Once a sprawling rail maintenance facility on the eastern fringe of the Milwaukee Core, the Coppice Yards were flooded during the 2171 Lake Michigan surge and subsequently abandoned by Ringo Heavy Industries, who held the lease. Nature moved in with the kind of velocity only accelerated climate systems produce. Engineered mycorrhizal networks — originally seeded by Helix Biosystems as a remediation project that lost its funding — spread through the ballast and cracked concrete, and within a decade the entire 40-block rail yard was a living, semi-sentient fungal forest. Bioluminescent mushroom columns now rise six and seven stories, their caps splayed wide enough to shelter entire encampments. The old rail lines still run beneath, half-submerged, colonized by something that looks like moss but isn't.

The Coppice Yards have become one of the strangest inhabited zones in GLMZ. Roughly four thousand people live inside the fungal canopy, in structures woven from mycelium-hardened lattice and salvaged Ringo steel. The Helix remediation network, running on a buried substation that somehow survived the flood, occasionally pulses chemical signals through the colony — signals that long-time residents claim to feel through their skin, especially those without BCI shielding. The effect is mild: a sense of drowsy well-being, sometimes accompanied by involuntary memory recall. Locals call it "getting dosed by the yard."

The zone is not technically claimed by any corponation, which makes it legally ambiguous and practically ungovernable. Ferrogate Security patrols the perimeter on contract for a Tier 3 municipal authority that can't afford to do anything more aggressive. Inside, a loose council of mycologists, squatter-clan elders, and one very old E.L.F. that calls itself Cordyceps manages the internal economy and resolves disputes. The Coppice Yards are strange, quiet, and suffused with something that might generously be called peace — or might more accurately be called the fungal equivalent of sedation.