A forgotten World
UnderCity is a sprawling cyberpunk city that exists in perpetual twilight, shrouded by thick clouds that block out the sun. Its streets are illuminated by a cold, eerie glow from massive holographic billboards and flickering neon lights. The architecture is jagged and assymetrical, as if the city grew organically, layer upon layer, without any thought for aesthetics. The population is diverse, ranging from humans with heavy cybernetic augmentations to dragonborn, tieflings dwarves elves and others that even include AI-driven androids that blur the line between man and machine.
At the heart of the city lies the Obsidian Spire, a towering, black monolith that pulsates faintly with an unsettling energy. It's said to house the city's governing AI, CoreBorn, which has ensured order for decades through its omnipresent surveillance and predictive algorithms. People have accepted this as the price of safety in an otherwise chaotic world.
The lower districts, known as the undercurrents, are a network of cramped alleys and underground markets where outlaws, hackers, and rogue inventors thrive. It's a dangerous place, but also where innovation flourishes unchecked. The upper districts are pristine and eerily quiet, home to the city's elite who seem almost disconnected from reality. Despite its technological marvels, UnderCity has a pervasive sense of unease - a city haunted by something unseen.
In the dank alleys of the undercurrents, where every tiefling looked the same, Tregorashe was an immediate anomaly. His horns didn't just sit there; they shimmired with a faint, bioluminescent green glow. It was a side effect of his peculiar connection to the Flux, an unpredictable energy field that coalesces in the city's forgotten corners. The undercurrents were both a harsh playground and a relentless curse. He was abandoned as an infant, growing up under the care of "Grimleaf," an eccentric druid-coder known for hacking the old environmental controls just to revive a few struggling patches of green.
Grimleaf instructed Tregorashe in the delicate balance between technology and nature that defined UnderCity's forgotten past - a harmony lost to the neon-lit, metal-strewn present. It was from the elder that Tregorashe truly learnt to command the Flux, not through sterile machinery, but via sheer vorce of will and a deep, intuitive resonance. While he absorbed much of Grimleaf's ancient wisdom, an inexplicable wildness thrummed beneath Tregorashe's calm surface.
It was during one of his deeper explorations that Tregorashe chanced upon it: a massive, techno-organic root system that bled into an uncharted layer of UnderCity. It pulsed with a faint, otherworldly life. Standing before it, he was engulfed by an overwhelming surge of the Flux, which flooded his mind with fragmented visions. He saw a past version of the city, alive and thriving before CoreBorn bagan its cold, sterile reign. Yet, within those glimpses, he perceived something more unsettling -a shadowy presence, a spectral entity that haunted UnderCity's very core. It blinked in and out of his awareness like static, too broken to be understood, but chilling him to the bone all the same. Grimleaf had warned him against disturbing things that lay in shadow. Days later, the old druid simply vanished, leaving behind only a series of cryptic warnings scrawled across hacked holo-screens. Tregorashe immediately understood the message: a warning and a summons. Whatever the shadowy presence was, it seemed tied to the string of peculiar disappearances plaguing the city, and somehow, to him. He couldn't shake the growing conviction that the Flux had chosen him for a purpose he was only just beginning to grasp. Tregorashe now Traverses UnderCity alone, a solitary figure with no affiliation to the Syndicate or the upper districts. He feels a rising certainty, however, that he is caught in the crosshairs of forces far beyond his understanding.
