The Nexus Well
New Legends wake on the well floor. The first line they meet reads like this.
You wake on the floor of the one faction-blind room in Catena, and the first person to reach you is a teenager who has never been spliced and never will be.
The Junction
The one faction-blind room in Catena, and the place a new Legend wakes.
The room nobody owns
In the dev build New Legends wake on the well floor in the development build. The rest of the district is mapped.
- Kind
- Safe hub
- Who runs it
- Nobody
- Combat
- None, by law
- Landmark
- The Nexus Well and the Flip-Board Spire
- Loop station
- A lit station
- Sound
- The flip-board's mechanical ripple, range fire, squad chatter
- Moving
- Wall-run shafts, grapple crowns, conduit grind-rails to follow, and an updraft out of the well
The Junction is a sunken transit plaza turned into the city's social centre. The Nexus Well is its landmark, ringed by an enormous analog flip-board that still calls out the day's dive seed and queue by hand, though every HUD already knows.
No faction runs it. By law it stays the one faction-blind room in the city, and all three recruit quietly from the crowd. Nobody fights here: hub districts are built without combat, and the Junction is the first one a new Legend sees.
Meridian charter gates stand on the well's lower terrace, where a dive queue is a line you physically stand in. A practice range, conduit grind-rails, the Undercut falls and the Quay Arches fill out the edges.
The Well and its rim
The flip-board
Every seed rollover is an audible event for the whole plaza, and a handful of insomniacs and shift-enders always watch it happen.
The HUD tells you; the board says it.
The broth cart
On the Well rim. Service is two words long, and more of the city's rumour passes through the cart than through anywhere else. Its owner will not repeat a thing for a second customer.
Broth. Sit.
The Ring
A painted circle on the Well floor where duels are argued. The suppression lattice is on, so they never get further than that.
The Lost Wall
By the east stair, where people tape notes for divers who have not come back up. It is never cleared, and nobody has ever been told to clear it. It is the first of the four walls.
Who is always here
- 04:00The seed rolls over and the flip-board calls it.
- 19:00Recruiters from all three factions work the same crowd and pretend not to.
Nobody lives here, formally. The people who are always here are the ones the city did not file: gophers, a dozen kids running errands for tips, and whoever has nowhere better to be.
Nobody's on the clock here.
On the walls
ARGUE HERE. The lattice is on. It has always been on.
NOBODY'S ON THE CLOCK
04:00 CLUB
DAD ITS THE 9TH
Third time I've written this out. Paper goes soft. You'd have laughed at that.
What runs
In the dev build New Legends wake on the well floor in the development build, and the Loop station is lit.
Besides the wake-up and the Loop station, everything here is the game's design: a practice range run by Patch, dive charters on the lower terrace, and a board that posts what the day's dives will be. There are no live servers, and a closed alpha by invite is next.
On the floor
- Patch is the Junction's gopher, and he finds new Legends before the registry does.
- The board-setter sets the flip-board by hand and trusts nothing else in the city to say a thing straight.