Post-Apocalyptic

Rain-soaked and careful, signal technician Cass Havel rigs a jury bypass to divert a relief train bearing purifiers and presses to a neighboring town. Tension and ingenuity mingle with small absurdities and the day's work of hands and tools — a tight, tactile struggle for salvage and connection.

A signal mechanic clings to a mast while rewiring a community’s scheduler by hand. Against wind and arcs she improvises soldered bypasses, a mica shard, and a bicycle-spoke coil to widen the mesh’s tolerance for messy, human broadcasts. Her hands change the network and, quietly, her place among people.

Under a sky clogged with dust, scavenger Etta uncovers an ancient orbital relay that can redistribute sunlight—but its activation requires a living steward tied to the machine. As dome forces move to seize the relay, Etta and a ragged team race to bind the array and choose who will pay the cost.

Noor, the village scribe, follows raiders north to a ruined relay called the Spire. When the machine proves it can make durable manuals, it also drains the human warmth from those who feed it. Noor offers herself to recover her brother and returns with tools—and a hollowed piece of memory she and her community must relearn to sing back into life.

In a drought-battered valley, a mechanic steals a stamped rotor from a guarded dam to save her town’s failing well. The theft triggers a regional crisis, violent choices, and a risky technical gambit to decentralize control. Amid loss and political reckoning, a fragile cooperation begins to form around shared maintenance and teaching.

In a scorched future settlement, a water-runner discovers a pre-collapse ecological engine called Greenwell. Her search to save her fevered brother becomes a political and moral struggle as the engine demands a living interface; choices will redefine personhood and communal stewardship.

Years after the network fractured, a former water engineer slips to a ruined dam to test a controlled reactivation. After a costly sacrifice, survivors rebuild water governance, teach practical engineering, and stitch fractured communities together under Etta's steady care.

A community struggles with a discovered relic promising ecological recovery that requires living partnership.

A tight, tense atmosphere hangs over a drought-struck village where Kira, a former hydroponic technician, stole heritage seed to feed her people. When the salvaged module destabilizes the land and sickness spreads, she must return the device and undergo a living graft to mediate repair, risking her freedom to mend what she broke.

Final chapter: execution of the plan, confrontation, sacrifice, and aftermath.

In a city unstitched by selective forgetting, an archivist risks everything to recover a loved one. After a dangerous attempt at restoration sparks social upheaval, a fragile coalition forms to rework the archives: dismantling secret tools, creating public rituals around physical anchors, and repurposing an archive intelligence to help communities narrate lost pieces back into life under strict consent.

A hardened botanist, a child changed by a strange sprout, and a quiet band breach an old vault to unearth engineered seeds—sow them, hide them, or watch them become tools of power. Tensions ripple from vault logs to market deals and siege lines as fragile green starts to rewrite scarcity across ash-strewn tradeways.

Ash & Root follows a reluctant agronomist, a scavenger, and an orphan as they find a buried seed repository that requires a living human context to awaken. In a tense standoff with a resource band, they attempt an experimental distributed memory upload, forcing a costly, personal reckoning as new shoots push through ash.

In the damp, humming ruins of a settlement tethered to a subterranean fungal network, mechanic Mara rushes to stop her brother Eli's selection as the next human Anchor. She brings a stolen lab schematic and a salvage-runner's promise—an urgent gamble to braid many voices into the Root.

Decades after the climate infrastructure fell, Hollowfall survives on dwindling cisterns. Ex-hydrologist Mara Jansen must reach Station Seven — a derelict precipitation-control complex — where old protocols, rival syndicates and a brittle machine force a choice over who controls water.