Nod
The Moons: Nod has moons but nobody agrees on how many. Ask ten residents and you'll get answers ranging from two to six. The moons are pale, featureless, and do not appear to orbit anything. Attempts to count them systematically have produced inconsistent results even when conducted simultaneously by multiple observers standing next to each other. Looking directly at them for too long tends to create a deep discomfort in the viewer. The Chroniclers stopped trying to maintain an official count three centuries ago.
The Smell: Long-term residents of Nod develop a smell that supernaturals can detect and humans cannot. It is faint, difficult to describe (mineral, cold, something like wet stone after rain), and it never fully fades, even after years back on Earth. Theriae with strong olfactory senses can identify a Noddish person at a distance. The scent has no known health implications but it marks people in ways they cannot perceive with obvious utility for anyone inclined to track former residents who thought they'd left the city behind.
Rain: It rains in Nod. There is no weather system that would produce rain, no clouds in any conventional sense, or water cycle that any Shaper or scholar has been able to identify. The rain falls from a dark sky, is clean, and carries a faint metallic taste that long-term residents stop noticing. It follows no schedule. The rain seems to have a character that is obvious to certain people. Soft cold rains seem to cleanse the streets while harder, hotter ones seem to precede or coincide with trouble. True storms, with thunder and lightning, are always a signal to stay inside; that's when the most dangerous creatures in Nod emerge.
Birds: There are birds in Nod. Crows, starlings, and species that don't correspond to anything in Earth's taxonomy. They are not Theriae, they are, by every available measure, simply birds. They nest in the Warrens, roost on the Tower's lower protrusions, and steal food from Ashmarket stalls. No one knows where they came from, what they eat when the market closes, or how they survive in a city with no sun and an active ghast population. Their presence is unexplained and, for reasons that residents find difficult to articulate, faintly comforting.
Cats: Housecats seem to be able to see through the veil and many Spectres are deathly afraid of them. Ghasts won't eat them and geists actively avoid them. Noddish Scholars propose some relationship to the long vanished Egyptian Aeons, Bastet and Sekhmet.
Pets: Keeping pets is not uncommon but they are chosen carefully. Some animals are more susceptible to the transformative powers of the city than others and many react poorly to non-human species. Even worse, some Theriae take great offense to the keeping of certain animals in captivity.
Tourists: Visitors from other Domains are sometimes called Tourists. They spend money freely, struggle with or disregard local customs, and are prime targets for Nods flim-flam artists. Some of them pay for exactly that experience.
The Sound: Nod hums. The sound is below the threshold of conscious hearing for most species but Skulks and some Theriae can detect it. It is constant, unchanging, and originates from no identifiable source. The pitch has been measured by Council and Kuron engineers and found to be consistent across every district, every depth, and every elevation tested, which should be acoustically impossible in a city of this size and structural variety. The hum does not correspond to any known frequency in eldritch language. It does not appear to do anything. It is simply there, the way a heartbeat is there.
Midway
Habits: Mortals who live near thin points in the Veil develop behaviors they cannot explain. Locking doors that are already locked. Avoiding a particular intersection even when it adds ten minutes to the commute. Leaving a glass of water by the back door before bed. Setting an extra place at dinner. The behaviors are specific to individuals, consistent over years, and virtually impossible to stop, even with conscious effort. Those who manage it report an acute unease that persists until they resume. The Germaine Foundation has documented over two hundred such habits across Midway's population and has not determined whether they are protective, compulsive, a subconcious expression of awareness of the veil, or something else.
Clocks: Mechanical and quartz driven clocks near thin points in the Veil lose time. The loss is small, a seconds or two per day, not quite enough to raise mundane concern but consistent enough to be observable. Since computer and mobile clocks rely on network calls they are unaffected and so the distortion goes unnoticed by most but the cumulative drift means that a mechanical clock operating within half a mile of a confirmed thin point will lose roughly five to nine minutes per year. The Germaine Foundation uses the drift as a detection tool. A clock that starts losing time in a neighborhood that was previously unaffected means the Veil has thinned there, and the Foundation would very much like to know how those two things are related.