Atlanta

Atlanta is the city where most of the series is located.

The Casino
The People’s HQ towers above the city. Alabaster-white in daytime, at night its walls glowed with gold and indigo, illuminated by powerful electric lamps or feylanterns. The Casino was built after the People purchased the lot where the Georgia World Congress Center stood before the magic destroyed it. They built it in five years, and the main floor is indeed a casino.

A total of eight slim minarets, instead of the original four, flanked the central domed building. High walls enclosed the complex, punctuated by blocky guard towers, equipped with howitzers and sorcerous ballistae. Solemn guards and occasional vampires patrolled the textured parapets the place oozed necromantic magic.

In addition, there is a statue of Shiva as Nataraja, Lord of Dance, standing in a circular fountain just before the entrance.

The Keep
All but invisible from the highway, the fortress sits in the middle of a clearing, defined by a dense wall of brush and oaks that looked decades older than they had any right to be with a single-lane dirt road that veered so abruptly from the highway.

The compound is a forbidding square building of gray stone nearly sixty feet high with many underground stories. Darkness pools in the narrow windows, guarded by metal grates. The place looks like the keep of a castle rather than a modern fort. The Pack is constantly adding new additions to The Keep as the Pack itself grows.

The keep has been built by hand with minimal technology and has took at least ten years to build it to its current state.

Unicorn Lane
Every city has one of those neighborhoods — dangerous, sinister places — so treacherous that even the criminals who prey on other criminals shun them.

Unicorn Lane is such a place.

Thirty city blocks long and eight blocks deep, it cut through what used to be Midtown like a dagger. Half-crumbled skyscrapers stand there, mute witness to the past’s technology, the husks of GLG Grand, Promenade II, and One Atlantic Center, gnawed down to bones by magic.

Rubble chokes the streets and sewage overflowed from the busted pipes in foul-smelling streams. Magic pools there, lingering even in the strongest of tech waves.

During the flare, Unicorn Lane grew to thirty-two blocks long and ten blocks wide.

Champion Heights
About the only high-rise still standing, it is a seventeen-story building of red brick and concrete. A complex web of wards works to convince the magic that the building is nothing more than a large rock so the magic will ignore it. A side effect is that parts of the building appear to be part of a granite cliff.

Red Point
A massive, forbidding structure of red brick and concrete, it has an eight-foot-tall concrete wall, narrow windows with metal grates, and is four stories tall. The clearing surrounding it shows signs of past landscaping.

It was once a prison. The left-wing inmates complained of ghosts trying to kill them. No one paid attention until the walls swallowed the prisoners during a strong magic fluctuation. They were partially entombed and still alive. The walls wouldn’t stop bleeding, so the Military Supernatural Defense Unit condemned the building, but they likely won’t level it until they’re sure they can’t use it.

Centennial Park
Pre-Shift it was open and airy, but the covens had planted fast-growing trees. Now there is an impenetrable green barrier. The park has also swallowed several city blocks and is about four times its original size. This is the home of the Witches’ Oracle.

Honeycomb Gap
It used to be Southside Park, a mobile park retirement community, set just under the Brown Mills Golf Course and across Jonesboro Road. One night the magic hit hard and the manufactured homes warped. A fifth of the inhabitants vanished into the walls, into “Outside.” Now it pulls metal to itself and is saturated with magic.

Warren
Bordered by Lakewood Park on one side and Southview Cemetery on the other, it stretches all the way to McDonough Boulevard. The South Urban Renewal project reconfigured the area for large, sturdy apartment complexes and two to three story office buildings. Since the Shift it became poorer, tougher and more segregated. Now it is like a war zone after a bombing.

White Street
White Street got its name during the snowfall of ’14, which refused to melt for three and a half years. When a street can hold three inches of powder despite the hundred-degree heat, you know it’s packing some serious magic. Anybody who could afford to move did.

Midnight Games Arena
The Arena is a large building made of brick that sits in the middle of a huge parking lot. It is oval in shape and three stories tall. It used to be the Cooler, Atlanta’s ice-skating rink. Wooden towers armed with machine guns and cheiroballistae stand a hundred yards from it. A two-foot-wide fluorescent white line marks its territory

Ponce de Leon Street
With the presence of the nearby mage university and its students who are impulsive in their purchases, Ponce de Leon had revived to become a bustling street full of shops, stalls, and eateries.

University of Arcane Arts
City Hall East is only nine stories high, but it is two million square feet and is steeped in history. It evolved from the 1962 Sears depot to a government hub to a community of condos, shops, and restaurants sheltering a couple acres of green.

The university purchased it, and now it houses faculty, students, libraries, laboratories, research facilities, and so on.

Bernard's
A restaurant where the elite gather to see and be seen and violence is forbidden. The building is an over-sized, Enlightenment-style mansion of redbrick, huge windows, and dark ivy climbing the walls.

Cutting Edge Investigations, Inc.
Kate’s new business. The building is solid brick, a squat two stories, with thick metal grates on the windows and a sturdy door. It is equipped with the basics of an armory, magical diagnostic equipment, and alchemical supplies.

Mercenary Guild Hall
The building used to be an old Sheraton Hotel built as a hollow tower. There was a restaurant, a coffee shop, a gift shop, and a raised platform area for happy hour. There was a stream running through the area and an elevator in a transparent shaft of plastic on the far wall. Now, the happy hour platform holds the job board, the gift shop is an armory, the restaurant is the mess hall, the elevator doesn’t work, and the stream is gone.

The Mole Hole
It used to be Molen Enterprises with a slender glass tower. It was owned by one of the richest families in Atlanta. Rumor says they got hold of a phoenix egg and planned to have it imprint on them. But phoenix rise like rockets into the sky when born, so instead the explosion took out the tower and three city blocks. It left a round crater about 140 feet across and fifty feet deep. Two weeks later it cooled and left a sheet of foot-thick glass on the bottom. People cut steps into the sides and turned it into an amphitheater. It sits in the middle of the city.

The Steel Horse
A bar on the border between the People’s and the Pack’s territories. It caters to both factions as long as they keep it civil. Only the bouncers are allowed real weapons. The building is an ugly, squat, and brick, with steel bars over the windows and a metal door over two inches thick.

The Temple
A place of Jewish worship bordered on three sides by brick buildings and by a brick fence on the fourth, it has bright red walls, a white colonnade, and white stairs. Mezuzot, verses from the Torah, hang along the walls and keep Unicorn Lane at bay. The wall itself has angelic names, magic squares, and holy names written on it.

Inside, enormous windows let in light. Pews are cream with dark red cushions. It has cream walls and a high, vaulted ceiling gilded with gold.

Johnson Ferry Road
It is the fastest way to the west back of the Chattahoochee River after it became a paradise for deep-water, magic monsters. Its bridge is home to the Bridge Troll.

MSDU Headquarters
It used to be the Hartsfield-Jackson Airport before the first shift, located on the south side of the city. It is three miles wide and now houses the MSDU Headquarters for the entire Southeast. The terminal building is armed with siege engines and machine guns with concrete bunkers. A second row of bunkers guards the concourse. For a half-mile around the outer-most bunkers is clear ground and runways, providing no cover for an attacking force. When activated there are three layers of wards: one around the control tower, one around the bunkers, and one extending the length of the field.

Jeremiah Street
The street, on the northeast part of the city, used to be called North Arcadia Street until a Southern preacher walked into the intersection with Ponce de Leon, started ranting about how he was the second Jeremiah and demanding people repent, and unleashed a meteor shower after being ignored. It leveled two city blocks. The street had to be rebuilt from the ground up and was renamed after the man who demolished it.

Sibley Forest
It started as an upscale, moneyed subdivision. A few years after the first shift, the nearby Chattahoochee River and wooded area swelled with magic. The trees encroached, and despite people cutting and burning them, they took over until Sibley was a true forest. Strange creatures live in them, and most residents fled. The few remaining have expensive wards, fences, and lots of ammo.

Factions
Post-Shift Atlanta is divided into several power factions.

The Pack
The Pack is the largest shapeshifter society in the South, possibly in the nation, rivaled only by the werebuffalo Herd in Texas and the Ice Fury Pack in Alaska. By the latest official count, the Pack includes twelve hundred shapeshifters and is constantly growing. Consisting of 32 species divided into 7 Clans, with a organized military discipline, the members of the Pack value loyalty, obedience, restraint, and duty above all else.

The People
Proficient in both magic and technology, The People defy categorization. Part cult, part corporation, part a scientific institution, the People concern themselves with necromancy: study, raising, and care of the undead. Like the Order, the People have a national presence, with bases in most major cities. The People are obscenely wealthy and seemingly interested solely in increasing their wealth. They control the largest vampire stable on the continent and are not shy about wielding their influence. Unemotional and cold, they are the rivals of the Shapeshifters.

The Order of Merciful Aid
The Order of Merciful Aid offers exactly what it promises: merciful aid on the edge of the sword or by the burn of a bullet. Powerful and disciplined, the Order is a nation-wide organization which consists of elite warriors and scholars. Each major city has its own Order Chapter. Members of the Order are called knights. When asked, the knights state their mission as simply “Protection of mankind.” The knights are lethal, honorable, and unfortunately, convinced that they are always right.

The Mercenary Guild
Founded by Solomon Red, the Mercenary Guild is a loosely structured organization which takes care of magic “hazmat” too minor to attract the attention of the Order of Merciful Aid or the Paranormal Activity Division of local police force. They can also be hired as bodyguards and kidnapping cases.

The Covens
The covens of Atlanta are numerous. They serve many gods and goddesses and have little in common. A typical coven consists of a limited number of members, usually thirteen. Some covens are exclusively female, while others allow male members.