Right now, we're all standing at the corner of Red and East, where I usually begin my fantastic dragon sightseeing excursion. They call this area Metro Olde. We're not too far from the edges of city, so the neighborhood is pretty nice, lots of small shops and picturesque, winding streets, the kind of stuff the holodiscs try and convince you that history was like.
Don't let it fool you. Most of this wasn't here even twenty years ago, let alone back before the city came afloat. Any idiot with a few grappling hooks and enough firepower can get themselves brand spanking new edgeside property, so the borders are constantly expanding. Hell, that's how the Edgeside makes it's money, moving and attaching itself randomly to the new boundaries of the city.
Mainly this area is here for the tourists. That means you, so feel free to look around and spend some money. There's a good list of resturaunts in your pamphlet; most of them even serve food. Because Forge is happy to let anyone move in and set up a life for themselves, there's all kinds of different things to eat. It's not strange to see a Dwarvin alehouse next to a bakery serving mountain style pork biscuits. Forge has it's own specialties too, like the shifting flavor ice chips that the city has recently been trying to export as a delicacy to some of the other, more gullible, city states.
Here magic and ice are as common as lava, the ice a biproduct of the monthly glacier smash that gives us our water. At least that's what the locals call it. Now there's something actually interesting we'll be taking a look at today. Since the city went afloat some 250 years ago, we've pretty much picked up every trick in the trade of using anti-gravity. It's actually pretty lucky the city had started planning to take the city aloft long before the volcano erupted, or else Forge would really have burned to death in the fire.
Nobody quite knows who started the project. It was supposed to be something to increase tourism. The natural hot springs just weren't enough for them. Even then, Forge was a mixed up, crazy place to live. So a bunch of businesses and citizens petitioned city hall for the money to place anti-grav units under the city. For some reason the city agreed to fund it. But halfway through management changed and the project was killed. It stayed dead until thirty some odd years later when they realized the ground was going to erupt underneath them. Then suddenly the floating city idea didn't seem like such a harebrained scheme.
They say the project director, then over seventy years old, danced a jig over the cracking, melting ground. Course, they also say he died shortly thereafter of a heart attack when he realized his house wasn't taking flight with the rest of the city. I doubt the second part is true. But it is true lots of the original city didn't make it. The project had only been half complete afterall. We're pretty fortunate the warehouses for water and food storage were among the parts that did.