Orange County

Everybody calls it Fun City, including people who mean the whole county and not the resort. The name belongs to a licensed entertainment district in the middle of it, and it spread outward because the resort is the only part anybody has a reason to name.

The county sits between Los Angeles and a sealed city, and there is no Orange County government: it went bankrupt for the last time in 2029, in the same wave of institutional collapse that broke so much else that decade, and never re-formed. What stands in its place is four owners, a contractor and a lot of leftovers.

Fun City proper: Amalgamated Studios, outright. Anaheim, Garden Grove, Buena Park and Stanton, incorporated as a single private entertainment municipality in 2031 by Amalgamated, the same conglomerate that owns most of the working floor space in Studio City and Burbank, which bought most of it during that bankruptcy. Virtual Disney, Knott's Berry Farm, the Crystal Cathedral, wax museums, wide clean avenues on a grid, and an idealized twentieth-century Middle America that never existed reproduced in enormous detail. It's a walled, badge-gated cluster like the others in this city, just run for tourists instead of towers; see Los Angeles for the pattern.

The inland hills: the Irvine Company. Irvine, most of Tustin and the master-planned ground behind them, held the way that company has held it since the last century: the land, the streets, the malls and the lease under your house. It is not a municipality and does not pretend to be. It's a landlord with a private security budget, and its ground is the most heavily gated residential country in Southern California. This is where the money that left our coast went, and what it bought is gates.

John Wayne: Ares. A forward airfield, no civil traffic, facing south.

The eastern edge: Pueblo. Their line is the Santa Ana Mountains crest, so the far slope, the Cleveland National Forest and everything over the ridge toward Riverside are Pueblo's, and two roads cross it: the Santa Ana Canyon at Yorba Linda and the Ortega Highway out of San Juan Capistrano. Both have customs houses and both work exactly like the passes above Los Angeles. What Pueblo does not hold is any of the flatland, the resort or the coast: they stopped at the ridge because that's where the watershed stops, and the county had nothing else they wanted.

Everywhere else: nobody in particular, and it's most of the people. Santa Ana, Costa Mesa, Fullerton, Orange, Anaheim outside the resort gates: ordinary towns with ordinary councils and about a million residents between them, running on their own rates. Nobody bought them because there was nothing to buy.

Over all of it, Ares holds the security contract, paid for by the Corporate Court and the corporations with harbor interests, because a hundred and twenty miles of frontier is a liability everybody wants watched and nobody wants titled. Knight Errant is thick on the ground from Long Beach south.

And the coast is dead. Newport, Huntington, Laguna: the Tide came up these beaches first, before it reached our harbor, so the county's own shoreline is cordoned and empty for the same reasons ours is. Nobody in Fun City advertises that the beach is thirty minutes away.

Then it stops, and the last stretch genuinely has no owner. South of San Clemente the old Pendleton reservation begins: seventeen miles of monitored scrub, a shut freeway, and Aztechnology's perimeter at the far end. Nobody has claimed it, nobody wants the title, and Ares patrols it under contract rather than by right. See San Onofre and the Seventeen Miles.

What the crew knows#

• Fun City licenses everything, and that is the whole relationship with home. Los Angeles has no authority to license anything; Fun City licenses gambling, liquor, shows, weapons carriage, medical practice and street performance, and audits all of it. The two places are each other's negative.
• It is a private municipality, so entry is admission. There's a gate, a fee, and a list, and Amalgamated can refuse anybody for any reason without stating one. Getting turned away is not an arrest and leaves no record you can contest.
• The admission policy is the ugly part and everybody knows it. The park sells a curated past, and it polices who appears in the scenery: metahumans have a difficult time at that gate, Humanis Policlub has an unembarrassed presence in the suburbs, and Amalgamated's position is that it hosts private events on private property.
• Security is contractors on a customer-service brief, which is not the same as soft: they are polite, numerous, well-equipped, and will walk you to a room rather than the parking lot. Incidents are handled as guest relations and written down that way.
• Every smiling employee is also a sensor. Cast, vendors, sweepers, the ride operators: noticing is in the employment contract and the radio is in the ear, so a description called in from a churro cart reaches the gate before you do. The armed tier exists and you will not see it in a guest area; it stages backstage and arrives through service doors.
• There is no night inside the wall. Los Angeles goes dark and sells the dark in neon; the park is lit to mid-morning until closing, because the lighting plan and the camera plan are the same drawing. Add the camera masts, the plate readers and a pass that logs every turnstile, and the visit is a record from the moment you pay admission.
• Money crosses in both directions. Angelenos come here to do the licensed things they can't do at home; Fun City residents come to Los Angeles to do the unlicensed ones. Both trips are ordinary and both are logged at the county line.
• You can reach Pueblo from here without ever using an LA customs house, over the Santa Anas at Yorba Linda or on the Ortega. It is not a loophole so much as a trade: the crossing gets written down in Orange County instead of Los Angeles, and to get to it you drive past Ares' cameras at the county line instead of Pueblo's at the Grapevine. Pick which record you'd rather exist.
• The county line is not a border, but it has cameras, and Ares reads them.

Getting in#

By road, and it's easy: the freeways work and the county line is a toll and a plate reader rather than a checkpoint. Fun City itself needs admission, which the crew can buy.

John Wayne is not an option for anything civil. Landing there means being on a military or security manifest, and the field faces south. See Santa Monica Airport for why every other field in the region is closed to this kind of work.

Canon reference: [Orange County (Fun City)](https://shadowrun.fandom.com/wiki/Orange_County_(Fun_City)