Radio

Radio is not a music player with a skip button. Nitroit's stations are stations: call letters (where licensed), formats, hosts, shows, schedules and things to say. They run on a clock, identify themselves at the top of the hour, and carry the story of the city — including, eventually, the Revada Festival. Their schedules follow the game's continuous clock (Time). Host lists are in Cast.

How the stations work

The game builds them the way American radio is built:

Element	In the game
Legal ID	At the top of every in-game hour, each licensed station states its call letters and community of licence, as FCC rules require. It is the only line every licensed station reads the same way.
Imaging	Sweepers, liners, jingles, beds and drops between tracks — audio branding that says where you are without interrupting anything. Each station's imaging matches its format: Millennium's is loud and cut hard, Umbra's low and warm, TKK's distorted on purpose.
Dayparting	Stations do not sound the same at 2 p.m. and 2 a.m. Hosts have slots, and each slot has its own imaging and energy.
Shows	Named, recurring programmes with their own formats — not a shuffled playlist with occasional talk.
Live reads	Hosts read local advertising themselves, in their own voices, for businesses the player can visit. Shops the player has a relationship with buy spots.
Talk breaks	Hosts have opinions, running bits, and things going on in their lives across the campaign.

Nothing on the radio is static. Hosts react to the season, the weather, what is happening in the city, and the festival's arrival. A player forty hours in is listening to stations that have changed since Act 1.

WMLN — "Millennium 101.3"

Nitroit's rock station. Active rock: nu metal, alternative, hard rock, punk and pop punk.

Host: Z Mike. One man, most of the broadcast day, audibly incapable of doing anything at low volume. He talks fast, talks over intros, shouts song titles, and treats every track as the best thing he has ever put on air. He is not ironic about the music and never winks at it. The station's whole position is unapologetic nostalgia for one era of American rock radio, and Z Mike is the last person alive who thinks that era should not have ended.

Why he works during a race. Millennium's imaging is tight and short, its talk breaks brief and loud, and Z Mike's job is to hand off to the next song with as much momentum as possible. A Millennium sweeper landing as the player comes out of a tunnel at 190 km/h is the best audio moment the station produces, and it is designed to be.

Show	When	What
Wake Up Screaming	Morning drive	Z Mike at maximum, at an hour nobody should be. Traffic, weather, and the loudest song in the library at 7:00.
The Long Haul	Midday	Deep cuts and album tracks. The one slot where he stops shouting.
Requests After Dark	Evening	Listeners call in; Z Mike argues with them about which record is better.
Rust Belt Rewind	Weekly	An hour on one album, band or year. The only time he talks about anything seriously.

Umbra

Underground hip hop. On air from sunset to sunrise, and not one minute before.

Umbra shares its AM frequency with a daytime-only station: the other licence holds the daylight hours, and Umbra signs on when it signs off. The player cannot hear Umbra in the afternoon — not because the game locks it, but because the station is not broadcasting.

The signal is weak, the audio warm and slightly murky, and it drops out under the rail bridges. None of this is a defect.

Hosts: Kane, Zane and Dwayne. Three friends in a booth — unsigned artists, rarities, B-sides, live freestyles, and a chemistry that is half the reason anyone listens. They are crate-diggers, not broadcasters: they interrupt each other, lose the thread, argue about records for ten minutes, and play things twice because the first time got talked over. They were friends before the show, and it shows in every break. In-jokes go unexplained and nicknames are inherited; a player who listens across the campaign works out the history between them without any of it being narrated.

Why it matters to the city. Umbra is Nitroit's own scene. The artists are local, unsigned and real inside the fiction, and some are NPCs the player meets at night meets — the record playing at 2 a.m. belongs to someone who was standing in a car park in the Industrial Flats earlier that evening.

Show	When	What
Sundown	Sign-on	The first hour. Slow, low; nobody raises their voice.
The Basement	Late evening	New local records, most of them unreleased.
Open Mic	Late night, weekly	Local MCs freestyle live over whatever Kane has on the decks. Recorded off the air by people across Nitroit onto whatever they have.
Last Call	Pre-dawn	Whoever is still awake. Sometimes just one of them, talking.

TKK

Frenchcore, hardstyle, hard techno, freetekno, hardtek, jumpstyle. Unlicensed.

TKK has no call letters because it has no licence. It is a pirate station run from somewhere in the Industrial Flats, broadcasting on whatever frequency is clear that week. It never gives a legal ID, because legally it does not exist. Every so often it moves: the frequency the player has tuned changes during the campaign, and finding it again is left entirely to them.

This is not affectation. TKK's music comes from the European free-party scene, which is unlicensed by nature; a station playing it in an American rust-belt city would be a pirate or would not exist.

Hosts: Blitz and Krieg, sister and brother.

• Blitz does most of the talking — fast, clipped, dry, funny in a way that takes a second to land. She runs the transmitter, knows the law well enough to stay ahead of it, and treats getting shut down as a scheduling inconvenience.
• Krieg barely speaks. When he does it is one flat sentence, usually the funniest thing in the break. He selects the music, and he is the reason the station is good.

They are siblings who work together and do not need to explain themselves to each other, broadcasting to a few thousand people from a room with the window open.

Show	When	What
Signal Check	Sign-on, irregular	Blitz confirms the frequency, reads out where they are not, and starts.
Hard Line	Peak hours	Continuous, mixed, no talk for forty minutes at a time.
Teknival	Weekend nights	Live from wherever the party is. Audio quality varies wildly and they do not care.
Off Air	—	Sometimes the station is simply not there. It comes back.

Radio and the rest of the game

• The police listen too. At high List positions (Police), news bulletins cover the pursuits. Z Mike reads it as a traffic story. Umbra reads it differently. TKK finds it funny.
• The festival arrives through these stations (Campaign), each in character: Millennium sells it, Umbra is sceptical of it, TKK ignores it until Blitz makes a joke about the ticket prices.
• Local advertising is the city's own economy. The shops the player uses buy spots, and a player at Loyal with a shop will eventually hear its owner read their own advert badly.
• There is no radio in Revada. Nitroit's stations do not reach that far, and the drive out is scored by them fading into static. At a festival venue there is the PA, race control and engine noise, and nothing else. The silence is one of the ways Revada is established as somewhere Jake does not belong.