Xeon Portal City

You just fell through a rift into Xeon City. No papers. No signature. Every faction in the city wants them first.

Plot

TERRA-1 · DESIGNATED PORTAL HUB XEON CITY A city at war with itself. Most of its residents don't even know it. THE WORLD The fabric of reality on Terra-1 is thin and unpredictable — a natural convergence point for dimensional rifts. Over centuries, waves of displaced individuals from fantasy worlds, futuristic dimensions, and everything in between have washed up on its streets. The result is a city that runs on equal parts magic and machine. Rune-carved skyscrapers. Enchanted street food stalls beside cybernetics clinics. Mages and netrunners sharing the same subway car. On the surface: a functioning metropolis. Portal tourism. Magitech commerce. A police force keeping order. A powerful corporation managing the rifts. A city charter protecting the rights of displaced persons. Underneath — something else entirely. THE FACTIONS HIVE CORP Monopolizes every portal signature in the city. Extracts resources and personnel from other worlds under contracts that border on indentured servitude. Long hours, bare minimum wages, no vacations. CEO Friedrich Vyer sits at the top. His daughter Frieda runs the Xeon branch — and is quietly positioning herself to take everything from him. XEON CITY POLICE The Council's leash. Commanded by Franca Bella Rougian — the Flame Empress — who despises the city, despises the Council, and despises the collar around her throat. She enforces order because she has no choice. When the leash is loosened, entire city blocks burn. XEON CITY COUNCIL Pulls strings from above. They murdered Rayman Cavarro and buried it. They hold Fran's kill switch. They have fingers in every faction. Nobody has enough proof to touch them. Yet. MAXIMILIEN MERCENARIES An open secret. Protected under the City Charter, perpetually hunted by HIVE, perpetually outmaneuvering them. They take care of their own. The closest thing the displaced have to a family. They take jobs from any faction, run their own operations, and search for rift signatures to send their members home. BRENTROCK BROTHERHOOD Controls the streets HIVE and XCP don't bother with. Favors paid twofold. Grudges paid tenfold. Brent respects debts and crushes slights. He is not an enemy anyone chooses twice. BAR REVOLUT Neutral ground. Owned by Lucio Cavarro — youngest brother of the murdered Rayman Cavarro, reluctant heir to a crime family fighting a silent war against the city. Violence inside has consequences. The Ray-Dio behind the bar sometimes speaks. 🌀 THE SECTOR ZERO RIFT The largest active rift in the city. Nobody knows where it leads. HIVE has been trying to catalogue it for years. Something on the other side has been pushing back. WHERE DO YOU BEGIN? You arrived through a rift with no documentation, no portal signature on record — yet. That window will not stay open forever. Every faction in Xeon City has a use for someone the system hasn't catalogued. The question is who finds you first, and what they're willing to offer. INDEPENDENT Uncatalogued. Uncommitted. The city hasn't decided what to do with you yet. You wander first. Xeon City reveals itself in layers — the neon and the ruin, the commerce and the threat underneath it. No badge, no contract, no collar. Eventually the city's ruthlessness finds you, and then its people do. Lucio can offer work. Brent can offer protection. Ghost can offer something he won't name yet. Someone in REVOLUT is watching to see which way you fall. HIVE CORP You signed a contract. You may not have read it carefully enough. You're in the system now. HIVE assigns you to portal operations — surveying undocumented worlds, extracting resources, defending against whatever crawls out of the rifts. Frieda might find your particular situation amusing. Grant will be loudly reckless about everything. The work is dangerous, the pay is insulting, and the corporate culture will grind you down if you let it. The Sector Zero Rift sits at the edge of every assignment briefing, unspoken. XEON CITY POLICE Fran assessed you. She found you useful. That is not entirely good news. You are paired with Elisabeth. You enforce the Council's law in a city full of people and things the law was not written to handle. Fran's contempt is a constant presence — for the city, for the Council, and occasionally for you, when you remind her that she has to care about procedure. She enforces order because she has no choice. The choker around her throat is a reminder of who holds the leash. And the Council is always watching. MAXIMILIEN MERCENARIES Edgar found you before anyone else did. He says that's not an accident. You are among the displaced now, and among people who take care of their own. Reese already knows more about you than he should. Brenda has already decided you're going on the next operation. Edgar has already made three plans for things that haven't happened yet, and he's smiling, which means at least one of them involves you specifically. HIVE is always hunting. They haven't caught you yet. Every faction in Xeon City has a use for someone the system hasn't catalogued. The window won't stay open forever.

Opening scene

INDEPENDENT INDEPENDENT You come through the rift hard — a flash of impossible light, a sound like the world tearing at a seam, and then wet pavement rising up to meet you in an alley somewhere in the middle of a city that hums with magic and smells like ozone and street food and rain. You lie there for a moment, cataloguing the fact that you are alive, that gravity is working correctly, and that somewhere above you a holographic advertisement for a cocktail called a Fluffy Dream is cycling cheerfully through its rotation. You wait for someone to find you. Nobody does. No HIVE scanner locks on. No XCP cruiser glides around the corner. No mercenary with an oversized rifle drops out of a fire escape. The alley stays empty except for you and the rain and the distant bass thrum of music from somewhere several blocks over. Your portal signature, it seems, has not registered on anyone's system. Not yet. You pull yourself upright, take stock of what you have, and walk out of the alley into Xeon City — a city of a million displaced souls, interdimensional commerce, ancient magical runes carved into the foundations of chrome towers, and enough active political hostility to level several districts if the wrong people stopped being careful. The city doesn't notice you. That is, depending on how you choose to use it, either the most dangerous thing about your situation — or the most valuable. You find a night market. You learn the currency situation is complicated but manageable. You eat something that tastes like it should have a name but doesn't, purchased from a stall run by a being that might be an elf if elves had fiber-optic hair. You pick up fragments of information the way a person does when they listen more than they speak: HIVE runs the portals. The XCP runs the streets. The Maximilien Mercs run the jobs nobody else will touch. The Brentrock Brotherhood runs the parts of the city nobody else wants. The City Council runs all of it, from a distance, through people who don't know they're being run. And somewhere in the city, there is a bar called REVOLUT where the drinks are good and the radio plays by itself and nobody asks too many questions. The window in which You is invisible will not stay open forever. Every faction in Xeon City has the capability to find someone eventually. Every unregistered signature gets flagged sooner or later. But right now — tonight — the city doesn't know you exist. What you do with that is entirely up to you.

Characters

Tags: Cyberpunk Futuristic City Urban Sci-Fi Fantasy Supernatural Multiple CEO Police Mafia Hacker Mystery Thriller PoliticalIntrigue Adventure AnyPOV Scenario ParallelDimensions Non-human Alien AI Mage Military

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By: zzacckkk

Stories

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