[ERF] Locale: The Bendybowl

BENDYBROW SUPERFACTORY
At the heart of it all is the city of rust; the Bendybrow Superfactory. Words could never do it justice. Under a haze of multicolored smog, in the glow of thousands of flickering foglamps, it fills up the Erf. Among the jittering buzz of an endless parade of drones, it stretches on over hills and down into valleys. Needled with sagging power poles and twinkling with emergency lights, there's not one scrub or tree to be seen. Ringed with gun turrets and carpeted with factory buildings, it's no place for life - and people keep coming back.

Nobody needs to ask themselves why Bendybrow is a tourist trap. It's a city-sized factory stuffed with everything a scavenger could love. Dormant loader drones, assembly lines packed with robot arms, nuclear power facilities buried down in the dirt - and there's just so much, so tight together. It's a tangle of half-collapsed rubble that's never sure if it's alive or dead, that's so massive that it's eaten up several major regions. What was once Bloodspa Lake is now just its liquid waste dump. What was once Slippery Valley is now just part of its strategic petrochemical reserve. What was once Arnie's Nose is now just a weird bump on its north side with a busted gate.

None of those names were mistakes. As much as Bendybrow looks like Cloneston in a nursing home, there were still harvesters behind its rise. Worse still was that there were two human beings there to name everything - and not the kind that had any business ever putting a pen to a map. It infests everything. The first power plant in Bendybrow was named "Fat Fred". The first mining site was just the "Old Hole". Its primary resource and distribution hub? "Bendybus". Somehow, they managed to dodge everything being named "Li'l Stinky" or "Ol' Lefty", but the compromise wasn't much better - especially when you start looking at all the strategic landmarks past the main base, with names like "ew" and "No."

Half the reason why all these names are still on a map is that Bendybrow isn't exactly a ruin. Most of it is totally non-functional on most days; if it hasn't run out of power or resources, it's fallen apart after years of constant abuse. What little is left is all hard at work to bring the rest of the sprawl back online - even if it's all a game of musical chairs between the start-ups and breakdowns. What that means is that the chief authority on local terrain features is the primary database for Bendybrow. Given that it's all distributed across every individual factory building, it's going to take an asteroid strike for someone to find a better name that sticks.

The other half of the reason is that Bendybrow is as much a blight as it is a looter's motherlode. Since it first started up, Bendybrow has been poisoning everything it hasn't dropped down into a sinkhole. It's classic harvester colonialism writ large; the only thing that ever mattered was that the factory could grow. Between the still-belching factories switching on, the years-long pollution in the soil and groundwater, and the occasional world-ending dust explosion, nobody can hang on for long. Towns lose their farms, drink down too much cobalt mine runoff, and melt away in the acid rain. Even Loonies know better than to set up shop by Bendybrow. That means most folks don't have time to start writing down new names before their brains start leaking out of their skulls.

What's perverse is that one of the things that keeps regular folk from setting up shop is one of the same things that should keep the Loonies close. Encircling Bendybrow is a massive network of walls, trenches, and automated defenses. Rusty gun turrets loom over every wall. Limping mine-drones hide away just under their muzzles. Artillery positions are dug in at the second line to nail harder targets - and spit flak at passing aircraft. There's even a network of ground-to-orbit laser cannons and missile siloes ready to knock down any spacers who want a piece of the action. Every last bit of it is on a hair trigger for anything without a valid IFF, or just an unlovable amount of legs. It's all on-again-off-again like the rest of the factory, but nobody's ready to try their luck with a 20mm auto-turret.

Nobody except for the Loonies. Much as they aren't fond of living nearby, Loonies get a free pass from the guns of Bendybrow. Nobody's exactly sure why - and rumors inside the family usually say it's got something to do with all that spookiness between the Loonies and the harvesters. Thanks to that silent truce, Looney teams from surrounding bunkers are common sights prowling the ruins. Most times, they're inside for the same reason anyone else is. Most times, they're only in it for blocks of raw material; even Loonies know better than to mess around with hardware that a harvester might've touched. On other occasions, they're there to scout things out - and occasionally get the jump on scavs digging where they're not meant to.

While engineers get to do their thing without a care for the kill-bots, everyone else has to find another way in. For most, that means sneaking in on one of Bendybrow's freight trains, or crawling through one of the long-lost service tunnels. It means worming their way through trenches cut under the guns, or fighting their way through monster-infested breaches in the walls. Once inside, the game doesn't end; rear-line sentry guns and drone patrols dot the base, ready to pop anybody who doesn't check their corners. As much as Bendybrow's a gold mine for daredevils, most keep their stays short. There's only so much lead poisoning the average scav can stand.

For the nuttiest of the few, getting in as much the destination as it is the journey. For them, it's about finding that one gap in the defenses to march in like they own the place. For them, it's about making it in and out of the most dangerous parts of the facility. For them, it's about seizing that one techno-nugget heralded by prophecy. Some even come in like they're a flock of repair drones, trying to wake the slumbering beast back up. None of them ever get very far before they get jammed in the gears of it - which is for the best, really - but that doesn't stop them from trying.

That detail is what really sets Bendybrow apart from other sites of techno-religious significance. As much as it's one Hell of a walk, at least half of the scattered tech cults of the Knobbled Cutters see Bendybrow as some kind of promised land. It might be hard to understand from the outside, but the ingredients are right there; Bendybrow covers the gamut of industrial technology from steam engines to spaceflight - and it fixes itself at least once a year. It's not an ancient place of Pioneer supertech, but that only inflates the legend. There, in that crusty dustbowl, is the rebirth of industry - again, and again, and again.

Thanks to that boom and bust cycle, Bendybrow is even more dangerous than just the concentration of carbon monoxide. Nobody knows when an old factory might jump to life again - with someone standing right under one of its welding arms. Nobody knows when the power might kick on somewhere - and send megawatts of death arcing out from a clipped power line. Nobody knows when any of that might shut off instead - and cause a calamitous collapse onto whatever gang of scavs might be convenient at the time. Meanwhile, drone trucks keep blazing down its roads, full of ores and fresh ammo - flattening everything that doesn't know how to use the sidewalk.

What nobody can figure out about Bendybrow is that, despite having harvesters at its roots, there have been no confirmed sightings of shrieking spiderbots inside its walls. People in the know reckon that there are little scrappy clunkers working in the shadows to get everything turned back on, but nobody's ever met one in person. All they ever see are the brainless robo-beasts, hauling freight and loading guns. Most have learned to treat them with the same respect as live harvesters; stop one from getting its job done, and there'll be a swarm of bomb drones on top of you before you can leave the scene.

It's hard to separate Bendybrow's own history from its surrounding environment. By way of being so big and important - and driving out just about everyone else - the Bendybowl may as well be synonymous with Bendybrow. Thanks to that database spanning the base, every power priest and Looney intel analyst has a full dossier - or five - on the superfactory. For a full overview of Bendybrow's life and times, please refer to the History section of this article.


Major landmarks are endless inside Bendybrow. It's hard to separate them from the carpet of industrial buildings covering the place, but structures of significance usually have some kind of name too moronic to have ever had context. The following is a list - mercifully incomplete - of some of the most important parts of the base.

• The Whoopsie is the garbage hauler that started it all. It's a wreck smashed into a small clearing, wired into the electrical grid by a web of power poles - whenever they aren't flat on their backs, anyways. For a fifty-year-old wreck, the Whoopsie is in surprisingly good condition. It's still a jumbled pile of hauler parts, but it's surprisingly rust-free relative to its surroundings. It's a favorite stopover for pilgrims from the north - especially since its still-working systems are hooked straight into Bendybrow's primary database.

• The Bloodspa Lake, just off the Whoopsie, used to be...well, a lake. Then Bendybrow happened. Now it's a massive, ragged pool of sludge and wastewater that's been steadily eating into the underground. Depending on the time of year, it likes to change color; puke green in the winter, neon teal in the summer, and red-orange in spring and autumn. There are supposedly some rites of passage dedicated to swimming from one end to the other, but nobody needs to ask about the survival rates on that idea.

• The Fat Fred Power Plant, on the other side of the Whoopsie, was the first power facility Bendybrow put up. It's a set of scrappy coal-fired steam turbines that are only just barely holding it together these days. Ever since the base went nuclear, Fat Fred went into standby for emergencies. Given that every other day qualifies as an emergency, Fat Fred is still chugging away - and one of the chief sources of smog over the base. Between all that, it's no surprise that Fred's detonated a few times in the past. For some reason, it's gone back up every time. Nobody's ever been happy about it.

• The Old Hole was the first mining operation Bendybrow dug into. At first, it was dedicated only to exploiting a few rich surface deposits of key metals, notably iron and titanium. As time went on and Bendybrow found more and more minerals below it, the Old Hole lived up to its name; the mining operation cut straight down - and turned the whole thing into a churning death pit. Nowadays, there's not much of value left in the pit save for the mining drones and ore elevators that are all stuck there. Of course, that's never stopped all the auto-drillers from trying for more.

• West of the Old Hole is Crumbly Grove Quarry. It was an early mining operation dedicated to harvesting various sands and stones, chiefly for the production of concrete. It was eventually abandoned when the Glorpy Mining Post came online and overtook it, but most of the equipment there is still operational. When the trains from Glorpy break down, the base turns to Crumbly Grove to fill the gap - even if it's only for days or even hours at a time.

• Northeast of the Old Hole is the Bendybrow Trainyard. When it's not piled up with derailed cars and pulverized freight, it's rammed to the gills with automated trains. It's where Bendybrow's outposts send their products, and the main base sends back drones and supplies. On the days it's not busted, it's a blur of motion; drone locomotives at near to the speed of sound, slowing down only just long enough to dump their wagons, gulp down supplies, and take the loop back out of the trainyard. It takes a special kind of nerve to make the jump from the platform to the train before it takes off - especially with that big shoulder full of engines that didn't hit the turn slow enough.

• The Flopsem and Florpsum Smelting Plants are Bendybrow's back-up stomach. When the Florpumungus complex is down - which is every other week - its older brothers get the job of picking up the slack. That means they look something like the gaping maw of Hell. As much as they're critical to operations, Flop and Florp are so overworked that repair teams can never get in long enough to do more than hose them down - and usually only when they burst into flames. They're both shoddy boxes full of slag, pools of half-blazing runoff, and bent chimneys choking on their own smog. Most days, they're both so ruined and slumped over that it's hard to tell which is Flopsem and which is Florpsum.

• The Bendybus Distribution Hub is hard to pin down as a single place. Its center of operations is southeast of Bloodspa, but it's more like the spine of the entire base. It's a network of long-distance conveyor belts, roadways, and drone hubs that run south to north, from Flopsem and Florpsum right up to Arnie's Nose. Roads branch off that main highway to service just about every piece of Bendybrow, about half of them diving underground only to pop up elsewhere. Defensive positions stud it at odd intervals, all leftovers from perimeter walls that were overtaken when the factory needed room to grow. Much as most non-Loonies try to avoid it because of that, the Bendybus is still the best way to get around.

• The Slippery Strategic Reserve used to be an outpost until Bendybrow crept up on it early in its expansion. It was dedicated to exploiting a major oil deposit in the so-implied Slippery Valley. As Bendybrow branched out to bigger and slipperier sources of gas and oil, the overtaken drilling post evolved into the strategic reserve of today. The resources collected from the site were sequestered into an emergency stockpile in the event that other prospects dried up, or a rainy day put the trains out of action. These days, Slippery is still doing just that - and it's one of those key pieces of redundancy that have kept the base from shutting down for good.

• The Bendybus Pumpmaster is a mixed set of storage tanks and heavy-duty pumps servicing a small trainyard, between Slippery Valley and the Bendybus. It's the primary connection between the Hawkins-Louie Complex and mother Bendybrow, that services the main base on-demand when production requires a specific kind of hydrocarbon product. Despite a whole lot of complexity in its operations, it's one of the most disaster-free stretches of rails on Bendybrow's train network. It's also the best way to catch a ride to the hydrocarbon complex; trains at the Pumpmaster need to dwell for a while to offload their fluids, which means the time to board is in the minutes instead of seconds.

• Snibbler's Hills are where Bendybrow's primary communications and radar infrastructure are. They're a vast forest of bent antennae, rusted radio masts, and sad, sagging radio dishes. Only one in ten still works right - and not very well. Even then, given how much that one-tenth encompasses, it's still more bandwidth and signal strength than anywhere else. It's another critical player in Bendybrow's continued operations; without Snibbler's Hills, the whole complex would lose its coordination, and all its repair drones would spiral out of control. That'd also leave the neighboring orbital defense siloes blind - and nobody wants to find out if they'd just start shooting off at random.

• The Tar Nation, right along Bendybrow's shore to the Longnuts River, is a backup power facility not a whole lot different from Fat Fred. What sets it apart is that it was built expressly for that task, and its proximity to Snibbler's Hills wasn't a mistake. It's a dedicated power supply made exclusively to keep the base's communications online even when nothing else is running. Just like Fat Fred, it's a major contributor to the weekly acid rainfall in the area. Purportedly, it was one of the first surface breaches by the mega-lobsters of the underground. Supposedly, it was built there "just to piss them off" - so says the database.

BENDYBREEZE POWER FACILITY
Hardly a power line's collapse away from the rails around Bendybrow's south wall is a big box full of guns. What was once a solar power facility is now just a redundant defensive position lined with basic auto-turrets, forming up the western wall of the Lunchlifter Corridor. Inside are the remains of transformers, solar panels, and other electrical equipment that'd once been meant to supply the main base with its daytime power. After Bendybrow's nuclear power came online, and the smog layer started looking more permanent, Bendybreeze fell into disuse. As much as the service drones keep fixing and loading the guns, they hardly touch that vast field of bleached-over sun-collectors.

Thanks to that, Bendybreeze's only apparent purpose is to trap anyone too curious for its own good. With most of the panels in pieces, and all that open ground for the turrets inside to monitor, walking inside is something like mooning a firing squad. The turrets there aren't shy about shooting back into the facility. Any stray shots would land on something that's already busted. They're ready to shoot through old panels, carve through fallen transmission towers, and punch through any blown-out miscellaneous hardware. The solar leftovers inside are still valuable, but it's such a deadly proposition to get through that nobody in the know tries. The ones who do usually end up as starved skeletons stranded behind a piece of hard cover - if they can get that far before their skull leaps off their shoulders.

As hard as it is to find records of the solar plant, the rustfathers of the Bendybowl have nevertheless gathered them together across the ages. Bendybreeze started life about six years into Bendybrow's history, in 1271 OSC, as part of an abortive attempt to prop up its power supply with something less floricidal. It reached fruition for a while, but that was as far as it went. It wasn't long before Bendybrow's needs had outstripped Bendybreeze's supply. The more the factory grew - and the thicker the smog layer grew with it - the more the solar plant became irrelevant. By 1300, the drones of the main base were so overtaxed trying to keep everything running that Bendybreeze started to bleach over. Before long, all the panels had fallen apart, and all that was left were the guns guarding the rubble.

GRUNGE MINING POST
Grunge is one of the simplest, smallest, and absolutely most vital mining posts for Bendybrow. It's west of Bendybreeze and southwest of the main base. It's probably the closest mining position to Bendybrow's walls. What makes it so crucial is what it's mining; copper, tin, and a few small gold deposits - which are all fundamental to the electronics the whole system depends on. Beyond that, it's nothing to write home about. It's a cramped box of close-by auto-mines, surrounded by gun turrets. A valley runs past it, offering a convenient vantage point to the outpost's defenses - and a deathtrap to anyone who thinks it's a good way to sneak in.

Grunge's history is equally unimpressive - so much so that it was nearly lost to a bug in the system in 1306 OSC. It was only by the careful sifting of the forge-priests of the north - and the Loonies - that what little could be said remained to be said. Grunge came a little late for its importance, in around 1272, when Bendybrow's demand for electronics started to outstrip what it could scrounge from surface deposits. As mass production took over, Grunge was set up past Flebfink Junction, and came to be in bits and pieces. Several major attacks were launched by the super-crabs during the siege years. How well those went isn't up to interpretation; videos leftover show smouldering corpses lining that convenient valley by its side. Some of the old exoskeletons are still down there - still with all the scorches from incendiary tracers.

BACKSBY MINING POST
Far in the north are three rings of blood and thunder. Far in the north is an impenetrable wall of smoke and spite. Far in the north, at the very end of Bendybrow's rails, is the most storied of mining outposts; Backsby. Nestled in the former site of the Backsby Woods is the so-named Backsby Mining Post, situated in the scrubby deserts known - for some reason - as the Lefties. Only Loonies have ever breached Backsby's walls. From what they've said, it's nothing special; metal mining, subsurface iron deposits, trains - the usual. Given that anyone else who tries for it usually ends up as a smear on the sand - well, maybe they're playing it down a little.

Backsby is built up around two major mixed deposits of iron, tin, titanium, and aluminum. The resources down below the surface are so rich and dense that most Loonies figure that it's not a natural formation, even if it looks the part. Both deposits are locked down by interior walls that emphasize the mining pits inside. Down in both are a jumbled mess of auto-diggers, ore elevators, and drone docks spiralling away into darkness. Loonies say it doesn't go that deep. The flattened skeletons they sometimes find at the bottom might beg to disagree.

The defenses at Backsby are fitting to a far-flung outpost. The walls are steeped high in sentry guns of all kinds; rotary cannons big enough to shred a tank, auto-guns fit for fighting infantry, shotgun grenade launchers with incendiary loads - if Backsby can see it, it can make it disappear. Meanwhile, the position is so far from Bendybrow that the smog only just reaches out to it. What that means is that all the rangefinders and radar guiding the guns doesn't have a speck of interference. Backsby sees all - and if you don't have a drone IFF or a Looney ID tag, it'll make you disappear, too.

The mining post has a run-of-the-mill trainyard handling imports and exports, but Backsby's defenses are sticking their noses into that, too. That's a literal statement; unlike most outposts, Backsby's guns are given free rein to look back into the outpost and slice apart anything hitching a ride by train. Trains running to the outpost are double-plated for exactly that reason - and the turrets know just where they can put a bullet into one that won't penetrate through. Loonies have dozens of videos of naive scavs riding in, only for the train to be peppered with smart-frags - and that's to say nothing of what they've seen happen to the people who made it to the platform.

Much as entrepreneurial types might not be able to get in, they've still got the servers back in Bendybrow to study up. With that kind of knowledge, it's been roughly established as fact that Backsby was an early necessity. It came together in a shape similar to the present, in 1265 OSC, as the first of Bendybrow's outposts. It grew a little, but it mostly stayed the same - and the crabs hated it. Hyper-crustaceans launched daily attacks on its walls. Some even made it through - and just as many came from inside, through its mining tunnels. That was the inspiration behind letting the guns shoot backwards - and adding in an extra layer of security behind the main line. The battles at Backsby stayed pitched for years on end, but never did the outpost fall under. Locals these days aren't sure if that was a good thing, all considered.

MEGADEATH DRILLING POST
Furthest east of Bendybrow are the Megadeath Fields, home to the Megadeath Drilling Post. The Bendybowl has a couple of other oil deposits, but those were claimed to service the same outpost they were built for. Megadeath is the outlier in that regard; its oil all goes straight to Hawkins-Louie for refining. Tight up against the Smug River, surrounded on all sides by steep coastal cliffs, and complete with a deep, lucrative natural gas deposit, Megadeath lives up to every idea behind its name.

Apart from harvesting gas and fluids, Megadeath isn't so different from other mining posts save for its size. It's a tiny, cramped place of pipes weaving around and under everything. Trains come in right on the edge of a reinforced shoreline. They come to station with only just enough clearance on any given side for a toddler to squeeze out. They slide out at a quarter of their ordinary speed, running tight between storage tanks and pumping equipment, and exit out the same gate they came in through. Whenever one jumps a rail, or hits the loop in the center too fast, the explosion is usually big enough to give Florpumungus a run for its money. It's nothing short of a miracle that all the volatile stuff under the ground hasn't burned off by now.

The potential for disaster is one way Megadeath got its name. The potential for violence is the other. Being so tiny and so important, Megadeath is flush with turrets. As if that wasn't enough, a small oil refinery and chemical plant on-site are dedicated expressly to providing military-grade fuel to a network of flamethrower turrets. Being on the wrong side of its own cliffs might sound like a con, but it's not. Every drop is long enough to crack a crab's skull on impact - and not much has the firepower to put a dent in the site from above. Put that together with all the choke points running down the cliffs, and it's all a recipe for the Bendybowl's greatest cook-off.

According to the net-prophets and Looney engineers, Megadeath had been known and wanted for a long while. It wasn't until around 1271 OSC that demand for what it could provide reached that favored threshold. Hawkins-Louie went up around that time, and Megadeath hit the drawing board with it. By 1272, when Hawkins-Louie was done, Megadeath was ready for action - and not a moment too soon. After just a few months of operation, the hyper-crabs took offense to the drilling operation, and tunnelled up to shut it down - right in front of Megadeath's southeast gate. Right then and there, Megadeath lived up to its name better than ever before. For a week unbroken, super-crustaceans came streaming up to meet the guns. For a week unbroken, every single turret and flamethrower on that side was blazing away, only ever holding fire to cool off. Records estimate that at least 12,000 lobsters died that week - more than most battles fought during the heyday of the Native Uplifting Agreement. The crabs only stopped when their corpses had clogged the holes.

GUNKY MINING POST
The Gunky Mining Post is a far-flung satellite facility placed down on a riverside bonanza of natural resources. Its primary purpose is the excavation of heavier metals and the exploitation of a local uranium deposit. Both are suspected to have originated from a major meteor impact some time in the past. Fortuitously, a near-surface oil deposit was also discovered nearby - believed to be from whatever the meteor splattered on its way down - at Slibberty Beach. A drilling platform and a petrochemical facility sit over top of it, supplying fuel and other oil products to Gunky and its close partner Pain-Popper.

But nobody thinks about any of that when Gunky comes up.

What defines the Gunky Mining Post is the absolutely silly network of defenses encircling it, especially on its western wall. It's hard to paint a picture of just how tough a nut Gunky is - even when only half of it is running. Gatling turrets, anti-tank gun emplacements, flame turrets, missile batteries - to say the walls are nothing but a solid sheet of muzzles and laser apertures wouldn't be far from the truth. Just as with every other facility around Bendybrow, every last defensive system is automated, mad as Hell, and loaded down with enough ammo for a decade of continuous fire. Nobody knows why, but it doesn't matter these days. Nothing gets in. Nothing gets out.

Except for the trains keeping the whole show running.

Like every other outpost, Gunky is linked up to Bendybrow via train. It sits at the furthest western end of the lines, just barely ahead of Pain-Popper. The trains bring in drone-borne supplies of ammo and maintenance equipment, and ferry out everything Gunky pulls out of the Erf. That's the chink in the armor that scavs use to get in for the loot, and pilgrims journey in on to see the feistiest holy site on their trip. It's how Loonies beat the rush when they don't feel like walking the whole distance from Bendybrow - if they're not shy about being on a three-hundred-ton missile if there's a break in the rails.

For the people cagey enough to make it inside, Gunky doesn't look a whole lot different than the rest of Bendybrow. It's a maze of flaking pipework whipping out from the rust-eaten refinery on the north side. It's a forest of automated drills carving into a jagged dead drop on its southern side - when there's actually power coming in from Bendybrow's supply. There are the corpses of a long-rotted forest surrounding the whole thing, still strewn with the bones of birds and badgers that were too stubborn or stupid to get out before the smog came in. There's that tremendous defensive wall, wrapping around it like a fat horseshoe - and, but for the grace of God, all those auto-guns are fixed facing outward.

Gunky is reckoned to have come late in Bendybrow's development. Between Looney investigation and the work of steel-seers, it's generally guessed that Gunky was founded to meet a demand for its rare metal deposits. It was a key part of Bendybrow's ability to manufacture more advanced computer parts and nuclear technology. What didn't come so late was the defense perimeter. The significance of the resources there was supposedly known for some time, which led to the gun-wall being set down around a year before the site was fully exploited. Its strategic significance evolved from there; the sheer level of noise the guns made was enough to make it the center of attention for the mega-lobsters in the west. Just like everything else, it was never scaled down. When the hyper-crabs were finally beaten back, Gunky stood tall - and, to this day, it's still shooting down every sorry seagull that blunders past.

LELDA'S LOOKOUT
For some dumbass reason, there's a giant castle up in the northern flats of Bendybrow. No, that's not figurative, or a metaphor - it's an actual God damn fairy tale castle. Half its turrets have fallen over, every other wall's lying in pieces, and it's all covered in carbon build-up from the smog, but the shape's still there. Nobody has a single good explanation as to why it's there. As Set goes, that didn't stop people from setting up shop inside. There might not be any princesses or dragons around, but the old fortress is home to the biggest - and only - permanent population inside Bendybrow's walls. Lelda's Lookout is the name. Thankfully, the silliness stops at the front end.

Inside Lelda's Lookout is a scavenger society of itinerants and sneaky looters. It sits at the crossroads of eight major underground passageways, six of them cleared-out crab tunnels. Three of that number are the easiest shortcuts in and out of the superfactory's walls - except when the lights are on. Being out in the middle of Bendybrow's only undeveloped property makes it that much easier to slip out for a salvage run - whenever the guns at Arnie's Nose are down for maintenance. It's a firm neutral ground for all the rival scav families, where everyone's got their shot to get in, earn their scrap, and get out. It's a convenient marketplace for looters coming back with a haul too heavy to drag back home - or for the daredevils looting by the ton when the Happy-Maker's out on the town.

Most folks you'll find at Lelda's are just passing through. The ones who live there, that close to all the guns and carbon monoxide - they're some of the toughest 124 people in the Bendybowl. They live in gas masks and improvised clean rooms like a scrappy parody of spacer society. They dress up in junky plate armor with axe-stocked shotguns like a trashy imitation of the knights that might've manned the fort in years past. They spend every week gunning down horrors from the deep - whether it's a leftover mega-lobster, or something uglier from deeper down. They live through the noise, the drone raids, and the radioactive thunderstorms without so much as batting an eye. Silly as it is, Bendybrow's castle lives up to its looks in spirit - if maybe not how silly the whole thing is.

Sillier still is that even Bendybrow doesn't know why Lelda's Lookout is there. Records don't mention it up until 1274 OSC - where its only mention is "we have a castle now!!!! (????)" Apart from work tickets like "find dragon for castle", Bendybrow's ruling weirdos didn't care much about it after - up until crabs started swarming up through its halls in 1278. Being both inside the walls, and on the other side of Arnie's Nose, the hyper-crustaceans didn't get far - and learned it wasn't working quick enough not to destroy the building. The fort sat dormant for decades, until around 1301, when pokey locals realized that the tunnels beneath hooked up to several burrowed-under walls. As soon as people started using the tunnels, a gang of bandits took it over as a tax route. A couple years later, better-equipped scavs booted them out and locked it down. Some of those same people are still on Lelda's watch - nowadays as part of the command staff.