Metropolis

Metropolis is the second-largest borough in Olympia, and a quaint mix of tall high rises and small businesses. The center of the borough is filled with skyscrapers employing hundreds of people each and luxurious apartments that overlook the city. Vendors on street corners sell everything from hot dogs to coffee to newspapers, and phone booths are tucked away at the entrance to most alleys and CityLink terminals.   As an upscale working and shopping borough, cars and taxis from visitors fill the streets, but local people walk between work and home. Many apartments outside of the borough center are small studio apartments without kitchens, forcing the people who live there to pick up groceries daily or eat from food stalls on the way home. This has created a culture where most buildings will have a storefront on the bottom floor to cater to this foot traffic.   Metropolis isn't all steel, glass, and concrete, though. Artwork and small parks are highly valued, with large murals, guerilla art, and perspective sidewalk chalk in comic style seen throughout the borough.   The bright shiny exterior of Metropolis hides an underbelly of crime tucked away in its corners and behind closed doors. Graffiti and protest signs frequently mark alleys and under bridges, and crime skyrockets late at night. Oracles and the courts are never fully given the funding they need to do their jobs, creating a cycle of arrest-release-arrest, and crime-fighting vigilantes roam the streets to pick up the slack.  

Cultural ideas/tenets in this area

The Metropolis borough was created from heroic ideals: self-sacrifice for the greater good, kindness toward your neighbors, and courage and bravery in the face of adversity.  

Magical Culture of the area

In Metropolis, magic usually manifests from within in the form of superpowers: super strength, flight, laser vision, and the like, rather than spells cast. These powers often come from strength of character or belief in yourself.   On the flip side, those heroes that have lost faith in themselves or are crushed by the weight of living up to the heroic ideals will often seek external sources of power: machines that no longer function according to known science, gadgets that bend the laws of reality, or batteries of power that they use to fuel themselves.