New Vance City

The Phantom Gullet is a sunken freight corridor branching off the Smuggler’s Docks—an echoing subchannel where lost shipments and abandoned tech drift in oily currents. Originally part of a cargo redirection system for the city’s maintenance fleet, it was forgotten during the Collapse and quietly reclaimed by the Shadow Syndicate. Now, it serves as a no-light drop zone for contraband too volatile or valuable to risk in open trade. The Gullet has no permanent crew, no guards, and no maps—just whispers and signals passed by encoded light pulses and AR glyphs scrawled into the walls. The current moves slow here, like the canal is holding its breath. Syndicate Runners speak of drone tethers that vanish mid-haul, of skiffs that return empty, of strange glints beneath the water that don’t belong to metal. Still, the risks don’t deter scavvers or fixers. If the Neural Bazaar is the city’s black heart, the Phantom Gullet is its gaping, silent throat.

The Phantom Gullet stretches like a collapsed lung beneath the city’s bones—a yawning trench of stagnant water flanked by fractured bulkheads and bowed support arches. The canal is wider here, darker, and far quieter than the main docks. No overhead lights remain functional; instead, phosphorescent runes flicker erratically along the walls, pulsing with encoded hues of blue and ultraviolet. Rust blooms in jagged swirls across every surface, bleeding down into the canal where the water shimmers with chemical opalescence. Half-submerged crates bob lazily, some still sealed, others cracked open and leaking luminescent dust or vine-like wiring. Wrecked drones rest at odd angles along the walls, their red sensor eyes permanently dim. Above, tattered signal sheaths hang like drowned banners, still crackling with static when passed. The air feels colder here, dense and charged—like sound doesn’t travel quite right.