Did you accidentally trigger the wrong location? Never fear, if you’ve decided to get the butterfly down Elizabeth street, continue to follow the map to TD8 to continue your chosen adventure. 

QA Data Node (Albert Lane, Queen Street Mall)

You arrive at the Log Out Terminal. You can already see the damage 3-Dom has done jumping against and melting the top of the building to your right. It’s like the metal edge has been turned into a giant sheet, billowing in the wind.

Behind it you can see tiers of Metricon glass and steel. They’re moving, as though the program is trying to manifest.

You look behind you; Metricon has flattened an entire wall on the side of the building, and is sectioning it off before extruding glass and metal panels. To your left, where Hungry Jack’s is, 3-Dom’s renders columns and arches from the stonework.

The bot glows. “Look! A maintenance screen.” It’s huge, just showing white and green static pixels at the moment.

The bot flies right into it, animating the colours.

“Traveller!” The bot’s voice comes out of the screen. “It is important that you stop looking at the buildings around you. The Simulation buildings are generated by the Nexus computers every time a visitor from Realspace observes them. By examining the architecture closely you force the Simulation to draw itself, but we don’t want to do that now. We want to make everything as indeterminate as possible.”

You hear groaning and creaking as the buildings reshape. There’s a gust of wind and crackling of wood and metal but you have to tune all that out lest it allow Metricon or 3-Dom to dominate. The green pixels on the screen begin to swirl.

“Don’t pay any attention to the chaos around you,” the bot says. “We promise to have your hyper-colour shirts and simulated fireworks the next time you visit. Please come back. I’ll make sure you get a discount!”

The swirling pixels slow and computerised sounds fade into the regular hustle and bustle of the mall. Soon the data screen is just a large mosaic.

You look around you. It’s like everything froze in the middle of battle. Is this the Realspace overflow 3-Dom warned you about at the start?

You’re back home and safe. But you’re not entirely sure what’s changed here. As you take a deep breath and get ready to move back into your regular life, you realise you’ll never be able to quite trust the real world again.

– END –

Take a picture of your final destination and tag it with #storycity and then either #metricon or #3dom, depending on which of the two Nexus programs you feel was most present in your final location. Or try to find evidence of where their battle spilled out into the real world while you try a new adventure.