Anything But Ordinary

By David Wood

**Flaming
Feather**

"Ordinary, Kansas" doesn't appear on any map. Nobody ever heard of it. It just seemed to spring up out of nowhere. Its population is indeterminate. Even Heaven and Hell have no records on it.

Calling it ordinary is just such a bad idea. The town is small, but it has buildings in styles which are hundreds of years old (looking fresh as the day they were built) alongside buildings which could have been finished and opened yesterday, mishmashed together in a singsong manner. What's more, a disturbing proportion of those shops and businesses sell weapons of one form or another, from any time period.

And the people...! Nobody dresses in a consistent fashion. Clothing comes from all eras, from the ancient to the contemporary, with modern influences for modern mores (no nudity, for instance). There are no police, but there really should be given how everybody seems to despise each other. Nobody in town is neutral; there is strong moral polarity. People there tend not to see things in terms of greys. Anything done is either good or evil. It's a bit like stepping into a pulp novel in that way. The two sides in town actively hate each other. And remember how many weapon shops there are in town? They tend to display that hate aggressively with whatever weapons they have available. The buildings are all fresh, but there are moments when it sounds like a warzone.

Angels in Ordinary will feel a tugging toward Heaven, demons in Ordinary will feel drawn toward Hell. And each will be unable to go Celestial there, no matter by how much they make their Will rolls. Obviously, Ordinary feels wrong to them.

This feeling will intensify when they finally see someone shot dead in the street get up and go to a friendly doctor's office to get patched up. This should bother visitors (especially Celestial ones) no end; residents won't even blink because odds are it's happened to them one time or another.

This is one of those cases where a mixed bag of angels and demons stands the best chance of understanding what's going on. Doing something about it, though, is another matter once they figure out what has happened...

There are stories of the collected libraries of Yves and Kronos, how vast they are and how there are uncomfortable little places where the two join.

And Heaven and Hell are vast, limitless tracts of real estate. Good as the shepherds/warders are on both sides, occasionally souls do slip loose and wander those undeveloped, limitless tracts untill they find something new and interesting.

In an undeveloped, limitless tract, any development is interesting. Including Ordinary ones.

Ordinary is one of those nebulous areas, outside the Libraries of Yves and Kronos, which exist in both Heaven and Hell simultaneously. It's been developed by the souls who have shown up there over the years, and tends to be unpleasantly violent because it's full of very good people and very bad people trying to form the town in their own image. They wanted to return to something resembling Earth, so the locale got sort of translocated to Earth, in some sufficiently out-of-the-way place.

It acts like a tether to both Heaven and Hell, and consequently beings from each realm feel drawn to it. And because they're already sort of technically Celestial by being in Ordinary, they can't go Celestial again.

Now, how to deal with it? The residents are functionally immortal. Every single one of them has to be driven from Ordinary and back into their respective realm and the buildings demolished. Yes, they'll object. Sometimes strenuously. Like I said, fixing this mess isn't going to be easy.

But as the game master, it's your choice how to handle it. This is one of those cases where Dominic and Asmodeus would want to cooperate to eliminate a threat. Plus, it happened here. Are there places elsewhere where this has happened? Or are waiting to? Did anyone escape from Ordinary and into Earth?

**Flaming
Feather**

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