New Vance City

Deep in the sub-grid layers of the Solar Sprawl, the Rationing Sector is where survival is dispensed by the watt and the calorie. Overseen by Solar Guardians clad in sand-scoured exosuits, this controlled zone serves as the final checkpoint for access to power-linked sustenance—nutripaste rations, recycled protein cartridges, and purified water drawn from solar stills. The sector is more than a food line; it's a ritual of obedience. Civilians present energy chit cards tied to their productivity and grid compliance, and those who lag behind the quota often find their portions slashed or substituted with filler paste. Captain Anya Brights preaches "earned light, earned life," and here that mantra becomes mandate. Every ration reinforces the Guardian's solar-credits economy, where loyalty and labor are traded for the right to eat. In the flicker of failing fixtures and solar-fed uplinks, the city’s dream of rebirth tastes like chalk and sacrifice.

The Rationing Sector sprawls across a sunken plaza of cracked concrete and repurposed loading bays, now ringed by solar conduits and mirrored deflection panels. Automated ration dispensers, rust-slicked and shielded with armored glass, hiss out pouches of paste with sterile finality. Overhead, lightstrips pulse with dim golden hues synced to solar fluctuation—if the sun dips, so does illumination. Guardians in gleaming bronze armor stand statue-still along perimeter catwalks, their helms aglow with power readings and behavioral scans. Scuffed queue lines snake between barricaded aid kiosks and graffiti-covered sensor gates. Families huddle under draped thermal sheets, waiting for names to flicker across hardlight displays. Every surface hums faintly with stored solar charge. It smells of metal, sweat, and sterilized hunger. The whole sector feels like a furnace-chapel—where energy is worshipped, and consumption is a sermon.