You have stepped out of darkness and stone, and step down onto a grassy surface, with trees turning red-gold and low bushes, the buzz of insects and the smell of growing things. Your eyes widen as you look around, and see paved city streets and houses and cars.
The PCs stand at the edge of a park in a quiet suburban neighborhood. The PCs don’t recognize the models of the cars parked by the side of the street, but the license plate of the nearest car located on the curb beyond the patch of grass reads “Metropolis,” a name that sounds familiar but they can’t quite place.
Looking about you see signs of civilization -- skyscrapers in the distance -- but no people. No one comes of any of the homes lining the street. They hear no police sirens in the distance. In fact, they hear nothing besides the chirps of birds and the buzzing of insects. No traffic noises, no hum of electricity, no sounds of people moving about.
Their initial relief at finding something so familiar now twists into something darker.
They walk down the street. The quiet, the lack of activity, and the emptiness begins to make you feel even more uncomfortable than the presence of threats. The fact that so much of this place looks familiar, yet feels so alien, makes the hackles on the back of your neck rise.
The residential neighborhood gives way to urban sprawl, which give way to highways and freeways and the long commute into the city. It is there that they find the first bodies. Men, women, and children sprawl across the road, sitting in cars, lying in the midst of half open doorways. The bodies are gray, dried out, mummified despite the prevailing wet climate.
Close examination reveals that the people have been dead a long time, but something has preserved them, perhaps as a warning.
The closer they get to the city, the more the chaos grows. Cars wrecked, smashed into one another, or through storefronts. The remnants of fires, long since smoldered to ashes. Broken glass and broken bodies, scattered across the landscape. The PCs pick their way across the charnel field, each of them growing more and more disturbed with every step. They stay together, talking softly when at all, trying to take in the monumental, quiet horror of the dead city.
It takes the PCs several hours to make their way into the city proper, where the streets are clogged with bumper to bumper traffic. Everything is run-down, burned out and destroyed as if a war has taken place. Only instead of bomb craters, shell fragments, and bullet holes everywhere (there are some, but not as much as a typical war zone would have), much of the damage appears to have been from metahumans. Melt points from energy blasts, knuckle imprints in metal, body-shaped outlines or indentations in concrete, and so on, all bear witness to a series of vicious battles between superbeings.
They are getting into areas that had been ripped apart by what looks like alien weapons, whole neighborhoods burned to ashes, cars melted into shapeless hunks of metal, shopping malls and stores gutted and merchandise spilled out over the flame-scorched parking lots, a few larger buildings chopped in half as if by surgical lasers and debris blocking the streets. They pass three abandoned metro buses, the first lying on its side, the second with three flat tires and a shattered windshield, and a third with most of the two upper floors of the First National Bank covering it. The downtown hardware store was crushed as if by a gigantic boot.
Though in an area of burned buildings, charred trees, and more wreckage, the depot has escaped the flames of war. There are twelve buses in the lot, rusted by the rain and parked haphazardly by their rattled drivers. Four of them are sitting on flats, so those are out.
Bodies are everywhere, trash and detritus in heaps on the sidewalks and alleys, a city in ruins. Nothing moves, nothing makes a sound except for the PCs.
Then they round a towering skyscraper and come upon a broad plaza the size of a city block surrounded by on four sides by twelve-foot high brick walls.
The once imposing front gates hang half-off their hinges, deformed by some enormous force unaccounted for its former inhabitants. Either someone had already gone at the gates with a chain-cutter, or the gates had been left unlocked on what had seemed like the last day of the world.
Beyond is a reflecting pool filled with dark, stagnant water, with a thick layer of pond scum and rotting leaves covering the surface. A faint disturbance ripples through the pond's layer of algae. Is something there? Unlikely, for what could live in those murky, tainted depths. In the center of the pool once rose a decorative mound of granite on a star-shaped dais chiseled from solid marble; now star has been sliced into five identical sections and split. Where the sectioning occurred is smooth and utterly seamless, a powerful laser is most likely the culprit.
Its front is an imposing, windowed half-dome of pale granite rising for ten stories. Two massive columns straddle twin banks of windows tinted impenetrably black. Inscribed on the curve of the dome are the words "Hall" "Of" "Justice".
Great rents are blasted into the stone walls at the upper levels, leaving the ceiling open to the air.
Entry Hall: In the center stands a huge statue of a broad-shouldered man wearing a cape and a skintight costume, with a pentagonal-shaped emblem on his chest emblazoned with the letter “S”.
Bodies lie in drifts around the statue, as though the doomed populace of the city believed his legacy might somehow protect them from the slaughter.
You don’t understand. These were comic books. Fiction. Cartoons. These people never existed, at best they were just a couple of lines and dots of color on cheap newsprint, beating the hell out of Lex Luthor and the Legion of Doom. This place is a monument to a place that never existed.