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.
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
Looking over the railing, the dimensions of the courtyard are identical to those seen from the first floor, though the mist that gathers in it makes it difficult to determine much else. There’s a faint glint of metal that may be the open bridge on the third floor, but the ground isn’t visible. What is readily visible, however, is the heavily thorned leaves of the plants waving in the absence of any breeze.
At the very least, there are no effects from being near the plants, meaning that they’re not shedding anything - which, in turn, means that it should be safe to set up rain and dew collectors.