New Vance City

The Overflow Trench is a forgotten drainage artery carved deep into the underbelly of the Waterworks—a massive sloped channel once designed to relieve flood pressure from the city’s reservoirs during storm surges. Now, with weather systems erratic and most infrastructure left in bureaucratic limbo, the trench rarely serves its original purpose. Instead, it’s become a natural borderland between authority and abandonment. Refugees, smugglers, and Waterworks outcasts drift through its slick expanse, turning its recesses into semi-permanent camps and contraband markets. Above them, ancient pumps groan in protest, their rust-choked vents spewing irregular torrents that flood lower walkways without warning. The Hydro Hegemony officially ignores the trench—it’s too deep, too unstable, too unprofitable. But rumors persist of secret tunnels branching off beneath the surface, of hidden wells, and scavvers who went looking for freshwater veins and found something else watching from the darkness.

The trench yawns like a wound across the lower sector—dozens of meters wide, sloped in tiers, and slick with the perpetual sheen of runoff and mold. Its concrete walls are etched with layered grime and faded warning glyphs, while exposed rebar curls like rusted thorns from old collapse zones. Trickling rivulets of tainted water flow unevenly down the trench’s grooves, joining in slow, fetid pools that steam faintly in the humid gloom. Makeshift rope bridges and scrap platforms connect the trench’s tiers, forming a ramshackle network above the waterline. Below, campfires flicker in shielded alcoves where huddled figures boil scavenged water in dented cans. Tarp shelters cling to wall crevices, lit by flickering lanterns and shattered glowrods. Pipes overhead weep condensation, and the ambient sound is a chorus of drips, hisses, and distant echoes. The trench seems to breathe—its air warm, wet, and metallic, as if the city’s lungs exhale through this buried artery.