Southern Bay Floor
The wind is the first thing you notice — no tall structures to break it, no canyon walls to contain it, just flat seabed and exposure. The smell is brine, sediment, and the faint sulfur of decomposing organic material trapped in the clay. Sound carries across the flats with nothing to absorb it — conversations, machinery, and the occasional crack of structural failure as improvised buildings settle unevenly into unstable ground. The light is better here than the Deep Dregs, which means the poverty is visible.
You build on ground that wasn't ground a generation ago and you hope it holds, because there's nowhere further to be pushed.
Pre-Collapse Identity
Open water — the Extension Bay and the shallow tidal flats extending toward the Faultline shoreline. Fishing boats, recreational sailors, and the brown pelicans that hunted anchovies in the shallows. The water was already polluted. The draining just removed the dilution.
Current Character
The southern extension of the bay floor Dregs — shallower and more exposed than the Deep Dregs of Sector 9, transitioning from the dense canyon of the central bay toward the marshier south bay. Forty to sixty feet below the Rim, the settlements here are sparser, the infrastructure more improvised, the density lower. This is where the Dregs thins out — fewer stacked towers, more horizontal sprawl across hardened seabed. The old the Corridor Bridge is visible to the south, its pylons marking the administrative boundary of the fully drained zone. Beyond it, the ground gets soggy and the settlements get desperate in different ways. People come here when even the Deep Dregs is too crowded, too dangerous, or too visible.
Terrain & Atmosphere
Flat exposed seabed at a shallower depth than Sector 9, which means the Rim walls are lower, the canyon is less claustrophobic, and more natural light reaches the floor. The terrain transitions from hardened sediment in the north to increasingly soft, unstable ground in the south as the bay floor approaches the marshland. Old infrastructure pokes through the surface — pipes, cable conduits, the foundations of structures built on bay fill that are now exposed geological features. The wind reaches here in ways it can't reach the Deep Dregs, making the southern floor colder and more exposed.
Corporate Presence
Ungoverned. Ironclad runs scavenger operations picking through the exposed seabed for salvageable materials. Wholesome sends outreach teams from the south — food distribution that maps the population and builds dependency. Relief deploys medical teams. None of them govern. All of them harvest.
Key Locations
The Corridor Bridge pylons (visible southern boundary marker — a line of concrete columns marching across the landscape), Containment Level 9 (deep sub-bay facility in the old shipping channels near the Sector 9 border — what's being contained is classified), the Transition Zone (where hardened seabed gives way to marsh).
Sub-Sectors
Nine sub-sectors of open seabed — no named neighborhoods, no claimed territory, just variations in how empty the emptiness is.
The Pylon March
21.5 km²
Northern bay floor where the Corridor Bridge pylons begin their march south — massive concrete columns standing in hardened sediment like the ruins of a cathedral with no walls.
The Trench
34.9 km²
Old shipping channel territory, where the bay's deepest pre-drainage corridors cut trenches into the seabed that still collect runoff and chemical pooling.
The Cracked Shelf
20.8 km²
Shallow sediment flats where the bay floor rises toward the western Rim — the ground is harder here, baked by decades of sun exposure, cracking in geometric patterns.
The Pipe Fields
19.7 km²
Central bay floor, featureless except for the exposed pipe networks of pre-Cascade utility infrastructure that surface like mechanical fossils.
The Fill
17.0 km²
Eastern margin where the seabed slopes gently upward toward the Faultline shoreline, the ground transitioning from marine clay to unstable fill.
The Numbered Camps
29.3 km²
Bridge pylon corridor — the Corridor Bridge's mid-span foundations stand here in a line, their bases colonized by scavenger camps that use the concrete for windbreaks.
The Reed Line
40.3 km²
Transitional marsh at the sector's southern edge, where hardened seabed gives way to soft ground that holds boot prints and swallows foundations.
The White Crust
23.0 km²
Western seabed shelf where tidal salt deposits create a white mineral crust that crunches underfoot and poisons any attempt at agriculture.
The Stilt Border
27.5 km²
Southeastern corner where the bay floor meets the marshland proper — standing water, reed growth, and the sulfur smell of organic decomposition in anaerobic clay.