Seron: Taking Shape

After coming up with the basic shape of Seron, the next crucial step was refining it.

As my original idea was about an action sequence in a sandstorm, my initial ideas fell in this part of the city.

When a location was conceived by action and violence, it’s hard to shake those sentiments. The sandy area was always a hive of scum and villainy. Somewhere lawless, and dangerous, where innocence gave way to vigilance.

I envisioned that a closed off, violent society would have some sort of currency. I took some inspiration from the Fallout games, where bottlecaps were used in place of money. I imagined iron would be the main currency; something people could use for shelter, or weapons. Something that could be mined and stockpiled; something valuable and worth fighting over.

This begged the question, why was this area like this? Is this the reason the other city floats above it? Or was the floating city the cause of this violence? The answers to this would come a little bit later.

Digging further into these questions, I thought about how a floating city might work. Science fiction, and the suspension of disbelief, could sort out the physics of how it floated, but not how the rest of it worked.

I imagined a city not attached to the ground would have greenhouses, to produce food. It would also have a means to create, and recycle, water.

Each answer seemed to resolve, or tick off, how the infrastructure worked. The next step was to understand how the society worked.