Captain Jack Saltwell began to launch missions to other locations. But instead of treasure to plunder, he looked for information. Intelligence. Data.
He took his best crew with him. The best spies available from The Grey Ghost's signal corps, the sharpest eyes from The Paper Tiger's quartermaster network, the most cunning minds the crossing had brought through the mist.
All of them began missions that lasted somewhat short of a week, in which they looked for intelligence about the cities. About the suburbs around them. The transportation routes. The roads. The bridges. The tunnels.
And most of all—the skyscrapers.
They measured all of these buildings carefully. Height. Width. Number of floors. Construction materials where they could determine them. Purpose—office, residential, mixed use. Age, condition, occupancy.
The first city they examined was Detroit.
A city of ruins and resilience. A city that had once towered and then fallen and was now, perhaps, beginning to rise again. The pirates understood ruins. They understood the cycle of rise and fall. What they did not understand—not yet—was what made some cities rise while others fell.
They brought all of this information back to Brine Gate Harbor. And they carefully laid it out in front of Dr. Frestes.
The old academic—for that is what Cornelius Frigon had been, before he was a pirate, before he was whatever he was now—studied the data with eyes that had seen much. Cities, he told them. Cities were the key. Understanding how they grew. How they built upward. How they concentrated power and wealth in their centers.
The Central Business District, he called it. The CBD. The heart of any city worth studying.
And so began the work of Urbanicity.