Paper Street

How to walk it

• Arrow keys, or W, A, S and D, walk you ahead, back and across the road while the street has the keyboard. The buttons under the street do the same, by pressing or by holding.
• Q and E turn you left and right, R and F look up and down, and X faces ahead again; so do the buttons beside the walking ones. Dragging across the street looks round too; on a touch screen a sideways drag turns and the page still scrolls under your thumb. Everything keeps facing you as you turn, the way cut-outs in a toy theatre face the audience.
• Tab goes from door to door down the street, and stands you in front of each one. Enter goes in.
• Steps or gliding. In steps, every press jumps you one stop, or turns you a twelfth of the way round, with nothing moving in between. Gliding walks you smoothly for as long as you hold a key or a button. Gentle starts in steps and Regular and MAX start gliding; the switch changes it for this visit, and nothing remembers which you chose.
• Nothing moves by itself. The street stands still until you walk, at every setting of the dial, and nothing on it flashes.

Walking into a room

A door marked You can walk in opens its room here, in its own world, drawn in that room’s own colours, never the street’s. Somewhere inside is the room’s own page, on a screen or a wall, and standing in front of it you read it and press things on it as the page itself; its links that go to another page take the whole window with them. Back out onto the street, or your browser’s Back, takes you out to the door you came in by. Where you are goes after the # in the address, which never reaches a server, so a room you are standing in can be sent to somebody. Every other door takes you to its page, as it does on the street.

Rooms you can walk into are built one at a time, each in its own world, never from one pattern for all of them.

Who walks with you

If a familiar out of Chimera Obscura is following you round the street, it walks with you here too, down at your feet. Signed on to the CB, Bring my avatar puts the avatar you wear on the CB in front of you, and you walk as it; until you do, or if you have none, you walk with no body at all, because nobody here is handed one.

What it is made of

The light on Paper Street is the street’s own. Nothing lights it from above: every front throws a pool of its own colour on the road in front of it, so the road is lit in patches all the way down, the colours of whatever stands beside it. The backcloth is a printed night, and the stars on it are paint. Under every front is the fold that keeps it standing.

What it keeps

Nothing. Opening the page reads the front page, once. Bring my avatar asks for your avatars, once, when you press it, with the pass the radio already keeps. Your familiar is read from your own browser, where it already is. Where you walked is not written down anywhere, and nothing here is counted: not doors passed, not rooms gone into, not how far you walked.