UrbEx in The City of Cin beyond The Fourth Dimension

There is a faction of people in our culture today that enjoy Urban Exploration, the peaceful infiltration of abandoned buildings for the sheer sake of curiosity. This is easy to relate to, at least for me. The quiet, tense joy of being where you are not supposed to be; the wonder of discovery and exploration in a local place, the familiar-yet-unfamiliar feel to it all.

There is a problem with this pastime, however. Namely, you cannot explore buildings that no longer exist. The two solutions to this problem are to be very alert about the overall state of abandoned buildings in your city; or to have a time machine. Being me, the obvious solution is to have the latter. But, if one has a time machine, why just visit an empty building? Why not compare their peaks with their troughs, their doldrums down the ages, their very birth and demise?

Therefore, if given a culture in which time travel is safely and widely integrated (i.e. you will be arrested and tried for killing your five-year-old grandpa), there will be a faction of people engaged in UrbEx across the fourth dimension. And there will be a sub-faction that specialize in malls. Why? Because of structures like this: Cinderella City.

One of the last products of '60s culture, revamped for the '80s, left to die for most of the '90s. The cultural information you could gain from watching this place throughout the decades could fill a small library. But it's never enough for some to merely observe. No, you have to explore it for yourself. It's not really historical research if you don't eat the food, wear the clothes, and have the black plague cleaned out of your system when you get back.

So what happens? Dead mall walkers happen. (These are people who walk 'dead' malls, not mall walkers who are zombies or similarly reanimated corpses. Both have great potential for stories, but I did not write all of this to trudge face-first into the idea of a parody of Dawn of the Dead.) People who have specialized immune systems that prevent diseases from spreading outside of their designated timeframe, computer-accessible video and audio recorders integrated into their eyes and ears, and a natural sense of curiosity. A fair amount of acting skills or social malleability are good to have as well.

Simply suit up in the attire of the time, maybe even buying more appropriate pieces from the local shops (if and when they exist), spend the day wandering about like an idiot, then quietly slip off to an out-of-the-way restroom or locker bay and bing off back to your own time.

"Oh!" you might say, "It's just a shopping mall, surely there are better places for historical observation!" To which I retort, yep. You have a huge swath of professional historians to dig around at the places of truly great and noble time, especially if your civilization has time travel at its disposal. So, who ends up being dead mall walkers? Amateur and aspiring historians, tourists that like to quietly laugh at the more primitive fashions, or bored people who heard about the activity through the media and wanted to give it a go just to say they did.

…I don't actually know where I was going with all this.