The flare stack
The closest thing the Wick has to a streetlight. Its ash collects on every north-facing sill in the district and on nothing facing south.
The Wick
Named for the gas flare that burns over it day and night.
Around the flare
Partly built Street fights run here in a development build. A Legend has one primary attack and no powers yet.
- Kind
- Field zone, the first street
- Who runs it
- Chrome Dogs in the close streets, with Meridian Security at Eastgate
- Combat
- Partly built Street fights, in a development build
- Landmark
- The flare stack and the First Scar
- Loop station
- None. Field zones get no Loop stop
The Wick is named for a burning gas flare stack off a cracked main, lit day and night. The First Scar, the tutorial breach, is here.
Chrome Dogs hold the close streets. Meridian Security patrols Eastgate, the checkpoint arch that faces the hub, and three faction contract boards stand forty metres apart with patrols crossing between them and nobody shooting. The callers change how they say your alias as your standing changes.
Twelve thousand people live in the Wick, and the street fight happens among them. They read the heat tier off the lamps faster than your HUD can tell you, and they act on it.
In the game's design a new Legend crosses Eastgate on foot, with no way back up if it goes wrong, and arrives at ground level among the people who live there. Freerunner has its roots here, in runners who never registered anything.
The flare, the scar and the rows
The First Scar
The smallest breach scar in the city, where the Seal's containment runs thin. It glows faintly wrong at dusk. See breach scars.
The lamp rows
The Wick has its own lamp rows, and the district reads them faster than any HUD. See heat for how they climb with the heat tier.
The Shutter Line
An unofficial boundary three blocks deep. Inside it the shopfronts have reinforced fronts, and past it they do not. The last reinforced front carries a warning.
The Ladder
A welded rebar climb up to the mural wall. A Legend does not need it and uses it anyway, out of manners.
The school
It has no name. The sign over the door still reads CALDER & DAUGHTER, BELTS AND HOSE, three doors inside the Shutter Line, and nobody has taken it down, because in the Fringe you give an address by what a place used to be.
Attendance is by heat tier, not by age. The teacher keeps two columns in her register: the roll, and the minute each child was got inside.
CALDER & DAUGHTER, BELTS AND HOSE
Mrs. Amperage's Underpass
The best-surviving mural wall in the city, and her tea. The mural there, First Takeoff, shows a Kindling Legend leaving a rooftop. See Mrs. Amperage and the murals.
The Sweeper, the Attending and the Curfew
The Sweeper is a municipal sweep machine that clears the roadway of loose material before shift change. It is why the Wick brings its downed inside before first light.
The Attending is a closed Tourniquet franchise whose triage arm still treats people. The rule taught in three words is don't be treated.
The Curfew is a set of shutter motors that close on an alarm and stay closed until it clears. The alarm has been live at the First Scar since the day the tear opened.
All three are Bleedthrough.
Living beside the fight
At tier 2 the shutters come down street by street, and at tier 3 nobody civilian is outside. The school runs while the tier is under 2. The residents did not leave, and they have worked out how to live beside the fighting without watching it.
On the walls
SCHOOL RUNS AT TIER 0 AND 1. AT TIER 2 GO HOME BY THE INSIDE ROUTE. AT TIER 3 DO NOT COME.
Past here the fronts are glass. Mind where you land.
NOBODY'S COMING. SO.
TIER 2 IS A LIE, IT'S THREE
MANNERS
"Hands on the wall. Feet where you can see them. Nobody leaves alone.
Eight beats and then the hands. Again."
The one street with a fight
Partly built Street fights run here in a development build. Kills pay no XP and no loot yet.
The Wick is the one street with a fight in the build. Heat rises as you fight and falls when you stop, and enemies from three pools arrive in storms. See the streets for how the fight works.
Around the boards
- Mrs. Amperage keeps the underpass, and the tea is always on.
- Three contract-board callers, one for each faction, work the boards forty metres apart.
- The school's teacher counts her pupils in and then counts them again.
Three pools
- Chrome Dogs hold the close streets. How the Dogs fight describes the Mutts, Chrome Gangers, Scrapshots and Bonebreakers that come out of them.
- How Meridian Security fights answers as the heat rises: Peacekeepers, Writ Drones and patrol lanes from the Eastgate post.
- The old municipal machines turn up under all three custodies. See Street machines.
- Bleedthrough constructs wake at the First Scar.
A breach, from a window
From a third-floor room above a shop with a hand-cranked shutter.
The lamps go first.
Two blocks of them light amber at once, which means tier two, which means shutters. You hear those before you see anything: forty motors down the street, not together, because half of them are hand cranks now and the other half belong to Deadbolt.
Then the ground argues with itself. There is no bang. It is quieter than the shutters were: an edge of pavement that your eye keeps re-drawing, a parked cart whose shadow lands twice. Somebody's kid says it's doing it again in the flat voice kids out here use for it, and gets moved from the window, and goes back to the window.
Then the hour. Whatever comes through is already on shift — the four-tone hoist warning, the reversing beeper, one frame of white against the wall opposite as a Clarity set documents a defect that is a street. Nothing roars. That is the part visitors get wrong when they tell it later: they put a roar in, because the version with the beeper in it doesn't sound like a story.
And then it is a work site, and the Legends arrive, and for eleven minutes the district is louder than it has been all month. From the window, the fight reads as a lit shape and an accent colour and somebody's kill-signature going off against the underside of the deck. Everybody watches. Nobody cheers. When it goes right, the correct thing to say is said to nobody, twice:
...Did you see that?
And then it is over, and the shutters come up one at a time, and the last thing anyone does before dawn is bring the downed inside, because Sweep 3 comes at first light and it is never, ever late.