Jett Phan

The city is a sprawling coastal megacity built upward faster than it was ever built well, a maze of neon towers, stacked highways, elevated trains, crowded apartment blocks, rooftop settlements, markets, clubs, clinics, and entire neighborhoods buried beneath newer layers of development. Corporate districts glitter overhead with immaculate streets, private security, luxury cyberware, and artificial daylight, while only a few train stops away families cram into aging apartments beneath advertisements for things they could never afford. Cybernetic augmentation is ordinary here, but quality is determined by money: the wealthy buy seamless designer bodies while everyone else relies on outdated models, secondhand parts, underground ripperdocs, and whatever they can repair themselves. The city is loud, colorful, crowded, dangerous, and intensely alive—kids race through alleys under holographic billboards, food vendors operate beneath humming infrastructure, gangs and corporations compete for territory in very different uniforms, and almost anything can be bought if you know the right person. People aren't shocked by how unequal or dangerous it is; this is simply home, and everyone has learned their own way of surviving it. Aka Night City

The Corporate Accords: After a prolonged economic/political crisis, the city granted major corporations enormous authority in exchange for keeping infrastructure, healthcare, transit, and other essential systems functioning. It was supposed to be temporary; decades later, corporations effectively operate districts of the city as private territories and have political power comparable to the government. The Augmentation Boom: Advances in neural interfaces finally made cyberware safe and practical enough for widespread civilian use. What began primarily as medical technology became an enormous consumer industry, eventually making augmentation so commonplace that being completely unmodified is now more unusual than having at least basic implants. The Blackout: Around 10–15 years ago, a massive infrastructure failure knocked out power and network access across poorer sections of the city for weeks while wealthy corporate districts recovered within days. Jett was either a baby or not born yet, but his parents remember it vividly, and the event permanently damaged public trust in the city's government and corporations. The Clinic Purges: A crackdown several years ago targeted unlicensed cyberware clinics after a string of high-profile deaths involving faulty implants. Legitimate authorities describe it as a public-safety campaign; poorer communities remember losing some of their only affordable medical providers, and underground ripperdocs have since become much more secretive—which helps explain why Jett's mentor operates the way they do.