Disclaimer: You do not need to read this parts if you do not want to. These are more for when we actually start the RP. This is not say you can't read it read as much as you like but currently you wont need it.
Disclaimer 2: I took most of this stuff from the wonderful supplement book for World of Darkness called "Chicago" if you like NWOD I recommend getting it. One of the best supplements for the game in my humble opinion.
Disclaimer 3: I know things in real Chicago are not as bad as presented in this description but in this fictional Chicago they are.
Chicago is known for its train system, the el or “L”, which is short for elevated train, even though two-thirds of the system’s tracks are below ground. The el has over a hundred miles of track and carries passengers to all parts of the city, including both major airports and 40 suburbs. The square elevation platforms that the tracks sit on are a familiar sight all over the city. They’re enormous, crude affairs of rusting metal that slice through neighborhoods like knives. One of the first lessons new residents learn after moving to Chicago is to avoid the el at night. The el is fine during the day when it’s the province of bankers, lawyers and secretaries on their way to and from work. By night,
though, say after 9 P.M., the el steadily becomes a no-man’sland where vagrants, gangs and criminals have free reign. Teams of transit cops make their rounds of the trains, usually with dogs in tow sniffing for drugs or explosives, but any criminal who’s paying attention can figure out their
routines and evade them with a little effort. If the el system were a neighborhood, it would have
the highest murder rate of any neighborhood in the city. Pushing victims onto the tracks as a train approaches is a popular form of murder in Chicago. El service comes to a screeching halt several times a year as the transit police suspend train service long enough to gather parts into a body bag and spray the blood off the tracks. There are also many hidden abandoned stations that many Chicago lore buff would gladly tell you horrifying tales about.
Center
The Loop is Chicago’s downtown, where the really tall buildings are. It is the rich, gray urban core of the city, the center to which all other neighborhoods orient themselves. The area is called the Loop because the el tracks make a big loop around the downtown area, effectively wrapping
it in a rusty iron ribbon. All in all, the Loop encompasses one fairly solid square mile of skyscrapers, all of which are trying to grab a little more heaven than their neighbors. The Sears Tower, not long ago the world’s tallest building, is here, as is the Hancock Building, presiding like royalty
over Chicago’s skyline. The Loop is ultimately a place of cold, hard commerce. It’s a place where winning is paramount, and success means reaping the biggest profits. In the cold glass and concrete canyons of the Loop, life is reduced to binary terms: profit and loss, one’s and zero’s, winners and losers, the quick and the dead. From the savage free enterprise practiced in the trading pits to the shark-smile meetings in corporate boardrooms, the bottom line is determined in neat ledger columns: if you’re not generating revenue, you’re a liability. And woe unto those who add to the red ink. The long-time mob presence in Chicago has given the Loop a peculiar claim to fame: there are more human remains in the foundations of these buildings than anywhere else in the world. The problem is so pronounced that the police are expected to be present any time an old building is being demolished, so there’s someone to take possession of the remains that are uncovered when the foundation is excavated.
Flowing through the heart of the Loop is the Chicago River, perhaps the most tainted and unnatural waterway in the United States. The twisted, slow-moving Chicago River has branches and tendrils meandering all through the Chicago area, including the North Branch, the South Branch
and the Main Stem. The modern Chicago River also incorporates 52 miles of constructed waterway.
Before 1900, the river emptied into Lake Michigan, where the city’s drinking water came from. Unfortunately, the city’s sewage emptied into river. This was a problem. So, in 1900, the city of Chicago and state of Illinois, in an act of nigh-unthinkable hubris, spent a staggering 40 million
dollars to reverse the flow of the Chicago river, sending it flowing backwards, toward a canal that led to the Illinois River and, eventually, to the Mississippi. In the West Loop, the Chicago River branches into several spurs, all of which go meandering off on their own convoluted paths through Chicago and its suburbs. There are those who say that something went terribly wrong with Chicago the day the river changed direction, that humankind’s ability and willingness to meddle had finally outstripped
wisdom completely, that the spirits of the place had been so deeply offended that they became angry and twisted. The first day the river changed direction, there were hundreds of maelstroms, the combined din of which sounded like a gagging giant. A number of long dead, unidentifiable bodies bobbed to the surface of the river and the lake, presumably from the old City Cemetery. On Lake Michigan, rogue waves washed away several fishermen and a woman walking along the beach with
her three children. Inexplicably, these events were seen as nothing but curiosities, and the people of Chicago went about their business as usual, oblivious to the subtle changes and feeling nothing but pleased with themselves.
Jutting out into Lake Michigan like the city’s turgid phallus is Navy Pier, a tourist trap of international proportions. If people see only one thing in Chicago, it’s likely to be the Pier and its exhibition halls, museums, theaters and mall stores. The big advantage of Navy Pier? Nothing really ever happens out here. Hundreds of cops work tirelessly to see to that. Navy Pier is entirely sterile and devoid of substance, like one big real-world episode of Sesame Street, a Potemkin village set up by the Chicago Chamber of Commerce to assure small-town tourists that cities aren’t the scary, filthy places they’ve always heard about. Instead, people get to stroll arm-in-arm by the big ships that are moored here, licking ice cream cones and feeling, probably for the only time in their lives, like they’re in a Norman Rockwell painting. Cops aren’t the only ones making sure Navy Pier stays tourist-friendly. The concessions stands and the Pier’s one high-end restaurant are managed by the Stephano family, one of the major mob families left in Chicago, and it’s in their best interest to see to it that Navy Pier has a fun, hospitable reputation. Anybody causing trouble on the Pier, especially trouble that might make it into the media, had best pray that the cops find them before the mob does. They take the protection of Navy Pier very seriously.
Southside
Chicago has two Chinatowns. The one people know and think of as “Chinatown” is a small neighborhood of 11 square blocks located on the Near South Side, centered on
the corner of Cermak and Wentworth, not far from the lake and the convention center. Isolated from the rest of the city by a formidable tangle of rivers, railroad tracks, expressways and some of Chicago’s worst ghettos, this Chinatown is a place of despair and resentment masquerading as a place of exotic fun for the purposes of attracting customers. Most residents of Chinatown feel like they’re in an Asian-flavored theme park. They’d love to drop the happy Asian “we love you long time!” shtick, but if the rest of the city stops coming down to buy lucky bamboo, cheap Asian knickknacks and kung pao chicken, they’re screwed, because it’s a crappy neighborhood and nobody would venture down there otherwise. Plagued by bad schools and a deteriorating neighborhood, those with the resources to flee Chinatown are doing so in droves, leaving for other neighborhoods and other cities. Those who remain are, by and large, those who have resigned themselves to dying in Chinatown: older, non-English speakers, many of whom are illegal Chinese immigrants smuggled in and lacking legal recourse. Hemmed in as it is, Chinatown has some of the worst feng shui of any neighborhood in the city. Some might call that ironic; Chinatown’s residents call it the product of several decades of racism. Since the Chinese first established a presence Chicago in 1890, any time a neighborhood had to be sliced up or relocated to build a new road, railroad track or government building, the Chinese got the short end of the stick. That — and the fact that Chicago’s
two main tongs (Chinese crime syndicates) couldn’t stand to operate in the same neighborhood — is why Chicago has two anemic Chinatowns instead of one robust one. The stronger of the two tongs, the On Leong Tong, controlled Chinatown and brought in money through prostitution, gambling and the distribution of heroin. In the early ’90s, the FBI crushed the On Leong in a major crackdown
on organized crime, and, while this was probably a good thing, it left Chinatown without even the wayward direction that the tong provided. The weaker of the two tongs, the Hip Sing Tong, established itself near the North Side neighborhood of Uptown, but the so-called Chinatown North is little more than an echo. As much Vietnamese as Chinese and occupying just four blocks of Argyle Street, this Chinatown more a demographic anomaly than a neighborhood, and certainly isn’t a tourist trap.
If there’s a bleak, cursed core to the South Side’s urban blight, it’s got to be Englewood. One of the city’s most prosperous neighborhoods, even during the Depression, the arrival of blacks and the ensuing “white flight” saw opportunities, property values and, ultimately, the area’s population plummet. Neglect and property abandonment soared through the roof, and the once-beautiful Victorian buildings that lined the streets of Englewood became listing, sagging sentinels bearing witness to a level of crime, addiction and despair rarely, if ever, seen in this country.
Englewood is a tangle of overgrown lots, abandoned multi-family homes, open-air drug markets (marked by shoes dangling from power lines) and boarded-up garages. Plenty of good people live here, unable to escape the sucking gravity of poverty (and the blood-sucking monsters attracted
to it). Englewood’s reputation is so bad, however, that it stains surrounding neighborhoods and attracts foul souls looking for a place to get away with evil.
Trapped in the otherwise nightmarish South Side are the University of Chicago and the bubble of relative sanity that surrounds it: Hyde Park. With its highly educated and relatively affluent community, Hyde Park is the largest continuous break in the slums and ghettos of the South Side. The neighborhood’s relationship with the university makes Hyde Park a sort of outer keep around the Ivory Tower. Hyde Park is a cultured, tolerant, hyper-civilized neighborhood that places heavy emphasis on knowledge and intellectual ability, and boasts the greatest number of bookstores per capita (good book stores, not those chains that sell nothing but cheap genre paperbacks) in the country. Hyde Park is among Chicago’s more picturesque neighborhoods. The streets are immaculate, the homes are in good repair and the people are friendly, but it’s hard to miss the fortress mentality
that neighborhood residents suffer from. There’s a hint of fear just under the surface, a bit of hyper-vigilance, a hair trigger fight-or-flight response that visitors can pick up on after just a few moments of conversation. Residents visibly jump at loud or unexpected noises, especially near the edges of the neighborhood where it’s harder to pretend that they’re not living in an artificial oasis kept intact by constant patrols by police and private security guards. Psychologists have diagnosed hundreds of
cases of post-traumatic stress disorder in Hyde Park, and some children show symptoms by the age of seven. And the cause isn’t particularly mysterious. From time to time, especially in the summer, the denizens of the wilder regions of the South Side drive into Hyde Park at night with their windows open and their huge subwoofers set to window-rattling volumes. They drive slowly through Hyde Park in an ominous procession as pedestrians flee the streets and parents run inside with their children and lock the doors. Ultimately, these parades are more about dominance than actual threat, but it helps to reinforce the roles of the South Side wolves and their Hyde Park sheep.
If there is a homeland for the painfully brilliant, it is the University of Chicago. Its gray Gothic buildings seem to act like a siren song to intellectually brilliant and socially maladjusted students. The U of C is “blessed” with some of the finest Gothic architecture in America. Combined with the Chicago’s cold, gray winters, that architecture makes the University of Chicago campus one of the grimmest, starkest places in the city for about four months out of the year, and, year after year, the school comes in last in a ranking of social skills and party opportunities. At the same time, the sheer intellectual capacity of some of its undergraduates outstrips that of many graduate students at lesser schools. The driving hunger for knowledge has landed both students and faculty of the U of C in bizarre circumstances on more than one occasion. Without a doubt, there are topics about which one can know too much for one’s own good. Many who would study such dangerous topics attend the University of Chicago. It was at the University of Chicago that Enrico Fermi developed the atomic bomb. Other, less famous scholars have also made dangerous discoveries down here, and not all of them have been scientific. With brilliance and obsession so common and wisdom in such short supply, bad things are bound to happen. In 1924, two University of Chicago students named Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb, for example, became obsessed with what it might feel like to take a human life. It’s difficult to say what led them to their fascination, but they gave in to it, and 14-year-old Bobby Franks died at their hands. Other students take to occult dabbling, and the results can be more disturbing, although none of the rumors can be substantiated. Campus police are required to undergo HUS (Highly Unusual Scenario) training in order to deal with some of the bizarre circumstances they may encounter in the course of their duties.
Two well-known South Side neighborhoods have reputations that run somewhat contrary to that of the South Side in general. The Ridge, located about as far south of the Loop as Evanston is North of it, is another term for the neighborhoods of Beverly Hills (or just “Beverly”) and Morgan Park,the emerald isle of Chicago’s South Side Irish history. The Ridge is an area packed with handsome, old-fashioned buildings, Victorian mansions and municipal buildings, Prairie-style houses and a medieval castle. This is also the highest ground in Chicago. For the most part, the chain-link jungle of the
South Side keeps visitors out of this largely residential area, but folks do come down to visit the so-called Irish Death March — the endless series of bars and pubs lining Western Avenue. The historic Pullman District is the original company town. Begun in 1880, it was a wholly artificial community
commissioned by George Pullman to house his employees and their families. It was a compact and controlled little town, with its own shops and restaurants, all recycling Pullman’s money through his workers and back to him. It was also a famous disaster. Following a fiscal depression, strike and riots,
the community crumbled into poverty and ruin. After his death in 1897, Pullman was buried in a bunker to protect his corpse from retribution and vandalism. Today, the neighborhood’s a National Landmark District with museums, a park and lots of iconic architecture remaining from the old days (because the neighborhood never got the influx of new money that would’ve led to new buildings).
The urban blight of the South Side doesn’t just stop once you leave Chicago proper; the blight infects the landscape for miles. On a low-traffic day, the south suburbs are no more than a half-hour from the heart of the Loop, but they’re a world away in every other regard. Calumet City, East Chicago and Gary, in Indiana, are towns haunted by the ghosts of past industry. Derelict steel mills stand rusted and silent in mute testimony to boom times long past. Along the lakeshore, the last of Chicago’s heavy industry — steel mills and oil refineries, for the most part — exist side by side with crumbling Victorian mansions and ramshackle houses hastily erected in the ’50s and ’60s to house those who couldn’t afford the brick bungalows that are more common in the city’s more prosperous neighborhoods. This desolate no-man’s-land extends from Chicago’s city limits all the way down to the Indiana border and beyond, where it finally peters out in a seedy zone of strip clubs, abandoned homes and undeveloped land on the other side of Gary. Zoning regulations are haphazard down here. There is no order or sense of a civic plan. The streets are not cleaned, so litter accrues in empty lots and gutters overflow in the spring when the first rains can get to the sewer because of the thick layer of dead leaves, fast food packaging and plastic grocery bags. Streets are lined with old, derelict cars that nobody ever seems to find the time to tow away. Churches, bars, ramshackle private residences, open land and the ubiquitous adult bookstores all mingle in close proximity to one
another, and nobody seems to notice. The south suburbs are the urban equivalent of a back room or storage locker, where Chicago hides all that is unfit to be seen in the city proper, a holding pen for ugliness and despair. It’s the gutter where Chicago’s losers wash up, with the lowest standards, the bleakest prospects and the cheapest rent. If your situation gets any worse than this, then you’re probably already dead and in Hell. If the Loop is Chicago’s premier setting for world-class business
transactions, the south suburbs are the place to go for the under-the-table, hush-hush deals. Need to dump some industrial waste, cheap? Need a telltale body disposed of in the rendering plant, no questions asked? Need to put a contract out on a union organizer? A business rival? Your wife? This is the place to do it. The roadhouses in and around Calumet City and Gary have acted as incubators for some of the foulest deeds perpetrated in Chicago. Whatever evil you need committed, there’s someone down here desperate, hungry or strung-out enough to do it — for the right price, of course. Many state their fee in dollars; others want payment in grams of drugs like crack or crystal meth, and others seek even less orthodox remuneration such as bones or the hair of children. And should one of these hired thugs go missing or wash up dead on the beaches of Lake Michigan — and they frequently do — there’s always another lost soul where that one came from.
Northside
North of the Loop is mile-wide border running up Lake Michigan to the northern limits of Chicago. This busy expanse of land is where much of the life (and nightlife) of Chicago takes place. Much of this area is densely populated with residential communities linked by well-lighted commercial strips. In the several large neighborhoods crammed into this area can be found Chicago’s primary concentration of up-and-coming 20-somethings, bohemian enclaves, young families and established yuppies. This is where they work and play, drink and fuck, live and breed. There are some who say that while the Loop is the center of Chicago’s financial existence, the North Side is the center of Chicago’s
life.
Full of upscale housing and posh boutiques, the Gold Coast is a wealthy neighborhood running along the lakeshore on the Near North Side. It is one of the most popular residential neighborhoods for the well-to-do, and has been since the ’20s. More millionaires cluster here than in any other neighborhood in the city, and the shops and restaurants in the area show it. From the ’50s to the ’70s, the neighborhoods around the Gold Coast fell into blight, and the Gold Coast became an island of affluence in a sea of poverty and crime. While decades of skyrocketing property values have made the entire Near North Side into a desirable residential neighborhood, small pockets of blight, micro-slums, remain in the area, and a stranger to the neighborhood could easily stumble from a street lined with posh boutiques into a gang-ridden war zone.
North Avenue runs perpendicular to Lake Michigan — which is to say it runs east-west — a few blocks north of the Loop. Not all that long ago, North Avenue was a light-industry corridor in the middle of the city. After the area went into a brief decline, it came back as a haven for 20-something
yuppies. Small condos with large price tags went up, seemingly overnight, all through the ’90s. Now North Avenue boasts a range of yuppie superstores such as Crate and Barrel, Pottery Barn and Home Depot. It also boasts the best upscale dance clubs in the city. Traffic slows to a crawl on weekend
nights as clubs sporting names like Cro-Bar, Exit and Circus overflow with 20-somethings wanting to drink, dance and hook up. These clubs are ground zero for those who really want to see themselves as decadent (in a trendy sort of way). Young, pretty people in hormonal overdrive can be talked into just about anything without a great deal of effort. Some of them have paid for their malleability. A handful of people disappear every year from the North Avenue clubs and aren’t seen again. The Chicago River, which runs near the club district, is inevitably searched, but rarely with any success.
As with any large city, Chicago has a sizeable gay population and a neighborhood that is, functionally, the city’s main gay ghetto. The stretch of Lakeview bordered by Belmont to the south, Addison to the north, Clark to the west and Broadway on the east is called “Boystown” for reasons that are perfectly clear when you pass through the area, especially on a weekend. Boystown is one of the two main concentrations of Chicago’s gay community and a relatively posh neighborhood of stylish boutiques and trendsetting coffeehouses, and it’s common to see samesex couples walking down the street holding hands and kissing without fear of stares or verbal assaults that would be
more likely just a few blocks away. Boystown centers along a strip of North Halsted, a busy, thriving commercial center that stays busy into the early-morning hours with bars, theaters, dance clubs, sex clubs and upscale restaurants. What the North Avenue strip is for guys looking for girls, the North Halsted strip is to guys looking for other guys.
If you believe what you read on the Internet (and many people do), you’d think that the neighborhood surrounding the intersection of Clark and Belmont is some sort of sacred Zion for every goth, punk, rivet-head and teenage reject in the country. The message is there for those who are looking for it: anyone who really wants to get out of their podunk prison of a hometown is only a Greyhound trip and an el ride away from a world of peers just as individual as they are. To a degree, the tales of a goth-punk New World — tiny though it may be — have at least a kernel of truth. The piercing shops, tattoo parlors, clubs, clothing and leather shops, hair salons and even restaurants around the intersection of Clark and Belmont cater to the darker brands of youth counterculture. The neighborhood does both edgy and rebellious well. It’s the yuppies and mundanes who don’t quite fit in here. For kids used to being the only freak in their hometowns, the sense of shared identity can be incredibly powerful. And, every year, hundreds of runaways (and recent graduates, for that matter) arrive looking for a place that will accept them and, like newly hatched baby turtles making a mad dash from beach to ocean, having left home for what they imagine to be the more enlightened streets of Chicago. But, also like newly hatched baby turtles, they face a small army of predators lined up to devour them before they reach their destination. There’s no shortage of those who would, in whatever way, take advantage of the kids who flock to this goth Mecca — on Sunday mornings, stoops and alleys are littered with empty bottles and spent visitors with nowhere else to crash.
Another major north-south thoroughfare along the North Side, Clark Street, actually runs at an angle, up and away from Halsted. The Clark Street corridor boasts nightlife of another variety that makes it popular with vampires. A long, busy stretch of Clark Street, from Fullerton (2400 North) to Irving Park (4000 North) sees two subcultures collide, albeit peacefully: gritty urban counterculture and baseball fans. Several underground/counterculture clubs and shops line Clark street, from the inveterate dance club Neo at the southern end, to the Alley, a thriving mall for goths and other disenfranchised subcultures, to the Metro, the city’s main venue for goth, punk and industrial acts on the northern
tip. Also at the northern edge of Clark Street is Wrigley Field, Chicago’s immensely popular and most recognizable ballpark.
Famed for being wealthy, the North Shore is one big bedroom community for Chicago’s wealthiest citizens. Chicago proper ends at the enormous Calvary Cemetery. Property values make a dramatic jump north of the cemetery, where the suburb of Evanston begins. The locals think of Evanston as a part of the city proper, but the facts of life there — and features like its own police force — prove that Evanston is a community apart from Chicago. Starting at Evanston and extending most of the way to the Wisconsin border, the wealthy North Shore is the antithesis of the blighted suburbs south of the city. These towns are wealthy, quiet and peaceful. Some say too peaceful. There’s a portion of Chicago’s population that sneers at the wealthy North Shore and claims (quite vociferously) that today’s peaceful suburbs are tomorrow’s anorexia deaths, family slayings and incest statistics. Whether or not that assertion is true would be hard, if not impossible, to determine. A thick veil of media silence blankets the area, muting any hint of scandal in all but the most extreme cases of mass murder. This media shield is considered one of the many incidental luxuries of the rich, and it lays thick across the north suburbs of Chicago. The police, too, are hesitant to intrude on the privacy of the very wealthy unless they’re called by an activated security system. Evanston is best known for being the home of Northwestern University, regularly cited as the best university in Illinois and one of the top ten schools in the nation. It is a private university and, unsurprisingly, the preferred institution for the favored and brilliant scions of wealthy families. Going north from Evanston takes you so the slightly richer town of Wilmette. North of Wilmette is Kenilworth, per capita the richest town in America. Going still more northward you arrive at Winnetka. Wilmette, Kenilworth and Winnetka are all populated by Chicago’s doctors, lawyers, CEOs and by a number of independently wealthy members of the leisure class. Those who find power or privacy intoxicating are likely to congregate up here. Many of the homes in these three suburbs, especially the largest gated estates near Lake Michigan, are incubators for trouble, obsession and madness. More than one bored North Shore matron has found that dabbling in spiritualism can lead to a very dark place. With so much latitude and privacy, it would be more surprising were there not individuals, indeed entire families, going quietly awry behind their tall, wrought-iron gates and lavish, landscaped estates. The orgies and month-long drug binges are, predictably, the most common — and most tedious — allegations leveled at the very wealthy, but that’s hardly the extent of their libertine antics. Some of the bizarre acts rumored to take place in the quiet, walled mansions of the North Shore elite are truly jaw-dropping. The most egregious of these excesses make their way into the rumor mill; most do not.
Chicago’s landscape is hyper-urban. The Midwest is largely flat and seemingly featureless, so little or nothing competes with the creeping brick-and-mortar grid that is Chicago. Both the county and the city seem to balance their budgets with property taxes, meaning that only the wealthiest can afford to have land that isn’t developed and making money. Private parks, therefore, are rare outside of the North Shore. The typical Chicagoan has three options for experiencing anything resembling nature: the parks, the forest preserves and the lake.
Chicago’s architects and, more recently, mayors have long had a vision of Chicago as a city of parks. When Chicago first incorporated in 1837, it took as its motto Urbs in Horto, meaning “City in a Garden.” The city has taken that motto very seriously over the years. Parks stretch along the vast majority of Chicago’s lakefront. The first of the city’s major parks, Lincoln Park in the Gold Coast neighborhood, was established on what had originally been the city cemetery. Most of the bodies were exhumed and moved to other cemeteries when a physician named John Rauch pointed out that the sandy soil and proximity to the lake made it highly likely that decaying bodies would leech into the lake, which was the source of the city’s water. Since then, the city has been building a green ribbon of parklands along the lakeshore. Though Chicago’s parks are extensive, they’re largely abandoned during the cold winter months. Even during the summer, the parks close at 11:00 P.M. to prevent “unauthorized use.” The regulations do a good job of repelling law-abiding citizens. Nobody else pays much attention. Once the police close the gates and make their sweep, people pour back into the parks on foot and continue with their unauthorized activities, including some very odd cultic rites, cruising for anonymous sex and camping out. Those passing through Chicago in the summer without money for a hotel room can usually find a spot in the park that’s quiet and dark enough for sleeping. If they’re lucky, they may even wake up the next morning.
In 1913, an architect and Freemason named Dwight Perkins proposed leaving large tracts of forest, prairie and wetlands in and around Chicago untouched, to let them stay green and inviolate. This was a radical idea in an era when the subjugation of nature was still seen as a good idea, but Perkins was a strangely persuasive man. His proposed map, which included over a 150,000 acres of land around Chicago, placed the forest preserves in a seemingly haphazard pattern around the city. The popular rumor is that Perkins laid out the forest preserves in a mystically important configuration, but nobody seems to know what it’s supposed to do. For the most part, the current uses of the forest preserve are much less mysterious. Jogging paths and picnic tables are common developments. The forest preserves aren’t all fun and games, though: they’re under much less supervision than the parks, and bad things do go on there. Hikers and joggers find dead animals — dogs and cats, mostly — with disturbing frequency. Many of the animals are impaled, decapitated or otherwise mutilated, and some of them have symbols carved into their skin. Some have been exsanguinated. In 1999 a group of hikers found the body of Daniel Christophori — a Northwestern graduate student of mathematics — buried in a shallow grave. His eyes and his hands were missing, and, like the animals before him, symbols had been carved on the body. The FBI has been unable to decipher the symbology or even determine the alphabet used in the carvings, but they do seem relatively certain that whoever killed Christophori is likely to kill again unless brought to justice.
Lake Michigan is the main reason for Chicago’s existence. By providing a key waterway to the continent’s interior, the lake allowed the city to become a major commercial nexus in the center of the United States. Lake Michigan plays the same role in Chicago that the ocean does in coastal cities, prompting yet another of Chicago’s myriad sobriquets: the Third Coast. Chicago is designed around the lake, squashed up flat up and down nearly 50 miles of lakeshore. In a landscape that lacks mountains or any other noteworthy geological features, the lake is the one and only element of the terrain that makes any impression. While people in other places use compass directions to get their bearings, Chicagoans calculate where they are by their position relative to Lake Michigan, even if they’re nowhere near the water. The city used to use the lake as a dumping ground until garbage, rotting meat and sewage started washing up on the beaches. There are still those who use the lake to get rid of items they don’t want to leave lying around, like bodies. Every year, several bodies wash up along the beaches of Lake Michigan and the banks of the Chicago River. A minority of these are suicides. The bodies that dumpers really don’t want coming back get dropped farther out in the lake, and only after being incorporated into a large chunk of concrete.Bodies on the beach used to be big news; now they don’t even make the first three pages of the Tribune anymore. There are still things that do. Around January of 2001, plastic baggies began washing up on some of the city’s downtown beaches. In itself, that wouldn’t be newsworthy, but the bags themselves contained fragments of fresh bone and children’s teeth. Since the first baggy was found, over 20 more have washed up, and police still don’t have a single lead in the case. Close to Chicago, the lake is largely domesticated. The big storms of fall and winter used to gnaw away at the shore with large waves, but enormous concrete blocks and boulders keep the lake at bay these days, with the exception of freak occurrences — which still seem to happen with a startling frequency. Every now and then, rogue waves, more properly called seiches, rise up and carry a person (or two) away, but that only happens once every few years. Along Chicago’s coastline, the lake is shallow and relatively warm. Swimming and boating are common in the summer, although E.coli outbreaks have kept many of the city’s beaches closed in recent years. Further out, Lake Michigan can get treacherous. At its deepest point, the lake is nearly 1,000 feet deep, and at those depths, the lake takes on some of the dangerous characteristics of the ocean. During major storms, strong southerly winds have been known to generate waves 20 to 25 feet high, and there’s no shortage of shipwrecks on the lake’s sloping, canyon- like underwater cliff-edges, for exactly that reason.
This our town [M] (World Of Darkness Roleplay)
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