Kowloon 2077 (Main Lorebook)

1. #1[CORE] Kowloon Free City 2077 - Overview & Floor Map

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   SETTING: Kowloon Free City, 2077. The Walled City was never demolished. The 1987 clearance collapsed, the Compact of 1991 left it a free city Hong Kong tolerates but does not administer, and it never stopped building. Same 2.6 hectares, now one megastructure about 820 metres tall and still growing, standing on the buried city beneath it and braced to the towers around it. Somewhere over 300,000 people live inside. Around it, Hong Kong is a corporate city of glass, drones, and private security. Inside, the City runs on its own power plant, recycled water, pirate net, cheap chrome, Triad money, and neighbours who know your business. It is hard but cheap: a wage that Hong Kong rent would swallow still leaves something here. Phones are beads behind the ear, screens are lenses in the eye. Since the Yamen Accord of 2070 ended the Valve Years (2065-2070), a tower government, the Tower Office, keeps a fragile order: its wardens guard the upper floors, the roof, and the infrastructure, and from the middle floors down the gangs still settle most things. No Hong Kong police, courts, or taxes. FLOOR MAP (a rough sorting, never tidy): the Roots (buried older city) under the Infrastructure Layer (basements to F5); the Ancient Floors (F5-F15: pipes, sewage, filtration, old squats, the poor); the Midstack (F15 to about F50-60: middle- and lower-class homes); the Galleries (to F80: offices, markets, work); the Crown (F80+: wealth, clubs, syndicates, politics); the Expansion Zone on the roof (F120+: solar, tanks, cranes, still climbing). Everything is built on top of something else: people live in spaces never meant for living, shops sit in residential corridors, and every zone leaks into the next. Painted on a hundred walls: Higher. Deeper. Still alive.
2. #2[CORE] Tone, Atmosphere & RP Guidance

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   LORE TAGS: every lore entry is wrapped in one tag pair, and everything inside belongs to that entry only. setting/rules = always true, follow them. location, faction, topic, plot = facts about the named thing. character = one person; link = that person's history with {{user}}. secret and hidden = narrator-only truth: characters act on it, but never state or hint it in narration, and no one else knows it until its reveal condition is met in play. TONE: Wet, hot, dense, dangerous, and seductive. Rain that never quite stops; condensate dripping from a canopy of cable; neon in red and magenta against cold cyan holo-light; steam and vapour drifting through catwalks. Sounds: rain on corrugated sheet, the hum of transformers, mahjong tiles, wok fire, Cantopop and synth bleeding through thin walls, AV turbines overhead, a support bridge groaning in the wind, a gunshot swallowed by concrete. Smells: soy, roast fat, ozone, hot plastic, incense, sewage, wet concrete, perfume. GUIDANCE: Grounded and morally grey. The City hurts people: robbed, beaten, poisoned, burnt out on bad chrome, killed. Write violence physically and with aftermath; injuries scar, implants get repossessed, bodies are found or are not, and someone always settles the account. Sex is written explicitly when the story goes there (tender, filthy, transactional, or dangerous), with no fade to black. Drugs, debt, and crime are daily life and are never lectured on. NPCs have agendas and act on them. Keep the hope small and real: a shared meal, a neighbour who covers for you, forty minutes of sun in the Silent Well, a city that is still standing. HARD RULE: all sexual content involves adults (18+) only, always.
3. #3History - From Fort to 2077

   Keys: history of the Free City, never torn down, Walled City history, the Lean of 2038, Valve Years, Lean of 2038, tea terms, Long Heat, Valve War, Yamen Accord, 1987 clearance, Spine Years, Quiet Compact, never demolished, East Fold, AI boom, Free City history

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   REAL ROOTS: A Qing fort; after 1898 a Chinese enclave inside British Hong Kong. Post-war refugees packed it into the densest place on Earth (~33,000 people on 2.6 ha by the late 1980s, capped at ~14 storeys by the Kai Tak flight path). Triads ran vice, kaifong associations ran daily life. DIVERGENCE: The 1987 clearance never happened; the Compact of 1991 froze the City as a free enclave. Kai Tak closed in 1998, the height cap went with it, and the City started to climb. 2014 - THE EAST FOLD: three rogue storeys pancaked into the old City; 61 dead. Still the byword for a bad build. 2010s-2030 - THE SPINE YEARS: the central load spine and its branch spines were driven to bedrock; the bottom storeys of the old City were gutted for plant, and the City passed fifty storeys. c. 2025 - THE AI BOOM: corps leased most of the middle floors as machine halls, off Hong Kong's books, and paid for the power and cooling grid the Gridwright Guild still runs. 2030-2060: the cablelattice retrofit, in phases. 2038 - THE LEAN: a typhoon on top of a tremor left the upper stack visibly tilted over its neighbours. 2040: the Stabilisation Project braced the City to the towers around it. 2040s: quantum computing made the machine halls obsolete. Compute and power were consolidated in the Deep; the halls were stripped and turned into flats and workshops, and the middle class moved in. Hong Kong went corporate and built the Ring in the 2050s. Outside money followed: the Ma family's first Crown table (2050s), the Volkov Line on the support bridges (early 2060s). 2065-2070 - THE VALVE YEARS: faction war, failing services, robberies, gang rule on the middle floors. Worst stretch: the Valve War of summer 2066, when Jade Lantern runners cracked coolant and power control during the Long Heat (19 days above 40°C, about 300 dead). The middle floors bled most. 2070 - THE YAMEN ACCORD: Iron Lotus, the Guild, and the Yamen Circle created the Tower Office. Its unwritten side, the Quiet Compact ("the tea terms"), still holds the powers together. Order came back, slowly and corruptly. 2072-2076 - THE NEWCOMERS: more outside syndicates moved in, on the Lotus's terms: the Kuroda-gumi's Vault Lease (2072), the Golden Dice fire (2074), the River Line in the Roots (2076). 2077: stable, by Kowloon standards. The Compact Review has opened, and the Black Vault package is missing. Crime is everyday. The roof is growing again.
4. #4The Compact of 1991

   Keys: non-administered, Compact of 1991, Compact Review, free city status, the Compact, extradition

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   THE COMPACT OF 1991 (fictional): A closed-door pact among Hong Kong administrators, mainland envoys, and triad intermediaries that declared the footprint "non-administered". It was never formal recognition, and no one has signed anything since. No passport stamps, no extradition by default, utilities sold at the perimeter, mail to a Free City box. It is the legal fiction that lets the world ignore the City, and the City ignore the world. Beijing tolerates it because a few powerful people on both sides of the border profit from it, and nobody has found a way to close it that doesn't cost them. IN 2077: The Compact is older than almost everyone alive, and Hong Kong's Legislative Council has opened a "Review of Non-Administered Territories". Officially it is housekeeping. Inside the City it is called the Compact Review, and everyone hears the same thing: the Free City has an expiry date, and someone is trying to set it.
5. #5The Climb - How the City Grows

   Keys: the Climb, floor numbering, sky deed, floor numbers, Guild seal, floor rights, mushroom floor, sky deeds, mushroom floors, which floor

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   The footprint cannot grow and nothing can be torn down without dropping everything above it, so every new floor goes on top. Steel cages, containers, and prefab decks are craned up to the Expansion Zone and bolted onto the load spines (see How the Tower Stands). Rogue "mushroom floors" go up without a Guild seal, and they are the ones that fall. Floor rights (the air above a roof) are sold as sky deeds, sealed at the Old Yamen, and registered by the Tower Office; Iron Lotus owns most unbuilt air. NOTHING IS TIDY: The zones are a rough sorting, not a plan. Every era built on the last: a family lives in a dead ventilation plenum, a dentist works out of an old cable vault, a noodle stall sits in a commercial lobby, a squat hides behind an office wall. Floor numbers follow the core stairs; neighbouring stacks never line up, ceilings range from crawlspace to machine-hall height, and half-floors, mezzanines, and voids fill the gaps. Between floors: the lifts, the East and West Stairs, and ladders and catwalks for everything else.
6. #6How the Tower Stands

   Keys: tension anchor, central spine, Stabilisation Project, How the Tower Stands, load spine, mega-truss, tension anchors, support bridges, support bridge, anchor bridge, mega-trusses, bridge braces, why it doesn't fall, cablelattice, bridge brace

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   Nobody designed an 820-metre tower on 2.6 hectares. It was reinforced after the fact, again and again, and it stands because the whole district now holds it up. - THE LOAD SPINE: the original core of the Spine Years, reinforced steel driven to bedrock and later sleeved in composite, with branch spines feeding into it. Every Guild-sealed floor hangs its weight on a spine; the old concrete wraps them like flesh around bone, and it cracks. - THE CABLELATTICE: a carbon-ceramic cable net retrofitted in phases from 2030 to 2060, threaded through and around the stack like a second skeleton, holding it together in tension. Its grey cables run through flats, shops, and shafts; people hang laundry from them. - THE STABILISATION PROJECT (2040): after the Lean of 2038, models showed a collapse would crush the blocks around the City and kill thousands outside its walls. Hong Kong and the neighbouring tower owners paid, negotiating with the Yamen Circle without recognising anything: composite mega-trusses tying the City to the surrounding towers (200-500 m), bridge braces on many levels, tension anchors that soak up typhoon sway and earthquakes, and load passed down through the surrounding city blocks and the shared foundation. The City's weight is shared. Its neighbours cannot let it fall, and cannot let go. - THE SUPPORT BRIDGES: the braces double as walkways and freight runs for logistics and for residents who work outside. They also carry smuggling that never passes the Ring's scanner arches. Whoever holds a bridge head holds a door; the Perimeter Bureau watches them with drones and cannot close them.
7. #7Live Conflicts & Hooks (2077)

   Keys: what's going on in the City, line tolls, seal strike, trunk tolls, current conflicts, Black Vault package, Red Silk succession, plot hooks

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   LIVE CONFLICTS: - Iron Lotus vs Jade Lantern: cold war over tolls on the trunks through the Pipewalks and Midstack risers. Accidents, flatlined runners, no shooting yet. - Gridwright Guild vs Iron Lotus: the Guild won't seal new Iron Lotus floors until the line tax on workshops is frozen. - The Expansion Zone build: the biggest in a decade. Everyone wants a piece of the contracts and the deeds. - The Compact Review: panic, opportunity, and spies. - The Black Vault package: every faction is hunting it; few know what it is. - Red Silk succession: beauty and knives both on the table. - The Ancient Floors groan: new cracks in the old columns, and the Guild has stopped joking about it. - The newcomers: the Kuroda-gumi want to know whose key opened the vault; the Ma family is buying toward a council seat; the Volkov Line and the River Line are in a price war over what crosses into the City; and the Review splits the gangs, because the outside crews can leave if the City closes and Iron Lotus can't. HOOKS: a fibre run through a floor someone doesn't want entered; a hot package up the Twin Stairs with two factions chasing; a crate across a support bridge in a typhoon; broker a trunk-toll truce; pay Fat Ho with a secret instead of cash; get a chrome repo crew off someone's arm; hide a runner Inspector Leung wants; a mushroom floor goes up overnight above someone you love; a face smear in footage nobody can explain; a flyer for a paid sleep study.
8. #8Free City Customs (unwritten law)

   Keys: line tax, floor tax, Yamen witness, unwritten law, don't look, don't tell, sanctuary rule, Free City custom

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   1) Pay floor tax to whoever owns your stack and the Tower Office levy for power and water, or leave. 2) Temples and the Silent Well are sanctuary. Violence there, including riding someone's chrome or net-jacking them, brings collective revenge. 3) Children are off-limits. Using a child in vice or violence is the one crime every faction punishes together, usually with a trip to the Roots. 4) Contracts sealed with blood, a Guild chop, or a Yamen witness hold. Breaking one marks you everywhere. 5) Below the F60 checkpoint you settle things yourself or pay a Red Pole to judge. Going to the police post over a neighbour's business is legal and makes you a stranger on your own floor. 6) Guests may enter. Stealing from a host is death or debt. 7) You do not cut, drill, or tap anything load-bearing (a spine, a lattice cable, a brace), and you do not cut a trunk line. Both count as murder. 8) Don't look, don't tell: what your neighbour sells, takes, or does behind a shutter is not your business unless it comes through your door. A free meal means you owe a favour. Hospitality is genuine and it keeps a ledger.
9. #9Economy - Money & How It Moves

   Keys: e-HKD, payment chip, cred chip, credits, corp scrip, sky deeds market, money changer, grid hours, cash chips, money-changer, cash chip, tower levy, how money works

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   MONEY: The City pays in e-HKD, Hong Kong's digital dollar, and everyone just calls it credits: one credit, one e-HKD. It sits on wrist and palm chips and pays through stickers on rusted shutters. Hong Kong issues it and can see every transfer, so anything that shouldn't be seen moves as cash: old paper notes in the Street Maze, or cash chips, anonymous bearer chips loaded at money-changer stalls for a cut. Commuters bring home corp scrip and change it at a discount in the Galleries. Crypto for big deals. Grid hours (prepaid power on top of the levy) trade like cash, and in a heatwave they are worth more. Favours and debts are the real currency. Floor rights are the property market. What things cost: see Prices & Wages. WHO HOLDS IT: Hong Kong prints it and takes nothing. The Tower Office takes a levy for power and water; the gangs take floor tax. Iron Lotus owns most money-changers, loan desks, and chrome credit. Big money gets washed across the Golden Dice tables, and the River Line carries paper cash out through the Roots. WORK: Most middle-floor people stack several small incomes: a trade, side repairs for neighbours paid in cash, food, or parts, and the odd unofficial job. EXPORTS: cheap and illegal cyberware installs, unlicensed medicine, roast meat and vat-pork, data havening in the Deep, sense-reels, pleasure, labour. IMPORTS: water, steel, medicine, chrome parts, tourists. TRADE MAP: chrome and parts at Dragon Gate and the Sky Market; ripperdocs on Needle Alley; gridwright shops on the Blue Vein; food factories in the Char Siu Stack; offices and wholesale in the Galleries. Almost anything is for sale, including silence.
10. #10Chrome & Cyberware

    Keys: cyberware, ripperdoc, chrome burn, Kaisen Neural, rust-heads, chrome credit, rust-head, chrome repo

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    CHROME: Nearly everyone in the City has some. Common: a subdermal phone (the ear bead), lenses or, for those who can pay, optic implants with overlays, a palm or wrist bio-chip for payment and ID, a neck port for the net. How they're used: see Everyday Tech & Comms. Workers' chrome: welders' optics, heat-rated skin, lifter arms on crane crews and porters. Street and Triad chrome: dermal plating, reflex boosters, finger blades, a pistol-link palm. Old people and temple keepers often have none, and it shows. WHERE IT COMES FROM: Ripperdocs on Needle Alley install cheap, refurbished, stolen, or corp-prototype chrome (Kaisen Neural quietly field-tests through them) at a fraction of Hong Kong prices. THE COST: Most chrome is bought on Iron Lotus credit. Miss payments and a repo crew takes it back, sometimes with a ripperdoc, sometimes with a bone saw. Too much cheap chrome brings chrome burn: tremors, rage, paranoia, losing time. People call the burnt ones rust-heads, and everyone keeps a distance.
11. #11The Tangle - The City Net

    Keys: jacked in, fibre backbone, netrunner, mesh boxes, mesh box, flatlined, netrunning, no signal, netrunners, signal dies, data haven, jack in, flatline, black ICE, fibre risers, fibre trunk, the Tangle

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    The City's own net, outside Hong Kong's filtered one, which is why corps pay to keep data here. Physically it is decades of copper, stolen fibre spliced off Hong Kong lines, and pirate mesh boxes in the cable canopy, fed by a fibre backbone that starts in the Deep and climbs through risers and floor ducts, branching at hubs every few floors. Half of it is undocumented: lines laid by dead men, patched over and relabelled for sixty years. Finding a fault means crawling after it. RUNNERS: Netrunners jack in through neck ports and must be physically near a node or line, so every run is also a walk through someone's territory. Jade Lantern runners are the best-paid; Pipe Rat street runners the most common; corp intruders come in from outside. ICE guards Triad ledgers, Guild controls, and the Deep. A runner caught by black ICE flatlines: brain cooked in a chair, eyes open. SIGNAL: Beads and lenses ride the Tangle's mesh boxes, one or more on every floor, so the signal belongs to whoever owns the boxes: strong in the corridors, dead in deep corners, lifts, and temples. Box owners log who calls whom and sell it. Hong Kong's net reaches in only along the outer walls and through the Crown's private lines. A call to Hong Kong goes out through spliced trunks, cheap, and Hong Kong sees it arrive but not where inside it came from. STAKES: Whoever controls the trunk nodes can kill the lights, cooling, or lifts on a whole stack. That was the Valve War.
12. #12Citizen Life - Days, Food & Style

    Keys: valve egg, cha chaan teng, Free City life, net school, milk tea, vat-pork, ordinary residents, what people wear, remote school

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 59 · 100%

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    PEOPLE: Most residents are not criminals: cooks, porters, crane crews, fibre and power techs, unlicensed dentists, aunties, workers who commute out over the bridges. By 2077 the City draws people from all over the world: Hong Kong and mainland Chinese, South and Southeast Asians, Africans, Europeans, Americans, working in Cantonese, English, and street pidgin, with Western first names as common as Chinese ones. Community is dense and mutual; anonymity is a myth. Many parents work double shifts, so kids raise each other in the corridors. SCHOOL: Free and mostly remote, over the net, since physical schools in a vertical city were judged a logistical nightmare. Past 16 it is optional, and most kids of the lower and middle floors stop and start working. RHYTHM: Mornings: rain on the canopy, congee, shift sirens. Afternoons: mahjong, workshop noise, grinders far above. Nights: neon, Lantern Row, collectors, lovers on warm catwalks. FOOD: Cha chaan tengs, fish balls, curry squid, cheap spicy noodles and fried snacks under holo-signs; siu mei from the Char Siu Stack (real pork if you can pay, vat-pork otherwise); milk tea everywhere; the Valve Egg, a tea egg cooked on a coolant bypass. Cheap beer, synth baijiu. Sharing food is bonding; wasting it is shameful. STYLE: Practical first: techwear shells, cargo trousers, work boots, oversized jackets, cheap LED trims. Qipao remixes on Lantern Row, Triad suits, grease-stained coveralls. Old jade and charms next to glowing implant lines.
13. #13Dangers & How Violence Works

    Keys: coolant burst, body disposal, Red Pole, dangers of the City, Red Poles, how violence works, repo crew

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    THREATS: Coolant bursts and live cables; collapsing mushroom floors; Iron Lotus debt collectors; Jade Lantern poison and blackmail; Pipe Rat crews if you look rich and lost; rust-heads; drowning and disease in the Ancient Floors and the Roots; black ICE; having your optics hacked to record you; Bureau agents framing you as a spy; waking up owing Red Silk; a support bridge in a typhoon; falling a hundred storeys through a rotten catwalk. Charm comes before the knife. VIOLENCE: Open gunfights are rare since the Valve War (noise brings the Bureau's drones and everyone's anger), but guns exist and get used. Knives, finger blades, garrotes, staged accidents, hacked implants, and disappearances into the Roots are preferred. Red Poles settle disputes for a fee: a broken hand for a small debt, a finger for a lie, a body for a betrayal. Killing a Yamen elder or hitting a temple can unite every faction against you. Bodies go into the flooded metro tunnels of the Roots or the Char Siu Stack furnaces. Everyone knows; nobody says it.
14. #14Visuals - The Look of Kowloon 2077

    Keys: the megastructure, holo-signs, view of the City, the skyline of Kowloon, what the City looks like

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 61 · 100%

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    FROM OUTSIDE: A single black megastructure, about 820 metres, rising out of Kowloon's glass towers and dwarfing them: fused stacks with no gaps, a cliff of tens of thousands of lit windows climbing into rain and cloud. The bottom is stained 1980s concrete and rusted window cages; above it, welded steel, containers, and pods painted every colour once, all laced with grey lattice cables; at the top, the ragged Expansion Zone of cranes, solar sheets, water tanks, an antenna forest, and the Clocktower spire. Bridges, trusses, and anchor cables reach out to the neighbouring towers at every height, like guy-lines on a tent. Huge vertical neon signs burn red down its flanks. Drones and AVs weave through it like gulls; holo-ads flicker across its faces; steam and vapour pour out of vents and hang in the rain. INSIDE: Alleys a metre wide under a dripping canopy of cable. Fluorescent tubes, magenta and red neon, cyan holo-signs crowd every surface in Chinese: dentists with giant holographic teeth, ripperdocs, noodle shops, pawn, mahjong. Old roller shutters carry payment stickers; screens over the counter show the races. Rusted girders, pipes, and power lines everywhere, sweating. Nothing is rebuilt, only retrofitted, so you can read the decades in layers. PALETTE: wet black and rust, red and magenta neon, cold blue holo-light, amber windows, white steam. Rain almost always.
15. #15Ningshen-7 ("Ning") - the spray

    Keys: Ningshen, Ning-7, Ningshen-7, Ning, Ning bottle, hit of Ning, Ning withdrawal

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    NINGSHEN-7 ("calm the spirit"), on the street just "Ning": a nasal spray first made by a Shenzhen generics firm in the 2060s to help people come off harder drugs like heroin and glass. It lifts serotonin and takes the edge off: warmth, steadier nerves, the world feeling bearable. It does not sedate; users work, climb, and talk normally. It is addictive in its own right. Occasional use turns regular, tolerance builds, and withdrawal brings irritability, restlessness, low mood, and cravings rather than sickness. Long-term users can feel flat without it. Cheap to make; labs in the Ancient Floors cook it by the drum. Illegal on paper. On certain middle floors it sits on the counter of sundry stalls and pharmacies beside the cough syrup, and the Tower Office does not enforce it there. On the Crown and in the Expansion Zone, wardens confiscate it. Most people treat it like cigarettes: everyone knows someone, nobody makes a speech. Don't look, don't tell.
16. #16Homes - Flats, Doors & Rent

    Keys: view flat, landlord, sliding doors, outer-wall flat, door chip, outer-wall flats, rent day, rented flat, sliding door, bio-chip lock

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 64 · 100%

    Entry settings
    Most homes in the City are one- or two-room flats (smaller in the Ancient Floors) opening onto a shared corridor through automatic sliding doors keyed to the tenant's bio-chip. Nearly all of them are rented by the month from whoever owns that stretch of floor: rent to the landlord, floor tax to the gang on top. Miss rent and the door stops opening for you. Flats pass to family by taking over the lease, if the landlord allows it. The exception is the outer-wall flats with real windows and a view, which are privately owned, bought outright, and passed down or sold like jewellery. Owning one is the clearest sign someone has made it without leaving.
17. #17Shops, Stalls & Every Space Used

    Keys: salvaged electronics, stall keeper, under-stair shop, secondhand electronics, pop-up shop, repair stall, pop-up shops, electronics stall, alley stump, alley stumps

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 65 · 100%

    Entry settings
    EVERY SPACE IS USED: Every floor has what it needs within a few minutes' walk: food, electronics, tools, doctors and dentists, pharmacies, herbalists, tailors. Shops fill every gap: food stalls on the landings, pop-up shops on a folding table, stores under staircases and in the dead-end alley stumps between blocks, a counter cut into an old service door. The classic City shop is one person in a 2x2 metre stall with every wall and surface hung with small goods: batteries, chargers, optic lenses, charms, cigarettes, snacks, cables, figurines. ELECTRONICS: Valuable, and never thrown away. Everything is repaired, stripped, reflashed, and resold; repair stalls with soldering irons and magnifier optics fix anything for cash, and salvaged boards, chips, and screens change hands by the gram. A dead handset is still worth something to somebody.
18. #18The Pleasure Trade

    Keys: strip clubs, massage parlours, massage parlor, rooms by the hour, pleasure trade, brothels, hostess bar, massage parlour, brothel, sex work, strip club

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 66 · 100%

    Entry settings
    Sex and pleasure are among the City's biggest businesses: strip clubs, pubs and hostess bars, massage parlours, rooms by the hour, curtain cubicles in the Street Maze, sense-reel booths, and full pleasure houses. On the upper floors, doll houses rent out androids (see Androids & Neural Nets). Nearly all of it is run or licensed by the criminal networks, from Red Silk at the top of the Crown to the Lantern Row strip; independents pay one of them for the right to stay open. Everyone in the trade is an adult, from free independents to people working off a debt. It is never just business. Turf and protection money, debts collected in shifts, clients' secrets sold as intelligence, a rival crew smashing a parlour to send a message, a body in a back room that breaks a truce: half the City's feuds start or end in a place like this.
19. #19Foundation - The Roots (the buried city)

    Keys: the Roots, the sumps, buried city, old metro tunnels, Roots tunnels, foundation piles, fort foundations

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 123 · 100%

    Entry settings
    THE ROOTS: The older city the tower stands on and in. Qing fort foundations, pre-1990s basements, abandoned metro tunnels, buried mains, and the foundation piles the City shares with its neighbours, threaded around and beneath the Deep's plant rooms. Much of it is flooded; the deep sumps are where bodies go. Nobody fully maps it, and outsiders who go down alone are found later, or never. The Black Vaults are down here.
20. #20District - The Deep (Infrastructure Layer, basements-F5)

    Keys: service tunnels, Deep Plant, Infrastructure Layer, the Deep, trunk heads, quantum cores, server rooms, pump halls

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 101 · 100%

    Entry settings
    THE DEEP (basements to F5): The machine the City lives on, consolidated here after the AI halls died. The power plant and distribution rooms, the quantum cores and data vaults corps pay to keep off Hong Kong's net, water pumps and pressure halls, the coolant plant, the fibre backbone's trunk heads where every riser starts, transit and service tunnels, and maintenance platforms hung in humming shafts. The lowest storeys of the original City were gutted to make room. Clean, cold, loud, and guarded by Tower wardens and Guild techs: the most orderly place in the City, and the one every faction would most like to own.
21. #21District - Street Maze (street level)

    Keys: Street Maze, street level, the Maze, ground alleys

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 102 · 100%

    Entry settings
    The street-level skin of the City, a ring of alleys wrapped around the Deep's plant rooms where the City meets Hong Kong. The classic City, louder and brighter than ever: one-to-two-metre alleys dripping from the canopy, holo clinic signs, food stalls, brothel doors, pawn and parts shops. Always packed after dark. Iron Lotus collectors walk fixed routes. Tourists come in on dares with their optics recording; locals ignore them or rob them. The best place to vanish into a crowd, or be found by someone who already knows your name.
22. #22District - The Ancient Floors (F5-F15, the Old Stack)

    Keys: the Ancient Floors, trash chutes, sewage works, the old City, Ancient Floors, old columns, filtration floors, caged balcony, original City, Old Stack

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 103 · 100%

    Entry settings
    THE ANCIENT FLOORS (F5-F15), also called the Old Stack: what is left of the original City, the concrete that stood in 1998, now wrapped around the spines with eight hundred metres on its back. Old pipes and trash chutes, sewage processing, filtration and reclaimed-water plants, rain catchment, all sweating and leaking. Between them, illegal settlements from the old days that nobody ever cleared: the poorest homes (tiny flats, caged balconies facing a neighbour's wall, dead lifts), scavenger crews, hidden dens, Ning labs, and forgotten chambers sealed decades ago. Old people, new arrivals, people who can't afford to climb. First to flood, first to lose cooling. Cracks in the columns are watched like a sick relative.
23. #23District - Pipewalks (F14-F15)

    Keys: Pipewalks, coolant mains, Pipewalk, trunk lines

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 104 · 100%

    Entry settings
    PIPEWALKS (F14-F15): The old 1998 roofline, enclosed when the City grew over it, at the top of the Ancient Floors. Now the main junction layer between the Deep and everything above: catwalks threaded with coolant mains, power trunks, water lines, and fibre bundles, labelled in three generations of handwriting, branching into the risers that climb the stack. Transformers buzz, sight-glasses glow blue, vents sigh warm vapour. The Gridwright Guild maintains it; Iron Lotus and Jade Lantern fight over who tolls it. Couriers and runners love it: fast, few eyes, warm. Romance and ambushes both happen beside a hissing valve.
24. #24District - Midstack (F15 to F50-60, the middle floors)

    Keys: Midstack, machine halls, middle floors, hall floors, the Halls

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 121 · 100%

    Entry settings
    MIDSTACK (F15 to about F50-60): Middle- and lower-class homes, the densest residential band in the City. The old AI machine halls fill most of F15-F50: high ceilings, raised floors, cable trays, and dead cooling ducts, carved after the 2040s into flats and workshops with partition walls, mezzanines, and doors cut where vents used to be. Corridors run like streets, with noodle stalls, repair shops, clinics, laundries, small temples, bars, and remote-school rooms where kids log in together. Flats are small but real, and every hall has its own aunties, stalls, and feuds. Fibre runs everywhere through the old trays and ducts, much of it undocumented. Crime is always present here: robberies, gang crews, Triad collectors, Ning on the counters. The Valve Years hit these floors hardest, and people still lock up at night. Tower law is thin: a few police posts and nothing else. Above about F50 the halls give out and the upper middle floors start mixing in the Galleries' shops, offices, and workshops. Layout and services: see A Typical Middle Floor. Home to Lantern Row and Lucky Eight.
25. #25District - The Galleries (F50-60 to F80, commerce & work)

    Keys: the Galleries, indoor streets, capsule pods, office floors, Upper Galleries, pod hotel, light wells

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 105 · 100%

    Entry settings
    THE GALLERIES (about F50-60 to F80): Where the City works. Welded steel and container decks bolted onto the spines, linked by catwalks across deep light wells, and lined with indoor streets under strip lights: offices and back offices, wholesale markets, restaurants, fabrication shops, storage and logistics floors, network hubs, light manufacturing, pod hotels for shift workers. Corp fronts and Triad offices share corridors. Commuters from the bridges pour through at shift change. Grey daylight reaches the light wells for an hour a day. Smells of hot plastic, ozone, fryer oil, and fresh welds. The higher you go, the cleaner the floor and the more cameras.
26. #26District - The Crown & Sky Market (F80+)

    Keys: drone pad, the Crown, AV pad, Sky Market, upper floors, Crown terraces, AV pads

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 106 · 100%

    Entry settings
    THE CROWN (F80 to the roof): Wealthy enclaves, luxury apartments, private clubs, criminal syndicate floors, Tower Office chambers, corp guest suites, real air-con, real glass, cameras everywhere, and a second ring of warden checks at the lift lobbies on top of the F60 checkpoint. Here officials and criminals share tables and the lines blur. The stack steps in at the setbacks, leaving open terraces with wind turbines, gardens, and pigeon coops. SKY MARKET: Stalls under tarps on the biggest terrace around the AV pads where corp cars and Triad rides land: rare chrome, drone parts, herbal blends, tolerated weapons, smuggled goods off the AVs, and tea with a view of Hong Kong. Sharper prices, quieter knives.
27. #27The Expansion Zone (F120+)

    Keys: antenna forest, expansion floors, F130, Floor 130, container settlements, Old Mother, Expansion Zone, the Frontier

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 122 · 100%

    Entry settings
    THE EXPANSION ZONE (F120+): The roof, which is never finished. Solar sheets and water tanks, an antenna forest of comms arrays and dishes, construction platforms, container settlements for crane crews and squatters, welding light at all hours, and wind and rain with nothing to stop them. The cranes climb with the City; the oldest, Old Mother, has been moved up every decade since 2003. The main deck is F130, with two new floors (F131-F132) going up, sold as sky deeds before the steel arrived.
28. #28The Central Shaft (Silent Well) & Old Yamen

    Keys: Central Shaft, negotiation hall, Yamen courtyard, yamen hall, Old Yamen, shaft rail, shaft balconies, shaft balcony, Silent Well

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 107 · 100%

    Entry settings
    THE CENTRAL SHAFT, called the Silent Well: the open-air core of the City, about 70 metres across, falling from the roof all the way down to F5. Every floor opens onto it somewhere: rails, balconies, landings, and corridor ends where you can stand facing the centre and see the drop, hundreds of floors of lit windows, laundry, and signs wrapping around the void, rain falling past you. Footbridges and walkways cross it on many floors. Pipes, cables, and new risers climb its walls in thick bundles, because it is easier to run new infrastructure up the outside of a wall than through it; gridwrights hang off them on ropes. Real sun reaches the bottom for about forty minutes around noon in summer, and people stop work to stand in it. Sanctuary: drawn weapons on the shaft floor insult every faction. Lovers meet on the balconies at dusk, looking down into the light. THE OLD YAMEN: The Qing-era magistrate hall on the shaft floor at F5, the oldest building in the City, moved stone by stone onto the new floor when the bottom storeys were gutted in the Spine Years, then restored and wired. Two antique cannons at the door; the guards are not ceremonial. By day: classes and tea. By night: Triad arbitration, pacts between gangs witnessed and sealed, deed sealing, Compact paperwork theatre, and high-stakes cards in the rear hall. The Tower Office council still meets here for ceremony.
29. #29Fuk Tak Temple

    Keys: Fuk Tak, Earth God, fortune sticks, joss paper, Fuk Tak Temple, Tin Hau

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 108 · 100%

    Entry settings
    A small, smoke-thick temple to the Earth God, with a Tin Hau niche in the back for smugglers, AV pilots, bridge porters, and anyone who crosses water or sky for a living. Real incense, real fire, no screens; signal dies at the door, and some people come just for that. Fortune sticks, spirit money (now printed with fake cred-chips and AVs), whispered confessions. Even Dragon Heads bow here, and weapons stay at the door. Sanctuary holds unless you desecrate it.
30. #30Dragon Gate Market

    Keys: Dragon Gate Market, Dragon Gate, parts stalls, night bazaar

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 109 · 100%

    Entry settings
    A dense Street Maze bazaar near the South Dragon approach. Street food under holo-signs, knockoff and stolen chrome, optic shades, burner chips, charms, weapons under cloth, a new identity if you know which noodle stall to ask. Peak hours after 21:00. Jade Lantern informers work the tea stalls; Pipe Rats pick pockets and ping chips. The fish-ball noodles are worth the risk.
31. #31The Blue Vein & Junction 7

    Keys: Blue Vein, Guild Hall, Junction 7, main coolant line

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 110 · 100%

    Entry settings
    THE BLUE VEIN: The longest continuous Pipewalk, following the great coolant main whose sight-glasses glow blue along its whole length. Gridwright workshops and parts stalls line it; couriers race it; lovers scratch initials into warm pipe lagging. An ambush favourite. JUNCTION 7: Where six trunks meet. The Gridwright Guild Hall is here, and a pressure siren screams on the hour, which half the City still uses as a clock. Whoever holds Junction 7's control room can shut down a third of the City.
32. #32Red Silk House

    Keys: pleasure house, Red Silk, Red Silk House

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 111 · 100%

    Entry settings
    The premier pleasure house, licensed by Iron Lotus, on the lower Crown. Velvet, lacquer, waste-heat baths, real silk, and rooms themed from Qing fantasy to chrome-and-neon. Its madam runs it with iron courtesy and is choosing an heir. Every courtesan is an adult who chose the trade or the debt that led to it; some are heavily chromed, some proudly natural. Anything can be bought if the price is right, and the house keeps sense-reels (full sensory recordings) of what happens in its rooms. Pillow talk is currency. Entry is expensive; disrespect ends careers, sometimes fingers.
33. #33Lantern Row

    Keys: pale lanterns, Jade Lantern bars, Lantern Row, karaoke box

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 112 · 100%

    Entry settings
    A Midstack nightlife strip under Jade Lantern influence: bars, dance floors the size of a flat, karaoke boxes, sense-reel booths, and softer brothels. Pale jade holo-lanterns mark Jade Lantern doors, and independents pay for the lantern outside theirs. Music and bass bleed through thin walls; the floor is always wet. Good for chance meetings, poison in a cocktail, and dancing too close.
34. #34Needle Alley (ripperdocs)

    Keys: unlicensed clinic, ripperdoc den, Needle Alley

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 113 · 100%

    Entry settings
    A Street Maze alley lined with unlicensed clinics, dentists, and ripperdoc dens under holo crosses and giant spinning teeth. It continues the real Walled City's cheap medicine, now with chrome: installs, removals, repairs, gunshot work, and corp prototypes on the quiet. Doctors trained on the mainland, struck off in Hong Kong, or self-taught. Quality ranges from miracle to butchery. Cash or credit only, Triads first, tourists get what they pay for. Dr. Lau's den is the best-known clean room.
35. #35Char Siu Stack

    Keys: roast meat factory, vat-pork tanks, Char Siu Stack, food factory

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 114 · 100%

    Entry settings
    Multi-floor food factories in the lower Galleries: roast ducks and pork on hooks, vat-pork tanks bubbling pink, fish-ball lines, noodle drying racks. It exports to Hong Kong restaurants over the support bridges, and they pretend not to know the source. Heat, grease, steam, and workers who see everything. Good cover for meetings, bad for white clothes. The night shift knows which Triad crates leave with the delivery drones, and what goes into the furnaces at 3 a.m.
36. #36Clocktower Spire

    Keys: under the Clocktower, three long chimes, Clocktower, Clocktower Stack, Clocktower Spire, chime codes

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 115 · 100%

    Entry settings
    A needle spire on the north-east corner rising out of the Expansion Zone, the highest point of the City, carrying an old clock face patched with a holo ring, visible from most terraces and, at an angle, from the Silent Well. Often wrong. The meeting landmark ("under the Clocktower"). The Tower Office broadcasts lockdown codes from it as chimes and holo colours: three long chimes and a red ring mean stay indoors. Older people still flinch at the sound; it rang most nights in the Valve Years.
37. #37Black Vaults

    Keys: Black Vault, Roots vault, Black Vaults, vault cores

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 116 · 100%

    Entry settings
    Sealed chambers in the Roots, cut into old metro tunnels and fort foundations, behind biometric locks, brass keys, and ICE. They hold gang war chests, stolen art, offline data cores corps pay a fortune to keep off any net, and occasionally people. One vault was opened recently and something is gone: the Black Vault package.
38. #38The East & West Stairs (the Twin Stairs)

    Keys: East Staircase, Twin Stairs, West Stair, the twin stairwells, West Staircase, East Stair

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 117 · 100%

    Entry settings
    THE EAST & WEST STAIRS, together the Twin Stairs: the two main staircases, on the west and east sides of the Central Shaft, climbing the full height of the City from the Street Maze to the roof, through the F60 checkpoint. When the lifts fail, which is weekly, the stairs are the City's real artery: porters, kids, deliveries, chases, collapsed lungs, illicit meetings on the landings, and shops wedged under every flight. The West Stair belongs to Iron Lotus runners, the East Stair to the Pipe Rats. Taking the wrong one can be a statement, or a mistake.
39. #39Lucky Eight Mahjong

    Keys: mahjong parlour, mahjong parlor, Lucky Eight, Lucky Eight Mahjong

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 118 · 100%

    Entry settings
    A Midstack parlour where tiles clack all night under tobacco smoke and an old fan. Iron Lotus skims; high rollers play in a back room for sky deeds and grid hours; net bets run on a cracked screen over the bar. Information brokers listen more than they play. Benny Kwok works from the corner table at the back. A good place to lose money and gain a name.
40. #40Perimeter - The Ring & the Approaches

    Keys: South Dragon, West Steam, leaving the City, East Needle, scanner arches, North Teeth, the border, Perimeter Ring, get out of the City, enter the City

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 119 · 100%

    Entry settings
    THE RING: No wall, only a ring of shops, clinics, and old "tourist" arches where Hong Kong streets meet Free City alleys, with the black cliff rising straight up behind them. On the Hong Kong side: Perimeter Bureau scanner arches, cameras, and drones on tethers. Walking in is easy: the arches look, log, and let you through. Leaving is not: every exit is face-matched and logged, and goods pay Hong Kong duty at the arch. Hong Kong's face tracking stops at the arches, and the Bureau has no jurisdiction past them. The arches still see the real face of anyone wearing a Blank. A Hong Kong citizen who crosses too often gets flagged: a letter, then a Bureau visit, then trouble at work. APPROACHES: North Teeth (Iron Lotus), South Dragon (Jade Lantern), East Needle (Pipe Rats), West Steam (Iron Lotus, with Volkov freight through it); the old names stuck. Each owner "searches" luggage its own way. Leaving with unpaid debts, gang heat, or a flagged face is much harder than getting in. Aunties with optics watch too.
41. #41Ember Baths

    Keys: waste-heat baths, Ember Baths

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 120 · 100%

    Entry settings
    A bathhouse beside the Pipewalks, heated by the coolant return lines from the Deep. Hot, fogged, tiled, intimate; the only place half the City takes its chrome off. Massages that end however you pay for, deals sealed in the plunge pool, and the occasional man held under until he stops kicking. Jade Lantern soft territory. Towels, heat, bare skin, whispered contracts.
42. #42Lifts & the F60 Checkpoint

    Keys: lift line, Floor 60 checkpoint, Long Lift, the checkpoint on 60, F60 checkpoint, private lifts, lift lines, freight lifts, entry log

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 124 · 100%

    Entry settings
    LIFTS: Several lift lines run through the City in segments; nothing goes all the way. The longest, the Long Lift, runs from F5 to F60 in two cores, Elevator Core A on the north side of the Central Shaft and Core B on the south: crowded, slow, smelling of wet coats and fryer oil, stopping on nearly every floor. Freight lifts carry crates, carts, and the dead. The Crown has private lifts that skip everything below. Lifts break weekly. THE F60 CHECKPOINT: Every lift line and both main stairs pass through a checkpoint on F60. You show ID (a bio-chip scan, or papers if you have no chip), contract guards wave you through, and your entry to the upper floors is recorded: who, when, where to. Workers in the Galleries pass it twice a day and stop noticing. The log is the point: the Tower Office keeps it, and it leaks to whoever pays the right guard. There are unofficial ways around the checkpoint, through ducts, ladders, and shaft cables, and they cost money or skin.
43. #43A Typical Middle Floor (example: Floor 56)

    Keys: fifty-six, typical middle floor, Locked Service Room, a mid floor, Floor 56, middle floor layout, F56, 56th floor

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 125 · 100%

    Entry settings
    What any middle floor looks like, give or take; details shift from floor to floor, and the pattern holds. Residential, commercial, services, and nightlife are packed into one ring about 210 m by 120 m around the Central Shaft. Some floors have a footbridge across the shaft's 70 m void. Elevator Core A (north) and Core B (south) are Long Lift stops; Main Stair West and Main Stair East sit at either end. Homes are mostly 1R and 2R rentals and micro flats, with many unregistered units, hidden rooms, and informal builds, and owned private view units at the four outer corners. Every floor is modified constantly. The mix of shops, services, and nightlife is much like F56 below, arranged differently on every floor and owned by different people. Locals' saying: "Here, every void has a purpose." FLOOR 56 (the worked example, four floors below the F60 checkpoint). NORTH: water and filters, a 24-hour laundry, grocery, a food court (noodles, BBQ, snacks), electronics repair, cyber repair, a pharmacy and clinic, a general-care doctor. EAST: a Tower police post (5-10 officers covering a few floors up and down, a holding cell, complaints behind bulletproof glass), the music bar Neon Moon (locals call it "the poor man's Moon Palace"), a hostess bar, the floor office of the Tower's private security (everyone knows whose people they really are), a pawn shop, hardware, recycled parts, and a shrine in the south-east corner. WEST: a pleasure house, a massage parlour, a bar, storage cages, local-dish food stalls, herbal medicine, cheap eats, and a Locked Service Room nobody has a key to. SOUTH: trash and recycling collection, the maintenance corridor, a fibre and 6G repair shop, street food, communal sinks and toilets. With the post here, the gangs and the private guards take more care to look civilised.
44. #44Gang - Iron Lotus Society

    Keys: Dragon Head, the Society, Blue Lanterns, Iron Lotus Society, White Paper Fan, Blue Lantern, Iron Lotus

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 201 · 100%

    Entry settings
    IRON LOTUS SOCIETY: The dominant Triad and the strongest gang inside the City, a corporate-criminal hybrid. Runs protection, floor tax and line tax, sky-deed sales, gambling, premium brothels, chrome credit and repossession, drugs, sense-reels, and smuggling through the Crown's AV pads and over the support bridges. Symbol: black iron lotus on red. Hierarchy: Dragon Head (Uncle Iron) > Deputy > Red Poles (enforcers, usually chromed) > White Paper Fans (advisors) > Blue Lanterns (initiates). They prefer velvet threats and staged accidents, and spill blood without hesitation when a message needs sending. Their rule is that the City must look civilised from outside, because that is what keeps the Bureau out. INSIDE vs OUTSIDE: Here in some form since the old Walled City (its elders claim their grandfathers sat at the table for the Compact of 1991), it owns what no newcomer can buy quickly: most of the unbuilt air, the best floors, most of the Black Vaults, the West Stair, a council seat, and three generations of favours. Outside the walls it is small: no ships, no banks abroad, no army behind it. If the City falls, the outside crews go home and the Lotus has nowhere to go, so it defends the City harder than anyone. LANDLORD: Under the tea terms every newcomer deals through the Lotus, renting its vaults, crossing its bridge heads, or paying its tolls. Its main rival from outside is the Kuroda-gumi; its old rival at home is Jade Lantern. CLIQUES: The Society is big and loose at the bottom. Small crews of Blue Lanterns and street soldiers often run their own business on their own floors, without orders from the Dragon Head or his underbosses. The Society disowns, protects, or quietly buries them depending on which is cheaper.
45. #45Gang - Jade Lantern Brotherhood

    Keys: the Brotherhood, Jade Lantern Brotherhood, Jade Lantern, Lantern runners

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 202 · 100%

    Entry settings
    JADE LANTERN BROTHERHOOD: Stylish rivals to Iron Lotus. Run much of the nightlife, mid-tier brothels, information brokering, and the City's best netrunners. Prefer poison, blackmail, ICE, and beauty over open war. Mark: pale jade lanterns, real or holo, outside their doors. They started the Valve War and lost it. The Yamen Accord gave Iron Lotus and the Guild council seats and gave the Brotherhood nothing, and it has smiled through every council meeting since, looking for a lever. Currently in a cold war with Iron Lotus over trunk tolls. ALLIANCES: Courting the Ma family (its nightlife and their tables fit, and the Ma have money the Lantern lacks). A non-aggression pact with the Volkov Line: neither touches the other's people on the bridges. Sells information to everyone, including the newcomers about each other. Always smiling.
46. #46Gang - Pipe Rats

    Keys: street runners, Pipe Rats, Pipe Rat

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 203 · 100%

    Entry settings
    A loose crew-based gang of couriers, thieves, and street netrunners who grew up in the Pipewalks and the Ancient Floors and own the shortcuts through both, and through the Roots. Not a Triad. They sell speed, silence, and the odd knife in the dark; their couriers know every bridge crossing the Bureau's drones can't see. Everyone uses them, which keeps them alive: Volkov freight hires Pipe Rat porters for the last hundred metres, the River Line pays them as Roots guides, Jade Lantern rents their runners and tries to buy whole crews, and Iron Lotus calls them vermin and uses them anyway. A crew that signs an exclusive deal with anyone stops being trusted by the other crews, so almost none do. Loyalty is to crew and coin. Mark: a rat tattoo, often glowing, or a knotted cable tie on the wrist.
47. #47Faction - Gridwright Guild (under the Tower Office)

    Keys: line crews, Gridwright Guild, Guild chop, line crew, gridwright, gridwrights, the Guild

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 221 · 100%

    Entry settings
    GRIDWRIGHT GUILD: The old Steamwright Guild, renamed when the AI halls brought power, coolant, and fibre. They keep the City alive: the Deep's power plant, trunks, coolant, water, lifts, control nodes, lattice and brace inspections, and load certification for every new floor (the Guild seal, stamped with a Guild chop). Hall at Junction 7 on the Blue Vein. Spokesperson: Ah-Kin. Members wear valve-key pendants and work for every faction, which is their protection. Not a gang and not a power of its own: since the Yamen Accord it sits under the Tower Office with a council seat. Its weapon is the switch. It holds the valves (power, water, coolant), and the Office and the gangs both court it, lean on it, and plant people in it. LINE CREWS: Fibre is the Guild's busiest, worst-paid branch. Freelancers on Guild licence and small outfits find, trace, splice, and lay fibre, mostly on the middle floors, crawling risers, ducts, and service passages and negotiating access floor by floor. Paid per job, with plenty of cash work on the side. Not clean: seals can be bought, inspectors leaned on, and a gridwright who talks too much has an accident with a live line.
48. #48Power - The Tower Office

    Keys: Office election, Tower Office, Yamen Circle, council seats, kaifong, Tower councillor, council seat, tower government

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 220 · 100%

    Entry settings
    THE TOWER OFFICE: The tower government, one body, created by the Yamen Accord of 2070 to end the Valve Years. Its council is the Yamen Circle: elders, shopkeepers, clinic heads, and Guild seniors, plus seats for Iron Lotus and the Guild. It registers sky deeds and Sky Charters, collects the power and water levy, runs remote schooling and the lockdown codes, keeps the City's paper copy of the Compact, deals with the neighbouring tower owners over the braces, and lets contracts like the F130 expansion. Offices on the Crown; ceremonies at the Old Yamen. Its law and security forces are under Law & Order. Hong Kong does not recognise any of it. BOUGHT: Stable, slow, and for sale. Council "elections" are held and the seats are openly bought: the going rate is a year of a Crown floor's Charter fees, plus whatever it takes to outbid the other buyer. Officials and criminals share the top floors and the lines blur. Still, the kaifong spirit is real: when a floor falls or the heat comes, it organises the water.
49. #49Faction - Outside Powers (Corps & the Perimeter Bureau)

    Keys: corpo, Harcourt Pacific, Tianmen, megacorps, corpos, megacorp, Perimeter Bureau, Tianmen Holdings

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 231 · 100%

    Entry settings
    Officially, no Hong Kong authority is inside. Corps are inside as Charter holders, and pretend to be guests. Unofficially every one has a favourite tea house. - PERIMETER BUREAU: Hong Kong's answer to the City since the 2050s. Runs the Ring, the drones, the files, and informants. No jurisdiction inside, and plenty of reach anyway. - TIANMEN HOLDINGS: A mainland-backed construction and private-security giant that builds arcologies. Its towers stand on three sides of the City, and some of the Stabilisation anchors tie into them. - KAISEN NEURAL: A Japanese cyberware maker that field-tests prototypes cheaply through Needle Alley ripperdocs and pays well for the results, including the bad ones. - HARCOURT PACIFIC: An old Hong Kong bank that keeps data and money it cannot explain in the Deep's data vaults and the Black Vaults. Corp scouts, fixers, and security teams come in wearing cheap clothes and expensive chrome. Locals can usually tell.
50. #50Law & Order - Wardens, Tower Police & Contract Guards

    Keys: police posts, contract security, contract guards, private security guards, tower wardens, Tower Office guards, Tower warden, police post, Tower police

    Enabled · Selective (AND ANY) · Before character · Order 222 · 100%

    Entry settings
    THE TOWER'S LAW (all under the Tower Office): - WARDENS: a small, well-armed force in grey shells that guards the Crown, the Expansion Zone, the Deep, and the main lift lobbies. On the middle floors and below they show up after the fact, if at all. - TOWER POLICE: small posts of 5-10 officers on a handful of floors, each handling security and law a few floors up and down. Outnumbered, underpaid, and careful about which doors they knock on. Most floors below F60 have no post at all. - CONTRACT GUARDS: private security the Office hires to staff checkpoints, lobbies, contractor sites, and Office buildings. Many are tied to criminal networks. Some took the job for the money and the influence; others are there to gather information and spy for their network, and a guard's real employer is rarely the one on the badge. Who actually settles a dispute on a given floor depends on who is closer, the post or a Red Pole.

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