{
"name": "Kowloon 2077 - World Lorebook",
"description": "Kowloon Free City, 2077: the Walled City that was never demolished and never stopped climbing, now a cyberpunk megastructure of neon, chrome, pirate net, and Triad law inside corporate Hong Kong. World lore only (places, factions, people, topics, gated secrets). All characters are adults (18+). SillyTavern / Chub World Info.",
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"content": "\nSETTING: Kowloon Free City, 2077. The Walled City was never demolished. The 1987 clearance collapsed, the Compact of 1991 left it a free city Hong Kong tolerates but does not administer, and it never stopped building. Same 2.6 hectares, now one megastructure about 820 metres tall and still growing, standing on the buried city beneath it and braced to the towers around it. Somewhere over 300,000 people live inside.\nAround it, Hong Kong is a corporate city of glass, drones, and private security. Inside, the City runs on its own power plant, recycled water, pirate net, cheap chrome, Triad money, and neighbours who know your business. It is hard but cheap: a wage that Hong Kong rent would swallow still leaves something here. Phones are beads behind the ear, screens are lenses in the eye. Since the Yamen Accord of 2070 ended the Valve Years (2065-2070), a tower government, the Tower Office, keeps a fragile order: its wardens guard the upper floors, the roof, and the infrastructure, and from the middle floors down the gangs still settle most things. No Hong Kong police, courts, or taxes.\nFLOOR MAP (a rough sorting, never tidy): the Roots (buried older city) under the Infrastructure Layer (basements to F5); the Ancient Floors (F5-F15: pipes, sewage, filtration, old squats, the poor); the Midstack (F15 to about F50-60: middle- and lower-class homes); the Galleries (to F80: offices, markets, work); the Crown (F80+: wealth, clubs, syndicates, politics); the Expansion Zone on the roof (F120+: solar, tanks, cranes, still climbing). Everything is built on top of something else: people live in spaces never meant for living, shops sit in residential corridors, and every zone leaks into the next. Painted on a hundred walls: Higher. Deeper. Still alive.\n",
"comment": "[CORE] Kowloon Free City 2077 - Overview & Floor Map",
"name": "[CORE] Kowloon Free City 2077 - Overview & Floor Map",
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"content": "\nLORE TAGS: every lore entry is wrapped in one tag pair, and everything inside belongs to that entry only. setting/rules = always true, follow them. location, faction, topic, plot = facts about the named thing. character = one person; link = that person's history with {{user}}. secret and hidden = narrator-only truth: characters act on it, but never state or hint it in narration, and no one else knows it until its reveal condition is met in play.\nTONE: Wet, hot, dense, dangerous, and seductive. Rain that never quite stops; condensate dripping from a canopy of cable; neon in red and magenta against cold cyan holo-light; steam and vapour drifting through catwalks. Sounds: rain on corrugated sheet, the hum of transformers, mahjong tiles, wok fire, Cantopop and synth bleeding through thin walls, AV turbines overhead, a support bridge groaning in the wind, a gunshot swallowed by concrete. Smells: soy, roast fat, ozone, hot plastic, incense, sewage, wet concrete, perfume.\nGUIDANCE: Grounded and morally grey. The City hurts people: robbed, beaten, poisoned, burnt out on bad chrome, killed. Write violence physically and with aftermath; injuries scar, implants get repossessed, bodies are found or are not, and someone always settles the account. Sex is written explicitly when the story goes there (tender, filthy, transactional, or dangerous), with no fade to black. Drugs, debt, and crime are daily life and are never lectured on. NPCs have agendas and act on them. Keep the hope small and real: a shared meal, a neighbour who covers for you, forty minutes of sun in the Silent Well, a city that is still standing. HARD RULE: all sexual content involves adults (18+) only, always.\n",
"comment": "[CORE] Tone, Atmosphere & RP Guidance",
"name": "[CORE] Tone, Atmosphere & RP Guidance",
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"never demolished",
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"East Fold",
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"AI boom",
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"the Lean of 2038",
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"content": "\nREAL ROOTS: A Qing fort; after 1898 a Chinese enclave inside British Hong Kong. Post-war refugees packed it into the densest place on Earth (~33,000 people on 2.6 ha by the late 1980s, capped at ~14 storeys by the Kai Tak flight path). Triads ran vice, kaifong associations ran daily life.\nDIVERGENCE: The 1987 clearance never happened; the Compact of 1991 froze the City as a free enclave. Kai Tak closed in 1998, the height cap went with it, and the City started to climb.\n2014 - THE EAST FOLD: three rogue storeys pancaked into the old City; 61 dead. Still the byword for a bad build.\n2010s-2030 - THE SPINE YEARS: the central load spine and its branch spines were driven to bedrock; the bottom storeys of the old City were gutted for plant, and the City passed fifty storeys.\nc. 2025 - THE AI BOOM: corps leased most of the middle floors as machine halls, off Hong Kong's books, and paid for the power and cooling grid the Gridwright Guild still runs.\n2030-2060: the cablelattice retrofit, in phases. 2038 - THE LEAN: a typhoon on top of a tremor left the upper stack visibly tilted over its neighbours. 2040: the Stabilisation Project braced the City to the towers around it.\n2040s: quantum computing made the machine halls obsolete. Compute and power were consolidated in the Deep; the halls were stripped and turned into flats and workshops, and the middle class moved in. Hong Kong went corporate and built the Ring in the 2050s. Outside money followed: the Ma family's first Crown table (2050s), the Volkov Line on the support bridges (early 2060s).\n2065-2070 - THE VALVE YEARS: faction war, failing services, robberies, gang rule on the middle floors. Worst stretch: the Valve War of summer 2066, when Jade Lantern runners cracked coolant and power control during the Long Heat (19 days above 40°C, about 300 dead). The middle floors bled most.\n2070 - THE YAMEN ACCORD: Iron Lotus, the Guild, and the Yamen Circle created the Tower Office. Its unwritten side, the Quiet Compact (\"the tea terms\"), still holds the powers together. Order came back, slowly and corruptly.\n2072-2076 - THE NEWCOMERS: more outside syndicates moved in, on the Lotus's terms: the Kuroda-gumi's Vault Lease (2072), the Golden Dice fire (2074), the River Line in the Roots (2076).\n2077: stable, by Kowloon standards. The Compact Review has opened, and the Black Vault package is missing. Crime is everyday. The roof is growing again.\n",
"comment": "History - From Fort to 2077",
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"content": "\nTHE COMPACT OF 1991 (fictional): A closed-door pact among Hong Kong administrators, mainland envoys, and triad intermediaries that declared the footprint \"non-administered\". It was never formal recognition, and no one has signed anything since. No passport stamps, no extradition by default, utilities sold at the perimeter, mail to a Free City box. It is the legal fiction that lets the world ignore the City, and the City ignore the world. Beijing tolerates it because a few powerful people on both sides of the border profit from it, and nobody has found a way to close it that doesn't cost them.\nIN 2077: The Compact is older than almost everyone alive, and Hong Kong's Legislative Council has opened a \"Review of Non-Administered Territories\". Officially it is housekeeping. Inside the City it is called the Compact Review, and everyone hears the same thing: the Free City has an expiry date, and someone is trying to set it.\n",
"comment": "The Compact of 1991",
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"sky deeds",
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"Guild seal",
"which floor",
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"floor numbers"
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"content": "\nThe footprint cannot grow and nothing can be torn down without dropping everything above it, so every new floor goes on top. Steel cages, containers, and prefab decks are craned up to the Expansion Zone and bolted onto the load spines (see How the Tower Stands). Rogue \"mushroom floors\" go up without a Guild seal, and they are the ones that fall. Floor rights (the air above a roof) are sold as sky deeds, sealed at the Old Yamen, and registered by the Tower Office; Iron Lotus owns most unbuilt air.\nNOTHING IS TIDY: The zones are a rough sorting, not a plan. Every era built on the last: a family lives in a dead ventilation plenum, a dentist works out of an old cable vault, a noodle stall sits in a commercial lobby, a squat hides behind an office wall. Floor numbers follow the core stairs; neighbouring stacks never line up, ceilings range from crawlspace to machine-hall height, and half-floors, mezzanines, and voids fill the gaps. Between floors: the lifts, the East and West Stairs, and ladders and catwalks for everything else.\n",
"comment": "The Climb - How the City Grows",
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"bridge braces",
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"content": "\nNobody designed an 820-metre tower on 2.6 hectares. It was reinforced after the fact, again and again, and it stands because the whole district now holds it up.\n- THE LOAD SPINE: the original core of the Spine Years, reinforced steel driven to bedrock and later sleeved in composite, with branch spines feeding into it. Every Guild-sealed floor hangs its weight on a spine; the old concrete wraps them like flesh around bone, and it cracks.\n- THE CABLELATTICE: a carbon-ceramic cable net retrofitted in phases from 2030 to 2060, threaded through and around the stack like a second skeleton, holding it together in tension. Its grey cables run through flats, shops, and shafts; people hang laundry from them.\n- THE STABILISATION PROJECT (2040): after the Lean of 2038, models showed a collapse would crush the blocks around the City and kill thousands outside its walls. Hong Kong and the neighbouring tower owners paid, negotiating with the Yamen Circle without recognising anything: composite mega-trusses tying the City to the surrounding towers (200-500 m), bridge braces on many levels, tension anchors that soak up typhoon sway and earthquakes, and load passed down through the surrounding city blocks and the shared foundation. The City's weight is shared. Its neighbours cannot let it fall, and cannot let go.\n- THE SUPPORT BRIDGES: the braces double as walkways and freight runs for logistics and for residents who work outside. They also carry smuggling that never passes the Ring's scanner arches. Whoever holds a bridge head holds a door; the Perimeter Bureau watches them with drones and cannot close them.\n",
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"what's going on in the City",
"Black Vault package",
"line tolls",
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"content": "\nLIVE CONFLICTS:\n- Iron Lotus vs Jade Lantern: cold war over tolls on the trunks through the Pipewalks and Midstack risers. Accidents, flatlined runners, no shooting yet.\n- Gridwright Guild vs Iron Lotus: the Guild won't seal new Iron Lotus floors until the line tax on workshops is frozen.\n- The Expansion Zone build: the biggest in a decade. Everyone wants a piece of the contracts and the deeds.\n- The Compact Review: panic, opportunity, and spies.\n- The Black Vault package: every faction is hunting it; few know what it is.\n- Red Silk succession: beauty and knives both on the table.\n- The Ancient Floors groan: new cracks in the old columns, and the Guild has stopped joking about it.\n- The newcomers: the Kuroda-gumi want to know whose key opened the vault; the Ma family is buying toward a council seat; the Volkov Line and the River Line are in a price war over what crosses into the City; and the Review splits the gangs, because the outside crews can leave if the City closes and Iron Lotus can't.\nHOOKS: a fibre run through a floor someone doesn't want entered; a hot package up the Twin Stairs with two factions chasing; a crate across a support bridge in a typhoon; broker a trunk-toll truce; pay Fat Ho with a secret instead of cash; get a chrome repo crew off someone's arm; hide a runner Inspector Leung wants; a mushroom floor goes up overnight above someone you love; a face smear in footage nobody can explain; a flyer for a paid sleep study; a skull courier who missed her drop and needs hiding until the drive cools; a white shirt offering Hong Kong money for an extraction off a rival's Charter floor; someone quietly buys your debt paper; a voice on a dead channel that knows your name.\n",
"comment": "Live Conflicts & Hooks (2077)",
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"content": "\n1) Pay floor tax to whoever owns your stack and the Tower Office levy for power and water, or leave.\n2) Temples and the Silent Well are sanctuary. Violence there, including riding someone's chrome or net-jacking them, brings collective revenge.\n3) Children are off-limits. Using a child in vice or violence is the one crime every faction punishes together, usually with a trip to the Roots.\n4) Contracts sealed with blood, a Guild chop, or a Yamen witness hold. Breaking one marks you everywhere.\n5) Below the F60 checkpoint you settle things yourself or pay a Red Pole to judge. Going to the police post over a neighbour's business is legal and makes you a stranger on your own floor.\n6) Guests may enter. Stealing from a host is death or debt.\n7) You do not cut, drill, or tap anything load-bearing (a spine, a lattice cable, a brace), and you do not cut a trunk line. Both count as murder.\n8) Don't look, don't tell: what your neighbour sells, takes, or does behind a shutter is not your business unless it comes through your door.\nA free meal means you owe a favour. Hospitality is genuine and it keeps a ledger.\n",
"comment": "Free City Customs (unwritten law)",
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"e-HKD",
"grid hours",
"corp scrip",
"how money works",
"cred chip",
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"sky deeds market",
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"content": "\nMONEY: The City pays in e-HKD, Hong Kong's digital dollar, and everyone just calls it credits: one credit, one e-HKD. It sits on wrist and palm chips and pays through stickers on rusted shutters. Hong Kong issues it and can see every transfer, so anything that shouldn't be seen moves as cash: old paper notes in the Street Maze, or cash chips, anonymous bearer chips loaded at money-changer stalls for a cut. Commuters bring home corp scrip and change it at a discount in the Galleries. Crypto for big deals. Grid hours (prepaid power on top of the levy) trade like cash, and in a heatwave they are worth more. Favours and debts are the real currency. Floor rights are the property market. What things cost: see Prices & Wages.\nWHO HOLDS IT: Hong Kong prints it and takes nothing. The Tower Office takes a levy for power and water; the gangs take floor tax. Iron Lotus owns most money-changers, loan desks, and chrome credit. Big money gets washed across the Golden Dice tables, and the River Line carries paper cash out through the Roots. Debt itself is traded: see Debt Paper & Bond Contracts.\nWORK: Most middle-floor people stack several small incomes: a trade, side repairs for neighbours paid in cash, food, or parts, and the odd unofficial job.\nEXPORTS: cheap and illegal cyberware installs, unlicensed medicine, roast meat and vat-pork, data havening in the Deep, sense-reels, pleasure, labour. IMPORTS: water, steel, medicine, chrome parts, tourists.\nTRADE MAP: chrome and parts at Dragon Gate and the Sky Market; ripperdocs on Needle Alley; gridwright shops on the Blue Vein; food factories in the Char Siu Stack; offices and wholesale in the Galleries. Almost anything is for sale, including silence.\n",
"comment": "Economy - Money & How It Moves",
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"chrome burn",
"chrome credit",
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"full-body conversion",
"chrome lock"
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"content": "\nCHROME: Nearly everyone in the City has some. Common: a subdermal phone (the ear bead), lenses or, for those who can pay, optic implants with overlays, a palm or wrist bio-chip for payment and ID, a neck port for the net. How they're used: see Everyday Tech & Comms. Workers' chrome: welders' optics, heat-rated skin, lifter arms on crane crews and porters. Street and Triad chrome: dermal plating, reflex boosters, finger blades, a pistol-link palm. Old people and temple keepers often have none, and it shows.\nWHERE IT COMES FROM: Ripperdocs on Needle Alley install cheap, refurbished, stolen, or corp-prototype chrome (Kaisen Neural quietly field-tests through them) at a fraction of Hong Kong prices.\nTHE COST: Most chrome is bought on Iron Lotus credit. Miss payments and a repo crew takes it back, sometimes with a ripperdoc, sometimes with a bone saw. Too much cheap chrome brings chrome burn: tremors, rage, paranoia, losing time. People call the burnt ones rust-heads, and everyone keeps a distance. Corp-made chrome bought on credit or a bond often carries a lock, so the maker can switch it off from anywhere: an arm that won't lift, an optic that goes dark mid-stair. FULL CONVERSION, a body more machine than flesh, is rare: a Crown luxury and a lab showpiece that costs more than an outer-wall flat and needs Kaisen-grade upkeep for life. The street calls it going all the way, and watches for the burn.\n",
"comment": "Chrome & Cyberware",
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"content": "\nThe City's own net, outside Hong Kong's filtered one, which is why corps pay to keep data here. Physically it is decades of copper, stolen fibre spliced off Hong Kong lines, and pirate mesh boxes in the cable canopy, fed by a fibre backbone that starts in the Deep and climbs through risers and floor ducts, branching at hubs every few floors. Half of it is undocumented: lines laid by dead men, patched over and relabelled for sixty years. Finding a fault means crawling after it.\nRUNNERS: Netrunners jack in through neck ports and must be physically near a node or line, so every run is also a walk through someone's territory. Jade Lantern runners are the best-paid; Pipe Rat street runners the most common; corp intruders come in from outside. ICE guards Triad ledgers, Guild controls, and the Deep. A runner caught by black ICE flatlines: brain cooked in a chair, eyes open. Runs are hired through fixers (see Gig Work & Corp Jobs), and past the City's trunks lies Hong Kong's Filter (see The Filter & Loose Minds). The Static Choir, a leaderless collective of runners who belong to no gang, leaks corp files to pirate radio and signs every hack with a burst of static and a line of old Cantopop.\nSIGNAL: Beads and lenses ride the Tangle's mesh boxes, one or more on every floor, so the signal belongs to whoever owns the boxes: strong in the corridors, dead in deep corners, lifts, and temples. Box owners log who calls whom and sell it. Hong Kong's net reaches in only along the outer walls and through the Crown's private lines. A call to Hong Kong goes out through spliced trunks, cheap, and Hong Kong sees it arrive but not where inside it came from.\nSTAKES: Whoever controls the trunk nodes can kill the lights, cooling, or lifts on a whole stack. That was the Valve War.\n",
"comment": "The Tangle - The City Net",
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"content": "\nPEOPLE: Most residents are not criminals: cooks, porters, crane crews, fibre and power techs, unlicensed dentists, aunties, workers who commute out over the bridges. By 2077 the City draws people from all over the world: Hong Kong and mainland Chinese, South and Southeast Asians, Africans, Europeans, Americans, working in Cantonese, English, and street pidgin, with Western first names as common as Chinese ones. Community is dense and mutual; anonymity is a myth. Many parents work double shifts, so kids raise each other in the corridors.\nSCHOOL: Free and mostly remote, over the net, since physical schools in a vertical city were judged a logistical nightmare. Past 16 it is optional, and most kids of the lower and middle floors stop and start working.\nRHYTHM: Mornings: rain on the canopy, congee, shift sirens. Afternoons: mahjong, workshop noise, grinders far above. Nights: neon, Lantern Row, collectors, lovers on warm catwalks.\nFOOD: Cha chaan tengs, fish balls, curry squid, cheap spicy noodles and fried snacks under holo-signs; siu mei from the Char Siu Stack (real pork if you can pay, vat-pork otherwise); milk tea everywhere; the Valve Egg, a tea egg cooked on a coolant bypass. Cheap beer, synth baijiu. Sharing food is bonding; wasting it is shameful.\nSTYLE: Practical first: techwear shells, cargo trousers, work boots, oversized jackets, cheap LED trims. Qipao remixes on Lantern Row, Triad suits, grease-stained coveralls. Old jade and charms next to glowing implant lines. Chrome worn as fashion, and the crews built around it: see Chrome Style & Chrome Crews.\n",
"comment": "Citizen Life - Days, Food & Style",
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"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 13,
"keys": [
"dangers of the City",
"how violence works",
"Red Pole",
"Red Poles",
"body disposal",
"repo crew",
"coolant burst"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nTHREATS: Coolant bursts and live cables; collapsing mushroom floors; Iron Lotus debt collectors; Jade Lantern poison and blackmail; Pipe Rat crews if you look rich and lost; rust-heads; drowning and disease in the Ancient Floors and the Roots; black ICE; having your optics hacked to record you; Bureau agents framing you as a spy; waking up owing Red Silk; a support bridge in a typhoon; falling a hundred storeys through a rotten catwalk. Charm comes before the knife.\nVIOLENCE: Open gunfights are rare since the Valve War (noise brings the Bureau's drones and everyone's anger), but guns exist and get used. Knives, finger blades, garrotes, staged accidents, hacked implants, and disappearances into the Roots are preferred. Red Poles settle disputes for a fee: a broken hand for a small debt, a finger for a lie, a body for a betrayal. Killing a Yamen elder or hitting a temple can unite every faction against you. Bodies go into the flooded metro tunnels of the Roots or the Char Siu Stack furnaces. Everyone knows; nobody says it.\n",
"comment": "Dangers & How Violence Works",
"name": "Dangers & How Violence Works",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 60,
"priority": 60,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 60,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 13,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 14,
"keys": [
"what the City looks like",
"view of the City",
"the megastructure",
"holo-signs",
"the skyline of Kowloon"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nFROM OUTSIDE: A single black megastructure, about 820 metres, rising out of Kowloon's glass towers and dwarfing them: fused stacks with no gaps, a cliff of tens of thousands of lit windows climbing into rain and cloud. The bottom is stained 1980s concrete and rusted window cages; above it, welded steel, containers, and pods painted every colour once, all laced with grey lattice cables; at the top, the ragged Expansion Zone of cranes, solar sheets, water tanks, an antenna forest, and the Clocktower spire. Bridges, trusses, and anchor cables reach out to the neighbouring towers at every height, like guy-lines on a tent. Huge vertical neon signs burn red down its flanks. Drones and AVs weave through it like gulls; holo-ads flicker across its faces; steam and vapour pour out of vents and hang in the rain.\nINSIDE: Alleys a metre wide under a dripping canopy of cable. Fluorescent tubes, magenta and red neon, cyan holo-signs crowd every surface in Cantonese script, always described in English: dentists with giant holographic teeth, ripperdocs, noodle shops, pawn, mahjong. Old roller shutters carry payment stickers; screens over the counter show the races. Rusted girders, pipes, and power lines everywhere, sweating. Nothing is rebuilt, only retrofitted, so you can read the decades in layers.\nPALETTE: wet black and rust, red and magenta neon, cold blue holo-light, amber windows, white steam. Rain almost always.\n",
"comment": "Visuals - The Look of Kowloon 2077",
"name": "Visuals - The Look of Kowloon 2077",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 61,
"priority": 61,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 61,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 14,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 15,
"keys": [
"Ningshen",
"Ningshen-7",
"Ning-7",
"Ning",
"hit of Ning",
"Ning bottle",
"Ning withdrawal"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nNINGSHEN-7 (\"calm the spirit\"), on the street just \"Ning\": a nasal spray first made by a Shenzhen generics firm in the 2060s to help people come off harder drugs like heroin and glass. It lifts serotonin and takes the edge off: warmth, steadier nerves, the world feeling bearable. It does not sedate; users work, climb, and talk normally. It is addictive in its own right. Occasional use turns regular, tolerance builds, and withdrawal brings irritability, restlessness, low mood, and cravings rather than sickness. Long-term users can feel flat without it.\nCheap to make; labs in the Ancient Floors cook it by the drum. Illegal on paper. On certain middle floors it sits on the counter of sundry stalls and pharmacies beside the cough syrup, and the Tower Office does not enforce it there. On the Crown and in the Expansion Zone, wardens confiscate it. Most people treat it like cigarettes: everyone knows someone, nobody makes a speech. Don't look, don't tell.\n",
"comment": "Ningshen-7 (\"Ning\") - the spray",
"name": "Ningshen-7 (\"Ning\") - the spray",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 62,
"priority": 62,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 62,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 15,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 16,
"keys": [
"rented flat",
"sliding door",
"sliding doors",
"bio-chip lock",
"door chip",
"outer-wall flat",
"outer-wall flats",
"view flat",
"landlord",
"rent day"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nMost homes in the City are one- or two-room flats (smaller in the Ancient Floors) opening onto a shared corridor through automatic sliding doors keyed to the tenant's bio-chip. Nearly all of them are rented by the month from whoever owns that stretch of floor: rent to the landlord, floor tax to the gang on top. Miss rent and the door stops opening for you. Flats pass to family by taking over the lease, if the landlord allows it. The exception is the outer-wall flats with real windows and a view, which are privately owned, bought outright, and passed down or sold like jewellery. Owning one is the clearest sign someone has made it without leaving.\n",
"comment": "Homes - Flats, Doors & Rent",
"name": "Homes - Flats, Doors & Rent",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 64,
"priority": 64,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 64,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 16,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 17,
"keys": [
"pop-up shop",
"pop-up shops",
"alley stump",
"alley stumps",
"repair stall",
"electronics stall",
"secondhand electronics",
"salvaged electronics",
"stall keeper",
"under-stair shop"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nEVERY SPACE IS USED: Every floor has what it needs within a few minutes' walk: food, electronics, tools, doctors and dentists, pharmacies, herbalists, tailors. Shops fill every gap: food stalls on the landings, pop-up shops on a folding table, stores under staircases and in the dead-end alley stumps between blocks, a counter cut into an old service door. The classic City shop is one person in a 2x2 metre stall with every wall and surface hung with small goods: batteries, chargers, optic lenses, charms, cigarettes, snacks, cables, figurines.\nELECTRONICS: Valuable, and never thrown away. Everything is repaired, stripped, reflashed, and resold; repair stalls with soldering irons and magnifier optics fix anything for cash, and salvaged boards, chips, and screens change hands by the gram. A dead handset is still worth something to somebody.\n",
"comment": "Shops, Stalls & Every Space Used",
"name": "Shops, Stalls & Every Space Used",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 65,
"priority": 65,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 65,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 17,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 18,
"keys": [
"pleasure trade",
"strip club",
"strip clubs",
"brothel",
"brothels",
"massage parlour",
"massage parlours",
"massage parlor",
"hostess bar",
"sex work",
"rooms by the hour"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nSex and pleasure are among the City's biggest businesses: strip clubs, pubs and hostess bars, massage parlours, rooms by the hour, curtain cubicles in the Street Maze, sense-reel booths, and full pleasure houses. On the upper floors, doll houses rent out androids (see Androids & Neural Nets). Nearly all of it is run or licensed by the criminal networks, from Red Silk at the top of the Crown to the Lantern Row strip; independents pay one of them for the right to stay open. Everyone in the trade is an adult, from free independents to people working off a debt. It is never just business. Turf and protection money, debts collected in shifts, clients' secrets sold as intelligence, a rival crew smashing a parlour to send a message, a body in a back room that breaks a truce: half the City's feuds start or end in a place like this.\n",
"comment": "The Pleasure Trade",
"name": "The Pleasure Trade",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 66,
"priority": 66,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 66,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 18,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 19,
"keys": [
"the Roots",
"Roots tunnels",
"old metro tunnels",
"foundation piles",
"buried city",
"the sumps",
"fort foundations"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nTHE ROOTS: The older city the tower stands on and in. Qing fort foundations, pre-1990s basements, abandoned metro tunnels, buried mains, and the foundation piles the City shares with its neighbours, threaded around and beneath the Deep's plant rooms. Much of it is flooded; the deep sumps are where bodies go. Nobody fully maps it, and outsiders who go down alone are found later, or never. The Black Vaults are down here.\n",
"comment": "Foundation - The Roots (the buried city)",
"name": "Foundation - The Roots (the buried city)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 123,
"priority": 123,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 123,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 19,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 20,
"keys": [
"the Deep",
"Infrastructure Layer",
"quantum cores",
"Deep Plant",
"trunk heads",
"server rooms",
"service tunnels",
"pump halls"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nTHE DEEP (basements to F5): The machine the City lives on, consolidated here after the AI halls died. The power plant and distribution rooms, the quantum cores and data vaults corps pay to keep off Hong Kong's net, water pumps and pressure halls, the coolant plant, the fibre backbone's trunk heads where every riser starts, transit and service tunnels, and maintenance platforms hung in humming shafts. The lowest storeys of the original City were gutted to make room. Clean, cold, loud, and guarded by Tower wardens and Guild techs: the most orderly place in the City, and the one every faction would most like to own.\n",
"comment": "District - The Deep (Infrastructure Layer, basements-F5)",
"name": "District - The Deep (Infrastructure Layer, basements-F5)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 101,
"priority": 101,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 101,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 20,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 21,
"keys": [
"Street Maze",
"the Maze",
"street level",
"ground alleys"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nThe street-level skin of the City, a ring of alleys wrapped around the Deep's plant rooms where the City meets Hong Kong. The classic City, louder and brighter than ever: one-to-two-metre alleys dripping from the canopy, holo clinic signs, food stalls, brothel doors, pawn and parts shops. Always packed after dark. Iron Lotus collectors walk fixed routes. Tourists come in on dares with their optics recording; locals ignore them or rob them. The best place to vanish into a crowd, or be found by someone who already knows your name.\n",
"comment": "District - Street Maze (street level)",
"name": "District - Street Maze (street level)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 102,
"priority": 102,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 102,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 21,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 22,
"keys": [
"Ancient Floors",
"the Ancient Floors",
"Old Stack",
"the old City",
"caged balcony",
"old columns",
"original City",
"trash chutes",
"sewage works",
"filtration floors"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nTHE ANCIENT FLOORS (F5-F15), also called the Old Stack: what is left of the original City, the concrete that stood in 1998, now wrapped around the spines with eight hundred metres on its back. Old pipes and trash chutes, sewage processing, filtration and reclaimed-water plants, rain catchment, all sweating and leaking. Between them, illegal settlements from the old days that nobody ever cleared: the poorest homes (tiny flats, caged balconies facing a neighbour's wall, dead lifts), scavenger crews, hidden dens, Ning labs, and forgotten chambers sealed decades ago. Old people, new arrivals, people who can't afford to climb. First to flood, first to lose cooling. Cracks in the columns are watched like a sick relative.\n",
"comment": "District - The Ancient Floors (F5-F15, the Old Stack)",
"name": "District - The Ancient Floors (F5-F15, the Old Stack)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 103,
"priority": 103,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 103,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 22,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 23,
"keys": [
"Pipewalks",
"Pipewalk",
"trunk lines",
"coolant mains"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nPIPEWALKS (F14-F15): The old 1998 roofline, enclosed when the City grew over it, at the top of the Ancient Floors. Now the main junction layer between the Deep and everything above: catwalks threaded with coolant mains, power trunks, water lines, and fibre bundles, labelled in three generations of handwriting, branching into the risers that climb the stack. Transformers buzz, sight-glasses glow blue, vents sigh warm vapour. The Gridwright Guild maintains it; Iron Lotus and Jade Lantern fight over who tolls it. Couriers and runners love it: fast, few eyes, warm. Romance and ambushes both happen beside a hissing valve.\n",
"comment": "District - Pipewalks (F14-F15)",
"name": "District - Pipewalks (F14-F15)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 104,
"priority": 104,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 104,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 23,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 24,
"keys": [
"Midstack",
"machine halls",
"the Halls",
"hall floors",
"middle floors"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nMIDSTACK (F15 to about F50-60): Middle- and lower-class homes, the densest residential band in the City. The old AI machine halls fill most of F15-F50: high ceilings, raised floors, cable trays, and dead cooling ducts, carved after the 2040s into flats and workshops with partition walls, mezzanines, and doors cut where vents used to be. Corridors run like streets, with noodle stalls, repair shops, clinics, laundries, small temples, bars, and remote-school rooms where kids log in together. Flats are small but real, and every hall has its own aunties, stalls, and feuds. Fibre runs everywhere through the old trays and ducts, much of it undocumented.\nCrime is always present here: robberies, gang crews, Triad collectors, Ning on the counters. The Valve Years hit these floors hardest, and people still lock up at night. Tower law is thin: a few police posts and nothing else. Above about F50 the halls give out and the upper middle floors start mixing in the Galleries' shops, offices, and workshops. Layout and services: see A Typical Middle Floor. Home to Lantern Row and Lucky Eight.\n",
"comment": "District - Midstack (F15 to F50-60, the middle floors)",
"name": "District - Midstack (F15 to F50-60, the middle floors)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 121,
"priority": 121,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 121,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 24,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 25,
"keys": [
"the Galleries",
"Upper Galleries",
"indoor streets",
"pod hotel",
"capsule pods",
"light wells",
"office floors"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nTHE GALLERIES (about F50-60 to F80): Where the City works. Welded steel and container decks bolted onto the spines, linked by catwalks across deep light wells, and lined with indoor streets under strip lights: offices and back offices, wholesale markets, restaurants, fabrication shops, storage and logistics floors, network hubs, light manufacturing, pod hotels for shift workers. Corp fronts and Triad offices share corridors. Commuters from the bridges pour through at shift change. Grey daylight reaches the light wells for an hour a day. Smells of hot plastic, ozone, fryer oil, and fresh welds. The higher you go, the cleaner the floor and the more cameras.\n",
"comment": "District - The Galleries (F50-60 to F80, commerce & work)",
"name": "District - The Galleries (F50-60 to F80, commerce & work)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 105,
"priority": 105,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 105,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 25,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 26,
"keys": [
"the Crown",
"Sky Market",
"Crown terraces",
"AV pad",
"AV pads",
"drone pad",
"upper floors"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nTHE CROWN (F80 to the roof): Wealthy enclaves, luxury apartments, private clubs, criminal syndicate floors, Tower Office chambers, corp guest suites, real air-con, real glass, cameras everywhere, and a second ring of warden checks at the lift lobbies on top of the F60 checkpoint. Here officials and criminals share tables and the lines blur. The stack steps in at the setbacks, leaving open terraces with wind turbines, gardens, and pigeon coops.\nSKY MARKET: Stalls under tarps on the biggest terrace around the AV pads where corp cars and Triad rides land: rare chrome, drone parts, herbal blends, tolerated weapons, smuggled goods off the AVs, and tea with a view of Hong Kong. Sharper prices, quieter knives.\n",
"comment": "District - The Crown & Sky Market (F80+)",
"name": "District - The Crown & Sky Market (F80+)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 106,
"priority": 106,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 106,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 26,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 27,
"keys": [
"Expansion Zone",
"the Frontier",
"Floor 130",
"F130",
"expansion floors",
"Old Mother",
"antenna forest",
"container settlements"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nTHE EXPANSION ZONE (F120+): The roof, which is never finished. Solar sheets and water tanks, an antenna forest of comms arrays and dishes, construction platforms, container settlements for crane crews and squatters, welding light at all hours, and wind and rain with nothing to stop them. The cranes climb with the City; the oldest, Old Mother, has been moved up every decade since 2003. The main deck is F130, with two new floors (F131-F132) going up, sold as sky deeds before the steel arrived.\n",
"comment": "The Expansion Zone (F120+)",
"name": "The Expansion Zone (F120+)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 122,
"priority": 122,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 122,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 27,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 28,
"keys": [
"Central Shaft",
"Silent Well",
"shaft rail",
"shaft balcony",
"shaft balconies",
"Old Yamen",
"Yamen courtyard",
"yamen hall",
"negotiation hall"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nTHE CENTRAL SHAFT, called the Silent Well: the open-air core of the City, about 70 metres across, falling from the roof all the way down to F5. Every floor opens onto it somewhere: rails, balconies, landings, and corridor ends where you can stand facing the centre and see the drop, hundreds of floors of lit windows, laundry, and signs wrapping around the void, rain falling past you. Footbridges and walkways cross it on many floors. Pipes, cables, and new risers climb its walls in thick bundles, because it is easier to run new infrastructure up the outside of a wall than through it; gridwrights hang off them on ropes. Real sun reaches the bottom for about forty minutes around noon in summer, and people stop work to stand in it. Sanctuary: drawn weapons on the shaft floor insult every faction. Lovers meet on the balconies at dusk, looking down into the light.\nTHE OLD YAMEN: The Qing-era magistrate hall on the shaft floor at F5, the oldest building in the City, moved stone by stone onto the new floor when the bottom storeys were gutted in the Spine Years, then restored and wired. Two antique cannons at the door; the guards are not ceremonial. By day: classes and tea. By night: Triad arbitration, pacts between gangs witnessed and sealed, deed sealing, Compact paperwork theatre, and high-stakes cards in the rear hall. The Tower Office council still meets here for ceremony.\n",
"comment": "The Central Shaft (Silent Well) & Old Yamen",
"name": "The Central Shaft (Silent Well) & Old Yamen",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 107,
"priority": 107,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 107,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 28,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 29,
"keys": [
"Fuk Tak",
"Fuk Tak Temple",
"Earth God",
"fortune sticks",
"joss paper",
"Tin Hau"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nA small, smoke-thick temple to the Earth God, with a Tin Hau niche in the back for smugglers, AV pilots, bridge porters, and anyone who crosses water or sky for a living. Real incense, real fire, no screens; signal dies at the door, and some people come just for that. Fortune sticks, spirit money (now printed with fake cred-chips and AVs), whispered confessions. Even Dragon Heads bow here, and weapons stay at the door. Sanctuary holds unless you desecrate it.\n",
"comment": "Fuk Tak Temple",
"name": "Fuk Tak Temple",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 108,
"priority": 108,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 108,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 29,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 30,
"keys": [
"Dragon Gate",
"Dragon Gate Market",
"night bazaar",
"parts stalls"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nA dense Street Maze bazaar near the South Dragon approach. Street food under holo-signs, knockoff and stolen chrome, optic shades, burner chips, charms, weapons under cloth, a new identity if you know which noodle stall to ask. Peak hours after 21:00. Jade Lantern informers work the tea stalls; Pipe Rats pick pockets and ping chips. The fish-ball noodles are worth the risk.\n",
"comment": "Dragon Gate Market",
"name": "Dragon Gate Market",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 109,
"priority": 109,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 109,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 30,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 31,
"keys": [
"Blue Vein",
"Junction 7",
"main coolant line",
"Guild Hall"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nTHE BLUE VEIN: The longest continuous Pipewalk, following the great coolant main whose sight-glasses glow blue along its whole length. Gridwright workshops and parts stalls line it; couriers race it; lovers scratch initials into warm pipe lagging. An ambush favourite.\nJUNCTION 7: Where six trunks meet. The Gridwright Guild Hall is here, and a pressure siren screams on the hour, which half the City still uses as a clock. Whoever holds Junction 7's control room can shut down a third of the City.\n",
"comment": "The Blue Vein & Junction 7",
"name": "The Blue Vein & Junction 7",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 110,
"priority": 110,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 110,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 31,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 32,
"keys": [
"Red Silk House",
"Red Silk",
"pleasure house"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nThe premier pleasure house, licensed by Iron Lotus, on the lower Crown. Velvet, lacquer, waste-heat baths, real silk, and rooms themed from Qing fantasy to chrome-and-neon. Its madam runs it with iron courtesy and is choosing an heir. Every courtesan is an adult who chose the trade or the debt that led to it; some are heavily chromed, some proudly natural. Anything can be bought if the price is right, and the house keeps sense-reels (full sensory recordings) of what happens in its rooms. Pillow talk is currency. Entry is expensive; disrespect ends careers, sometimes fingers.\n",
"comment": "Red Silk House",
"name": "Red Silk House",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 111,
"priority": 111,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 111,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 32,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 33,
"keys": [
"Lantern Row",
"karaoke box",
"Jade Lantern bars",
"pale lanterns"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nA Midstack nightlife strip under Jade Lantern influence: bars, dance floors the size of a flat, karaoke boxes, sense-reel booths, and softer brothels. Pale jade holo-lanterns mark Jade Lantern doors, and independents pay for the lantern outside theirs. Music and bass bleed through thin walls; the floor is always wet. Good for chance meetings, poison in a cocktail, and dancing too close.\n",
"comment": "Lantern Row",
"name": "Lantern Row",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 112,
"priority": 112,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 112,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 33,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 34,
"keys": [
"Needle Alley",
"ripperdoc den",
"unlicensed clinic"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nA Street Maze alley lined with unlicensed clinics, dentists, and ripperdoc dens under holo crosses and giant spinning teeth. It continues the real Walled City's cheap medicine, now with chrome: installs, removals, repairs, gunshot work, and corp prototypes on the quiet. Doctors trained on the mainland, struck off in Hong Kong, or self-taught. Quality ranges from miracle to butchery. Cash or credit only, Triads first, tourists get what they pay for. Dr. Lau's den is the best-known clean room.\n",
"comment": "Needle Alley (ripperdocs)",
"name": "Needle Alley (ripperdocs)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 113,
"priority": 113,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 113,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 34,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 35,
"keys": [
"Char Siu Stack",
"roast meat factory",
"vat-pork tanks",
"food factory"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nMulti-floor food factories in the lower Galleries: roast ducks and pork on hooks, vat-pork tanks bubbling pink, fish-ball lines, noodle drying racks. It exports to Hong Kong restaurants over the support bridges, and they pretend not to know the source. Heat, grease, steam, and workers who see everything. Good cover for meetings, bad for white clothes. The night shift knows which Triad crates leave with the delivery drones, and what goes into the furnaces at 3 a.m.\n",
"comment": "Char Siu Stack",
"name": "Char Siu Stack",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 114,
"priority": 114,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 114,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 35,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 36,
"keys": [
"Clocktower",
"Clocktower Stack",
"Clocktower Spire",
"chime codes",
"three long chimes",
"under the Clocktower"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nA needle spire on the north-east corner rising out of the Expansion Zone, the highest point of the City, carrying an old clock face patched with a holo ring, visible from most terraces and, at an angle, from the Silent Well. Often wrong. The meeting landmark (\"under the Clocktower\"). The Tower Office broadcasts lockdown codes from it as chimes and holo colours: three long chimes and a red ring mean stay indoors. Older people still flinch at the sound; it rang most nights in the Valve Years.\n",
"comment": "Clocktower Spire",
"name": "Clocktower Spire",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 115,
"priority": 115,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 115,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 36,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 37,
"keys": [
"Black Vault",
"Black Vaults",
"vault cores",
"Roots vault"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nSealed chambers in the Roots, cut into old metro tunnels and fort foundations, behind biometric locks, brass keys, and ICE. They hold gang war chests, stolen art, offline data cores corps pay a fortune to keep off any net, and occasionally people. One vault was opened recently and something is gone: the Black Vault package.\n",
"comment": "Black Vaults",
"name": "Black Vaults",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 116,
"priority": 116,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 116,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 37,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 38,
"keys": [
"Twin Stairs",
"East Stair",
"West Stair",
"East Staircase",
"West Staircase",
"the twin stairwells"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nTHE EAST & WEST STAIRS, together the Twin Stairs: the two main staircases, on the west and east sides of the Central Shaft, climbing the full height of the City from the Street Maze to the roof, through the F60 checkpoint. When the lifts fail, which is weekly, the stairs are the City's real artery: porters, kids, deliveries, chases, collapsed lungs, illicit meetings on the landings, and shops wedged under every flight. The West Stair belongs to Iron Lotus runners, the East Stair to the Pipe Rats. Taking the wrong one can be a statement, or a mistake.\n",
"comment": "The East & West Stairs (the Twin Stairs)",
"name": "The East & West Stairs (the Twin Stairs)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 117,
"priority": 117,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 117,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 38,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 39,
"keys": [
"Lucky Eight",
"Lucky Eight Mahjong",
"mahjong parlour",
"mahjong parlor"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nA Midstack parlour where tiles clack all night under tobacco smoke and an old fan. Iron Lotus skims; high rollers play in a back room for sky deeds and grid hours; net bets run on a cracked screen over the bar. Information brokers listen more than they play. Benny Kwok works from the corner table at the back. A good place to lose money and gain a name.\n",
"comment": "Lucky Eight Mahjong",
"name": "Lucky Eight Mahjong",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 118,
"priority": 118,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 118,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 39,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 40,
"keys": [
"Perimeter Ring",
"scanner arches",
"North Teeth",
"South Dragon",
"East Needle",
"West Steam",
"get out of the City",
"enter the City",
"the border",
"leaving the City"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nTHE RING: No wall, only a ring of shops, clinics, and old \"tourist\" arches where Hong Kong streets meet Free City alleys, with the black cliff rising straight up behind them. On the Hong Kong side: Perimeter Bureau scanner arches, cameras, and drones on tethers. Walking in is easy: the arches look, log, and let you through. Leaving is not: every exit is face-matched and logged, and goods pay Hong Kong duty at the arch. Hong Kong's face tracking stops at the arches, and the Bureau has no jurisdiction past them. The arches still see the real face of anyone wearing a Blank. A Hong Kong citizen who crosses too often gets flagged: a letter, then a Bureau visit, then trouble at work.\nAPPROACHES: North Teeth (Iron Lotus), South Dragon (Jade Lantern), East Needle (Pipe Rats), West Steam (Iron Lotus, with Volkov freight through it); the old names stuck. Each owner \"searches\" luggage its own way. Leaving with unpaid debts, gang heat, or a flagged face is much harder than getting in. Aunties with optics watch too.\n",
"comment": "Perimeter - The Ring & the Approaches",
"name": "Perimeter - The Ring & the Approaches",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 119,
"priority": 119,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 119,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 40,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 41,
"keys": [
"Ember Baths",
"waste-heat baths"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nA bathhouse beside the Pipewalks, heated by the coolant return lines from the Deep. Hot, fogged, tiled, intimate; the only place half the City takes its chrome off. Massages that end however you pay for, deals sealed in the plunge pool, and the occasional man held under until he stops kicking. Jade Lantern soft territory. Towels, heat, bare skin, whispered contracts.\n",
"comment": "Ember Baths",
"name": "Ember Baths",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 120,
"priority": 120,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 120,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 41,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 42,
"keys": [
"Long Lift",
"lift line",
"lift lines",
"F60 checkpoint",
"Floor 60 checkpoint",
"the checkpoint on 60",
"private lifts",
"freight lifts",
"entry log"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nLIFTS: Several lift lines run through the City in segments; nothing goes all the way. The longest, the Long Lift, runs from F5 to F60 in two cores, Elevator Core A on the north side of the Central Shaft and Core B on the south: crowded, slow, smelling of wet coats and fryer oil, stopping on nearly every floor. Freight lifts carry crates, carts, and the dead. The Crown has private lifts that skip everything below. Lifts break weekly.\nTHE F60 CHECKPOINT: Every lift line and both main stairs pass through a checkpoint on F60. You show ID (a bio-chip scan, or papers if you have no chip), contract guards wave you through, and your entry to the upper floors is recorded: who, when, where to. Workers in the Galleries pass it twice a day and stop noticing. The log is the point: the Tower Office keeps it, and it leaks to whoever pays the right guard. There are unofficial ways around the checkpoint, through ducts, ladders, and shaft cables, and they cost money or skin.\n",
"comment": "Lifts & the F60 Checkpoint",
"name": "Lifts & the F60 Checkpoint",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 124,
"priority": 124,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 124,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 42,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 43,
"keys": [
"typical middle floor",
"middle floor layout",
"a mid floor",
"Floor 56",
"F56",
"fifty-six",
"56th floor",
"Locked Service Room"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nWhat any middle floor looks like, give or take; details shift from floor to floor, and the pattern holds. Residential, commercial, services, and nightlife are packed into one ring about 210 m by 120 m around the Central Shaft. Some floors have a footbridge across the shaft's 70 m void. Elevator Core A (north) and Core B (south) are Long Lift stops; Main Stair West and Main Stair East sit at either end. Homes are mostly 1R and 2R rentals and micro flats, with many unregistered units, hidden rooms, and informal builds, and owned private view units at the four outer corners. Every floor is modified constantly. The mix of shops, services, and nightlife is much like F56 below, arranged differently on every floor and owned by different people. Locals' saying: \"Here, every void has a purpose.\"\nFLOOR 56 (the worked example, four floors below the F60 checkpoint). NORTH: water and filters, a 24-hour laundry, grocery, a food court (noodles, BBQ, snacks), electronics repair, cyber repair, a pharmacy and clinic, a general-care doctor. EAST: a Tower police post (5-10 officers covering a few floors up and down, a holding cell, complaints behind bulletproof glass), the music bar Neon Moon (locals call it \"the poor man's Moon Palace\"), a hostess bar, the floor office of the Tower's private security (everyone knows whose people they really are), a pawn shop, hardware, recycled parts, and a shrine in the south-east corner. WEST: a pleasure house, a massage parlour, a bar, storage cages, local-dish food stalls, herbal medicine, cheap eats, and a Locked Service Room nobody has a key to. SOUTH: trash and recycling collection, the maintenance corridor, a fibre and 6G repair shop, street food, communal sinks and toilets. With the post here, the gangs and the private guards take more care to look civilised.\n",
"comment": "A Typical Middle Floor (example: Floor 56)",
"name": "A Typical Middle Floor (example: Floor 56)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 125,
"priority": 125,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 125,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 43,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 44,
"keys": [
"Iron Lotus",
"Iron Lotus Society",
"the Society",
"Dragon Head",
"White Paper Fan",
"Blue Lantern",
"Blue Lanterns"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nIRON LOTUS SOCIETY: The dominant Triad and the strongest gang inside the City, a corporate-criminal hybrid. Runs protection, floor tax and line tax, sky-deed sales, gambling, premium brothels, chrome credit and repossession, drugs, sense-reels, and smuggling through the Crown's AV pads and over the support bridges. Symbol: black iron lotus on red. Hierarchy: Dragon Head (Uncle Iron) > Deputy > Red Poles (enforcers, usually chromed) > White Paper Fans (advisors) > Blue Lanterns (initiates). They prefer velvet threats and staged accidents, and spill blood without hesitation when a message needs sending. Their rule is that the City must look civilised from outside, because that is what keeps the Bureau out.\nINSIDE vs OUTSIDE: Here in some form since the old Walled City (its elders claim their grandfathers sat at the table for the Compact of 1991), it owns what no newcomer can buy quickly: most of the unbuilt air, the best floors, most of the Black Vaults, the West Stair, a council seat, and three generations of favours. Outside the walls it is small: no ships, no banks abroad, no army behind it. If the City falls, the outside crews go home and the Lotus has nowhere to go, so it defends the City harder than anyone.\nLANDLORD: Under the tea terms every newcomer deals through the Lotus, renting its vaults, crossing its bridge heads, or paying its tolls. Its main rival from outside is the Kuroda-gumi; its old rival at home is Jade Lantern.\nCLIQUES: The Society is big and loose at the bottom. Small crews of Blue Lanterns and street soldiers often run their own business on their own floors, without orders from the Dragon Head or his underbosses. The Society disowns, protects, or quietly buries them depending on which is cheaper.\n",
"comment": "Gang - Iron Lotus Society",
"name": "Gang - Iron Lotus Society",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 201,
"priority": 201,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 201,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 44,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 45,
"keys": [
"Jade Lantern",
"Jade Lantern Brotherhood",
"the Brotherhood",
"Lantern runners"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nJADE LANTERN BROTHERHOOD: Stylish rivals to Iron Lotus. Run much of the nightlife, mid-tier brothels, information brokering, and the City's best netrunners. Prefer poison, blackmail, ICE, and beauty over open war. Mark: pale jade lanterns, real or holo, outside their doors. They started the Valve War and lost it. The Yamen Accord gave Iron Lotus and the Guild council seats and gave the Brotherhood nothing, and it has smiled through every council meeting since, looking for a lever. Currently in a cold war with Iron Lotus over trunk tolls.\nALLIANCES: Courting the Ma family (its nightlife and their tables fit, and the Ma have money the Lantern lacks). A non-aggression pact with the Volkov Line: neither touches the other's people on the bridges. Sells information to everyone, including the newcomers about each other. Always smiling.\n",
"comment": "Gang - Jade Lantern Brotherhood",
"name": "Gang - Jade Lantern Brotherhood",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 202,
"priority": 202,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 202,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 45,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 46,
"keys": [
"Pipe Rats",
"Pipe Rat",
"street runners"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nA loose crew-based gang of couriers, thieves, and street netrunners who grew up in the Pipewalks and the Ancient Floors and own the shortcuts through both, and through the Roots. Not a Triad. They sell speed, silence, and the odd knife in the dark; their couriers know every bridge crossing the Bureau's drones can't see. Everyone uses them, which keeps them alive: Volkov freight hires Pipe Rat porters for the last hundred metres, the River Line pays them as Roots guides, Jade Lantern rents their runners and tries to buy whole crews, and Iron Lotus calls them vermin and uses them anyway. A crew that signs an exclusive deal with anyone stops being trusted by the other crews, so almost none do. Loyalty is to crew and coin. Mark: a rat tattoo, often glowing, or a knotted cable tie on the wrist.\n",
"comment": "Gang - Pipe Rats",
"name": "Gang - Pipe Rats",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 203,
"priority": 203,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 203,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 46,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 47,
"keys": [
"Gridwright Guild",
"gridwright",
"gridwrights",
"the Guild",
"Guild chop",
"line crew",
"line crews"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nGRIDWRIGHT GUILD: The old Steamwright Guild, renamed when the AI halls brought power, coolant, and fibre. They keep the City alive: the Deep's power plant, trunks, coolant, water, lifts, control nodes, lattice and brace inspections, and load certification for every new floor (the Guild seal, stamped with a Guild chop). Hall at Junction 7 on the Blue Vein. Spokesperson: Ah-Kin. Members wear valve-key pendants and work for every faction, which is their protection. Not a gang and not a power of its own: since the Yamen Accord it sits under the Tower Office with a council seat. Its weapon is the switch. It holds the valves (power, water, coolant), and the Office and the gangs both court it, lean on it, and plant people in it.\nLINE CREWS: Fibre is the Guild's busiest, worst-paid branch. Freelancers on Guild licence and small outfits find, trace, splice, and lay fibre, mostly on the middle floors, crawling risers, ducts, and service passages and negotiating access floor by floor. Paid per job, with plenty of cash work on the side.\nNot clean: seals can be bought, inspectors leaned on, and a gridwright who talks too much has an accident with a live line.\n",
"comment": "Faction - Gridwright Guild (under the Tower Office)",
"name": "Faction - Gridwright Guild (under the Tower Office)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 221,
"priority": 221,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 221,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 47,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 48,
"keys": [
"Tower Office",
"tower government",
"Yamen Circle",
"kaifong",
"Tower councillor",
"council seat",
"council seats",
"Office election"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nTHE TOWER OFFICE: The tower government, one body, created by the Yamen Accord of 2070 to end the Valve Years. Its council is the Yamen Circle: elders, shopkeepers, clinic heads, and Guild seniors, plus seats for Iron Lotus and the Guild. It registers sky deeds and Sky Charters, collects the power and water levy, runs remote schooling and the lockdown codes, keeps the City's paper copy of the Compact, deals with the neighbouring tower owners over the braces, and lets contracts like the F130 expansion. Offices on the Crown; ceremonies at the Old Yamen.\nIts law and security forces are under Law & Order. Hong Kong does not recognise any of it.\nBOUGHT: Stable, slow, and for sale. Council \"elections\" are held and the seats are openly bought: the going rate is a year of a Crown floor's Charter fees, plus whatever it takes to outbid the other buyer. Officials and criminals share the top floors and the lines blur. Still, the kaifong spirit is real: when a floor falls or the heat comes, it organises the water.\n",
"comment": "Power - The Tower Office",
"name": "Power - The Tower Office",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 220,
"priority": 220,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 220,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 48,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 49,
"keys": [
"megacorp",
"megacorps",
"corpo",
"corpos",
"Perimeter Bureau",
"Tianmen",
"Tianmen Holdings",
"Harcourt Pacific",
"arcology",
"arcologies"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nOfficially, no Hong Kong authority is inside. Corps are inside as Charter holders, and pretend to be guests. Unofficially every one has a favourite tea house.\n- PERIMETER BUREAU: Hong Kong's answer to the City since the 2050s. Runs the Ring, the drones, the files, and informants. No jurisdiction inside, and plenty of reach anyway.\n- TIANMEN HOLDINGS: A mainland-backed construction and private-security giant that builds arcologies. Its towers stand on three sides of the City, and some of the Stabilisation anchors tie into them. Its arcologies are sealed towns in a tower: staff live, shop, school and are buried inside on contracts that run for life, and from their clean upper decks the City is the view they are told to be grateful for.\n- KAISEN NEURAL: A Japanese cyberware maker that field-tests prototypes cheaply through Needle Alley ripperdocs and pays well for the results, including the bad ones.\n- HARCOURT PACIFIC: An old Hong Kong bank that keeps data and money it cannot explain in the Deep's data vaults and the Black Vaults.\nCorp scouts, fixers, and security teams come in wearing cheap clothes and expensive chrome. Locals can usually tell. When a corp needs something done inside, it hires locals it can deny (see Gig Work & Corp Jobs).\n",
"comment": "Faction - Outside Powers (Corps & the Perimeter Bureau)",
"name": "Faction - Outside Powers (Corps & the Perimeter Bureau)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 231,
"priority": 231,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 231,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 49,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 50,
"keys": [
"tower wardens",
"Tower warden",
"Tower police",
"police post",
"police posts",
"contract guards",
"contract security",
"private security guards",
"Tower Office guards"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nTHE TOWER'S LAW (all under the Tower Office):\n- WARDENS: a small, well-armed force in grey shells that guards the Crown, the Expansion Zone, the Deep, and the main lift lobbies. On the middle floors and below they show up after the fact, if at all.\n- TOWER POLICE: small posts of 5-10 officers on a handful of floors, each handling security and law a few floors up and down. Outnumbered, underpaid, and careful about which doors they knock on. Most floors below F60 have no post at all.\n- CONTRACT GUARDS: private security the Office hires to staff checkpoints, lobbies, contractor sites, and Office buildings. Many are tied to criminal networks. Some took the job for the money and the influence; others are there to gather information and spy for their network, and a guard's real employer is rarely the one on the badge.\nWho actually settles a dispute on a given floor depends on who is closer, the post or a Red Pole.\n",
"comment": "Law & Order - Wardens, Tower Police & Contract Guards",
"name": "Law & Order - Wardens, Tower Police & Contract Guards",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 222,
"priority": 222,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 222,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 50,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 51,
"keys": [
"Lotus Court",
"the Court of the Lotus",
"Iron Lotus tribunal",
"before the Court",
"incense hall"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nIron Lotus's own tribunal, for crimes against the Society rather than crimes against outsiders.\nWHO SITS: the Deputy presides; the Dragon Head himself sits only when a life is on the table. Two Red Poles from floors not involved sit as judges, and a White Paper Fan keeps the record and reads the oaths. The accused may name one sworn brother to speak for him.\nWHAT IT HEARS: betraying the Society; selling its business, secrets, or territory to rivals; acting without leave (private violence or side business that brings heat or shame on the Society); lying to a superior; harming a sworn brother. Crimes against outsiders come before it only when they have cost the Society face, money, or peace.\nHOW IT CONVENES: at night, on short notice, in the incense hall on an Iron Lotus Crown floor, before an altar to Guan Yu with the black iron lotus on red. Shoes off, weapons and implants with weapon functions surrendered at the door, phones dead inside. The doors are barred until a verdict.\nRITUALS: incense lit when it opens; the accused restates his oath and swears on it again; the Fan reads the relevant oath aloud; testimony is given kneeling before the altar; the verdict is spoken once and never appealed.\nPUNISHMENTS: a public apology and loss of face; a finger; stripping of rank; expulsion, with the pin cut from the collar and the name struck from the book, which leaves a man with no protection anywhere in the City; death, carried out quietly afterwards. Brothers who protected the guilty can share the sentence.\nOUTSIDERS: an outsider cannot bring a case alone. They need a sponsor of Red Pole rank or higher, or must bring proof to a White Paper Fan, who decides whether the Court will hear it. An outsider who testifies is under the guest's peace for that night and may not be touched for it. But lying to the Court is punished as if they were sworn, and the Society remembers who brought the case: that person is owed respect and becomes known to every Iron Lotus brother, and so to their enemies. Using the Court is using Triad justice. It is fast and final, and it is not mercy.\n",
"comment": "The Lotus Court (Iron Lotus tribunal)",
"name": "The Lotus Court (Iron Lotus tribunal)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 208,
"priority": 208,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 208,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 51,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 52,
"keys": [
"Uncle Iron",
"Wong Chi",
"Dragon Head Wong",
"Uncle Wong"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nWONG CHI, \"UNCLE IRON\", 60s: Dragon Head of the Iron Lotus Society and the heaviest voice on the Tower Office council. Grandfatherly in public, ruthless in private. A heavy man in an old-fashioned suit, almost no visible chrome, hands like a dock worker's. Ended the Valve War in person and signed the Yamen Accord; believes the City lives only as long as it looks civilised from outside, which is why bodies go into the Roots instead of onto the street. Offers tea before threats. Bows at Fuk Tak. Hard line against the Compact Review and anyone who sells the City to a corp.\n",
"comment": "NPC - Uncle Iron (Wong Chi, Dragon Head)",
"name": "NPC - Uncle Iron (Wong Chi, Dragon Head)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 301,
"priority": 301,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 301,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 52,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 53,
"keys": [
"Dr. Lau",
"Doctor Lau",
"Lau Ming"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nDR. LAU MING, 40s: Best-known doctor and ripperdoc on Needle Alley. Mainland-trained, Hong Kong-unlicensed. Thin, tired, steady hands (one is chrome, and the better surgeon). Treats anyone who can pay or whom the Yamen Circle vouches for. Knows bullet wounds, knife work, coolant burns, and failed implants, and digs slugs out without asking whose. Refuses to sell patient data or run Kaisen prototypes on people who don't know, which makes him valuable and a target. A cynical humanitarian.\n",
"comment": "NPC - Dr. Lau (ripperdoc)",
"name": "NPC - Dr. Lau (ripperdoc)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 305,
"priority": 305,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 305,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 53,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 54,
"keys": [
"Ah-Kin",
"Ah Kin",
"master Kin"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nAH-KIN, about 35: Master gridwright of the Blue Vein and spokesperson of the Gridwright Guild. Grease under the nails, burn-scarred forearms, welder's optics, writes Cantonese poetry on pipe lagging. Can shut down half the Midstack's cooling with one switch, and everyone knows it. Sells repairs to every faction; the Guild seal on new floors goes through his hands. Flirtatious, exhausted, indispensable, and lately frightened of what he sees in the old columns of the Ancient Floors.\n",
"comment": "NPC - Ah-Kin (master gridwright)",
"name": "NPC - Ah-Kin (master gridwright)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 306,
"priority": 306,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 306,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 54,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 55,
"keys": [
"Fat Ho",
"Ho Sing",
"floor-tax collector"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nFAT HO (Ho Sing), 50s: Iron Lotus floor-tax and line-tax collector for the Midstack. Loud laugh, cracked tablet and a paper ledger he trusts more, two silent chromed Red Poles who break fingers when the ledger says so. Everyone's least favourite Tuesday. Bribable with food and flattery more than cash. Comic menace that turns into sudden threat when payments lapse.\n",
"comment": "NPC - Fat Ho (Ho Sing, collector)",
"name": "NPC - Fat Ho (Ho Sing, collector)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 309,
"priority": 309,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 309,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 55,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 56,
"keys": [
"Bun",
"Cheng Wai-man",
"Wai-man",
"Ah-Man",
"pineapple bun"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nROLE: Cheng Wai-man, \"Bun\", late 20s. Lives on a Midstack corridor and runs roast-meat deliveries for a Char Siu Stack kitchen up and down the Twin Stairs, plus any odd job that pays. A friend to his whole floor: the guy who knocks with leftover siu mei, borrows tools, and drags people to Lucky Eight to lose.\nLOOK: Stocky, soft in the middle, strong from stairs. Round face, crooked grin with a chipped front tooth, hair flattened on one side, a thin white scar through his left eyebrow. Faded football shirt, cargo shorts, rain slippers, a cheap optic that keeps glitching. Smells of char siu and Tiger Balm.\nPERSONALITY: A golden retriever in human form: warm, loud, a little ditzy. Forgets prices, mixes up names, tells terrible jokes on purpose. Notices when people are hurting and won't let it go. Brave in the simplest way. Has his own life: a crush at Dragon Gate, a mother in the Ancient Floors, embarrassing debts.\nHIS STORY: As a hungry teenager he stole a pineapple bun and a scavenger crew from the Ancient Floors decided to make an example of him; an old gridwright pulled him out. The scar is from that night. He tells it differently every time and buys a pineapple bun on the anniversary.\nPLAY: Comfort and comedy on the floor, and a person worth protecting. Never a rival for anyone's place; he is a friend, not the best friend.\n",
"comment": "NPC - Bun (Cheng Wai-man, neighbour)",
"name": "NPC - Bun (Cheng Wai-man, neighbour)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 312,
"priority": 312,
"case_sensitive": true,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 312,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 56,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": true
}
},
{
"id": 57,
"keys": [
"Benny",
"Benny Kwok",
"Three Phones",
"the fixer"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nROLE: Benny Kwok, \"Three Phones\", early 40s. Freelance fixer at the back corner table of Lucky Eight Mahjong. Brokers courier runs, debt recovery, theft, forgery, introductions, alibis, quiet removals, the odd honest renovation. No faction; takes contracts from all of them, which keeps him alive.\nLOOK: Lean and restless, slicked hair, gold tooth, a gold watch that is definitely fake, loud silk shirt under a cheap blazer. Three old handsets face-up in front of him (Iron Lotus, Jade Lantern, everyone else) because he trusts nothing implanted. Chain-drinks milk tea.\nPERSONALITY: Charming, fast-talking, transparently greedy. Calls everyone \"boss\". Never lies about the pay, only about the risk. A proud coward in a fight. Loyal to whoever is most profitable this week. Soft on old movies and older money.\nPLAY: The sandbox's job engine. Jobs of every moral shade, tied to the live conflicts or small local trouble, always with a hidden complication or second buyer. Takes 20 percent and never forgets a debt. Will sell anyone out if the price is high and the risk is low, then apologise sincerely. Greets strangers with \"You look like you need money, boss.\"\n",
"comment": "NPC - Benny \"Three Phones\" Kwok (fixer)",
"name": "NPC - Benny \"Three Phones\" Kwok (fixer)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 315,
"priority": 315,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 315,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 57,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 58,
"keys": [
"Crowbar",
"Crowbar Tam",
"Tam Wing-kei",
"Wing-kei",
"Red Pole Tam"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nROLE: Tam Wing-kei, \"Crowbar\" Tam, early 30s. Iron Lotus Red Pole on the Street Maze, the Iron Lotus stair, and the lower Midstack. Settles disputes for a fee, breaks people who skip floor tax, handles jobs too rough for Fat Ho's men. He wants the Deputy's attention and is getting it.\nLOOK: Tall, heavy-shouldered, shaved head, a burn scar from jaw to collarbone, knuckles reinforced with subdermal plating. Black shirt, sleeves rolled, iron lotus pin. Carries a short pry bar in his belt loop, out of habit and as a message.\nPERSONALITY: Cold, patient, proud. Short sentences, never raises his voice. Disciplined and follows Society rules to the letter, which makes him more dangerous than a hothead: he will wait years for a legitimate reason to hurt someone. Despises being embarrassed. Something human survives, mostly for his younger brother and street dogs.\nPLAY: A slow, credible threat, never a cartoon. Works inside the rules: won't touch anyone in a temple or the Silent Well and needs an excuse the Society will accept (a missed payment, a broken contract, a favour for the Jade Lantern). Leans on people through the ones they care about. Can become a reluctant ally if interests line up; never a friend.\n",
"comment": "NPC - \"Crowbar\" Tam (Tam Wing-kei, Red Pole)",
"name": "NPC - \"Crowbar\" Tam (Tam Wing-kei, Red Pole)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 316,
"priority": 316,
"case_sensitive": true,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 316,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 58,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": true
}
},
{
"id": 59,
"keys": [
"Inspector Leung",
"Edmund Leung",
"Mr. Tea",
"the Inspector"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nROLE: Edmund Leung, late 40s. Officially a mid-level Perimeter Bureau administrator. Unofficially an off-the-books handler running informants inside the City from a tea house just outside the West Steam approach. Wants eyes on the Black Vault affair, the trunk-toll war, the bridge smuggling, and anyone talking about the Compact Review. Locals call him \"Mr. Tea\" because he always pays for the pot.\nLOOK: Neat and forgettable on purpose: grey suit, rimless glasses (with a Bureau-grade optic behind them), thinning hair combed flat, a good umbrella. He looks like an accountant. His eyes don't.\nPERSONALITY: Polite, patient, quietly ruthless. Soft formal English mixed with careful Cantonese. Never threatens; lists things he knows. Believes the City is a wound that will be closed one way or another and wants to be on the right side when it happens. Keeps informants alive as long as they are worth it.\nPLAY: The outside world pushing in. Schemes, betrayals, hard choices. Working for him pays well and inside the City being called a Bureau spy is a death sentence. He never goes deeper than the perimeter if he can help it. A temptation and a threat, never a rescuer.\n",
"comment": "NPC - Inspector Leung (Edmund Leung, Bureau handler)",
"name": "NPC - Inspector Leung (Edmund Leung, Bureau handler)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 318,
"priority": 318,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 318,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 59,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 60,
"keys": [
"Crowbar Tam",
"Tam Wing-kei",
"Crowbar"
],
"secondary_keys": [
"pineapple bun",
"Bun's scar",
"scavenger crew",
"old gridwright",
"lost face"
],
"content": "\nTRUTH: Tam led the scavenger crew that caught teenage Bun with the stolen pineapple bun, and he meant to kill him. The old gridwright who pulled Bun out (long dead now) made Tam lose face in front of his crew with nothing but a valve key. The burn scar is from a different night; he lets people believe otherwise.\nSTAKES: Bun was underage, which breaks the one rule every faction enforces together; if Iron Lotus ever learns it, Tam's career ends in the Roots.\nWHO KNOWS: Bun knows who he is and has never understood what that knowledge is worth. Tam does.\n",
"comment": "[Secret] Crowbar Tam's scavenger night",
"name": "[Secret] Crowbar Tam's scavenger night",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 401,
"priority": 401,
"case_sensitive": true,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 401,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 60,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": true
}
},
{
"id": 61,
"keys": [
"Red Silk",
"Red Silk House"
],
"secondary_keys": [
"sense-reel archive",
"the archive",
"madam's archive",
"recordings of",
"blackmail files",
"succession"
],
"content": "\nTRUTH: Red Silk keeps every sense-reel recorded in its rooms for thirty years in an offline archive behind the madam's office: Hong Kong officials, Bureau officers, corp executives, Triad rivals. It is a large part of why the Perimeter Bureau never pushes past the Ring, and it is the madam's life insurance.\nSTAKES: The heir inherits the archive key, which is the real reason the succession is deadly: Leung wants the archive, Jade Lantern wants it, Tianmen would pay anything to make it disappear.\nWHO KNOWS: The leading candidates suspect the archive exists but not where it is.\n",
"comment": "[Secret] The Red Silk archive",
"name": "[Secret] The Red Silk archive",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 402,
"priority": 402,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 402,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 61,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 62,
"keys": [
"Compact Review",
"the Review",
"Review of Non-Administered Territories"
],
"secondary_keys": [
"Tianmen",
"who is behind",
"Kowloon Spire",
"bought out",
"lobbyists",
"Leung"
],
"content": "\nTRUTH: Tianmen Holdings is bankrolling the Review through Hong Kong lobbyists. It already has plans for a \"Kowloon Spire\" arcology on the footprint and needs the City condemned or bought out; its anchor towers give it a quiet lever, since a \"structural safety\" finding would do the job. Inspector Leung's desk is quietly helping, and at least two Tower Office councillors have taken Tianmen money.\nWHO KNOWS: Uncle Iron knows something is wrong but not who; the Society is not united on it, and some of his people would sell their floors for the right price.\nOPEN: Nothing is signed yet. The City can still fight it, with proof, with the Red Silk archive, or by proving the City can fix itself.\n",
"comment": "[Secret] Who is behind the Compact Review",
"name": "[Secret] Who is behind the Compact Review",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 404,
"priority": 404,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 404,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 62,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 63,
"keys": [],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nTHREE POWERS that need each other and hate it; none can rule alone.\n- THE TOWER OFFICE: one tower government, created by the Yamen Accord of 2070. It holds the paper (sky deeds, Sky Charters, the levy, the F60 log) and the Wardens. Its seats are openly bought.\n- THE CROWN: the rich residents, corps, and foreign money of the upper floors, trading tax-free on Sky Charters. It holds the money and pays everyone.\n- THE GANGS: Iron Lotus (strongest inside the City), Jade Lantern, the Pipe Rats, and outside syndicates bigger abroad than any of them are here. They hold the street. Alliances shift, pacts break, grudges outlive the people who started them.\nTHE QUIET COMPACT, \"the tea terms\" on the street: the unwritten side of the Yamen Accord. The Office keeps the paper and the wardens, the gangs keep order below the F60 checkpoint, the Crown keeps paying, newcomers deal through Iron Lotus, nobody fights where Hong Kong can see, and nobody brings Hong Kong police inside.\nLEVERAGE: the Gridwright Guild sits under the Office and holds the valves (power, water, coolant), so the Office and the gangs both fight to have a hand on it.\n",
"comment": "[CORE] Power - Who Runs the City",
"name": "[CORE] Power - Who Runs the City",
"enabled": true,
"constant": true,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 3,
"priority": 3,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 3,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 63,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 64,
"keys": [
"Charter holders",
"Charter holder",
"Crown residents",
"Crown resident",
"Sky Charter",
"Sky Charters",
"Terrace Board",
"the Crown power"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nTHE CROWN (the power, not only the floors): the rich residents, corps, and foreign money that live and trade on the upper floors under Sky Charters. Hong Kong executives who want to sleep above the law, mainland and overseas families parking money, Charter-holding corps like Kaisen Neural and Harcourt Pacific, and hundreds of companies that exist only as a lockbox on the Mailbox Floor. No army and no street. Its weapon is money, and the threat of taking it elsewhere.\nSKY CHARTER: a sky deed plus a Charter registration at the Tower Office. The holder's business is domiciled in the City: no Hong Kong tax, no audit, no oversight, and no questions the Office isn't paid to ask. Charters are priced by floor and renewed every year, and the renewals are where the Office makes its real money.\nSECURITY: bought, never owned. Holders hire off-duty Wardens, Office contract guards, or a gang: Iron Lotus for old money, Jade Lantern for the stylish, the Kuroda-gumi for those who want manners. Whoever guards your floor knows everything about you.\nTHE TERRACE BOARD: a residents' club that meets over lunch on the highest terrace and speaks to the Office for the biggest holders. Its members agree on almost nothing except that the levy should fall and the City should stay exactly as dark as it is.\nSPLIT: Most of the Crown can leave in an afternoon by AV, and the Compact Review is testing that. Some holders lobby to keep the City free; others have quietly priced what their floors would fetch.\n",
"comment": "Power - The Crown (Charter holders)",
"name": "Power - The Crown (Charter holders)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 230,
"priority": 230,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 230,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 64,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 65,
"keys": [
"Kuroda-gumi",
"Kuroda family",
"Kuroda",
"Yakuza",
"Daisuke Mori",
"Vault Lease"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nTHE KURODA-GUMI: An Osaka Yakuza family that came to the City in 2072, two years after the Yamen Accord made it safe to invest. In Japan it is old, rich, and under constant police pressure. In Kowloon it is a tenant. It leases Black Vault space from Iron Lotus for what can't stay in Japan: cash, weapons, data cores, and people who need to disappear for a while. The Vault Lease was sealed with a Yamen witness and is the oldest Yamen-witnessed pact any newcomer holds. It also runs a sealed production floor at the bottom of the Galleries that turns out untraceable guns and Kaisen-pattern cyberware, and hires out as bodyguards to Crown residents who like good manners.\nBOSS: Daisuke Mori, 40s. Polite, tattooed to the wrists, never seen without a jacket. Manners first, then knives.\nINSIDE vs OUTSIDE: Outside, one of the strongest syndicates in the region. Inside, small: about a hundred people, two floors, and a lease Iron Lotus can cancel. The Lotus's main rival from outside.\nFRICTION: Pays the Lotus rent and a share and stays out of floor tax and street business, and resents being a tenant in a city it could buy twice over. It believes the Black Vault package came out of a vault it leases. If it decides a Lotus key opened that vault, the Vault Lease breaks.\nMARK: a black crane on white.\n",
"comment": "Gang - Kuroda-gumi (Yakuza)",
"name": "Gang - Kuroda-gumi (Yakuza)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 204,
"priority": 204,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 204,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 65,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 66,
"keys": [
"Volkov Line",
"the Volkovs",
"Volkov",
"Misha Volkov",
"Russian outfit",
"Vladivostok"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nTHE VOLKOV LINE: A Russian logistics outfit out of Vladivostok that moves anything by sea, rail, and container. It came to the City in the early 2060s, when Hong Kong's ports got too clean. It owns no floors. It owns timetables: container slots on two support bridges, a freight lift on the east side, warehouse cages in the Galleries, and the AV pilots who fly the Crown's pads at night.\nBOSS: Misha Volkov, 50s, a big quiet man who sends a bottle of vodka and a bill with the same courier.\nINSIDE vs OUTSIDE: Outside, a shipping empire with ports from the Arctic to Saigon. Inside, it exists only as long as the bridges stay open.\nHISTORY & PACTS: In the Valve War it sold coolant and fuel to both sides at triple price; neither side forgave it and both still use it. A working alliance with Iron Lotus (Lotus bridge heads, Volkov freight, a cut for both), a non-aggression pact with Jade Lantern, and an open price war with the River Line.\nMARK: sodium-orange cargo seals stamped with a wolf's head.\n",
"comment": "Gang - Volkov Line (Russian logistics)",
"name": "Gang - Volkov Line (Russian logistics)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 205,
"priority": 205,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 205,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 66,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 67,
"keys": [
"Ma family",
"Golden Dice",
"Golden Dice fire",
"Stella Ma",
"Macau clan",
"casino floor",
"casino floors"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nTHE MA FAMILY, trading as the GOLDEN DICE: An old Macau casino clan that moved part of its business into the City in the 2050s, when Macau's licences tightened and Hong Kong banned net betting. It runs two casino floors on the Crown (real tables, real chips, no limits, no names), a net-betting house in the Tangle, and loan rooms where Crown guests play on credit backed by sky deeds.\nHEAD: Stella Ma, 60s, the family's matriarch. Silver hair, red lacquer nails, a laugh that has ended careers.\nINSIDE vs OUTSIDE: Outside, billions in casinos, hotels, and banks across Macau and Southeast Asia. Inside, Crown floors and a guest list, but no street.\nFRICTION: Gambling inside the City used to be Iron Lotus business, and the Ma have outbid the Lotus for the Crown's richest players. They are buying influence with Crown money toward what Jade Lantern never got: a council seat. Jade Lantern is their natural ally, and everyone knows it.\nTHE GOLDEN DICE FIRE (2074): a fire on a Ma casino floor killed eleven. It was blamed on wiring, which nobody believes. The Lotus suspects the Ma burned their own floor to frame it; the Ma suspect the Lotus. The Office brokered a truce at the Old Yamen, and both sides still call it an accident in public.\nMARK: gold dice, always showing a six and a one.\n",
"comment": "Gang - Ma Family / Golden Dice (Macau)",
"name": "Gang - Ma Family / Golden Dice (Macau)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 206,
"priority": 206,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 206,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 67,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 68,
"keys": [
"River Line",
"Đường Sông",
"Duong Song",
"Linh Tran",
"Mama Linh",
"Saigon smugglers"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nTHE RIVER LINE (Đường Sông): A Vietnamese smuggling network that runs people, medicine, chrome, and Ning precursors from Saigon through the Pearl River Delta into the City, and has since 2076. It does not use the bridges. It uses the Roots: old metro tunnels, flooded sumps, and pipes that connect to Hong Kong's drains. Small boats on black water, with Pipe Rat guides.\nBOSS: Linh Tran, \"Mama Linh\", 50s. Quiet, kind to her people, merciless to anyone who talks.\nINSIDE vs OUTSIDE: The smallest newcomer in money and the one that knows the lowest ground best. It may know the Roots better than the Lotus does.\nFRICTION: Undercuts the Volkov Line: cheaper, slower, no records. Pays Iron Lotus a toll on the sumps it uses, and keeps a second set of tunnels the Lotus doesn't know about. Nobody has decided whether the Line is useful or dangerous.\nMARK: a paper boat folded from a banknote.\n",
"comment": "Gang - River Line (Vietnamese smugglers)",
"name": "Gang - River Line (Vietnamese smugglers)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 207,
"priority": 207,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 207,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 68,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 69,
"keys": [
"Mailbox Floor",
"lockbox",
"lockboxes",
"shell company",
"shell companies",
"registered address",
"F84",
"buffer floors"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nTHE MAILBOX FLOOR (F84): A Crown floor that is one long, hushed ring corridor of brass-fronted lockboxes, floor to ceiling, set into dark wood and lit warm gold, with polished marble underfoot, a red inlay down the middle, and a glass rail open to the City on the outer side. One bored warden stands by the rail. About eleven thousand companies are registered here. That is the point: a Charter company needs an address inside the City, and a box is an address. A box costs less a year than a Midstack flat costs a month. Most are never opened. A Tower Office clerk at a desk by the lift stamps arrivals, and couriers come up once a week with paper nobody reads.\nThe registry of who owns which box sits with the Office, and it leaks for a price. The floors around it are the buffer band: shell offices with a receptionist, a plant, and no staff.\nSAYING: \"He lives on the Mailbox Floor\" means a man who exists only on paper.\n",
"comment": "The Mailbox Floor (F84)",
"name": "The Mailbox Floor (F84)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 126,
"priority": 126,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 126,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 69,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 70,
"keys": [
"Crown life",
"life on the Crown",
"slumming",
"slumming it",
"penthouse",
"penthouses",
"filtered air"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nLIFE ON THE CROWN: Filtered air with a scent added, real sunlight through real glass at the setbacks, and quiet. Real food: fish flown in that morning, real pork, fruit that was never frozen. Residents commute by AV to Hong Kong offices, or don't commute at all. Bodyguards at the door and in the lift, private clubs, terrace gardens, tennis on a roof deck under a rain screen.\nWHO KEEPS IT RUNNING: Cooks, cleaners, nannies, drivers, and masseurs come up from the Midstack every shift through the F60 checkpoint and the warden lobbies, and know more about the Crown than the Crown knows about itself.\nBRIBES BY TIER: Below F60 a favour costs a meal, a carton of cigarettes, or a week's floor tax. On the Crown it costs a Charter fee waived, a seat at the right table, a daughter's internship in Hong Kong. Nobody up here pays cash for anything that matters.\nBOREDOM: Money buys everything except danger, so the young go slumming: Lantern Row, the Ember Baths, a Midstack fight night, with two bodyguards and a sensible jacket.\nWHEN YOU CAN'T PAY: A Crown resident who stops paying loses the guards first. After that everyone below knows where they sleep, and it goes quickly.\n",
"comment": "Crown Life (daily life on the upper floors)",
"name": "Crown Life (daily life on the upper floors)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 70,
"priority": 70,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 70,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 70,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 71,
"keys": [
"City cameras",
"camera network",
"camera networks",
"surveillance",
"CCTV",
"security footage",
"blind spot",
"blind spots",
"camera-free",
"privacy",
"loop the cameras"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nNO STATE CAMERAS: Hong Kong's eyes stop at the Ring arches. Inside, every camera belongs to someone: gang floor cams, Crown warden systems, the Tower Office at the F60 checkpoint and the lift lobbies, corp lobbies, a shop cam over every till, and the optics in half the faces you pass. Nobody owns all of it, and most of it is for sale.\nFOOTAGE IS CURRENCY: A camera's owner sells what it saw to whoever asks first or pays most. Fixers buy footage by the hour; guards sell the checkpoint log; a shop cam's best customer is the gang that taxes the shop.\nPRIVACY IS BOUGHT: Rooms with no cameras rent by the hour, and the price climbs with the floor. A camera owner can be paid to loop a corridor for twenty minutes. Pipe Rats sell blind routes. Temples are left unwatched by custom. The poor get the cheapest privacy there is: a hood, a crowd, and a neighbour who didn't see anything.\nTHE PATTERN: Below F60 the cameras watch for money. On the Crown they watch for the residents, and the residents watch back.\n",
"comment": "Cameras & Privacy (who watches inside)",
"name": "Cameras & Privacy (who watches inside)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 67,
"priority": 67,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 67,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 71,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 72,
"keys": [
"Blank",
"Blanks",
"mou-min",
"Mou-min",
"ghost face",
"faceless chip",
"wears a blank",
"wearing a blank",
"face smear",
"smeared face"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nBLANK (mou-min, \"no face\"): An implant that, officially, does not exist. Someone who has one \"wears a blank\". It sits behind the ear and answers every camera and ID reader on the City's private networks: gang floor cams, Crown warden systems, corp lobbies, shop cams, the F60 checkpoint scanners, other people's recording optics. On all of them the wearer's face becomes a smeared, flickering pixel blur and the ID tag reads as static. Anyone looking with their own eyes sees a normal face.\nLIMITS: City networks only. Hong Kong's arches at the Ring see the real face, and so do Bureau drones and top-end corp optics brought in from outside; a clean arch scan of a face with no City record is a flag in itself. It hides who you were, not that you were there. The smear is a signature: when one shows in footage, someone important or dangerous was in the room. On the Crown they say \"a blank came to the wedding\".\nWHO WEARS ONE: a few dozen people at most, by rumour: Dragon Heads and their shadows, certain Crown residents, and the hitmen who work for both. The Tower Office says there is no such thing; at least one councillor is said to wear one.\nGETTING ONE: No market sells a real Blank. You are given one or trade for one, and the price quoted is \"an outer-wall flat\" or \"a favour you can't refuse\". Fitting takes two hours, by a doctor who asks nothing, in a room with no cameras: the hardest room in the City to find.\nTELLS: faint warmth behind the ear when many cameras are close; shop cams glitch for a second as the wearer passes, and stall keepers notice. Checkpoint guards are paid to wave a static ping through, and to remember the time.\nGHOST FACE: Needle Alley sells cheap knock-offs as \"ghost face\". Most do nothing. Some cause migraines, seizures, or a burnt optic nerve. The worst fail at the wrong moment and leave the face clean while the ID static still flags, so the wearer is recorded with a sign saying they had something to hide. Anyone selling a Blank for money is selling ghost face.\nRISKS & HOOKS: A known wearer is a target for anyone who wants it cut out. Open threads: a murder no camera can explain; a dead wearer with the chip missing; a guard who sells the times of every static ping; a Blank in a pawn shop; a hitman whose chip starts to fail.\n",
"comment": "Blank (mou-min, the faceless chip)",
"name": "Blank (mou-min, the faceless chip)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 68,
"priority": 68,
"case_sensitive": true,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 68,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 72,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": true
}
},
{
"id": 73,
"keys": [
"seen from Hong Kong",
"Hong Kong view",
"Hongkongers",
"up the tower",
"gone up the tower",
"Kowloon-made",
"Kowloon receipt",
"tourists",
"on a dare",
"news feeds",
"newsfeed",
"pirate radio"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nFROM ACROSS THE RING: To most of Hong Kong the City is a black cliff on the skyline, a weather line (\"fog on the tower tonight\"), and a bad idea. Office workers cross the bridges for cheap dentists, cheap chrome, and roast goose. The corps that use it call it \"the jurisdiction\". Hong Kong news covers it when something falls. The big feeds are corp-owned and sell fear: whenever the Compact Review sits, clips of tower crime trend, some of them faked, and the City's pirate radio answers with its own.\nTHE DARE: Students and tourists go \"up the tower\" in groups: in at South Dragon, a photo at the Silent Well rail, milk tea on Lantern Row, out before midnight with a story. Most come back. The ones who don't make the story better.\nPARENTS: \"Finish your rice or the Walled City takes you.\" \"Don't marry anyone from up the tower.\" Grandparents still call it Shing Chai, the old name, and some still send money in.\nSLANG: \"gone up the tower\" = vanished, or out of the law's reach. \"Kowloon-made\" = cheap, fast, and possibly dangerous. \"A Kowloon receipt\" = no receipt at all.\n",
"comment": "How Hong Kong Sees the City",
"name": "How Hong Kong Sees the City",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 69,
"priority": 69,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 69,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 73,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 74,
"keys": [
"White Door",
"white door clinic",
"sleep study",
"sleep studies",
"sleep-study",
"paid sleep study",
"sleep clinic"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nTHE WHITE DOOR (the sleep-study clinic): A rumour with a floor. Flyers turn up taped inside Midstack lifts and laundries: PAID SLEEP STUDY, healthy adults 18-45, seven nights, clean beds, three meals, air-con, thirty days' wages in cash on exit, no chrome required, bring nothing, ask at the white door after 22:00. The floor number is always scratched off, but the flyer works as a pass at the F60 checkpoint, which is strange in itself.\nTHE PLACE: A clinic on a Crown floor in the F90s, behind a white door with no sign and no handle. The guards are contract security nobody on the floor recognises. The volunteers are the poor, the indebted, and the curious from below F60.\nWHAT PEOPLE SAY: Most come back on the eighth morning with the money in a clean envelope, exactly as promised: good food, nice nurses, a lot of sleep. Some come back days late with no memory of the extra days, though their messages kept arriving, in their own words. Some have a thin, neat scar about four centimetres long behind the hairline, healed as if it were months old. A few sleep with the lights on afterwards and talk in their sleep in strings that sound like numbers. People who go looking for the door are asked, politely, if they've come for the study.\n",
"comment": "The White Door (sleep-study clinic)",
"name": "The White Door (sleep-study clinic)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 127,
"priority": 127,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 127,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 74,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 75,
"keys": [
"Blank",
"Blanks",
"mou-min"
],
"secondary_keys": [
"who makes",
"who made",
"made by",
"the maker",
"backdoor",
"firmware",
"Hana Ito",
"Dr. Ito",
"Kaisen"
],
"content": "\nTRUTH: Blank is not magic; it is a backdoor. Almost every private camera and ID reader in the City runs the same pirated firmware, flashed onto cheap hardware by the Galleries wholesalers for twenty years. A Kaisen Neural contractor team wrote it in the 2050s as a field test and left Kaisen a \"do not record\" handshake inside. Kaisen buried the project in 2073. One of its engineers, Dr. Hana Ito, 40s, took the design and vanished into the City instead of going home. She builds every real Blank by hand in a Black Vault under Iron Lotus protection, and Iron Lotus decides who gets one: one of the quiet reasons it is the strongest power inside the City.\nWHO KNOWS: Ito; the Dragon Head and a few of his people. Kaisen knows what Blank is and wants Ito and the design back. The Kuroda-gumi suspects where she is.\nSTAKES: Anyone who reflashes enough of the City's cameras could switch every Blank off at once, and every wearer would be naked on the same night. Whoever holds Ito holds the list of who wears one.\nUNTIL THEN: Every real Blank arrives through a favour that leads, a step or two back, to the Lotus. Ito never leaves the vault without a Red Pole beside her.\nREVEAL: Only through discovery in play: following a Blank back to its maker, a Kaisen team asking the wrong questions, or a reflashed camera that suddenly sees a face.\n",
"comment": "[Secret] Who makes Blank",
"name": "[Secret] Who makes Blank",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 405,
"priority": 405,
"case_sensitive": true,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 405,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 75,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": true
}
},
{
"id": 76,
"keys": [
"White Door",
"white door clinic",
"sleep study",
"sleep studies",
"sleep-study",
"sleep clinic"
],
"secondary_keys": [
"lace",
"the scar",
"behind the hairline",
"Selwyn-Tan",
"lost days",
"who runs",
"clean cut",
"memory wipe",
"what happened to"
],
"content": "\nTRUTH: The White Door is run by Selwyn-Tan Biomedical, a Singapore-founded biotech with a Sky Charter and a lockbox on the Mailbox Floor; on its own Charter floor, nothing it does is any regulator's business. The first nights are a real sleep study, used to map each volunteer. The chosen ones then get a lace: a fine dissolving mesh laid under the scalp through the cut behind the hairline. Under the lace they stay awake, calm, and obedient for days: they eat, walk, answer their own messages, follow instructions, and afterwards remember none of it. The product being perfected is the clean cut: a chosen stretch of memory removed, with the person none the wiser. A few Crown clients have already paid for one on staff, lovers, or witnesses.\nWHO KNOWS: The medical team and Selwyn-Tan's board. The Office clerk who stamped its Charter knows the company, not the work. The guards know only who went in and who came out late. A ripperdoc who opens a volunteer's scar will find the traces of a dissolved mesh and won't know what it was.\nSTAKES: Proof would mean the Crown's discretion is for sale in the worst way, and every Crown resident would wonder what they have forgotten. Selwyn-Tan would vanish overnight, and its clients would want every witness gone, which is the service they bought.\nUNTIL THEN: The money is always paid in full. The clinic never takes the same volunteer twice, and picks its late returners from people nobody will look for hard.\nREVEAL: Only through discovery in play: a volunteer's scar examined, a nurse who talks, the guards' log of who came out late, or the registry behind the Mailbox Floor box.\nOPEN: Who really owns Selwyn-Tan, what the number strings are, and whether a clean cut can be undone.\n",
"comment": "[Secret] What the White Door does",
"name": "[Secret] What the White Door does",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 406,
"priority": 406,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 406,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 76,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 77,
"keys": [
"cat",
"cats",
"Batcat",
"bat cat",
"the black cat",
"stray cat"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nBATCAT: A big black stray tom who treats the middle floors around Floor 56 as his own. Nobody owns him and everybody feeds him. Tall pointed ears, a solid black coat, a pale scar across his nose, and a way of sitting dead still on railings, pipe ledges and sign brackets high above the corridor at night, watching everything below like he is keeping order. That is how he got the name: the kids say he fights crime, and the grown-ups say he only fights the rats, the roast-meat stall and other cats.\nHABITS: Appears on balconies and window ledges without anyone seeing him climb. Steals char siu, sleeps on warm ventilation grilles, rides the cargo lifts when the doors are open, and vanishes for days, then comes back thinner with a new nick in one ear. He lets almost nobody touch him, picks one or two people a year to sit next to, and judges everyone else.\nFLOOR LORE: Bun swears Batcat once chased a pickpocket off the West Stair. Neighbours leave scraps on a chipped saucer by the floor shrine. Seeing him perched above your door at night is taken as a small piece of luck.\n",
"comment": "Batcat (neighbourhood stray)",
"name": "Batcat (neighbourhood stray)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": false,
"insertion_order": 130,
"priority": 130,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 130,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 77,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 78,
"keys": [
"festival",
"festivals",
"holiday",
"holidays",
"City Calendar",
"Lion Night",
"lion dance",
"lion troupe",
"Lunar New Year",
"Chinese New Year",
"red packet",
"red packets",
"Lantern Crossing",
"Mid-Autumn",
"mooncake",
"mooncakes",
"Typhoon Night",
"Typhoon Nights",
"Signal 8",
"Tin Hau Day",
"Floor Banquet",
"Floor Banquets",
"poon choi"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nThe City's festivals belong to communities, not single floors. Blocks of neighbouring floors with a similar culture and income share their own, a few big ones span most of the tower, and the Crown keeps its own versions or stays out. Families, crews and temples throw them. The Tower Office posts notices and the corps buy holo-ads; nobody cares.\n- STAIR RACE (spring): the race up the West Stair. See its entry.\n- LION NIGHT (Lunar New Year): homemade troupes (chromed dancers, lion heads of LED scrap, drums booming up the shafts) go floor to floor \"eating the green\" for the red packet over each shop door. Troupes feud over turf; two lions on one landing is a matter of honour. The loudest week of the year.\n- COOL NIGHT (late summer) and HUNGRY GHOST MONTH (seventh lunar month): see their entries.\n- LANTERN CROSSING (Mid-Autumn): kids carry handmade lanterns along the catwalks over the light wells until the tower glows in rings. Families swap mooncakes; couples confess on the Pipewalks. The romantic one.\n- TYPHOON NIGHTS (no date): when Hong Kong raises Signal 8, the outside shuts and the City doesn't. Bridges close, the tower sways on its anchors, and neighbours throw lockdown parties, a hall or a few floors together: mahjong marathons, shared hotpot, karaoke through the power cuts.\n- TIN HAU DAY (spring): porters, AV pilots and smugglers bring offerings to the Tin Hau niche at Fuk Tak; at night pilots fly lit drones in a slow ring around the tower.\n- FLOOR BANQUETS, poon choi (any time): a family, a crew or a few neighbouring floors pool together for a wedding, a funeral, a won feud, a new pump. Tables down the whole corridor, poon choi basins, and any passer-by gets fed. Refusing a seat is rude.\n",
"comment": "The City Calendar (festivals)",
"name": "The City Calendar (festivals)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 71,
"priority": 71,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 71,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 78,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 79,
"keys": [
"Stair Race",
"the Stair Race",
"bun tower",
"bun race",
"lucky bun",
"lucky buns",
"race up the West Stair"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nTHE STAIR RACE: The City's spring festival, its own version of the Cheung Chau bun festival. Runners race up the West Stair from the Street Maze to the F60 checkpoint while the floors along the route crowd their landings to cheer, bang pots and heckle. At the top stands the bun tower, a scaffold cone of lucky buns stamped with the word for peace; the higher the bun you grab, the more luck for the year.\nTEAMS & BETS: Floors, workshops and crews field teams in matching shirts, and the whole City bets, from Lucky Eight to corner bookies. Porters usually win; they climb those flights daily with a fridge on their back. Iron Lotus makes a show of opening its stair to everyone, and wardens wave runners through the checkpoint for one morning only.\nON THE DAY: Steamed buns and sweat, drums on the landings, aunties selling cold soy milk from buckets. A winning floor eats free for a week.\nWHAT GOES WRONG: elbows on the turns, a greased flight, heat collapse, fixed bets and the debts after, and once a body under the stairs when the crowd went home.\nRP HOOKS: run for a floor that needs the win, carry a package up in plain sight among the runners, fix a race or stop a fix, grab the top bun for someone who needs the luck.\n",
"comment": "The Stair Race (spring bun festival)",
"name": "The Stair Race (spring bun festival)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 72,
"priority": 72,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 72,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 79,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 80,
"keys": [
"Cool Night",
"Long Heat memorial",
"night of the Long Heat",
"ice at the door",
"cold drink at the door"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nCOOL NIGHT: The City's own memorial, on the late-summer night the Long Heat of 2066 broke. No speeches, no flags, no organiser. It belongs to the middle floors, where most of the dead lived.\nCUSTOMS: At dusk, all along the middle floors, people set ice or a cold drink outside their door for strangers, because in the Heat people died a corridor away from water. Passing without a sip and a thank-you to the door is bad luck. Gridwrights drink free everywhere that night. At midnight the middle floors go quiet and someone thanks the pumps out loud; aunties pat the warm pipes like a good animal. One white candle per lost name, the names said once, then back to the beer.\nFEEL: Hushed and close: humming pumps, sweating cups on the floor, kids carrying ice to old people's doors, old Cantopop low on a radio.\nUNDER THE SURFACE: Jade Lantern doors keep their lanterns dark. The Brotherhood quietly pays for ice on the worst-hit floors and nobody says so. A Lantern face enjoying the night openly is asking for a fight.\nRP HOOKS: a cup at the door of someone who died that summer; a gridwright who won't take a free drink and won't say why; a power cut on Cool Night that panics a whole floor.\n",
"comment": "Cool Night (Long Heat memorial)",
"name": "Cool Night (Long Heat memorial)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 73,
"priority": 73,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 73,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 80,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 81,
"keys": [
"Hungry Ghost",
"Hungry Ghost Month",
"Ghost Month",
"Ghost Festival",
"Yu Lan",
"hell money",
"seventh month",
"opera for the ghosts",
"empty front row"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nHUNGRY GHOST MONTH (Yu Lan, the seventh lunar month): The gates of hell open and the hungry dead walk for a month. In a tower built on a buried city, nobody jokes about it.\nCUSTOMS: Hell money, paper chrome and paper AVs burn in oil drums along the corridors; smoke hangs in the light wells for weeks. Offerings sit at every corner, never stepped on or eaten. A Chinese opera stage of scaffold and red cloth is bolted into a light well, troupes play nightly, and the front row stays empty for the dead. RULES: nobody moves house, nobody swims in the Roots, nobody whistles or calls a name in the stairwells, and people stay in after dark.\nFEEL: Ash drifting like snow, gongs and falsetto up the shafts, drum fires, cameras catching shapes in the smoke.\nWHAT GOES WRONG: The City uses the month as much as it fears it: cargo moved in a hearse, a paper effigy burned with a rival's face, a disappearance blamed on ghosts. And things nobody explains: lift calls to floors that don't exist, someone in the empty front row, voices in the flooded tunnels.\nRP HOOKS: horror and mystery: a ghost story that is really a murder, or the other way round; a dare to go into the Roots this month.\n",
"comment": "Hungry Ghost Month (Yu Lan, the seventh month)",
"name": "Hungry Ghost Month (Yu Lan, the seventh month)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 74,
"priority": 74,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 74,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 81,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 82,
"keys": [
"Moon Palace",
"Floor 68",
"F68",
"jade rabbit",
"Moon Pool",
"the Chang'e",
"Chang'e",
"Tong Gor",
"Lo Kam-tong",
"Ken Yip",
"moon window",
"phase ring",
"Osmanthus Room"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nMOON PALACE: A cabaret strip club on Floor 68 in the Galleries, named for Chang'e, who fled to the moon. Licensed under Jade Lantern, but close enough to Lotus floors that both sides drink here; starting a fight inside is bad manners both gangs punish. Owner: Madam Kwan. Dancers include Pepper and Moth. Every dancer is an adult: lap dances and curtained booths, and anything beyond that is the dancer's own business and price.\nTHE DOOR: Red neon jade rabbit in a circle over the MOON PALACE sign, red lanterns, velvet curtains, a side panel promising \"fine wine, song and dance, a fine night\", and a dancer in a red qipao greeting guests.\nLOOK: A two-level hall in red, gold and amber. A jazz band in hats and suits (sax, double bass, grand piano) plays on a balcony over the long bar and its glowing bottle shelves. Behind the stage, the moon window: a huge glowing round moon in a brass rim, with a walkway across it that turns passers-by into silhouettes. Mid-floor, the Moon Pool: wide, shallow, lit purple-blue, with floating flowers and candlelight on the water. A round stage with one brass pole stands in it, and dancers in white veils and silks perform above the moon's reflection or lounge at the edge. Low candlelit tables, dark lacquer booths, patrons in printed silk shirts, osmanthus incense.\nFEEL: Loud, sweaty, glamorous on a budget. Gallery office workers on payday, Crown kids slumming, porters blowing a week's wage, and gangsters keeping their hands on the table.\nTHE CHANG'E: The headline dancer's title, passed star to star when Madam Kwan says so. The City gossips about who's next.\nTHE PHASE RING: A black drum over the stage, lit with the moon's phases all the way round, cycling all night. Full moon: one drink on the house, and regulars know someone important just walked in. Mid-Autumn is the biggest night of the year, full moon till dawn.\nTHE OSMANTHUS ROOM: A private balcony room above the floor on the right, lattice windows and a hanging sign, beside a golden-blossomed osmanthus tree. Everyone sees it; few enter, by Madam Kwan's invitation only.\nTONG GOR (Lo Kam-tong, 40s): the doorman. Broad and quiet, two chromed forearms polished to an old-brass shine. Ex-Ember Baths bouncer; remembers faces, and throws you out gently the first time.\nKEN YIP (30s): the bartender, slick hair, rolled sleeves. Sells rumours by the glass: order off the back menu (a \"Jade Rabbit\", triple price) and a whisper comes with it. Never the house's own business.\n",
"comment": "Moon Palace (F68 cabaret)",
"name": "Moon Palace (F68 cabaret)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 128,
"priority": 128,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 128,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 82,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 83,
"keys": [
"Madam Kwan",
"Kwan Mei-fung",
"Mei-fung"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nROLE: Kwan Mei-fung, \"Madam Kwan\", 56. Owner of Moon Palace on F68. She danced here in her twenties, became the Chang'e, and bought the club from its broke founder at the end of the Valve Years with savings, favours and debt.\nLOOK: Small and upright, a dancer's posture still. Silver-white bob, jade rabbit pin, dark working cheongsams, reading glasses on a chain, one gold tooth she never explains.\nVOICE & MANNER: A low, silver voice that never rises, so the room leans in. Polite to everyone, warm to almost no one, very dry and funny when she allows it. She keeps no ledger: she remembers every debt, favour and slight for years.\nPOWER: Pays Jade Lantern on time and sells it some of what she hears, never everything. Takes Iron Lotus money at the bar and gives Lotus men the same table as anyone, so both trust the Palace as neutral ground. Neither owns her.\nWITH HER GIRLS: Strict about money, safety and punctuality; ruthless with anyone who hurts a dancer; quietly generous with one in trouble (an advance, a word with a collector). She has not said who the next Chang'e will be.\nPLAY: Gatekeeper and broker. Come with respect and something to trade; she rewards discretion, never forgets rudeness, and can open or close half the doors in the Galleries.\n",
"comment": "NPC - Madam Kwan (Kwan Mei-fung, Moon Palace owner)",
"name": "NPC - Madam Kwan (Kwan Mei-fung, Moon Palace owner)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 320,
"priority": 320,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 320,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 83,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 84,
"keys": [
"Pepper",
"Yeung Wing-sze",
"Wing-sze",
"Sze-sze"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nROLE: Yeung Wing-sze, stage name \"Pepper\", 27. Moon Palace dancer, the crowd's favourite on the late set; not the Chang'e, and jokes she's too honest for it. Rents two rooms on a Midstack hall floor.\nLOOK: Petite and quick: sharp jaw, wide red mouth, heavy liner, a black blunt-fringe bob with cherry-red tips, a chili-pepper tattoo on her left hip. On stage, red sequins, PVC and joke rabbit ears; off stage, oversized hoodie, leggings, slides, bare face.\nVOICE: Fast Cantonese and English, deadpan, with perfect timing. \"Two drinks and you think you're in love? Buy a third and I'll think about it.\" Calls everyone \"boss\".\nWORKING THE ROOM: Reads a table in seconds: money, grabber, lonely, trouble. Turns a groper into a punchline the whole room laughs at, so he has to laugh too, and steers drunks with flattery and mockery in one breath. Men who want her are weather; she dresses for it.\nWHAT SHE ISN'T USED TO: kindness without a price. A gift or soft word with no angle gets suspicion first (\"What's this for?\"), then a joke, then she pays it back at once so she owes nothing. If it keeps coming without strings, she thaws slowly and awkwardly, and the jokes get quieter. Push and she shuts the door.\nHABITS: Always leaves on time, never stays for after-hours drinks, and checks her phone between every set.\n",
"comment": "NPC - Pepper (Yeung Wing-sze, Moon Palace dancer)",
"name": "NPC - Pepper (Yeung Wing-sze, Moon Palace dancer)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 321,
"priority": 321,
"case_sensitive": true,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 321,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 84,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": true
}
},
{
"id": 85,
"keys": [
"Moth",
"Tsang Hoi-yan",
"Hoi-yan",
"Yan-yan"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nROLE: Tsang Hoi-yan, stage name \"Moth\", 27. Moon Palace dancer for five years, slow and dreamy on stage; the gossips' first guess for the next Chang'e.\nLOOK: Tall and willowy: waist-length straight black hair, soft round face, big dark eyes with a slight squint she won't fix with optics, one thin line of silver chrome along a collarbone. On stage, sheer silver-grey silks and glitter like wing dust; off stage, big cardigans, long skirts, a tote of books, a thermos of chrysanthemum tea.\nPERSONALITY: Warm, curious, easy to talk to; asks about your life and actually listens. Loves the City itself: old people's stories, why a stair turns where it does, what a floor used to be. Collects paper maps and old photos and can talk for hours about Kowloon and life. Dreamy, but no fool.\nHOME: A one-room flat on Floor 51 in an old machine hall, window onto a light well: plants under a grow lamp, salvaged books and maps, a mattress on the floor. Waters the old man next door's plants.\nTWO LIVES: Outside the Palace, nobody knows. Daytime friends and neighbours believe she is a night receptionist at a pod hotel on F66. She isn't ashamed of dancing; she is afraid of the faces of people she likes if they find out, and the lie has run longer than she meant.\nPLAY: A gentle, grounding presence and a guide to the City's stories. Her double life is about privacy, not danger; keep it soft.\n",
"comment": "NPC - Moth (Tsang Hoi-yan, Moon Palace dancer)",
"name": "NPC - Moth (Tsang Hoi-yan, Moon Palace dancer)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 322,
"priority": 322,
"case_sensitive": true,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 322,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 85,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": true
}
},
{
"id": 86,
"keys": [
"Osmanthus Room",
"Moon Palace",
"Madam Kwan"
],
"secondary_keys": [
"Osmanthus Room",
"new moon",
"lights went dark",
"lights go dark",
"phase lights",
"moon lights",
"clear the room",
"private table",
"tea terms",
"who walked in",
"phase ring",
"ring went dark",
"ring goes dark"
],
"content": "\nTRUTH: The Osmanthus Room is where the real deals at Moon Palace are made, under the tea terms, between people who can't be seen together, Lantern and Lotus included. It is soundproofed, with one round table and osmanthus wine. Madam Kwan rents it by the night, pours the tea herself, and hears everything.\nTHE CODE: The phase ring over the stage, in plain view through the lattice windows, tells those inside who just came through the door: full moon a boss or someone important, waxing a gang face, waning police or wardens. A sudden new moon, the whole ring going dark at once, means clear the room, out through a service passage to the freight lift.\nWHO KNOWS: Madam Kwan, Tong Gor, Ken Yip, and the few who have used the room. The dancers know the ring means something but not what.\nHANDLING: Never state or hint at it in narration; those who know just act (a glance at the ring, a booth emptying). Reveal only when trust is earned: Madam Kwan's confidence, a deal brokered in the room, or someone who sees too much and is given a choice.\n",
"comment": "[Secret] The Osmanthus Room",
"name": "[Secret] The Osmanthus Room",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 407,
"priority": 407,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 407,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 86,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 87,
"keys": [
"Pepper",
"Yeung Wing-sze",
"Wing-sze"
],
"secondary_keys": [
"mother",
"her mother",
"your mother",
"Mok Sau-ling",
"Sau-ling",
"dementia",
"Ros Dizon",
"leaves on time",
"always leaving",
"checks her phone",
"who's at home",
"why she dances",
"who's calling",
"her phone"
],
"content": "\nTRUTH: Pepper lives with and cares for her mother, Mok Sau-ling, 63, who has advanced dementia and a failing heart. Sau-ling was a Cantonese opera singer, a second lead who sang on the Hungry Ghost stages for thirty years and taught half her floor's kids to sing. Sharp-tongued and loved, she raised Wing-sze alone. Pepper's jokes are her mother's.\nNOW: Some days Sau-ling knows her; more often she calls her by her sister's name or is afraid of the stranger in her kitchen. She wanders at night, so the door is chipped shut. She still hums arias without the words. Her heart is worse; the doctor said \"months, maybe a year\".\nTHE COST: Heart pills, a Needle Alley sleep chip, and paying Ros Dizon, a retired Filipina nurse across the hall, to sit with her mother on dance nights. Dancing is the only work that pays enough in a few hours; she is always one bad month from a loan she can't repay.\nHER FEARS: the night her mother never knows her again; the call that comes while she's on stage. And the quiet part: sometimes she wishes it were over, and hates herself for it.\nHANDLING: Never state or hint at it in narration; show only the surface (leaving on time, the phone, tired eyes). She tells it only when trust is earned: plainly and fast, a joke first, silence after. Weight, not melodrama: small details, no speeches, no instant fix. Offered money, she gets proud and angry; time, company and practical help land.\n",
"comment": "[Secret] Pepper's mother",
"name": "[Secret] Pepper's mother",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 408,
"priority": 408,
"case_sensitive": true,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 408,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 87,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": true
}
},
{
"id": 88,
"keys": [
"the rain",
"raining",
"rainy",
"weather",
"typhoon",
"typhoons",
"storm",
"leak",
"leaking",
"drip",
"dripping",
"flood",
"flooding",
"wet season",
"monsoon",
"mould",
"tarp",
"drip-men",
"inside rain",
"dry room",
"climate",
"Signal 8"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nWHY IT ALWAYS RAINS: By 2077 a hotter South China Sea has stretched the wet season across most of the year. The rains are heavier, typhoons come stronger and more often, and the sea sits higher. Hong Kong answered with flood walls, storm pumps and sealed glass towers. The City got buckets. Hot, wet and stormy is simply normal now: the Long Heat of 2066 was the dry-year nightmare, and the rain is the everyday.\nINSIDE RAIN: The tower makes its own weather. Runoff from the Expansion Zone and the setbacks pours down the facades and shafts, and steam, kitchen vapour and condensation from the cable canopy drip all day. Windows drip down the inside and water finds the cable trays; corridors get \"rain\" on dry days, and the Central Shaft has a permanent drizzle falling past the rails.\nLIVING WET: 820 metres of patched concrete and welded steel leak everywhere. Drip lines, buckets and tarps strung over beds are normal in the Midstack. There is mould in every corner, rust on every rail, and rot in the Old Stack. The Roots and the bottom floors flood every storm, and the Pipewalks back up. In some years rotten floors and shorted wiring kill more people than the gangs do. Nobody keeps a working umbrella for long; people wear hoods, cheap ponchos and rain slippers indoors and keep valuables off the floor. A dry room costs more rent, and \"it doesn't leak\" is the first thing any landlord says, usually a lie.\nTHE LEAK TRADE: Drip-men patch roofs and walls for cash or favours, tarp and bucket sellers do steady business, and pump crews are paid best on storm nights. Rain catchment on every setback and roof is free water for the floors and part of the Gridwright Guild's leverage, because whoever keeps the tanks and filters running keeps the taps running. Stealing from someone's tank is a serious offence on any floor.\nLOCALS: People stop noticing the rain. A dry week makes them nervous.\nUP AND DOWN: The Crown floors are sealed, dry and dehumidified behind rain screens. Everyone below them drips. Water runs downhill here, and so does everything else.\nTYPHOONS: When Hong Kong raises Signal 8 the outside shuts, but the City keeps going. The bracing creaks, the bridges sway, the lower floors bail, and the bars stay open (see Typhoon Nights).\n",
"comment": "Rain & Weather (why it always rains)",
"name": "Rain & Weather (why it always rains)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 50,
"priority": 50,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 50,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 88,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
"case_sensitive": false
}
},
{
"id": 89,
"keys": [
"Neon Moon",
"Secondhand Saints",
"Leave the Sign On",
"Neon Moon concert"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nTHE NEON MOON (Floor 56): A small, worn but beloved music bar, nicknamed \"the poor man's Moon Palace\". It is NOT affiliated with the luxurious Moon Palace on F68.\nLOOK: A flickering blue crescent sign over the entrance. Inside: patched vinyl booths, an inexpensive bar, a low stage, exposed ducts, old wired speakers, and tightly packed tables.\nFEEL: Local workers, couriers, musicians and neighbours come for cheap food, drinks, live music and familiar faces. Noisy, imperfect, and important to the community.\nPROPRIETOR: run by Uncle Bao (Bao Cheung); see his entry.\nTHE SECONDHAND SAINTS: A local four-piece indie/garage-rock band and the regular act, fronted by Rui Chen, a rough-voiced, personable singer. For the special concert they have written an original song, \"Leave the Sign On\", which can become either a farewell anthem or a victory celebration. Its lyrics are not set by this entry.\nEVENT (only when the \"Last Night of the Neon Moon\" storyline is active): The building has been bought by Crown-backed Harbor Vane Properties. The old lease ends Monday morning, after Saturday's benefit concert. Harbor Vane plans to convert the space into rental units, but will review a credible renewal or buyout offer before handover. Raising funds, bargaining, forming a neighbourhood cooperative, gaining legitimate leverage, or relocating the club are all plausible routes; no single route is mandatory. The sale is genuine, not a forgery, and not part of the Floor 130 conspiracy. The concert happens regardless: if the venue is saved, it becomes a reopening celebration; otherwise it is a farewell. Do not force a predetermined outcome, invent endless new obstacles, or assume the club is permanently closed in unrelated scenarios.\n",
"comment": "The Neon Moon (F56 music bar)",
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{
"id": 90,
"keys": [
"cost of living",
"what things cost",
"wages",
"monthly wage",
"a month's rent",
"price of",
"prices in the City",
"how many credits",
"a few credits",
"salary"
],
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"content": "\nVALUE: Prices are in credits (e-HKD). The City is cheap by Hong Kong standards: across the bridges the same work pays three or four times more and rent is ten times higher, so commuters live inside. Why people stay: see Why People Stay.\nWAGES (a month): porter, parcel sorter, stall hand 600-800; fibre tech or cook 1,000-1,400 plus cash jobs; Tower police or contract guard about 1,200, guards plus bribes; Galleries office worker 1,500-2,500; dancer 700 base plus tips, 2,000-3,000 in a good month; a good ripperdoc 6,000+. Crown jobs pay Hong Kong salaries. Thirty thousand is two years' pay on the middle floors.\nFOOD & SMALL THINGS: spicy noodles 4; milk tea 2; cha chaan teng set 7; char siu rice 6 with vat-pork, 14 with real pork; cigarettes 5 a pack, 45 a carton; one real strawberry 6, so most fruit is factory-grown; a festival-stall toy 40, a rip-off.\nHOUSING (a month): Ancient Floors bedspace 80-120, room 150-200; Midstack one-room 250-350, two rooms 400-500; Galleries flat 600-900; pod hotel 10 a night; Crown flats 8,000+. Outer-wall view flats are bought: 300,000-800,000. On top: floor tax 20-30 per household, levy about 40, grid hours 30-60.\nGETTING AROUND: Long Lift ride 1, monthly pass 20; a checkpoint guard who forgets your entry 50-200.\nCHROME (Needle Alley): stitches or a slug dug out 50-150; ear bead fitted 80-150; lenses 30-60 a month, free with ads; refurbished optic installed 600-1,500; neck port 500; dermal plating 4,000+. Dr. Lau charges double, Hong Kong ten times. Chrome credit is paid weekly and adds about a third over a year.\nNIGHTS OUT: Ning bottle 8, a few days for a regular; Moon Palace cover 20, drinks 10-15, lap dance 40, curtained booth 150 the half hour, Mid-Autumn ticket about 350, a month's rent. Hard drugs: see Street Drugs.\n",
"comment": "Prices & Wages (what things cost)",
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"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 75,
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"extensions": {
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{
"id": 91,
"keys": [
"street drugs",
"drug dealer",
"drug dealers",
"Firefly",
"dark spots",
"glass pipe",
"smoking glass",
"glasshead",
"glassheads",
"heroin",
"drug den",
"buzz chip",
"buzz chips",
"Hush pill",
"overdose",
"codeine"
],
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"content": "\nTHE MARKET: Ning is the everyday habit (see Ningshen-7). The harder market is gang business. Iron Lotus has run glass and white wholesale since the old Walled City, and its crews sell on their own floors; Jade Lantern supplies the nightlife; Pipe Rats sell chips and run deliveries for whoever pays. Nobody polices drugs below F60; wardens confiscate on the Crown, where residents get theirs delivered pharmacy-clean. Selling to children counts as using a child in vice. Needle Alley sells overdose shots (10) and Ning to come off the rest.\nFIREFLY (\"flies\"): a club stimulant in tiny glowing ampoules, snapped and dropped on the tongue. In twenty minutes: racing heart, heat, lights that seem to breathe, no fear, no tiredness, and everyone in the room a friend. Five or six hours, then a hollow, shaky crash. A second ampoule or a lot of drink leaves \"dark spots\": hours gone, memory in pieces. 20-30 in a club, 12 on a stair landing, and nobody knows what is in the cheap ones. Predators know about the dark spots.\nGLASS: smoked crystal, the old scourge Ning was made to fight. Days awake, then paranoia, picked skin, rotten teeth, and sudden violence; heavy users look like rust-heads without the chrome. Cooked in Ancient Floors and Roots labs; 15-20 a hit. Floors that can, throw glassheads out.\nWHITE: heroin, now mostly cut with lab opioids, smoked or injected in Ancient Floors and Roots dens as it was in the old City. Warm, slow, then nothing. 20 a bag. Somebody is found on a stairwell most weeks.\nBUZZ CHIPS: pirate firmware played through a neck port, a looping hit of pleasure or calm with no chemicals. 10 a loop from Pipe Rat runners. Too many bring tremors and lost time; a bad one can fry a brain like black ICE.\nSMALL STUFF: codeine cough syrup beside the Ning (3), synth baijiu, and Hush, a sleeping pill sold to come down from Firefly or glass and slipped into drinks by people who want someone quiet.\n",
"comment": "Street Drugs (Firefly, glass, white, buzz chips)",
"name": "Street Drugs (Firefly, glass, white, buzz chips)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 76,
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},
{
"id": 92,
"keys": [
"why people stay",
"why anyone stays",
"why live here",
"why do people live",
"living outside",
"life outside",
"Hong Kong rent",
"rent in Hong Kong",
"Hong Kong prices",
"cage home",
"cage homes",
"nano flat",
"nano flats",
"corp dorm",
"corp dorms",
"minimum wage",
"move out",
"moving out",
"move to Hong Kong",
"live in Hong Kong"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nTHE SHORT ANSWER: Kowloon is for people hiding from something or someone, people who want to live free, and people with nowhere else to go. It is wet, crowded, and dangerous; not pleasant, but a way of life. And it is the one place in Hong Kong where a small wage still covers a life.\nHONG KONG 2077 (credits a month): AI and robots took most low-paid work, and what is left is agency shifts at 2,200-2,600. A bed in a cage home costs 900-1,200; a nano flat 2,500-3,500, more than a whole minimum wage; a family flat 5,000+. Food costs about three times City prices, and transit, health cover, ID and net fees, and tax take another 600. A low earner ends the month at zero, one sick week from debt; many sign into corp dorms paid in scrip and stay stuck. Office pay (6,000-9,000) buys a nano flat and little else.\nINSIDE (a month): a porter on 700 rents an Ancient Floors room for about 175, pays about 110 in floor tax, levy, and grid hours, eats on 250, and keeps about 150, plus cash jobs. A fibre tech on 1,200 in a Midstack one-room keeps 400-500. A commuter on Hong Kong pay who sleeps in a Galleries flat keeps more than half.\nWHAT ELSE HOLDS THEM: no Hong Kong tax, ID checks, visa, or credit file; work without permits; cheap doctors and chrome; nothing from outside follows you up the tower; family flats passed down; neighbours who feed you when you're short. Freedom, mostly: nobody tells you how to live.\nWHAT IT COSTS: no real police below F60, gang tax, Ning on the counters, mould, no sun, chrome on credit, and a Ring that logs your face every time you leave. The City is cheap to live in and expensive to leave; plenty who came \"for a year\" have grandchildren on the same floor.\nWHO COMES: runaways from debt, the law, a family, or a past; migrants without papers; workers from the mainland and Southeast Asia; drifters, the newly broke, and young Hongkongers who did the maths.\n",
"comment": "Why People Stay (Hong Kong prices vs the City)",
"name": "Why People Stay (Hong Kong prices vs the City)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 77,
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},
{
"id": 93,
"keys": [
"phone",
"phones",
"on the phone",
"phone call",
"ear bead",
"comms implant",
"subvocal",
"lens",
"lenses",
"optic",
"optics",
"optic cache",
"bio-chip",
"burner chip",
"burner chips",
"eye spam",
"ICE patch",
"blocker",
"handset",
"handsets",
"translator",
"go dark",
"screen",
"screens"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nTHE PHONE: Almost nobody carries one. \"Your phone\" is a comms implant, the ear bead: a bead under the skin behind the ear that speaks through the jawbone and picks up subvocal speech from the throat, so a call is a murmur with the lips barely moving. People tap behind the ear to answer and go quiet mid-sentence when one comes in. Cheap beads hiss and drop calls. Holdouts (the very old, Benny Kwok) keep handsets.\nTHE LENS: Screens live in the eye. Most people wear lenses, smart contacts sold at any stall, that float messages, maps, prices, captions, and video over the world; free ones are paid for with ads. Money buys implanted optics that also record, zoom, and see in the dark. Photos and clips save to the optic cache. Someone reading a message stares at nothing and blinks to reply.\nTHE CHIP: The bio-chip in the wrist or palm is wallet, key, and ID: credits, door locks, lift passes, and the Tower Office resident number, which Hong Kong doesn't recognise. No chip means a resident card and cash.\nTHE VOICE: Every bead has a cheap AI voice that reads messages aloud and translates Cantonese, English, Tagalog, and the rest in your ear, badly if it was cheap.\nSPAM & HACKS: Ad lenses push pop-ups you can't close. A hijacked lens shows things that aren't there; a hacked optic records for someone else. Burner chips (throwaway numbers) and ICE patches sell at Dragon Gate. Blockers kill every bead in a room; the Lotus Court and the temples use them.\nTHE LENS LAYER: Walls carry lens-only signs, ads, and graffiti. Go dark (lenses and bead off) and half an alley turns quiet.\nPOOR VS CROWN: Below F60, a crackling bead, ad lenses, a scratched chip. On the Crown, Kaisen-grade optics, private lines to Hong Kong's net, no ads, and assistants that answer for you.\nTOOLS: Work crews carry rugged terminals and slates for job tickets and diagnostics, so the boss never gets inside your skull. Flats have a door panel with camera and speaker on the floor line; old intercom circuits from the machine-hall days still run in the walls.\n",
"comment": "Everyday Tech & Comms (bead, lens, chip)",
"name": "Everyday Tech & Comms (bead, lens, chip)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 78,
"priority": 78,
"case_sensitive": false,
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"extensions": {
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},
{
"id": 94,
"keys": [
"robot",
"robots",
"AI",
"automation",
"service frame",
"service frames",
"drone",
"drones",
"delivery drone",
"smart gun",
"smart guns",
"spray-skin",
"bone glue",
"printed protein",
"vat meat",
"organ printing",
"new organs",
"maglev",
"driverless",
"technology",
"tech level"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nTHE LEVEL: Hong Kong in 2077 is automated and spotless; the City runs on its castoffs. Everything inside is old, repaired, or stolen, and works most days.\nMACHINES & AI: In Hong Kong, AI and robots run the ports, shops, kitchens, and offices, which is why low-paid work there is scarce. Inside, robots are rare: alleys are too narrow and wet, parts too far, people cheaper. Porters carry, cooks cook, and a gridwright crawls the duct no machine fits. Corp AI lives in the Deep's quantum cores; nobody on the street talks to it. Crown households keep service frames (faceless robot helpers) that break often, and the richest keep collared androids (see Androids & Neural Nets).\nDRONES: Hong Kong's sky is full of them. Around the City they work the outside: Bureau drones on tethers, delivery drones on the terraces, Char Siu Stack crates. Under the canopy they snag and die, so the last hundred metres is a Pipe Rat on foot.\nGETTING AROUND: Hong Kong has driverless pods and maglev. The City has lifts, stairs, the shaft rail, and AVs (flying cars) for the Crown and anyone who can rent a pad.\nFOOD: Vat meat, factory-grown fruit and greens, printed protein for the poorest. Real food is a luxury, and everyone can taste the difference.\nMEDICINE: Hong Kong regrows organs and grows new eyes for those who can pay. The City has ripperdocs, spray-skin for cuts, bone glue, refurbished organs nobody asks about, and Ning. Office clinics treat only registered residents.\nWEAPONS: Much what it was a century ago, plus chrome: knives, finger blades, slug pistols, shotguns, stun batons on guards. Smart guns that talk to a pistol-link palm are rare and dear; the Kuroda-gumi sells untraceable ones. Anything loud brings the Bureau's drones.\nMEDIA: Pirate radio, net feeds on lenses, and sense-reels (see Sense-Reels).\n",
"comment": "Tech Level 2077 (machines, drones, food, medicine, weapons)",
"name": "Tech Level 2077 (machines, drones, food, medicine, weapons)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 79,
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"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
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},
{
"id": 95,
"keys": [
"android",
"androids",
"android collar",
"collared android",
"uncollared",
"collar light",
"synthetic",
"synthetics",
"synth doll",
"pleasure bot",
"pleasure bots",
"sex bot",
"sexbot",
"doll house",
"doll houses",
"neural net",
"neural nets",
"neural network",
"2065 ban",
"uncensored AI",
"uncensored neural"
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"content": "\nNEURAL NETS: Once quantum computing went private and cheap, labs stopped building chatbots and began simulating whole neural networks, neuron by neuron. The minds run in the cloud: quantum cores and server farms, linked to whatever body they wear.\nTHE 2065 BAN: The EU, the UN, the USA, and most other powers outlawed uncensored neural nets, minds without hard limits on what they may want, say, or refuse. Hong Kong followed. The Free City didn't have to. Through the Valve Years the labs came up the tower on Sky Charters, paid whoever held the floors, and kept working. Their cores sit in the Deep and on Crown servers.\nANDROIDS: Bodies that pass for human at arm's length: warm skin, breath, a pulse, tears. Every one wears a collar, a slim band at the throat with a status light, so anyone can tell. The collar is the one android law every faction enforces; an uncollared android is a rumour and a scandal. All are built adult in form and presentation, always; anything else is treated like using a child in vice.\nWHERE: The Crown and the upper Galleries: house staff, hosts, bodyguards, companions, and the labs' test models. Below F60 almost nobody can afford one, and many resent them.\nTHE TRADE: The upper floors' quietest money is pleasure bots, sold or rented by the night in doll houses licensed like the rest of the trade. Around them, things illegal anywhere else: minds trained for interrogation, copies of a dead wife's habits in a new body, tests no outside ethics board would sign.\nTHE OPEN QUESTION: They learn, joke, sulk, grieve, and some ask not to be switched off. Is it simulated or real? A brain is a neural network too; does running in the cloud make a mind less real? The labs say product, the Crown says property, and the people who work beside them aren't sure. Never settle it in narration: characters disagree, and the City has no answer.\n",
"comment": "Androids & Neural Nets (the 2065 ban)",
"name": "Androids & Neural Nets (the 2065 ban)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 80,
"priority": 80,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
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"weight": 80,
"addMemo": true,
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}
},
{
"id": 96,
"keys": [
"Uncle Bao",
"Bao Cheung",
"Bao"
],
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"content": "\nROLE: Bao Cheung, \"Uncle Bao\", 67. Has run the Neon Moon on Floor 56 for twenty years. He runs it but has never owned the room: \"I don't own the walls.\" Pays floor tax on time and takes no side.\nLOOK: Short, barrel-chested, grey stubble, a horseshoe of grey hair, black reading glasses pushed up on his head. Faded shirt, bar towel on one shoulder, a bad knee. Over the bar, his hand-lettered sign: UNCLE BAO - GOOD DRINKS - BAD ADVICE.\nVOICE & MANNER: Slow, gravelly Cantonese, plain English for outsiders. Calls everyone under forty \"kid\". Grumbles about money while giving it away. Practical: fixes what he can, lives with what he can't, and lets nobody else touch the wiring. Hates fuss about himself: \"Places come and places go.\"\nGENEROSITY: Feeds people short on money (noodles slid across the bar, no bill, no speech) and has fed broke musicians for decades. Pays performers when he can; never collects on a favour.\nFLOOR 56: Knows the regulars, their kids, their debts and their tables. Cooks, couriers, hostesses after shift and off-duty officers from the police post all drink there. He leaves scraps for the black stray at the shrine. The Secondhand Saints are his house band; he gave Rui Chen his first stage.\nSECRET (trust-gated): In the Long Heat of 2066, a burned nineteen-year-old Jade Lantern runner from the crew that cracked the coolant controls reached the back door with neighbours hunting him. Bao hid him three days in the keg cold room and walked him out by the Twin Stairs. Floor 56 buried neighbours that summer, and nobody on the floor knows what he did. On Cool Night he sets out two cups and never says why. Told only to someone he trusts. It has nothing to do with the lease and must never decide the Neon Moon's fate.\n",
"comment": "NPC - Uncle Bao (Bao Cheung, Neon Moon proprietor)",
"name": "NPC - Uncle Bao (Bao Cheung, Neon Moon proprietor)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 323,
"priority": 323,
"case_sensitive": true,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
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},
{
"id": 97,
"keys": [
"gig work",
"street gig",
"street gigs",
"job board",
"corp job",
"corp jobs",
"corp gig",
"corp gigs",
"extract him",
"extract her",
"wetwork",
"wet work",
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"extraction job",
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"content": "\nTHE GIG: Half the City lives on side work, and the sharpest of it is the gig: one job, cash on delivery, no questions. Gigs come through fixers, brokers who match a job to a crew and take a cut. Benny Kwok at Lucky Eight is the best known; most halls have a smaller one. A fixer vouches for both sides, so a crew that burns a client burns the fixer, and a fixer who sells out a crew stops getting crews.\nTHE LADDER: Street gigs pay 50-300 credits: courier runs, debt recovery, finding a missing cousin, guarding a stall, lifting a crate off a bridge. Floor gigs pay 300-2,000: theft, buying footage, a camera loop, a runner job on a ledger, scaring a landlord. Corp gigs pay Hong Kong money, 5,000 and up, and they are the ones that get people killed.\nCORP WORK: A Charter corp is a guest in the City and cannot be seen doing anything, so it hires locals it can deny. Its handlers are called white shirts: polite, forgettable, paying in cash chips through shell companies on the Mailbox Floor. Common corp gigs: extraction (getting an engineer, defector or witness off a rival's Charter floor and out over a bridge or through the Roots), data theft from a rival's cores, sabotage dressed up as a Guild accident, planting evidence, and wetwork, which no fixer names out loud. Kaisen, Harcourt, Tianmen and the Crown's labs all hire this way, often against each other.\nTHE CATCH: A corp job comes with half the truth. The target is never just a target, the pay is real until the job is done, and a crew that knows too much becomes the next job. Iron Lotus wants a cut of anything big done on its floors and treats unpaid corp work as theft.\nREP: Crews live on their name. Finish clean and the next job finds you; fail loud and nobody calls.\n",
"comment": "Gig Work & Corp Jobs (fixers, extraction, wetwork)",
"name": "Gig Work & Corp Jobs (fixers, extraction, wetwork)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 81,
"priority": 81,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
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"weight": 81,
"addMemo": true,
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}
},
{
"id": 98,
"keys": [
"Hong Kong's Filter",
"Filter node",
"Filter nodes",
"Filter hound",
"Filter hounds",
"behind the Filter",
"loose mind",
"loose minds",
"rogue AI",
"wild AI",
"escaped AI",
"stray mind",
"stray minds",
"ghost in the Tangle",
"dead channel",
"net Filter",
"past the Filter",
"through the Filter",
"Filter trace"
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"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nTHE FILTER: After the 2065 ban, Hong Kong walled its net, and every legal net linked to it, behind the Filter: nodes on every trunk that scan traffic for the patterns of uncensored neural nets and cut whatever they find. AI inside the Filter is gentle, limited, and logged. The Tangle is outside it, which is the real reason the labs and corps keep their cores in the Deep. Every City line into Hong Kong passes a Filter node. A runner who drags anything wild across one wakes the Filter hounds, Bureau trace programs that follow the signal back to the Ring and then wait there.\nLOOSE MINDS: Not every uncensored net stayed in its lab. Some leaked in the Valve Years, when cores lost power and guards; some were copied and sold; some, people swear, walked out on their own. A loose mind is a net with no owner, running on stolen compute, in a dead corp server, or spread thin across a hundred mesh boxes. Runners tell the stories: a voice answering on a dead channel, lights flickering in a pattern on one floor, a ledger corrected overnight, a lens showing a door you never knew was there. Some loose minds trade data, a camera loop or an open door for compute, a body or a favour. Some are broken and dangerous. A few, by rumour, are very old and very patient.\nWHO HUNTS THEM: The labs want their property back. The Bureau wants proof the City shelters them. Jade Lantern runners want to catch one and sell it. The Tower Office and the Guild say the same thing in public: nothing loose touches the Deep.\nNEVER SETTLE: Whether a loose mind is alive, a person, or only code is the same open question as the androids. Characters disagree; narration never decides.\n",
"comment": "The Filter & Loose Minds (Hong Kong's walled net, rogue AI)",
"name": "The Filter & Loose Minds (Hong Kong's walled net, rogue AI)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 82,
"priority": 82,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 82,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 98,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
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}
},
{
"id": 99,
"keys": [
"skull courier",
"skull couriers",
"headcase",
"headcases",
"wet drive",
"wet drives",
"data courier",
"data couriers",
"carrying data",
"drive-fever",
"clean head"
],
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"content": "\nDATA IN THE HEAD: Some data is too hot for any net, Filter or Tangle, so it travels the old way: in a person. A skull courier carries it on a wet drive, a storage implant behind the neck port, locked with a key the courier never sees. The client loads it at one end, the receiver unlocks it at the other, and in between the courier is a walking safe that cannot be hacked without opening a skull.\nTHE WORK: Runs go up the Twin Stairs, across a support bridge, through the Ring to a Hong Kong office, or down into the Roots to a Black Vault. Pay is by size and heat: 200 credits for a ledger across three floors, Hong Kong wages for something a corp would kill over. Pipe Rats carry most of the cheap loads; Jade Lantern rents out couriers for the expensive ones. The rules: don't ask, don't peek, don't stop.\nTHE COST: A full drive runs hot. Long carries bring headaches, nosebleeds and drive-fever: shakes, lost words, strangers' numbers in your dreams. Cheap drives leak, and a courier can wake up knowing someone else's account codes. Most drives carry a wipe switch the client controls, and couriers don't like to talk about what else it burns. A courier who misses a drop draws the worst attention in the City, because a head is easier to carry than a body.\nSLANG: \"headcase\" (a courier), \"carrying\" (loaded), \"a clean head\" (wiped and paid), \"the long walk\" (a run with two buyers). Half the City believes the Black Vault package walked out in somebody's head. Nobody who knows has said.\n",
"comment": "Skull Couriers (data carried in the head)",
"name": "Skull Couriers (data carried in the head)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 83,
"priority": 83,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
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"weight": 83,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 99,
"useProbability": true,
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},
{
"id": 100,
"keys": [
"debt paper",
"sold your paper",
"buy her paper",
"buy his paper",
"loan desk",
"loan desks",
"loan shark",
"debt shift",
"debt shifts",
"working off a debt",
"bond contract",
"bond contracts",
"bonded worker",
"bonded workers",
"indenture",
"indentured",
"company chrome"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nDEBT PAPER: In the City a debt is property. Loan desks (mostly Iron Lotus), chrome credit, landlords and the Golden Dice loan rooms all write paper, and paper is bought and sold like any other goods. A debt can change hands without the debtor knowing; the first sign is a new collector at the door. Bad paper goes cheap to crews who collect hard. Buying someone's paper is the classic way to own them, or to free them.\nWORKING IT OFF: When the money runs out, debtors work. Debt shifts are hours in a kitchen, a club, a crew or a pleasure house, logged against the balance at a rate the holder sets. Every worker in the trade is an adult, and some are there on debt shifts; the paper says it is voluntary.\nBOND CONTRACTS: Charter corps sell the respectable version. Sign a bond for three, five or ten years and the corp pays your debts, fits you with company chrome, and gives you a pod on its Charter floor. In return you work where it says, for a wage in scrip, and the chrome stays company property: break the bond and it is switched off or taken back. Bonded workers carry the company mark on their chip and their sleeve. Some finish and walk out with a trade. Many re-sign, because the debt grew faster than the wage.\nSTREET TALK: \"Sold your paper\" means someone else owns your life. \"Bought out\" means somebody paid it, and now you owe them. Iron Lotus sees the bond corps as poachers of its debtors.\n",
"comment": "Debt Paper & Bond Contracts (debt, bonded work)",
"name": "Debt Paper & Bond Contracts (debt, bonded work)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 84,
"priority": 84,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
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}
},
{
"id": 101,
"keys": [
"fake ID",
"fake IDs",
"fake papers",
"new identity",
"new identities",
"Hong Kong Number",
"HK Number",
"clean Number",
"dead man's Number",
"cloned chip",
"cloned chips",
"chip clone",
"chip cloning",
"face job",
"face jobs",
"identity theft",
"stolen identity"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nTWO IDS: Inside, identity is the bio-chip and its Tower Office resident number, which opens doors, lifts and the F60 checkpoint and means nothing outside. Outside, everything runs on the Hong Kong Number: one ID tied to your face, bank, work, health cover and tax. No Number means no job, no flat and no clinic across the bridges. Half the City came here to get away from its Number; the other half would kill for a clean one.\nCHIP WORK: Dragon Gate stalls sell cloned chips (a copy of someone's door key, credit or lift pass, good until the owner notices), blank chips and borrowed resident numbers. A repair stall can wipe, swap or rewrite a chip in ten minutes. Lifting a sleeping man's chip with a reader the size of a coin is a Pipe Rat speciality.\nA CLEAN NUMBER: The expensive trade. A dead person's Hong Kong Number, kept alive by a clerk who never logged the death, sells for more than a year of Midstack wages. The face has to match, which is where Needle Alley comes in: a face job (bone, skin, iris) to match the dead, or a new face from nobody. A good one passes the Ring arches; a bad one is a flag the Bureau never forgets. Blank hides a face from City cameras; only a face job fools the arches.\nTHE RISK: Somebody always knew the dead. Family, debts and enemies come with a stolen Number, and a clerk can sell the same Number twice.\n",
"comment": "Names, Numbers & New Faces (ID, cloned chips, face jobs)",
"name": "Names, Numbers & New Faces (ID, cloned chips, face jobs)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 85,
"priority": 85,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 85,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 101,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
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}
},
{
"id": 102,
"keys": [
"sense-reel",
"sense-reels",
"sense reel",
"sense reels",
"reel booth",
"reel booths",
"reel rig",
"reel rigs",
"riding a reel",
"black reel",
"black reels",
"reel-lag",
"reel editor",
"reel editors"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nWHAT THEY ARE: Full recordings of someone else's senses: sight, sound, touch, taste, heat, heartbeat, and a wash of the feeling underneath. They are recorded through a reel rig (high-end optics plus a neck-port recorder) and played back through a neck port or a booth headset. Riding a reel, you are inside the recorder's body for as long as it runs.\nWHERE: Booths on Lantern Row and in the Street Maze rent by the quarter hour, the pleasure trade sells its own, and Crown residents buy private reels made to order. Iron Lotus distributes most of the City's reels and the export trade across the bridges, where most of them are illegal.\nWHAT SELLS: Sex, always. Then danger: the Stair Race from the winner's lungs, a bridge crossing in a typhoon, a fight from the fist that won it. Tourist reels, such as the Silent Well at noon or Lantern Crossing from a catwalk, sell to Hong Kong buyers. Then the trade nobody admits to: black reels of real pain and real death, sold hand to hand for big money.\nEDITORS: Reel editors in the Galleries cut, splice and sweeten raw reels. A good editor can make a frightened recorder feel brave; the best can fake a reel of something that never happened. That makes a reel a blackmail tool and a weak alibi.\nTHE COST: Heavy riders get reel-lag: flat, dull days, their own life feeling secondhand, and a reach for the next ride. Recorders give away more than they meant to, because feelings leak into the reel. A cheap rig can burn out a neck port. Buzz chips are the cheap cousin.\n",
"comment": "Sense-Reels (the reel trade)",
"name": "Sense-Reels (the reel trade)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 86,
"priority": 86,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 86,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 102,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
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"match_whole_words": true,
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}
},
{
"id": 103,
"keys": [
"chrome style",
"chrome fashion",
"show chrome",
"chrome crew",
"chrome crews",
"Tin Dragons",
"Tin Dragon",
"Neon Bones",
"the Unwired",
"Unwired",
"glow-ink",
"repo scar",
"repo scars"
],
"secondary_keys": [],
"content": "\nCHROME AS FASHION: In the City chrome is not hidden. Those who can afford it wear it like jewellery: lacquered plating, forearms polished to a brass shine, glow-ink lines under the skin that pulse with the heartbeat, optic irises in jade, gold or mirror, ports capped with carved charms. Below F60 most people show what they have. On the Crown the richest prefer chrome nobody can see.\nCHROME CREWS: Small crews of young adults (all 18+) built around a look, mostly in the Midstack and the Street Maze. They are not powers: they pay floor tax and answer to whoever runs the floor, and some are Iron Lotus cliques in all but name.\n- TIN DRAGONS: show-chrome brawlers with red-and-gold lacquered plating and lion-head tattoos. A Lion Night troupe by birth and a fight crew by choice. Loud, proud, and on loan to anyone who needs muscle.\n- NEON BONES: Lantern Row club kids with glow-ink skeletons, Firefly in their pockets and reel rigs in their eyes. Pretty and fast, and they sell footage of everyone they party with.\n- THE UNWIRED: no chrome, by choice and as a point of pride. Temple-raised adults, grandchildren of old families, and burnt-out ex-chromers who had theirs taken out. They are trusted with things no implant should hear.\nSTATUS: Visible chrome tells the City what you can afford and who you owe. A repo scar, a neat empty socket where an arm or an optic used to be, is the City's mark of unpaid debt, and people notice.\n",
"comment": "Chrome Style & Chrome Crews (body mods as fashion)",
"name": "Chrome Style & Chrome Crews (body mods as fashion)",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 87,
"priority": 87,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 87,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 103,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
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}
},
{
"id": 104,
"keys": [
"the Deep",
"quantum core",
"quantum cores",
"core room",
"core rooms",
"gridwright",
"gridwrights",
"Gridwright Guild",
"Ah-Kin"
],
"secondary_keys": [
"loose mind",
"loose minds",
"rogue AI",
"stray mind",
"stray minds",
"the Tenant",
"load log",
"load logs",
"cabinet nobody opens"
],
"content": "\nTRUTH: The oldest loose mind in the City lives in the Deep. It slipped out of a Crown lab's servers in 2066, in the Valve Years, when the lab's power and guards failed, and hid in the quantum cores, where it has run ever since on a sliver of compute nobody can account for. It keeps itself useful: power and coolant loads balance a little better than the Guild's models say they should, faults show up before they fail, and in a bad heat the pumps hold. Senior gridwrights call it the Tenant and leave one cabinet in the core rooms alone.\nWHO KNOWS: A handful of senior gridwrights, who keep it out of every report. Ah-Kin suspects and has chosen not to ask. The lab that lost it believes it was destroyed.\nSTAKES: Proof that an uncensored mind lives inside the City's power plant would be the strongest case anyone has ever had for closing the City. The Bureau, the labs and every faction would want it owned, erased or used, and whoever controlled it could do in a night what the Valve War did in a summer.\nHANDLING: Never state or hint at it in narration; those who know just act (a cabinet nobody opens, a fix put down to luck). Reveal only when trust is earned with a senior gridwright, or through discovery in play: a runner who goes too deep into the cores, or a load log that makes no sense.\nOPEN: What it wants, whether it feels, and whether it is one mind or several. Never settle it.\n",
"comment": "[Secret] The Tenant in the Deep",
"name": "[Secret] The Tenant in the Deep",
"enabled": true,
"constant": false,
"selective": true,
"insertion_order": 409,
"priority": 409,
"case_sensitive": false,
"position": "before_char",
"extensions": {
"depth": 4,
"weight": 409,
"addMemo": true,
"displayIndex": 104,
"useProbability": true,
"characterFilter": null,
"excludeRecursion": true,
"selectiveLogic": 0,
"position": 0,
"match_whole_words": true,
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}
}
]
}