The Grid
The Grid stretches like an iron web across the middle layers of the city. It’s vast, large, and packed with heat, smog, and the thrum of machinery.
This is where most people live, sweat, and grind out their lives. It’s a sprawling network of modular housing, infrastructure conduits, and manufacturing corridors. To live in the Grid is to be a part of Neospire’s circulatory system: replaceable, necessary, and constantly in motion.
Environment & Layout
The Grid is a patchwork of:
- Apartment Blocks
- Factory spires and logistics hubs
- Data farms and utility nodes
- Cramped streets twisted between megastructures
The sky is only visible if you're lucky. Bridges, ducts, cables, and rail lines weave overhead like nerve clusters. The smog in the industrial areas of the Grid block out the sun if the sandstorms haven't already. Everything smells like ozone, burnt oil, and cheap street food.
Lighting is mostly artificial—The streets are lighted by neon street lamps and signs of street vendors or LED street signs.
How Big is the Midline Grid?
| Metric | Value (approx.) | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Horizontal footprint | ≈ 300 km² (about 115 sq mi) | Rough oval stretching 25 km east–west, 15 km north–south. |
| Vertical build | 20–40 stories of stacked catwalks, factories, rail tubes, & housing decks. | Adds a functional floor area of nearly 9,000 km² when you count every deck. |
| Population | 9–11 million permanent residents + 2 million shift-commuters from the Verge | 70 % of Neospire’s total population. |
| Industrial load | 84 % of city power generation, 90 % of finished-goods output. | Everything from micro-reactors to synth-food vats. |
What Lives & Works Here
| Function | Key Elements |
|---|---|
| Heavy Industry | Arc‐smelters, bioreactor towers, drone foundries, cyberware fabs. |
| Waste Management | Blue-Fire Incinerators ring the perimeter (plasma burn & power recapture). Remaining slag and non-combustible trash is slurry-piped to Ocean Drop Shafts—vast armored chutes that eject compressed waste into the Gulf trench creating a landfill island. |
| Transit Arteries | Triple-deck mag-rails (“Pulse Lines”) for freight & commuters. Under-deck street grid for wheeled service, patrolled by Zenith Civil Security APCs. |
| Housing | Megablock complexes (80–250 m tall) with modular pods; each block is its own micro-city with street markets on every 5th floor. |
| Commerce & Small Corps | Thousands of Tier-3 corporations: robotics start-ups, alloy recyclers, biotech spin-offs, fringe media networks. Most rent tower floors from Orbitalis, or Covac Dynamics. |
Districts Inside the Grid
| District | Signature Landmarks & Activity | Resident Gangs | Notable Small Corps |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ironworks Belt | Ocean-facing furnace rows, molten slag canals, constant orange glow. | Scrap Serpents (steel-runner bike gang) | MagHex Foundry, Blazeline Gear |
| Cascadia Heights | Tallest residential stacks; rooftop grow-farms and AR schools. | Gridiron Collective (semi-legal labor union) | LiftLife Logistics (autolift maintenance) |
| Bayburn Docks | Automated container cranes, submersible dry-docks, sealed ocean shafts for waste ejection. | Rust Tide (dockworkers turned smugglers) | HydraMarine Salvage, Blue-Fire Waste Sys. |
| Dynamo Strip | Neon entertainment canyon: stim-bars, braindance clubs, cheap chrome parlors. | Pulse Vipers (supply-chain hijackers) | NeonNow Media, AmpTek Prosthetics |
| Coil Corridor | Power ladder spires, high-heat maintenance catwalks, fuse-banks the size of office blocks. | Coil Rats (wire-theft specialists) | EnerVault, Kilowatt Labs |
| DataBasin-14 | Server-farm caverns air-cooled by Gulf drafts; ice-blue glow day & night. | PacketJackals (data-theft runners) | NanoQuant, GhostStack Hosting |
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