New Teras, Topside

Topside

Simultaneously a city and a country, New Teras occupies the bulk of the western coast of Domovina. Founded in the distant past, sometime after The Collapse but long enough ago to predate scholarly memory. What is known is that Terran settlers crossed The Ravaged Sea to establish a beachhead and to reestablish contact with their primordial kin in Domovinia. They made camp between the sea and the western edge of the Great Waste along a thin band of arable soil, from that initial camp emerged an outpost, which turned into a town, which grew into a city, that eventually evolved into the largest megalopolis on the planet. Still technically a colony beholden to Teras, NT largely functions as an independent city state with its own unique culture and economic system, a society based around the reverence of technology and innovation, in stark contrast to its magic using neighbors. It is also a place of profound contradiction, home to soaring achievement and excess, but also crushing despair and violence.
One billion. That is the current population estimate for New Teras. The key word is “estimate”, there hasn’t been a genuine attempt to take a physical census for centuries, not since the early decades of the industrial period. The central registrar has deemed it an unrealistic task in a place so incredibly dense and complex, in their words akin to “counting every grain of sand in The Great Waste”.
The city is entirely covered in a grid of mammoth towers thousands of feet tall. Essentially the city is a layered structure composed of four main parts, the Underside, where people can go an entire lifetime never seeing the sunlight, home to the poorest citizens, it can be an extremely dangerous place, but can also be a place of great community and vibrance. The Middleness, sterile, safe, and ordered, where the bulk of the population lives, people live and die here without experiencing much more than being a cog in the great NT mechanism. Topside, sun touched, where the upper classes live and mingle, many from Middleness get a taste of it when they commute to their jobs there. And lastly Old Town, a dense cluster of glass and steel towers in the middle of the city, it’s the brain of NT. Via its own self-aggrandizing mythologizing it was built on top of the site of the original colonial outpost, at its center is the pyramid of the Oligarchs, a great glass structure nearly four miles high, the home of the most powerful people and entities in the city.