As beautiful as it is, Telos Prime has a seedy underbelly. Because the towers are so incredibly tall and close together, sunlight rarely reaches the ground. Beneath the "lightzone" you’ll find the Tombs. Cast in perpetual shadow, this is where people go for a little adventure. Garbage and crud from the upper level piles up down here like silt in a pond (literally and metaphorically). A ghastly smelling fog hangs around the bases of each tower; the byproduct of a million exhaust and filtration fans. Inside the buildings, you’ll find the lower rent apartments and stores that serve the middle class workers for the MultiNats. While no where near as bad as the Tatters, the Tombs aren’t somewhere to be walking down alleyways at night (BTW, it’s always night there). Archon rarely patrols down here, relying more on bots and bacon to do their dirty work.

     Dangerous as it is, the Tombs have some of the best clubs and brothels you’ll ever hope to find. The nightlife here is 24/7 and caters to every vice (yes, EVERY one you can thin of and more). Prostitutes, either doll, freak, human, or hybrid, are displayed in several "shopping malls." Just pick which one you want, and enjoy yourself. Just be careful you don’t get something penicillin won’t kill. Drugs and membots are sold at every corner. Gambling is available if you’ve got the creds and body parts to spare (and you can bet on ANYTHING). Illegal augmentation clinics and weapon shops are in every alleyway. There are also "secure rooms," away from the prying eyes of corporates and Brains; available for meetings you don’t want broadcast over Telos.

     If you’re looking for adventure, privacy, or something illegal, or just want to slum for awhile, the Tombs are the place to hang.

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     New York has its subways, London has the Tube, Paris has its catacombs. Telos has the Underground. A reflection of every tunnel, sewer, crypt, and metro is probably somewhere in the Underground. It’d be impossible to map every level or passageway that’s down there. Half of the Underground has been long forgotten. Entire societies make their home in the abandoned sections. You could spend your life in the Underground and never realize there was a world above the surface, only an escalator or a lift-shaft away. Most of the grav-trains connect to major junction stations. From there you can ascend to the above ground trains or go farther down into the earth (to reach the city outskirts). While vehicles or lift-cars provide a faster means of transportation, you can get virtually anywhere in Telos via the Underground. And yes, like any metro, the place can be dangerous as hell. Be on your guard, but definitely get a Metro-pass as soon as you can. You’re going to need it.

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     There are reasons that Crown Enterprises (CE) is the most hated MultiNat in Telos. Nocturne happens to be one of them. The energy requirements of 29 billion people have pretty much wiped out all natural resources in Telos (a sizeable feat considering the size of the planet). Fusion plants were expensive and difficult to maintain, especially outside of Prime. Something needed to be done and fast. Whoever answered this energy problem would also become very, very rich.

     So, CE used its influential lobbyists to acquire governmental rights to begin the Belenus Project. This involved the transformation of several hundred square miles of the Tatters into giant solar collectors. Of course, the residents in these underprivileged areas protested, eventually forming the Non-Compliance Federation. They won the rights to their neighborhoods and refused to sell the land to CE. With typical Crown ingenuity, the corporation purchased the air space ten stories above street level and all civic property (such as sideways and streets). They then built the massive solar panels above the neighborhoods, trapping the residents beneath a metallic roof of darkness.

     Already a slum, Nocturne has gone from bad to worse. The area is blanketed in perpetual night. Due to the collectors, the ambient temperature is usually twenty degrees higher than the outside, sometimes much more. By 1400 each day, the average temperature in Nocturne is 150° F (yeah, but it’s the dry heat). At "night," it rarely drops below 90° F. As few citizens can afford food, let alone air conditioning, it’s like living inside an Easy-Bake oven your entire life. The only time the sky becomes visible is during cleanings. To remove all the grit and dirt from the collectors, they are re-angled down slightly, then CE serv-bots spray millions of gallons of water on them. The runoff washes everything into the streets below. Of course, since the drainage systems aren’t maintained, flooding becomes a serious problem for residents (not to mention sewage back-ups on a scale you don’t want to think about).

     Thanks to the heat, low income, flooding, neglect, and endless night, Nocturne is as close to Hell as you can get. The crime rate here is the highest in all Telos, and that’s saying something. Gunfire is incessant, fires burn unhindered, corpses bake in the streets, and gangs lord over makeshift fiefdoms. MultiNats use this free-fire zone as the testing grounds for their genetic and membot research (and failures). Some MultiNats even provide the gangs with experimental weapons and augmentations to see how they work in the "field." Body Shops here make a killing (literally). Zoners, gutters, psychos, and amoks are a regular sight.

     If you’re seriously deranged or want to test out your new Damocles G-12 Scythe on a moving target, then head down to Nocturne. God help you, moron.

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     There are your "have’s" and your "have not’s." In Telos there are about 18 billion of the latter. Be they proles, low-lives, or just can’t get above the poverty level, all those billions need to live somewhere. Welcome to the Tatters. Stuck between Prime and Machine City, this endless sprawl of slums, ghettoes, barrios, and ribbon archologies is where most tellies live, work, and die. However, even in the Tatters, there are different degrees of anguish.

     The closer one gets to Prime, the better off you are. This is usually where all the menial and blue-collar works etch out a living. Every day, millions take the Underground into the city center to work at their low-end jobs, or head to Machine City to struggle with more manual-based labor. Not exactly suburbia, not exactly Hell’s Kitchen, it could be considered a life. Security is provided by local companies made up of bacon or volunteer muscle. This has created mini-cities, communes of people banding together to survive.

     The further you get from Prime, however, the worse off you are. Soon the archologies become increasingly rundown, while abandoned buildings and burnt-out vehicles become commonplace. And the crime-rate soars exponentially. Tracer fire lights up the night and screams go unanswered. Serial killers are not so much born here, but multiply like bacteria. Drugs, disease, and desperation are the flavor of the day. Many sections of the Tatters serve as the landfills for Prime’s trash. This has spawned the Garbage Men, a nomadic culture who make a living out of sifting through Telos’ solid waste. Millions of zoners congregate here, mostly the victims of MemFatale’s that have melted their brains into pudding.

     If you’re into slumming in Nth degree, the Tatters are the place for you.

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     The average life expectancy for most workers in Machine City is ten years. By then, they should be dead from one of a hundred types of cancers or industrial mishaps. For this reason, only the desperate take jobs here; and even then, only in the "Human zones." This is where the manufacturing and processing of every commodity and commercial product in Telos is conducted. A virtual sea of steel, catwalks, cooling towers, and furnaces, this place is a maze of machinery and warehouses ringing Telos. Almost everything is automated just because of the number of toxins released into the atmosphere every day. Radiation and biological hazards are commonplace. Vast strip mines feed the bellies of a thousand smelters, cranking out an eternal stream of precious metals and steel. Nothing goes to waste here, everything converted by nanotech into useful goods. Cleaners, drones the size of city blocks, drive out into the Tatters to collect "materials." While this is usually garbage and waste, they aren’t very discerning between what is organic and inorganic.

     Why anyone would want to go here boggles the imagination, but several people use the abandoned factories as a home or place of operations. This is probably because of the distinct lack of security outside of the MultiNat’s manufacturing zones. Few, however, are stupid enough the test the Safe N’ Sounds and Kill-Happies that patrol the more "sensitive" areas.

     A subsection of Machine City is the Protein Banks. Very little goes to waste into Telos, and whatever parts Body Shop can’t use, gets thrown into the Protein Banks. Here the dead of are reprocessed through nanotech into useful organic products or fed to the genetically grown animals used to feed Telos’ hungry population.

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     A 200-foot high by 50-foot thick wall of ferroconcrete surrounds Telos. No one knows what the thing’s diameter actually is. Atop the Wall sits the Manta Observation & Suppression System, or MOSS. The Moss is an automated weapon’s system consisting of 20mm cannons, gattling guns, and incinerators, all with multi-phasic targeting (i.e. They can simultaneously track twenty targets). Anything, ANYTHING, that approaches the Wall will be fired upon. This is on the off-chance that the fields of thermo-mines haven’t done the job first. Anything that manages to get over the Wall must contend with the heavily armed and highly motivated Aegis Security forces. simply put, the Wall is the most advanced defense system you’ll ever witness.

     And it has to be.

     Beyond the Wall are the Cannibal sectors. To this day, no one knows what spawned this endless waste of ruined buildings and crater-strewn landscapes. Disaster, plague, whatever, wiped out half the planet and left behind the Cannibal Sectors. They now serve as the dumping ground for every last drop of toxic and radioactive waste produced by Telos’ 29 billion souls. The human survivors there have become so mutated that can’t even called living anymore. These are the Geeks. Machine City inadvertently feeds them by pouring oceans of blood and rotting animal flesh out of their gene-grown slaughterhouses (29 billion people eat a LOT of hamburgers and chicken paddies) and directly into the Cannibal sectors. This staple diet of protein sludge has made the Geeks very large, indeed. But it hasn’t curbed their appetite one bit.

     And if that wasn’t enough, some fool got the idea of releasing pigs into the Cannibal Sectors to get rid of the waste and dying Geeks (pigs are great for eating bodies, you know). The infamous Gorehounds are the produce of this brainstorm. Imagine a pack of rabid pigs come at you out of the darkness, each the size of Clydesdale and a mean streak that take the pucker out a Justicar’s ass. They’ve found scraps of security bots lodged in the bellies of these bastards.

     Rumors of even worse creatures are always surfacing, usually from the Aegis troopers watching over the Wall. Half of them are pure bollocks, but the other half… who knows? Psychos killing people for the extra body parts, floating squids hunting Geeks with pyrokinesis, pale women that suck the body heat out of anyone they touch. No, the Cannibal Sectors are not for the faint of heart.

     But fools still go out there, following rumors of a Paradise beyond the horrors. None have returned. It’s doubtful any ever will. Fairytales never come true in Telos.

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     Telos is dying- slowly, but it is only a matter of time before the population chokes itself out. The hope for the future rests not on the planet, but rather thousands of kilometers upwards. Circling in geostationary orbit, Citadel Station is owned and operated by the TriOptimum Corporation. It serves as the way-station to the Inner and Outer Planets. Access to Citadel Station is typically acquired via the Silver Tower. This Beanstalk is essentially a 35,000km tall series of elevators, allowing for the transportation of sizeable materials (which limit the effectiveness of ground launch vehicles). The monopoly on travel via the Silver Tower has provided the TriOptimum Corporation with a sizable income.

     The two Inner Planets remain inaccessible and without economic viability. However, the nearest Outer Planet, Ares, is currently being terraformed in anticipation for the eventual Exodus. The asteroid belt and several moons around the gas giants Zeus and Cronos have been lightly settled. The various mining corporations control the Outer Reaches, as these settlements are called. Constant trade wars and extremely hazardous conditions make these outposts unlikely locales for a vacation. Also, corporatations maintain totalitarian control over these 'communities,' much like that seen during the Industrial Revolution (i.e. company stores, housing, and laws). Considering the travel times and cost sinvolved, space travel remains soully in the hands of the major corporations. 'Civilians' are a virtual unknown.

     Rumors persist that the TriOptimum Corporation has begun work on a Faster-Than-Light drive. Considering the intellectual might of the enigmatic Lady Harla Destride, CEO of TriOptimum, such rumors undoubtedly have some truth to them.

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