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Hopperton Itself

Hopperton is an interesting city on the coast of a small nation. It is both big and small. It is big in terms of how spread out and developed it appears to be. For example, there is a trolley system, a large and prestigious university, a large downtown centered on an ornate city hall, several public parks with trails, fountains, and lake-like ponds, as well as many buildings with old facades, the oldest only going back two hundred years at most. Currently, there isn't much construction of new buildings, only the occasional repair of the old ones, where the workmen begin late the morning and quit early afternoon. In terms of both size of area and number of people, Hopperton is factually the second largest city in the nation. However, Hopperton is small in terms of the people and how they interact with each other. Crowds are usually infrequent and light, and the feeling among its residents is generally warm, and a shade naive. It location on the warmer, more relaxed West gives it a B...
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Rafferty's Apartment

Once inside, you see a short entry way with a small bathroom directly to your left. The wall on the right extends straight back, where it opens up into a single room divided into two sections, a kitchen and a bedroom. The far wall, opposite the door, is mostly comprised of a plate glass sliding door that leads to a medium balcony, artfully decorated with plants, and a small outdoor chair and table, which makes it unofficially the dining area.  The kitchen is separated from the bedroom by a short wall that doesn't quite reach the ceiling. Storage, boxes, a screen, a makeshift closet helps to fill the gap above. The kitchen is hardly ever used, but the refrigerator is useful, the sink is necessary, and there are a couple of small counters with cabinets to store an extremely modest amount of utensils, plates, and glasses.  The bedroom has room for the aforementioned closet, which is mostly a clothing rack inside a make shift alcove, a couple of end tables, a large comfortable loo...
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Rafferty in Hopperton

Rafferty lives in a mostly single room in Hopperton, upstairs in the Flynn building, above a small general store. The stairs to Rafferty's apartment, and other people's apartments, are to the left of the general store, and are hidden behind an unassuming door painted blue gray, a color that blends into the building itself. Passerbys would naturally think that the door merely leads to storage access for the general store, or a utility area that services the Flynn building somehow.  Rafferty rarely sees any of his fellow renters on the second floor. He guesses that many of these other apartments are empty, or used for storage. There have been other people, renters he assumes, that he has seen in the hallway, but none longer than four months in a row. The longest residents appear to be sad, older men, past the age of usefulness, shuffling on to obscurity and irrelevance to life. Silent and alone, they slip by at odd hours of early morning or late night, ghosts of mundane despair. ...
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