A World With No Extras IV: The Medallion

Part I
Part II
Part III

The Medallion, the red city's financial district, buildings thrown into a hulking, black, monolithic silhouette by the crimson light of the evening.  Once this was a place where the children of the lakes and prairies brought their riches in the form of cattle, to be bought and sold, and eventually to be slaughtered.  Now the cattle have been abstracted and those dwelling in the steel towers deal in debt securities and derivative instruments, moving vast and imaginary fortunes back and forth, and hoping that no one realizes the riches only exist because a handful of important men agree they do.  Not everything is so sterile, though - the blood of innocents has soaked the ground, tainting the foundation stones, and wealth sprung from blood brings vice.  The homeless crowd out-of-towners asking for alms and find occasional work as runners bringing something illegal from another neighborhood to the dwellers in the glass minarets. Lee Riggs is one of these, a twenty six year old kid with a fresh face, an honest smile, and a switchblade.  His partner Rob is a wizened old man who used to be the safecracker in a crew of drugstore cowboys.  Both are homeless by choice, having been rejected by society and rejecting it in return. 

The homeless are mostly ignored by the cops.  Kace Vang and his partner Fatima Grant think of them as too troublesome to find given the usual pettiness of their transgressions against the law.  They focus on violent crime, which, while comparatively rare in the Medallion, is still all too frequent given the sheer number of people moving through and the fortunes won and lost.  Their Sergeant, John Garrison, has charged Grant, who stands nearly seven feet tall, to make it her business to take a gun forcibly away from someone every day that she works.  While they are on duty, Kace and Fatima occasionally stop in to the Medallion Java Club for a shot of espresso and a bit of gossip.  Grace, the owner's daughter, pours an excellent cuppa, but they spend most of their time talking to Rory Hendricks, the manager, who seems to know a little bit of everything happening in the Medallion.

High above all of this in the concrete and crystal cloud-piercers lie the offices of Hopper Financial Services.  Joziah Hopper has inherited the reins of the company from his father Amiri, who is still alive and puts incredible pressure on his sons.  Thus far, Joziah has been successful.  He is one of those rare men who can carry a habit and a job at once, a highly functional addict.  He speaks to no one about his meetings with Lee Riggs or his daily ten bag routine, or his hatred of the industry and the people therein.  He tells himself the dope is to keep him going and to help him meet the expectations of others, the only thing he has that is his and only his, but the isolation of the lie he lives does nothing but add to the mounting pressure in his mind.  One day that pressure may crack him, and it is hard to tell if it will mean a swan dive from a tall building, or if it will be his younger brother Anderson who pays the price or Alaiya Nash, the escort he hires from the White Rose Club to keep his secrets and hang on his arm when the situation calls for him to have a companion.  For her part, Alaiya believes in nothing she cannot touch, and is gathering information on Joziah which she plans to use to blackmail him.  Perhaps this will be the trigger that leads to his ultimate breakdown.  Or she may try to blackmail Johnny Sharpe, the ancient proprietor of the service for which she works, threatening to expose what happens at his "private parties."  She has toyed with the idea but her intuition tells her Johnny is much more dangerous than his aged frame conveys, and in this at least, she is right.  Johnny's own experience with blackmail has allowed him to wield influence like a weapon, and he has strings attached to everyone and everything in the Medallion.

Johnny's bouncer, Dylan, has a daughter named Promise who is wise way past her young years, having been raised mostly by the patrons and dancers of the club, and having guessed at some of the few things she has been shielded from - such as the aforementioned "private parties."  Johnny wanted to have her attend, but her father vowed to kill him if he did so, and Johnny believes him.  She is entering her teens and has found a pair of boys she can twist to her any whim in the form of Winston Meyer, a formerly homeless kid who has been taken in by the folks at the Medallion Java Club, and Christian McCollough, a teenager working in the mail room at Hopper Financial.  They both vie for her affection and would do nearly anything if she told them to.  These kids, still developing the ability to understand consequences, can be exceptionally dangerous in the right circumstances, especially Christian, who seems to have no limits to the hate he has for the hypocrisy and hubris he sees in the adults around him.

Winston, for his part, gives a little of his pay to Nola Matthews every week.  Nola is mad; she sees everything exactly as it is, rather than paying attention to the misleading pictures words place in the minds of most men, and this has driven her insane.  She is regarded as a prophet by the homeless, who intuit her ability through the pronouncements she sometimes shares when lucid, and is generally looked after.  She is the only one who sees Salem Jones for what he is, naming him Deathbringer, Hollow Man, and Soulthief, and those with the wisdom to pay attention have started to steer clear of him. Jones sometimes appears to be one of the homeless and sometimes appears to be a small time hustler. His real hobby isn't passing dope to Lee Riggs but stalking and taking those who will not be missed.  People are his playthings and his hobby is murder; never does he feel more alive than when he has someone at his mercy in the streets he refers to as his playground.  Any one of the people above could become his prey.

I've finished the first of the files I created for the "World Without Extras" Dungeon 23 project I'm working on a little early - the idea was a character per day, and I've finished 31 characters thus far.  I have changed the goals a little, with each month being a neighborhood, and within that neighborhood having several "families" which could be blood relations but could also be those associated through a particular place of employment or some other uniting factor.  This month after doing the first few characters, I decided the neighborhood would be the Medallion, the financial center of the city.  The "families" involved are the Hoppers, a group of blood relations and associations who run Hopper Financial, the police of Precinct 10, the folks who work at the Medallion Java Club, an excellent purveyor of coffee, the employees and associates of the White Rose Club, an escort service, and a group of people I call the Thorn Street Irregulars, who are mostly homeless.

The paragraphs above describe a few of the relationships between these people, but there are many many more connections, and I expect the number of these only to grow as I begin to work on other places within the city.  Those of you who run games can probably already see a few "hooks" as it were, though none of these were intentionally developed as such, and are more the organic result of the relationships themselves.  I still do not know if I am making a gaming aid or laying the groundwork for a novel, but it's been nice to have something regular to do involving creativity and writing.  There have been a few times this month where I forgot during the early part of the day and had to make time to sit down and create a character and think about the relationships they would have later in the day.  Once I actually got up out of bed to make myself do it.

It will be interesting to see the end result of these efforts, assuming I can sustain them, which I have every intention of doing.  I have found that if you want to get better at something you should do it regularly, and my hope here is that I will be better at character development and finding relationships between characters as a result of doing this.  When I was working in construction, I had a day where I hit one of my fingers with a hammer and it hurt like a son of a bitch.  My boss, an old man who was full of folksy wisdom like "The drywall don't get any lighter as you get older, go back to school," and "Mass and gravity always have the right of way," overheard me cursing and told me to stop, and then heard me say something about how HE never hit himself with a hammer.  

He asked me, "How many times do you think you drove a nail before you hit your finger?" and when I wasn't sure, he said "maybe ten thousand?" and I allowed that might be about right.  

"Well," he said, "when you've hit your finger ten thousand times, you'll be pretty good with a hammer, too."