Mirrorside & Mirrorside

written by Lexi Antoku

Whether Mirrorside & Mirrorside is a single city or two is a question more philosophical and semantic than practical. Linked by gateways in their reflective surfaces, the Mirrorsides flow into each other. Mirrorside & Mirrorside is one city in two bodies.

Cities of Mirrors

Each city calls the other its Mirrorside, but long years of cultural exchange have led to recognition that this is a mutual relationship. They each have their own worlds and their own people with their own lives.

The Reflected World

When you look at any reflective surface in Mirrorside & Mirrorside, you see yourself, but you also see your locale’s Mirrorside (or, more casually, its mirror side). Most spaces have close correspondences, so close that if you don’t look carefully, you may not even realize that you’re seeing a different world. Lately, places considered suitable for travel are decorated differently on each side to help people tell which side they’re on.

Reflected People

When viewed across a reflection, people are shadowy and indistinct. The sounds they make are both muffled and echo distantly. Scents are fainter. While this once led to fear and distrust, crossing through a mirror allows you to sense those people in full detail. The mirrors make perception of any living being you left behind—person, animal, gem, or plant alike—just as vague until you cross back over. The mirrors themselves seem to be the cause of this, but it’s more as an inconvenience than as a problem or cause for alarm.

Art without Borders

The days of separation and fear are long past (and most Mirrorsiders find them embarrassing). The myths of devils or servants of dragons snatching children away are long-gone. Modern Mirrorside & Mirrorside has a long-intertwined artistic tradition, particularly in shared architecture born of curiosity, research, and eventual exploration.

Major artistic installations are designed to be viewed from one world, or the other, or while standing on the threshold between them. Impressive buildings with standing mirror-gates built into them create shared-space structures that spill deliberately from one realm to the other. Architects coordinated for years to create the Grand Walk, a boundary-breaking park that serves as a center of social life and commerce joining the two sides through the largest single mirror in the city.

Beyond the Cities

Each Mirrorside exists within its own, fully extant world beyond the sprawl. While they can mostly come and go as they please, they cannot explore the wider world of the other side. Leaving the city in your world works perfectly, but on your Mirrorside, thick clouds of fog grow ever-denser until you find yourself back in the city.

Predictably, native and immigrant Mirrorsiders love outsider physical arts, sciences, music, history, philosophy—every one of them is captivating, pieces of a world so close they can almost taste it. Indeed, cuisine from abroad is one of the most universally valued commodities, second perhaps only to firsthand tales of distant lands.

Echoes

Echoes in Mirrorside are almost inevitably people who have left the city and don’t intend to return, playing out old routines in their former home. If they return, curious coincidences will divert any random or deliberate meeting with their own echo unless a Weaver intervenes.