NEON CITY

"The brighter the lights of Neon shine, the darker the shadows they cast. Every morning, shopkeepers scrub blood from their doorsteps. Every night, enforcers collect bodies like garbage. The corps call it 'acceptable market adjustment.' The gangs call it 'establishing boundaries.' The rest of us just call it another long night. These neon signs promising paradise? They're funeral lanterns for the living." 

• Kazuo Takeda, Street Ronin, 124 AP

A century before the Great Collapse turned the world into the Desolation, the great city of Osotaka, situated on the Isles of Shima, was a vast urban sprawl of cities that had gradually grown into one continuous ocean of steel, concrete and neon lights. Spared destruction during the wars of the Great Collapse, the city nonetheless transformed in the decades of turmoil that followed.

As untold refugees from around the world streamed into Osotaka, the already overpopulated city was unable to cope. As services and soon after society broke down, corporations and criminals stepped in to carve up the city between them, turning it into the dark, neon-lit hive of despair that the city is now. The old name of Osotaka was soon forgotten, as generations of new arrivals simply began calling it Neon city...

Mercenaries, often referred to as Street Samurai or Ronin by the people of Neon City, freely roam the streets of the sprawl, swords for hire that will fight and kill for anyone - for money. There are so many that turn to this way of life out of desperation, that their services usually come cheap. In the eyes of their employers, the lives of these street samurai are worthless and disposable and it is not uncommon for them to be used as cannon fodder when corporations go to war.

The gangs of Neon City, thrive on controlling all the drugs and money that flow into and out of their neighbourhoods. The life of a ganger is usually violent and short, as turf wars for control of even just a single building block can turn into a bloodbath.

Hackers project their consciousness into the cyberspace network that connects all of Neon City. In their so-called Avatar form, they can break into systems to steal data, take control of devices like surveillance cameras or sentry guns, or simply open a secured doorway - the possibilities are endless. Every gang, mercenary unit or corporate strike team is backed up by one or more hackers, assisting, and sometimes protecting them, from cyberspace.

Once they have entered cyberspace, the hacker is looking for the right connection nodes, data highways and file stacks. Depending on the system they are breaking in to, they may only have seconds to achieve their task, although seconds in real life may feel like several minutes or even hours to those inside cyberspace.

If a hacker triggers the system's countermeasures, they need to either fight or escape as fast as possible. Often, it will be too late. The highest tier countermeasure programs detect the hacker's link-up port in the real world and overload their neural headset...

...leading to the hacker's painful death in the real world! The life of a hacker is dangerous but rewarding. They are well treated and better paid in comparison to regular gang members, but many of them have a short life, only surviving a handful of real, non-simulated cyberspace raids before their luck inevitably runs out.

The many red light districts of Neon City fill the pockets of the gangs that control them with easy money. Because of this, gang raids on rival red light territories are not uncommon, usually ending in the death of many of the workers and customers...

The services of a Geisha, real or automaton, do not come cheap and are usually only affordable for corpos and higher tier gang leaders.

To be a citizen of Neon City usually means to be a subject of either a gang or a corporation. Both have their advantages and disadvantages. Either way, the most common cause of death for the average citizen of Neon City is to die in the crossfire of a gang war, or simply be collateral damage in a hostile corporate takeover.

The many districts of Neon City are connected by an aging but functioning monorail network.

Getting onto the wrong monorail line and ending up in the wrong district can be a death sentence for an unwary lone traveller...

Monks of the Bright Path can be found in Neon City in abundance. The city with its vast population of people living in desperate circumstances is a fertile recruiting ground for them. Many Neon citizens end up making the pilgrimage to the jungles of the Jade Domain, where they will most likely end up in the ranks of the Neo-Cong.

The once mighty, globe spanning corporations of Osotaka only operate in Neon City today. In this age of desolation, most of the rest of the world is simply too unstable and void of infrastructure for a corporation to function. The main trade partner outside of the isles of Shima is the Prime AI, and a steady stream of new clones are purchased and imported to Neon City on a regular basis. While the corporations are still immensely powerful, their resources are not as unlimited as they once were, and they have to fight hard to retain what wealth and power they have.

Every corporation has its own CorpSec force, able to deploy powerful strike teams anywhere in the city at short notice.