River's Edge (#1485)

(an instance of Generic Room with Surfaces made by Trismegistos)

     An apron of sticky ground borders the confluence of river and channel. Dead fish, cans, bottles, and truck tires dot the muck, hieroglyphic under an oily rainbow slick.
     To the south, a fifteen-foot chainlink fence stretches east to west, topped with outward-slanting razorwire and still stainless after all these years. Beyond it you see the beginning of a vast expanse of pavement stretching to the horizon, flat as Kansas. The wind blows across it, bringing hints of ozone, sulfur, formaldehyde. The rain has turned the pavement into a mirror-like slick.
     A weathered sign dangles on the fence. Some industrious soul with boltcutters has engineered a waist-high opening in the links. The ruined city huddles to the north, across the water.

You hang yourself up on the fence.

You notice some details:
      Some of the dead fish look like they were eaten to pieces by corrosive chemicals; others are mutants -- scaleless, four-eyed, or having rudimentary paws in place of fins.
      A heap of every conceivable kind of canister and bucket, all marked with that red, three-armed symbol.
      The official-looking sign reading DANGER - KEEP OUT! carries the familiar radiation symbol, the more arcane and menacing horns of the biohazard emblem, and a couple of novel symbols based, like the other two, on triaxial radial symmetry, captioned CHEMOHAZARD and NANOHAZARD. To these has been added, in red dayglo stencil -- you guessed it -- another triaxial rune with three L-shaped arms. You seem to remember more ... perhaps if you look thoughtful, it will come back.
      Yes, wasn't it a few years before the apocalypse ... something about an industrial region that the Army Corps of Engineers had to pave over after it got too contaminated? You had no idea it was so close to Bellona, or so big. Maybe this site had something to do with the catastrophe? Or maybe it's some kind of crazy metaphor about the apocalyptic processes tolerated in the everyday functioning of technological civilization...naah, what a nutty idea.

You see Dinghy here.

EXITS:
      [ jump ] Middle of South Channel. You wade out into the oily waters, then swim out to ....
      You peer through the fence, taking in the vastness of the desolation. [ south ] Dog Solitude. You stoop and wriggle through the fence, acclimating yourself to the smell.

This place has a certain ambiance...
     Something howls out on the unnatural plain.
     A tatter-winged, half-dead butterfly flutters through the fence.
     The wind shifts slightly, and you get a whiff of hydrocarbons.
     A fly alights on one of the dead fish, twitches, and falls belly-up.
     Far away, you hear a Crispin-Glover-like cackle.