At around the halfway point in book 1 of my urban fantasy story, which is set in the USA between 1998 and 1999, the heroine finally finds the hero in a top secret research facility run by a coven of witches who worship the goddess of curiosity. This facility is constructed beneath a major American city and, to minimize the chances that the humans will discover signs of its existence, is not connected to the city's infrastructure in any way and has no doors, tunnels, or access points in or out except via magical portals. These portals lead to numerous minor secret bases of theirs across the country, and when the heroine breaks the hero out and they make their escape together, they wind up forced to escape through one portal in particular and then destroy it on the other side to prevent themselves from being pursued. Which leads to the plot of this part of the story: the portal led to somewhere in the midwestern united states, right at the start of the North American blizzard of 1999. The protagonists are now forced to survive isolated in the blizzard with minimal supplies while the freezing cold shuts down the heroine's most useful power and she's forced to rely mostly on her new ally for survival. So I have to pick a location that could reasonably be accessed in normal, decent weather (so that it makes sense as a place the witches would have hidden their portal waypoint at), but which during that blizzard would have suddenly become incredibly isolated, and the fight to get back to civilization would become incredibly dangerous. Unfortunately, I don't know much of anything about that part of the US, so I thought I'd ask around here if anyone has a good suggestion for where my heroes should wind up when they go through that portal.
This is probably a clearer description of the layout than the readers deserve, or will care for - and I'm already lost. These things are all plot devices. Nearly all - it does mention the heroine rescuing the hero and then the roles reversing. If there's going to be any mushy stuff, one wants incredibly dangerous scenarios - so there's plausible deniability and it's all socially excusable. But looking at that wikipedia article (and vaguely remembering my brother being stuck in it and having to sleep in some kind of sports hall):- 39 auto-related deaths 5 snowmobile-related deaths 32 deaths from over-exertion and heart attacks primarily due to shoveling snow 2 froze to death That's not exactly John Franklin. - "Nooo! Don't shovel anymore! I love you!" The sense of danger comes from the descriptions not the historicity. Creative license allows the OP to invent somewhere that's up a mountain and covered in trees and 50 miles from the nearest road - even if there is no such place in the Atlas. Or there are infinitely many other possibilities. The top of a tall building in a blizzard could be difficult: the fire escape door is frozen shut, they have to jump from ledge to ledge and stand on gargoyles. Two principles for plot devices are:- - keep them to a minimum. They are never where the interest comes from it's about what they reveal in the characters - they serve the fiction, not the facts. If mist freezing on the surface of Lake Tahoe is what'll develop the themes and reveal the characters, don't mind if it's in the wrong state or unrealistically far from Reno, or the lake didn't really freeze over in that blizzard, or it doesn't really usually have a houseboat with chicken legs standing in the middle of it Yeah. Houseboat of Baba Yaga. Normally the portal opens behind its left funnel, and you scratch its feathers as you go past. But in the blizzard nobody's fed it a virgin, so it's fuckin' pissed and it's going to hunt the hero and heroine over the ice until either it runs out of coal or they make sweet love and taste like earwax. If we don't know the geography, it's incumbent on us to make stuff up. What's usually not a good idea is to hunt after realism and build up a travel guide - when (1) we're here to tell a story and (2) we've never been to the area. < "We write what we know" If it's speculative fiction - where witches do magic - realism is often a crutch. We can be realistic about what we know - and then if the reader is bored of our characters they at least learn some local geography so that's good - but if we start leaning into what we don't know the research burden can become exponential without the writing necessarily ever becoming convincing. It's better to go the other way and be fantastic. Another approach is to realise that most fiction can be located anywhere - locations are unreal in fiction, they are just bags of descriptions. It's not like real life where people have to really be in them all the time. So if it becomes taxing to use the Midwestern US as a setting, what are the downsides to relocating the whole thing to a place the OP has lived? Are they really so serious? The benefits are the research burden falls to almost nothing and the descriptions become more natural because we know how we feel about places we've lived. So we know how our characters would feel - so we can write about that instead of what they see. Researching what they would see is hard enough - but to get the feelings of a particular neighbourhood needs an eyewitness account and finding one of those in the right style to suit a story is pot luck. w.bogart mentioned Chicago - one of my favourite stories is set there (Jimmy Corrigan) so maybe I'd be able to find a few passages to use as a reference quickly enough, but otherwise I'd have to trawl through https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fiction_set_in_Chicago. I'm good at stealing other people's descriptions and changing all the words - I can do that almost unconsciously - and it's a perfectly fair research technique. The problem is that it requires so much luck to find a good description to crib from. IMO finding a real location on the map fitting the OP's requirements is only the first part. The real battle is to then describe the place convincingly.
I’m not answering your question, but the first thing I thought when reading this is why have do they have the facility beneath a large city but no access points. I understand the portals but they could be located elsewhere just as easy. This of course may be answered in other portions of the book. regarding the topic at hand, perhaps a small town, laststop before going over a large mountain pass. Everything locked up for weeks. I don’t know if u want them totally alone or some interaction from outside people.
The biggest sticking point in your scenario is that no town in the Midwest is THAT isolated. I lived in the tiny town of Newbury, Geauga county, Ohio during that blizzard. Geauga is part of the Ohio snow belt and we got hammered, but people were out plowing pretty quickly. Other than being without power, which is common enough there that you prep for it, life went on pretty much as usual. I think the schools were closed for a week, but it's not like people were hunkered down and struggling to survive. When you live in the Great Lakes region, snow storms are normal. This one was bigger than usual but nothing most people couldn't handle. I lived in the NY/PA/OH stretch of Lake Erie for 55 years, and I honestly can't think of a single place in the region that would be that far out and isolated. Even around Chautauqua Lake, which is mostly vacation rentals, there are people who live there permanently and a lot of people come in to ski. Your characters wouldn't have to go far before they found someone with a 4 wheel drive truck and enough supplies to share.
Hell, I don't even remember the winter of '99. For location, you could have them pop through to somewhere in the Rocky mountains or perhaps the Appalachians or Catskills.
I just saw a video about how remote and unexplored large parts of the Appalchians are, and that people disappear there all the time. Here it is: Why People Disappear in the Appalachian Mountains The portal would have to let out way out in the forest on a mountainside, not near any roads or anything. And you could use the standard "People in Appalachia are inbred hillbilies" trope we've seen so many times. I mean, you don't need to actually have them be inbred hillbillies, but the protags believe they are, so don't go to them for help. Or they just need to stay away from people altogether or something. But hey, if experienced hikers and climbers, trying to stay on the Appalachian Trail, keep disappearing, it must be some pretty rough and rugged country, and a long way to any form of civilization. Closer to the Northeast than the Midwest though.
My city, Colorado Springs, was the city that had the people freeze to death. They were trapped in their car on Powers I believe, a couple miles from where I lived at the time. It's a pretty big road. Even back then it was at least 3 lanes on each side. If you google it now, businesses are dense along it, but it wasn't like that so much back then. You would have little shopping centers just at the major intersections and that was mostly it. It skirted the east side of the city. Neighborhoods did go over to the farther east side of it (because that's where I was) but it wasn't like that all the way north and south. There were big swaths of empty land. If you got stuck in that, there wasn't much you could do but wait it out. Those drifts were nuts. Even the plows couldn't get through them. I believe one of the army bases here (Ft. Carson?) sent out a bunch of heavy equipment to help clear it all. They had to bulldoze certain roads. The drifts were taller than the plows.
Yeah, it can happen if there's a blizzard or enough snow and ice. Like in The Shining. That was a mountain resort town, and it was totally inaccessible in the winter unless you used a snow cat. I mean, it's a movie (and a novel), but it was researched I'm sure.* I'm thinking mountainous areas especially would be vunerable. Might need to rethink that. King has been known to write some pretty crazy things without bothering to check. Apparently especially concerning guns.
Nah, that's not nuts. There are plenty of mountainous New England areas only accessible by snow cats, and those are barely ant hills compared to the Rockies.
If you're still looking for ideas for this story, I'd say Michigan's upper peninsula Very remote. Good amount of snow.
I cannot argue with this answer. Not the answer I'm sure they were looking for, but not a WRONG answer.
