Scavengers

Lore & Background

The Company is a faceless, voiceless employer that exists only as a tinny voice through a cheap phone and a set of cold, numerical quotas. It sends its Scavengers to a string of abandoned moons—hulking, rust-eaten industrial shells where the machinery of some forgotten era still groans in the low gravity. The moons are not terraformed, not maintained. They are dumps, warehouses, and factories left to rot, and the Company wants the metal back out of them. Why it needs the scrap, what it does with it, and who exactly signs the pay stubs are questions the Scavengers never get answers to. The phone does not answer questions. The phone gives orders.

What the Company does not provide is safety. The moons are not empty. Something lives in the ventilation shafts, in the dark between the crates, in the long corridors where the emergency lights flicker and die. The creatures are not hostile in a cartoonish sense; they are simply *there*, and they are hungry, and they are faster than you in the dark. The Scavengers' only real defense is a flashlight beam, a running start, and the hope that the other three are still breathing on the other end of the phone channel.

The quota system is the true antagonist. It does not care about your strategy, your caution, your careful planning to take only the high-value circuit boards. It is a number. Miss it, and the next run is harder, the moon is worse, the creatures are more numerous. The Company's economy runs on Scavenger bodies as much as it runs on scrap, and the phone's flat, unbothered tone makes it clear that replacement is not a tragedy. It is an administrative note.

In Their Own Story

The drop pod shudders, groans, and slams into the deck plating with a sound like a car crash in a cathedral. Four helmets crack open. The air tastes like copper and old grease. "Alright," says the one in the back, already fumbling with the flashlight. "Quota's three hundred. Let's not die."

The first corridor is easy. Crates, pipes, the soft hum of dead machinery. They knock scrap loose, toss it into the shared bin, and the phone buzzes with a flat tone: *Current: 47 / 300.* The one holding the flashlight sweeps the beam down the hall and stops. Something in the far corner is watching. It is not moving. It does not need to move yet.

"Let's go back," says the one who always says let's go back. "No. We're close. Just grab the circuit boards in the next room." The flashlight beam trembles. The thing in the corner tilts its head, just slightly, like a dog hearing a can open in another room.

They run. The pod is there. The door is there. The phone crackles: *Extraction in 00:47.* Forty-seven seconds. The thing is already in the corridor behind them, and it is not running. It is *arriving.*

Reader's Guide

In a typical run, the four Scavengers fall into roles almost instantly, even if nobody assigned them. There's the one holding the flashlight—their beam is the group's eyes, and everyone else orbits that cone of pale light like moths around a streetlamp. If the flashlight dies, the run is over, and everyone knows it.

Then there's the one who always says "let's go back." They are the conscience, the one who notices the sound in the vent, the one who counts the creatures and does the math that nobody else wants to do. They are usually right, and they are usually ignored, and that is the tragedy.

The runner is the one two rooms ahead, already at the next bin, already tossing scrap into the shared pile. They are the engine of the quota. They are also the first to be eaten, because they are the first to be in the dark without backup.

And the hoarder. The one who grabs the heavy metal, the bulky scrap, the stuff that slows everyone down, because *it counts toward the number.* The group argues. The phone buzzes. The quota does not care about your opinions.

The Company, of course, is never in the room. It is a voice in a phone, a number on a screen, a flat tone that says *quota not met* as if commenting on the weather. You never see its offices, never meet its managers, never read its letterhead. You only hear it, and it only speaks in numbers. It is the employer you will never actually see, only hear, and it will replace you before the dust settles on your helmet.

Did You Know?

• The Company is never visually depicted in-game; its entire presence is mediated through a phone voice and on-screen quota text, making it a purely auditory and bureaucratic antagonist.
• Scavengers are completely disposable: if a player dies, they are gone for that run and the Company simply replaces them. There is no respawn, no recovery, no mercy.
• The game's co-op design means the four Scavengers share a single scrap bin and a single extraction timer, forcing constant negotiation between risk and reward in real time.
• The moons are deliberately designed as liminal, industrial spaces—half-factory, half-ruin—so that the horror comes from the environment feeling *almost* safe before it isn't.