Transdimensional Cities
There are a lot of weird places in the world. There are talking jungles and upside down plains where the rain falls upwards. There are psychedelic tundras and digital rain forests and that one island that’s completely cut off from civilization where all the seagulls constantly sing songs about cool guys not looking at explosions and throwing things on the ground and being way too excited about boats. But some of the weirdest places in our universe are the places that sometimes aren’t even in our universe!
Transdimensional cities are locales that phase in and out of any given dimension. One second they’ll be there and the next they’re shimmering out of existence (ok they still exist but now they’re in a pocket dimension that can’t be reached by anybody). If you’ve even seen one you know how trippy of an experience that can be. The word “mirage” actually comes from the name of one of these cities that fritzes in and out of the Sahara Desert every so often, confusing travelers. The supernatural properties of the vast majority of transdimensional cities are magic-based. Some monks decided they’d get more meditation done if they didn’t have to deal with the rest of the world except for for one week every fifteen years. Or some rogue mage folded an entire city into a pocket dimension in order to practice his evil magic in private, and on dozens of unwilling participants. Recently scientists have made a few forays into trying to replicate the abilities of these cities with varying results. At best they’ve been able to warp individual buildings like smoothie stores or Halloween themed restaurants (Boo Burger was sorely in need of this transdimensional upgrade, now instead of offending people all year long, they can just blip out of this dimension whenever it isn’t October) but entire cities have proven to be a bit more tricky. If you would like your city to be considered for an experiment in dimension shifting enter our sweepstakes here!
As far as you need to be concerned with these cities, remember, cities that only enter this plane of existence very briefly every so often might be very appealing to a variety of types of people. Supervillains, for example, might appreciate the downtime from being on the run or having their evil schemes foiled by a kid with a magic backpack that can fit more rocket launchers in it than should be physically possible. (Here’s to you Ricky Rockets, keep doling out your hilariously disproportionate brand of child vigilante justice!) In days past, superheroes were forced to assume that every transdimensional was home to dozens of supervillains who were hiding out. Plus, due to the transient nature of transdimensional cities, they had to assume that the city could blink out of this reality at a moment’s notice. This resulted in superheroes storming transdimensional cities and beating up as many people as possible and throwing them in prison while there was still time. That caused everybody a lot of headaches (both literal and metaphorical). It turns out that it is erroneous to assume that most people in any given transdimensional city are supervillains. Lucky for you the citizens of the various cities have worked out a better system!
These days transdimensional cities have pretty heterogeneous populations. It took a couple of years of bussing people between cities but now everything is pretty well organized. There are cities specific for every kind of person who might want to hop out of reality for a while. We’ve got monks who want seclusion. Supervillains who need to keep out of the public eye. Deadbeat dads, people with overdue library books, people who’ve unintentionally killed people, people who don’t want to be spoiled on shows they’ve only just started binge-watching, procrastinators. If you don’t want to be a part of society all the time you can bet that there’s a transdimensional city somewhere out there for you! So now all you need to do is figure out where the supervillain-filled ones are going to pop up next so you can be there to rain justice down on their bald, horned, helmeted, and on-fire heads!
Determining where and when a transdimensional city will next appear can be a tricky thing. Most cities will appear in the same place every time, and most of those are on a set cycle, so all that needs to be done there is a good old-fashioned, potentially decades long, stake-out. Grab a buddy, some donuts, and a big ol’ book of Mad Libs and settle in for a good long wait. But sometimes the cities don’t show up in the same place (more on that later) or it disappears and reappears at infrequent intervals. In which case you’d be wise to keep a few tracking devices on you and throwing one into every city that randomly pops up in your path. Short of that, I’m sure you can get some brains together (from the brain store) and devise some sort of mathematical algorithm to calculate the exact where and when for any given transdimensional city. Unfortunately you’ll have to do your own work for this one. We here at Howtohero steadfastly refuse to do any math. As a rule.
When transdimensional cities’ locations are randomized, or if they always appear in the same place but it’s been a while since the last time this city appeared and since then some foolish people built a lame stationary city in its spot, things go sideways real fast. That’s how you have situations where cities become superimposed on other cities or stuff starts getting spliced together. Gross. Luckily, using some regular off-the-rack-store-bought magicks these problems can be easily avoided! Sort of! And as we all know, sort of avoiding a problem is the best way to deal with a problem! See, using magic you can actually cause it so that when a city magically vops into a location that already contains something (a city, a town, a village, a cat) the thing that was there before actually switches places with the transdimensional city. Turning the transdimensional city into a regular one and vice versa. (I bet you guys didn’t expect to learn the secret origins of Surprise Cat! the cat that appears when you least expect it in this post but there you have it!) Sure, now there’s a regular city warping in and out of our dimension and that’s not really what those people signed up for but all transdimensional cities were normal cities at some point! (Except for Nexusville, which was built from a one-of-a-kind transdimensional brick over a period of three hundred years by different construction workers and engineers who happened to come across the partially completed city during that time.)
If you’re a guy who is from a transdimensional city and is deciding to use your first trip to this dimension to fight our criminals, then first of all, welcome to the neighborhood. Second of all, where do you get off punk! These are our criminals! You come in here all high and mighty and judgemental from your crime-free teleporting city (remember all the transdimensional criminals live in their own, separate city) of ninjas and think you can fight our crime? Get over yourself! Also, be warned, lots of times people like you tend to lose track of the time. I guess time flows differently in between dimensions. But you might find that when you get tired of beating up our muggers in our alleys that your city might be gone. Now, it important that you don’t misunderstand what’s happened. Your city has simply transported itself beyond the vail of what we can perceive in this dimension (as cities are wont to do). It hasn’t been destroyed. It hasn’t been stolen. Just wait ten to fifteen years and it’ll be back. No harm no foul. What you need to do now, is not go on a roaring rampage of revenge where you punch everybody in sight. Also don’t blame us for your city going away. We didn’t do that. Have you read the rest of this post? We clearly have like zero to two ideas about what’s going on with these cities. Don’t punch anybody. If you really feel like you have to punch somebody you can punch some more of our criminals but your city and all your loved ones aren’t gone forever. Write that down.
Transdimensional cities are easily one of the weirdest parts of the Weird Factor. They’re cities that are sometimes there... but usually not. What a headache. And most of the time the people who live in the city don’t even know when things are gonna get all space-warpy. They’ll just be buying groceries and vwoompf now they’re underwater, or in a frozen wasteland, or in Cincinnati. What a life that must be. Still, it’s interesting to see how civilizations and cultures develop when they’re removed from society for years at a time (or minutes at a time, but in cities like those there’s not a ton of deviation from the world around them). From an anthropological perspective that is. So good for anthropologists I guess!