Editing Setting:Nutopia/Locations (section)

=Elsewhere=
===Babel, City of Tides===

During the events the brought the last age, the Mega Corp Light-Core was confronted with a problem. A second rate shipping company, it found itself unable to compete with the giants of it's day. It set out with a project, shackling its fate to the communication and solar generating satellites in the sky above. It began to build the world's first space elevator; a tremendously tall tower, stretching to the heaven's above, able to quickly and cheaply catapult cargo into low orbit, from which it could easily corner the market on satellite technology. The project started, building proceeded smoothly, and then the end of the world came.

One of the first targets was the near-completed tower, though none alive know who fired at it. Though constructed on the Indian Subcontinent, it's towering primary spire, which soon earned the mocking nickname of Babel by the more powerful corporations in the world, could be faintly seen from much of the Eastern Hemisphere. A weapon, some say a nuclear in nature, while others claim rail guns, nanites, or perhaps even a suicide run from an aerial craft, brought the elevator down. The lower levels were destroyed instantly, but the upper levels, caught in lower gravity above and the forces rippling up the superstructure from below, drifted out into the Indian Ocean, before crashing with a tremendous tidal wave.

The tower, built for the high stresses of planetary momentum and wind shear, somehow survived. Part of the substructure crashed into the bottom of the sea, while the upper portions jut above. The tower has been since been found, and has become something of a bustling sea center, it's surface extending over miles of the Indian Ocean. Known as Babel, City of Tides, it takes on travelers, traders, and sailors of all sorts from Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, Southern Asia, and Australia, becoming an important sea based oasis.

Babel is powered primarily by a solar furnace; collection of solar connection rigs, still wirelessly connected to the dedicated solar satellites that it was intended to service in the first place. This, on top of expressing it's dominance on a the few nearby deep-sea oil drilling rigs in the seas around it, provided Babel with enough power to last well through the coming nights.

Babel is serviced by a vast shipping fleet, known collectively as Etemenanki . They serve as it's chief limbs, eyes, and mouth, projecting the will of Babel into much of the Indian Ocean. A collection of yachts and cruise liners to shipping frigates and once modern ships of war comprise the Etemenanki, endlessly questing the high seas for freight, personnel, and fuel. There are six main task forces of the Etemenanki, and each roam separately, under the command of an Admiral. These six, combined with the Tower Admiral of the Babel proper, form the primary administrative body of Babel, the League of Tides.

Babel's biggest problem is perhaps projection of power. Though each task force of the Etemenanki is more then able to hold it's own, with battleships, cruisers, and even a carrier or two, the physical space in the ocean is vast. Slavers, raiders, and rival warlords feature one of the primary plot hooks of Babel; piracy. Vast tracks of sea are no man's land, and the area has become a haven for those you want to hide on the run. Smaller islands, scattered from the eastern Indian chain, to man-made ones floating on debris, built into abandoned oil derricks, and carved from coral atolls, are hung onto desperately, with the survivors doing whatever dark and sometimes twisted efforts are required to stay alive. These ocean born frontier towns are armed to the teeth, and will normally trade with the ships of the Etemenanki, but when left to their own devices for too long, or prodded once too many times by raider, will sometimes up a mobilize, setting off across the open sea in a near mindless wave of killing and looting.

As dangerous and unpredictable as the frontier towns may seem, they hold the key to many of the great treasures in these waters. For just under the waves lie untold treasures, from pieces fallen from Babel in it's crash, satellites plunged into the waters as they lost power, and oil and mineral veins deep on the ocean floor to be pillaged. Many of these small flotilla's are built on existing constructions, allowing a quick, if perhaps dangerous, path to the secrets on the floor. Babel itself has established a number of these routes, with it's undersea superstructure and original cargo hauling capabilities helping in this effort. It is through this exploration of the ocean floor that one of the great mysteries of the entire Indian Ocean was found. The code name Atlantis Project.

===Brusselsphere===
An enormous conglomeration of geodesic domes covering about 70% of former Belgium, Luxemburg and the Netherlands, Brusselsphere was one of the most spectacular, most bombastic corporate projects to ever come to fruition. A megacity in which the weather was controlled precisely by a regulatory system, ensuring the best climate conditions on the globe. During the Fall, eco-terrorist sabotage brought down the climate control AI, baking or freezing several domes until they were stopped. Those areas are still cooling down, and Delvers are advised to stay away from the hostile desert and jungle conditions.

Brusselsphere used to be the corporate-government capital of Europe, and together with Londons Prime, 2, 3, and 4 it formed the hub of the great financial networks that spanned the globe and projected corporate power. Most of the corp headquarters buildings still stand, looted and gutted from the Fall times, but rumours have it that there are still undelved vaults and secret bunkers under the city. The old EUSEC defense system may still be active, which could explain the periodic appearance of security drones, armed and attacking anything that moves. 

===The Neumann Vault===
Take a trip through the Old Midwest, past the Cloning Farms still running, endlessly producing steadily more devolved subhumans as their genetic patterns degrade, beyond the Archives, the vast multi-kilometre data warehouses once full of the sum of human knowledge and now just meaningless ones and zeros, and beyond the Red Zone where the radiation from the Goldmarck Neumann Wars is still strong enough to kill an unshielded man in hours. Keep going, into the vast fields of GM wheat, effectively unkillable and unstoppable, that turns even the flesh-melting nanite clouds into another energy source. Keep going, through the vast craters of the Megabombs, GM wheat only broken by the scarce few ruins still stable enough to stand, and pools full of every kind of pseudolegal chems mixed by decades of leakage and sunlight into brews so utterly toxic not even the wheat can grow in it. Tread lightly past the Sentinels, unimaginably lethal 'bots designed to be able to hold off entire armies alone, still defending the ruins of their homes. There, go into the Deep Crater, and you can see it; the Neumann Vault.

It is an unassuming structure, a block of some fancy darkened supermetal, five hundred metres long and wide, and a hundred tall. Look for the door, fifty metres by fifty, every centimetre of space taken up by warnings etched into the metal. Behind that door lies the reason for the Neumann Corps' existence, the reason for their destruction, and the reason hundreds of Delvers die each year trying to open it.

A relative latecomer to the Corporations, Neumann was a small company built by a bored megarich executive around this facility, an empty space occupied only by at-the-time advanced nanonic assemblers with one task; to copy itself, and to improve itself every time. One day, the Vault would be opened, and whatever was inside would be The novelty of the offering amused many of the idle megarich, and money flowed in, soon powering it to the status of a moderate Corp. They built other divisions and started work, and soon forgot the assemblers in the vault over newer, more advanced models. They ran into money trouble, and were prepared to open the Vault to see what they had cooked up in desperation, and this so worried the Goldmarck Corp, another high-level corp mostly specializing in nanonic assemblers, that they declared a Private War, at first subtle, then more and more overt. By the end of it, just four weeks after it had begun, both corps were utterly destroyed, and the Vault soon forgotten as the Fall of the Corporations came a bare month later, befor the radiation had cooled enough to send in even hardened 'bots.

Decades later, the Vault still lies unopened, its work going on far longer than even the Neumann Corp had planned. Anything could be in there now, a mist of dead nanites self-coded into deactivation, assemblers capable of rearranging the universe on the subatomic level, a vast array of pretty and meaningless junk, built to please the eye of a nanite swarm gone Smart, or nothing, the assemblers improving themselves beyond the constraints of the universe.

All I know is what the Vault told me. Seven hundred metre crater walls mean that this vault had the Corporations so worried that, even as their world collapsed around them, they spared the time to launch no less than twenty-eight Megabombs at this place, and that the Neumann guys were so worried it could get out they built a facility that could survive that sort of punishment unharmed.

I came to unlock riches, me and the twenty others of our Delve. Only three of us survived to reach the Vault, and the other two had died by the time I found the Key. I could have opened it, but never brought myself to. I gave away my chance for new-Megarichdom at the doors of this vault, and ran back to my Enclave with everything I had destroyed, because I couldn't help but fear what could come out of those doors.

I'm giving you the key, because I'm a dead man. Even shielded, that place was so hot it cooked my DNA like like a frozen dinner, and I won't last the month. The key's gene-locked, and can't be lost, sold, or destroyed, only given away. You seem better than the sort of bastard might take the key off my body, and I'd rather whatever was in that Vault went to you instead of some fuckhead Raider.

Just remember. There are some doors in the world that, once opened, can never be shut again.

[[Category:Homebrew Settings]]
[[Category:Nutopia]]