setting.

[officialnotice]

SETTING

wayward pines     outside of town     the fence and beyond

Wayward Pines, Idaho, is everything an idyllic little town aspires to be. Surrounded by the majesty of nature and populated by an almost stereotypical assortment of precisely the sort of neighbors you'd expect in a small-town suburb, there's something about the place that almost feels like home - or at the very least, like it could feel like home if you gave it a shot.

THE TOWN OF WAYWARD PINES

All in all, the town gives off a pretty heavy 90's vibe — bizarrely low gas prices, payphones on corners and storefronts, a newspaper vendor box in front of the diner and grocery stores. Very few people seem to be talking on cell phones, and at least ten percent of adult women in the town are sporting 'The Rachel'. The commercial part of town takes on a bit more of a western feel, with a lot of unpainted wood and saloon-style storefronts down Main Street where most of the large and small businesses can be found.

TECHNOLOGY & COMMUNICATIONS ⟼ Up 'til very recently, the level of technology found in Wayward Pines was almost entirely 90's-era, give or take a decade depending on the item in question. Vehicles, for example: Anyone who knows much about the average car will notice that some of the cars in Wayward Pines come from as late as the early 2000s. In contrast, household computers were definitely becoming a thing in the 90's, yet the only computers you'd see in Wayward Pines were the highly-specialized sort at the grocery store check-out, or the database-only systems in the library.

Since the truth about our cozy mountain town was revealed to the populace at large, more advanced technology has begun to integrate into daily life. Most of the citizens now have smartphones with audio, video, and text capabilities, and many other modern technologies are available upon requisition.

BUSINESS & INDUSTRY ⟼ The central slice of Wayward Pines is home to a small handful of streets zoned 'commercial', the heart of which lies on Main Street. There, you'll find just about anything you could possibly need to make a life in a sweet little town like this one, plus a few fun extras.

Job opportunities are rich, and your character will find that even the most basic jobs they could possibly get pay an obscene amount when compared to the cost of living. (Picture entry-level McDonalds burger-flipping earning you $20 per hour.) Unless they're feeding a family, residents can typically support themselves on just a part-time job, so stores will rarely be manned by the same individuals more than three or four days a week.

While Main Street's pretty full up, adjacent streets have a scattering of buildings for lease if characters want to start their own businesses. The locals are very supportive of small local entrepreneurs, and there's plenty of market for even a niche new business.

HOUSING ⟼ Drifting away from the Main Street business area, you'll find yourself roaming through streets upon streets of suburban houses, varied only in color. Some streets have small, two-bedroom homes. Others have massive five-bedroom houses, a neighborhood meant for families with too many kids. Each house has an attached garage and a small backyard.

Available housing tends to be clumped together on one or two subsequent streets. The rest of the residential zone varies heavily in activity level - some streets bustle with residents going about their day-to-day, while others are practically ghost towns.

RECREATION ⟼ Though residents of Wayward Pines still have to work to make a living, few work more than three or four days in a given week, leaving plenty of time for recreation. Enjoying yourself seems to be one of the tenets of the town, and the people who built the town apparently shared this ideal: They've provided nearly every form of entertainment a small town like this could hope to offer. A movie theater, bowling alley, mini-golf course, go-karts... The list goes on. There are coffee-shops and diners for people to meet and kick back, a bar with dancing after 7 PM, and even an officially-sanctioned stretch of woods that you're welcome to camp in.

In fact, it's not uncommon to find your characters being encouraged to go out and partake in these activities. Two tickets to the movies might arrive in his or her mailbox, for example. Or maybe it's an invitation to a neighborhood cook-out in the local green, where you can mingle with your neighbors and hopefully make a few friends.

POPULATION ⟼ Excluding player characters, the population of Wayward Pines hovers around 350 people of varying demographics. They go about their daily lives all around your character, from the clerks manning the grocery store check-outs to the kids riding bicycles down the street, from the nurses who helped your character when they first woke up in the hospital to the guy across the street who always mows his lawn at 6 AM on a goddamn Sunday.

These individuals will interact with your character! They'll show up selling Girl Scout Cookies, they'll wait on your character's table at the local diner, they'll even invite your character to their neighborhood's barbecue. This can all be handwaved and used to your leisure, as long as you stick to the following behavioral guidelines:

First and foremost, many citizen NPCs (especially the meek or upstanding sorts) will show residual 'avoid' reactions to anything which comes in conflict with the Official Notices formerly posted by law in each public building. If you mention your past or how you got here, if you try to push them for details about Ortech or what they're doing, if you so much as talk about going for a hike in the woods, all citizens (consciously or otherwise) put space between themselves and your character. They avert their eyes, they cross their arms apprehensively. The brave ones will stick around but change the subject. Most others will find an excuse to skip out of the conversation altogether. The reaction is much milder now than it was in Arc I when those things were actually against the law, but old habits die hard and old fears die even harder.

Aside from that, they're honestly a pretty friendly bunch. Not eerily Stepford-friendly, but friendly like you'd expect from a small-town guy or girl who doesn't mean you the slightest bit of harm. Personalities vary between the townies, but the worst you'll typically find is a drunk guy looking to brawl you before he passes out.

While most if not all of the residents are at least generally aware of the dark and dangerous truth under the town's sunny surface, non-player residents tend to live life as if the town is precisely what it pretends to be.

VENTURING OUTSIDE OF TOWN

With your typical wooded town, businesses fade to residential areas, which then thin out and fade into woods. Not so, with Wayward Pines. The city limits are marked not by signs, but by the unyielding line of tall pines from which the town most likely got its name. All man-made structures halt at the tree line, and even the braver citizens tend not to stray far into the shadow of the trees if they can help it.

And honestly? We don't blame them, if for no other reason than the sheer size of most of the trees.

FLORA ⟼ Upwards of 100 feet tall and 4 or 5 feet in diameter, the trees that make up the forests surrounding Wayward Pines are nothing short of imposing. Largely pine with the occasional fir or juniper, the forest is home to a variety of lesser plants and shrubs, like ferns, sagebrush, honeysuckle, and kinnikinnick. A handful of clearings play host to blackberry and blueberry patches, the berries of which are edible, and every so often a huckleberry bush can be spotted where the forest meets the cliffs.

The deeper you go, the dimmer it gets. Almost no light makes it through the canopy, more than a quarter of a mile out. The forest here feels ancient and untouched.

And perhaps for good reason. Every so often, roughly once every couple of weeks, a scream can be heard from deep in the woods, typically to the west of town. It sounds unnervingly human, yet inexplicably broken - as if the one who screamed did so through intensely-damaged vocal cords. It echoes through trees, the origin difficult if not impossible to pinpoint by ear. Any attempts to go searching in the trees to the west of town would bring the sheriff calling, once upon a time. Nowadays, with no law to keep you in town and no built-in trackers to enforce it, you're welcome to get as lost as you'd like.

FAUNA ⟼ With the exception of large predators, you'll find pretty much the expected collection of wildlife in a mountain town in Idaho. A medium-sized herd of elk roam through the trees pursued by a small band of coyotes, raccoons and possums slink through the streets on the edges of town at night, bees build hives in arbitrary out-of-the-way crevices, and the local parks each have a handful of squirrels.

Birds are mostly limited to songbirds, with the occasional owl or hawk. The river hosts a few sorts of fish, primarily sturgeon. Aside from bees and what sounds like the chirping of crickets at night, there's a marked absence of any form of insect.

LANDSCAPE ⟼ Surrounding the forest on the north, east, and south are sheer cliffs, hundreds of feet high at the lowest and colored by a mix of the red of hematite and the greys of dolomite.

While they appear rough to the touch, any handholds you may find will only get you as high as, at most, the tops of the trees. The view's pretty good, but the cliff still spans hundreds of feet above your head... And even after all that work to climb up there, the climb back down will be twice as risky.

Along the eastern cliff face, up near the very top, characters with keen eyes might be able to spot a reflective glint. Unfortunately, it's not nearly as interesting as it initially seems: Wayward Pines is powered largely by solar panels and the row of grey-painted turbines just barely visible on top of the cliff.

Aside from the cliffs, a river cuts through the northern woods between the town and the cliffs. The river is crystal-clear and the current is weak enough to go for a swim. Follow it upstream, and it veers up into a canyon directly northwest of the town. Follow it downstream and it disappears into a hole in the face of the cliff.

The lack of a solid stone barrier to the west doesn't mean that direction is much easier. The forest is a mile and a half deep, and the undergrowth here is almost too thick to navigate. It's also easy to get turned around, and if you're not careful venturing this direction, you'll find yourself emerging again on the side of the road back to town.

THE FENCE AND BEYOND

If you have any doubt that life in Wayward Pines isn't as sunny as it seems, the fence is precisely the reality check you need. Formerly one of the town's best kept secrets, it's now widely recognized as one of the biggest factors keeping the residents of Wayward Pines alive, let alone safe.

Now that much of the surveillance inside of the footage has been removed, scouts are assigned to patrol the fence multiple times per day to keep a sharp eye out for any sign of trouble.

REACHING THE FENCE ⟼ Well, you could follow the canyon upriver. The canyon is nearly impossible to navigate; the river rapids will sooner bash your head on a rock than let you swim, and the walls of the river are a steep wealth of loose stones to slip on. If you somehow manage it, the canyon goes for about a half-mile before it abruptly ends at a section of fence spanning the canyon's entire width.

The simplest way, though? Head west. Fight your way through the forest and tangle of undergrowth, through the creeping sense that you just plain shouldn't be here. Every so often you'll come to a spot where the ground underfoot inexplicably slopes uphill at an impossible angle, forcing you to climb about ten feet (likely with nothing but thorny undergrowth to hold onto) to the next stretch of flat. By the third one, your exhaustion's starting to kick in. You feel a little bit weaker, a little more drained. Don't worry, you aren't out of shape. You're just within range of...

THE FENCE ⟼ It's big - at least 30 feet tall, made of metal and a bit of concrete for stability. Though the top five or six feet are slim metal bars, everything up to that point is solid, windowless metal. It goes on quite a ways in either direction; follow the wall far enough and you'll see that it connects with the cliffs that surround the rest of Wayward Pines, effectively boxing the town in.

In actuality, you'll feel it long before you see it. A full 500 yards from the massive metal wall, when it's hardly a shadowy smudge through the trees, you start to feel (you guessed it) a little weaker and a little more drained. Trouble is, the closer you get, the weaker you feel - like the wall itself is sapping the strength out of you, and the closer you get, the worse it feels. Any powers you may have had grow weaker in kind as you make your way to the fence, but even ordinary humans will find their strength sapping away. By the time you're close enough to read the signs and to feel the crackle of electricity radiating from the thick wires criss-crossing the wall's metal surface, you're too weak to stand.

Which is honestly probably a good thing. Contact with the fence would cook a large elephant from the inside out in just seconds, let alone what it would do to a human being. Your best bet is to count this as a learning experience, and simply to crawl far enough away to be able to stand.

(It's worth noting that while the individuals patrolling the fence do seem a bit more tired and sluggish, they're far from incapacitated despite walking right alongside it. It's safe to assume that characters who join the patrols will be granted that same luxury.)

AND BEYOND ⟼ What's outside of the fence? The apocalypse, circa 2997. As far as the residents of Wayward Pines are concerned, what that apocalypse looks like is almost entirely unknown... so far, at least. Hopefully a few months of exploration will paint a better picture of precisely what we're dealing with.