New Vance City

Once a nerve center of automated pre-Collapse production, the Collapsed Assembly Plant Core lies half-buried in slag and smoke at the heart of the Rust Belt. Once a gleaming marvel where machines birthed more machines, its skeletal remains now serve as a battlefield of ideology and salvage. The Gear Rats worship it as a mechanical temple—offering oil, flame, and metal in ritual contests of disassembly. Deep within its broken labyrinth, scavvers whisper of an intact AI core still muttering diagnostic loops from a lost era. These whispers draw the brave and the deranged alike. Static Cultists cluster in the lower levels, drawn to surging bursts of distorted signals, while a rare few Silent Walkers occasionally pass through, ghosting between wreckage as if mapping some unseen pattern. Time fractures the deeper you go—visual glitches, reverse echoes, and dreamlike stutters mark a place no longer aligned with reality. Few make it to the core. Fewer come back whole.

The structure sprawls like a decaying steel carcass—its main support collapsed inward like a broken spine, limbs of automated cranes frozen mid-motion. Conveyor lines hang torn, thick with rust and oily fungus that pulses faintly in low light. Graffiti—some from Rats, others static-born—wars for space across bulkheads, partially overtaken by bioluminescent mold. Scattered wreckage suggests old battles, with melted plating and half-dismantled bot shells strewn like bones. The central corridor winds downward into shadow, marked by flickering hazard signage and looping warning alarms in broken pitch. At the chamber’s core, a scorched platform houses the flickering remains of a vertical AI tower—still blinking with corrupted logic, its cables twitching like nerves. The space hums with erratic energy and whispered code. And always, from somewhere deep inside, the distant echo of a machine praying to itself.