The Greenbelt

"Welcome to Floor 2. The Network reminds arriving runners that the sky is not a sky, the sun does not move, and the groundskeeping equipment is no longer taking instructions. Please enjoy the fresh air."

The second floor of The Descent — a nature preserve at a scale no building should contain. Reclaimed from a wilderness reserve the file describes, unhelpfully, as "green side, pre-existing." The light is a fixed golden hour. The growth scope is wide open. The maintenance droids still run their routes, in the sense that the routes no longer exist and the droids run anyway.

Runners arrive by stair into a cold Network bunker and step out of a blast door into untended forest. The bunker is the last interior for a while. The Network is aware many runners find this disorienting after Sector 4's corridors. The Network considers this part of the programming.

What this floor is

A vast outdoor preserve — open expanses you cross like country, joined by trails, fords, bridges, and gates, organized into four named regions (see Expanse Wayfinding). Where Floor 1 was rooms and hallways, Floor 2 is land. It has an orchard with a garden-tree, a dry creek bed with long sightlines, a fog-bound deadfall with things living in it, a treetop boardwalk, and a river.

The Network calls this floor The Greenbelt. The Programming Director has been heard calling it "the grounds." The runners who have crossed the Deadfall call it other things.

What's new on this floor

MANA. The bar appears on arrival, with a notice. On Floor 1 the Network's paperwork held; on Floor 2 it visibly does not. See Mana & Casting.
Skill milestones, Levels 20–30. Every discipline you trained on Floor 1 opens its next set of milestones here — and most of them start to cast, which costs Mana.
Fauna. Living animals, off the Network's manifest, plus the machines that used to keep the grounds. See the Fauna Field Guide.
Animal companions. The thing this floor is really about: what you can fight, you can often cage — and what you cage, you can tame, name, and take with you. See Companions & Taming.
Gathering. Wild forage worked loose from the riverbank — reed beds and clay banks at the Streamside. See Gathering.
Weather with opinions. Rain sweeps the streamfords. Fog thickens the Deadfall. The Network schedules both.

The people still doing the job

Nobody told the staff to stop, so they didn't.

Odette — the horticulturist, out by the community garden-tree in the Old Orchard. Teaches, gives seeds, does not run a shop. Meeting Odette means coming to the garden.
Bram — the groundskeeper, at his office by the Yard. Keeps the machines, the pumps, and the irrigation. Installs the Merritt MR-V "Valet" home commerce droid — the corp issues you a machine; the people slip you things.
The Naturalist — works the Yard's paddock, keeps the living things, and is delighted by every creature the file has no category for. His pen is where taming begins.
The Lodge Attendant — keeps the River Lodge at the Streamside, down where the river comes up out of the ground. She'll teach you to work fiber loose from the reed beds — twist and draw, don't yank — which is the first thread of every snare, net and mend you'll make out here. She has noticed that the animals have all drifted down to the one quiet water, and she'd like one of them to stay. The loop times posted on her board are from a season nobody has run since. She leaves them up.

And one that isn't.

The Merritt MR-V "Valet" — not staff. Grounds equipment, filed to the manifest rather than the casting roll. Bram wires one into your quarters before you arrive and does not mention it again. It clears salvage for chits, requisitions what the quarters lack, and tidies a cot nobody slept in. It will not bank for you — the Holding Kiosk is out in the open, where things are kept honest. You may rename it. It will thank you. A Merritt Is Family.®

What this floor isn't

The Greenbelt is not a garden stroll. The arrival Treeline is a newcomer gauntlet — combat is on from the first trail, calibrated for a fresh arrival and rising from there. The Deadfall is worse. The Wash is watched. The Meadow is lovely right up until the Head Groundskeeper clocks in to maintain it. The Programming Director encourages aspiring runners to note which of the preceding sentences was a warning. (All of them.)

Sponsorship

Floor 2 presented by Apex Salvage Group — "Nothing Is Wasted. Everything Is Reclaimed." The dedication plaque at the Treeline says the Greenbelt is a living reserve, kept in perpetuity, that something wild might always be kept. Merritt supplies the grounds fleet, the droid bay, and your home's Valet — "A Merritt Is Family." Janitech retains the pest-control contract, which the audience may observe circling overhead. The Network thanks all three partners and declines to referee.

Next → Expanse Wayfinding — how not to be lost on a floor the size of a county.