In working on the Guidebook, I've instructed Agent Huinesoron to write a little about the process of mapping the city.
He's... not best pleased.
When originally constructed, the road that now leads from Door 1-Nou-1 to the city centre was one half of The Loop, an ellipsoid road that encircled the Farmlands. By the magic of multilingual punning, this swiftly became known as The Wolf, but the contingent of French-language recruits tasked with tending the farms defiantly reverted the name to
Le Loup. This trend of naming the city's roads in French has proven surprisingly resilient, outlasting almost every other characteristic of the settlement.
With the onset of the fanfic explosion, the concurrent population boom in HQ, and the establishment of the
École pour la Formation des Agents (Agent Training School, now New Cal Elementary High), Le Loup was split in two. The western half became the Rue des Agents, while the east (now disused) was named the Rue des Fleurs (a name since reused for an entirely different road).
As settlement continued, the Rue des Agents was extended down the western side of the American Quarter (at the time known only as New Cal). For a time, a student at Elementary High with a basic grasp of French managed to get it known as the
Rue des Protecteurs des Scénarios, but the more concise Rue PPC quickly took its place.
In 2006, the Black Cat invasion shook the PPC's self-confidence. For the vast majority of agents, who had joined the Protectors in 2002 or later, the death toll during the attack was like nothing we had ever seen. As the settlement was expanded into a true city, a major push was made to name the roads being planned after the agents who had laid down their lives in service to the PPC - or who had managed to escape in retirement.
For a while, the Rue PPC was immune to this shift, but the installation of street signs brought its doom. The road feeding into the Town Square from the south was named the Rue Jay Thorntree - and due to a strike by the Quartermaster, it received its signage some six months before the Rue PPC. By the time the signs were ready to be installed, the Jay Thorntree name had been adopted for the entire length of the road.
In the aftermath of the Macrovirus Epidemic, the French Quarter was laid out south of the civic centre, with its chief access road being the Rue Verra Rose. An adjustment of the plans for the northern end of the settlement led to the Rue Verra Rose becoming a direct extension of the Rue Jay Thorntree, reopening the question of how many names a single road should have.
By this time, the
Musée des Univers Perdus had become prominent in the city, and its chief curator, Doctor Cornelius, joined with other early recruits to the PPC to argue for representation of the very first agents. The American Quarter's original streets, until then known simply as
La Tête and
Le Pied for their positions on and below the ridge, took the names of Agents Josephine and Suzay, the first known victims of the Mysterious Somebody. And the northern reaches of the Rue Jay Thorntree - previously the Rue PPC, previously the Rue des Protecteurs des Scénarios, previously the Rue des Agents, previously Le Loup, The Wolf, and The Loop - were named in honour of the very first of us: the Rue Anya, and the Rue Elisabeth.
(Excerpt, 'A PPC Agent's Guide to La Calédonie', DoO)
I... kind of expected that to take one paragraph, but it's fun, so it stays.
hS
