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maskormods) wrote2013-12-31 08:51 pm
[ARCHIVED] INFORMATION: WORLD & INDUSTRY
These pages are being preserved for reference but are no longer active and will not be updated. Please visit modormenace for all current game information!
The locations listed on this page are not controlled by the moderator staff; rather, they are intended for player use, to bring local life and color to their characters' interaction with the world of Mask or Menace. Special thanks and complete credit go to Carolyn and Noodles for their hard work and contributions in creating these locales, and to Ishmael for her development of the economic and industrial landscape.
Leaving the continental United States or traveling beyond its territories isn't much advised for imPorts, be they registered heroes or not, due to the uneasy political landscape of a world still gripped by the Cold War. If characters wish to travel, however, there's more than enough within the good U S of A to keep them occupied.
Named for the city in Scotland from which its first inhabitants hailed, Aberdeen has been around since the mid-1700s, and has ranged over the years from tiny to respectable, but never important—it served as the site to no historic battles, no remarkable citizens, no interesting landmarks or significant history. It would still be nothing more than a dot on the map today if not for the Tennessee Valley Authority, who in 1944 used its location on a bend of the Tennessee River to build the Kentucky Dam, a hydroelectric station. The consequential flooding of nearby towns made the reasonably-dry Aberdeen a convenient refuge for displaced citizens to settle; the population boom, coinciding with economic boom at the close of WWII, made Aberdeen a relatively important city on a regionally-important river. The city aesthetic is, aside from its well-preserved "historic downtown," that of post-war architecture.
Via the inscrutable workings of government, Aberdeen became a pilot location for the TVA's nuclear development project; construction on the Edwin Teller Power Station (now Edwin Teller National Park) began in the late 1960s, and—due to some manufactured delays—went live in early 1976, to coincide with the Bicentennial. It continues to function to this day without downtime or major incidents, and is considered a model first-generation fusion plant. It's scheduled to be temporarily decommissioned and updated to incorporate new, more efficient reactor design sometime between 2030 and 2040, but the TVA foresees no need for anything but routine maintenance until then.
Aberdeen today is a practical sort of city. Inhabitants know their history more or less begins in the 1940s, and thus the only airs they put on are Atomic Age ones. They see themselves as reliable workhorses of the Cold War, doing an important job to keep the rest of the country ticking. There's a certain allure to fusion power that hasn't entirely gone away as it's become widespread, but it's of solemn scientists in lab coats and responsible workers in coveralls and hardhats, doing what's necessary rather than what's glamorous. It's not really a city that anyone but nuclear physicists wants to vacation in, but it's a perfectly pleasant place to live, as long as one isn't looking for nightlife or anything unconventional. The local branch of the state university system has a world-class program in nuclear engineering, able to poach from places as illustrious as MIT, and Dr. Teller himself would sometimes lecture there before his death in 2003. ImPorts visiting Aberdeen without being on an errand for the government are likely to be greeted with a whiff of suspicion. It's not hostility towards imPorts specifically as it is that Aberdeen is a bit insular; anyone not from around there is going to get a slightly chilly reception. No one's car's getting keyed, but no one's going to be making friends on the (fusion battery-powered) bus, either.
Aberdeen, Tennessee
Amistad, Texas
Directly on the Mexican border, Amistad sits at the confluence of the Rio Grande, Devils River, and Pecos River, on a reservoir created by the Amistad Dam. In reality, the dam was begun in 1963 and completed 1969, but in this universe, construction began in 1948 during the post-war boom and was finished by 1951. Texas, tasked with hosting the World's Fair in 1959 and never concerned with any traditions but its own, broke with convention and built an entirely separate town for the fair, choosing the site of the Amistad dam, so it could take advantage of the generated hydroelectric power, and wouldn't be constrained by an existing city's limitations. In 1959, the brand new town of Amistad, Texas welcomed visitors from the world over, and if all the cement wasn't quite dry yet, the ambitious scope of the project overshadowed that by far. Since it was entirely a planned location, it was built with every modern convenience to handle the crowds a world's fair brought, and the exposition went off with almost no bobbles.
After the Fair ended in 1960, what saved Amistad from becoming a ghost town was its location. The company that had run the hotels for the expo by contract with the state of Texas offered to keep them open, since they'd noticed people liked the swimming and hiking almost as much as they'd liked the fair. Together with the staff of the hydroelectric plant and a few entrepreneurs willing to take a risk, that was almost enough people for a resort town, and the novelty of vacationing there kept Amistad afloat until the fact that it really is a nice place to live could make it permanently viable. It's only in the 21st century that Amistad's come into its own as a real city. It prides itself both on its laid-back Tex-Mex culture and the larger international influences kept from the world's fair, and presents itself as a small but cosmopolitan city that values the intangibles that make life worth living. Some of the companies that exhibited at the World's Fair have kept their pavilions and turned them into offices there to manage their Latin American branches without falling afoul of tax laws about extranational assets. The bilingual Amistad University (or Universidad de Amistad) welcomes Spanish-speaking students from both within the United States and Latin America, and even a few from Spain proper. The light rail system is regularly ranked as one of the top public transit systems in the world. Amistad has year-round outdoor recreation on the reservoir and in the surrounding hills, including protected Mesoamerican archaeological sites. Downtown is very walkable, and expansion of the city has largely stayed rational, if not quite so thoroughly vetted as the city center.
ImPorts in Amistad are likely to find themselves ignored--or at least that's how it feels in comparison to Heropa. Amistad doesn't much care about imPorts one way or another, though people with obviously non-human appearances or superhero fashion sense are going to collect some stares. In general, it's a friendly neutrality, since welcoming people from all over is an important part of Amistad's self-image, but imPorts will be treated no better (or worse) than anyone else as long as they conduct themselves no better (or worse) than anyone else.
Argonite/SC0, Utah
Though both exist, it's not Area 51 or Groom Lake that attract the most attention or conspiracy theories in this universe: it's a spot near the Bonneville Salt Flats in Utah, an unassuming bit of desert like any other. Rumor has it that a sprawling underground facility snakes through the sandstone below the desert where all manner of cutting edge and probably unethical scientific research goes on — though on the outside, it's as mundane as a former weapons testing site can be. Labeled on maps as nothing more interesting than "SC0", the area is visibly little more than scrub and rocks, with some remnant chainlink fence hung with the usual threatening GOVERNMENT PROPERTY or UNEXPLODED ORDNANCE signs to keep people out, and a cluster of sand-scoured poured-concrete buildings and quonset huts at the end of an unmaintained runway.
The official position is that SC0 is a decommissioned artillery and explosives test site, closed off for public safety until such time as the government has the resources to spare to ensure it's safely cleared of 50 year old still-live bombs. The state of the world being what it is, such a remote, non-nuclear site is of course a low priority, and the occasional lights and activity people claim to have seen there are merely spot-checks by military police out of the Dugway Proving Grounds to discourage amateur detectives. No one wants a repeat of that unfortunate incident in 2006, do they? The conspiracy theorist position is that SC0 is a still-functioning facility belonging to one of the less reputable bits of the military. What the military is supposed to be doing there changes depending on who you ask, but the most common, and remarkably persistent suggestions are that the government is attempting to Import new superheroes on their own terms, or experimenting with giving normal people superpowers. Locals, or as local as they get to SC0, tend to keep their opinions to themselves. Trespassers on the facility have been arrested in the past, and a few years back, some of that "unexploded ordnance" the signs warn about stopped being so unexploded, and took a pair of thrill-seekers with it. This led to a fresh crop of rumors that the two had been killed because they'd gotten too close to something, not from tripping over a long-dormant artillery shell. Regardless, tour guides and independent expeditions have been more cautious since then, not scaling the fence in the handful of places where the barbed wire at the top has "inexplicably" come down, and mostly contenting themselves with surveillance equipment set up on a nearby bluff.
The nearest thing that can even pass for civilization is a cluster of prefab and cinderblock buildings almost 50 miles away, at the minuscule, unexciting, and all-but-abandoned mining town of Argonite. Argonite's principal industries, such as they are, are the mining of the mineral from which the town takes its name, and catering to conspiracy tourists passing through on their way to the rutted track through the sand that leads to the gates of SC0. To this end, the town center features a run-down motel with a dozen or so rooms, and a gas-station-cum-general-store that has rather more USB cables, camera batteries, and USGS maps for sale than you would expect. The diner across the street is also better than it has any right to be, though calling it "good" would be a stretch. ImPorts visiting Argonite or SC0 will be more or less ignored by the locals unless they're buying something, and latched onto like leeches by any conspiracy theorists they reveal themselves to.
High Rock, Colorado
Silver, skiing, and, strangely enough, computers. High Rock is a city that's been marked by good fortune, or at least good timing. Usually described as being "nestled" in the Colorado Rockies, that's a travel agent's polite way of saying High Rock is a mile and a half above sea level. It's in an almost painfully beautiful location, made outright painful by the fact that breathing there is a chore.
A silver strike in the area led to the town being founded as a mining settlement in the mid-1800s. Unfortunately for the speculators of the time, the veins were hard to work, and High Rock was functionally a ghost town by the 1880s. In the 1920s, however, someone realized that the difficulties the first prospectors had faced were the sort that the greater technical prowess of the 20th century could solve, and it revitalized High Rock, to the point where the Great Depression almost didn't affect it, since the silver deposits that had played out in other parts of the Rockies were essentially untouched in High Rock.
In the 1950s, the flow of silver slowed to a trickle, but the failure of the mines coincided with Alpine skiing becoming popular, and High Rock changed from purely a mining town to a resort town that also had a few mines. Sleepy in the summer and bustling in the winter, from the 50s to the 90s, High Rock was synonymous with skiing, to the point where a popular brand of winter accessories was named after it.
Then, in the mid-90s, IBM bought one of the exhausted mines, leaving most people scratching their heads right up until the corporation announced its new line of secure data storage services. Locked in its vault under the Rocky Mountains, IBM had built an enormous, climate-controlled facility that not only stores data, but can access and provide it to the client over fiber optic lines in seconds. The fees for live access are, of course, exorbitant, but mere space on a shelf for a tape or drive is much more affordable, and IBM's bulletproof reputation means that they have no shortage of clients. By now, every former mine anywhere near the city is owned by IBM or a competitor in the business it pioneered, and High Rock is now referred to, tongue-in-cheek, as "Silicon Mountain" in contrast to California's Silicon Valley. It's not just data storage anymore; despite the thin air, High Rock is now a center of the computer industry.
The growth of the city in fits and starts has led to distinctive neighborhoods. Much of the early mining settlement is gone, replaced by the sleek glass bricks of the computer companies, though there are a handful of Deco buildings that survive from the 20s boom, including City Hall. There are modern, large hotels in the corporate part of town, but the ski resort section tends to have smaller lodges and shops built during the post-war period. The little industrial section is a holdover from the heyday of the mines and mostly does rapid fabrication for the computer companies and a couple of boutique ski equipment manufacturers.
High Rock doesn't know what it wants to be as a city, and consequently it's impossible to say how any particular person is going to react to an imPort. IBM employees have a different perspective than someone in the hospitality industry or a ski bum who pays for their hobby by leading hikes in the summer.
Keokuk, Iowa
In MoM, the US never lost its manufacturing base. Keokuk, on the west bank of the mighty Mississippi, is part of the country's heavy industry. Need a giant, single-piece forging for a nuclear plant? Keokuk. Precision-cast engine blocks for Detroit car manufacturers? Keokuk. Enormous props for an aircraft carrier? Keokuk. If it's made of steel (or one of the structural materials that's replaced steel, including sophisticated metallo-ceramic composites, but that doesn't sound as good), there's a factory in Keokuk that can make it.
First settled by European Americans in the early 1800s, Keokuk began as a trading post for furs from Canada, and grew rapidly as the riverboat trade increased. For reasons unknown, it was named for a Sauk Indian chief after the Blackhawk War in the early 1830s. Up until the Civil War, it was a rough little town, but it was used as an embarkation point for Union soldiers heading to southern battles, and grew quickly. Several hospitals were established to treat returning injured soldiers, and eventually a medical college was founded there.
Around the turn of the century, the city's focus changed from river trade to manufacturing, factories springing up rapidly to meet the needs of the automotive and burgeoning aeronautical industries, and then the demands of the Allied war machine during World War II. Though the location is scenic, the city during the 20th century was not a pretty place, the practical needs of industry overriding aesthetic concerns. Downtown retains many grand buildings and several public parks from the Gilded Age, and the newer convention district by the airport had visitors in mind when it was designed, but the city is still by and large an industrial one.
Keokuk is a well-off place--not ostentatiously, but the factories provide good, steady jobs, and most people in the city are secure. As a result, the area trends surprisingly liberal, willing to tolerate more nonconformist ideas and behavior than one might expect, though nobody is going to find any communist cadres meeting in the VFW hall.
ImPorts can expect a warm welcome, though not really as celebrities. Keokuk's just friendly, and that's all there is to it.
Merriton, California
In the redwood forests of Northern California, right where Rt 1 starts to parallel the coast, you'll find Merriton. Before Prohibition, Merriton was a fishing town, founded as such in the early 1800s. Some unsuccessful prospectors drifted north from the Gold Rush, as did Chinese workers escaped or cut loose from the railroads. Likewise, a steady trickle of free spirits from back East and people with warrants in other states flowed into town. A sort of informal agreement that nobody would complain and get the Feds interested sprang up, and Merriton became something of a free port in fact, if not in law, at least until the Coast Guard built a station there in the 1890s and the locals grew more circumspect.
During the Roaring 20s, Merriton was in a position to profit handsomely from Prohibition. Within months of the Volstead Act, there was a thriving bootlegging trade running through. Ships carrying whiskey from Prohibition-free Canada would offload their cargos in the black of night, often with the full cooperation of the Coast Guard. The locals would stash their haul in the woods, and truck it down the coast to San Francisco and points south. This is Merriton's major claim to historical importance, and the city likes to boast that alcohol running in Merriton was never connected to organized crime--boutique scofflaws, if you will. Since Merriton's bootleggers were in fact mostly middlemen selling to interests in larger cities farther south, the government never bothered to make a major bust in town, but this never stopped anyone from bragging about their smuggling prowess.
The population rose (and became more law-abiding) during World War II as Coast Guard recruits rotated through for training and ships patrolling the Pacific coast docked for leave and resupply. Lacking the facilities to support larger ships, Merriton stayed a Coast Guard town, very rarely hosting Naval vessels. The Coast Guard station is still in service, plucking unfortunate mariners out of the water and blowing up the occasional beached whale carcass. NOAA and academic oceanographers sometimes operate out of the port, and there's always been a small fishing fleet that called Merriton home, as well.
Local business focuses on the city's maritime pursuits and redwood tourism. There's also distillery that advertises based on its bootlegging bona fides--of which has barely any. It was "founded" in the first owner's basement in 1933, a few months before the end of Prohibition, with the fruits of the Canadian whiskey trade. (Exaggeration aside, the whiskey's not bad.) Merriton in general displays cheerful lack of concern about the veracity of its own history, especially if it can separate tourists from their dollars. Legends abound, from famous bootleggers to Bigfoot to ghost ships, and they're mostly not remotely true, as exasperated historians at UC Merriton will inform anyone who asks. Still, it's a pleasant little city, freewheeling and laid-back in a way the rest of the country never quite manages. In a lucky quirk of history, the city has a beautiful neighborhood of Victorian homes that have escaped fire and earthquakes, and quite a few of them have been turned into charming bed and breakfasts with stunning ocean views. The Chinese population has always been well-integrated, and there's no separate Chinatown, but there are a lot of excellent Chinese restaurants, including a Schezuan-French fusion one that earned a Michelin star.
Merriton is not a bastion of Cold Warriors. They're still pretty compliant by the standards of our universe, and having a "REGISTERED" tattoo isn't going to get anyone refused service anywhere. Having an "UNSETTLED" one might well net someone a discount, though. Harmless disobedience is part of the DNA of the city, and imPorts unhappy with the Cold War culture on the East Coast might well enjoy a respite there.
Port Clarence, Alaska
Port Clarence Naval Station is below the Arctic Circle--though just barely. About 50 miles north of Nome, it's the major American listening post on the Bering Strait. Inside a sheltered bight on the Seward Peninsula, Port Clarence boasts a nuclear submarine dock, a permanent task force of icebreakers, and a wing of long-range bombers (technically on loan from the Air Force.) The station maintains a full-sized runway year-round, capable of accommodating any plane in the US armed forces, though for most of the year, it's an ice runway and only expert pilots land there.
Though it's considered a hardship assignment, this is not where the screwups go. The Cold War is still in full swing, and Port Clarence is staffed with the best the military has to offer. They're positioned to catch Soviet submarines doing illicit things in the Bering Strait, and to listen for missile launches over the North Pole. Granted, there's not much anyone can do if the ICBM's start flying (maybe imPorts can help!), but military decisions are not always rational ones.
Officially, it's no-civilians-allowed, save the occasional technical representative, but Alaska is wide open and hostile, and the station usually allows the Parks Service, State Troopers, and other organizations to use its resources for search and rescue; they have a lot of very skilled people with nothing to do but wait for a war to start, and most of them jump at the chance to do something useful. As long as the station maintains readiness, the Navy turns a blind eye to this technical breach of regulations. The locals--Nome is "local" by Alaskan standards--are thus more fond of the station personnel than they otherwise might be, and welcome them into town for R&R, as long as they don't get too rowdy.
The Navy would love to have an imPort or six with the right kind of powers around, just in case, but it's a hard sell, given the location and the Navy's particular brand of muscular patriotism.
Walt Disney World
Although the Disney Corporation of this world, like our own, intended to build its Walt Disney World Resort near Lake Buena Vista in Florida, the U.S. Government rejected the bid, not wanting such a large beacon for visiting foreign nationals to be placed so near to the highly sensitive military installation at Cape Canaveral. Instead, the park was constructed outside the city of Auburn in eastern Alabama, near the scenic Piedmont hills. The park opened in 1971, and sees over 50 million visitors annually—and, to no surprise, the influx of both people and money caused the small town of Auburn to expand into a miniature metropolis, home to its own airport and booming local economy. Like the park of our world, most of attractions and costumed characters are the same, and there's just as much merchandise as ever (though all proudly Made in the U.S.A), but besides the location, the major difference is in EPCOT Center. Unlike its real-world counterpart, which became something of a sad commentary on the utopian hopes of the past generation, this EPCOT is a real, functioning city, a joint project of the Disney Corporation and the US Department of Energy. It's powered by fusion generators (as is the rest of the park) and applications to move there are carefully screened, since living in EPCOT is functionally a job. All residents over the age of 18 are employees of either Disney or the DoE, and even the Disney employees have security clearances. The Disney employees run the amusement park side of the endeavor, but there are sections of EPCOT where tourists can't go, protected by security gates and friendly but very insistent guards.
This is where the residents actually live, with schools and stores and all the amenities of a fully modern city, if perhaps a little too streamlined and photogenic to have grown up organically like other cites, and where the government employees of EPCOT work behind the scenes creating all the neat toys for the tourists to play with, and quite probably other things as well. It's possible to get a tour of off-limits sections, but it involves having connections, undergoing a security screening and, depending how good the tour is, a scary NDA. The exception is the annual lottery for an all-expenses weekend visit to EPCOT proper (and a week at the rest of Disney World, of course) which always raises an obscene amount of money. The take goes with great fanfare to a variety of uncontroversial charities, including animal welfare, environmental protection, foreign aid, and various scholarships.
To most imPorts, it's likely to seem like a shinier, smilier version of something Orwell came up with after a few beers, but the common perception of EPCOT among natives is almost entirely positive. While the full breadth of what goes on at EPCOT is far from public knowledge, it's obviously nothing that isn't beneficial to the American Way of Life. ImPorts are very welcome at Disney, but those with powers or experience that could come in handy in EPCOT's futurist mission might find themselves being sounded out about a job, especially those who've registered.
For those adventurous souls that go through the process of legally leaving America—or those who simply go out without leaving a note—there is much about this world different than those they knew before. The grand shaping of the post-WWII and Cold War eras have not laid the same borders here. Without the conclusion of this war, and without the collapse of the Soviet Union, its territories—countries we now know as Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania in the Baltics; Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Uzbekistan in Central Asia; Belarus, Moldova, and the Ukraine in East-Central Europe, and Armenia, Azerbaijan, and Georgia in the Southern Caucasus, as well as historic Russia—still lay within its borders. Territories used as battlegrounds and leveraging points between these two superpowers have for the most part been held in that state. Even imPorts in good standing and allowed international travel will find their options limited.
But beyond the workings of the political machines of international conflict, there is much in this world that is not quite right.
The area that can properly be called the Devil's Teeth is a stretch of ocean about 100 miles northeast of Puerto Rico, midway between there and Hispaniola. It runs about 75 miles east to west along a trench in the ocean floor. The rocks that give the place its name poke up from the waves, some few high enough to deserve the title of islands, but mostly they're simply rocks amidst the waves, waiting to tear holes in the hulls of the unwary. Navigation there is treacherous, and historically the small but powerful currents and barely-submerged sea mounts have caused enough shipwrecks to give the area an evil reputation. The continental shelf is littered with wrecks, from galleons of the 1400s all the way up to modern craft—including aircraft, downed by the unpredictable inclement weather. Today's mariners and aviators who get in over their heads are usually rescued (in one famous case by a vacationing imPort with precognitive powers), but the location racked up an impressive body count even into the mid 20th century.
Historically, the place has always been considered cursed. Native stories about it are sketchy and limited to what Spanish chroniclers saw fit to pass on, but they do mention unseasonable electric storms visible from land, and impute malign powers to the phenomenon. Early Spanish navigational maps warned sailors away if the winds gave them the slightest choice--which they often didn't. It was the Spanish sailors who first gave the spot its name; which supernatural evil got credited with the area varied over the years, but the "teeth" stayed constant, and most people now call just call it "the Teeth."
As the Bermuda Triangle mythos began to solidify in the 1960s, the Teeth had a starring role. Better navigation and technology meant a rise in survivors from wrecks in the Teeth starting in the late 1880s, but more survivors meant more people to tell the tale, and so its reputation spread into wider culture. The underwater graveyard there is now tenanted in the popular imagination with everything from U-boats to vast fortunes in pirate gold to flying saucers to vengeful ghosts of drowned sailors and slaves.
Geographically, the southern side is far too deep for divers and requires a pressurized submersible to reach, and it's that side that the Bermuda Triangle legend fills with mysterious wrecks. The north side has its share of downed vessels as well, but because they're mostly shallow enough to dive to, their reputation is less sinister and more melancholy. Much to the chagrin of the US Navy, chartered tour companies lead expeditions to some of the famous sites, and every year, a few of the less scrupulous operators end up either being rescued from the weather and the currents or arrested for violating international law regarding the treatment of shipwrecks. As long as one is traveling with a reputable tour company, a visit to the Teeth is generally quite safe; the currents are no match for powerful modern engines, the submerged hazards are well-mapped and detectable by sonar, and weather radar and satellites provide advanced warning for all but the most sudden storms. There is also excellent sport fishing, and some of the same companies that run diving tours also having fishing ones available.
Los Dientes del Diablo
Boca do Inferno
Literally "Hell's Mouth," this cave on the seaside cliffs has long been a popular tourist attraction and historical site, famous for its appearance in a short film from the end of the 19th century. In more recent times, however, strange events have started taking place around this gaping chasm. Strange noises over the sounds of the crashing waves, the mysterious disappearances of numerous people and animals, unsettling scents emerging at odd hours of the night—rumors are circulating that the name is true to its word, and that the Mouth will either swallow you whole... or spit up something nobody wants to see.
As greater numbers of imPorts are drawn into this world, the agitation at Boca do Inferno only seems to be getting worse, and long-time residents of the nearby city of Cascais are packing up and leaving for fear of the worst.
Queda
Situated in the Iberian Peninsula between Portugal and Spain's borders, fully surrounded by land and populated with mountainous regions, Queda is a country governed by one of the oldest surviving monarchies in the world. Various districts separate this country, each of them dominated by a noble family with a history stretching back centuries. Immigration is low to Queda, but emigration is on the rise. The once-thriving economy—now based mostly in the export of clothing and fine glassware—suffers from a lack of innovation, weighed down by a society that just won't get with the times. While many of its technologies and customs are similar to those of its neighbors in our modern world, the general fashion and architecture of Queda is a mix of contemporary, late 19th century, and early-to-mid 20th century revivalism. Visiting the capitol city or the surrounding territory is compared to taking several steps backwards in time, with the benefit of Wi-Fi and cellular reception.
Though tourism is not a big industry for Queda, the country itself is beautiful, and its history offers a unique draw, for the beasts we would consider mythological are worshiped here, and in some cases are real (at least, so the Quedan people claim). Even in the modern era, they continue to be a major subject of interest and study, in a variety and richness of breeds that go from the prized creatures the nobles represent their houses with to the feared monsters children are warned about.
America strongly believes in limiting their outsourcing to countries deemed either non-threatening or acceptable to their own viewpoint; by and large, the United State's industry has stayed within the States themselves, strengthening the economy and circling back to feed a sense of self-sufficiency and patriotism and pride in accomplishment. Consequently, what is imported generally comes out of either South America or the Western European countries, and the majority of what's found on shelf proudly proclaims "Made in the USA." Unions are not as strong a presence, with most corporations expected to act as "good citizens," if only to discourage strong labor actions.
The manufacturing industry does not care for imPorts unless said imPorts have useful information to impart regarding better practices or higher levels of efficiency in processing materials.
In general form, many technologies appear as low-tech. Many mobile phones still look like clunky bricks, flat screen TVs are few and far between, and people still carry boomboxes! In function, they are anything but low-tech, but their appearances can be deceiving. Marketing technology's primary focus tends to be improving its usage rather than designing it to be small and sleek, but when updated, their efficiency is greatly improved along with its functions. In the recent years and with the arrival of imPorts, there has been a push and demand for portable models, though its popularity has yet to reach levels some are hoping for. Sleeker and compact models that are available are seen and associated with hipster communities and can earn a scoff if someone is seen with one of these sleeker, smaller models.
Japan didn't become the leading edge of technology design and re-imagining that it did during our world's history, and without it dominating the marketplace in technology, more North American and a smattering of European companies are represented in market. Many of the major breakthroughs are tied to companies such as General Electric, forming subsidiaries that framed different portions of the earlier technology markets: you can find General Electric's Family Gaming systems as commonly as top competitors from Microsoft and RWB Development. (Red, White, and Blue Development, Inc. specializing in home electronics, entertainment systems, and car and theatre sound systems. They're late joining the cell phone and tablet industry, though they don't develop their own software so much as create the devices to support various platforms with specialized and advanced system capabilities.) Unlike in our world, Microsoft's MD-DOS GUI interface was not named Windows; rather, this operating system is Microsoft Galaxy, and is still the most common platform for computers in businesses to date.
Gaming companies are most interested in what information and creativity they can glean out of the existence of imPorts, along with the entertainment and toy industries who look to make good sells. This ties into the advertising industry; if imPorts are being involved in advertising, they'll also be involved in some aspect of the technology or entertainment industry. Technology companies will also shamelessly mimic imPort-created technologies and consult with imPorts to gain further insight and advancements in their own technologies. Being such a strong sector, and so constantly developing new technologies, the native population feel less threatened by imPort potential; they're permanent, and learn quickly, while imPorts are transients. Making hay while the sun shines is a practical point of view they embrace.
Mobile phones look fairly similar to how the old Nokia 3310 used to; clunky, boxy rectangles, with their most notable feature being the lack of a screen. the reason for this becomes clear once you discover that the phone has the capacity to emit holograms, which can be used to perform all of the same functions a modern android phone would be capable of, such as video calls and browsing the internet.
Televisions can either be purchased as one of the older, boxy looking kind which come in sizes comparable to modern flat-screen TVs and have imagery equal, if not superior definition, as well the capacity to sync with other devices. Movies downloaded on phones through a wireless link can be played. Rising in popularity are projects with project stunning and sharp holograms in adjustable sizes, but sacrifice their wifi capabilities as a result.
Jukeboxes and record players are the most popular home music systems and generally have the same wifi capabilities as the conventional televisions do.
Portable music players look a lot like cassette players, minus the cassette part, and function along the same lines as mobile phones do. Recently, something called an iPod has been released, though not many people see any reason to use it. Unless you're a hipster.
Roombas are in vogue. A large portion of American households own at least one. Government housing comes with one. Said rooms have low level artificial intelligence and are capable of learning and very basic speech, which is to allow it to easily navigate the house and determine when it needs to be cleaned with more accuracy. Occasional this results in a roomba believing itself to be a cat.
Hover technology isn't limited to just cars. Bicycles, scooters, skateboards, roller blades -- there are "hover" versions of all of these, and they are incredibly popular. While the older wheeled models are still around, they are more likely to be found in thrift stores and garage sales. Many stores have ceased stocking them due to low demand. Hover technology has also been incorporated into aircraft to make air travel both swifter and safer.
Computers and laptops are heavy and boxy much like televisions, but even the cheapest models are incredibly powerful. Lag and overloaded processors are incredibly rare, unless what one is doing literally requires a supercomputer.
Household appliances are all very "work reducing" oriented. Stoves can tell what heat is necessary to cook meals as well as when said meal is done, provided the ingredients are inputted in the right amounts. The wrong amount can result in an over or under-cooked meal. Refrigerators adjust their internal temperatures in different compartments depending on what's stored in them. Dual washer/dryers are popular and common; after a wash cycle, the machine will dry clothes.
3D printers are widely popular, though hardly cheap, with the cheapest one can purchase roughly around $50,000. They can be bought for personal use, though many are trying to determine a way to regulate them, particularly those who use them to print out guns and other weapons.
Currently highly controversial and still in development is transcranial pulsed ultrasound -- sound waves which can be used to affect specific regions of the brain. Though this is intended for military use (i.e. a soldier using these waves to stimulate certain areas of the brain, potentially reducing fatigue or even eliminating pain altogether), public opinion is that this is dangerously close to mind control and it has not been able to get off the ground.
Development of artificial intelligence is coming along quite well. Many "learning" appliances are available on the market now.
Nanotechnology is, as demonstrated by the tattoos on imPorts' arms, absolutely thriving. It has been used for medical applications, mostly as a less invasive and painful method of breaking down cancer/tumors as opposed to radiology or surgery, as well as a way of monitoring vital signs and a person's general health state. There are rumors it has been weaponized and has offensive capabilities in the military and is proven to have surveillance applications, by the tattoos.
Miscellaneous Specifics
Hollywood is alive and well and loving the hell out of the imPort community. When you're looking at entertainment outside of the technology market, there are movies, book deals, plays, tours, songs, plushies, toys, and everything under the sun to be made or taken or used to better advantage within the entertainment industry's grasp.
They are especially interested in the life stories of imPorts, and many hit blockbusters have been made after creative teams have reinterpreted real life experiences by off-worlders into digestible media formats for the United States. This has started to be world-wide in spread, with many of the messages tying back to countries of origin and instilling both a sense of pride and a sense of accomplishment in heart and country.
Fast food hasn't taken off in the same way, hardly exiting the "Americano" and Burger joints that popped up in the 1950's. With the focus being on family style dining and sit down restaurants, Mom & Pop shops that aren't part of nation-wide or state-wide restaurant chains are still going strong, supported by local communities where possible, and by tourism in other sections of the country.
Finding restaurants serving particular ethnic dishes can be a chore outside of the major cities, and once in those cities, it's more common to find ethnic variety only within the bounds of a given ethnic community. In the last fifteen years, that landscape has started to shift, seeing breakthroughs in "Americanized" ethnic food restaurants showing up outside of traditionally recognized ethnic zones within the larger framework of a city.
Cafes are popular, though no singular corporation dominates in the same way Starbucks does today: there are many competing chains, and even they find they don't win full stop against the local coffee and tea cafes kept alive and thriving within the community. There's a strong sense that you should support your local businesses, and the affordability of living conditions is such that people can feel confident spending more on the non-necessities of life.
They generally don't have strong ties to the imPort community unless they're invented through advertising contracts.
The Advertising Industry is a beast that interconnects with both government and private interests, playing off national sentiment and building the nation's acceptance of given standards of normalcy while influencing trends in fashion, design, and desire. There is a preferential use for Hero presence in various advertising campaigns, though all in all, the industry tries to avoid making overt political or religious statements.
That said, it doesn't mean advertising hasn't been used to make political statements, or that the advertising industry doesn't cross over with some of the government propaganda machines to produce at times frightening brainchildren. It's recognized as being in poor taste, except in situations of international tension.
They love imPorts as long as the general sentiment towards imPorts is positive. Advertising can help change imPort image from neutral to great; alternately, a lack of imPort presence in the advertising industry can help show them as being out of public favor.
Both sectors offer pensions and other benefits to make them highly attractive to the labor pool. Working for the public sector still means better retirement and health benefits, but also generally lower pay grades if working outside of the higher risk job sector (fire, police, etc). The divide between financial classes is not as extreme as it is in our present modern day: there is a viable, strong middle class that drives the economy and market.
Private and public industries compete for affiliation with imPorts, but it's considered high risk with a high turnover rate, so that level of enthusiasm varies based on individual business ventures and needs.
Between the focus on American-made goods, the cultural reticence towards too-big business, and the remnant influence of imPorts on the technological progress of industry both within the United States and outside it, the corporate landscape of this world is a sight different from that of our own. Below is a breakdown of some of the bigger names, where big names exist.
If you're looking to buy a car, you're buying American. Ford, General Motors, and Chrysler are the only names you're going to see on the dealer's lot; German vehicles might be respected, but not well enough to import in numbers high enough to satisfy the American need for freedom, and the Japanese motor industry hasn't quite made its way out of the national garage to the international parkway. The makes and models of these cars have maintained their 1950's aesthetic, though with the inclusion of hover technology and greater safety standards, the yearly lineup hasn't matched real-world automobiles in quite some time.
Apple and Microsoft are top producers in this universe as well, similar in spirit to their real-world counterparts—but the "Manufactured and Assembled in the United States" labels on product boxes might come as a surprise to some. Microsoft has a much bigger stake in the realm of home console gaming here, and titles published under their subsidiary company Dirty Rotten Villains Games are top sellers season after season. DRV Games specializes in first-person shooters and massive multiplayer games, and they're currently in the development stages of full-immersion virtual reality games in the near future.
A newcomer on the electronics shelves, RWB Development, specializes in sound systems, though more recently is branching into developing the hardware for portable electronics. Evergreen Electronics, though they do produce some odds and ends in the electronics department to pay the bills, specialize in sustainable energy sources and the development of alternate fuel systems; with a heavy reliance still on nuclear fusion, there's not as big of a push for alternative fuels, and so this West Coast company struggles to get a foothold in the wider market. OpXtras is another major electronics company, though rather than be an innovator in any one given market, theirs are reliable, reasonably priced, and tend to rate best in comparisons of longevity and durability more than performance.
If you're not getting your hardware from an independent retailer, you're getting them from Super Electronics.
More details about some of these and others can be found above, under Technology.
Though ubiquitous big chains--McDonald's, Starbucks, Wal-Mart, and so forth--technically exist in this universe, you'll be hard-pressed to find one in a given county; the modern world metropolitan staple of a Starbucks across the street from another Starbucks would be laughable here. However, there are a few restaurants and shops you can expect to see more than once. Bottle Rockets, a popular brewery bar&grill, tends to do better business in the summer (July in particular), and are a popular destination for birthdays thanks to their memorable and creative use of sparklers. If you're looking for something faster, Quick Burger--or "Quickies"--is the fast food joint; their burgers are a cultural cornerstone for excellence. (In-N-Out? White Castle? What are those?) For coffee, if you're in Heropa, the place to go is Cranberries Coffeehouse—family-owned, and though it carries a variety of roasts of coffee, every single bean is imported from Hawaii, the Caribbean, or Latin America.
Most groceries are local markets, but New Day Grocery is one of the more-present larger chains, with locations in a number of states on the East Coast. For those buying on a larger scale, Savings Heroes is a membership-only wholesale-style market that sell a rotating stock in bulk amounts—in case you really do need to buy mayonnaise by the drum.
Consistent international tensions remaining high have opened up the market for preparedness and disaster readiness supplies, and you can get everything you need at Just In Case—survivalist superstores found nationwide, most have licensed subcontractors on the premises, offering deals on construction and reinforcement of home and shelter, just in case.
As far as retail clothing goes, most shops are locally based, but Little Miss—which, despite the name, stocks clothing for all ages, genders, and body-types—is a national chain known for its lower prices and out-of-season styles. Unfortunately, these two qualities go together, as their low prices are derived from buying their stock from what other retailers and department stores couldn't move off the shelves. For teens, or those with more "unconventional" taste, there's XenoTopic—notable for its incorporation of imPort influences, which can lend to a look that's out of place or out of time.
For imPorts interested in the entertainment industry, they should keep an eye out for Hubrick Studios. One of the major film production studios based on the West Coast, Hubrick Studios is always looking for interesting life stories it can transform into blockbuster films. In the music industry, there's Indigo Falls Records: an independent label that not only actively incorporates imPort cultural influences into the modern day music, they seek out imPort performers as well—they're very willing to sign contracts with these transdimensional travelers seeking work as songwriters, vocalists, and/or performers.
Other companies and organizations that actively seek imPorts are quite far removed from the pop culture machine. You Only Live Once (#yolo) is a culturally ubiquitous charitable foundation that assists in cases with terminally-ill children looking to do the impossible—and seeking out imPorts to help. On the far end of the spectrum is Zygote Industries, a leading research company based out of Washington D.C., currently focused on and pioneering in genetic research; providing sample and subject that might not otherwise be found in the human genome can earn a savvy imPort a pretty penny in compensation.