My travelogue is in one of my OGR's, but I've edited it a little bit for more clarity and description of my city, so here is the updated version.
Alptraum is a city of secrets: on the outside, a beautiful utopia, with shiny, curved buildings and glistening streets. However, look closer and you’ll see a side harder to notice. The city is perfect – a bit too perfect. Everybody looks the same, a model human, a perfect human. Rejected, imperfect citizens cower and hide behind the buildings, living like vermin. In the middle of the city stands a large, tall building, gleaming attractively. This is the centre of Alptraum, where only the elite can live: they don’t just need to be perfect to be worthy, they need to be even more than perfect. The rest of the buildings, lower down, seem to reach up to this centre monument: they twist and turn, slowly clawing up to this perfect structure, someday hoping to reach the top. This is a fruitless effort, however. No person or structure will ever reach as high as the centre of the city. The lesser beings live in a desperate limbo. Trying to be perfect, but never quite getting there. Being shunned by the community. Despite the pleasant exterior, when you see the hidden horrors of Alptraum they are hard to unsee.
The buildings of the city are mysteriously silent, as if they are trying to hide the secret society that lives within. The whole city is surrounded by gleaming gates, keeping out the dregs of society. They move around the gates like zombies, with no hope of ever getting in but never quite giving up.
The buildings in Alptraum are some of the most unique structures you would see for miles. Organic, yet utterly perfect. If it had been made by mother nature herself, perfectly natural and beautiful without even trying. However, knowing this is man-made, when looking at the buildings all you can think of is the pain and sweat that went into constructing such perfect and balanced structures. Of course, this would have been the work of the lesser beings in the city. The imperfect ones will slave away all day, trying their best to claw their way up the social ladder, yet never moving up even one rung. If you are born into a lower class, that is where you stay. Being judged on how you have been born is harsh; but the citizens of Alptraum view it as normal. It’s just how the world works. It’s natural to be oppressed if you aren't the epitome of the perfect human being. The rigid social structure in this city is proudly displayed like a banner across the whole city. Anyone that visits Alptraum will know this is how the city functions. The perfection of the city seems too fragile, as if the whole society could come crumbing down at any moment. And maybe, someday, it will.
Like living in a waking nightmare, the citizens carry on with their daily lives, making sure they walk perfectly, talk perfectly, move with such absolute precision that they could be mistaken for robots. Each building is different but the same: with different aspects of beauty, but when looking beyond this they all look monotonous and eerily identical. It’s as if someone has tried to be different, and decorate these buildings in an interesting way, and then failed. The streets are so clean they seem to shine – the floor is incredibly smooth, like marble. The path is immaculate. So immaculate that nobody dares step on it, despite that being its purpose. Most outsiders, practically all of the outsiders, aren't allowed into this city so all you can do is stare at it from the outside: you’re not perfect enough to enter. You fear if you set foot in through the gates and break this rule, you’ll become just like the lesser citizens. Forced to scramble for survival, hiding in the shadows, seen but not heard. Ignored.
You begin to walk away from this city hidden on the top of a mountain, and as you walk away a mixture of fog and soft sunset light consumes it, almost making it disappear. What doesn't disappear is the feeling of gloom and oppression that follows you, even as you walk away. Alptraum may seem like a dream, but if you dare to enter the city, and hear the gates thud closed behind you, you’ll realised that you've actually just stepped into a nightmare.
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