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.
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.
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.
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.
