New Vance City

The Brine Chutes are a sloped network of massive waste channels used to discharge excess salts and chemical runoff from the Waterworks’ deeper purification tanks. Once automated and precisely monitored, the system now runs on a fragile balance of decaying valves and gravity-fed flow. The Hegemony considers the chutes “maintenance priority tier zero”—in other words, they don’t care. But for the desperate and clever, the Chutes offer both danger and opportunity. Smugglers use side shafts to hide contraband or bypass toll checkpoints. Junk scrappers trawl the edges for corroded tech that somehow still pings with life. But the deeper you go, the more corrosive the environment becomes. Boots rot. Skin burns. Voices echo back wrong. No one quite agrees what’s causing the shimmer sometimes seen deep in the runoff below—just that those who try to get close come back confused, or not at all. Still, for some, the Chutes remain a lifeline… or a grave.

The Brine Chutes begin as a concrete canyon—high walls lined with copper-scored scoring and mossy decay, sloping down into layered spillways crusted in white mineral buildup and rust. Gray-green liquid trickles constantly from massive overhanging pipes, forming shallow streams that steam faintly under the weight of their chemical load. The air is thick and acrid, tinged with chlorine, metal, and something almost sweet in its rot. Sections of the trench are segmented by corroded bulkheads, some hanging loose on broken hinges. Makeshift ladders and jury-rigged railings made from scavenged pipework zigzag along the sides, leading to alcoves where tarp lean-tos and tool piles mark squatter or smuggler activity. In the distance, the runoff disappears into a glowing grate where a distorted humming noise vibrates through the stone. At night, bioluminescent fungi trace jagged lines along the walls, painting the tunnels in sickly blue veins. The Chutes don’t sleep. They drip. They breathe.