2023.08.17
The City was low-key, but literally, magical. At some point a wish granting aspect seemed to have been woven into its fabric. A scorching hot August might herald the unexpected appearance of an ice cream truck, or even a hitherto neglected corner ice cream shop. The number of middle tier lottery wins was suspiciously high.
We suspected there was a retro-temporal aspect to it as well. One day people just began to notice The Pirate Quarter, a somewhat Disney-fied set of streets on the north side, on the inlet to the sea that no-one would swear had always been there but no-one could deny having always been part of the City either.
The residents of the Quarter were nice enough, like Jamie McGrew, the old guy with the eyepatch over one clouded eye and his perpetual scruff, who worked on the tourist galleon forever moored to the main pier. Off duty he would happily answer questions about his own personal past, but no matter how much we probed we could never detect a paradox, just a life story deftly woven in and around aspects of our own histories we had clearer and more concrete recollections of. A few of us the Bat started calling him "Jamais", as in "jamais vu", but he took our suspicions in good cheer, and soon enough we couldn't remember when we thought we hadn't always known him.