The world — LIVEWIRE

History

Halcyon Shores was built as a beachfront company town, home to Buzzworks Nutrition Co. and its flagship protein powder, Voltage — marketed on the promise the city itself was named for: an engineered, branded calm, all amino acids and clean gains, nothing so crude as a fat-burner buzz.

Seven years ago, launching a botched "Performance Formula" reformulation, Buzzworks emptied a tanker's worth of concentrate straight into the bay as a viral publicity stunt — turn the whole waterfront into a free sample. Within days, part of the population began mutating into aggressive, hyperactive creatures the survivors started calling the Jolted. Buzzworks collapsed within the month, its security bots left to wander the ruins on outdated firmware. The government quarantined the district and, once the story stopped trending, quietly stopped funding anything beyond the fence.

Year -12

Buzzworks Nutrition Co. breaks ground on Halcyon Shores as a beachfront company town, built around the launch of Voltage.

Year -1

Voltage's "Performance Formula" relaunch campaign begins; production is quietly accelerated to hit a launch-week deadline.

Year 0, week 1

The contaminated reformulation leaks into the water table during the launch stunt. First Jolted sightings within 48 hours.

Year 0, month 1

Buzzworks collapses; security bots left running on their last-issued firmware. Federal quarantine fence goes up.

Years 1–2

Unmonitored quarantine. Bottled water becomes currency, survivor camps form, and the Junkyard Dogs start taking ground. Mike's first two years are in the books; Node's are in the comic.

Years 3–6

Node gathers a crew and founds The Static. The first pirate broadcast goes out. A black-market salvage economy settles in.

Year 7 — present

Cleanline acquires the quarantine rights and announces the Reclamation Initiative. The campaign begins.

Present day

Cleanline, a rebranding-and-reclamation contractor, has bought the quarantine rights and announced a public "Reclamation Initiative": clean up the district, resettle survivors, erase the outbreak from the record, and hand back a marketable, sanitized Halcyon Shores. Where Buzzworks was gleeful corporate chaos, Cleanline is corporate denial — it treats the outbreak, and the people who lived through it, as a PR problem to be scrubbed rather than a place to be rebuilt.

Seven years is long enough for a quarantine to stop feeling like an emergency and start feeling like a postcode. Holdouts trade salvage on a schedule, kids too young to remember the outbreak treat Jolted sightings the way other cities treat bad weather, and Node's pirate broadcast has become as much a variety show and swap-meet noticeboard as a resistance signal. Cleanline's arrival isn't rescuing anyone from chaos — it's interrupting a functioning, if grim, life.

Districts

Six districts that fit together like a jigsaw into one seamless open city, with no loading screens between them. Every place has its own colour, and colour means faction: neon and spray paint for The Static, white and chrome for Cleanline.

Tidewater Pier

Colour: Every neon at once
Mood: Seaside nostalgia, graffiti city
What's there: The Static's home turf, a seaside town gone feral and the most heavily graffitied part of the city. Guesthouses with striped awnings, arcades on the pier deck, a helter-skelter, a rollercoaster frame, and the derelict Ferris wheel where most players pull off their first full chain. Reactor Park, a reclaimed skate spot under the power station, is here, and so is Basecamp, up on a rooftop over the rail yard.

Marina Commons

Colour: Electric blue
Mood: Dead consumerism
What's there: A dead shopping district, bright but dulled. At its heart is the dead mall: a glass-roofed three-floor atrium with broken skylights, dead escalators that make perfect grind lines, a food court, a comic shop and a cinema on the top floor. Around it are a spiral-ramped car park, Junkyard Dogs checkpoints built from abandoned cars, and a marina full of empty boats and rigging.

Rust Cove

Colour: Rust red and brown
Mood: Industrial decay
What's there: Junkyard meets industrial estate. A scrapyard with stacked-car towers and a magnet crane, a chemical works whose leaking tanks feed the toxic slicks, a shipbreaking yard, and Funland Pier, a fouled fairground whose rusted rollercoaster coils above the docks. The Junkyard Dogs hold a fortress of shipping containers here.

Downtown Halcyon

Colour: Neon against white and chrome
Mood: A visual war
What's there: The financial district and an open propaganda war: Cleanline's glass and granite on one side, fly-posters and spray paint on the other. A broadcast tower, window-cleaning cradles on the move, a half-built skyscraper with a crane jib to grind, the abandoned police HQ and giant ad screens, some already tagged over. PR-Drones sweep the streets in grids.

Driftwood Heights

Colour: Full spectrum, lived-in
Mood: Defiance in every brick
What's there: Mike's neighbourhood and the biggest district by far: tower-block estates linked by sky walkways, steep terraced streets strung with washing lines to grind, a high street with a weekly market, and a huge mural on the end of a tower block that you can see from across the map. Nearest the Spire, grey cladding and Cleanline billboards are creeping over the neon.

The Reclamation Spire

Colour: Pure white and chrome
Mood: Clinical, and empty
What's there: Cleanline's forward headquarters, and the one place no graffiti has ever reached. Glass labs, a "wellness" showroom, the only tidy lawns in the city, drone hangars, a decontamination plant and a chrome monorail looping round a central tower.

Who's fighting for it

Cleanline

A reclamation-and-rebrand contractor that moved in once Buzzworks was gone and the quarantine became unprofitable to ignore. Sterile chrome-and-white aesthetic against the city's neon; every unit and vehicle carries visible "brand safety" signage. Publicly, a cleanup-and-resettlement operation.

The Static

A pirate-radio-and-salvage resistance network that formed during the original outbreak and has kept the district's holdouts fed, armed and off the record ever since. Named for the static it puts over corporate broadcast signal — the opposite of Cleanline's sanitized messaging.

Buzzworks remnants

Not an active faction, more a hazard layer. Decommissioned Buzzworks security bots still patrol on outdated firmware, keeping the original outbreak's fingerprints visible on the map.

The Jolted

Civilians and animals mutated by the original Voltage contamination. Feral rather than organized — an ecosystem hazard as much as an enemy roster, and the one thing both Cleanline and The Static claim to want "handled," for very different reasons.

The Junkyard Dogs

A third faction, and a warring one — working-class opportunists in scavenger dress, bankrolled by more money than a scavenger crew should ever have. Present in every district, with a fortified base in Rust Cove. Where Cleanline fights to erase Halcyon Shores clean and The Static fights to protect what's left of it, the Junkyard Dogs fight for the oldest reason a gang ever has: whoever holds the ground gets to keep it.

Halcyon Shores