ROOTS → F130 · WHO RUNS THE CITY
Power in Kowloon Free City stands on three legs that need each other and hate it. The Office keeps the paper. The Crown keeps paying. The Gangs keep the order. None of them can rule alone, and every one of them has tried.
Nobody lets Hong Kong police inside.
F5 · OLD YAMEN · THE UNWRITTEN SIDE
The Yamen Accord of 2070 ended the Valve Years on paper. Its unwritten side, officially the Quiet Compact, was agreed over tea in the rear hall of the Old Yamen while the paper was read out in the front. On the street it is just “the tea terms”.
樓務處 · POWER ONE · THE OFFICE
The Tower Office is one body. Its council is the old Yamen Circle (elders, shopkeepers, clinic heads, Guild seniors) with seats for Iron Lotus and the Guild beside them. Stable, slow, and bought.
It registers sky deeds, collects the power and water levy, runs the wardens, Tower Police and contract guards, keeps the F60 log and lets the big contracts.
It also sells. It registers every Sky Charter, priced by floor and renewed every year, and the renewals are where it makes its real money. 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. Hong Kong recognises none of it.
F80+ · POWER TWO · THE CROWN
“The Crown” is a place, F80 and up, and the people who own it: rich residents, corporations and foreign money. They don't run floors or carry guns. They pay for everything, and expect it to keep working.
天契 · SKY CHARTER
A sky deed plus a Charter registration at the Tower Office. The business is domiciled in the City: no Hong Kong tax, no audit, no oversight, and no questions the Office isn't paid to ask. Security is bought, never owned: 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.
Open file ▸信箱層 · F84 · THE MAILBOX FLOOR
One long, hushed ring corridor: marble underfoot, warm light, brass-trimmed lockboxes floor to ceiling, numbered in brass, and one bored warden. A Charter company needs an address inside the City, and a box is an address: it costs less a year than a Midstack flat costs a month. Around it, the buffer band of shell offices with a receptionist, a plant, and no staff. “He lives on the Mailbox Floor”: a man who exists only on paper.
Open file ▸Filtered air with a scent added, real sunlight through real glass at the setbacks, and quiet. Fish flown in that morning, real pork, fruit that was never frozen. AV commutes to Hong Kong offices, or no commute at all. Bodyguards at the door and in the lift, private clubs, terrace gardens, tennis on a roof deck under a rain screen. The cooks, cleaners, nannies and drivers come up from the Midstack every shift, and know more about the Crown than the Crown knows about itself.
Nobody up here pays cash for anything that matters: a favour costs a Charter fee waived, a seat at the right table, a daughter's internship in Hong Kong. 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. A resident who stops paying loses the guards first. After that, it goes quickly.
The biggest holders speak to the Office through the Terrace Board, a residents' club that meets over lunch on the highest terrace and agrees on almost nothing except that the levy should fall and the City should stay exactly as dark as it is.
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. The gigs: extraction off a rival's Charter floor, 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.
The respectable version is the bond contract. Sign 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. The chrome stays company property: break the bond and it is switched off or taken back. Many re-sign, because the debt grew faster than the wage.
ROOTS → F60 · POWER THREE · THE GANGS
Not one thing. Inside the City, Iron Lotus is king. Over the last thirty years, and faster since the Yamen Accord, four outside syndicates have moved in, because a city with no Hong Kong police, no extradition and no taxes is worth a fortune to anyone who stores, makes or moves what can't be handled elsewhere. Outside the walls, every one of them is bigger than the Lotus. Inside, all of them pay it.
鐵蓮會
KING INSIDE
Home team · strongest inside
Here first, and owns what no newcomer can buy quickly: most of the unbuilt air, the best floors, the West Stair, a council seat and seventy years of favours. No ships, no banks abroad. If the City falls, the Lotus has nowhere to go, so it defends the City harder than anyone.
Deals Landlord to every newcomer. Its own people answer to the Lotus Court.
Mark black iron lotus on red
Open file ▸
玉燈兄弟
RIVAL AT HOME
The stylish rival
Started the Valve War in 2066 and lost it. The Accord gave Iron Lotus a council seat and the Lantern nothing, and it has smiled through every council meeting since. Nightlife (the Moon Palace on F68 runs under its licence), information, the best netrunners.
Deals Courting the Golden Dice. Non-aggression with the Volkov Line. Sells information to everyone.
Mark pale jade lanterns
Open file ▸
EVERYONE'S RUNNERS
The street · couriers & runners
Not a Triad: loose crews who own the shortcuts. Everyone hires them, which keeps them alive. A crew that signs exclusive with any syndicate stops being trusted by the others, so almost none do.
Deals Porters for the Volkov Line, Roots guides for the River Line, runners for Jade Lantern, “vermin” to Iron Lotus, who still pays them.
Mark a rat tattoo, or a knotted cable tie
Open file ▸
黒田組
MAIN OUTSIDE RIVAL
Osaka Yakuza · since 2072
Old, rich, and under police pressure at home. Here, a tenant: about a hundred people, two floors, and sealed vault space in the Roots leased from Iron Lotus. Cash, weapons, data cores, and people who need to disappear. Also untraceable guns, and bodyguards for Crown residents who like good manners. Local boss Daisuke Mori: manners first, then knives.
Deals The Vault Lease of 2072, the oldest newcomer pact. It believes the missing package came out of a vault it leases.
Mark a black crane on white
Open file ▸
OWNS TIMETABLES
Russian logistics · early 2060s
Owns no floors, only timetables: container slots on two support bridges, a freight lift on the east side, warehouse cages in the Galleries, the Crown's night AV pilots. Sold coolant to both sides in the Valve War at triple price. Nobody forgave it; everybody still uses it.
Deals Alliance with Iron Lotus, non-aggression with Jade Lantern, open price war with the River Line.
Mark sodium-orange cargo seals stamped with a wolf's head
Open file ▸
金骰
WANTS A SEAT
The Ma family · Macau casino clan · 2050s
Two casino floors on the Crown with no limits and no names, a net-betting house in the Tangle, and loan rooms backed by sky deeds. Run by the family's matriarch. They have outbid the Lotus for the Crown's richest players.
Deals The 2074 truce after the fire, which the Lotus thinks the Ma set themselves. Jade Lantern is the natural ally. Buying toward a council seat.
Mark gold dice, always showing a six and a one
Open file ▸
KNOWS THE LOW GROUND
Đường Sông · Vietnamese smugglers · 2076
People, medicine, chrome and Ning precursors from Saigon, never over the bridges: through the Roots, on small boats on black water, with Pipe Rat guides. Run by a woman the boat crews call only “Mama”. The smallest in money; maybe the best at the lowest ground.
Deals Pays Iron Lotus a toll on the sumps, and keeps a second set of tunnels the Lotus doesn't know about. Undercuts the Volkov Line.
Mark a paper boat, folded from a banknote
Open file ▸Inside / Outside bars: rough street estimate of strength in the City vs. in the wider world.
Not powers · a look and a name
Small crews of young adults (all 18+) built around a look: the Tin Dragons in red-and-gold plating, the Neon Bones with glow-ink skeletons, the Unwired with no chrome at all. They pay floor tax and answer to whoever runs the floor, and some are Iron Lotus cliques in all but name.
Open file ▸One job, cash on delivery
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. Street gigs pay 50-300 credits, corp gigs Hong Kong money. Iron Lotus wants a cut of anything big done on its floors.
Open file ▸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. The first sign is a new collector at the door. "Sold your paper" means someone else owns your life.
Open file ▸恩怨 · PACTS & GRUDGES
Pacts are made over tea, sealed with a Yamen witness, and broken when the price is right. The two rivals that matter to Iron Lotus: Jade Lantern at home, and the Kuroda-gumi from outside.
THE RING · BORDERS & CAMERAS
Legally the City is still “non-administered”, as the Compact of 1991 left it, and Hong Kong recognises nothing inside. Beijing tolerates it because powerful people on both sides of the border profit from it.
AT THE ARCHES
INSIDE
FROM HONG KONG
無面 · MOU-MIN · UNCONFIRMED
An implant that, officially, does not exist. On the City's private cameras the wearer's face is a smeared, flickering pixel blur and their ID tag reads as static. In person, they look like anyone. On the Crown they say “a blank came to the wedding”: somebody important or dangerous was in the room.
WHAT PEOPLE SAY
It sits behind the ear. A few dozen exist at most, by rumour: Dragon Heads and their shadows, certain Crown residents, the hitmen who work for both. At least one councillor is said to wear one. No market sells a real one: you are given one, or trade for one, for “an outer-wall flat” or “a favour you can't refuse”.
LIMITS
City networks only. The Ring's arches still see the real face, and so do Bureau drones and top-end corp optics. It hides who you were, not that you were there, and the smear itself is a signature.
GHOST FACE
Needle Alley sells cheap fakes. Most do nothing. Some cause seizures or burn out the optic nerve. The worst leave your face clean while the static flags you.
WHO MAKES IT
Nobody who knows is saying. Every stall on Needle Alley has a different answer, and none of them are worth the noodles you bought to hear it.
年表 · PACTS & BETRAYALS
The old City's triads run vice; Lotus elders say their grandfathers sat at the Compact table.
The footprint is declared “non-administered”. File ▸
Three rogue storeys pancake into the old City. 61 dead. Everyone remembers.
Iron Lotus buys up the unbuilt air above the City: today's sky-deed fortune.
With the new nightlife of the converted machine halls.
The Ma family opens its first Crown table.
The Volkov Line takes container slots on the support bridges.
Jade Lantern cracks the valves in the Long Heat. Volkov sells coolant to both sides. Iron Lotus wins.
The Tower Office is born, and the Quiet Compact is agreed over tea. Jade Lantern gets no seat.
The Kuroda-gumi arrives and leases its first Roots vault from Iron Lotus, with a Yamen witness.
Eleven dead on a Ma casino floor. “Wiring.” Each side blames the other; a truce at the Old Yamen.
The River Line arrives: boats on black water through the Roots.
Whose key opened the vault? The Ma want a seat. The bridges are in a price war.
AFTER THE LIGHTS GO OUT · URBAN LEGENDS
Every power in the City has a file on these, and none of them will say what's in it. Collected from the Tangle, the stairwells and the laundries. Nothing here is confirmed.
Tangle board · /kowloon/stories
Core B slows at 47, sits four seconds with the doors shut, and carries on. On the West Stair the landing between 46 and 48 is a welded door with a red circle, and there is no room for a floor behind it. Don't answer the knock.
Read the file ▸Voice memo · a Midstack laundry
In a blackout, on an old battery set, past where the numbers stop: a woman reading floors, then names. In the Long Heat of '66 she read thirty-one.
Read the file ▸Floor 11 · what the grandmother tells new families
Three soft knocks and a polite voice asking for the key to 1107. There is no 1107, only a newer wall between 1106 and 1108. If you answer, he learns your voice.
Read the file ▸Crown warden camera log · redacted
Every 21 August at 12:01 the shaft cameras log a fall through the noon sun. No cam below F40 sees it. No body. The face-match result is redacted by Office order.
Read the file ▸Pipe Rat voice note · 03:12 · deleted
A dead metro panel past the third sump, no power, and the old MTR chime: “The next train will not stop.” Then a roll call of the dead, and one name that was still alive.
Read the file ▸Lift flyer + forum reply
Seven nights, clean beds, thirty days' wages. Most come back with the money. Some come back days late, with days they can't account for and a neat scar behind the hairline. The floor number on the flyer is scratched out. The White Door ▸
Read the file ▸Wedding photographer · /kowloon/work
Mingling among the guests at the reception, a guest-shaped smear where a face should be, and a guest tag that reads static. On the Crown they say “the blank came to the wedding”.
Read the file ▸F5 · THE DEEP · DATA VAULTS
The same Data Bank as the main site: every public file, now with the power files and the City's Legends. Search, filter, follow the cross-links, share a link to any file. Press / to search.
Select a file.