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Post by Insano-Man on Sept 18, 2018 19:21:33 GMT -5
This topic is a child of the Cloneston article directory.DEAD DROPVertical movement is a fact of life in Cloneston. Much of the city is made up of skyscrapers and massed collections of conjoined structures. Architecture is left to the fickle whims of the AI senators. Factories are stacked on top of stories-high daycare centers, cloning facilities are adjoined to orphanages, and hospitals are tucked behind walls of munitions plants. A single structure may have every possible industry and service within it from bottom to top, no matter how inefficient it might be. Connecting most of the city are mind-bending weaves of tram lines. Some span the entire length of the city, others go no more than several blocks. Many overlap, connect, wrap around eachother, or even simply collide. Some lead into enormous elevators, others weave through buildings like high-flying subway tunnels. Some pass through permanent clouds of industrial smog, others simply end in a sudden drop kilometers high. New tram lines are added and old lines moved or damaged on a daily basis. Navigating Cloneston's public transit network is as much luck as it is skill. Private transportation is a rare commodity. Few buildings are connected by skybridges, fewer still by roadways. Air transport is mostly restricted to the city's clone police, who prowl the skyline endlessly and regularly disrupt the city's tram lines. Only a scarce handful of areas feature the horizontal space and infrastructure needed for cars. These regions are mostly built on top of enormous plates linked between multiple skyscrapers, and few connect to eachother. Some lie low and close to the ground, even connected to the floor below by highways. Others sit atop buildings like mushroom caps, drowning out enormous swaths of sunlight below. Life on the plates around the city's top is often affluent. Of the score of reasons why, sunlight is one of the most noticeable. Little much of it penetrates past Cloneston's roofs. Clouds of smog, knots of buildings, messes of utility lines, and tangles of tram rails blot out the bulk of the city's sunlight. Below the midpoint of the city's vertical expanse, the only light leftover is from the constant glow of civilization. Apartments, factories, radio towers, and street lights paint everything in a haze of yellow-orange. Successive layers of smog and infrastructure further dim available lighting closer to the ground. Cloneston's floor is in perpetual twilight, and only the outermost limits of the city retain any visibility near the bottom. At Cloneston's floor, life is at its most haggard. Factories, AI cores, and cloning facilities dominate the complex, overdeveloped space at the bottom. Some are still growing upwards as more and more infrastructure is added atop them. Few civilian vehicles are present; the roads are simply too dangerous. Between reckless clone vehicles, choking miasmas of toxic gas, and wandering hordes of monsters, venturing outdoors at Cloneston's roots is tantamount to suicide. Wars for the city's infrastructure run rampant across the streets between clones of different factions. Tides of half-intelligent mutants compete for the scraps of society above. Nightmarish monsters stalk the streets, ambushing clones and civilians alike. Half-finished clones emerge to the surface in disjointed warbands at war with everything around them. Parts of ailing buildings and unfortunate aircraft rain down intermittently, choking the streets with rubble and shattered corpses. At the bottom, the secret struggle for Cloneston is at its strongest - and its noisiest. Below, in the underground, conflict rapidly tapers off. Automated sentry turrets, clone defenders, and layer upon layer of security networks lock down traffic to all but that ordained by the city's senators. Battles in Cloneston's underground are mostly limited to electronic warfare. The few physical fights are largely carried out by hackers clashing with clones, prowling monsters, or other hackers of different factions. In the AI cores and cloning facilities, even the monsters help keep the tenuous peace; with limited prey and poor access, they do little but act as barriers to invaders. Further below, in the deep underground of Cloneston, mining infrastructure weaves between deep building supports and industrial facilities. Automated mining drones, clone defenders, and layer upon layer of gnarled caverns lock down traffic to all but the most vicious and agile of monsters. Clones and drones regularly clash in isolated shootouts with hungry beasts. Tunnel collapses are routine and sometimes felt in the city above. Mixes of abandoned sewage systems and crushed-down structures afford occasional access to the mutants and monsters of the wastelands. Ordinary people are scarce and unwelcome.
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Post by Insano-Man on Jan 30, 2019 8:51:56 GMT -5
MAP OF CLONESTON Click this image for a simplified version without region titles or borders.Most of Cloneston might be a raging warzone, but the people of the city still have to figure out how to get around it. For that purpose, Cloneston is broken up into a handful of territories that emphasize topography over politics. Marked out on the map above are the biggest regions of the city, with borders drawn to best reckoning. It should be noted that these boundaries are anything but static. Shifting economic turns, political struggles, and space junk can redraw the map on a moment's notice. Likewise, the prevailing conditions in each aren't laws as much as the clones would try to will them so. It's not impossible to see a half-finished warband hijacking a tower in the Uptown Flats, nor a posh plate down in the Barrens. - Cornerstone is the noisy southwestern tip of Cloneston. It's named for the now-pulverized Cornerstone General Power & Utilities building, which gives an idea as to what the region's all about. Cornerstone is flooded full of power plants, industrial sites, and related services that are absolutely vital to the city. At the same time, it's one of the ugliest, messiest places to live. Pollution of all kinds covers it from top to bottom, whether it's light, noise, smog, or air traffic. Likewise, it's an AI haven full of upstarts and fidgety small-time senators. Wars go on just about every weekend over major power facilities. Every so often, the bigger AIs duke it out in a proxy battle for the top producers in the region.
Cornerstone is heavy on AIs, but it's light on people. The people that do live there are packed up around the eastern edges, usually around the edge of the Southern Industrial Corridor. Slim pickings on housing means that most living things deeper in are clones, and even the cops don't have many departments in the area. Clones cluster more towards the edges of the territory, near the entry points from the scums. A few high-profile airbases serve wasteland patrols at the extreme southwest. The rest stay on call for AI shootouts closer to the center. - The Southern Industrial Corridor is Cloneston's southern provider. It's what the name suggests; it's where the vast majority of production goes on. Refineries, factories, city-bottom mining centers - if it's a domestic product, the SIC probably had a hand in it. Automated supply centers and distribution hubs line the outskirts. Pipework and tram lines tangle across everywhere. The Corridor gets its name from the long extension up into the center of the city. The "handle", as it's called, is full of heavy tram lines meant to get products across the city. Most of it was reclaimed from the Downtown Barrens after the Calvin Street Incident. For a time, it extended across the city, but Midwave pushed out most of the northern drones and loaders around the turn of the century.
The short supply of major residential areas in the Corridor means it's largely uninhabited. The handful of people there are aliens, squatters, and clone custodians. That comes with the symptom of dark, dingy, robot-owned towers covering most of its expanse. Nicknames for the SIC include "the hammer" for its shape, which is made by the intrusion into the Barrens up north. "The trench" gets around thanks to the low-rise plates dominating that area. "The alien factory" is one of the stranger ones. It focuses on the clusters of alien enclaves that clump together after making it out of the Transorbital Shipping Sector. Neul Industrial, Bazo'Zaraddar, and the Drassa Enclave - or what's left of it - are all prime examples. - The Downtown Barrens are the part of Cloneston that really makes it a huskland. They're a big sea of ruins, rubble, and toppled towers leftover from the Calvin Street Incident. The whole place gets its name from the fact that the entire city is about a third its usual height inside the region. Trams are scarce, power is unreliable, and the only reliable occupations are scavenging or starving to death. The only means to get across it are usually cargo trams running along the tract reclaimed by the Southern Industrial Corridor. It's a wasteland of building stumps that makes the Chopping Blocks far up north sound tame by comparison.
City folk don't live in the Barrens, but wasters do. The Barrens are one of the gateways from the scums and the undercity to the towers up above. Mutants own the lower buildings, squatters and scavs stay in the structures safe enough to sleep in. Even then, the population is a footnote compared to the rest of Cloneston. Ordinary people stay as far away as possible. Clones are mostly transient residents coming up from cloning plants or passing by on air patrols. The lack of lights and life keeps the whole place dim, dark, and dusty. - West Cloneston is the part of the city without a proper name. People just know it as the "western city", "West Residential Zone", and a platter of other names. "West" is the only part that ever keeps steady. For most of the city and everyone outside, West Cloneston is the real Cloneston. It's where the city has its smoggy slums, tall towers, and precarious plates. It's where commerce and violence mix up with an electrified urban area a few hundred meters above the ground. It's a dystopia at its finest - and not many people are happy with it.
That fact is a major statement on Cloneston itself; West Cloneston is one of the biggest population centers in the city. It's packed with natives from top to bottom. Spacers trickle in from the Transorbital Shipping Sector, wasters retire from the edge of the city facing the scums. AIs flock to the place to take advantage of the population. The police presence is proportionate; it's one of the biggest concentrations of cloning facilities in the city. Most clones see their pod day down in the western undercity and clamber up through the gangs and freaks that own the middle. - The Uptown Flats are the northwest rich quarter of Cloneston. They're the polar opposite of the Downtown Barrens. High-rising buildings knife through clouds, capped with pristine plates and powerful people. Flat-topped towers own the horizon like a forest of steel fungus. Industrial facilities are almost totally absent. The sky's even visible in some areas. The region is the cleanest, nicest place in Cloneston - even if that's not saying much. Down at the middle, around the rest of the city's level, it's the same as everywhere else.
The dichotomy is the same for the people living there. At the top, the rich, famous, and dangerous lead lives of luxury. They own private militias of clones, mercenaries, and hackers. They flirt with AIs and captain the city's industry from up high. Around the middle, gangs struggle to get recognized by the big names above. Average folk suffer in squalor. Clones crack down on everything from parking fines to jaywalking wherever they haven't been swiped or bought out. Between the heightened clone discipline and interest from senators, wars in the undercity are twice as loud as anywhere else. Mutants and monsters are packed into warbands and blood hordes more than anything else. - Midwave gets its name from plenty of sources. It's a center for Cloneston's middle class, midway into the middle of the city. It used to ride the wavy line made by the Southern Industrial Corridor, until it took over the northern trench around the end of last century. What identifies Midwave more than its name is what it's filled with; entertainment centers. Most of the territory is a lightless light show, with a big sea of towers cut across by neon and digital signs. Plates are packed with theaters, clubs, and communications towers, all with their lights blinking against the black.
The source of the city center's nightlife is simple. Midwave is one of Cloneston's most populated areas. People there are mostly city folk mingling with the occasional spacer and alien. Clones are at the city's average in the territory, usually on a leash or under watch by nearby business owners. AIs drift around in the background, mostly looking for cores in the undercity and contacts in the clubs. The real stars are Midwave's hackers. About half of the city's cyberwarfare experts earned their reputation in Midwave, either solo or with one of its big cybersecurity houses. - The Northeast Commercial Sector is plainly named and plainly straightforward. It's Cloneston's economic heart, where most businesses have their offices. It's where most of the city's food comes from - and where most of it ends up after it's been sent to the sewers. Industrial facilities chug along where the Southern Industrial Corridor used to hook into the sector. Thanks to all that, the NCS is a hotspot of flashpoint conflicts. Corporate wars, mercenary feuds, and senator-backed strikes are all business as usual. The constant fighting is the source to blame for city's constant stream of famines.
The Commercial Sector isn't especially populated compared to the rest of Cloneston, but the people there are major drivers in the city's economy. Clones are common, mostly under control by the corporations that are closest by. As part and parcel of Cloneston's chaos, mercenaries are the prime contenders in the NCS. If a corporation isn't stacked deep in another's contractors, it's usually a mercenary outfit itself. The undercity isn't any stranger to spillovers from the fights up above. Mutants swarm in from the scums to prove themselves up against the armies and assassins roving around. - The HEXAK Exclusion Zone is a no-man's land of absolute terror. More than just that, it's recognized outside the city as a genuine terrorscape - a place where the rules of reality are just strong suggestions. It's a classic huskland with broken buildings and none of Cloneston's trademark smog. Behind that simple mask is a place where a pantheon of prankster gods waits to peel apart anyone who wanders in. Soulless husks of people pop in from nothingness. Physics flails around in a rage. Things happen for no reason at all in HEXAK. Sometimes, those things are flung into the city - at hypersonic velocity.
HEXAK is so bad that a quarantine was put into place and a wall built on the city's side. Its only population - apart from the merry ghosts inside - are thousands of clones standing guard on that wall. A council of no less than six strategic coordinators manages the operation, officially titled the Northern Security Quarantine. Even wasters know the place well enough to avoid it completely. Mutants are exiled there as capital punishment. Some are forced to jog through on a rite of passage. The things that live there, the native creatures - those are all horrors the city does not speak of. - The scums are the part of the Cloneston Wasteland immediately around the city itself. Some people consider the undercity a part of the scums, and some of them are even wasters. City folk and wasters alike use "scums" as a euphemism for the whole of the wastes. Around Cloneston, they're at their worst; collapsed towers, empty shells, half-built buildings, and rubble everywhere. Everything is a slurry of sludge, sewage, and skeletons pitched out from the city's edge. Running through all the waste and wastes are the pipelines, mining tunnels, and freight lines connecting Cloneston to its outlying mining posts.
The people of Cloneston don't own the wastes. The people who own the stink and the slime are the true natives - the wasters - and the half-finished clones that stagger out of the city. They mix in with monsters and mutants flowing in and out of the wider wastelands. They band together in little shantytowns and pipe villages wherever they can find a blind spot in the air coverage. Clones own the outer edges of the city, running patrols across the city's outlands arteries. Some have outposts in the outer scums to improve their range. For people coming and leaving the city, the scums are their first welcome and last farewell. - The Restricted Residence Zone is an area off the side of HEXAK that was locked off for Beth's private use. It's an empty part of the city that's home to nothing but abandoned buildings and the occasional mystery lab deep at the bottom. No one knows what goes on in the murky depths of the city's best-known blacksite. Only Beth's rivals are in any hurry to find out. As part of the first senator's monopoly on the region, only AVALON mercenaries and Beth clones are allowed entrance. Everyone else is a squatter, a spy, or a mutant.
- The East Breach Ruins is a nest of mutants and monsters eating at eachother every night and day. It used to be part of the Northeast Commercial Sector until the Siege of the East dug into it in 1184. That was Cloneston's wake-up call to the narrow-but-deadly possibility of a wasteland invasion. Since then, it's been quarantined, and not a single tram line runs in or out of it. The rest is all abandoned towers and crumbling skyscrapers. The only residents are mutants, wasters, and the occasional unlucky mercenary sent out on a recon run.
- The Striyman Sinkhole is a mixed bag of NCS holdouts and Downtown rubble. It's centered on a sinkhole of catastrophic size, at least 20km in diameter. Underneath that is an even deeper pit leading into a hole carved out from a land formation that came up from the Chambers of Myth. The surroundings are sloped, slanted, and steadily sinking in. The clusters of buildings that are safe to inhabit mostly file themselves away as part of the Northeast Commercial Sector. The rest are lumped in with the Barrens. The sinkhole was formed in the wake of the Calvin Street Incident, after the shockwave knocked the underground loose.
- The Tobias Freeman Plunge is what could've happened if the Striyman Sinkhole didn't hurt so much. It formed in around 1153 OSC when a geodisplacement caused a major cave-in for one of the city's biggest mineshafts. A hole about 3km deep opened up with a sinkhole around Striyman's size. The incident was a catastrophe, but the city adapted in short order. Today, the Plunge is filled with buildings built expressly for the pit. Towers rise up along the sides of the hole, with mining operations digging even deeper. Beyond that, it's not much different from the rest of Cloneston; full of clones, slums, and misery in the middle of an AI hurricane.
- The Transorbital Shipping Sector is a mostly-abandoned stretch of plate-top spaceports and freight yards in the city's southwest. It was pieced together in a start-and-die spacer gold rush around the July Stampede of 1240 OSC. The fighting of the time drove off interest only by the time the infrastructure had been pieced together. Nowadays, most of it is empty, rusting, and swamped with squatters. Abandoned spacecraft lie dead and dormant all over. It's still the city's widest pipeline to orbit, but only a few spacers ever come down through it. Trips up are twice as rare.
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Post by Insano-Man on Jan 30, 2019 9:53:30 GMT -5
CITY OWNERSHIP MAP Click this image for a simplified version with region titles only.No one can ever say they've owned Cloneston. Not very many can say they've ever owned enough to fit on a map. Those tiny few are the senators; Cloneston's kingpins, most of them AIs on any given day. The colors on their turf are usually just as important as the way the land's laid out. Drawn out on this map are the city's biggest names and their biggest slices of land. With all that said, war is the state of affairs for most senators. Even as big as the city's top dogs are, they can never hang onto turf for very long. Some hang onto tiny holdouts deep in hostile territory, others have little pockets of influence in the no-man's lands. Treat everything here as a guideline - and tread lightly. - Jimmy territory is the Cloneston everybody knows. The clones, the chaos, the daily gunfights between trams - the clone prince is woven into the fabric of the city like no one else. Life deep in his territory is usually safer - usually safer - than unclaimed turf, but the party never stops when Jimmy's around. The big benefit of all Jimmy's noise is that crime is low - if the man himself is factored out - and gangs are mostly on his payroll. Brawls with clones and mercs take up more of the share than muggings, stabbings, and Damsel's kind of assault.
- Life in Beth territory is more calm, more orderly, and a little more clonely than elsewhere. The first senator likes things quiet. It keeps things quiet. It counts on controllable assets to do that. Things are clean, the lights stay on, and the water stays running. It's something close to the opposite of Jimmy's turf. Open fighting happens once a week, at best, and gangs don't have many options. Most mercenaries are already on a Beth contract - or running blind with half their officers dead from ambushes and snipers. On the other hand, massed clone crackdowns are only a hair less common than the rest of the city. Crime rates from frustration and desperation are jumped up in equal measure.
- The reputation Gregor Chuikov has for being a warlord comes complete with an iron fist. Gangs are bulldozed by S&C mercs, clones are hijacked on the department level by corporate hackers. Organized crime has to figure out how to survive up against someone ready to fight harder, dirtier, and heavier than they are. At the same time, anyone not on an S&C contract is left to twist in the wind. Corporations are bought out, driven out, or taken over. Smaller businesses pay protection money. The average Clonestoner is just collateral damage - and all the fighting on Chuikov's borders means the tally never stops ticking.
- VANDAL doesn't have much in the way of fully-recognized territory. Most of his assets are underground - sometimes, literally. Where he owns the place, VANDAL's the invisible hand. He doesn't work with armies, angry mobs, or big shows of force. He works with snipers, informants, and hackers. He doesn't work with building infrastructure or improving lives. He works his hands into corporate pockets and crime families. He's loved by executives everywhere; if there's one senator that serves up a profit, it's VANDAL. He's feared by mafiosos everywhere; if he can't have the syndicate, he'll cut its head off with a few turncoats and snipers. The little man doesn't see a thing from it all. For the normal folk, it's as if VANDAL doesn't exist.
- Damsel Center wraps a tight grip around everything in its turf. It doesn't work with human agents much, but it keeps its clones tight. Gangs and crime syndicates are clamped down on hard. Mercenaries go on payroll - or in a collar. Paying customers are kept safe. Supply lines stay open, power lines stay hooked up. It's a twisted imitation of Beth's way of doing things, with less clone hordes swarming around jaywalkers. The caveat is the abductions. No one is safe on Damsel's turf unless they've already got a contract - and even that's not much of an improvement.
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