Hardware Space
It’s sort of like Terry Pratchett’s L-Space, except that it involves giant hardware stores, has considerably fewer books, but also considerably less active danger. You see, all hardware stores across the multiverse — at least, all hardware stores above a certain cultural level — are interconnected, spatially. Maybe temporally, too? It’s hard to say. Nobody’s ever reported a time-slip. But then, nobody’s ever reported a time-slip, so it’d be evidence either way, right?
Cedar Jack’s Dodo Ranch – Google Docs
Cedar Jack’s Dodo Ranch
This sprawling (1,200 acre) poultry farm in southern Nebraska is not exactly hidden; it’s just obscure. There aren’t any neighbors, Cedar Jack’s Dodo Ranch is rural enough that the site has its own generators and sewage treatment, and the operators of the Ranch don’t advertise their products. Despite the name, nobody named Jack has owned the Ranch within living memory; currently, it’s competently operated by Greg and Linda Henderson. They took over the place twenty years ago, and plan to let their kids operate it, assuming that their kids want to run a free-range poultry farm that specializes in extinct birds.
Lyman-Dodgson Mental Wellness Residential Center – Google Docs
Lyman-Dodgson Mental Wellness
Residential Center
The Lyman-Dodgson Mental Wellness Residential Center (usually called Lyman-Dodgson) is a privately owned mental health care residential facility located in upstate New York. It is fair to call the campus ‘sprawling:’ the property has a forty-bed secure facility, two twenty-bed buildings arranged as four-bedroom suites with a common living space, and seventy townhomes arranged in fourteen buildings. Add to that a combination social space / classroom facility, physical therapy building, a park and outdoor recreational area, a small office building for administration, and a security system that rivals Camp David’s, and you end up with quite the site.
Continue reading Location Seed: The Lyman-Dodgson Mental Wellness Residential Center.
VFW Post #7123
VFW Post #7123 is located in Gerritsen Beach, Brooklyn; and it’s utterly unremarkable. The Post is located in a standalone cinder block banquet hall-plus-bar not too far from the water, and while it was hammered by Hurricane Sandy a few years back the damage was all repaired. And therein hangs a tale.
Oracle at Hierapolis – Google Docs
The Oracle at Hierapolis
The fun thing about the scientific mind is that it can be so usefully distracted. For example: does one have an oracular site with the unfortunate side effect that people and animals sometimes suddenly die in its proximity? Easy enough to arrange matters so that there’s an convenient mundane explanation, like dangerously high levels of carbon dioxide emanating from a local cave. It’s even better if you can put your oracular operation inside a cave that already has a toxic gas problem (assuming that you can compensate for that): you don’t have to worry about people seeing through your fakery, because it’s not actually fake in the first place.
Spokeeasies
It’s like a Speakeasy, only everything and everyone in it is dead. That’s actually less macabre than it sounds; nothing is decomposing, decaying, or even subtly off. Just… dead. As in, all the beers are from breweries that no longer exist, the jukebox is a classic Seeburg that plays 45s only from artists who have passed away (including artists who never had their albums recorded on 45s), the television gets stations and shows that have been off the air for decades and the staff — well, you can figure it out. Note that the bartenders and waitresses never leave the Spokeeasy. They’re openly disinterested in even trying.
Cormorant Lake Station – Google Docs
Cormorant Lake Station
“Gateway to the Hollow Earth”
This town doesn’t appear on Google Maps; and when the aboveground portion does show up on the Internet, it’s usually mislabeled as Cormorant Lake Lodge, which is a Manitoban hunting fishing lodge about a mile to the southwest. Cormorant Lake Station definitely exists, though. Aboveground, it’s about twenty or so buildings, including a small hotel, a general store, and an auto repair garage that is far too large for the business it now gets. The town mostly stretches along the northwest shore of Air Force Bay; the only real way to get there is via lake ferry to the lodge. The locals are polite, friendly, and not particularly prone to secrecy.
Gamma Lunae Coloniam – Google Docs
Gamma Lunae Coloniam
Well, that’s what’s inscribed on the buildings and mosaics. Not that anybody’s found Gamma Lunea Coloniam: it’s nestled in a lunar pit in the Mare Ingenii, which is located on the dark side of the moon. So it may be a while before anybody goes to look at it.
Museum of Natural Disasters – Google Docs
The Museum of Natural Disasters
(Sioux City, Nebraska)
If anybody looked very closely at the Museum of Natural Disasters’ books — mind you, nobody has been allowed to do that since 1958 — they’d be confused at how the museum manages to stay in operation. It’s not a bad museum, you understand. It’s a perfectly good kid-friendly institution that helps teach natural science via fanciful and exciting dynamic exhibits. Which is a fancy way of saying that the museum educationally blows things up for kids.
Continue reading Location Seed: The Museum of Natural Disasters.
I think that this may have been inspired by a Suppressed Transmission? I can’t remember and my books are behind several physical walls of sewing equipment. But it sounds like an idea that Ken Hite might have.
State of Transylvania – Google Docs
The State of Transylvania
It’s always existed, but you’ve never heard of it. It’s not on the map, there’s no 51st star in the flag, and it has no representation in Washington. As long as you’re not actually in Transylvania.
If you are in Transylvania, then it’s a somewhat rural state whose capital and major city is Teakle. A history of the state — if again, read inside Transylvania — reveals that it became a state in 1815, barely sided with the Union in the Civil War, and generally existed, unremarkably, for the next hundred and fifty years. The legislature is Democratic, the governor is Republican, and the Senate and House delegation is split evenly. Transylvania has 4 electoral votes, and has been a reliable Republican Presidential state since 2004. Apparently, Transylvania’s Makepeace Bishop served as Vice President in 1880, and Horace Leviathan Jones was a strong Presidential candidate on the Democratic ticket in 1912. The major industry today is livestock; Transylvania still sends endless streams of cows and pigs north to Chicago for the slaughter.
