The Pit

In lieu of the normal authoring conventions of this cache, I'm leaving this article to Saint-Ain't, as he's had the most hands-on experience with this hellhole.

— Null Kit

Written by: Sain't-Ain't

There's two things that are iconic about Raleigh's own special little stretch of barrens that everyone calls the Concrete Forest: The first are the namesake 'trees'; those skeletal skycraper-husks that were supposed to be the nexus of the Forester Group's business and information-technology complexes, but now mark the border of the parts of Raleigh most folk wouldn't dare venture through without an armed escort, hollow and dirty, looking like the remnants of trees after a forest fire. The second iconic landmark of the forest is the structure in the heart of Forestville, a huge, smoke belching building that marks the destination of the Barrens' few communal pilgrimages. This article's about the latter.
As far as Raleigh's politicians and 'civilized' folk are concerned, the structure's called the 'Forestville Arcology', an early attempt at the concept of a self-sustaining residential superstructure that wouldn't technically have been self-sustaining, if it ever saw life, and now stands as a monument dedicated to the ultimate fate of Raleigh's investment in the Forester Group. To the people living in the Concrete Forest, it's called the Pit, a dangerous yet titilating multi-story maze of abandoned complexes, endlessly belching out a torrent of opaque, toxic smoke through its halls from the fires deep in its heart, a blaze kept lit by the dissilusioned and vengeful residents of the Concrete Forest to remind Raleigh of its countless crimes. Maybe. We're still not sure about the exact nature of the fire...
If you've got commonsense, you'd understand that the Pit isn't a place you should ever go of your own volition. But for the demographics of foolish, daring and mentally unwell people in the Concrete Forest and beyond, there's always something that gets people to strap on a ghetto gas-mask and climb through the broken windows and inside the barrens' blackened heart. For some, it's to throw more crap into the fire in the hopes that it'll keep burning for a while longer, and for others it's the allure of the stashes of valuable goods the denizens of the forest hide in the smokey halls to deter all but the most dedicated stalkers and thieves.
But the third temptation, and the one you're probably most interested in? It's that in spite of years of pilgrimages and treks through the building to the middle, we haven't even begun to fully explore this place. Sure, pretty much all of the rooms on the first floor and up have been mapped out by someone or another, but having taken a peak in the underground parts myself? Yeah, we're not even close to seeing what this place's full deal is. If you wanna look yourself, be my guest; I bet if the Forester group left any fancy drek down there, it's probably not been touched since. For a pretty good reason, mind you...

Purpose / Function

Back when the Forester Group were still a thing, this building was going to be the heart and soul of the industries that would make up the new Forestville, a combination luxury apartment-building, laboratory and production facility where the finest minds in Raleigh (at least, the finest ones that the Forester Group could extract) would congregate and produce all sorts of goods and technology that the rest of Forestville would work towards selling and mass-producing. Once Forestville became the Concrete Forest, the Pit took on a more straightforward purpose of being a great big perpetual pyre burning in the middle of the Concrete Forest, as a perpetual middle-finger to society, and as a semi-safe place to stash your stuff where most people are smart enough to avoid.

Alterations

The Pit's not had much in the way of intentional changes for obvious reasons, but years of dereliction and having a bonfire burning in the middle of it has no doubt changed it in a myriad of small ways. The top and outermost layers of the structure have mostly been worn away by time and the elements, while the sections near the bottom have been pulled apart and walled back up by countless go-gangers looking to turn the arcology into their own fort, before giving up for some reason or another, and what was left of the shiny chrome panelling has turned a matte black from years of fire and smoke billowing through it.

Architecture

It used to be that this giant pile of burnt crap was the brainchild of one of the CAS's most famous and academically respected architects, and back in the day... it didn't really look like it either. It was supposed to be a collective vision of the future, incorporating all the latest fads in architectural engineering, climate-control and nanomachine-assisted construction, but to anyone with functioning eyes, it was an unsightly cubist nightmare of chrome geometric shapes and jutting sections. If y'ask me, the place looks better now that it's been abandoned and burnt for a few years.

History

We've all heard the story of the Concrete Forest, about how Jonathan Brightday and a bunch of other silicone arcology quadrillionares banded together to create the mother of all ivory towers, to turn a big chunk of Wake County into a mini-sprawl for all the CAS's best business-leaders, engineers and scientists to... well, they weren't really clear on what they were gonna do, just that it would make the CAS rich as hell and the UCAS mad, which as far as motivations go isn't the worst I've heard.
Anyways, the epicenter of this idea was the Forestville Arcology. Brightday and his hand-picked 'Forester Group' were gonna have their own little gated community in the middle of their gated community, living in the most luxurious accomodations of the time and working in the most advanced labs and facilities money can buy in the same building. Truth be told it wasn't technically an arcology since it wasn't even close to being fully self-sufficient and relied on imports from the rest of Forestville, but bragging about living in a 'forestville campus' doesn't have the same song and dance as an arcology.
The not-arcology was one of the first structures they started building in the Forestville project, almost to a comical degree: By the time they finished the foundations of the surrounding buildings alone, not only did they have the core of the building set up, they were running preliminary tests on the fancy new miniaturised fission powerplant sitting in the center of it.

If the Roxbridge paydata's to be believed, Brightday was claiming this little thing would have enough energy to power most of Forestville by itself. Investigators after the fact found out this was a total exaggeration, but it didn't stop some corps from sending in people to look at what's left of it these days, and to its credit some of the stuff they gleamed from it was put to use in current argologies to pretty decent affect.

— Redhat

This was all for a reason, mind you. Jonathan and his gaggle of yes-men wanted to integrate themselves into Forestville as soon as possible and involve themselves in its construction, whether the actual people in charge of that wanted them there or not. As a result of all of this, pretty much all of the Forester Group's personal rooms were more or less complete and in luxurious working order, in comparison to the tents and prefab cratehomes everyone else was huddling up in.
Meanwhile, underneath the structure, another cadre of workers were hard at work building basement-floor after tunnel after substructure underneath the arcology, and unlike the (allegedly) pretty stuff above, workers were talking about how completely utilitarian these underground rooms were. Most were used as utility and storage for the not-arcology being built above, but others were designed more like bunkers and vaults than anything else: thick, reinforced walls and heavy doors, closed-circuit power systems and sturdy computers hooked up to (now-destroyed) sensor-clusters up on the surface. And to add to the mystery, the workers in those rooms were from a completely different company than the mostly Saeder-Krupp subsidiaries working topside.
When the Forester Group up and vanished in '56, the Arcology was naturally the first place they looked and consequently found no signs of them; even their quarters looked like they were never lived in, and any personal electronics left behind were wiped clean. Despite the best efforts of the understandably nervous Raleigh City-Council, and Lone-Star even pulling an all-out manhunt, it looked like the Forester Group and a handful of subordinates had vanished, one by one, throughout the day and didn't leave a single trace, including most of the money needed to finish the Forestville project.
The remaining people did their best to conduct damage-control from the arcology, but with funding gone and a growing number of disillusioned workers, even they eventually up and abandoned ship, only taking with them the essentials because nobody wanted to be around when the nooses were being tied. The building stood empty for a long while, save for curious corporate reps and vandals looking for something to take their anger out on, and for a few years Raleigh did their best to forget the eyesore ever existed, along with the rest of Forestville.
Come early 2061, and some workers noticed a plume of smoke rising from the now-abandoned Forestville Arcology. At first, they dismissed it as another fire started by squatters or angry vandals, but as it grew in size, people started to worry, and those worries only multiplied when former employees from the project remembered that there was a functioning fission-powerplant in the middle of the structure, and while the primary fuel-rods were transported out of Forestville a while back, you never know...
Understandable deciding that it's better to be safe than sorry, the city sent in a few emergency-service vehicles along with a contracted nuclear engineer to put the blaze out, just in case the worst had happened. They were expecting some resistence, having known in advance that Forestville was still full of angry workers and that squatters had began occupying some of the buildings, including the arcology, but they were nowhere near ready for how unified and violent the occupants of the abandoned structure were at repelling the emergency workers, using everything from rocks, to power-tools to stolen and handmade firearms to ruin the day of anyone who came near, until they forced the emergency services to retreat back to the safety of the spraw.
Raleigh City-Council eventually dismissed the fire as a threat to the city's existence after careful analysis via geiger-counter equipped drones swooping in from above, and the city went back to ignoring the new stretch of barrens, that the locals were now calling the Concrete Forest. But the truth is that nobody really knows what the fire's deal is: As the years went by, the fire intensified but never grew out of control, seemingly content to burn endlessly and belch a torrent of black and only slightly radioactive smoke over Forestville, and while barrens residents continue to make occasional pilgrimages to what they were calling 'The Pit' to throw more combustible 'fuel' into the firery maw, nobody's really sure if it needs fuel at all.
Things remained that way until 2079: One of the first major settlements of the Concrete Forest, the Rampart, let their curiosity about the Pit overtake their common-sense: A handful of their best Falconers and a small escort of mercenaries - myself included - to mount an expedition into the heart of the Pit, take some readings on homebuilt sensory-aperatus and figure out what was actually going on.
I'll spoil things for you chummers: We didn't find any answers, but we learned a few new questions. The journey there and back wasn't notable, potshots from gangers aside, but that changed when we managed to tunnel our way through to the core of the Pit. The makeshift heatsuits we were stuffed into barely kept us conscious while the leader took some readings of the fire's heart, and a couple of leaks meant two Falconers were looking at a life of assisted breathing. Meanwhile, another group had gone underground to see what's happening underneath the fire, and... well, they're gone. We'll review that elsewhere.
Once we were all out and having some celebratory water (well, the beer had ice in it), the eggheads at the Rampart looked over the sensor results and reviewed the camera footage, and they came to a couple of very unsettling revelations. The first was that the composition of the smoke and gasses contained trace amounts of a radioactive isotope but one that has nothing to do with the fuel and materials that were allegedly used in the Forester Group's reactor design. The second and more alarming one came from the cybereyes of one of the other shadowrunners brought along: The remains of the reactor were belching out a lot of smoke, but some of it was originating from beneath the reactor.
Things have been silent since then, and if the Rampart's made any headway on what they've discovered I've not heard about it. I'd say I'm hoping it's nothing serious, but I thought the same about the first plumes of smoke, so...

RUINED STRUCTURE
2059

Alternative Names

Forestville Arcology

Type

Arcology / Residential Complex

Parent Location

The Concrete Forest