The City Wrought In Neon is the dark echo of Earth’s city of Las Vegas. On the surface, it seems like a typical night along the – tall buildings covered in blinking lights, mirrored windows, and omnipresent neon lighting proclaiming the wonders and marvels of the City and the buildings within it. The inhabitants of the city are loud and raucous, revelers to the core in clothing that ranges from elegant formal outfits and evening gowns to little more than sequined bikinis with feather headdresses. Every minute of every hour is a new performance, a new excitement, with revelers who reach exhaustion either collapsing in the narrow alleys between the casinos to sleep in the detritus of a never-ending party, or staggering into the casino hotels to collapse in rooms that are always almost but not quite sold out.
Scratch the surface and the glamour fades; the alleys behind the casinos are home to men and women in dark, sober attire reminiscent of the Mob that once ruled Las Vegas, and they’re always busy running supplies of alcohol, food, drugs, and stranger things that seem to appear from nowhere in shipments that arrive from somewhere unknown. If a reveler stumbles into this area, they’re quickly escorted away with a free sample of something to take away the memory of what they just saw. Recursors are also likely to find the mobsters trying to hustle them away; resisting will see a bristling array of weaponry produced from under coats and inside cars, the sober faces turning grim.
Dig a little deeper yet, and recursors can find the real trouble of the City – hidden in the darkest alleys where even the mobsters fear to go, skittering amid the crowds of revelers unnoticed, and sitting in the highest offices of the buildings around the recursion are Things that can manipulate the fabric of the recursion the way a sculptor manipulates clay. The smallest and weakest are little more than mindless predators, abducting the occasional reveler to feed; some are vampires who leave drained bodies to rot in the gutters, some are more savage creatures that leave little more than a bloodstain.
Those amid the crowd manipulate and feed on emotions, pushing the fever high of the revel to extremes until the revelers begin to break down in fits of emotion as their surface feelings boil over or their guilty buried secrets – for everyone in the City has guilty secrets – surge up and crush them with terror, guilt, and despair.
At the top, the masters of manipulation bend the City itself to their whim, rewriting the buildings and streets in a perpetual silent war with one another to channel the most psychic and mystical power to their part of the city. On the face of things, they look the most human of all the hidden creatures of the city, immaculately groomed and elegantly clad. One look into their eyes dispels this illusion, revealing a greed and hunger worthy of a planetovore.