A crew working the North Quarter and a crew working Magic City will both, sooner or later, find themselves dealing with the same names, whether as clients, obstacles, patrons, or the reason a job went the way it did.
The five corporations
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Covenant Medical
HQ Liberty Yards
The clinical face of the most prestigious university on the seaboard, and the lab where the Neurocybernetic Interpreter was born. It wears that legacy modestly in public and leverages it aggressively in private.
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DarkSun, Inc.
HQ Metro Core
Most corporations find a niche and stay there. DarkSun found all of them: farm robotics, software, armor, armaments and food, priced so most people can afford them. It conducts its government business in the open, which in NYTE City is the strangest thing about it.
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Hillcrest Pharmaceuticals
HQ Delmarva
Gene therapies, regenerative medicine, cures for diseases that used to be terminal: the humanitarian option, and it says so. The people who've been worked on by its private divisions call it Hellcrest.
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Hyde Dynomat
HQ Metro Core
The architecture inside someone else's device. Most of the city uses something built on Hyde Dynomat every day without ever thinking about it. The rumors about its ties to the supernatural have all been thoroughly debunked. The debunking has been unusually thorough.
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Neurodyne Industries
HQ Metro Core
Works on the mind. Its NeuraLINK jack puts the LINK straight into your brain, and its users call that "going full drool". What's waiting on the other side isn't in the brochure.
The Unseen Court
The Vampires, the Werewolves, the Deadmen and the Fae: the old powers of NYTE City, and the council they convene when something needs deciding. Four seats, three votes to carry a matter, and no interest in ruling anything. Ruling is visible.
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Seat
Vampire
The oldest money in NYTE City. Three centuries spent turning the one advantage nobody else has, time, into the one everybody understands.
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Seat
Werewolf
The only house whose people hold jobs: the docks and the freight corridors, and also the claims desks, the clinics, and the middle floors of buildings the Vampires own.
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Seat
Deadmen
Here first, by a margin that makes the comparison pointless. The dead who didn't finish: slowed, quiet, aware, and capable of holding a grudge for as long as it stays useful.
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Seat
Fae
Not from here, don't live here, hold a seat anyway. What they give in a bargain is always real, and almost never what you thought you were getting.
The city pays, continuously, in bodies, blood, and bargains, without ever realizing it.
The Other Guys
An army, a marketplace, an intelligence, a clinic network, a hobby club and an agency. They fit no category, and they carry the same weight.
- The Chrome Berets DarkSun's standing army, for rent. What sets them apart is what they won't do: no espionage, no sabotage, no blackmail. That isn't sentiment. It's the business model.
- The Goblin Market A market in a pocket dimension, findable only by people who already know it's there. It sells what can't be sold anywhere else, and it's the only truly neutral ground in the city.
- QUORUM An AI built in 2031 to advise Queen City's lenders. Its advice was right so often that the humans stopped overriding it. It doesn't manage the city's money anymore so much as it is the system.
- The Seraphim Mobile clinics that reach the neighborhoods the billing system forgot. The care is real.
- The Technomancers Rocket City engineers who caught a signal in 2076 that broke every instrument they owned, and built new ones that could hear it. Their employer claimed all of it. It has not happened again. They're still listening.
- The Watchers Formed when the city's expansion started digging up things no survey had accounted for. They keep a working file on persons of note, handle liaison with the Unseen Court, and these days mostly do damage control.
The shape of the city → · What's in the dark → · The glossary →