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.

Broad strokes, because the crew's business here is passing through or spending money:

The county is what sits between Los Angeles and a sealed city, and nobody owns it. Not us, not Pueblo, not Aztechnology. Ares holds the security contract, paid for by the Corporate Court and the corporations with harbour 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 John Wayne is Ares' forward airfield.

Fun City proper is Anaheim, Garden Grove, Buena Park and Stanton, incorporated as a single entertainment municipality in 2020 by Amalgamated Studios — the same Studio City outfit that owns lots in Hollywood — which bought most of it during Orange County's last bankruptcy. Virtual Disney, Knott's Berry Farm, the Crystal Cathedral, wax museums, wide clean avenues on a grid, and an idealised twentieth-century Middle America that never existed reproduced in enormous detail.

Inland of it: Irvine, Tustin, Yorba Linda, the hill suburbs. Intact, prosperous, private, and the most heavily gated residential ground in Southern California. This is where the money that left our coast went, and it did not come back.

And the coast is dead. Newport, Huntington, Laguna — the Tide came up these beaches first, before it reached our harbour, 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.

And then nothing. 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. See San Diego.

Canon reference: Orange County (Fun City) on the Sixth World Wiki, for the published version. Where it and this page disagree, this page is what happened here.

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 car park. Incidents are handled as guest relations and written down that way.
• 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.
• 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.