There’s something pitifully sad about an abandoned nursery, the crib empty and the windows open to let in the elements. There is a wooden toy chest, empty, and a changing table that has clearly been home to some family of small animal. The faded yellow walls and white furniture have aged forlornly. A damp, unpleasant smelling teddy bear sits on a tiny rocking chair in the corner, its middle torn open and stuffing spilling out over its crooked legs. The mobile above the crib has lost whatever hung from it, leaving only a wire skeleton.
There is a linen closet in the nursery, with blankets and sheets in an old chest. They show very little damage, chewed through here and there but free of mildew or rot.
Next is the gallery. A simple square room, wooden floors, two armchairs in the center. The walls are covered in portraits, some as large as windows and some no bigger than a breadbox. Many appear at first glance to be relatively intact. Their frames show the damage of age and inattention, flaking off their gilt and showing spots of dark, glistening build up of some sort.
The largest of the portraits displays a blond woman in a green Edwardian dress, holding white flowers on a dark background. Her hair is drawn back with small ringlets around her face. She is smiling just slightly, and the tips of her teeth don’t look quite right.
To either side are smaller portraits, one the classic fox hunting scene. A group of riders and hounds at the edge of the woods, in the corner the poor beast in question, behind a smudge of brush. On the other, a round faced child with dark curls in a sailor suit, looking sullen and displeased. There is a snarling terrier at his feet, back arched in a catlike pose and mouth open.
One painting shows a family scene, a sitting mother with baby on lap and a father standing aside what looks to be a seven year old boy. It seems to be from the Victorian era, judging by the mother’s high bun and ruffled collar and the father’s small wire spectacles and neat suit. Off the the side, behind the family scene, a dark smudge that looks almost like a body hanging upside down.
And now, upon entering the room and casting eyes to the wall, it becomes apparent that many of the portraits have in fact been defaced with spraypaint and swaths of thick, oily colors, obscuring their contents. They have been turned into abstract works of madness with only a hint of the original viewable - an eye peering out of inky blackness here, a hand stretching out of a sea of red there. There’s a very strange smell in this room...
The next room is a music room, the centerpiece a baby grand piano. Its strings are snapped and the keys covered with filth, a large dead moth splayed out across them. There is also a small breakfast table and two chairs, set against the wall by the window. The blue tablecloth on the round wooden table shows the same wear as most fabric in the house, holes from moths and stains from the weather that leaked in through the window. As do the blue curtains and flowered wallpaper.
The fifth door leads to a bathroom, similar to the master bath. There is a shower over the tub here, however, the showerhead a horrorshow of caked rust and black grit. The toilet seat is gone, as is the mirror that should hang over the sink. The nail is still there.
Between the bathroom and the other bedrooms is the billiard room. The large billiard table is covered in scuffed red felt, and looks set for a game. Except of course the billiards and table itself are filthy, seemingly coated in some glaucous film. The cues hang on the wall, similarly filthy. The walls are wood paneled. A box of cigars can be found, seemingly kicked and forgotten beneath the table.
The last two rooms are guest bedrooms. The furniture in each is the same - a double bed, a desk and chair, a dresser - though the small decor is different here and there. A vase on the dresser in the first room, a desk replica of The Thinker on the second. Green wallpaper in the first, blue in the second. The second bedroom shows far more damage, the linens on the bed a foul unusable mess. The drawers of the dresser are scattered on the floor.
The attic is inaccessible.
Lawton Park
Area
Visible from the waterfront homes is a rail drawbridge crossing the waterway. However, it’s raised, and there appears to be a chunk missing from it; either way, the controls are on the far side of the channel, so there’s no way to lower it.
Downstream from the bridge are the Ballard Locks. The silver, tentacle-like abstract sculptures next to the pedestrian bridge seem to move and twist ominously when you’re not looking directly at them. The bridge, at least, is intact - however, halfway across, there’s the barrier.
The barrier is invisible until touched - but when anything other than water or air comes in contact with it, it ripples visibly, shimmering in impossible, otherworldly colors. No amount of pressure will cause it to yield, and even weapons and projectiles ricochet off the strange force field. If you want to leave this part of the city, apparently you’ll have to take one of the southerly routes.
South of the locks is the Kiwanis Ravine. A charnel-house smell emanates from the woods, and anyone unwise to move toward it rather than going around the park will find themselves in a field, face to face with a huge and unidentifiable pile of putrefying flesh - several tons, easily. At first, it all seems to be one piece, but anyone who can resist vomiting for long enough to inspect it will spot the thick cord sutures binding together what are still massive and unidentifiable remains.
Due south of the Kiwanis Ravine is 34th Avenue, Lawton Park’s main drag. On the east side of 34th Avenue, south of the intersection with Thurman street, stands a grocery store, the sickly tang of decay and rodent inhabitation emanating from within it; of the shopping carts littering the parking lot, few are in usable condition.
Further down 34th, on the northwest corner with Emerson, stands a curious building: an apartment complex, six stories tall, out of place with its surroundings and occupying the entirety of the lot - the remains of a sign out front seems to indicate that parking is available on the next block. More unusual than the building’s size and poor land use, however, are what one notices upon approaching it: all of the windows appear to be intact, though there’s an unusual sheen to them. After dark, the building is visible from quite some distance: the lights that stay on through the night in one apartment on the south side of the fourth floor are the only artificial lights left in this part of the city. Strangest of all, the monsters seem to give the building a wide berth at all times.
Just off of 34th, on Barrett, is a church with an odd, ribbed round roof like the top of a tent.
Behind the church, sharing the same parking lot, is a small L-shaped building adjacent to a tiny playground; on the Dravus Street side, its sign proclaims it “Our Lady of Fatima School.”
If, rather than going south on 34th, one goes east at Ruffner and follows it past where it turns into Manor Place, one will find oneself in a village of apartment complexes.
The apartment village is bordered by two overgrown parks - Lawton to the north, and the smaller Magnolia Manor to the south. The former has been overtaken by trees - mostly pines, but there are a few oaks and chestnuts here and there - whereas the latter seems to have been an entirely open space, save for the attempts at a community garden in it. The garden is dry and dormant for now, but the profuse raspberry canes and mint runners indicate that there might be something worth coming back for, if you’re still alive in a few months.
North of the district’s eponymous Lawton Park is another elementary school - this one providing the first hint that things might not have been right in this part of the city before it was suddenly and hastily evacuated. The Lawton Elementary School has been carefully cleared of anything usable - desks, books, wall hangings, even the telephones and some of the carpeting are gone. In front of the building is what appears to be the remains of a shrine to victims of some unknown calamity: candles, crosses, rosaries, and mouldering silk flowers remain, alongside frames filled with shredded, mildewed, and decomposed paper and tattered laminate that must have once been photographs. At the south end of the building are hints of a small fire; it appears to have been much too localized to take the number of lives the shrine suggests, but the scorch marks curl around the windows in a disturbingly tentacle-like way.
Grocery Store
The produce department seems to be where the greatest volume of organic material rotted away, and there are even indications that things tried to sprout in the decaying vegetables; however, the potatoes and onions that seemed to have briefly thrived are liquefied now, their foliage desiccated. Rodent spoor litters the floor and displays, and the few remaining plastic bags of nuts have all been chewed into and urinated on by said rodents; trying to find any edible morsels remaining amid the shells would require a strong stomach and cheerful disregard for the notion of hantavirus.
In the meat department, there are suggestions of styrofoam trays here and there beneath patches of sticky liquefaction, but nothing useful remains on the customer side. Back in the staff area, the prospects are slightly better - most of the knives are gone, along with the more expensive equipment like the grinder and slicer and meat saw, but a seemingly forgotten cartilage knife and cleaver are on the floor next to one of the shelves; a stack of stainless steel trays rests above the sink, next to a few styrofoam meat trays; and while the remaining few rolls of plastic wrap are shredded and covered with rat piss, the damage seems to be confined to their exterior. Rooting around in the cabinets yields not only an unexpected bounty of rodent nests, but, in one that was apparently too well sealed for them to invade, large containers of salt, paprika, dry mustard, and oregano, which still seem to be in usable condition, a bottle of worcestershire sauce, and a roll of aluminum foil. There are also a number of wheeled racks - stainless steel, plastic, and wire - which could somehow prove to be of use.
The most profound horrors the store possesses are in the fish department. Fish is, after all, hardly the first thing one grabs in the event of whatever sort of calamity befell the city, and a great deal of it seems to have rotted away here; what was the lobster tank is a pit of tarry, black, evil stench, and a sticky layer of decayed matter covers the bottom of both the display cases and the bins out in front of the display which once held ice and fish; some of them contain oyster shells as well, visibly gnawed by the rats and mice. A few plastic containers of fish seasoning remain intact on the shelves, however, and back behind the counter, there are a handful of undespoiled large plastic bins, some of which even have latching plastic flaps for closure. As with the meat department, the knives are gone, but here, a motorized drum fish scaler remains. No sane soul would open the freezers.
In the grocery department, the shelves are largely bare, picked clean long ago; most of those things that weren’t taken have been chewed into by rodents. On the shelves, gutted boxes of dry goods are steadily decomposing, and all of the labels have been removed from the handful of cans that remain, a few of which have succumbed to corrosion after years of being urinated and defecated upon by rodents. The few remaining jars have fared better, and while the jellies have gained a suspect hue and the seals on some of them are broken, the pickled onions and peppers and cucumbers and olives seem to still be edible. There are even two or three jars of honey, crystallized with age, but honey never goes bad. Other than the cans and jars, what’s left is mostly useless: lightbulbs, boxes of trash and sandwich bags which the rats have already partially shredded for nesting material, toothpicks, a few bottles of seasonings, a bottle here and there of antacids or vitamins or fiber pills. In the cold cases, a handful cartons that used to hold milk or juice are decomposing on the shelves; the frozen dinners and packages of vegetables were long ago emptied out by rodents. Here and there, the detritus appears to have been disturbed by something larger than the rodents, and a few badly decomposed rat carcasses litter the shelves and floor.
In the bakery and deli section, there are more wheeled racks remaining, along with a number of plastic clamshell trays and stainless steel food trays; the interior pots of the soup warmers might even be worth taking. There are a few palette knives and other blunt implements remaining, and even a metal spatula; there’s also a deep fryer that was never drained, and the grease beneath the surface layer of mold emits a nauseating stench that seems also to hint at the number of rodents that lost their lives trying to drink from it.
The back warehouse seems to have suffered fewer depredations, both by humans and rodents, though the pickings in it are slim. Here and there are a few ignored cases of canned goods, some even with enough of their labels remaining to discern their contents - most of them are canned vegetables, but a few are chicken, fish, soup, chili, beans, or dog food. All told, there are perhaps two hundred cans. Most of the boxes are empty, but one still contains two bottles of canola oil. There’s also a pallet of Quaker products that was wrapped well enough to avoid large-scale rodent depredation; there are a few dozen intact boxes in total of Rice-a-Roni, dry oatmeal, and oatmeal health bars.
Church-in-the-Round and Our Lady of Fatima School
Approaching the altar, a darker story unfolds. The altar itself is devoid of any decor, no holy book or candles. There are, however, piles and smears of dark ash. There is no cross here, the space where the tortured Christ should hang replaced with a large piece of plywood. On it, in large red letters, are the words: “They’ve been waiting since morning. Why was I so long, dallying in the sooty room? The story of man is sickening.”
The closets and office rooms have been boarded up.
Behind the church, sharing the same parking lot, is a small L-shaped building adjacent to a tiny playground; on the Dravus Street side, its sign proclaims it “Our Lady of Fatima School,” and entering it will make it even more obvious that it is indeed a religious school. Unlike the church itself, the building hasn’t been defaced, and Christian mottoes and emblems, most relating to the Virgin Mary, still remain here and there in the hallways. Inside the handful of classroom desks still upright are a few usable pencils, though the erasers have succumbed to the thermal cycles of the weather, tiny plastic rulers, and a few notebooks that haven’t yet been completely overtaken by mildew, half filled with childish scrawl. All of the books have been removed from the library, save for one - a badly charred Holy Bible laying open on one of the tables.
Apartment Village
Many of the apartments bear signs that something was nesting in them - and it was much bigger than rats. On the ground and to a lesser extent the second floor, the signs of habitation seem to point to multiple different types of incomprehensibly vile things, but on the higher floors, they seem predominantly insectile - though no less outsized and grotesque.
However, pushing past one’s inevitable disgust at the strange signs of life might yield rewards; many of the apartments appear to have been looted, but those that were missed still contain the occasional bottle of liquor - hidden just well enough for the original tenants to forget about it in their haste to leave - and some forgotten cutlery and cookware. There’s even some camping equipment in a handful of apartments - the tents and blankets are too rodent- and... otherwise-infested to be worth taking, but there are plastic tarps, lengths of rope, canteens, and even a few pitons that are still usable. In the backs of three or four closets, there are even what look like surplus Vietnam medical kits; the aluminum containers seem to have kept any animals from getting at the supplies inside.
Along with supplies, there are a handful of small oddities to be observed, if one explores at great length.
In one second floor unit, the living room seems to hold nothing but smashed instruments: mostly guitars, but also a drum set and even a twisted and warped saxophone. In amongst the broken instruments, if one looks closely, are the remains of shattered records and torn sheet music.
Another accessible second floor apartment offers a strange and curious sight. Though the rooms are as damaged and infested as the rest, in the shower stall of the bathroom - if one is brave enough to venture within that particular room - is a grandfather clock, showing little damage and even occasionally letting out a weak ‘tick tock’ as its pendulum struggles to swing. Oddly enough, all its cogs and gears appear rusted far beyond working use.
The third most unsettling scene - for some degree of ‘unsettling’, one supposes - is a first floor unit that shows, as all the others, the signs of infestation and destruction. But the smell in here is far worse, rotten meat and sickness. It emanates from the fridge, a silent unit of the ever classic goldenrod coloration, the door defaced with the spray painted words ‘it’s so dark in here’.
Strangely enough, the fridge is empty.
The Teratoma
Overview
The building has electricity, but it's unreliable at best, and the lights always seem to flicker at a migraine-inducing frequency. Despite the unreliable power, the building is always a constant 60° F, winter or summer. In some areas, a strong sense of paranoia and sightings of shadow people are common. When you turn on the tap, sometimes you'll get water that's tea-colored from all the rust, and sometimes, it will smell like it's just come from the bottom of a bog; sometimes, what comes out is blood and tissue fragments.
For the moment, this building is one of the safest places in the city.
The Stairs
All of the outer stairwells open onto the exact same set of iron grating stairs - simple tests will confirm this - yet, somehow, one leaves the stairwell on the same side of the building as one entered it from.
The two inner stairwells have no abnormal properties and are consistent with the rest of the building, though the exit onto the roof is labeled as "ROOF AXES" rather than "roof access."
First Floor
There’s a small lobby past the office, opening onto two elevators and a door to one of the outer stairwells. Nothing happens when you try the elevator switch, though there’s a faint metallic groan from further up the shaft. The outer stairwell door opens easily onto a set of metal grating stairs above an oily, black sea, beneath an equally black sky. The outer stairwells, other than the eastern one, are about halfway down their respective hallways, one each in the northern, southern, and western hallways. The inner stairwells are located in the eastern hallway near the entrance to the courtyard, and in the southwestern corner, across from the entrance of the common room.
The hallways leading off from the lobby sport broad yet dim and greasy windows onto the building’s interior courtyard. Like the building’s outer windows, they seem to be made of squamous tissue, and around the edges, hairs are curling into them. Unlike the stairs, the courtyard isn’t some forsaken void dimension. However, none of the plants look quite right - everything is covered in improbably colored thorns, and the branches are constantly in motion despite there being no wind audible. There are working lights in the halls; they seem to come on automatically at night, bathing the hallways in dim, flat fluorescent light that gives one’s skin a corpselike pallor and one’s eyes an unnerving darkness. Where it spills out into the courtyard, it occasionally illuminates ghastly, inhuman shapes that don’t look a thing like the vegetation, but which move out of sight too quickly for one to be completely sure. At night, the rustling of leaves out in the courtyard is unsettlingly audible from everywhere on the floor.
At the southwestern corner of the building is a large common room. Unlike the thin carpet in the hallway, the floor of the common room is tile. Near the eastern entrance is an old TV/radio cabinet, and despite the fact that there are no power cords emerging from the back of it, nor outlets for them to plug into, the television occasionally turns itself on to play noiseless static. All other furniture has been removed from the room, and at night, there are patches of icy, impossible darkness that move around it like live things.
Around the outer perimeter of the building are the apartments - ten on this floor, though four were uninhabited prior to whatever happened to the city.
Apartment 101, just past the lobby in the northern hallway, is set up as a demonstration apartment; the walls are painted in the same cold off-white as the rest of the complex, but the furniture, still intact, is of a distinctly ‘70s design. The floors are covered in beige shag carpeting, and the furniture is upholstered in ochre faux leather with striped pillows, and colorfully patterned art prints hang on the walls. The refrigerator is avocado green, one of those colors people only thought looked good in the ‘70s, and the countertops are fake wood - maple, to match the cabinets. The shower tile in the bathrooms is mustard yellow, while the floor tiling is black and white, and the sink and toilet are both avocado. There’s no power, and the water to this apartment was apparently never turned on; however, there is what looks like water staining on the ceiling of the guest room, and there are strange fissures in the ceiling of the master bedroom. The blankets and mattresses on both beds are perfectly usable, though they’re slightly dusty - and the bedspread on one is faux cheetah print, while the other is dark red paisley.
Apartment 102 is much more shabbily furnished, and the layout is mirrored from 101’s so that the two half bathrooms in the hall share a set of plumbing. Whatever caused the water damage in 101 is much worse in here. One corner of the living room and the entire guest bedroom ceiling are brownish and bulging slightly, and there’s a sickly sweet smell tinged with decay emanating from them. The wood-paneled walls are also warped and bulging, and the dark brown carpet is slightly soggy.
If you venture into the bedroom, upon coming out, you’ll leave faint reddish-brown prints on the lighter carpet of the hallway.
All the blankets have been stripped from the beds in both rooms, and any clothing and personal effects have been removed; the mattress in the guest bedroom is suspiciously stained and damp looking, and the master bedroom has a waterbed. There are some ancient, mostly-empty bottles of cleaning products in the master bathroom. In the refrigerator are a few ancient patches of mold and rot that might once have been food, and a bottle of white wine - open, mostly empty, and long ago turned. In the small closet near it are a half-empty box of aluminum foil and a canister vacuum cleaner. Aside from a few orphaned pot lids, the drawers and cabinets have been completely emptied out.
Apartments 103, 104, and 106 are completely empty, though the faint scuff marks on the walls indicate that they might have been tenanted at one point.
Apartments 105, 107, 108, 109, and 110 are in a similar state to 102, minus the water damage - aside from a few spare sets of sheets and blankets and some heinously '70s clothing, little remains in the bedrooms, though the furniture is all still there. Apartment 108 has a large mahogany dining room table that’s heavy as sin but could be used as a barricade if worse comes to worst, a small first aid kit left in the bathroom - albeit one mostly full of useless crap like old bandaids and expired aspirin - and a bottle of vodka left in the freezer. 105 has more aluminum foil, along with some plastic wrap and disposable cups and plates, and a tarp in the back of one of the closets.
None of the apartments on the first floor seem to have power, despite the lights in the hallway. All told, there's relatively little amiss down here.
Second Floor
Perhaps the fact that the halls meet at a 135-degree angle, one that the building’s exterior design shouldn’t allow, has more to do with that.
By the numbers of the apartments on either side of the lobby, there are fourteen apartments on this floor. Again, they’re around the outer perimeter of the floor, and there are windows overlooking the courtyard; they’re thicker than the ones on the first floor, they’re slightly milky, and their surface is uneven, distorting the dimmed view through them. While plant runners are visible coming up from the courtyard, their thorny leaves swaying slightly in the nonexistent breeze, there’s a mist that combines with the slight opacity of the windows to make it difficult to see the ground.
The door to apartment 201- the first apartment in the north corridor - is locked; attempts to kick it in will reveal that there’s something heavy, yet somewhat spongy and yielding, behind it.
Apartment 202 is unlocked, and the lights come on when the switch is flipped, glowing dull orange and illuminating grungy black and white tile. The kitchen, to the left of the entryway, has rust-streaked steel counters and mustard-yellow tiles with mildew in the grout, and there’s a strange blackish crust around the edges of the sink. Every so often, the lights flicker to a weird, flat, dim gray, and when they do, it looks as though there’s some kind of translucent, amorphous black mass in the sink, several pairs of round red eyes shining out of it. The refrigerator is open, a small colony of mold occupying the shelves and crisper drawers, and the cabinets are empty except for a few saucers and a serving platter.
The darkness gathers in the edges of the living room like a live thing, creeping furtively out of its corners when the lights flicker. The room is uncarpeted, the floor concrete with brownish stains that have a different texture from their surroundings and strange ridges here and there, but it’s furnished, with a cheap crappy glass and metal table whose paint is flaking away from the rust, an olive paisley lounge chair, and a beat-up, yellow and orange striped wraparound couch from which there has been a very determined attempt to scrub several dark stains. There’s also a faux oak cabinet in front of which a television lies screen-down, shattered.
The hallway back to the two bedrooms is still carpeted; the guest bedroom appears to have been used for storage, as there’s a hardwood table that might have been worth some money back before it was sporting the multiple gouges and scuffs visible on its surface, an empty armoire, a cheap, proto-Ikea desk, two typewriters, and several boxes of very ‘70s clothing in there. Laying out on the floor is a ouija board, missing the planchette.
The carpet from the living room has been nailed to the walls of the master bedroom, and if you pull it aside and put your ear to the wall, faint scraping and breathing noises are audible from apartment 203. The master bathroom is trashed, all the fixtures broken off near the floor, which may be where the water damage on the floor below comes from, except for the fact that there’s no water up here and the room smells like mildew with a hint of sulfur, not the corpselike sickly sweet smell on the floor below.
The door to apartment 203 is somehow fused into the wall, and judging from the way it feels when kicked, there’s solid cinder block behind it as well.
There’s a little alcove on the corner, between apartments 203 and 204, with a window looking out into the branches of a pine tree that doesn’t exist when one views the building from the outside. There’s a sobbing, gurgling noise audible through the wall of 203, and there is something faintly and disturbingly human about it; there’s intermittent knocking as well, and the sobbing intensifies with it until finally both quiet again.
Something about the west hallway makes it feel like a killing floor. There are no windows onto the courtyard on this side, and the doors of apartments 204 through 207 are fused into the wall the same way the door of 203 is. The lights don’t work in this hall, and there’s the constant feeling of something watching you - something inhuman and hostile. The light coming through the branches of the pine tree throws constantly moving shadows across the floor, but something about them seems off - too dark, too active, and if one concentrates for long enough, one might notice some slow flutter of movement of the walls themselves. There are faint animal scrabbling and groaning noises at what would be the corner between apartments 207 and 208.
The door to apartment 208 is missing entirely. Where it should be, there’s a blank space in the wall.
The door to 209 is set back in a hallway that shouldn’t exist, according to the building’s outer geometry, and opens with a squeaking noise that sets one’s teeth on edge. There are hand-sized bubbles of faintly yellowish fluid suspended in the squamous tissue of the windows, and across the living room wall is a wide crack, full of oversized and poorly aligned human-looking incisors - though it may be difficult to spot behind the bulge of veiny tissue with skin almost like chamois leather hanging from the ceiling to within four feet of the floor. It’s disturbingly warm to the touch, pulsating slightly. The kitchen is in only slightly better shape; the countertops are warped, the stove is badly rusted, and there are long, unnaturally thick hairs protruding from the gaps between the cabinets, and between the stove and the counter. There’s no refrigerator, and the cabinets are empty; squeezing past the fleshy bulge on the hallway wall that’s similar to the one on the living room ceiling will confirm that the apartment was uninhabited, the bedrooms completely devoid of furniture.
The back half of apartment 210, where the bedrooms and bathrooms are located, is covered in the same fleshy substance, and there’s the sound of something pacing back and forth in one of the bedrooms. The front half is more normal, with gray faux-leather furniture in the living room, and atop one of the cabinets there’s a set of encyclopedias dated 1969; inside the cabinet is a set of doo-wop records and a record player - still functional, but the sporadic power fluctuations alter the speed of the record, distorting the sound eerily. In the kitchen, the refrigerator is empty, and most of the drawers and cabinets are filled with abnormally thick hair, but there’s a forgotten, completely full bottle of dish soap under the sink.
Apartment 211 has nothing noteworthily wrong with it, but it was also uninhabited prior to whatever happened to the city. There’s no furniture, and nothing in the cabinets except for a forgotten roach motel under the master bathroom sink, in which there’s a severed, shriveled human toe.
The interior of apartment 212 is pitch black, and the lights don’t work. Shining a flashlight around it reveals that everything’s in place - the living room is comfortably (and gaudily) furnished, there are a few small knives in the dish rack next to the sink, and the faint smell of rotting food is wafting from the refrigerator. However, the tissue of the windows is completely opaque, and something about this apartment makes you feel sick and feverish the moment you step through the door. The darkness seems to slink angrily away from the flashlight beam like an animal, and the batteries drain unnaturally quickly; in the dimming light, the shadows seem to pull themselves up into shapes like people wearing long, hooded cloaks. The further you head into the apartment, the worse the fever and nausea and dizziness become, and the more cloying the darkness is, though eventually one might notice a faint tinge of light at the back of the apartment - one coming from beneath the door of the master bedroom.
The bedroom is fully lit, revealing an impossible phantasmagoria of massive, curved bones and raw-looking exposed tissue. There’s something moving back and forth in the middle of it, but back here, the headache is almost literally blinding, making it impossible to tell exactly what it is, aside from that it’s wet and bloody and too suggestive of the human form for comfort.
Anyone in a frame of mind to toss the apartment for supplies will find a few towels, an extra set of sheets, and several travel toiletry kits in the hall linen closet, and several cans of tuna, vegetables, and fruit salad in the pantry.
There’s a cyclical buzzing audible through the door of apartment 213. Upon opening it, heat and moisture and the scent of decaying meat and plant matter roll out. Apparently whoever owned the apartment had a serious botany hobby, as there are planters full of dead plants, along with blown-out grow lights and drip tape - long ago clogged by the tissue fragments that sometimes emerge from the building’s pipes - all over the place. Surprisingly, none of the plants seem to have been marijuana, but instead were probably orchids or lilies. Here and there, a few shoots are poking up between the dead plants, but the few leaves they sport are thorny, like those of the plants in the courtyard. Despite the buzzing, there’s a disturbing lack of any signs of insect activity in the apartment. Its inhabitant seems to have taken poorer care of themselves than of the plants, as all that’s left in the refrigerator is plant food, and the cans of soup and potted meat in the cabinets are all store-brand; the few clothes left in the closet are worn and threadbare, and there are only a few cheap disposable razors next to an unopened travel-size stick of deodorant in the bathroom cabinets. In the guest bedroom, used as a study in this apartment, the bookshelves are mostly bare, with a few haphazardly strewn books on some of the more obscure points of botany remaining to attest to the fact that most of the shelves’ contents were probably hurriedly shoveled into boxes before the inhabitant left.
Apartment 214, like apartment 201, is inaccessible because of something heavy and yielding - probably another one of those growths of flesh - blocking the door.
Third Floor
The third floor lobby sits at the intersection of not only the two expected hallways, one to the north and one to the south, but a third one leading off to the east, in a space where, from the outside, there clearly isn’t any building. Apartments 305, 306, and 307 are off of the hallway, with the door for 306 at its very end and 305 and 307’s doors roughly across from each other. Anyone opening the door to 305 will need to be on their guard, lest the wooden futon frame that immediately falls out of it crack them in the face; what’s behind the door is no bigger than a supply closet, and the inside is packed with furniture.
306 is comprised of a small kitchen, dining area, and living room - recessed into the floor, with two beanbags remaining in it - seeming to protrude out of the building, a large bay window forming the east side of all of the above. The noise of insects is plainly audible, but doesn’t seem to intensify when any of the drawers or cabinets are opened; there is a tape strip in the refrigerator with a few fruit flies stuck to it. In the bathroom, just south of the living room, there’s a plunger tucked behind the dry toilet, and “YOU FILTHY REVISIONIST” is scrawled on the mirror in what looks like black permanent marker. In the bedroom - to the north of the kitchen - are several dense quilts draped across a waterbed filled with something that, when prodded, seems to be comprised of half liquid and half very large chunks. There are several issues of a magazine titled simply “Arcturus” on the nightstand, dated between June 1972 and November 1973; the articles inside it are a mix of hard science topics, like the rate of pack ice breakup in the Bering Sea and the progress of Comet Kohoutek, to seeming absurdities dressed up in science like the supposed massive increase in cannibalism and “topopathic anomaly” cases along the West Coast. The October 1973 issue indicates Seattle as an area of interest in the latter, but the November issue carries a retraction of that statement.
The door to 307 leads out onto a balcony overlooking 34th Avenue - a balcony that isn’t visible from the street. There is a water-filled ashtray with a soggy pile of what may have once been magazines next to it.
Immediately to the south of the anomalous hallway, on the exterior side of the building, is the doorway to Apartment 308. There’s something large and yielding blocking the door from the inside, but the concerted and constant application of force to the door will lever it open enough for anyone daring enough to clamber over the leathery, fleshlike tissue blocking the door from opening completely. Faintly rust-colored water is dripping through the ceiling in several places; in one, what looks almost like a very small pitcher plant has taken root beneath it. The living room carpet is spotted with black mold. The kitchen cabinets contain numerous pesticides and fungicides, alongside canned beans and vegetables and roach traps. There are a few paisley and argyle rayon blouses and sweaters in the bedroom closets, next to crystals strung from the hanger beams and mirrors pasted everywhere. In the mirrors, the entirety of the bedroom - painted in off-white, with tan shag carpeting - appears a variegated, bloody red, and something is constantly moving in the reflections even when the observer is standing still.
309, the corner apartment, is minimally and cheaply furnished, with couches and chairs that look like they’re from the ‘50s and have seen a lot of partying. There’s some flatware and a long-expired box of crackers in the cabinets, and a carton of cigarettes in the hall closet. What should be the bathroom door instead leads onto the same balcony that the door to 307 leads to.
Below 309, the hallway makes a 135-degree bend, and on the interior side of it is a large bay window looking out over the courtyard. Long, thick strands of hair are curled within the tissue, and it’s slightly red-tinted where the plants tap a slow rhythm against its edges. The bridge across the courtyard looks twice as long, with a subtle curve to it, and at night, the lights of the lower floor hallways look eerily orange through the mist. During the day, one can occasionally glimpse what looks like a human figure moving past the windows on the other side of the courtyard.
The doors to 310 and 311, side by side below the bend, lead to a tiny space that looks like a half-finished kitchenette. There’s a small counter with drawers and a cabinet beneath it; the latter has an assortment of capped pipes, attached to a small fleshy-looking patch in the wall by thin tendrils.
Apartment 312 is missing entirely, though a faint irregularity in the texture of the wall suggests that there might have once been a door there. At night, the fluorescent lights here are especially dim and flash at an extremely slow rate, about three cycles per second; sometimes, the flashes catch a dark blob of almost solid-looking shadow, just outside where the door to 312 would be.
Around another corner, this one actually forming a right angle, the door to apartment 313 opens onto a vast, black space from which a dripping noise and faint chlorine scent emanate. The beams of flashlights do not penetrate the gloom very far, but they reveal blank concrete walls and floor. Investigating the actual extent of the space reveals it to be easily the size of a basketball court, with nothing inside it except, in some of its far corners, the muffled sound of extremely slow, heavy breathing.
The door to the bridge across the courtyard opens across from 314, and two metal tracks lead down the wall and across the floor to the door of the apartment. A faint humming sound emanates from within the apartment; however, the vast, strange, sinister-looking machinery beneath the metal grating floor - similar to an astrolabe made half from massive gears and razor wire - is heavily rusted and looks as though it hasn’t done anything in centuries. Fleshy tendrils emanate from a vaguely human shaped patch under the grating in the bedroom, and have covered over the surface of some of the outermost gears.
The door to apartment 315 leads to apartment 306.
Apartment 316 is perfectly normal, apart from being larger and laid out differently than any of the other apartments in the building. It’s a split floor plan, with two guest bedrooms that share a bathroom on the right side of the living room, and the master bedroom and another bathroom off to the left. The wood-paneled kitchen is immediately to the left of the entrance, separated from the living room - elegantly furnished, by 1970s standards - by a bar, on which sits a single empty martini glass. The refrigerator is empty, and the cabinets are full of diet products - cereal bars and low-calorie drink mixes, mainly - along with instant coffee and Tang, and a half-finished bottle of vodka. Back in the bedrooms, the beds are neatly made; in the guest bedrooms, there are no clothes, but there are a few towels and an unopened bar of soap in the linen closet. The master bedroom closet contains a few outrageously ‘70s leisure suits, but nothing else, and the chest of drawers next to the bed is empty; in the master bath, the tub is full of a black, tarry liquid that smells only faintly of carrion. There’s nothing else in the linen closet.
Around another 135-degree corner are the doors to apartments 301 through 303. Behind the door to 301 is a bathroom; investigating the linen closet reveals a door into the hallway of apartment 309, where the bathroom should be. Going through from the apartment 309 side still leads to the balcony. In the bathroom cabinets are a toilet brush and cleanser, a half-used tube of toothpaste with mold visible around the edge of the cap, and a container of dental floss.
Apartment 302 is packed with crap - exercise machines, appliances, and even what appears to be a few pieces of some kind of old, long-disassembled amusement park ride. There have been attempts to gear some of them together into what looks more like a rube goldberg machine than anything actually useful. There are old issues of Popular Mechanics, dating mostly from the 1940s through 1960s, strewn around the apartment, along with notes and schematics that describe a machine somewhere in the chaos that can generate an electrical current strong enough to recharge a car battery. Concerted digging might even lead to its discovery.
Apartment 303 contains a large collection of taxidermied and preserved animals, including a preserved babypede in a jar on the kitchen counter. Most of the rest of the collection is fairly mundane - there are a disturbingly high number of cats (most of them very poorly taxidermied) and a few dogs, along with visibly roadkilled raccoons and opossums (also horribly taxidermied), but in between are a few more exotic pieces, like turtles and iguanas and even a coati (which, at least, appear to be professionally done). In the jars are a wide variety of scorpions, spiders, and snakes, though anyone with an eye for zoology will notice most are North American species. On the way back to the bedroom, however, the pieces become more disturbing - sewn-together chimeras of multiple different species covered in mouths and eyes, at first just as poorly done as the cats, but back toward the bedroom, fitting together well in unnerving ways that increasingly bring to mind the monsters out in the city and assorted Lovecraftian hellbeasts.
Finally, one more 90-degree turn puts one back on the east side of the building, next to apartment 304, just above the anomalous hallway. Apart from an extraordinarily creepy clown doll on the massive, brightly-colored striped semicircular sofa in the living room, and several large pieces of creepy clown themed artwork on the walls, 304 looks fairly normal. There’s a ten pound bag of rice in the refrigerator, and it looks and smells as though it might still be good, but no other food in the apartment. The half bathroom mirror has been replaced with an especially deranged-looking clown picture, and there’s one over the bed in the master bedroom that’s even worse. Hidden beneath a false bottom in the nightstand drawer next to the bed are a mirror, a razor blade, and a large, sealed package of white powder.
Fourth Floor (in progress)
Apartments 414 and 413 appear to have been uninhabited at the time the city was abandoned; there are a few of the odd fleshy growths seen in other parts of the building pushing through the walls, but nothing of any particular interest.
Apartment 412 - the one lit up at night and visible from 34th Avenue - is fairly normal. This apartment has only a few things noteworthily wrong with it: in the living room, in front of the (still working) TV where a lounge chair might be, is a lump of flesh growing up out of the floor; in the back bedroom, the bed is likewise covered in skin; and there’s a broad crack on the wall above the bed, filled with teeth (which, if you touch it, will bite you, though it doesn’t break the skin, and there are no lingering effects). However, there’s a strangely inviting, soothing aura about the place, and there are canned food, drinking water, and blankets stored within the apartment, allowing for a brief respite - for one person, the food and water supplies would easily last three months. A box in one of the closets contains six AN/PRC-68 radios.
Directly across the hall from 412, apartment 411 also looks fairly normal. There are a few dozen cans of food in the cabinets in there as well, but not nearly as many as in 412, and flatware to accompany it. There's a box of foil-sealed dry milk packets in one of the cabinets as well. The furniture is normal (and upholstered in garish paisley), and tacked to a corkboard in the kitchen is a folded-up street map of the Magnolia, Interbay, Queen Anne, Cascade, Capitol Hill, Downtown, and Central Area (above Route 90) portions of the city. Nothing is marked on it, however.
Apartment 410 appears to be covered in wet pinkish tissue, piled up into small lumps four to eight inches tall. Most of these have insectile or mantislike limbs - with the same fleshy appearance, but sharply pointed - that reach toward anyone who opens the door. Soft scratching noises can be heard emanating from the apartment through the master bedroom wall of 412.
Just around the corner, in apartment 409, the floor, not just the windows, is made of squamous tissue, and deforms just barely perceptibly underfoot. There's furniture visible beneath the floor, and not all of it looks like it's really there - some of it looks almost two-dimensional, while other parts of it look like actual furniture, protruding into the squamous tissue nearly up to the surface, but with dimensions that don't look quite right even accounting for distortion involved with phase boundary transitions.
On the courtyard side of the southern hallway is apartment 408; faint slurping noises, like someone pipetting large drops of thick liquid, are audible from outside the door. Inside, the apartment is barely illuminated by a few washed-out fluorescent tubes, like the ones in the first floor hallways, and the window panes are heavily obscured by hair inclusions. The floors and walls have the faint suggestion of veins, and along them are more fleshy protrusions, of sizes ranging from no bigger than a housecat to almost the size of a twin bed, complete with some suggestion of limb differentiation.
Apartment 407's interior walls are composed of the same firebrick that makes up the outside of the building, though the bricks around the windows are noticeably charred, and the mortar between them bulges weirdly. There are some scorched remains of posters on the walls, and the polyester of the loud plaid sofas is slightly melted. In the kitchen cabinets, there's flatware and a few boxes of sugary cereal, their contents still sealed; the faint scent of decay coming from the refrigerator means it's not worth looking inside. Back in the master bedroom, there are worn blankets on the bed, and faded paisley house dresses in the closet; the second bedroom was obviously a children's room, with two small beds and a crib, and a scattering of stuffed animals. The closet contains a wealth of boardgames and an indoor croquet set.
All sounds in apartment 406, around the corner from 408, are weirdly muted and hollow, as though the apartment - identical in layout to all the normal ones in the building - is somehow much bigger, despite the light-colored plaid wraparound couches in the living room and shag carpeting throughout the apartment that would otherwise muffle sound. The kitchen cabinets are empty aside from a few sealed boxes of cereal and instant oatmeal, but issuing from the plumbing is a strange gurgling sound. In the guest bathroom - the walls papered in a garish floral pattern and the floor tiles black and white - the noise sounds like the cries of hunting hounds slowed down and dragged out on a stretched-out audio tape. There are a few thin sheets on the beds in both bedrooms, and the door to the master bathroom is locked; the door doesn't even rattle when kicked, not that one would want to break into the room where the plumbing noises not only seem to be emanating from, but sound like a woman's sobs.
Apartment 405 seems to be completely full of squamous tissue; the boundary phase distortion results in what, from the door of the apartment, is a tiny little window of the living room and what doesn't look even a little bit like the courtyard beyond it: the view is one of an underwater area, shallowly flooded and completely devoid of any signs of life, past or present, apart from a few pylons, heavily crusted with marine life, marking the boundaries of a long-decayed dock.
Fifth Floor
Sixth Floor
Roof
Southeast Magnolia
Area
On 34th Avenue, immediately to the south of Lawton Park, is a large building whose sign proclaims it to be the “Catharine Blaine School”; judging by its size, it’s most likely a combined elementary and middle school. The classrooms on the outside of the building don’t have anything particularly interesting left in them - the books of arithmetic and social studies and English have developed thriving colonies of mildew, and the globes and other plastic models are peeling badly. The chemistry labs have been emptied of all chemicals and specimens; there’s a little bit of glassware left, but most of it is broken, and the spark lighters are rusted beyond usability. A lone dirachnid is building a web in one of the fume hoods. There are half-frozen puddles on the floor beneath the shattered windows.
The few classrooms with no windows are better preserved. Some of the books are intact, and in the margins of a few are childish scribbles, though there’s something sinister about the contents of those scribbles. The sketches of a tall, dark figure beaming out “mind control rays” or references to a disease that “makes you a zombie maybe???” could be channeling standard Cold War fears, but the sketches of children kicking strangely disjointed baby dolls are more difficult to explain.
The school is situated between two sets of athletic fields, one a large lot of overgrown grass that might have been used for soccer games back in its day, and the other, slightly less overgrown, appears to have been intended for playing softball. Next to the latter on the 34th street side is a set of tennis courts, though the fields themselves are more visible from the 32nd street side, where a sign describing them as the “Magnolia Playfield” remains, but has fallen over.
At the corner of 32nd and W Smith, next to the softball fields, is the entrance to the Southeast Magnolia metro station. The entrance is largely bricked off, with concrete barricades placed in front of it for good measure; however, one of the barricades has been moved aside, and there is a hole in the bricks large enough for a man to fit through easily. The longer one stares at it, the more one will feel oddly compelled to go through it and explore the station.
East of the Magnolia Playfield, on 32nd street, is a grocery store.
The rest of the commercial area is mostly south of the school, on both sides of Smith and McGraw between 34th and 31st streets. Just south of the Magnolia Playfield is the Magnolia Garden Center, and across from it is a hardware store.
South of the hardware store and garden center are a number of abandoned restaurants. A few of them are completely empty, doors still locked even though all the glass is shattered; in others, it seems as though the staff figured the evacuation would only be temporary, as all the equipment and utensils were packed away - though, some of the drawers are busted open, with knives and spatulas and strainers spilled out onto the floor - and the food disposed of, save for five-gallon cans, the labels missing, in one completely overlooked storeroom. Still others seem to have either received no warning, or been operating up until the last possible moment despite it. The pots and pans and utensils are caked with filth, and the stench coming from the industrial refrigerators and freezers is still cloying. There are a few more huge cans here and there; if opened, they’ll prove to be mostly stock, or vegetables, or especially tomatoes, but there are a few of fruit, salsa, olives or other assorted pickled substances, or some obscure meat - and a few have the distinct bulge of botulinum contamination.
At the southernmost end of Southeast Magnolia is a large, but mostly deserted, marina.
East from the stores, a large sinkhole blocks passage on 28th between Smith and McGraw, extending all the way to the front steps of a school building that looks as though it was abandoned decades before the rest of the area, given its relatively extensive graffiti and the rotting plywood still covering many of the windows. Judging from the faint sulfurous scent floating up from the sinkhole, it resulted from the collapse of a sewer main, and it looks as though, with no one around to fix the first one, several successive collapses and some erosion have enlarged it. Directly beneath the steps of the abandoned school, a handful of human bones protrude from the soil, and at the bottom of the hole, mostly submerged, are a bent television aerial and a few dense, misshapen bones that don’t appear to be human.
Further east, on 21st street - next to the Interbay - is an Irish pub.
Grocery Store
Whatever happened, the shelves that still stand intact are desolate. A handful of cans with torn labels are scattered about the floor. Two boxes of salt have weathered the assault, stacked on top of each other beneath a jumble of fallen store display signs. Even most of the seasonings are gone, but a few small jars of allspice and cloves remain.
Garden Center and Hardware Store
The garden center store has been looted, but its contents were more strewn around than anything else. One of the nickel candy dispensers has been knocked over and shattered; the other is intact, but filled only with a solid mass of mold now. Broken pots and bird feeders and assorted garden implements litter the floor, the bags of fertilizer have been ripped open, and the only items that seem to be missing are some of the bags of animal feed; the few remaining ones were eaten into by rodents that moved on long ago. The paper seed packets are covered in mildew, and some of their contents seem to have attempted to germinate before they rotted away; there are a few foil packets containing mostly flowering plants, but there are a few melon varieties as well. However, on the ones where the labeling is intact, the last time their germination rate was tested was 1968. The garden center gift store, the second building on the lot, has also been looted, and a small fire seems to have been started in it at one point, though it seems to have been confined solely to the greeting card section.
Across 32nd from the Magnolia Garden Center is a hardware store. This one is much bigger than the one in Briarcliff, but nearly as picked over. There are lengths of chain left, but the ropes and bungee fasteners are completely gone; the lumber department is almost completely picked clean, but there’s still a fair amount of insulation remaining - though much of it is fractured or torn. There are also a variety of plumbing fixtures, bolts, wing nuts, and useless items like signs and house numbers. Here and there are a few boxes of tacks, but for the most part, the store has been stripped of anything useful - there are no tools, or glue, or tape; even the caulk is gone. Much of what the mob decided not to take with them has been destroyed - cans of paint are thrown over the floor, and containers of cleaning and garden products have been split open, but there are still a few intact bottles and boxes at the very backs of the shelves. With some persistent digging and a lot of chemical know-how, one might be able to scrounge together enough ingredients for a small quantity of homebrew low explosives.
Marina
On the plus side, Mt. Rainier and the Space Needle are visible across the water, and the view from here is quite picturesque.
The restaurant looking out over the docks must have been a nice one, once, but now, with its broad bay windows shattered, the interior has been colonized by mold and rot. On one of the tables is the badly decomposed carcass of a shark, except its fins are too long, twisted strangely - and its eyes are still intact, bulging weirdly. Most of the other tables and chairs are knocked over and broken, but there doesn’t seem to be any overt sign of vandalism, such as charred patches or graffiti. Down in the kitchen, however, there’s a thick black crust on the countertops and smeared on the floor, with forks, knives, skewers - what seems like every pointed implement the kitchen held, in fact - jammed into what was apparently rotting meat not very long ago. Well, not very long ago compared to how long the rest of the city has been rotting; it’s a mass of maggots now. Here and there, a curve of bone is visible, though, at the very least, it doesn’t appear to be human.
Neely's Bar
There are dozens of bullet holes in the walls.
There’s a ladder slung in one corner, and it’s just long enough to reach the upper floor. Up there are a few cots that look as though they haven’t been used in months, though someone was definitely staying here after the city was emptied; the blankets are spotted with mildew, and most of them are sporting dubiously-colored dark stains. The windows are still boarded up here, with gaps just big enough to get a decent line of fire on anything down in the street - and while there are bullet holes in the walls upstairs, too, there are no corresponding ones in the boards, indicating that the shots came from inside the building. A tank of propane, long empty, has been jury-rigged into the gas fireplace, next to which is an overturned, long dry Moka pot for coffee. In between the artificial logs is a charred fragment of what looks like a Vietnam-era PSYOP pamphlet, the part that’s still legible reading, “When checking for psychological contamination, the most important step is” along with part of a red arrow in what had once been a diagram below the text. On the opposite side is written “records of all instances of possible exposure. TO SURREND” The heading of the next section trails off into charred blackness.
There’s no booze left up on the second floor - or anywhere in the building. However, there is an old record player, the hand-cranked kind, that might still work; the record on the turntable, whose fragmentary label identifies it as “Arc Light Afterglow” by the Rolling Stones - but whose few legible track titles seem to be identical with Let It Bleed - is badly warped. There’s a latched case nearby that, upon examination, proves to contain more records, some in potentially even playable shape. A few of the band names, like the Stones, are familiar, but the titles of the albums and some of the songs are not.
Back down in the kitchen, there’s a brick oven, and next to it, a haphazardly stacked pile of broken tables and chairs. Clotheslines are suspended near the front of the oven, and a few rusting cast iron pans rest inside of it. All of the knives are gone, but a few rust-speckled forks and spoons remain in the drawers, along with broken meat thermometers and battered ladles and whisks. There’s also a desultory scattering of rodent and cockroach excrement, but it seems like the animals have already discovered what you’re now finding out: there’s nothing edible or even particularly useful left here.