Everyone who ends up in the Hub materializes with a phone, either on their person (in a pocket, in a bag, whatever) or at their feet. The phones are pretty hard to lose-- even if you make an effort to ditch it somewhere, it will inevitably find you within about a day. The city's robots have quite a bit of fun returning lost property, it seems.

It's strange that you'd want to ditch your phone anyway. It's pretty handy!

Communications

Phone have voice, video chat, and texting features. (And yes, there is a keyboard for those with problems using a touch-screen to type.)

With a little mucking around with the back-end, you can encrypt communications, and if one end of a real-time conversation is secure than the other end is as well. It takes some know-how with computer code and some time for trial and error, and every so often a firmware update gets pushed through the network that kills encryptions-- they will need to be replaced by the truly security-dedicated once or twice a month.

Really paranoid types might notice that the phones are still communicating some kind of usage data to a central database. There's a disclaimer buried in the EULA that says non-identifying user data is transmitted... but that's an awful lot of data being sent if the central database is really just concerned with usage stats and crash reports.

Apps

These are smartphones, of course they have apps.

Weather gives the forecast for the week, though it's not very accurate beyond giving a general idea of what the temps might look like and if there might be precipitation. The specific daily/hourly forecasts in the app tend to be hilariously off-base. And every once in a while the app just freaks out and predicts crazy things like asteroids or a high of 60000 degrees Fahrenheit.

Mail is an e-mail app to let you transfer messages and files between phones. It's a good idea to check it on the regular-- the inbox tends to fill up pretty quickly with spam otherwise. Unless you are in the market for natural male enhancement on the cheap from Canada...

Photos lets you take pictures and store them on the phone. There is a limited amount of storage space.

Music plays music. Books is an ereader app. Alas, apparently the cell network here just isn't up to streaming video, because there are no streaming video service apps. Your phone doesn't start off with any multimedia, but the mall sure is full of places with a really bizarre mishmash of creative works, like a hundred shopping malls from around the multiverse dropped their catalogs on the place.

House is your house remote control app. It contains your electronic keys (you just have your phone out and select unlock to get in!) and the command interface for your home's assigned maintenance bots, thermostat, etc. It also has contact information for your current roommate, because that sort of thing is important.

CityPass is your combined citizen ID and bank account. The bank account comes pre-loaded with about $45,000 USD and it never seems to deplete no matter how much you spent on frilly lingerie at the mall. It never increases either, so if you want to acquire something crazy like a stretch limousine, you might have to go in on the purchase with a few neighbors. The citizen ID card lets you access the city's public transit system, including Metrorail, and is needed if you ever collect other important documents like medical records.

AirCart is a grocery app. If you happen upon one of those nifty billboard convenience stores, you can use the app to shop for groceries by scanning items. Your purchases will then be delivered to your door. Alas, it doesn't let you order from home-- maybe the city was having a problem with recluses never leaving or something.

Characters with the right tech background who learn the phone's OS can conceivably write apps and add to the total.

Hacking

The phones rely on a city-wide wifi network with a cell tower backup for the handful of areas lacking hotspots. While most homes have individual secured wifi hotspots, most public wifi is just that. Public. That means that phones can be hacked from afar, especially if they are using the cell network or are using an unsecured wireless network.

While people practiced with encryption can secure their messages from casual hack attempts, and the phones themselves come with a pretty darn good firewall and regular security updating, an experienced hacker could conceivably break into a phone. It requires knowledge of that phone's exact IP address-- hacking from afar takes a good deal of old-fashioned legwork to figure out what public wifi the mark uses and what their address on the network is-- and you have to actually succeed at the attempt to sneak past the phone's on-board security.

As such, hackers should comment to the HACKING thread below with the following information:

Character name/canon in the subject header.

Background: A brief description of the character's skill area-- someone who is a hacker with counter-espionage experience would probably be better at this than someone who primarily accesses other people's data through worms. The numbers you pick to represent your skills should be in line with this background.

Hacking skill: Give a number between 1-10 to roughly represent how often the character succeeds at hacking attempts in their canon, 10 being 100% success, 1 being 10%.

Hacking resistance: Number between 1-10, representing how often the character manages to repel hacking attempts in their canon.

Wild factors: If there are circumstances that would give a character a bonus (or penalty!) to the above stats if faced with a hacker from outside their canon source, note here.

Care and Feeding of Your Phone

On second thought... your phone is a little weird.

Aside from the glitches in the apps, the phone never seems to need charging, either. It does have a data cable in case you want to synch it with a larger computer in your home, but the battery never reads anything other than 100% all of the time. Mechanically inclined characters who attempt to take apart their phones will find that it's densely packed with circuit boards and it.. doesn't seem to have a power source. Anywhere. Where a battery might inhabit a normal phone is just a glass something or other. Maybe it's a future battery... but when you hook the glass up to something else, nothing happens. (It makes a very pretty suncatcher, though.)

You can lose your phone. It's a phone and doesn't have limbs. The robots will eventually track you down and return it-- they seem to have been programmed to prioritize that, and even people who move around the city a lot will eventually be intercepted by a helpful goonie-bot. The weird thing? When you check your formerly-lost phone you find texts you never sent or history for calls you never made. When you go to access the details-- the message or the entry for the contact you called-- the phone spits out gibberish and crashes. When it reboots, the communications you never sent are gone.

You can break your phone. You can scatter the bits around. It'll still find you within 24 hours, all backed up like nothing happened, albeit with the same weird junk data.

You can't really escape the phones. It's probably a good thing they're low-maintenance then.

You can't just die and get better like nothing happened.

If you want to die in-game, make sure you have the consent of the character playing your killer if this is not a murderer-less crime. Killing can be upsetting, especially for protag types and especially for protag types who didn't mean it. If you want to die to NPC monsters or whatever, go for it.

A dead character stays dead for seven days, and then respawns in the Hub in the condition they were in when they first arrived, down to lint in their pockets, minus a few little... problems.

Characters who die will experience a death penalty lasting for seven days. It seems the universe doesn't like having to respawn you.

Penalties include physical or mental effects and escalate as the number of deaths a character accrues goes. Your character will divorce more and more from reality or become more and more monstrous and out-of-control the more times they bite it and have to be respawned. There are a lot of potential death penalties, too many to exhaustively list here, but there are three broad types.

Monstrous penalties are what they look like on the tin. As your character racks up deaths, they start to slowly resemble and then behave like a twisted beast of chaos and shadows. It starts subtly at first-- an aversion to light here, a craving for the living force of a sentient being there-- and then starts to escalate. Soon your fingers are twisting into claws and you desperately crave flesh to the point you can't eat anything else... then you start phasing through walls and feel an uncontrollable urge to stalk the people you love...

And worst of all, if you are really allergic to living, you seem to spend more and more of your time as a monster...

Break penalties start off innocuous, or at least humorously. To put it in the briefest of terms, you start to see people as popular AU or fanfic trope versions of themselves-- the coffee shop, the swim team, the werewolf pack. Problem is, the more often you die, the more you start to see people as their AU selves, until it starts to effect even those closest to you. It's really quite terrifying if you think about it:

Your memory and perception of people just ends up a little off. You could swear that the battle cyborg you occasionally trade information with is actually a professional tennis player. That the quiet girl in the library is actually a raging alpha-female on the prowl for someone to join her wolf pack. They might correct you, but you can't quite shake the feeling for a few days...

And then the people you're friends with start to seem off too, as your deaths start to mount. Why was your friend carrying a sword? They run a coffee shop! And then it starts to spread to your closest companions... And then it starts to seem like everything is some chaotic jumble of what you think you know about people and what they actually are, and no two people even seem to be from the same kind of twisted reality anymore...

Glitch penalties are the most common for people to experience, particularly if they don't really rack up the death counts. Most of them have to do with messing up one's interaction with reality-- senses, speech, or occasionally vivid hallucinations about the way the world works that have psychosomatic effects. If you hallucinate that the floor is lava? You feel a burn even if you aren't injured. You could start regularly tasting sounds or be constrained to always speak in heroic couplets. (Unless your name is Etrigan. Then you have to speak like a normal mortal. Shudder.) You could lose your vision and have to echolocate or use scans.. or lose your form of perceiving the world and gain sight. It's all rather disorienting, as if the world didn't quite reboot you right when you came back from the dead...

Glitches don't really escalate. Soon enough someone will end up either on the path of becoming a monster or on the path of seeming to break entirely from reality.

And reminder... anyone who is dead in canon and comes back for the game will have one death already added to their register. So if they die again? It's gonna be a bit more interesting...

Comment below if your character is going to die. Include the name, username, and date of death. We will issue a reminder of when you character respawns and the death penalty involved.

☸ The Setting



You find yourself in a futuristic city, deserted by all but a bunch of robots maintaining order and keeping the lights on. As time goes on, you notice that this place is probably on Earth even if all the constellations are wrong. The days are about 24 hours long, there's only one moon tidally locked to the planet, and seasons happen with about the same regularity that you've come to expect of Earth.

It's weird here. All your citizenship information is stored in your phone-- your ID, your bank account (And how weird is it that you have one of those? You just appeared out of nowhere!), even control of the robots that maintain your home. You don't have to work-- the amount of money in your account is enough for you to buy a brand new car if you wanted, and it never seems to go down.

Your housing is taken care of too-- you've been assigned a place with a roommate, and the address and any keys to enter the location are already in your phone. If you don't like it? There's plenty of room available, both single-family and apartment-style living to suit most tastes. All the mayor seems to care about is that people aren't living alone, for safety's sake.

It's weird. If it weren't so empty here, it'd probably be paradise-- a future world with no need to struggle for the basics and all kinds of leisure open to play with. But the problem is.. where are all the other people?

If that wasn't bad enough? You can't leave, either. The mayor is very sorry about this, but there’s some kind of weird anomaly on the outskirts of town, manifesting as a shimmery field that gives your character a headache if they look at it too long. If they try to walk through this barrier field, they will black out under a feeling of intense vertigo, senses scrambled until they are tasting blue and a jackhammer noise feels fuzzy, and then regain consciousness on the other side of the map. Characters who started out walking south will be on the north side of town, walking east gets leads you to the west side of town.. like being trapped in a bad video game. Trying to use fancy teleporting devices or psychic powers to leave the area or to look beyond its borders leads to the same screaming black vertigo effect. It’s like the whole place is surrounded by something very, very wrong.

The mayor is trying to work on a fix, and in the meantime he'll try to make you as comfortable as he can during your stay.

☸ Key Locations



The Hub (1)



Everyone's arrival point Located roughly in the center of town, the Hub consists of a huge collection of stand-up, single-person pods like something a cartoon mad scientist would have laying around. They are actually single-person teleporter units, or they would be if anything was working. Your character (unless they are just too big) will appear in one of the pods upon arrival or upon respawning after death. The pods are not locked and will open automatically after about thirty seconds, though it's still not a fun experience for the claustrophobic.

On the floor below is an arrangement that looks very reminiscent of the transporter room from Star Trek-- these in better days were cargo teleporters. Very large characters will arrive here.

The rest of the Hub complex, aside from the floors of teleporters, resembles any large transit center. There are waiting areas, automated areas for procuring food and drink (though, alas, nothing specialized to non-Earthlike metabolisms), and even a gift shop that sells random touristy kitsch. The general area is well-lit and screams future with its tasteful appointment, track lighting, and touchscreens everywhere. There are directories available scattered through the complex that provide directions out of the building and to various points of interest around the city-- though for some reason the computer thinks you're in a large city at home if you simply ask "where am I?"

Allbright Memorial Hospital (2)



This facility has the capability of treating most human-like characters with no problem... if there were qualified physicians to supervise the robots. As it is, all the robots are programmed for basic first aid for human-types, though anything beyond stitches is a little beyond them and the stitches are likely to be crooked.

The robots could probably be programmed for non-humans, but it would take a programmer of sufficient skill and a doctor to input the proper medical protocols. As it is, the robots are designed to help, so they'll try to execute their programming anyway. Even if their help really, really doesn't help at all.

Metrorail Station (3)



The trains still run on time, thanks to being automated monorails... but after a pleasant ride, you just end up back at the station no matter what you do. It's not a bad train ride. You get to spend an hour in a quiet, gently rocking vehicle with comfortable seats (for public transit anyway). Looking out the windows isn't recommended-- but if you really want to ride the train, comment in the relevant thread and we'll give you a synopsis of what your character gets to see. (It should be noted that characters who ride the train too often see their CityPass app deny them access to the station for a while. Hmmmmm.)

The station is notable for being equipped with one of those fancy QR-code based convenience stores in addition to the usual newsstand, weird vending machines, and noodle cart. Download the grocery app to your phone and snap pictures of what you want, and it will be waiting for you at home. Take a train ride to nowhere and then enjoy your ramen when you get back!

Community Center (4)



Located in a patch of wooded park, this facility is a combination public bath (onsen-style) and normal gym/community fitness center. There are areas for most sports, including an ice rink for skating and hockey and a gym that can host basketball or roller derby. Sports equipment is available on loan if you forget your own, though the mettaurs who maintain the locker rooms get awfully testy if you try to make off with center equipment.

While there are marked guy and gal bathing areas, none of the robots are programmed to care who is where.

City Hall (5)



While nobody can remember what the city is called, it does have an ultramodern city hall. This is where the mayor holes up with the robot control system most of the time-- while he can be spotted around the building, he seems to prefer staying locked in his offices. As a result, access to the central computer system is prohibited.

While the place is mostly empty clerical offices, there are a few points of interest. The roof is actually a garden, typically planted with a mixture of ornamentals (mostly flowers) and edible herbs. The second floor hosts an automated cafe that serves very nice sandwiches and coffee-based drinks. There are also several large conference rooms designed to hold government meetings and a medium-sized auditorium for larger gatherings that could probably be co-opted pretty easily for plays or movie nights.

Starlight Mall (6)



It's a mall. It sprawls across approximately four city blocks and has four floors of shops. The food court has a carousel in it.

Some mall-only military-spec robots patrol the area, looking for shoplifters. They will attempt to tackle a thief and steal back the item being stolen, but they can be outrun pretty easily and it's not like the bank balance on your phone ever seems to decrease... or increase for that matter.

Needful Things (7)



Leland has his own fantastic junk shop in a less-pristine area of the city, far away from the Starlight Mall. It's like every cliche of an eccentric antiques dealer's shop that you can find.. but you can also find just about anything there among the piles and piles of stuff.

One wrinkle: Leland prefers to trade in kind rather than for the meaningless money-- he has apparently been collecting stuff for a long time, and he'd rather not see his work frivolously go to waste. If you can't trade him something, he'll gladly take a future favor instead. Sure, the more desperately-needed or difficult to source the object, the greater the favor, but come on. He's not running a charity here.

He also has a large collection of Stephen King books. Which you are free to sit and read, but not allowed to take out of the store. It doesn't count as trading. The man just really likes Stephen King. So letting patrons read his books just means that Leland will have someone to talk about his collection with.

Cathedral (8)



Like the city itself, the name of the cathedral is lost. All the relevant signage has been broken, gouged, or otherwise rendered illegible. It's definitely not an old building, though, as even a cursory search through would show that modern conveniences like electricity, heat, water, and wifi are all present. The cathedral itself appears to be multi-denominational, and in the same couple of blocks in the city there are other houses of worship as well. It appears that whatever else this place was, it was pretty darn diverse. There's even a storefront Chuch of the SubGenius!

Riverview Apartments (9)



The first housing block that the mayor opened for the habitation of newcomers. It's a high-rise apartment building, like most in the city, and it features two and three bedroom luxury apartments. There are very nice views of the river, though those who are a little bit weaker of stomach might prefer the other side of the building since the river also offers a pretty good view of the anomaly too.

The building is thankfully in excellent repair, and there are a gym, pool, and small bar/grill on the first couple of floors.