New Vance City

Once a regulatory backlot of the Gear Rats’ refinery complex, the Waste Treatment Ponds were designed to neutralize industrial runoff—until the Collapse ignited every fail-safe and dumped decades of unchecked chemical slurry into their basins. Now they stew as glowing cauldrons of mutagenic soup, surrounded by rotted catwalks and the sound of burbling bio-death. The sludge bubbles with unnatural rhythms, birthing flora that pulses like organs and fauna that shouldn’t crawl, but do. Crystal Wretches cluster near the pond rims, feasting on radiant filth, while scavvers whisper about slick-skinned “pondspawn” dragging whole caravans into the muck. Even the Gear Rats refuse to touch the area now—too unstable, too cursed. Rumor says the ponds remember every chemical ever poured into them and are learning to react. To adapt. Maybe even to hunt.

The Waste Treatment Ponds stretch out in uneven tiers—massive concrete vats fractured by subsidence and warped heat. Their contents glow a sickly medley of green, orange, and violet, casting shifting auras across the skeletal gantries above. Pipes dribble neon ooze into the tanks like feeding tubes, and rusted valve wheels spin without input. Around the ponds, twisted foliage writhes with unnatural colors: ferns made of chrome, blossoms that hiss steam, and vine growth that clings and pulses to the beat of your breath. Pockmarked catwalks teeter over the sludge, their supports half-melted and marked with hazard glyphs now unreadable under mineral blooms. Overhead, clouds hang low and iridescent, catching the chemical fumes like stained glass in a cathedral of decay. The air is heavy—warm, wet, metallic—and always watching.