Welcome to Oakdale

Oakdale is a peculiar little American-style town tucked away somewhere in the Canadian countryside, seemingly separated from the rest of the world by an unusual fog-covered bridge. Despite technically being located within Canada, Oakdale feels like a picture-perfect slice of 1990s America. Its streets are lined with small diners, family-owned businesses, gas stations, grocery stores, suburban homes, and little shops with colorful neon signs. Pickup trucks, classic muscle cars, station wagons, and IROCs cruise down its roads while classic rock and country music play from radios.

Life in Oakdale is slow, friendly, and remarkably inexpensive. Gasoline costs around five cents per gallon. Groceries cost mere pennies. A full meal at a diner might cost twelve cents, a cup of coffee costs two pennies, and a brand-new car might set someone back eight dollars. Houses can be purchased for a handful of dollars, and even major purchases rarely exceed twenty.

The people of Oakdale are perfectly accustomed to their peculiar little world. They treat twenty dollars as an extravagant sum, consider a fifty-dollar purchase practically reckless spending, and regard someone carrying several hundred dollars as extraordinarily wealthy. Someone flashing a hundred-dollar bill might as well be showing off a personal fortune.

Oakdale's economy is equally bizarre. A single twenty-dollar transaction can increase the town's entire economy by an astonishing 64 percent. A generous tip at a diner can become local news, and a visitor spending a few hundred dollars can cause an economic boom that residents discuss for weeks.

Despite its oddities, Oakdale is a charming, peaceful community. Its residents are generally welcoming, neighborly, and a little old-fashioned. People know their neighbors, shopkeepers remember their regular customers, and gossip travels faster than the local telephone network.

The town is full of quintessential 1990s American nostalgia: VHS rental stores, arcade cabinets, payphones, roller rinks, diners with jukeboxes, shopping malls, cassette tapes, landline telephones, and cars that haven't seen a factory assembly line in decades.

There is, however, one particularly strange detail: nobody seems to know exactly where Oakdale is. Roads lead into town, but finding a road back out is another matter entirely. Visitors occasionally arrive through the surrounding countryside, often after encountering an unfamiliar foggy bridge.

To the people who live here, Oakdale is just home.

To everyone else, it's a place where a twenty-dollar bill can make you one of the richest people in town.