Palm Mall & Palm City — Home Away From Home

This is a post about wonderlands. There are many names for the same thing, but wonderland fits best for how I use it. (Memory palace, for example, has the connotation that I'm trying to use it to remember things, which I am not). Briefly, a wonderland is a persistent mental space one can go to at will, essentially the same as a space you may visit in a dream. In this blog post, I'm going to be describing the place and the goings on there. It is up to you if you feel that is something worth reading

Palm Mall - The Original

My wonderland started off as an uninhabited space, based upon the beautiful melodies of Corp's Palm Mall. It was a simple imagining of the mall as I saw it — blown out, white coloring of everything. Large marble tiled floors, each shop decorated in a slightly different way. The four-floor mall was a square shape, dominated by a large glass-covered square atrium, taking up most of the space in the mall. The shop fronts hugged the edge of the mall, their glass fascades facing inwards into balconies. As the mall had only me in it, twenty feet was more than enough width for a balcony. Each 'side' of shops was perhaps one or two hundred metres long. At the bottom of the atrium, covering the space was a tree canopy and what I can only describe as a small rainforesty park. It's not neseccarily warm there, but the air is very moist and misty. Notable locations include the gym, from this track, which is located on the ground floor next to the rainforest; the cafe, where the steaming of milk can be heard throughout the first, long ambient track, which is one of the only shops which is a freestanding stall on the top floor; the revolving restaurant, for which you had to go over a skybridge to get to; and the gallery, located on the third floor.

Palm City

Palm mall has since turned into palm city. Palm mall was originally located in a generic British city (this was not a choice of mine, it was simply revealed to me after I used the exit to the mall, and it put me out on a British city-centre high-street. It was also revealed to me when I could see the view below from the revolving restaurant.) Palm city is a different beast entirely. It is located in a vast, uninhabited swath of moorland, perhaps in the scottish highlands. Other than the Palm City (and its accompanying buildings), it is moorland in every direction, with the beautiful rolling hills that give the moorland its character (i like moorland a lot). Palm city is a single, massive building, as if you attempted to put an entire city into a shopping mall. It is truly huge. Its structure is almost cubic in nature. Imagine a wireframe for a cube. Each edge required to make up the cube is one of the 'streets' of palm city. These corridors are very large, being the entire width needed to accomodate a shopping-mall style 'street', and the shops on each side, too. Each street is around three-four stories, depending on interior ceiling heights in the shops. Externally, each street is the same height. Each street is divided into two main levels, where the second level is a sort of wide balcony on both sides where you can see down into the lower level. Of course, this is only the flat 'streets', vertical sides are different.

People live in the vertical sections of palm city, as well as above the streets. The roof of a street in palm city is quite high. From the point of view of the street, there is a flat, opaque section of roof in the middle of each street (the highest section of roof), from which the transportation system (which I will talk about later), is suspended. From each side of this middle section comes down a vaulted lattice of steel and glass, meeting the walls of the street at the top. It is around a 45 degree angle, so very simmilar in nature to a common residential roof, just made from glass. It lets natural light pour in to the street. Above this flat section are six regular-sized stories, simmilar in nature to a commie block, just a plain rectangle (although ornately decorated with marble pillars and ornamentation). These blocks are residential, and span the entire length of a section of street. The vertical sections of palm mall are also residential. They are circular, and are dominated by a large atrium in the centre of each one. Looking up from the bottom into an atrium, one can see rows upon rows of circular balconies, and front doors looking inwards. Foliage is plentiful within the atriums, a tangle of trees and plants climbing through the open space, curling around pillars of white marble.

And so this pattern repeats on, with immense cubes assembled from the horizontal and vertical streets. This is not a place that has to be bound by reality, and the transportation system reflects this. The transportation system is the logical conclusion of the moving walkway. One can make a moving walkway, or travellator, faster and wider, and make it more beautiful with floors of marble. It can be made more comfortable, with lounge furniture, lamps, chairs, bars, and more, across the sides of this moving room. The walkway can be sealed, and the air made to move as fast as the furnishings, so the wind in faces is not an issue. You could also achieve this by modifying the train. Making it longer and longer, until, like a snake eating its tail, it loops back around on itself. A continous room moving around and around at fourty miles per hour. The walkways of palm city are not huge, perhaps three or four metres across in each direction. With white marble floors, and glass walls, one speeds through in comfort. Intersections work simmilarly to highway interchanges. Selection of right, left, or straight on, is made through standing or sitting in the left, right, or middle sections of the walkway. It splits into three, and three different walkways rejoin in each new direction. Of course, care must be taken, as in order for the walkways to split, there must essentially be a sharp point that you could smash into at fourty miles per hour if not careful. To mitigate this, there are very long triangles coming from the floor, to the roof, when the walkway needs to be divided. As passengers come up to these divisions, the nature of moving in to a long triangle means that the walls slowly rise from the floor as you move. For the transition from horizontal to vertical, simmilar precautions need to be taken, as the walkway divides itself into squares as it begins its ascent. This is easier to manage, as it works simmilarly to the flat tiles of an escalator separating from one another to become the stairs. These vertical sections of the walkways are nestled into the walls of the atrium, as opposed to going through the middle of an atrium. Entering these walkways is also a slight challenge. To enter them, one enters what can be best described as a lift/elevator box. This box closes its doors, before moving upwards to the walkway while accelerating quickly along a rail to match its speef with the walkway. The doors then open, and one can simply step into the walkway. To disembark, the process is the same, though performed in reverse, of course.

Between these streets , the moorland is left untouched, save for a few rail tracks underneath, to bring goods and people to palm city. These rail tracks snake through the moorland off into the distance. The only thing I could perhaps describe the whole situation as is simmilar as Hogwarts, with a train line through to the vast, singular building. Although palm city has no 'Hogsmeade'. Whenever me and Kimn get the train into Palm City (we often do because it is *much* easier to begin visualisation for me beginning in a small place, so I can become properly immersed and properly 'into' the wonderland, before having to visualise something much larger), we find ourselves on a large private rail carriage, much larger than a standard rail carriage. We have two full stories, a bedroom, and the most beautiful wood panelling. Of course, giving this level of comfort to each passenger leaves the train much over a mile long. Once we have traversed the beautiful countryside, the train switches back and forth along the railyard, negotiating with other trains. We then disembark on to the platform (which is substantially shorter than the train, so it is sometimes required to walk down the corridors of the train), and go up in to a beautiful atrium, with views to four streets each way. One criticism I have of Palm City is that there are not enough 'unique' spaces, so we are trying to add more in.

The original Palm Mall had no inhabitants, it was just me and Kimn there, exploring the mall. However, as wonderlanding becomes easier, Palm City has offered its inhabitants to us. I have not talked in depth with any of them yet, they are currently people in the background, to make the place feel less empty, but I hope to one day visit their houses within Palm City, and get to know them. To any readers who may find it difficult to imagine interacting with people in your head in this manner, I remind you that you have the capability for it. After all, you interact with all sorts of characters, and are in all sorts of places in your dreams. One thing that I do know is that houses in Palm City are very large, I would estimate that ours is of around six thousand square feet. So each resident has a sunstantial proportion of a floor within an atrium, or a large amount of commie block, to play with.

I hope to add to this page illustrations of the beautiful palm city, as I am not the clearest writer. To finish this, I would like to note that describing palm city has left me profoundly relaxed, almost as relaxed as I am after a visit to it.