location seed – Page 6

Location Seed: Massacre Mirages.

Massacre Mirages

Typically: deeds are evil, places are not. The distinction is important, even though the residue for extremely evil deeds can linger in a particular place for a long, long time. Since evil is not an intrinsic feature of the landscape, it acts as an irritant on the universe itself. Left untreated, the universe typically responds by trying to expel the evil somewhere else. Anywhere else; it doesn’t really matter. Put more simply: places where Bad Things Happened make passageways in reality. Passageways that others can use.

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Location Seed: Foster Park Gazebo.

Foster Park Gazebo – Google Docs

Foster Park Gazebo

The Foster Park Gazebo is located in Le Mars, Iowa; it is mundanely located in the Foster Park Historic District, and is considered to be a historical site of some local note. Esoterically speaking, it is easily the single most occultly-charged location in the Midwest between Chicago and Rapid City, South Dakota. It’s so potent that novice spellcasters are advised to cast no spells within two hundred feet of the gazebo itself, particularly including ones involving fertility.

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Location Seed: Oak Island Base.

Oak Island Base – Google Docs

Oak Island Base

How do you keep a secret? By not keeping anybody around who can see it. Oak Island is a small island in the Lake of the Woods that was ceded to the United States by the Webster-Ashburton Treaty, ostensibly to resolve surveying errors but mostly because the British government preferred that the underground derelict alien base found on it become the headache of somebody else. British savants had prodded and poked at the stupid thing for forty years, they got nothing out of it, and perhaps Brother Jonathan would have better luck. Or else get themselves blown up by randomly touching things.

The American government — with, admittedly, a lot of help from first the British, then the Canadian governments — has been themselves nervously poking at the place ever since. Oak Island Base is an extensive underground facility with ten levels, and enough space to host about five hundred humans; based on the size of the ‘beds’ and ‘tables’ in the facility, it was capable of hosting about seven hundred or so of the aliens. Most of the facility is empty: the aliens apparently took everything with them that could be easily removed. It wasn’t until the 1930s that researchers realized that there was an electrical system in the place, and the 1960s before somebody figured out how to refuel the nuclear reactor that powered it. Discovering that there were embedded video screens to switch on didn’t occur until 1998; people have been trying to decypher the digital menus and library ever since.

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Location seed: The Lake Niangua Extrusion.

The Lake Niangua Extrusion – Google Docs

The Lake Niangua Extrusion

Lake Niangua is an extremely shallow lake in Camden county, Missouri. Ostensibly. Well, yes, it really is a shallow lake. You can fish there, and everything. Just don’t do a chromosomal analysis of the fish, because their DNA is left-handed.

And it’s not just the fish; the entire ecosystem of that lake is left-handed — or, to (mis)use the technical terms: the ecosystem there displays mostly Z-DNA helical structures instead of Earth’s more usual B-DNA structures. Which seems to make the fish look weird and taste a little funny, but that’s about it. But what makes the situation very strange is that the effect is absolutely limited to that one lake; flora and fauna taken from it (or introduced to it) prove remarkably difficult to transplant.

Continue reading Location seed: The Lake Niangua Extrusion.

Location seed: Anchor Station Medved.

Blame this. Also: The Secret World had an awesomely cool Halloween mission every year that involves radios playing old-style spooky stories in-game, numbers stations, and ghosts. Presumably, so will Secret World Legends.

Anchor Station Medved – Google Docs

Anchor Station Medved

Are you familiar with numbers stations? They’re legendary among the conspiracy community: radio stations broadcasting nonsense on the shortwave bands, transmitting out gibberish that’s as tantalizing as it’s creepy. One of the most infamous ones is whatever-the-is MDZhB (or UVB-76) station that the old Soviets (and new Russians) that has been broadcasting since before the end of the Cold War. The first layer of the onion claims that the station is a caretaker for an espionage resource, which is to be activated in wartime and then used to transmit information that could be decrypted via the use of one-time pads. At least, that’s what the Russian spy agencies solemnly tell the current Russian regime. There are more layers to the onion, however.

Continue reading Location seed: Anchor Station Medved.

Location seed: Caojiawan Ghost Station.

Caojiawan Ghost Station – Google Docs

Caojiawan Ghost Station

…Well. It’s complicated.

Imagine the problems, if you would, of being one of the administrators for the municipality of Chongqing. The area has a population larger than Texas’s, with half of them living in one city. It’s corrupt. It’s fairly poor, despite being heavily industrialized and a major transportation hub. And it’s full of ghosts, of course.

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Location Seed: The Bend.

Bend – Google Docs

The Bend

Canaan, Connecticut

The Bend is a patch of land about the size of an acre, located at the south end of Wagnum Lake in the town of Canaan, which is itself located in Connecticut’s Litchfield County. And… it’s one of those places that ‘defy gravity.’ Normally, that’s just a place where there’s an optical illusion in place that makes an downward slant look like a level or upward one; but in this case it’s an area where, if you put a metal ball in one particular spot, it will slowly but noticeably rise twelve inches in the air, and stay there.

And that’s pretty much it.

The best that the scientists can come up with is that it’s a knot in space-time — right, that’s not what they said at first. It’s the immensely dumbed-down explanation that at least allows people to move on with working the problem. Whatever it is is just exotic physics, not supernatural, but it’s really strange exotic physics, and as time goes on many of the scientists involved are getting less and less sure about whether they’re even close to accurately modeling what’s going on here. It’s all a mystery.

Unfortunately, it’s not exactly a sexy mystery, from a funding point of view: which means that there’s no institutional drive to investigate. Quite the opposite, really: the property in which The Bend is located happens to belong to somebody who once pulled over in the middle of the night to give a wet and bedraggled hitchhiker a lift, a hot meal, and fifty bucks for the bus to Hartford. That hitchhiker now oversees Illuminati operations for the entire Eastern Seaboard, which effectively means that NO ONE MAY BOTHER THAT GOOD SAMARITAN BY TRAIPSING THEIR EXPERIMENTS ALL OVER HIS PROPERTY. Researchers can still research, as long as they leave no traces (memory manipulation does not count as ‘no traces’). They’d be well-advised to leave no traces.

And, hey! Guess who got assigned to run interference for the latest research team!

Location Seed: Whistler’s Peak, Kansas.

Whistler’s Peak, Kansas – Google Docs

Whistler’s Peak, Kansas

Whistler’s Peak, Kansas

Population: 3,560,000 (2010 census)

Type of Government: Mayor (incumbent: M. Kent, R)

Representation in Congress: The Fourth Scion of the Dusk (R, KS-05); and Spinning Jenny (I, KS-06)

Principal Industry: Whistler’s Peak is the center of Earth’s nascent astroshamanistic industry. There are three major aerospace ports: Robert A. Heinlein Interplanetary, Anderson/Piper Interdimensional, and Whistler’s Peak International.

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Location Seed: The 3:45 Room.

3_45 Room – Google Docs

The 3:45 Room

The 3:45 Room exists in an otherwise unremarkable office building, in an appropriately convenient city. The Room is 15’ by 15’ by 10’; it contains a cot, toilet, shower head, hot plate, ceiling light, microwave, combination desk and mini-fridge, wall cabinet, stopped clock set to 3:45, and no electrical outlets whatsoever (the appliances are all spliced directly into the wall). Cell phones and wifi inexplicably fail to work inside the Room; supernatural attempts to scry its interior, or communicate from inside the Room, do not end well. All of this is helpfully explained on a sign on the door leading to the 3:45 Room.

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Location Seed: The Kanorado Bypass Anomaly.

Kanorado Bypass Anomaly – Google Docs

The Kanorado Bypass Anomaly

This anomaly exists just east of Kanorado, Kansas, virtually on the border of Colorado. If someone is driving on I-70 East, they will find an unmarked turnoff that leads to a desultory rest stop. There is always a police car on the site, which is always there to keep people out of what appears to be a storage facility. Authorized personnel will find that the facility hides a ramp to an underground two-lane tunnel. Anyone who drives through that absolutely straight, ten-mile tunnel will find themselves in an identical fake storage facility – on I-80 West, just past Ogallala, Nebraska. Just to make it clear: the two towns are roughly one hundred miles apart.

Continue reading Location Seed: The Kanorado Bypass Anomaly.