Cactus Pad Saloon
The Cactus Pad Saloon is the only local watering hole still in operation. It's a creaky old place with swinging saloon doors and a gigantic bar, stocked with dusty bottles of alcohol older than most of the folks who come here.
Walking into the saloon is a strange experience. You'll find yourself wanting to stay for hours, ordering just one more drink: the bartender will make you whatever you like and charge it to your room. Stay for a few hours, play some darts, or challenge someone to a game of corn hole out front. A player piano tucked into the corner provides lively music.
Don't mind that sometimes your glass slides down the bar by itself and shatters on the floor, and pay no attention to the cowboy sitting at the end there: he won't be there when you look twice. The bullet holes in the ceiling have always been there, the bartender says, and so have the ghosts.
Stardust 24/7 Diner
Hungry? Thirsty? Just need a place to crash while you wait out a hangover? The Stardust Diner is here for you, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Its glowing neon sign may be missing a letter—most of the time it reads Tardust—but here the coffee is hot and the pancakes are fluffy.
Squeak your way into a cracked pleather booth and order whatever diner food you'd like from your chipper waiter, seemingly the only employee. If you can find it at a Denny's or a southern diner, you can find it at the Stardust. The coffee isn't good but it is cheap and plentiful, and the waiter won't judge if you ask for a little brandy in it instead of cream.
If you're here on a date, share some milkshakes or a slice of pie! Push a button on the jukebox and listen to the entire discography of Dolly Parton, or perhaps Lil Nas X's Old Town Road, or Lil Nas X's cover of Jolene. Those really are the only artists.
The General Store
Parked right on the main (and only) street in town, beside the saloon, is the General Store. It's like a general store, if a general store was also a very specific store. That is to say, you can get dry goods like flour, cornmeal, and sugar here, but if you look hard enough, you can also find weird novelty keychains, cowboy boots, and empty glass jars.
The stock seems to change every time you enter, except for the cornmeal and dried beans. You won't find the same novelty license plate twice! Check out the selection of useless healing crystals, or snag that jar of artisanal prickly pear jam before it's gone forever.
Depending on the day, you can find just about anything in the store, as long as it isn't exactly useful. You want a notebook? Great! You get a novelty children's notebook shaped like a cowboy boot with a big plastic spiral binding. You want tools? There's a novelty multi-tool that has a small knife, tweezers, a corkscrew, and a candle snuffer. Think about the novelty version of what you want, and it may just be there. Or not! Whatever's most fun for you. Except if it's useful. Sorry, that just isn't happening.
You won't find weapons or grappling hooks or anything really useful or good, but really: don't sleep on that jam.
The Endwell Bathhouse
The bathhouse is deceiving: the outside is as run down as the rest of town, but as soon as you step inside of it, it's like entering a different world. It's clean with bright white stone, warmth radiates from the floors, a pleasant moisture in the air. Waiting to greet you is a
familiar figure, his fur damp. He may offer you a towel.
Three doors wait, each with an sign with a figure and some text underneath it:
- One shows a tentacle and reads: Aqunid
- One shows a stick person in a triangle dress and reads: Female
- One shows a perfect sphere and reads: Chrono
No matter which door you enter, you come to a changing room with showers and cubbies for your clothes, and fresh, fluffy towels.
Through those rooms are the pools: private ones for each room, and then one large communal pool at the back. The pools are hot, the water fresh, the perfect thing to warm up from the chill outside. Sure, there are a few racks of manacles on one of the walls, rusted and unused. Certainly all the small windows to the outdoors are covered in bars, but that's fine. You can find wooden saunas if you want to turn the heat up even more, the steam hot enough to melt whatever tension you're carrying.
The town's walls—and there are walls, low stone things encircling the town, with gates at each cardinal point—don't seem to do much to keep out the desert beyond. Wellstone is in a low, hot basin, surrounded on all sides by desert stretching out into the dark jutting teeth of distant mountains.
To the north, The Staywell Hotel is accessible up a little path. The southern gate leads to a high-walled, dying hedge maze, choked with thorns, cacti, and dust, and full of gaps. The eastern and western gates are run-down, rotted with patchy lichen, and lead to the dead woods which come running right up to the feet of the walls. At night, eyes are visible among the bare sticks and branches, and the howling of wolves—coyotes?—surrounds the town, echoing everywhere.
The Dead Forest
The forest around the town is a very strange place. Crowding close to the town like grasping fingers, its skeletal trees are always creaking and groaning, or rattling like bones. Their sunbleached wood is brittle but tough, twisted and worn bare by sand and time. Crows and vultures haunt the bare branches. Bright eyes blink from knots and between sticks.
There are voices here whispering among the trunks: birds, animals, and something else, a strange static frequency. The longer you wander among the dead trees, the more likely you are to feel something grabbing at your clothes and your hair. A branch or a twig, or the spine of one of the long low cacti growing here and there. It's probably not a hand.
At twilight, the forest fills with a fine, cold mist, obscuring the knotted roots that stick up from between the trees and making wayfinding very difficult. The more you walk, the thicker the mist gets until you show up somewhere else entirely. You're equally likely to be spat out into the bare desert as the edge of town. There's a small chance you'll end up in the graveyard.
The Hedge Maze
The hedge maze was grand, once. Its dying hedges are full of thorns and twigs and little else, and here and there great chunks are missing, letting the desert through. It is choked with cacti, tumbleweeds, and dust.
It's a stifling place, even now. The longer you spend in it, the more like you feel your every move is being watched. Eyes prickle along the back of your neck. Critters rustle in the thorny brush. You're liable to come upon a rattlesnake or a massive scorpion in here. If you do, you'd better run: animals in the hedge maze are twice as aggressive as they should be, and liable to attack.
Stay here long enough and you may just find the graveyard tucked away at one end. It never seems to be in the same place twice, and it's much easier to find if you aren't looking for it.
The Graveyard
Tucked away in some ever-changing corner of the hedge maze is a tumbled collection of worn wooden graves, weather-eaten and fading. Some take the shape of praying angels or worn wooden shapes. Some are rough, sandy gold stone, worn beyond reading. Marigolds, dried beads, and burned-out incense decorate some of the graves. Somewhere in here is a grave with your name on it, and an epitaph to match.
It's said if you leave a coin for the dead, you'll be blessed with good luck, but the real blessing comes from pouring whiskey on a grave.
Walking into the graveyard when it's dark makes your hair stand on end. Wails and whispers emanate from among the gravestones. A hand might brush along your skin, but any attempt to contact the dead results in nothing. Maybe it's just the wind, or the coyotes and jackrabbits still prowling among the graves.
Flora & Fauna
Out here, even the plants & animals are rugged things, built to survive. Spine-heavy prickly pear cacti sprout up from between buildings. Sedate saguaros, large as trees, jut up on the horizon. Cholla cacti sport inch-long thorns that seem to lock themselves into skin if touched. Desert sagebrush and sharp-edged yucca take over the rocky landscape, shoving their way through the skeletons of buildings.
Among all of this wander a strange mix of creatures: coyotes, songbirds, and hedgehogs; long-legged jackrabbits, snuffling, tusked javelinas, cactus wrens and spiders and wolves; the occasional mountain lion. Rattlesnakes lurk in barrels and shadows Their venom is enough to seriously hurt, or even kill. If you leave your shoes outside, be sure to check them for scorpions or tarantulas sheltering from the wind and the dust.
A sprawling web of tunnels and rooms, that seemingly stretch on forever is accessible through a crevasse, open in the earth under the diner. In the back, the floor collapsed and a long, narrow staircase winds down into the darkness of the catacombs. Strangely, the ever-present feeling of being watched is absent here. In fact, it is dark, very dark. It's impossible to see unless you have dark vision, or bring a flashlight.
From the surface entry, you enter a series of small clear spaces connected by tight tunnels. Some are so tight it's terrifying to try and get through. The walls and floor feel like solid stone in some places, and oddly squishy in others. Some tunnels are damp, while others are bone dry. The walls can be smooth, or oddly dotted with what appears to be old bones and skulls. For those in tune with the feeling of death, it is palpable down here, death surrounding and encompassing you, coupled with an intense, deep, thrumming feeling of life.
The Ship Graveyard
A strange, wet cavern, echoing and filled with the sound of dripping opens up from a tight, tangled path. The sound of dripping permeates the air. Lights and thrumming emanate from the cavern.
The cavern is littered with ships of all kinds. Ships made for the sea, the sky, outerspace. Ships from your world, perhaps, or from any world. Giant starships to tiny dinghies. They've been here for a very, very, very long time.
Parts from these ships are salvageable, from sheets of metal to wood to tech that may or may not work. It all looks very old and degraded by its time in the desert. Who knows what you might find in there?
The Glittering Cave
A strange cavern with glistening walls opens up. It has a calming presence, a strange feeling that anything is possible. They aren't wet, but if you shine a light on them they sort of... glitter. This room is strange, for when you're in it, and you think of something you want, it appears. No matter what it is, it appears. It is usually not quite right, but there it is! Sort of!
If you picture something, but you're also thinking of something else, you'll get a strange mix of the two, like if you're thinking of pizza but also your mind drifts to a street where you used to get pizza at home, your pizza might have acorns on it instead of pepperoni. If you picture a person, and wish they were there, the glitter in the room coalesces into what looks like a person, at first. Then, as the glitter falls away, so does the person. It collapses to the ground in a pile of blood and bone and viscera, along with some small objects that may represent the person to your character.
Things created in this room can be edible (if you wish for food) or potable (if you wish for drink).
The Staywell Wreckage
A large, large cavern taken up by what looks to be the Staywell. Except it looks like the Staywell Manor on top of the Staywell Manor on top of the Staywell Hotel, on top of the Staywell Hotel, and so on. Some rooms are accessible, but most are crumbled under the weight of a hundred Staywells.
Only the most recent Staywells are accessible (the last two or so), and the older the Staywell is, the more it has been destroyed under the newer ones. Whenever a cycle ends, if the Staywell was destroyed in the storm, it will then be in this cavern when the next cycle begins. It will be destroyed however it was in the storm. You may be able to salvage things like the bulletin board or items from rooms.
The Cistern
The cistern is a large, large room that stretches out seemingly forever. From the caverns, you descend for a long set of stone steps to foot deep water. Except, it isn't exactly water. If you touch it, or step into it, it will eat away at your skin, your clothes. The water is intensely acidic and will devour almost anything it touches.
If you're able to traverse the cistern, you'll find glowing mushrooms dotting the landscape, an area full of skeletons and bones, and if you go too far, you'll find yourself disoriented and turned around. Time will stretch and move, and you'll find yourself spit out close to the stairs, not quite sure how you got there.
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