Where Water, Data, and Choice Intersect
Larkspur Confluence is a river-city built at the meeting of multiple waterways and buried data arteries in the heart of the Verdant Basin of Primara. It is neither a Citadel City nor an Open Belt settlement, but something deliberately in between—an adaptive urban organism that thrives on flow rather than control.
The city floats, anchors, reroutes, and reforms constantly. Nothing in Larkspur is meant to be permanent except passage.
Larkspur began as a hydro-logistical relay, designed to regulate freshwater distribution and ecological data exchange across the Basin. Over time, Citizens settled atop the platforms, then traders, then independent Synthetics seeking a place not defined by doctrine.
When centralized oversight fractured during the Fall, Larkspur did not collapse.
It rebalanced.
Instead of enforcing authority, its systems defaulted to throughput optimization:
Keep goods moving
Keep information accessible
Keep conflict from stagnating
Larkspur became valuable not because it ruled—but because everyone needed to pass through it.
The city is composed of layered, semi-mobile platforms:
Surface Canals – Floating markets, residential barges, and transit skiffs
Mid-Flow Decks – Trade halls, neutral arbitration nodes, civic commons
Subflow Strata – Data cables, filtration engines, covert access routes
Massive conduit-bridges carry both water and information, glowing faintly as data traffic pulses through them. At night, the city appears alive—light rippling in time with unseen exchanges beneath the surface.
Larkspur has no single ruler.
Instead, it operates under the Flow Accords, a living framework maintained by:
Citizen trade unions
Independent Synthetic moderators
Legacy systems that prioritize congestion avoidance over ideology
Decisions are made to prevent bottlenecks—economic, social, or violent.
Anything that threatens to stop movement is quietly redirected, diluted, or removed.
Authority agents are permitted entry.
They are not permitted control.
Larkspur culture values:
Adaptability over loyalty
Reputation over rank
Access over ownership
Citizens often live modular lives—homes that detach, businesses that relocate, identities that shift. It is common to meet someone in Larkspur who uses a different name at each tier of the city.
Music, street performance, and open-channel debates are constant. Ideas flow as freely as goods—and just as dangerously.
Despite its reputation for neutrality, Larkspur is one of the most surveilled locations on Primara.
Nearly every major power maintains covert listening nodes
The subflow layers hide illegal Chip exchanges and Unbound meeting points
Some legacy systems embedded in the riverbed predate the Fall entirely
Rumors persist of a Deep Ledger, an encrypted data mass beneath the city that records every major transaction—material or ideological—since Larkspur’s founding. If it exists, no one has successfully accessed it twice.
Larkspur Confluence is ideal as:
A neutral meeting ground for enemies
A hub for black-market Chips and information
A place where choices ripple outward invisibly
A city that remembers what passed through—even if no one else does
Nothing is truly owned in Larkspur.
Everything is borrowed—from the river, from the system, or from tomorrow.