Street view of the Emerald City.
The Kingdom of Dolls
Capital City: Emerald
Machina is the largest artifact left from the Age of the Humans. Metallic and minimalistic, rounded glass skyscrapers loom over this once futuristic location. The skies are often overcast with a cool moderate climate, but the kingdom itself is not a feasible place to live. Thick smog coats the clustered cities, and suffocating white ash rains in the region almost daily. A malfunctioning gasmask means certain death.
A Brief Oveview[]
Despite being abandoned, Machina is spotlessly, eerily clean. The ashes are swept from the streets as soon as they fall by the many high-technology androids here, the last ones remaining from the Age of Humans. It seems that the androids were programmed to maintain the cities, and the humans died so abruptly that no one had ordered them to stop.
Stragglers show up every now and then. Archaeologists and architects come quickly to gather human artifacts, remains, or blueprints of the ancient buildings to return to the outside world.
Androids[]
The only permanent "citizens" are the androids. They do various tasks besides keeping the city clean, including bringing out food every day, taking the untouched plates away to be disposed of, and bringing dead unfortunate explorers to a big pit of corpses since they ran out of burial space for previous dead unfortunate explorers.
Archaeologists must usually bring rare minerals or gemstones to trade with the androids for human curiosities; newer human goods can still be obtained since the androids still have a functioning manufacturing system that they were never given commands to halt.
The androids are extremely unsettling to the outside world because unlike the current Earth population, they lack muzzles and tails. Based on the similarities between recovered human skeletons and the androids, the commonly accepted theory is that humans built these robots in their likenesses.
Spring[]
Machina will soon be completely inaccessible. The underground spring that provides electrical energy is slowly dying out. Once it vanishes, the androids keeping the cities clean will run out of power, and those who try to enter will die from the kingdom’s accumulated ashes before they can reach the buildings in the center of the region.
Trivia[]
During the Age of Humans, the androids could often be mistaken for humans from far away. The largest complaints were that close-up, the androids are too bilaterally symmetric and that their motions do not perfectly emulate a living human's, eliciting an uncanny valley effect.