The Inner Bay is the flooded heart of New Hope City—the slow, dark artery around which everything else still turns. Once a bustling commercial harbor and transit corridor, it now divides the city into hostile halves, shaping movement, trade, and conflict as surely as any wall or army.
After the collapse, floodgates failed, pumps shut down, and unchecked subsidence allowed seawater to claim entire districts. What remains is a wide, uneven expanse of deep water, sunken streets, half-submerged buildings, and drowned infrastructure. Cargo ships lie rusting where they were abandoned mid-evacuation. Ferries sit tilted against collapsed piers. Skyscraper basements vanish beneath black water that reflects neon and firelight in broken, trembling patterns.
The Inner Bay is deceptively calm. On the surface, it often appears still—fog drifting low, lights shimmering across the water at night. Beneath, currents twist through submerged streets and tunnels, dragging debris, bodies, and infected into unseen depths. Entire neighborhoods lie below the surface, sealed and silent, occasionally releasing trapped air or toxic blooms that rise without warning.
No faction truly controls the Inner Bay, but many depend on it.
The Docklands and pirate factions move goods, weapons, and people across it under cover of darkness.
The Exchange relies on bay routes to bypass land borders and faction checkpoints.
The Shatterreach uses hidden docks and wrecks as ambush points.
The Reclaimers monitor it relentlessly, knowing that whoever dominates the bay controls the city’s arteries.
Travel across the Inner Bay is dangerous and tightly calculated. Known safe routes shift with tides and wreck movement. Sound carries far over open water, making engines a risk. Fires and flares attract both infected drifting in from flooded zones and opportunistic raiders waiting among the wrecks.
The infected within the bay are different—waterlogged, silent, and unpredictable. Some cling to submerged structures. Others float just below the surface, unseen until disturbed. Entire salvage crews have vanished after disturbing something too deep, too old, or too dense to escape.
Despite the danger, the Inner Bay is indispensable. It is the fastest way to move between districts. It hides secrets, lost data vaults, sealed research labs, and sunken stockpiles untouched since the first days of the outbreak. Every major power watches it. Every ambitious faction wants a foothold. No one has succeeded in taking it fully.
To survivors, the Inner Bay is not a place—it is a risk calculation.
Cross it, and you might gain everything.
Misjudge it, and the city swallows you without a sound.