Tales from Neon CityA Lunara Comics portal
❧ The Zone
Huge, layered, commercial, glamorous, exhausting. Towers you can't see the top of, markets you can't see the end of, and rain that never quite stops. Two realities share the same streets. Neither is entirely legal.
Corporate, lawful, branded, monitored. Everything glows, everything is regulated, and everything has a logo on it. This is the city on the billboards, and the billboards are on everything.
Clubs, fixers, cybernetics, stolen goods, data brokers, illegal systems, and services that are technically illegal and completely normal. Not a separate city. The same city, one door further in.
That's the street name. Odd little cyber shops, retro-tech dens, repair stalls, import shops, tiny bars, cyber-access booths. Harmless-looking. What matters is what's behind, beneath, or through them: the doors into the underground market.
Not one place. Decentralised, fragmented, territorial, partly mapped and partly mythologised. It changes. Most of it isn't quite illegal — tolerated, unlicensed, deniable, protected by someone who was paid to protect it.
Underground club, hacker hangout, nerd haven, and one of the strangest social spaces in the city. Famous. Well-attended. Said to be neutral ground, or close enough. Said to be a few other things too.
Watch the logos. Loop owns the way you move, Xee owns what you carry, Steler owns what you're afraid of. Watch the doors — the shabbier the store, the more interesting the back room. And watch the rain: in Neon City, it lights everything up and hides everything else.
A district map is in the works. The city, like the story, is still being surveyed.