Mopire City is my absolute favourite SL build. I have been coming here for years, and have blogged it many times (use the ‘search thingy’ on my blog to look up Mopire City) and had many adventures here. I have walked, driven, and even flown (in a UFO) this amazing place… you can’t actually fly here, but if you rez an aerial vehicle, you can. I have even seen a giant here. The level of detail and the quality and consistency of every component here is amazing, and the place is huge. It is actually several sims, I think… Mopire City/Rieri-Town in Tokyo/Tokyo-Windhill/Mitsumi-Town…
… I have always had an ‘in the twilight zone’ feeling here… no-one lives (that I have ever been able to ascertain) here, I have never seen a real shop here, and I almost always have the place to myself. None of those things make much sense in SL; how on earth do they finance a build like this if it generates no revenue? There is one revenue generating aspect to it, but I’ll mention that later. Over the years I have formulated a theory that this place is a huge, private playground dedicated to war games. There is an underground network here that is huge, and the first time I ever came here, when it was all new, I think, if you went into that network, the ‘life’ icon appeared in your HUD, that doesn’t happen, now, but it was a clue. There is fake advertising everywhere, but the only real, SL advertising, is for weapons. There is a shooting range in the subway. These were all clues for my theory…
… in all the time I’ve been coming here, I keep finding parts/things I’ve never seen, before. Yesterday, from the landing point, I went a way I’ve never been, before, literally just around the corner, and noticed these banners that totally confirmed my suspicions. I kept walking that way…
… and, once again, found an entire chunk of the city I have never seen…
… a little park…
… this lovely little area, all totally new to me…
… so, in a way, I wasn’t that surprised when I stumbled upon this place… a real shop selling shooty stuff. It was still very weird/jarring… this wasn’t the Mopire City I knew, I could almost hear ‘X-Files’ music playing, somewhere in the background. It vindicated my theory, but it was very weird that it took me so long to find this place, almost like it had been hiding, and had now, for some reason, shown itself…
… I mentioned a possible source of revenue before… R2 Fashion has always floated above Mopire City, and I’ve always thought it might be the financial wing of the operation. When I first started coming here, there was a physical elevator in R2, that would take you down to the city, but they took it out, and for years there was just a hole in the floor you could jump down, then I think even that got covered, for a while…
… I zapped up there to see what was there, now. The hole was there, but glassed over, but there was one of those teleports, that look like an elevator door, so I took it back down. I took a few steps from where I’d landed, turned around, and saw…
… this. I’m pretty sure this was not here when I used to take the elevator, or even when I used to jump down the hole. Surely I would have noticed, in this beautiful, empty city…
… a hanger filled with aerial war machines. Now I really felt like I was in the twilight zone, it was enough to make my spine tingle… I half expected to hear the rattle of small-arms fire, or the scream of a warplane going over the city… perhaps to see a column of oily smoke roiling into the sky. It was so weird that my theories had all been made real, so suddenly, in a single visit. I don’t know what to expect, here, any more.
*edit* I looked up ‘Second Life Special Operations Command’… it is a group with 8 members. And, if I had gone into that mall where I noticed the banners, there is another weapons shop, and more of those banners… none of those things used to be in there, so, perhaps, this is a new manifestation?
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