New Vance City

Mirelock Hollow is a half-swallowed relic of pre-Collapse water regulation nestled in the forested wetlands north of the Waterworks. Originally built as an emergency overflow basin, the site has become a stagnant marsh where the filtration systems gave up long ago. The Hydro Hegemony considers it too remote and too overgrown to bother reclaiming—but that hasn’t stopped travelers, squatters, and outcasts from drifting through. Shallow pools of fetid runoff gather in natural basins, and rusted intake towers tilt precariously from the mud. It’s a place of quiet desperation: some come to hide, others to scavenge, a few to test the old myths that say clean, untouched water still flows somewhere below. Strange fauna breed in the warm, metallic wetlands, and the frogs croak with an odd mechanical tone. Nobody controls Mirelock Hollow, but it’s never truly empty. The moss-covered machinery still hums faintly—just enough to remind intruders that something here remembers its purpose.

Mirelock Hollow sprawls through a mist-shrouded basin of slanted trees, sunken steel, and glimmering algae-scummed ponds. The forest presses in with gnarled roots and thick underbrush, but twisted pipework and broken floodgates pierce the soil like skeletal remains. Large concrete pylons lean at awkward angles in the mire, their rusted spouts trickling sluggish water that glows faintly green in the low light. Vines loop through shattered grates and coil around weathered warning signs half-buried in muck. The ground is soft, unstable—each step squelching between moss and old drainage stone. A gutted monitoring station stands crooked among the reeds, its roof collapsed, yet its cracked monitors still blink with fading red indicators. Strange bulbous fungi sprout from rust seams, pulsing gently as if reacting to movement. The entire Hollow breathes with eerie stillness, veiled in perpetual fog and filtered sunlight, like nature is trying to erase the evidence… but hasn’t quite succeeded.