#Qerse

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TTS Flag Fridays: The Masterpost

Central: Geographic and political center of Tick-Tock Town. A hotpot of cultures and styles. Highly aristocratic.

Seaside: Port sector of the city. Split into thirds by two rivers and stitched together by eight bridges. A hard day’s sweat triumphs over industrial ease here.

Qerse: Largest of the eight districts and the most machine-infested. Factories dominate the skyline. An import center and home to various immigrating groups from around the celestial ring.

Prosperia: Beautiful and nature-grown. Home of in-city orchards and a native food supply. Largely carapacian, largely upper-to-middle class.

Alterneo: The troll side of town. A highly competitive market and a highly competitive citizenry at odds with each other. Labyrinthine streets and intimidating architecture swallow up the lost.

Emerald: The city’s entertainment hub and glittering home to local leprechauns. Tourist-friendly economically but tourist-unfriendly in geography. The wealthy elite colonize the coastline with seaside summer mansions.

Sburbia: Hotbed of magical power within the city. Large suburban sectors populated by humans, among others. Colleges have a home here, magical or otherwise.

Nocturne: A district tarnished before it had the chance to grow. Ruin and squalor pervade, though charitable hands have led to the downtrodden and aimless to settle here. The unexplained and the unfortunate have led to a new title and a cursed reputation.

Flag Fridays are officially wrapped up, and all that’s left is to finish up the City Map 1.0 of Tick-Tock Town. Tune in next week for that to go live.

This was fun! I have other ideas for weekly series coming up so stay tuned for news on those.

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VULERTA Sign of the Mutineer

VUL(P)* = Cream Sign • *ERTA = Prospit + Lies

This sign is the TickTockStuck equivalent of the canon sign Scorist.

Within the Verse, this sign belongs to the technologically talented Mallek Adalov, who is usually content to spend his nights in the comfort of his penthouse tech den in the district of Qerse in Tick-Tock Town. Mallek has, by virtue of his self-taught expertise with machines, become a household name among the free doll community for his aid in removing restrictive ball-and-chain programming from their persons.

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I wanted to fit this into the Flag Friday post proper but it’s ultimately a minor detail I’ve brought up a couple times before and the post was getting long enough as-is so:

The eastern edge of Qerse (the eastern edge of the city) is home to the ceaseless and senseless uncivil war of the Erisoldiers and where that whole mess started. Nobody’s sure why is started, and nobody cares why they’re still fighting because asking any random two Erisoldiers will give you completely different and contradictory answers...even if they’re supposedly on the same side. Everyone in Qerse just tries to stay away from that side of town these days, unless you’re one of the less well-off families in which you’re probably bunkering down in one of the empty houses over there.

The story of the north edge of Qerse, for the record, can be summed up as “we were going to expand and build more houses up here, but then a giant worm-beast made out of clockworks started chewing through our city like delicious cheese so we had to put a stop to that and we’ve just never gotten around to fixing up the houses”. It’s all ramshackle houses that people have had to fix up for themselves, and some non-commercial transportation to the rest of the planet.

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TTS Flag Friday: The District of Qerse

The district flag of Qerse is set against a field of nuclear green, one of the national colors of Derse which here is meant to represent innovative energy and power. The only other color on the flag is black, inspired by the black carapaces of the original population, which here represents magical force.

A checkerboard pattern takes up half of the space on the flag, starting from the furl and descending towards the lower side of the hoist. The pattern is created by splitting the flag into an 8-by-9 grid, and is referred to as the “Staircase of Progress”. As a symbol of the district the Staircase represents its penchant for endlessly inventing new technology and making discoveries in the name of forwarding progress, and the checkboard pattern can be seen decorating many different public sectors of the district.

The national symbol of the seven-toothed cog sits in the upper-left corner, as black for Dersite carapaces as the cog on Prosperia’s flag is white for Prospitian carapaces.

The early history of Tick-Tock Town saw its northern half housing mainly carapacians before its population grew increasingly diverse. That diversity, along with what the north had become as the city grew, led Prospitian citizens to move westward and bring the nature-loving ways of Prospit to shape their side of the city. When the districts were properly established, the north was split in half; the northwest became the beautiful and organic Prosperia, while the northeast became the artificial and industrious Qerse.

Qerse is the largest of the city’s eight districts, even after Prosperia and eventually the human-centric district were carved out of it. Where Prosperia is coated in plant life, Qerse takes after Derse in coating itself in machinery and odd devices of all sorts. Function dominates form here, and in the scant places where “beautification” is a concern, the aesthetics lean towards the geometric or else take after the machines around them. Even outside the north side of town where the factories lie, it’s not hard to find some impractical piece of clockworks jutting from the side of a building like a parasite.

By far the most important of these industrial sites is a gaping hole in the ground the size of a city block known as The Factory Pit. It’s a swelteringly humid place born during the Reconstruction and the city’s attempts to forcibly remove the Clockwork Network after it ceased worming through Tick-Tock Town. Those attempts had started by amputating large sections of the machine and had worked well enough at first, leaving stumps which are still visible across the city. When the same method was tried on a piece of Clocknet in Qerse, however, it started to spill out huge quantities of scrap metal, uncontrollably and with no visible end. The city prevented itself from drowning in junk when they attached a floodgate to the stump, and afterwards quickly realized how it could stand to profit from a seemingly endless supply of metals. That gated “out tunnel” pours out a wealth of copper, iron, bronze, and other metals for the city to repurpose on a daily basis, while a nearby “in tunnel” leading back into Clocknet serves as a disposal for not just unusable junk but city trash. Qerse had already been the industrial sector of Tick-Tock Town prior to its creation but The Factory Pit marked the point where Clocknet started to become a cultural landmark for the city and especially the district, which to this day has a gigantic arch formed by Clocknet still standing in its skyline.

Not that machines are the only cultural touchstone that Qerse can lay claim to. Before machines completely dominated the district, it also used to be a major hub of magical activity in the city, with some old landmarks and families able to attest to that history. The title of magical hub has slowly moved westward to Qerse’s neighbor district, but magic still plays a vital role in its operations. Specifically: those vital roles are staffed by dolls. The majority of dolls in Tick-Tock Town can claim Qerse as their birthplace...though just as many would prefer to live anywhere else. The doll manufacturing plants create dolls for two purposes: to lessen the burden of an organic workforce with efficient mechanical servitors, and to export that workforce to other destinations in the Verse to serve the same end. The Mayors’ Office mandates that dolls have to be treated as citizens, but Qerse tries to avoid going any further than that minimum; dolls have more protections here than in Seaside but those protections come at the cost of being treated as an obligatory workforce, as a means to an end. There’s an effort by free dolls elsewhere in the city to slowly improve conditions for dollkind here, partly through politics and partly through revolutionary acts, both methods seeing heavy pushback by local industrialists and aristocrats.

As for the rest of the population of Qerse, it’s a highly mixed bunch. Carapacians dominate like nowhere else, but there’s roughly even numbers of humans and trolls scattered throughout. The district’s status as an import center is helped by chunks of the city that have become home to immigrating families from across the Verse. Notable examples: folks from the Land of Rot and Sparks (whose culture already favors machines and science), the Land of Haze and Comets (whose underwater cities have the same clustered feeling that residency in Qerse has), and the Land of Coal and Trials (who are perfectly at ease in the local smoggy atmosphere). The cheap supply of metals available here means that many dabble in the mechanical arts, with inventors and gadgeteers just a knock on a door away. 

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Keep in mind that the inspection-allowance system that Wrecked uses is exclusive to that district; none of the others have the want or need for that level of infrastructure. The Dersite District Qerse has a lot of run-down buildings near its outskirts but when the motion came into vote the idea of putting money into a part of town nobody liked going to anyway was unpopular, to say the least.

So nobody is going to be knocking on Zebede’s door to evict him out of his bee-filled nightmare tower any time soon.

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Where Everyone Lives, V2.0

There’s an old post lying around here that has basically this same premise but now that we’re post-Flag Friday it’s worth revisiting where exactly everyone is in the Verse, and going into a little more detail then the V1.0 version did. I’ll be splitting this one up by district since most of the cast is in Tick-Tock Town.

Central District

Galekh Xigisi can be found near the Central-Prosperia border in his family’s antique mansion. The surrounding land is gray and dead, and inside the home has been extensively modified to accommodate oozing personages.

Tagora Gorjek lives here with his father, where he often works towards his future career when he isn’t out looking for those in need of his services. The inside of his home is kept clean as a mirror, though thanks to his bumbling clones he has to spend a lot of time keeping it clean.

Tirona Kasund lives with her brainspawn brethren in a communal dormitory run by the city. She’s lived her whole life here, same as the others, and her room is decked out in motivational posters, mathematical or otherwise.

Tyzias Entykk lives and works here, in a communal apprentment she shares with a lot of other up-and-coming law students. Her family home, however, is a modest residence in the middle of Prosperia.

The home of the aristocratic Erdehn family is here, whose questionably talented daughter Amisia is usually off in a studio being rented out in Prosperia.

Seaside District

Polypa Goezee’s main base of operations is somewhere in this district, though she has little hidey-holes scattered all over the city. Main points in common between them all are stockpiles of emergency rations, backup legs, and spare manga lying around to keep herself entertained while she’s waiting out pursuers.

Remele Namaaq lives here, in Seaside Central.

Zebede Tongva and his father live here in a run-down apartment tower infested with bees and bee-friendly plants. It’s in a block of hexagonal apartments near the Seaside-Qerse border, and a stone’s throw from Erisoldier territory in Seaside East.

Tagora Gorjek’s mutated clones have a home to themselves here, paid for by Tagora himself to keep them away from him. Its residents have given it the moniker “the Tagormitory”.

Prosperia

Amisia Erdehn’s art studio is located in a penthouse suite that comes complete with greenhouse area. Most of the greenhouse glass is covered up to keep paint and hand-vomit from splattering everywhere, and the actual living space is fairly small, but Amisia prefers it to her family home in Central.

Bronya Ursama and her wealthy parents live in a wide-but-not-deep mansion with lavish surrounding gardens. Despite having everything she could want at home Bronya’s felt increasingly uneasy and spends more of her time out of the house than in it.

Karako Pierot is staying with a wealthy family who adopted him, though few would be able to tell you he’s doing so if they’re aware of him at all.

Lynera Skalbi and her parents reside in historic Skalbi Manor in the aristocratic sector here. Their not-wide-but-deep mansion is loaded with magical paraphernalia from their family’s past, including a deep stockpile of captured demons.

Stelsa Sezyat lives and works out of a modest home she’s earned for herself. The local community is very accepting of free dolls like her and includes more than a few free dolls in their number.

The Entykk household can be found here, towards the Alterneo-Prosperia border.

The Houtek family lives here, albeit without their daughter Marsti after they mutually decided to part ways.

Qerse

Ardata Carmia lives here.

Charun Krojib lives underneath Tick-Tock Town in the Understreets, deep enough to be below the sewer lines even, but is roughly in the Qerse area. Their cave is right next to a chunk of Clocknet, which they scavenge from frequently for their art.

Chixie Roixmr and her mother have a dingy little place to themselves in the side of Qerse host to many other immigrant families from the Land of Rot and Sparks. It’s on a winding road that’s one of the most curvy in the city outside of Alterneo, but you can tell it’s her home from how many of her own promotional posters she has plastered over every wall.

Daraya Jonjet lives here in a snug two-floor house, not that you would be able to find her here during most hours. It’s in the LORAS part of town, and it shows inside and out as her parents still have the experiment-loving mindset of native LORASites. The house’s scarce room being taken up by science equipment means Daraya spends a lot of time outside the house.

Mallek Adalov and his father control a spacious penthouse, though it feels smaller than it really is thanks to all the tech cluttering the place up. The suite has as many mods as its young resident does, many of them installed to help with doll de-programming and re-programming.

Tegiri Kalbur has been a longtime Qerse native, with both his old dojo and his current apartment being found here. The former has been trashed for years but he’s made the latter into a comfortable little den for himself and occasionally Polypa by stocking the place to the roof with anime merchandise.

Alterneo

Fozzer Velyes works in an in-city cemetery and lives about a block away. The place is small for someone his size so he mostly uses it like a storage shed and just sleeps in the cemetery. Easier to keep people from robbing graves that way.

Marsti Houtek lives down in the sewer lines beneath Alterneo, in a janitorial side area she’s converted into a home for herself. She doesn’t spend frivolously so while the place is spotless from roof to floor, there’s not a lot of decoration here, though it does include a giant tub for her to toss bath bombs into.

Wanshi Adyata lives just a neighborhood away from a historic library, where she works part-time to eventually get her hands on some grimoires stored there. Her house is in one of the upscale neighborhoods closer to the Central-Alterneo border.

The Maenad household, currently sans the Maenad’s daughter Chahut, can be found here.

Emerald Quarter

Zebruh Codakk and his father used to live here in a stately manor, until the latter had a fatal accident and left the whole property to his son and his son’s significant other. The mansion used to be full of people, but now it’s only home to two. Zebruh doesn’t really leave the house anymore, but his self-proclaimed better half certainly does. 

Sburbia

None of the trolls live here, actually! It’s a mostly human-populated district so no surprise there. This section’ll be more packed with stuff when I decide to include the Homestuck cast in this post.

Nocturne / Wrecked

Boldir Lamati lives with her adoptive parents in one of the nicer parts of the district near the Nocturne-Emerald border. Inside her home she has access to a wealth of academic knowledge and when she’s not off sleuthing you can usually find her at home by the fireplace with her head in a book.

Diemen Xicali lives alone in a loft above a butcher shop bereft of meat, living or otherwise. It’s a sparsely-decorated abode, and most of what is there got there thanks to doing favors for Mallek.

Elwurd has managed to fix a place up for herself here, a real model citizen when it comes to home improvement. She lives alone in a place built for two.

Folykl Darane and Kuprum Maxlol are hiding out inside a large warehouse here, one of the few places that can actually support Kuprum and the giant chunk of Clocknet stuck to him. It’s a better place than its humble description makes it out to be thanks to being close to the Emerald Quarter, with internet and everything.

Outside of Tick-Tock Town

Azdaja Knelax and Konyyl Okimaw live in a seaside mansion on the Land of Coral and Combat, won with their collective earnings in the gladiatorial arena scene. Azdaja’s taken over the surface part of the mansion with robotics and advanced tech. Konyyl’s carved her own spot in the mansion’s basement, which runs straight down to the shoreline and is full of traps and dangers she uses for exercise.

Baizli and Barzum Soleil travel with the Midnight Melpomene, performing odd jobs around the carnival and specializing in daredevil stunts. Their young age makes them a rarity within the Melpomene’s expansive staff, and impressively enough still have their own room.

Chahut Maenad, after being forced to flee Tick-Tock Town, briefly joined up with the Midnight Melpomene and eventually made her way to the Land of Oasis and Abyss. She’s settled into a comfortable position on the island of Hore Corror, though she still sometimes tours with the Melpomene to sneak back into Tick-Tock Town.

Cirava Hermod can be found deep inside the bowels of the 🐠ＭＯＩＳＴＹＳＴＯＰＩＡ 🐠, where they tend to stay after Ｔｈｅ Ａｃｃｉｄｅｎｔ led to them becoming partly petrified. Their layer of the city is drenched in seawater and some parts are flooded, but it’s perfect to keep people from bothering them while they stream.

Lanque Bombyx lives by himself on one of the many planets of the celestial ring, though not one mentioned in this post.

Marvus Xoloto travels a lot on business and has no consistent home.

Nihkee Moolah lives on the Land of Coral and Combat. She may not be a native to the planet but she fits right in with the hyper-competitive culture, being a thus-far undefeated gladiator with a home of her own on the planet where she spends most of her time prepping for the next fight.

Skylla Koriga is trapped along with her mother inside the ghost town of Tarnation, located in a nebulous location somewhere on the Land of Dunes and Darkness. The best she’s got is a run-down farmstead but it’s not her neighbors have much better.

Vikare Ratite has no strings to hold him down. He doesn’t live anywhere anymore.

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TTS Flag Friday: The Emerald Quarter

The district flag of the Emerald Quarter borrows its symbolism from the traditional leprechaun game of table stickball, with black quarter- and half-circles around the edge of the flag and the seven-toothed cog’s pivot acting as the cueball. The six “holes” are meant to signify that this district was the sixth to be established in the city.

Color-wise, green and gold stand for the district’s vast wealth while white and black stand for good and bad luck, respectively. Green also ties the flag to the district’s primary population, the naturally-green leprechauns, and combined with the arrangement of the holes makes the flag resemble a dollar bill as well as a stickball table.

The seven-toothed cog on the Emerald Quarter flag is the only such cog of the city’s district flags to be multicolored. Both parts of the cog are separate colors to represent different landmarks in the city. The circular white pivot represents the local Vice-Mayor’s office, marble-white and capped with a dome. The gold represents the Yellow Brick Road, a local street that loops around the district and is designed to distract and disorient newcomers.

During Tick-Tock Town’s early growth period, its population surged with folks of all stripes coming into the city. From the rest of the planet came trolls and humans, and from the celestial ring came a smattering of reptiles and leprechauns. Those leprechauns, many of whom were freshly exiled from their native moons around the Verse, converging in one place was especially notable; while full communities of leprechauns are easy to find on any given moon once they leave they tend to wander by themselves or in small groups. Tick-Tock Town itself was founded by outcasts and exiles, and that bit of history had the unexpected side effect of making it a popular destination for the emerald-skinned folk. They largely opted to settle near the coast (partly to recapture the feeling of living near the moons’ chalky seas) and while their sector of the city was for a long time treated as the far west side of Seaside, it was eventually split as its own district and gained the moniker of the Emerald Quarter.

The district’s name comes in part from the style of architecture Emerald favors. Buildings here are the most colorful in the city, decorated lavishly in the hues of the Verse’s moons, but the most common is a bright emerald shining from its crystalline spires and neon-lit streets. City blocks tend to share the same color, with solid colors closer inland and homes striped with white closer to the coast. A few buildings break from this mold, mostly as a result of other districts moving into Emerald, but even these exceptions share the local trait of wearing the district’s opulence on their sleeves. Even the mundane is dressed up like a palace here; stained glass studded into the artisan exteriors like gemstones, or else used to color the light and create a dreamlike haze in the streets.

The influx of wealthy non-leprechauns into the Emerald Quarter has proven to be a double-edged sword for the native leprechaun populous. It has improved the overall standard of living, but those same patrons have taken over prime real estate in the area, making their district one of the most expensive to live in, and have made extensive pushes in the past to rebuild the district more to their liking. Leprechauns, whose culture revolves around pranks and tricks, collectively built their district to be a maze. It’s not as chaotic as Alterneo’s streets but the district is full of dark alleyways, dead ends, secret doors, staircases with unevenly-spaced steps, misleading signposts, and every other trick of misdirection in the book. Those tricks are slowly but steadily being phased out as a result of the aristocracy pushing against them and making the streets increasingly drab and uniform. The local Leprechauns, in turn, have had to push back.

One of the oldest and most famous push-backs still in the Emerald Quarter is the Yellow Brick Road, built before even the Clockwork Network appeared in the city. The Road is a long and winding street coated in yellow paint that worms through the entire district but specifically avoids every major hotspot and highlight it has to offer, and instead cutting through its darkest and dingiest corners. At the same time, the Road is uneven and covered in bumps, making it infamously irritating to walk or drive over, and large chunks of it are purposefully unlit at night. The Road was built primarily to get back at citizens jokingly giving the area the nickname “The Emerald City” (derived from human pop culture) by thoroughly wasting their time, and to dissuade tourists from moving in.

The natural majority of the population in the Emerald Quarter are leprechauns, with the second-most representation coming from Prospitians. The white-bodied carapacians were drawn to the district thanks to a plethora of parks and general greenery present here and their presence has contributed to a beautification of those same parks. As for the rest, the district has a notable troll population thanks to neighboring the troll-centric Alterneo, and small scatterings of other races. While leprechauns still dominate, their majority is slowly shrinking as the years pass due to other races moving in and forcing them to spread out across the rest of the city.

Notable Residents of the Emerald Quarter: The Felt, Zebruh Codakk, The Peixes Family (by way of seaside mansion).

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TTS Flag Friday: The District of Nocturne

The district flag of Nocturne is split into three triangular sections by a jagged orange border that crosses the flag in a “V” shape. The lower-left and lower-right triangles are both black and contain an outstretched hand, the left a troll’s grey and the right a leprechaun’s green. The central triangle is white and contains the national symbol of the seven-toothed cog, colored the same orange as the V-shaped border. The border has eight diamond protrusions that all point upwards into the white triangle’s space. The shape of the border is meant to symbolize disaster, partly by taking the shape of rising flames and partly by mimicking the shape of the Clockwork Network.

The design is inspired firstly by geography. The hands are colored according to Nocturne’s neighbor districts; from inside Nocturne looking towards the center of Tick-Tock Town, troll-majority Alterneo lies to the west and leprechaun-majority Emerald lies to the east, with Central lying beyond both of them.

The flag’s design is also meant as a promise to the citizenry of Nocturne, lost in the wake of the destruction caused by Clocknet. A promise that, in their time of need, they will be offered a charitable hand to guide them out of darkness, though their personal disasters, and into the light. In this reading the hands represent protection from all matters, physical, financial, or otherwise.

At the height of Tick-Tock Town’s development, it slowly started to expand westward along the coast, creating a pocket of buildings between Alterneo and the Emerald Quarter that matched neither the former’s stark brutality nor the latter’s extravagance. For this reason it was split from both into a new district, relatively small but as the city was still planning on growing it was expected that this little district would grow along with it. That district was named Nocturne, as it was (and is) the only district in the city not to share a border with Central (being metaphorically “in the dark”), with “oct” being a clever nod to its status as the eighth district. Shortly after its inception, however, that district would begin a long history of misfortune, tragedy, confusion, and unexplainable circumstances that would lead to the name most residents of Tick-Tock Town refer to it as today: Wrecked.

Nocturne had only a few years to set itself up, barely any time to establish an identity for itself outside of cultural hand-me-downs from its neighboring districts, before the city underwent the most important event in its history since its founding. The emergence of the Clockwork Network caused massive damage across the city, but few had damages on the level that Nocturne did. From the perspective of its inhabitants, the great machine passed over the Emerald Quarter and to make up lost time did double time on their side of town. The riches that the Emerald Quarter carried over turned to ruin, and any vicious streak descendent from Alterneo was declawed, all of it tumbling into the mechanical bowels of the worming menace.

Even before Clocknet trashed the district and made people wary of coming to it, citizens living in and visiting Wrecked could feel something off about the place. Nothing on the surface seemed wrong, but something invisible pervaded through the whole district, like a foul smell that can’t be placed or a noise that appears and disappears with no cause. People would usually lay some blame at the base of two famous landmarks in the district: the Black Dome and the Asclepius Clocktower. The former, a small park and grim rotunda topped by the titular dome; the latter, a two-faced tower in the shape of intertwined serpents. Both monuments from an outside perspective seem to be placed completely naturally but defy explanation upon closer inspection, namely their construction. As the buildings of Nocturne were erected, the two monuments seem to have simply appeared overnight while nobody noticed. Plans and blueprints for them exist at the district Vice-Mayor’s office, certainly, but no construction crew can claim to have built them and no artists have stepped forward to explain some of their stranger quirks, like the Asclepius Clocktower being completely silent and having no doors to enter it. They’re just...there, exuding an ominous aura onto the surrounding area and frightening away city residents who can’t even describe what they’re frightened of.

There are other factors to Wrecked’s wrecked reputation that are equally spiritual. It’s a district that citizens contradictorily call a haunted place and as one so eerie that even ghosts dread to haunt it (a statistically invalid claim; there’s just as many ghosts and demons here as anywhere else in Tick-Tock Town). People claim to hear whispers when nobody is around. They claim to see people running around at the corners of their vision that bear an uncomfortable resemblance to themselves or people they know. On electronic media they claim to speak to people that don’t really exist and can’t be found again afterwards. They make many claims of strange occurrences, all of them questionable, but as far as the city is concerned they’re nothing more than hearsay. They’ve had enough issues trying to get Wrecked back into shape and solving the tangible societal issues going on without worrying about imaginary specters or deconstructing why buildings exist.

The empty homes littering the district were emptying the city’s coffers, both from keeping them in a livable state and from kicking out the squatters moving in. Once word of Wrecked’s status as an ostensible ghost town spread, an influx of citizens desperate enough to brave its haunts and impoverished enough to lack any other options started to move in in droves. It became such a problem that the city considered a martial solution to keep homes available but thankfully for all parties involved, political or otherwise, a different solution was proposed. In an uncharacteristic turn of good luck, a recent series of political assassinations and intrigue ended with the current Vice-Mayor of Wrecked coming into office, and he was far more understanding of the citizen’s plight than prior holders of his title. Upon convincing the rest of the governing bodies of the district and the city that it would be more efficient economically to simply pay these wayward folk to maintain the houses in exchange for living in them (with government supervision and inspection, naturally), Wrecked instituted a massive overhaul of how it operated. The ultimate plan they went with made a lot of people happy, except for the city aristocracy who were (and are) still mad about it and to this day endeavor to have the policy revoked.

In a post-Reconstruction world, Nocturne is perhaps the plainest of Tick-Tock Town’s eight districts. There’s no great seats of power here, no communal ports, no magnificent factories, no elaborate bio-organic beautification, no labyrinthine vicious streets, no wild neon-lit boulevards, and no mystical schools of magic to be found. Its architecture was designed to be quickly-built and efficient over any aesthetic values, and with city aristocrats long since having scorned the district, any wealth has had to come from the ground up instead of being handed down. It’s a side of town that never had the chance to decide what it was before disaster ripped it apart, and it had to build its identity in misfortune’s wake. Few call by it by its true name even after its worst days ended. Some call it Wrecked with a sneer, dismissing it as a nowhere district for nobodies to languish in obscurity; others call it Wrecked with a smile, a wink and a nod towards the long struggles it has ceaselessly fought to overcome. It’s a humble lot that live in Nocturne: the orphaned, the unwanted, the unseen. They’ve all done their part to make a place where they can support each other in their personal crises, a place where they’re needed and taken care of, and a place that, above all else, they can call home.

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TTS Flag Friday: The District of Sburbia

The district flag of Sburbia is set against a field of violet, representing magic and its overarching influence over the district. Its central symbol is a six-pointed star split into diamonds, each one representing a different school of magical study. The green color of both the star and the seven-toothed cog represents knowledge. The top diamond of the star is split into two pieces for two purposes. The first is to turn this central symbol into seven shapes to pay homage to Sburbia being the seventh district to be formed, and the second is that it creates an arrow pointing upwards to represent Sburbia being the northernmost district in Tick-Tock Town.

The flag is always printed with a white stripe to the left of the star, and a black stripe to its right. This is an homage to the district having been made from chunks of both Prosperia to its west and Qerse to its east. The seven-toothed cog is placed between the white stripe and the six-pointed star, an indication that the district’s population and politics have migrated away from Qerse and closer to Prosperia. An aesthetic feature is that the cog is rotated to “point” towards the white stripe, further emphasizing this meaning.

While Prosperia and Qerse had been split in two to better address the concerns of their respective citizens, that didn’t mean tensions didn’t build up between the neighboring districts. Old cultural rivalries sparked anew as each side built themselves up in the manner appropriate their cultural origin, with increasing incidents of violence erupting at their shared edges. The city recovered from the physical damages in time, but this period has left its own impact on many families, some feuds forged that continue to this day. The city feared that these street fights and feuds would explode into a proper civil war and take the rest of the city down with it, a fate it thankfully avoided thanks in large part to the incoming human population.

While the immigrating troll population settled in the east and created the district of Alterneo to suit their own needs, the immigrating human population was happy to settle down around the preexisting districts. The north side of town (the edge between Prosperia and Qerse) ended up housing a sizable population of humans thanks to it being a middle ground of two extremes; it wasn’t overbearingly coated in grimy machinery nor were overgrown plants crawling along the streets. The humble, even outright cozy, environment the humans made for themselves in this in-between zone acted as a buffer between the feuding Prospitian and Dersite sects of the populace, keeping them separated but content in their respective lifestyles. As this new human-centric part of the city developed and grew, it eventually became its own separate district wedged in-between Prosperia, Qerse, and Central, a district named Sburbia.

Sburbia can be roughly split into thirds based on their proximity to Central: the aristocratic neighborhoods, the educational sector, and its scenic suburban sector. The presence of magic follows the same lines: the upper class hoards magic and magical artifacts to themselves, the educational sector is loaded with museums and more facilities dedicated to magical study than be listed here, and the suburbs are mostly mundane with some magical influence seeping in from outside. These circumstances are not unique to Sburbia (the upper crust all over the city push for exclusive access to magic) but it’s more pronounced here than elsewhere in the city.

That magic is only truly available to the few doesn’t mean it’s not apparent throughout the district for the many. The many gardens here are home to herbs, spices, and other plants useful to magicians. What machines exist are often augmented with magic, sometimes to the point where they’re made animate to act autonomously (not to the point of being fully sapient dolls, but can capably perform routines), iconically in the form of walking trash cans that keep the streets clean by themselves. It’s even present in the shape of those streets; the buildings of Sburbia borrow heavily from the geometric preferences of Qerse but during the Reconstruction the streets were rebuilt to be curvier and more organic like those in Prosperia, and in many cases they were designed to resemble various magical symbols. The suburbs in particular were remade and laid out like giant magic circles, creating a series of distinct yet interconnected communities.

The namesake suburbs of Sburbia are a lowlands between the towering peaks of its neighboring districts. You won’t find buildings as tall as those in Qerse, Prosperia, or Central, as the majority of buildings in the area are single-family homes and apartments with attached garden spaces. They have the highest concentration of humans in the city, though they share the space with a handful of carapacians and unassuming leprechauns drawn to the area thanks to its magical reputation.

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TTS Flag Friday: The District of Alterneo

The colors of the district flag of Alterneo are drawn, as much of troll culture is, from troll biology. The bright orange of the upper and lower thirds of the flag derive from troll horns, the yellow of the central hexagons from troll eyes, and black from the lips and the darkened skin of adult trolls. The color of these features in individual trolls can vary, and these colors specifically were chosen for symbolic value; orange ties to the natural passion trolls give towards their interests, yellow the fortune accrued by the district, and black for the notorious dark corners and mysterious underground present here.

The central stripe consists of five hexagons, five to indicate Alterneo’s status as the fifth district to be established. The central hexagon contains the seven-tooth cog, symbol of Tick-Tock Town, while the others contain black circles representing incubating grubs. The message the design sends is that Alterneo represents a new generation of trollkind, separate from the rest of the culture.

The design also subtly alludes to the troll hemospectrum. When one counts each distinct corner (including corners made by a line reaching the edge of the flag and not including the cog), there are 52 distinct “points” representing the 52 natural blood colors of trollkind.

By the time Tick-Tock Town’s northern half split in two to accommodate the needs of its carapacian natives, the city had already become a bustling metropolis, with folks immigrating into the city from across the planet. Human visitors simply integrated wherever they felt comfortable, but troll visitors had particular needs and thus many of them chose to settle down in the quickly-expanding western half of the city. They would eventually spread out all over the city but by that point a sector of west Tick-Tock Town had been solidly carved out for trollkind, which in time would become the district of Alterneo.

While the rest of the city was dealing with the mechanical menace of the Clockwork Network, Alterneo was standing mostly unscathed. Troll culture utilizes biotechnology, which Clocknet is incapable of integrating into itself. As a result, the district is the least-impacted out of any in the city in spite of being nestled between the heavily-impacted Wrecked and Prosperia with only has some token outgrowths of Clocknet visible aboveground. During the Reconstruction, when its seven fellow districts were focusing on rebuilding and repairing, Alterneo was focused on building up and upgrading its already-existing infrastructure.

Not that those upgrades made the district any less imposing or easier to navigate. The troll-dominant sector of the city is famously labyrinthine with tight alleyways laid out in methods even the mad would fail to make sense of. Troll design sensibilities meant that the earliest buildings in the district were obsidian-black towers jagged along every edge and standing as garish patchworks of architectural styles, united only by the shared feature of monsters carved in as decoration. Many buildings have since been streamlined but the roads have maintained the hectic planning of the district’s early days, with many triangular three-way intersections (and in one famously chaotic case, a hexagonal six-way intersection). The new style takes from troll biology and favors organic shapes; spikes like horns and teeth line building corners, buildings flow and curve like skin, and monsters of all sorts hang like gargoyles from the walls. Everything’s easier on the eyes now, at least.

Culturally, the district can be divided into two faces, both of which can be described as “competitive”. On one face, you have an aggressive business culture that moved in once the district built up its wealth and the property became more attractive (more attractive than the grungy Qerse, at least). On the other face, you have the local monster slayers and spiritual bounty hunters, whose biggest gatherings and supply sites are all found in Alterneo, hidden away in the underground basements and cellars still around. That same underground is also home to a lavish party scene the local teens can’t help but get wrapped up in.

Alterneo is naturally the most troll-populated district in the city, with only token smatterings of other local races presents. Whether they’re in the corporate, combative, or counterculture sides of the district, the residents of Alterneo are a driven and self-motivated bunch who won’t easily let anything stand in their way. Not the archaic traditions of blood castism (long since scraped from legal jurisdiction), nor the modern-day struggles of class warfare. If they want something, they’ll either have it eventually or die trying. That drive showed in its past, with buildings built to the individual tastes of its residents, and it shows in its present, with each side of the district trying to make itself rise above the others.

Notable Residents of Alterneo: Wanshi Adyata, the De Leon family, the Vantas family, the Megido family, the Nitram family.