"When the wintry winds are blowing,
And the snow is starting in to fall,
Then my eyes turn westward, knowing that's the place,
I love the best of all.
California, I've been blue,
Since I've been away from you,
I can't wait 'til I get going,
Even now I'm starting in to call:

'California here I come!'
Right back where I started from,
Where bowers of flowers bloom in the sun,
Each morning at dawning birdies sing an' ev'rything:
A sunkist Miss said, don't be late,
That's why I can hardly wait,
Open up that Golden Gate,
California here I come!" --- Al Jolson

Geography

• Venice. About half of the Los Angeles basin is now under anywhere from five feet to fifty feet of water. In areas where buildings remain above water, shanty towns and squatters have developed a whole culture of boats, bridges, elevated highways and dangling trams. The social class of these people range from completely indigent to lower-middle-class in the glass skyscrapers that still pour upwards.
• Tydalay."Tidal LA" is a strip of about a quarter of the Los Angeles basin that varies in depth wildly - sometimes by a matter of inches, sometimes by a matter of feet. It tends to be a little poorer and less well-populated, but lies at the heart of the LA cultural scene.
• Dryalay."Dry LA" is about a quarter of the Los Angeles basin, mostly to the east and north of the city. These suburbs and miniurbs are approximately equivalent to any other Federated American city.
• Century City Arcology. The most "traditional" arcology, the FSA prefers Century City's well-patrolled corridors to the wild crazyquilt of the rest of the Basin.
• Santa Catalina. This undersea arcology lies several miles from Century City, out under the Pacific ocean, accessible by a high-speed tubetram that runs every ten minutes.

Places They've Been

• The Ring. FSA law prohibits any unlicensed business from being undertaken within a one-mile radius of the Corporate Platform - this means a semi-permanent ring of ships, trawlers, platforms, and squatters has sprung up about a mile away. Like a shanty city, it contains black markets, clubs, bars, trading posts, and not a whole lot in the way of law. There is a small section of the Ring dedicated to the biggest arms bazaar on the American West Coast.
• The Library. The FSA doesn't fund much in the way of libraries directly (most of them are attached to universities and other educational institutions now), so the Los Angeles library, which occupies a crumbling cylinder with jagged spires extending outwards at the top, is only partly a city effort and is chiefly the brainchild of the "tribe" of archivists and librarians that both work and live there, a little like Dark Ages monks. They are not at all selective about what they keep on their shelves, and the filing system takes a lot of getting used to.
• Chin Corleone's Italian-Korean Internationale Restaurant. A favorite hangout of the player characters, this rather indescribable place floats on the swells and waves of Tidalay, slightly anchored by heavy weights so as not to spill too much food when the waves come in or out.
• The Distributed University of Southern California at Los Angeles (DUSCLA). The OpNet version of a University, where students attend virtual classes prepared by their professors. One of the PCs, T.J. Pierce, works at DUSCLA, and they have taken great advantage of his contacts there.
• Morgan Grace's Office at Old LA. "Honestly, the best part of the interview was seeing Morgan Grace's office. It's kind of a funnel; you start off by walking through the doors down this narrow hallway that opens up into an odd-shaped room, with this absolutely amazing floor-to-ceiling semi-opaque window directly behind his expensive desk. It's a classic throne-room style approach. But with that window, everything gets distorted just enough to make even the seediest buildings look beautiful and magical (and let's be honest, this is a nightclub district, which basically requires the buildings outside the window to be the seediest around). It's architecture designed with one goal in mind: to make you aware that Morgan Grace sits in this office and that you should envy him. And worst of all, it works. If he'd let me turn on the damn camera instead of just recording the sound, you'd see what I mean. Ah well, someday I'll either be rich enough to have an office like that, or I'll just find a set designer who can mock it up for a movie." -- Thomas J. Pierce, on Morgan Grace's office
• The Arms Bazaar on the Ring. "Take a building like a warehouse, only rustier and darker, and fill it to bursting with a rat-warren of narrow aisles, improvised stairways and ladders, fifth-hand countertops and shelving units. Hang curtains and doors to give yourself the all-important back room for the really BIG deals, and make sure all the people there look as dangerous as the guns they're selling. Oh, yes, the guns. Enough to arm every man, woman, and child in SoCal (assuming you could afford it, of course), from the antique to the ultramodern to the outrageous. Did you know you can buy access and control codes to corporate weapons satellites? Or Tainted ammunition from halfway around the globe? It's true. And it's about forty miles offshore. Welcome to Los Angeles, I guess." -- Thomas J. Pierce, on the arms bazaar

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