Downtown

Downtown: Nomosa Springs downtown is located in the general center of town. Everything looks open and everywhere there are scraps of food that look like they’ve only recently been dropped, as though everyone suddenly packed up and left before you got there. It’s always overcast in Nomosa Springs, the sun never comes out. Sometimes it rains, sometimes it snows, but there’s never a ray of sunshine. Downtown is where this is most pronounced, because many of the streets are narrow and snaking corridors of brickwork and concrete and they become very dark as a result. The buildings are usually only one or two stories tall. All the windows on the second story have curtains pulled. Sometimes they move, but never enough to see inside.
The main street is packed with stores on either side, all of them open, with huge window displayed showing off mannequins with whatever products are sold. The exact way the mannequins look depends on the store. If it’s a food store, they’re obese, gorging on other fleshy-looking mannequins laid out in pig troughs. There’s blood on their mouths and hands, but they’re smiling. There are no eyes, no nostrils, no clearly defined facial features except a grin with all their teeth showing, vibrantly white. The mannequin in the trough is often smiling as well, when the face is intact.
The stores that sell clothing have mannequins wearing skin-tight clothing, often splitting at the seams, puss leaking from them like it’s a festering wound. They’re always smiling too but they have eyes, unlike the food mannequins. They’re always pitch black eyes. The female mannequins have hourglass figures and the men have unnaturally muscle-bound bodies.
The stores that sell anything else show mannequins with a missing arm or leg, sometimes more, all of them smiling and held aloft by strings. Sometimes they’re spun around like puppets and blurt out garbled recorded messages to buy whatever is in the store.
Most stores you can’t get inside, the stores are usually so full of mannequins that you can’t even get in the door. Some of them you can. The few you can get into seem small at first. Well-stocked shelves, tightly packed and often with mannequins at the end of each shelf, all smiling, but small, with pleasant LED lights. If you go further into the store, the lights turn fluorescent and start to dim, the shelves get taller and taller. The mannequins started to slump, like malfunctioning automatons at Disneyworld, their smiles plastered to their faces. If you go deep enough, when you aren’t looking, their hands move and grope you, their grips tight and warm but always go limp the moment you turn to see. Deep enough and you are surrounded by mannequins, all of them reaching out and touching you the moment they aren’t in sight.
On the main street itself though, there are no signs of life. But if you peer into the side-alleyways, you sometimes catch sight of Denizens. Denizens are roughly humanoid in shape. Their skins are waxy and constantly drooping down where they aren’t burnt and swollen, leaving bits of muscles uncovered in between puss-filled burn-marks. Their eyes cannot see straight, their nose is cut off, they often have extra arms or legs, usually split at the base into two, with strings of sinew and bone connecting them in criss-cross patterns, their fingers seem necrotic and rotting and flies circle hungrily between their limbs. They wear no clothes, save a scrap of fabric that spans their groins and the remnants of a ripped, torn and tattered shirt. Their swollen skin starts anywhere their clothing is torn although there can sometimes be scraps of untouched skin away from their clothes. They often walk with difficulty, their legs sometimes little more than a span of muscle and bone, although others appear grotesquely fat because of all the swollen skin. You can differentiate between male and female, but it’s very difficult.
They tend to stick to alleyways because that way they can avoid being seen clearly. They speak with voices that almost pass for normal, but sound like they’re talking through mucus and water. They beckon other Denizens and especially you to step closer to them. They tend to lie flat against the wall while they do so, to mask their deformities. It’s only when you or whatever they want is in reach that they can grab them, their loose and slackened skin letting go entirely and slithering across their prey’s body, passing over your chest, circling around your back, then back across your stomach. The Denizen’s snaking skin after passing over your stomach will split into two. One part will travel up your stomach, chest, neck and into your mouth, continuing down your throat. Another will swivel its way into your navel. Boils will spread across your body very rapidly, maddeningly itchy, which after about half a minute, start to burst, each of them full of something acidic-like, which begins to burn your body in much the same way it happened to the other Denizens. Boils will appear on your arms and lower legs, sometimes your back and all over your face, but not much anywhere else. If they do this to another Denizen, it’s because that Denizen is not as burned as they themselves are and they wish to do something worse to them out of spite.
At night, Denizens skulk the main street freely, avoiding the streetlamps where possible. Sometimes they cry, but mostly they simply grunt and moan, moving around in the shadows.
Another creature often found in downtown is a Loper. Lopers are dog-like in many respects. They bark, they bound and they move in a doglike way. You can often hear them making noise in the alleys that aren’t taken by Denizens. Their body is dog-shaped, but in place of paws, they have hands and feet. Their heads are human, always with their mouth agape and stretched unnaturally far sideways. Their teeth are all sharpened to point and are longer than normal human teeth. Their eyes are usually missing, and their throats are often cut open and bleeding slowly, something that comes from fighting other Lopers. Simultaneously hyper-territorial and cooperative, Lopers regularly fight one another to gain temporary control of alleyways and stores, but it’s not uncommon to see packs of Lopers resting together that only days before were fighting. Lopers are somewhat skittish around humans, often mistaking them for Denizens, who they give a wide berth. Those that are not blind, however, will immediately give chase and ravenously call in other Lopers to join the hunt.
At the center of Downtown, there’s a fountain with a statue of a mermaid and a sailor. They are both naked, the sailor muscular and the mermaid another hourglass figure, stunningly beautiful. The sailor is holding the mermaid over his head, triumphantly displaying her like a hunting trophy and the mermaid is squirming and holding a knife in her hand, trying to stab the sailor. The water has long since stopped running and coins from various times and countries litter the bottom of the fountain, a long snake skeleton coiled around the central pedestal. It’s peaceful here in the daytime, if you can ignore the Denizens in the alleys, but at night, it’s their main gathering point.