New Sci Fi Setting Seeds

Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2 · 03-01-2021, 11:30 PM

Mystery City

A primitive world (someplace where they think steamships are a pretty neat idea) holds a secret.

One of this planet's great nations has a good TL5 industrial base, feeds itself, and has a growing population. But to the inhabitants, it's capital - the Mystery City - is a sealed-off enigma, approachable only with permission and that permission is never given. No non-citizen has ever gotten within sixty miles of the city.

The question of the Mystery City is cleared up when examining the world from orbit, but that just raises more questions.

First, the planet has a ring, barely visible from the surface. Examination shows that it consists of carbonate dust.

The Mystery City is clearly visible, on an obviously artificial plateau fifty miles across and covered with signs of TL5+ civilization. And right in the middle of the plateau is a circular section, twenty-five miles across, surrounded by a wall a mile-and-a-half tall and a mile-and-a-half thick. It is a perfect black suggesting vantablack. There are three entrances, and the interior is filled with a major TL5 city. The city and the plateau around it are lit with electric lights (TL8 LEDs from spectrographic analysis). The airspace is filled with the frequencies of advanced scanners - whether or not those activate defenses is a question no one has had the nerve to answer yet.

The Mystery City appears to be the base of an orbital elevator, and the orbital ring the remnants of the elevator itself. But there are no other remains of a advanced civilization on the planet. It's possible that it was an ancient alien base, but without direct access to the city, who can tell?

The nation based around the Mystery City has no exotic materials or technologies, it's no more advanced than the rest of the planet's nations. But the Mystery City is the only area on the planet with electric lights.

So the objective of everyone who knows of the world is to examine the Mystery City and get some answers to it's many questions without alerting the steampunk residents. Or alerting any possible remains of whoever built them.

03-01-2021, 11:30 PM	#11
Mysterious Dark Lord v3.2 Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: The deep dark haunted woods	Re: New Sci Fi Setting Seeds *Mystery City* A primitive world (someplace where they think steamships are a pretty neat idea) holds a secret. One of this planet's great nations has a good TL5 industrial base, feeds itself, and has a growing population. But to the inhabitants, it's capital - the Mystery City - is a sealed-off enigma, approachable only with permission and that permission is never given. No non-citizen has ever gotten within sixty miles of the city. The question of the Mystery City is cleared up when examining the world from orbit, but that just raises more questions. First, the planet has a ring, barely visible from the surface. Examination shows that it consists of carbonate dust. The Mystery City is clearly visible, on an obviously artificial plateau fifty miles across and covered with signs of TL5+ civilization. And right in the middle of the plateau is a circular section, twenty-five miles across, surrounded by a wall a mile-and-a-half tall and a mile-and-a-half thick. It is a perfect black suggesting vantablack. There are three entrances, and the interior is filled with a major TL5 city. The city and the plateau around it are lit with electric lights (TL8 LEDs from spectrographic analysis). The airspace is filled with the frequencies of advanced scanners - whether or not those activate defenses is a question no one has had the nerve to answer yet. The Mystery City appears to be the base of an orbital elevator, and the orbital ring the remnants of the elevator itself. But there are no other remains of a advanced civilization on the planet. It's possible that it was an ancient alien base, but without direct access to the city, who can tell? The nation based around the Mystery City has no exotic materials or technologies, it's no more advanced than the rest of the planet's nations. But the Mystery City is the only area on the planet with electric lights. So the objective of everyone who knows of the world is to examine the Mystery City and get some answers to it's many questions without alerting the steampunk residents. Or alerting any possible remains of whoever built them. __________________ "When you talk about damage radius, even atomic weapons pale before that of an unfettered idiot in a position of power." - Sam Starfall from the webcomic Freefall