Searching Far and Wide

[intricate_engineer]

Glen was creating a prototype for a new gate design. It was meant to be affordable and provide quick transport between individual homes. She tests several objects and a rat and everything seems to be working.

She steps through. Instead of finding herself in the room next door, she finds herself standing on a sidewalk in an empty city. The buildings are tall and perfect, colorless with doorways far too tall for any human. The roads have no straight lines and twist in on themselves. There is no life or sound.
Glen tries to stay calm. She begins to walk along the road, randomly opening doors and exploring buildings that are as silent as the rest of the world.

She opens a door that she hopes will lead onto a roof and is instead met with warmth, and soft noise, and color.

Comments

[the_very_best]

"You're gonna have to be less general."

[intricate_engineer]

"How high is the average person's standard of living? How much does it vary? What is your world's overall population? What is your political system?"

[the_very_best]

"Average person has, like, an apartment or house, and one to three Pokémon, and - what are the usual benchmarks, here? Few billion, like, three, four? Politics is mostly local, most places elect a mayor, but there's regions of cities that agree on standardizations of this and that and cooperate on inter-town transit routes and stuff."

[intricate_engineer]

"Are most people literate? Is the wealth evenly distributed? How poor are the poorest people?"

[the_very_best]

"Near universal adult literacy, I don't know what qualifies as 'evenly' but some people are richer than other people, really poor people wind up sleeping in Pokémon centers or managed shelters..."

[intricate_engineer]

"In some worlds, a few rich individuals hold the majority of the wealth. In other worlds, the richest individuals have less than one hundred times the wealth of an average individual. Do the poor frequently die from starvation, exposure, or easily preventable diseases?"

[the_very_best]

"I mean, if they're poor because they can't hold down a job because they have some kind of mental problem and they wander out of town I bet they tend not to last long but I'm pretty sure the shelters and centers will feed them and public health would be after them if they were at risk for anything contagious."

[intricate_engineer]

"Is there a lot of unemployment?"

[the_very_best]

"How much is a lot? I don't have a lot of points of comparison here."

[intricate_engineer]

"Do you know the percentage of the population who are unemployed? Is it a large enough problem that it's a major political issue?"

[the_very_best]

"I don't know the percentage but it's not a political talking point."

[intricate_engineer]

"Are goods frequently mass produced?"

[the_very_best]

"Yeah."

[intricate_engineer]

"What is the crime rate?"

[the_very_best]

"I am not a statistics collection. There's organized crime, some pickpockets and embezzlers and the occasional murder and stuff?"

[intricate_engineer]

"Do people generally feel safe leaving their homes and are murders rare enough to be newsworthy?"

[the_very_best]

"The danger to life and limb is overwhelmingly undirected 'mon, not murderers, and one is pretty safe against 'mon inside a town. And anybody who has a 'mon good enough to protect them against wildlife has a shot against a murderer."

[intricate_engineer]

"How dense are your population centers? Are people spread out around central zones or are they tightly clustered together in cities?"

[the_very_best]

"Depends on the town. There's big cities with a lot of vertical building, there's sleepier sprawlier towns."

[intricate_engineer]

"Do those small towns commonly bleed into each other and into larger cities or would you say they are more isolated?"

[the_very_best]

"More isolated. You usually have to travel a bit to get from one to the next."

[intricate_engineer]

"When was your last war?"

[the_very_best]

"Uh, my region's or the whole world?"

[intricate_engineer]

"Your region?"

[the_very_best]

"Eeeeighty years ago?"