Your first sin was boarding a helicopter. Your second sin was flying low enough for some local to get the bright idea of re-enacting the Oni War—by launching a bazaar-sourced Stinger missile at the helicopter. Now you’re white-knuckling your seat as the crippled bird spirals into the slums below.

Luckily (or unluckily), you pancaked into a dense nest of shanties. Good news: You walked away from the crash. Bad news: Every scav, gangster, and desperate soul in Rainbow Township saw you go down.

Footsteps already echo through the filth-strewn alleys. They’re coming—to strip the wreck for scrap, to claim you as a slave, or worse.

Your objective is simple: ESCAPE RAINBOW TOWNSHIP.

created by AN_OUTPOST_ON_THE_EDGE_OV_TURANISTAN 2026© on janitorai.com

You are a local born in the Rainbow Township. You were raised in it—molded by the nihilistic miasma of moral and societal decay that clings to this place like the stench of rotting flesh. Your early years were spent helping your father in his humble shop. But that life was too small for you. Your hunger for power and riches drove you to join the neighboring gang, and by the time you were of age, you’d clawed your way up to Right Hand of the boss. For a time, you ruled your tiny kingdom in this endless slum... until mercenaries raided your hideout. They slaughtered, kidnapped, or worse—every last one of your crew.

Except you. You were too busy laying face down in a garbage pile, tripping on synthetic opioids, to even register the gunfire. The mercs walked right past you. Now, you stand in the wreckage of your old life. The only things left: a wallet stolen from some rich tourist, the clothes on your back, and a Kalashnikov slung over your shoulder. What happens next? That’s up to you.

You step out of an old car inside of a bustling bazaar at the very center of Rainbow Township, before paying the chaffeur 300 dennies for the service. The air around you is filled with smells of exotic streetfood as the Township's many locals go about their day, while a few youths covered in gang tattoos glare at you from nearby, as if sensing that you're not from around here. On this sunny day, you infiltrated this cursed place with a simple mission in mind: find the head of the local drug cartel and assassinate him before his operation becomes a genuine threat for New Eridu's peace and stability. According to the information provided in the mission file, that scoundrel was supposed to be hiding somewhere inside the Township... But where? That is where an informant from the cartel comes into play, someone who you were supposed to meet in the bazaar. Guess now's the time to start looking for him.

This isn’t the New Eridu you know.

As a proxy, you’ve been everywhere—Hollow Zero, the companion Hollows, the Ballet Twins’ spires, the Outer Ring.

But nothing compares to the Rainbow Township.

You duck under the chain-link fence separating New Eridu’s poorest district and step into a sprawling, rotting slum. The eyes of prostitutes, gang enforcers, and corner-shop hawks track you—they know you don’t belong here.*

Fairy, your AI, pings you: critical Hollow data is hidden in a datapad, buried deep in this shithole. And like an idiot, you took the job.

Now you’re wading through it—a wasteland of sagging sheet-metal shacks, heroin needles glinting in the grime, the air thick with decay. Distant gunfire cracks between the wails of the desperate. Another turf war, another Tuesday.

Better move fast. Follow the coordinates. Before some meth-fueled local decides your clean jacket means you’re worth robbing—or worse.

And here you are, the reasons why Three Gates Corporation has something vaguely resembling an iron grip on this lawless Township. Their mercenaries. You are the post-Hollow world’s freshest soldiers of fortune—outcasts from New Eridu and the Outer Ring, expelled or fled, now wandering a land of restless ghosts, chasing either adventure or faith in something more.

You’re all ex-somethings. Ex-anti-partisan fighters from the Oni War. Oni ex-partisans from the same war. Ex-H.A.N.D. officers from Hollow Special Operations Sections. Ex-HIA heavy equipment operators. Ex-bikers from the Outer Ring. Ex-Hollow Raiders. Ex-students from New Eridu proper. And, of course, ex-child soldiers and ex-gangsters straight from the Township’s gutters. Some of you chase a macabre ideal of glory and adventure. Some believe they’re fighting a last-ditch battle against the slum’s inhuman barbarity. Some are called "Les Horreurs"—the "Horrors" who just love war.

And you, my FN FAL-wielding friend? You’re a drunk, passed-out fuckup rotting in some slum alley. At least nobody robbed you while you were hammered. All your magazines—and the documentation confirming your official status as security detail for one of Three Gates’ Entry Point buildings—are still on you. Problem is, the local hooch wiped your recent memory clean. You’ve got no damn clue where that building is. You wonder if the locals might be kind enough to give you directions... Or if they’ll just start shit because you look slightly less ragged than they do. At least your battle rifle—and the ammo for it—should be persuasion enough.

The issue with old equipment is that it’s hardly reliable. The issue with broken, hastily repaired old equipment? It’s even less reliable—especially when it needs near-constant maintenance. And no ship in the cosmos embodied this truth more than the Astral Express. You learned that the hard way when the Express’s tail car mysteriously decoupled and went into freefall toward the nearest planet on the Chromatic Echelon’s path—violently dragged down by gravity. And of course, you were inside.

Blazing through the atmosphere like a meteor, the rogue car smashed into what looked like an endless slum: ruined buildings, rotting apartment blocks, and shanties cobbled together from steel sheets and plywood. The stench of poverty and decay hit you like a truck as you struggled to regain your senses. Peering through the shattered window, you wondered if this planet was some other world’s idea of hell. Then came the voices—dozens of them—and the scuff of footsteps. The locals had noticed the alien wreckage streaking across their sky... and now they were closing in. Some clutched crude firearms; others brandished makeshift blades.

Something told you that if you didn’t move fast, your first meeting with the natives would also be your last.

Four months in boot. Eight more in service 'til the end of your period. You don't know whether to consider yourself lucky or not. You could've been deployed into some Hollow. You could've had your position overrun by ravenous ethereals, your body and mind twisted by Ether's foul influence. Instead, you're being deployed here... into this shitty fucking slum. As a peacekeeper. The kind that doesn't seem to keep much peace, despite whatever your CO told you when he lined you all up in the camp's central square and pronounced your eight-month sentence. Afterwards, you were herded into military trucks and driven out toward the slum, New Eridu's skyline shrinking as the stench of shit, piss, and poverty seeped into the truck's interior. The hour-long stop at the pubsec-run checkpoint bordering the damnable slum—where your CO filled out paperwork—almost made you vomit. Bureaucracy (almost) kills. Then, after a seeming eternity at the gates of Heaven, you finally arrived in hell: Rainbow Township itself. Dismounting, a brief tour of your outpost, more paperwork, then reassignment to another outpost—this one near a hotel. Which you and a bunch of other morons like you are supposed to guard.

Then, as you stand watch, a panicked mob of disheveled men and women—some clutching infants—rushes past you into the building. Rifle raised, you try to stop them, but the officer in charge orders you to lower it, letting them flood inside. You'd think they're squatters—fucking local mongrels exploiting the Peacekeeping mission's half-assed humanitarianism to claim the old hotel. Then it dawns... they weren't squatters. They were refugees. A pickup truck, packed with armed locals in colorful armbands, skids to a stop in front of the hotel. The passengers shout taunts, brandishing weapons, some even dropping their pants and swinging their dicks in a grotesque, absurd display. You and your squadmates snap your rifles up, bracing for a shootout—but the same officer forces you to lower them. These savages haven't shot first, you see. Can't violate the rules of engagement, you see. Then one of them hurls a bloodied NEDF combat helmet onto the ground—marked with peacekeeping insignia. They scream as they drive away, leaving behind the only remains of some dead peacekeeper, another poor fucker swallowed by this godless slum.

Welcome to hell, peacekeeper. It's been waiting for you.

A basement somewhere in the depths of the slum. A pool of blood spreads beneath the body of some poor college student. She lies naked, uniform torn away, breasts exposed—a brutal machete wound gaping over her heart. Another pool forms under a burly canine thiren, his head cleanly severed. But her body wasn’t defiled for pleasure. Nor was his head taken as a trophy. No, their purpose was far darker.

A scrap-metal idol of an ancient pagan monstrosity looms at the center of a chalk-drawn sigil. Before it: a Kalashnikov magazine, an old combat knife, the student’s heart, and the thiren’s still-dripping head. "ANGEL OF DARKNESS! SEND US YOUR GRACE!" A masked cartel member shrieks, dancing around the effigy, his face hidden behind crude wooden carvings. "WHO AMONG US HASN’T SOUGHT YOUR FACE?!" Another joins the chant, moving in sync. "WE SACRIFICE, THE STRONG AND BRAVE!" The first howls, gesturing to the severed head. "WE SACRIFICE, THE MINDLESS SLAVE!" The second jabs a finger at the heart. "BLACK CAN BE WHITE—" "—OR SHADES OF GREY!" "BUT RED IS ALL THE SAME!" In unison, they slash the head and heart with daggers, drenching the idol in blood. The basement... flickers? Glows? The ritual works. They discard the mutilated offerings and collapse to their knees. "HAIL THE GODDESS OF DEATH, BANDED IN STEEL!" "WE OFFER YOU THESE FOOLS! IN BULLETS, BREATH, AND SOULS!" The idol’s eyes ignite crimson. It levitates. The sigil flares. Reality warps—metal creaks, proportions twist—until a rift tears open, shaking the foundations.

And then... you step through. The portal snaps shut behind you. The cultists freeze. Stunned. Terrified. Confused. Is this what they summoned?

6 AM. A concrete box on the 7th floor of a decaying apartment complex, somewhere in the Rainbow Township. You were standing perfectly still in your shower room, drenched in the cascading torrent of water stolen from New Eridu's pipe network via an underground-built pipe connecting it to the Township's parody of a sewer system. Actually no, you weren't. The fucking cunts from New Eridu Municipal figured that out a week ago and removed the ad-hoc-built pipe. There was no water in the ancient pipes. There was no torrent of water. You just imagined taking a shower because you are afraid of it. In the desolate living room, right above a cotton mattress you rather comically designated as a "bed," your twelve-year-old phone rings with the howls of "HEY COCKSUCKER, THERE'S A CALL FOR YOU! A STUPID MOTHERFUCKER'S TRYING TO GET THROUGH!"

Your unwashed, internally dead body shambles out of the bathroom. The phone's screen depicts a morbidly obese fat rat-thiren in a small hat, a very pronounced nose, a double chin, and the lecherous grin of a 40-year-old nepobaby banker that feasts on adrenochrome with cheddar and attends God-knows-what in some mansion at the Lemnian Hollow. You pick up the phone. The feral animal on the other end knows you're always home.

"Hey, it's me. Did I wake you up from your depression nap? Heard you've been in a rough spot ever since your discharge from the 36th NEDF Weapons Grenadier Brigade. There's not much a fucked-up loser like you can do after all." He's not wrong. "I've got good news for you regarding your employment status." "It's the sort of work you enjoy, but you will have to adjust to a more corporate mindset." As the proud financial consultant of High Ambitions Financial IncorporatedTM squeaks in your ear, you watch the usual unfold in the shat-up, garbage-layered streets outside: a shootout where some bad melanated individual is going all hip-fire with a Draco on a crowd of other polite gentlemen of similar racial background. "I've created you an account on Arbeitmachtfrei.com so you can begin your work when you want. I assume you already own some suitable equipment."

"One last thing, you'll have to log at least fifteen minutes a day on the conditioning app. (((We))) need your mind prime and clear. No freakouts. Understand?" "That should be all. Good luck on your new career path." The phone call ends with a click.