;_; I KNOW, I've BEEN imagining it, waugh! I was so looking forward to it. I mean, fuck, I could go on-- Seattle is where the term Skid Row was coined. That's the street where they rolled the logs down the hill to the water to ship them away... right through the middle of the asian community, where it didn't matter if a log went off course and ran over somebody or smashed a house. And before that, the asian community was FLOATING ON AN ARTIFICAL ISLAND MADE OF GARBAGE. Which at one point caught on fire, and sank, with massive casualties. On top of the other major fires that nearly wiped out the whole city (as was the trend at the time). The shadowlands in this place would be insane.
At one point we found a building that had obviously at some point been a Masonic temple-- there were Mason symbols in the stone above the door, in the walls and floor. The place was huge, but had no signs, no markings, just a small unobtrusive locked door with steps leading upwards inside. On the top floor, 5 stories up or so? A massive open balcony, with huge pillars, totally decked out in opulent red and gold. I'd like to know what goes on in there.
I went on the Underground Tour twice-- you can go down below street level and see the buildings' original entrances, and all sorts of crazy things. The sawdust settles and rots, so the floors down there wobble up and down sometimes like 3'. (At one point a little kid drowned in a pothole in the sawdust-filled streets-- he was trying to paddle a little boat across it, the thing was something like 9' wide, 18' long, and 8' deep.) When they got toilets, they had to be built above sea level because the plumbing went to the ocean-- which in some cases meant climbing up 15 stairs or so to get to the toilet, which is fun in the dark while you're toting a shotgun to fend off plague-infested rats. (the underground was eventually condemned due to AIDs bubonic plague) If the toilet was not high enough and you happened to flush while the tide is coming in you'd end up with a massive geyser.
Yeah pretty much only the Sabbat would be able to shake up the Kuei-Jin much, and that by sheer fucking Zerg rush. Which could be quite effective, depending. To even get the Kuei-Jin to bother to pay attention much less reveal themselves, they'd have to start by going after the mortals in the asian communities, fucking up the businesses and infrastructure, which would threaten the support systems and food sources for the Kuei-Jin-- which are vulnerable in that they are unusually VISIBLE, Chinatown being such a distinctive thing, organization has its down side. The international districts do have very clear borders, though, and there would be solid defenses of some kind to prevent that type of invasion. It'd be messy, good popcorn stuff.
Kuei-Jin have groups specifically dedicated to hunting down the newbies and whipping some civilization into them-- the thing is, without that, new Kuei-Jin tend not to ever surface from a crazed bestial state and get themselves dead rather quickly, after making a big cannibalistic mess. There might be a few orphans that manage to survive, but not necessarily a large group.
One of the characters I'd made was a dude who was born in Seattle around the turn of the century, fatherless, mother a prostitute-- he'd never been anywhere near his homeland and couldn't even speak the language fluently till after he rose and got dragged back there for re-education. He was a bootlegger, a gangster-- not yakuza or tong style, but a garden variety suspender-wearing, drug-dealing, woman-beating, tommy gun-toting thug. He's quite mellow and philosophical now, appreciates tea, but still talks with an entirely American accent, which confuses people beautifully.
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Date: 2008-09-28 09:46 pm (UTC)At one point we found a building that had obviously at some point been a Masonic temple-- there were Mason symbols in the stone above the door, in the walls and floor. The place was huge, but had no signs, no markings, just a small unobtrusive locked door with steps leading upwards inside. On the top floor, 5 stories up or so? A massive open balcony, with huge pillars, totally decked out in opulent red and gold. I'd like to know what goes on in there.
I went on the Underground Tour twice-- you can go down below street level and see the buildings' original entrances, and all sorts of crazy things. The sawdust settles and rots, so the floors down there wobble up and down sometimes like 3'. (At one point a little kid drowned in a pothole in the sawdust-filled streets-- he was trying to paddle a little boat across it, the thing was something like 9' wide, 18' long, and 8' deep.) When they got toilets, they had to be built above sea level because the plumbing went to the ocean-- which in some cases meant climbing up 15 stairs or so to get to the toilet, which is fun in the dark while you're toting a shotgun to fend off plague-infested rats. (the underground was eventually condemned due to
AIDsbubonic plague) If the toilet was not high enough and you happened to flush while the tide is coming in you'd end up with a massive geyser.Yeah pretty much only the Sabbat would be able to shake up the Kuei-Jin much, and that by sheer fucking Zerg rush. Which could be quite effective, depending. To even get the Kuei-Jin to bother to pay attention much less reveal themselves, they'd have to start by going after the mortals in the asian communities, fucking up the businesses and infrastructure, which would threaten the support systems and food sources for the Kuei-Jin-- which are vulnerable in that they are unusually VISIBLE, Chinatown being such a distinctive thing, organization has its down side. The international districts do have very clear borders, though, and there would be solid defenses of some kind to prevent that type of invasion. It'd be messy, good popcorn stuff.
Kuei-Jin have groups specifically dedicated to hunting down the newbies and whipping some civilization into them-- the thing is, without that, new Kuei-Jin tend not to ever surface from a crazed bestial state and get themselves dead rather quickly, after making a big cannibalistic mess. There might be a few orphans that manage to survive, but not necessarily a large group.
One of the characters I'd made was a dude who was born in Seattle around the turn of the century, fatherless, mother a prostitute-- he'd never been anywhere near his homeland and couldn't even speak the language fluently till after he rose and got dragged back there for re-education. He was a bootlegger, a gangster-- not yakuza or tong style, but a garden variety suspender-wearing, drug-dealing, woman-beating, tommy gun-toting thug. He's quite mellow and philosophical now, appreciates tea, but still talks with an entirely American accent, which confuses people beautifully.