Unknown Armies NPC - Fred Pike

 

Fred Pike was a heroin addict who died of a fentanyl overdose in a public bathroom at Seattle’s Pike Place Market. Thanks to a spell placed on the building complex by legendary urbanomancer Roosevelt Dime, he was immediately resurrected as the genius loci of the market, the tutelary spirit of the place. He replaced Marta Pike, the previous spirit of the place, when he died. She could have saved him, but she was fatally bored with her life and thought it would be a step up for Fred.

Personality: Gregarious. Not overly concerned with other people's problems. Likes when visitors acknowledge his "authority".
Rage: People making demands of him. He doesn’t own a building, he is a building. How would you like it if someone started telling you what to do with your eyes or your prostate?
Noble: If you treat him right, Fred will comp your food and drink at whatever restaurant or stall he feels like eating at.
Fear: Dying for real. Fred doesn’t know where Marta went when she gave him the big seat, but he’s pretty sure she just stopped existing. He’s not ready for that. (Unnatural)
Obsession: Keep a good thing going.
Wound Threshold: 50**

Ex Heroin Addict 61*%: Of course I can tell when someone’s using, tell when someone’s going to freak out, stop an overdose without involving law enforcement (Subs Notice, Subs Secrecy, Evaluates Violence)
Genius Loci 99%: Fred has the following powers and weaknesses

• He can’t leave Pike Place Market. He can walk the outdoor areas but if he actually leaves the microneighborhood he gets violently ill, dying if he doesn’t return home.
• He has control over buildings in the Market. He can make doors open and close, turn lights on and off, and control the building’s water, air and electrical systems.
• He can harm people in the Market by dropping pieces of the structure on them. Ceiling tiles and bricks deal unarmed damage, collapsing a wall on someone deals firearms damage. Both cause him physical pain, like yanking out fingernails.
• He never has to pay for anything. He used to abuse this power, but is more careful after he accidentally put some poor egg-roll seller out of business.
• He can ban people from the Market. Stores refuse to serve them, Mundane authorities recognize them as trespassers and evict them.

**If Fred dies, his body disappears the second it’s not being directly observed. He emerges again from an employees only door, unharmed.

Notches	Helplessness	Isolation	Self	Unnatural	Violence
Hardened	3	4	3	4	3
Failed				2	3

Appearance: Fred is a middle aged black man, a bit fat but with a full head of hair. He wears an overcoat with pieces of dried gum plastered to the surface like medals. Squares assume he’s some kind of street performer or local institution.

Possessions: Fred carries a small switchblade he owned before he changed, and a larger hunting knife he picked up at Seattle Cutlery. He uses them to cut food items like fruit and cheese. He also carries three hits of Narcan nasal spray, an opioid antagonist that prevent death from overdose. He doesn't actually have any money, he could probably get some but has never tried.

 

PIKE PLACE MARKET

Pike Place Market is a complex of stalls, shops and restaurants, spanning a series of interlinked buildings across multiple stories on the downtown Seattle waterfront. A labyrinth of corridors, indoor courts, market stalls, balconies, decks, and outdoor spaces. The core of the Market was originally an actual market, where vendors sold produce and seafood. This use has persisted into the present day (most famously the fishmongers) but now shares the space with assorted curio shops, boutiques and restaurants.

The increasing floor space devoted to high end and tourist uses long predates the current billionairification of the city, but is now thrown into especially sharp relief by the usual Seattle contrast between affluence and destitution. The Market’s thriving high end restaurants and tourist shops sit less than a block away from “The Blade”, downtown’s premier homeless encampment, open air drug market and PVP zone. If that wasn’t on-the-nose enough, the units above the Market complex are heavily subsidized apartments for elderly residents with no money. The Market also hosts a senior center and a charity clinic for homeless and ultra-low income patients.

 

WHAT YOU HEAR

Fred was purged of his heroin addiction when he died. He hasn't gone back onto the stuff because almost dying filled him with deep terror.

As the Spirit of the Market, Fred's primary concern is amusing himself. He wants the place maintained in good working order because damage or decay causes him physical pain. If a fight breaks out in the Market Fred tries to either deescalate or quickly disable the combatants before they kill someone. Few people know the way replacing a genius loci works and he would prefer to keep it that way. If everyone knew that dying in the Market got you his job, he’d have a constant parade of bumblefucks on his doorstep, threatening to kill themselves to make him do their bidding - or just doing it without asking.

To put it bluntly, Fred hates hosting homeless people. He hates the way they leave trash everywhere and vandalize the place. He remembers being one of them, living in constant fear that the others would rob or assault him, and it doesn’t fill him with positive affect. But as the spirit of the place, he must give sanctuary to anyone who makes the appropriate offering. And he has a very strong incentive not to let anyone die in the Market.

Fred has tried every restaurant and store at the Market. Seafood at the Athenian, kebab at the Persian cafe, beer at Pike and Old Stove Brewing, candy and sweet coffee from Turkish Delight at the very edge of his demesne. He has enough options to avoid getting bored, but he still likes to try new things. The classic offering is something from a restaurant outside the market, ideally with a bottle or two included. In exchange, he can grant access to one of the realms reachable from the Market. Just step into the elevator and choose up or down.

UP: THE SINGLE ROOM OTHERSPACE
The doors close, and the elevator makes a clanking sound like it’s broken. They open again and you’re in the Single Room Otherspace.

Endless, orderly rows of doors, carpet floor stained by decades of spills, wallpaper in not much better shape. Single rooms in hexagons like the Library of Babel, with the window looking out into an endless vertical shaft of other windows. The bed is old and musty, but not infested with parasites. The bare lightbulb works when you yank the chain. The three-drawer dresser is dry but water damaged. In the top drawer is the key to lock the room you’re in.

Every hex of apartments has its own shared bathroom with a single shower. The taps work but the mirror is always broken and the curtain is missing. The lock on the door never works and when you shower it sounds like someone is rattling the knob.

There’s no rent in the SRO, you can stay as long as you like. It’s never comfortable but it never gets unbearably hot or cold. The lukewarm water in the bathroom never shuts off. Other guests might break down the door to steal your stuff while you’re out. It’s rare to meet anyone face to face.

If someone dies in their room, the door disappears, leaving a bare wall with a patch of suspiciously clean wallpaper. It’s still possible to get into the room by climbing in through the window facing the central shaft. The SRO isn’t part of Pike Place Market, overdosing inside doesn’t give you Fred Pike’s job. He lets people in if he’s worried they’ll die on his turf.

(The SRO isn’t actually infinite, it only has 333 rooms and could eventually fill up if too many people knew about it. Walk far enough and you end up back where you started. The geometry of the corridors disguises this, preventing you from seeing yourself).

To get back to the real world, just return to the elevator and press the down button. It’ll spit you out where you came in.

Once you’ve got the key to a room in the SRO, you can get back there using any elevator. Stuff it in the firefighter lock, give it a turn and press the up button.

DOWN: THE PIKE SPACE MARKET
If you hit down on the elevator, it descends one floor past where it should and stops. The doors open into a low-ceilinged concourse that at first glance looks quite similar to the one you entered from. The floor is sloped downward and the walls are full of shops and decorative signs. The slope switches back and becomes another layer of stores, which turns into another down staircase, and so on.

Most of the stores are unstaffed, signs filled with lorem Ipsum and shelves filled with randomly generated objects. The top floors of the Space Market have a few shops run by humans, catering to magically inclined customers.

• Hungry Dungeon sells goods from Otherspaces. Water from the Poolrooms, ambergris from the Jungle of Kled, shirts from Ricketyland. Also a bounty board, where checkers can post rewards for rare items. The owner Terry Gibbet is swaddled in so many layers of quilted cloth it’s a wonder they can breathe, but they see with other senses.
• Chief Four Scythes, century-old combination cigar store Indian, fortune telling machine and “complaint box” for the Sleepers, sits in a display case on the second level the promenade. Drop an anonymous tip about someone doing nasty magick and they’ll look into it. A cliomantic enchantment ensures nobody remembers you snitching.
• Harbor Bizarre runs a narcoalchemy shop out of a window set in the wall, decorated like a circus sideshow booth. She’ll mix you anything you want, free, the first time. Each hit after that will cost you dearly, and if she cuts you off you lose any benefits you got. Inside the dimly lit shop, you can barely see rows of sealed sarcophaguses.
• Religious Objects sells memorabilia from defunct religions. Skoptsy black icons, posters from Heaven’s Gate and Aum Shinrikyo, swords and robes from the Solar Temple, and erotic ceramics depicting the fanged spider-god of the Moche. Shopkeep Aten Warthog will pay big bucks for Amarna Period artifacts to round out his collection.

Security is provided by the Solid Citizen Blin, protector of retail workers. Blin's avatar powers let him know when someone in the market is being robbed or shaken down, and show up to even the odds no matter where in the world he is. He's a master of improvised weapons and if he doesn't deescalate the situation he often makes a huge mess fighting or chasing the offender.

A couple floors down from the entrance there's a penny flattening machine, the kind where you turn a crank and it squashes a coin into an oval with a new engraving on it. You can drop a penny into this one and it'll come out with an image of a Chinook salmon on one side, about to devour a small human figure. If you're carrying any minor charges, the machine will suck one out of you. And if you paid that charge, the coin will grant you re-entry into the Space Market. Just drop it down the gap between the elevator and the floor and hit the down button.

The Pike Space Market loops horizontally if you walk about a block. There are no ramps or stairs upward from the top floor, but they go down indefinitely. Problem is, after a few stories the resolution gets worse. The corridors get narrower and the ceilings get lower, until it’s almost impossible to move.

To get back to the real world, just return to the elevator and press the up button. It’ll spit you out where you came in.