New Vance City

Beneath the glitching ruins of an old broadcast relay station lies the Hidden Laboratory—an unsanctioned research bunker swallowed by static and secrecy. Once a Citadel black site for studying pre-Collapse neurotech and advanced signal resonance, it was lost during the earliest waves of electromagnetic collapse. Now it serves a darker purpose: a sanctum of the Static Cult. The Conductor refers to it as “The Tuning Chamber,” where captured minds are dissected, rewritten, and retuned to receive the divine broadcast. Echoes of failed awakenings haunt its walls—memory loops gone feral, feedback-induced psychosis, and glitch-scarred implants. Yet within this place of unholy communion, strange miracles occur: twitching bodies revived by noise, machines that respond to thought alone. It’s a shrine, a workshop, and a tomb. And for those brave—or foolish—enough to enter, there is no guarantee they’ll leave speaking their own words.

Accessed through a collapsed metro tunnel hidden behind a rust-choked antenna array, the Hidden Laboratory is a decaying warren of reinforced chambers, half-submerged in magnetic sludge and illuminated only by red strobes and sputtering CRT monitors. Cables hang like black vines, some pulsing with rhythmic signal pulses, others stitched directly into twitching human spines. Walls are scratched with spirals, waveforms, and coordinates written in looping, repetitive script. Broken drones skitter along the ceilings, projecting fragmented sermons in dead languages. The lab’s central chamber—a dome of copper and concrete—hosts a towering spire of feedback coils that hum and shudder like a living thing. Every surface buzzes with energy, every shadow dances to frequencies only the Cult can hear. It is less a lab and more a living transmitter—an altar to interference, chaos, and the worship of corrupted signal.