The Cities’ Hidden Rage
Image by Wendy Seltzer, via Flickr
A speculative fiction written in the game world, but based on photographs of real-world signs, as an early promotion of the game launch. Link is here but may or may not be active, so full text is below.
Everyone knows those places in their city: the bizarre little legends and memes that slither up through the sewer grates and into the collective unconscious of any place’s native children. Big, obvious ones: Amsterdam is sinking. Seattle is always rainy. L.A. is built over a hellmouth. But more importantly, the smaller ones, the ones you only truly understand if you live there for years. Only people from the Jersey shore know what “bennys” are. Austinites work to “keep Austin weird,” but only a native knows just how weird.
People outside of Boston often know about the Red Sox/Yankees feud; fewer know about the “Green Monstah.” Fewer still know about the Rage Warehouse.
At a busy intersection, near one of the preeminent technology institutes in the nation, sits an ancient hulk of a building, a brickwork study in industrial menace. In this fortress, one can store valuables even in the face of conflagration: in massive letters on the building’s side, it reads:
Storage Warehouse Fire Proof
The local joke, however, that obscure lore that only locals tend to understand, is that from the traffic light on that corner, one’s vision is partially blocked, such that the building seems to say:
Rage Warehouse Ire Proof
This is amusing to those gods of physics and smartphones and flashing lights who teem in the streets nearby. But what is hidden from most of them is that this is no accident.
There are others, you see.
Rage warehouses, we shan’t say abound, but we shall say that there are several, scattered through metropolitan areas about the country. Most look unassuming or even tumbledown, like the one above. This, too, is no accident; such places are better off if they seem unappealing. The eye slides off of them. And the magic within stays safe.
Some magic, as you are only now coming to know, is driven by emotion. Some emotions – like lust or grief or joy – are more potent than others, like frustration, or boredom. But some – like rage – are the most powerful, and must be contained lest they do harm. Certain people – some of them mages, some vampires, even some werewolves, though they usually hold no truck with such matters – came to a quorum long ago, sometime mid-20th century. There was entirely too much rage in the world, and it needed to go somewhere.
Thus were rage warehouses born. Quiet, well-secured and mostly unnoticed locations, where rage could be safely stored and kept when it got too out of hand. Most quickly realized the weapons potential of this, of course. Such places needed careful warding. And to the un-Awakened, they seem like shabby places, not worth notice.
That they remain so is paramount to everyone’s safety.
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