New Vance City

Buried deep in the smoke-choked scrapyards of the Rust Belt, the Abandoned Mechanic’s Garage is a half-collapsed relic of pre-Collapse industry—ignored by most but whispered about by the Gear Rats. Once a trusted service bay for city vehicles, it’s now an unofficial shrine of mystery and malfunction. Some say the place reboots itself at night—doors realigned, shelves restocked with rare parts, drones twitching back to half-life. Raiders who stumble upon it often vanish, or return with wild stories of working lifts, speaking intercoms, and messages printed on oil-stained receipt paper. The Gear Rats don’t officially claim the place, but they watch it. Occasionally, a salvage crew arrives not to strip it—but to leave offerings: gears, melted batteries, even small effigies made of twisted wrenches. Whatever lives beneath the garage now, it’s not human. And the Rats seem to respect it.

The garage squats like a decaying beast in the shadow of a toppled smokestack, its once-white walls stained with soot and rain-streaked oil. Its signage—"VAN-MEK SERVICE & BODY"—hangs at a crooked angle, scoured by sandblasts and corrosion. The cracked forecourt is littered with tire shreds, rusted oil drums, and heaps of half-digested metal stripped from forgotten rigs. A large roll-up door yawns halfway open, exposing the dark interior where mechanical arms twitch sporadically on ceiling tracks, their sensors blinking as if searching for long-lost commands. Inside, the air tastes like ozone and old welds. Graffiti and burn marks mar the walls, alongside cryptic scrawlings in grease pencil—part schematics, part warnings. In the rear, a disassembled loader mech looms over a floor hatch framed with glowing circuit glyphs and salvaged hazard tape. Beneath, flickering fluorescents buzz over rusted terminals and cobbled-together tech, all humming with impossible energy.