New Vance City

The Quarantine Ward is a sealed wound in the gut of New Vance—a forgotten annex of the Memorial Hospital where the city's first infection cases were corralled and left to rot. Meant to be a lifeboat, it became a tomb. Cracked visors and shattered IVs lie scattered where panicked staff once tried—and failed—to contain the spread. Sealed blast doors still bear the emergency glyphs of the Citadel Council’s early containment effort, now useless. It’s here that the Silent Walkers are most frequently sighted, drifting through once-sterile corridors like priests of some necrobiotic faith. Shamblers never attack them; they merely follow. Many believe this is where the infection began to listen. Desperate scavvers sometimes enter in search of rare meds or answers, but few return whole. The ward whispers through vents and broken intercoms. Not in words—but in pulses. In breath. In memory. And something always remembers.

The Quarantine Ward is a labyrinth of rusted sterility. Strips of torn biohazard tape flutter like prayer flags from flickering vents. Wall-mounted defibrillators dangle from chewed cords, and gurneys slump beneath crumpled hazard suits. Rows of sealed observation rooms remain fogged with age, glass scratched by fingernails or tools—or something else. Once-white walls are now streaked in grays, greens, and dried arterial reds, layered like a grotesque mural. Above, broken ceiling panels sway gently with the building’s breath, revealing nests of wiring and bone. UV lamps flicker intermittently, casting antiseptic shadows across floors coated in both chemical residue and black mold. And always—always—the Silent Walkers. Cloaked in bone-woven rags, they stand beside beds like mourners at a wake, motionless and reverent, as if listening to the past through the decayed pulse of the ward.