Redmond

Redmond used to be one of the wealthiest and most successful communities of greater Seattle. In the 20th century, it was a major center for the burgeoning computer industry. Huge office complexes and skyscrapers sprang up along with suburban homes as businesses expanded and moved into the area.

The Redmond Barrens are practically lawless, where possession of the smallest amount of food or the least valuable trinket can be a reason for someone to kill you. Weekly convoys of armed trucks deliver food to the district’s few stores and charitable shelters, frequently attacked by roving bands of squatters and gangs looking to steal the shipments

It’s always dark. Even the light only serves to deepen the shadows cast by urban decay and neglect. Trash piles in the streets and not a block is free of a barrel fire or a bullet hole. The Stuffer Shacks have double-armored glass, and the coffin motels smell like solvent and the blood it failed to wash away. The devil rats aren’t afraid of a Ghost-damned thing, the cops don’t get out of their cars (assuming they make a drive through at all), and the go-gangs are revving and whooping at all hours.

The folks who live here in the neighborhood that defined Z-Zones rarely have a functional roof. Electricity, plumbing, and Matrix access are jury-rigged or outright stolen and dumpster diving is a time-honored activity for both the residents and the enterprising scrapers of the region. Time was, they’d sneak into Bellevue and take what they could get, selling, trading, or keeping what they got to keep the Barrens going. Bellevue’s answer? A nice, big wall cutting the worst sections off from the nice, honest SINners. Most of the nicer wreckage you find here today is courtesy of the luxury district twenty years ago, lending a lot of spots a kind of baroque, decayed elegance. Y’know, if you squint really hard.

That’s another thing. Redmond has very, very few registered SINners. The dispossessed end up here, rejects and ruffians and refugees, relegated to the garbage-heap ruin that makes up most of the region. Most folks here are squatters, at best, and education is a rarity for those who have the time and inclination. Between eating out of trash cans and living in the vicinity of a melted-down nuclear reactor, lifespans frequently don’t surpass the twenties.

Redmond isn’t all bad, necessarily. There’s Touristville, where the rich come to slum in a kind of parody of poverty, with smoky casinos, strip clubs, bunraku parlors, and all the BTLs and booze and designer chems they can afford. Here, it’s all about the neon, whether physical or AR, and the semifaux mixture of the decrepit and the decadent. The point is to make rich people feel like they’re being adventurous without putting them in any actual risk, which makes it more like a Redmond theme park than authentically Redmond. It’s all run by the syndicates, so while crime is just as prevalent as anywhere, it’s more a commodity for sale than a risk around every corner, so long as you follow the rules and pay all your tabs promptly

Literally none of the revenue goes into the neighborhood and Touristville might as well be its own separate district for all that its residents care. They aren’t welcome, and they aren’t looking to be. Whatever parody of government is in power this month, it’s the gangs and the gun that rule Redmond, and for some, they wouldn’t have it any other way. The Stars only patrol a few neighborhoods, and it’s really just to fulfill their contractual obligations, as Redmond is technically part of their jurisdiction. That makes a lot of it an E-Zone, at least on paper. Touristville technically makes C, but again, it’s the Mob calling the shots, there, and those cops enjoy plenty of bribes and perks to turn a blind eye to rampant, genteel subversions of city ordinances (in other words, most Stars consider it a pretty cherry assignment). E-Zones get drive-bys to make a show of force, more a deterrent of presence than any actual effort to prevent or solve crimes. The only time this changes is when some heinous criminal goes to ground in the Barrens, and then they come in force. If the victim is from Redmond, you’re not getting any help. If the victim wasn’t from Redmond, you better get out of help’s way.

The other end of this is the Funhouse (though those looking to legitimize it are calling it the Crimson Triangle, or just the Triangle), ruled by the western dragon Urubia. This six-building region has been renovated into what might constitute a faux arcology, self-sufficient and well-guarded. The occupants are treated well, by all accounts, with jobs, education, health care, and no small degree of entertainment. It almost feels like it’s not a part of Redmond, yet represents something built out of the ruins of it, a surreal feel of rebirth that hasn’t forgotten its roots but rather cultivated them into something with that impossible ingredient: hope.

Major Neighborhoods

Avondale

If you keep following the 520 through Touristville and keep going north you'll eventually leave the relative civilization of Redmond and enter the gloomy plain of the Avondale area.

Avondale looks more abandoned and dirty, lacking any of the sleazy glitz and glam of Touristville as well as any of the relative effort put into the few government buildings in the district's heart.

Abandoned residential houses, once the suburbs, line the streets. They are at best inhabited by squatters. Most art burned down, collapsed, or otherwise damage. Power, water, and other utilities are nonexistent.

The wildlife and parks that once surrounded Avondale is now polluted, ugly, and overgrown.

What apartment buildings that haven't collapsed along Avondale Road (which is flanked by razor wire fences) itself have become fortified "Barracks Blocks," crumbling but fortified pockets of habitation for those who can't survive on their own.

They're almost always run by gangs, filled with drugs, and are usually what most people think of when they consider SINless accommodations.

Bargain Basement

Once one of the swankiest highrises in Redmond when it was a booming pre-Crash tech enclave, the Bargain Basement has been gutted and reformatted into a neighborhood offering housing and the best black-market bazaar you’ll find in the region.

Both Yakuza and Mob connections have been running the show here for a long time, but the funny thing about rising real estate is that sometimes it forces the neighbors to up their game. The syndicates now find themselves trying to weigh their options against the Urubia's growing influence and the BB is where the test case is happening.

Each side is trying to out-do the other on a budget, meaning it’s become a kind of swanky-for-a-squatter imitation of the Funhouse.

It has no nightclubs or schools or anything but business is up in the newly erected bazaar and the housing is getting somewhat better services. That means a three-bedroom luxury condo that once housed a single corporate middle manager is now home to three different families sharing the common kitchen area and making do with spotty illegal utilities taps that the syndicate-backed landlords set up, but that now comes with less extortion, more electricity, and hot water!

Brain Heaven

Brain Heaven is a run-down neighborhood south of the Crimson Triangle and southwest of Glow City.

The area itself is not completely abandoned but thanks to the decades of radiation bleed from nearby Glow City, hardly anyone lives in Brain Heaven voluntarily and those that aren't squatters live in the south-most portion of it.

Even then, very little of Brain Heaven is maintained. Some houses are covered in ash or debris, windows are regularly broken (usually by roving squatters from Glow City looking to score some loot), and a good few are burnt or collapsed husks that no one's bothered to bulldoze. The streets of Brain Heaven tend to flood whenever it rains, leaving pockets of standing water that is often ankle-deep or more thanks to the district government's neglect of the local sewer systems and rivers - both of which are largely blocked.

The Body Mall attracts a good amount of attention here, and those who aren't in the few southern-most legitimate residences tend to make their own "drek houses" out of debris, usually with small makeshift walls separating their "property" from a neighboring resident's.

The further away from the legal residences you get, the more desparate and poorer these drek house squatters become. By the time you get to Glow City, almost all of them are terminally ill, with more than a handful of drek houses at any time having a corpse inside.

Glow City

The partial meltdown of the Trojan-Satsop nuclear plant in the southeastern area of Redmond some seventy years ago contaminated Beaver Lake and the surrounding land - the region itself still glows with radioactive runoff for a few kilometers.

In 2028 Shiawase Atomics built a new plant next to the rusting hulk of the old one, reasoning that the already contaminated land would be available for development on the cheap (they were right). They remain the only industry in the area.

After the Ghost Dance War and later the Crash of ‘29, squatters and refugees moved into the abandoned area nicknamed “Glow City,” taking over empty buildings and facilities and setting up their own tent cities and ghettos.

The metroplex government made some token attempts to remove them but quickly gave up, so the squatters stayed. The population has only grown since, despite the incredibly high death rate from cancer and radiation sickness, to say nothing of the massive infant mortality rate and some of the hideous radiation-induced mutations. It’s hard to tell between the changelings who were forced here and the metahumans who have been twisted by the Glow.

There are also persistent rumors of all kinds of freakish creatures living in and around Glow City, although (hopefully) most of them are urban legends.

Hollywood

Located just south of Woodinville, Hollywood is mostly known as Redmond's finest extended stay neighborhood in the metroplex. That's a joke they like to tell because the Hollywood Correctional Facility is a pretty fine bolthole to settle into, as you get a warm cot and three square meals a day as well as big walls to protect you from devil rats! You're also incarcerated, so you take what you can get.

The rest of Hollywood is a fairly typical squatter's town, albeit for the fact that it manages amenities that Barrens don't usually have: a hospital, a few bars, and even some small businesses that come in and out of business depending on how bad gang and squatter activity was that week.

Very few of the correctional officers here live in Redmond but the ones that do are some of the few SINners in Hollywood, and the businesses around Hollywood tend to have no issue employing SINless. That does mean that if something goes down, Lone Star doesn't give a drek about most of the people injured and just because the correctional facility is the heart of this neighborhood it doesn't mean that they'll start lifting fingers to help out any more quickly.

Most are willing to take those risks - hell, sometimes people are coming from where this is a step up - for what Hollywood offers: vague notions of security. Anyone who comes too close with too much ordnance doesn't last long and the area around Hollywood has water, power, and sewage services. Many of the residents illegally tap into these services but thankfully Hollywood is like anywhere else in the Barrens: Lone Star doesn't care about that at all until someone tells them to.

Kingsgate

The Kingsgate neighborhood is located east of Highway 405 (or just 405 as most people call it) and sits opposite the Juanita neighborhood of Bellevue.

is located east of Highway 405 and opposite the Juanita district Bellevue and to say that Kingsgate has seen better days might be the biggest exaggeration in cosmic history.

Shortly after the turn of the millennium, before the US really started to fall apart, Kingsgate was considered 'the next Bellevue'. The city planners expected that the high-tech companies spreading in Bellevue would shake over the 405 to Kingsgate and bring it money. That did seem to be the case for a few years, but then something unexpectedly went wrong.

The successful tenants withdrew from the swanky industrial parks and the office buildings, most of them relocating to what would become the Downtown district. Local landlords tried to jack up prices on the remaining businesses, and in that they drove out the area's former less-successful rivals. Kingsgate entered a holding pattern, with everyone who didn't leave taking a "wait and see" approach. Surely all those businesses would come back, surely Bellevue and Bothell would spread the love out in this direction. It would be just as fast as the exodus, they just had to hold onto hope.

Of course, things never did. The number of empty buildings skyrocketed, the income of the homeowners sank, residents fell into debt and began missing payments. The banks weren't doing much better, with every seizure for them becoming a property that no one wanted to buy. The Matrix Crash of 2029 nuked any remaining white-knuckled hope for Kingsgate's future and most of the local banks died out and all the chains closed their doors - Kingsgate was a write-off.

And so the Kingsgate of today was born. Office buildings that are empty except for the squatters. Overgrown industrial parks which all too often are fortified as fortresses for local gangs who themselves turn into their own personal battlefields.

About the only thing about Kingsgate that thrives are the bars. Those who live here put most of their money into them, after all, and Kingsgate managed to get a decent chunk of love from Seattle in regards to running water, power, and sewage updates. Despite that, Kingsgate shows no sign of growing.

Woodinville

"The best E-Zone in the Barrens!"

Woodinville is fairly special for the fact that when Lone Star returned triumphantly to Seattle and took the metroplex's police contract, their security certification process had to be done twice in the Woodinville neighborhood.

They didn't end up putting Woodinville above an E, but it was at least considered. This was something of a big deal in Woodinville, whose demographics hadn't changed at all since Lone Star's last security classification in 2072. Almost everyone living here is still SINless, still obscenely poor, and still illegally squatting in buildings with illegal power taps or paying landlords who are illegally subletting properties they own to individuals who, legally, aren't people.

It was nearby Snohomish which caused the confusion, with the Sons of Snohomish in particular performing so many charity and public outreach events and even providing transport up to the Avalon Clinic which gave Lone Star pause. While Touristville is the only place someone might want to live in Redmond, Woodinville at least is started to smell a lot less like the rest of the drek, even if by a small margin.

Olympic Park

Located in the southeast corner of Redmond and crossing into Salish-Shidhe territory, Olympic Park was created for the 2076 Summer Games on the Federated-Boeing owned portion of Redmond.

In 2072 when the Olympic Games were announced as a joint venture between Seattle and the SSC, Federated-Boeing presented a plan to erect the needed venues on the property with an eco-friendly method of clearing the ash and converting it to concrete.

Federated-Boeing Olympic Coliseum became the center of a vast complex straddling the border; the project was a huge PR success and the games turned out to be enormously profitable.

Afterward, the venue no longer had a purpose and despite attempts to find a use for it, Federated-Boeing has already left it vacant and unused.

Now several years after the summer games, Olympic Park has become a no man’s land of parking lots, crumbling concrete venues and security fencing straddling the Metroplex-SSC border.

Squatters have taken over many of the structures and the entire complex is a prime smuggling route, as policing the maze of structures is a nightmare for border authorities.

Federated-Boeing still owns the land and plans may be in the works to raze the existing structures and erect a new aircraft production facility but thus far nothing has been announced.

Purity

Another of Redmond's many squatter neighborhoods, Purity is just west of the Snoqualmie River and west of the High Bridge Road. Its a mostly rural squatter community that keeps to itself and residents of Purity are known for being actively unhelpful to human outsiders and notoriously unfriendly to other metatypes.

Most of the buildings here are pre-Crash of 2029 construction and a good few of them are even as old as the 1970's, although a good portion of those are half-collapsed or have been transformed by the elements. Those that live here have to create everything or scavenge everything and they've been doing it for at least two generations now. The majority of Purity's residents were born here and either don't have the strength or resources to get out of this Redmond squatter hovel.

With how meta-heavy the Plastic Jungles are, Purity has also become the home base of an anti-meta gang which makes sure the two communities don't intermingle, and there have been a few notable clashes in recent years. The anti-meta gangers always seem to get patched up for free at Snohomish's Avalon Clinic in nearby Maltby, which has led some to believe that Purity might actually be supported by their fellow metaracists more than just ideologically.

Sophocles

Located just east of the Bargain Basement, Sophocles is a typical example of a squatter neighborhood in Redmond: they have no official power, water, sewage, or garbage or law enforcement. Everything here is what the residents can will up out of thin air or drag in from somewhere else.

Sophocles was once the eastern reaches of Redmond city, with some of the buildings in Sophocles now well over 200 years old. In their original state they were probably fantastic historical examples of a turn-of-the-century America in the late 1800's but as it stands now the years have taken their toll.

Now the buildings in Sophocles are brittle and rotting. Many of them cordoned off and almost all of them are abandoned. Their windows are covered in plastiboard or calcisheet tarps and their walls marked with years of graffiti, chemical staining from acid rain, and bullet scarring.

Before it was part of the metroplex this area was a historic downtown with an outer ring of office complexes and other white collar work buildings, a good portion of them NSA-affiliated. These were all leveled during the Ghost Dance War, where the NANs committed to several heavy attacks and leveled the USA-aligned government contractors as well as the NSA building in the area.

After the Treaty of Denver, these buildings were never rebuilt or even fully demolished, leaving squatters to infest the area as they try to live in or salvage from half-collapsed structures, some of which still have a functional roof or two.

Touristville

The only part of the Redmond Barrens to be considered marginally safe is what is officially known as Redmond City but unless you're working in the Redmond District Hall or some sort of metroplex government agency then you'll know the area by the nickname thats stuck around since the 2050's: Touristville.

Touristville's name came from the fact that this is where the wealthy tourists (as well as SINners in general) come to "slum it" in a kind of parody of poverty. Smoky casinos, strip clubs, bunraku parlors, and all the booze and BTLs and designer drugs their little hearts can afford.

In Touristville it's all about the neon. Both physically and in augmented reality, the entirety of Touristville looks like a squat version of all those early-century flatvids about "cyberpunk dystopias." Shades of pink, purple, blue, and green set to just the right levels of manufactured appealing to draw your eye and keep you engaged. Touristville exists to suck your credit dry by any means necessary.

Buildings are purposefully left looking artificially run-down, giving the faux-decrepit mixed with actual decrepit a chance to mingle with the decadent. The entire point is to make the rich tourists feel like they're being adventerous without actually putting them in any real physical risk, which makes Touristville something like a Redmond Barrens theme park than anything authentically Redmond. Hell, even Lone Star patrols in Touristville occasionally and managed to give the neighborhood a Bronze safety rating (C rating, for those familiar with the Lone Star Security Rating system). They've responded to a few calls to bust in heads, but almost exclusively to SINners who are out of their depth - don't get it twisted, though. SINless are not any more welcome in Touristville than anywhere else.

Touristville is also all run by the syndicates - mafia and yakuza especially but anyone who can weasel into a business or block has managed to stay there. That means none of the revenue goes into the neighborhood.

The Crash Zone

The small community of Monroe, near the Salish-Shidhe border north of the Snoqualmie River, was at the center of the worst air disasters in Seattle history when a spaceplane - carrying Corporate Court Justice David Hague - crashed there in 2059. The explosion and ensuing fires destroyed structures in a nearly three-kilometer radius and killed most of the area’s few thousand inhabitants. The remaining fuel on board the spaceplane was sufficient to cause fires hot enough to fuse the ground into glass at the center of the crash site.

One of the worst side effects of the crash was damage to the nearby Seattle Metroplex Reformatory. The prison was in pretty bad shape even before the equivalent of an explosive ICBM hit Redmond. After the crash, hundreds of prisoners rioted. A mass jailbreak ended in the deaths of most of the prison guards and staff, with the prisoners in control of the facility, the largest intact building near the blast-zone.

The Metroplex Guard and fire-control teams from Franklin Fire Services managed to contain the damage from the crash (although we’re talking “contained” inside a large area, and often involving firebreaks created by blasting buildings). Before Governor Schultz could make any decisions regarding the Crash Zone, she was lost inside the Renraku Arcology and Governor Lindstrom had more important things to worry about than some damage to an outlying area of the Barrens.

So the devastated area was abandoned and it didn’t take long for the squatters to move in. The former inmates from the Reformatory quickly claimed control over the whole of the Crash Zone and began scavenging whatever they could from the ruins. The zoners fiercely defend their territory using weapons from the former prison, but they are allowing squatters to set up in the area, so long as they recognize their authority.

The Crimson Triangle

Ruled by the western dragon Urubia, the property in the Crimson Triangle is was a six-building planned tenement complex made up of four sixteen-story apartment towers along 228th Avenue Northeast, south of the Bargain Basement and northwest of Glow City.

Urubia renovated this area into what might constitute a faux arcology, self-sufficient and well-guarded. The occupants are treated well, with jobs, education, health care, and no small degree of entertainment. They even have a fully-funded detox program for all residents.

The complex is laid out in a triangle with apartment towers at each corner: North, Southeast, and Southwest. The fourth tower - the Funhouse - is located just north of the center of the triangle. The education and community center is between the Central Tower and the Southwest Tower.

The maintenance facility is between the Central Tower and the Southeast Tower. Each of the four apartment towers has three levels of subterranean parking.

The roofs of the towers have been reconstructed into varied biomes and reinforced so they can sustain incredible weights, every one of them private and closed off to the public.

It almost feels like it’s not a part of Redmond yet represents something built out of the ruins of it, a surreal feel of rebirth that hasn’t forgotten its roots but rather cultivated them into something with that impossible ingredient: hope.

The Crimson Triangle has also started celebrating Queen’s Day, which is more like a weeklong annual revel celebrating the completion of the Funhouse complex. The Funhouse is always open, but this is a full-on bacchanal.

Every ganger, every resident, every visitor is welcome.

The food and booze are overflowing, the prostitutes hold freebie lotteries, and there’s space enough for any of them to sleep it off and come right back down swinging.

The Plastic Jungles

The Plastic Jungles are quite a sight, even by Seattle standards. Acres of dirty grayish and tattered canopies of bioplastic stretched high overhead from support struts create a near-tropical world underneath, warm and filled with greenery the rainwater and (to a degree) the air filtered by the bioplastic netting and the plant-life. There are small trees and bushes, creeping and climbing vines, and exotic flowers in every color of the rainbow, filling the air with a heady scent. Under the foliage are tents and shelters built out of discarded bioplastic sheeting, scrap wood, and plastic, with thatching and materials harvested from the jungles. It is a strange indoor-outdoor rainforest on the outskirts of one of the largest cities in the world.

Back around the turn of the century, a wealthy agriculturist built a series of massive greenhouses in northwestern Redmond near Echo Lake. The tent-like buildings were several kilometers across and stood on land considered too polluted with toxic contaminants to grow anything. The agriculturist proved the skeptics wrong almost. The land yielded amazing harvests of food, but most of it was too contaminated for human consumption.

So the greenhouses were converted to grow tropical plants and flowers until the Crash of 2029, when the owner lost his entire fortune and the complex went into receivership. As the depression left by the Crash worsened and Redmond was slowly abandoned, nobody bothered to look after the place.

Since then, it’s become a mixture of contained jungle of strange blooms and local homesteaders grow-oping it into a surprisingly fruitful agricultural source for the region. These sharecropping squatters don’t take kindly to poachers, pillagers, or arsonists, so they’ve been known to defend the region with surprising vigor. Their almost-organic produce is also used in trade for security and protection from local gangs.

The Rat's Nest

Officially the North Seattle Refuse and Reclamation Center, the Rat’s Nest is a huge, open-air landfill several kilometers across. Just north of the Snoqualmie River, not far from the edge of the Salish-Shidhe border, it is a regular point of contention between the metroplex and the Sovereign Tribal Council, since toxins from the dump leech into the soil and groundwater and refuse to respect political borders for some reason.

Well over a thousand squatters live in the Nest in makeshift huts and tents on, in, and around mountains of garbage and refuse. Some of the squatters pick through the trash for anything usable for themselves or to sell on the black market. The area’s population has swollen since the influx of the displaced, so you can expect to find a lot of desperate, scared people in the Rat's Nest area.

The trash-rats, or gomi-nezumi, as the Yakuza call them, have a real nose for finding things. They have managed to salvage tech, weapons, clothing, building materials, and other treasures from the trash mounds. Most of it ends up in the Bargain Basement or in the hands of a yakuza at a later date but nothing’s stopping the gomi-nezumi from selling to someone who comes directly to them. You have to make it worth their while, and they’ve gotten canny as fuck about what has value but you’d be amazed at what people throw away.

The Verge

Living in the shadow of a volcano means more than acid rain: it means ash, and lots of it. The last major eruption of Mount Rainier in the early 2070's sent tons of ash pouring down on the south and eastern parts of the Seattle metroplex and one areas sits snugly in central-east Redmond and is known as The Verge.

The Verge is a spot of shared Seattle-SSC land that is basically buried and forgotten by both sides, one of those little bureaucratic AROs they put a pin in and promptly forgot about.

Federated-Boeing managed to negotiate a deal on some of the land in the mid-2070's - specifically the southeastern portion - and used it as a PR cleanup stunt for the 2076 Olympic games, splitting what used to be the largest neighborhood in Redmond into one of the smaller ones.

The squatters removed from Olympic Park moved northwards, back into the remaining portions of the Verge. Areas which were formerly starting to recover naturally were practically yanked back down into depression overnight as thousands of the most desperate SINless began taking over the empty buildings and storefronts, digging things out as best they could.

Life (such as it is) returned to normal in the now much smaller Verge.

Places of Interest

Hotels

Redmond Center Hotel

Type: Hotel

Rating: ★★

Price: ¥65

Location: Redmond Way & Avondale Way, Touristville

Description: At one point the Redmond Center Hotel was a luxury hotel, but since Redmond became a Barrens its all been downhill.

Around 2050, manager Mik Rezac was caught in a compromising position by the local yakuza and they wasted no time at all flipping the joint into becoming one of theirs and their foothold in the Redmond Center. Not long after, one of the hotel guests was found in his room with his throat slashed, effectively forever reducing the prices and knocking a star off of the Redmond Center Hotel for the rest of its years.

Its clung on since then, of course, it just isn't a luxury affair. Its clean enough, but more and more neon and intrusive AROs show up with each passing year. The rooms are still excellent and really cheap considering what they give you and the Redmond Dining Room on the second floor of the hotel serves excellent Salish-American food at equally good prices.

Novelty Hill Sleep & Eat

Type: Hotel

Rating: ★

Price: ¥15

Location: Novelty Hill Road & West Snoqualmie Valley Road, the Verge

Description: This refurbished warehouse is filled with a steel pipe framework holding racks of sleep cubicles stacked fifteen high, with narrow catwalks running between them, pretty typical coffin hotel setup.

You get a clean(ish) sleep coffin in a safe(ish) warehouse. The wall of sleeping cubes overlooks a cafeteria section where they sell edible(ish) food.

It’s where the desperate, the poor, and the cheap hang their hat. Nothing more, since you can’t fit anything else in those cubes. And that’s after the improvements the Finnigan mob made to it a few years back.

They added in fire alarms, a sprinkler system, and refit each cube with a working ventilation system and locks. They also, kindly, added in the cafeteria and a bathroom so you didn't always have to use the overcrowded bathroom in the Stuffer Shack across the street.

Stoker's Coffin Motel

Type: Motel

Rating: ★

Price: ¥5

Location: Southeast 48th Street & 236th Avenue Southeast, Brain Heaven

Description: Barebones doesn’t begin to describe this squatter-level default, where a few nuyen buys you a spot to sleep and literally nothing else.

Even the vending machines have been looted into less than scrap. But then, five nuyen for a night of almost-safety has its value.

Slabs R' Us

Type: Motel

Rating: ★

Price: ¥50

Location: Redmond Way & Cleveland Street, Touristville

Description: Slabs R' Us puts the "coffin" in coffin hotel thanks to an enterprising ex-doctor seeing an abandoned funeral home in Touristville and getting a big, bright idea.

Funding his venture by selling all of the refrigeration equipment and gutting the top level, the doctor ended up opening one of the most secure (from the outside) coffin motels in all of Seattle.

Storage is minimal (practically non-existent), the cubes themselves are stuffy and have poor ventilation and no amenities beyond basic climate control but if you're looking for a place where you can sleep like the dead and not have to worry about getting jacked in the night, Slabs R' Us is greatful for your business.

Restaurants

BucketBurger

Type: Fast Food Restaurant

Cost: ¥¥¥

Location: Northeast 80th Street & 164th Avenue Northeast, Touristville

Description: BucketBurger is a trendy, high-end burger chain that started in Redmond in the mid-2050's. It offers gourmet burgers at reasonable prices and a lot of flair to the point of nearly being a novelty restaurant. Its flagship location in Touristville draws in a lot of visitors and its recently opened a few locations in the CAS.

The interior décor of BucketBurger is exaggerated, colorfully thrown together, visually striking and obscenely tasteless memorabilia of American pop culture of the last century. The staff wear 1950's style fast food employee outfits, usually with short skirts and made of satin.

The burgers can be ordered as a single, double and triple stack, toppings and ingredients are individually put together from the menu. Orders are brought out by staff wearing roller skates if they're sitting indoors.

Redmond Phoenix House

Type: Japanese Restaurant

Cost: ¥¥

Location: Northeast Union Hill Road, Touristville

Description: Phoenix House serves great Japanese food, mostly soy, but with some fresh on special from time to time.

It was once a first-class restaurant before the first Crash of 2029. It somehow survived that, albeit losing much of its first-class clientele and had to aim a little lower, finding a new and appreciative clientele.

However, the ambiance has been lacking since the owners ran into financial trouble after Crash 2.0 and had to seek assistance from the local Yakuza, who are now squeezing them and turning the place into one of their new hangouts.

Yoshiro's

Type: Japanese Restaurant

Cost: ¥

Location: Woodinville Snohomish Road & 175th Street Northeast, Woodinville

Description: This little Japanese soy shack is about as greasy and grubby as it comes. The food isn’t good enough to lick the plastic spoon you eat it with, and even the beer is watered down. The only reason it’s worth noting is that it’s technically Yakuza-run, and wannabe toughs and the odd aspirant Yak foot soldier like to hang out there. If you want to cultivate a little talent or need some expendable bodies for your meatgrinder run, these losers are likely to consider themselves shadow assets. Just don’t believe the delusions of grandeur that motivate their bravado: they aren’t connected, and they haven’t accomplished a tenth of what they claim.

Once in a while someone of some minor importance, likely connected to someone higher up the food chain, slums here, basically doing the same thing you suggest. You might find an in to more important contacts in the Yakuza here. It just takes time, patience, and the ability to fake respect.

Bars & Clubs

The Jackal's Lantern

Type: Bar

Location: Northeast 25th Street & 168th Avenue Northeast, Touristville

Description: The Jackal’s Lantern is one of those temporary “just for a night” pop-up bars that have somehow managed to take root and stick around for more than thirty years.

That’s the Jackal’s Lantern, a den of supreme inequity that the Halloweeners have called home for so long they might as well own it.

It’s been burned down by malice or malpractice a few times, and moved just as many. Discarded Halloween decorations, dismembered doll parts, scavenged LEDs, and a waitstaff that dresses up like horror movie tropes.

The booze is cheap but still strong. The music is discordant. If you get high, it’s like having a fever dream for kicks.

Crusher 495

Type: Nightclub

Location: 124th Avenue & 143rd Street, Kingsgate

Description: Going on forty years, this badass ork owned nightclub has been keeping it real in Touristville. If you’re into heavy rock and industrial music, this is the place for you. Don’t hit the dance floor unless you’re prepared to slam-dance with a drunken ork or troll.

If you’ve got even a vague notion of human supremacy then you’re going to find out why Eddy Kosky, the owner, is considered a pillar of the community insofar as metahuman rights go. That means you’ll find out what orkish wrath feels like, curb party style. Eddy knows everyone and is well-loved for his loyalty to Redmond interests and people, SIN or no.

If you’re down on your luck, Crusher is like a second home. If you want to make Redmond a better place, you’ve got friends here.

The Skeleton

Type: Nightclub

Location: Redmond Fall City Road & 196th Avenue Northeast, Bargain Basement

Description: If you’re looking for flavor then the Skeleton is considered one of those holes in the wall that famous people love.

Up-and-comers consider it a lucky charm for their careers to play here and nova acts have a tendency to show up just to wail a few for the hell and nostalgia of it. You can find grubby locals and rich kids trying to pass for grubby locals in this so-cliché-its-somehow-genuine rock-club décor.

Try to make it around midnight, when the real acts start to show up, but don’t be surprised if someone you spotted in the earlier hours is making the charts in a few years.

Downfall

Type: Bar

Location: Northeast 175th Street & 140th Avenue Northeast, Woodinville

Description: Nothing special insofar as watering holes go, at least by Seattle standards, but that makes Downfall a pretty nice place in Redmond.

The real draw is that it attracts a number of Awakened who keep the place safe out of informal loyalty to their unofficial spot.

Not exactly the place to scout talent, but fairly secure with non-lethals if someone gets out of line.

Aces

Type: Bar

Location: 130th Avenue & 142nd Street, Touristville

Description: The interior of this charming watering-hole is filled with peeling paint, fraying vinyl, half-broken windows patched over with packing board, and a great combination of cheap, crappy food, watered-down rotgut, and tinny music blasting from a patched together collection of speakers tacked up all over the place. The regulars entertain themselves with the pool tables, the smudged and fuzzy trideo, and good old-fashioned bar brawling.

Aces is the local hangout for the Crimson Crush gang as well as a number of shadowrunner wannabes and fairly cheap muscle, mostly orks and trolls. So it’s the place if you’re hiring (and on a budget), or if you need to deal with the Crush for one reason or another. Still, even if you don’t go in looking for a fight, chances of finding one are really good.

Banshee

Type: Bar

Location: 1267 163rd Avenue Northeast, Touristville

Description: You’d think this place got its name from its crappy Thursday night karaoke sessions with a tinny sound system and drunken patrons who can’t carry a tune in a bucket, but truth is nobody knows.

Banshee is strictly no-frills: a bar, some strings of LEDs, a pissed-looking ork bouncer, and cheap booze.

Its prime appeal is being so unremarkable and low-key enough to do business in, provided you keep an eye on the hungrier-looking patrons.

The Joke

Type: Nightclub

Location: Union Hill Road & 208th Avenue Northeast, Bargain Basement

Description: Jacque Shurrock turned the lobby and ground floor of a pre-Crash apartment tower into a club back in the 2040s. Jacque owed his seed money to the Yakuza, and they have held on to control of the place since it started.

With dancing, drinking, and bawdy cabaret acts (verging into live sex and S&M shows some nights) downstairs, the Yaks have turned the upstairs into a combination of office space, black market warehouse, syndicate hostel, and sex club.

You need to know somebody to get upstairs and the higher you go the tighter the security gets. The upper apartments are the personal office space and playground of Jonny Wakshira, the kobun in charge of the place, who spends a fair amount of time down in the club people-watching and enjoying the company of his chosen companions for the evening.

The Mad Woman

Type: Nightclub

Location: 51st Street Northeast & 228th Avenue Northeast, Sophocles

Description: A glitzy nightclub with the in-crowd some sixty years ago, the aptly named Mad Woman is like a very old sex worker these days.

The light and sound systems were cannibalized along with a lot of the wiring ages ago, although some enterprising DJs have set up a small AR network and some wall-mount mini-speakers to replace them.

It became popular with neo-tribal communities looking for a place to hold regular rave parties in the early 2070's and its since then more or less been revitalized by that and a burgeoning shaman community.

The Seamstresses Union

Type: Bar

Location: 7004 180th Avenue Northeast, Touristville

Description: Located in the heart of Touristville, only a few blocks from the District Hall, the Seamstresses Union was the original home of the actual seamstresses union for the city of Redmond over a century ago.

The Union building has since been retrofitted, rebuilt, restored and changed hands so many times that only the owner has been able to keep track of the entire tale.

The first and second floors are inaccessible to public traffic, the old brownstone building still acting as a duplex for the owner, an older mixed-race dwarf woman known only as Mrs. Kubota.

In the basement, the Seamstresses Union is a lively little neighborhood bar on the corner of "illegal" and "opportunity." It offers the usual fare of drinks and processed soy bar food but also a lot of cozy seating thats well soundproofed. Those who know how, or who, to ask a whole host of other services are available here.

Mrs. Kubota is a madame who runs a small but lively business in the skin trade, although she will rent the rooms from time-to-time if someone really needs it (and asks nicely). She also has a well-fortified safehouse in a secret sub-basement which is available only to people she trusts which includes a small illegal bazaar which sells augmentations, drones, weapons, reagents, and telesma.

Attractions

Federated-Boeing Olympic Coliseum

Type: Abandoned Multi-Purpose Arena

Location: Olympic Park

Description: The main attraction of the 2076 olympics now sits abandoned, stained with acid rain and covered in layers of undisturbed ashfall from Rainier. The main arena is cleared out and overgrown but the building itself is filled with dozens, possibly hundreds, of different types of squatter. The height of the arena provides good sightlines and there are a lot of escape points, so its usually those not wanting to be found (or those afraid that they will be found) hiding out here, typically temporarily.

The surrounding buildings are much the same and on any given day the residents here are just as likely to wake up dead as they are to try and move on to greener pastures.

The Funhouse

Type: Entertainment Center

Location: 228th Avenue Northeast, The Crimson Triangle

Description: You ever wanted to climb up on a dragon and give it a hug without worrying they’ll fry you? Baby, have I got the place for you.

The central tower of the Crimson Triangle is known locally known as the Funhouse. Its where hot DJs spin the good drek while you and Urubia, the owner of this whole scene, dance the night away.

The top four floors of the Funhouse have been gutted and rebuilt into what’s described as a sprawling living space for the Crimson Queen herself. The two floors directly below have been converted into an entertainment space rumored to be the site of numerous unspecified illegal activities.

The lower five floors have smaller entertainment spaces and upscale apartments for Urubia’s followers. The last five are open to everyone. This is where you'll find the nightclub, brothel, bar, and a casino.

The prostitutes are clean, the casino pays out so well there’s no way they’re turning a profit and you can see and be seen by all kinds of shadow and low-to-mid gangs and syndicate players in an atmosphere of revelry, neutrality, and relative safety.

“Relatively” translates to Urubia eating anyone who causes trouble. Yeah. That kind of safety. Leave the guns at home, kids, this is dragon country.

The Taetzel Building

Type: Abandoned Building

Location: Avondale Road, Avondale

Description: The Taetzel Building was once a flourishing office building but was abandoned prior to 2050. Since then it has been a rusting 28-story shell placed squarely in a growing slum.

It serves now as a potential shelter for gangers, runners, or any squatter capable of protecting their slice of the pie in the Redmond Barrens.

Government Buildings

Hollywood Correctional Facility

Type: Correctional Facility

Location: 156th Place Northeast & 159th Avenue Northeast, Hollywood

Description: This is Redmond’s premier (and only) prison. “Going to Hollywood” isn’t always a bad thing when taken from the local perspective. After all, it’s a safe three hots and a cot with four walls and activities. That’s more than most get in this neighborhood, so it’s one of the few prisons that’s got more people trying to get in than get out.

Hollywood has gotten a couple of upgrades lately, given that it’s effectively the most fortified government-held position in the region. These include additional staff housing, expanded garage, and improved security measures. The fact that they’re facing in far more than out has some folks calling it the Hollywood Prison Fort.

Redmond District Courthouse

Type: Courthouse

Location: Northeast 85th Street & 164th Avenue, Touristville

Description: The Redmond District Courthouse provides some semblance of law and order to Redmond but that really isn't saying much. The building itself is over a century old and is filled to the brim on any given day, with every internal process and hearing backed up several months.

The law officials working for the District government here are all overworked, most of them are on the take, and there are even a few true believers in the mix who often find themselves exceeding expectations shortly before burning out or getting murdered.

Redmond District Hall

Type: District Hall

Location: 15670 Northeast 85th Street, Touristville

Description: Redmond’s government buildings, like its government, are largely a joke.

The gangs and syndicates are practically baked-in to the government at this point and in a lot of areas no one bothers with District government at all, instead heading to their local legbreaker's day job to put the money down pre-emptively.

The Mayor and the District Council arguably try but they aren't allowed to try too much without ending up dead, courtesy of Redmond's criminal residents.

Businesses

Buy-Low Foods

Type: Grocery Store

Cost: ¥

Location: 7589 170th Avenue Northeast, Touristville

Description: Buy-Low Foods is a lower-class supermarket chain that is something of a cross between a scaled-down KongWalmart and a ruddy Stuffer Shack.

They don't really offer anything special and they don't even have the usual departments (such as a deli or bakery) and instead rely solely on shipped-in, even the "fresh" items which are almost exclusively pressed-and-flavored soy products.

Buy-Low's primary business model is cheap. That means people come in, buy in bulk, and leave. More than a few of them are scattered around the Barrens neighborhoods of Redmond and Puyallup and their food tends to come in aerially or in a well-protected convoys but even then the more remote locations are hit often.

Between intense demand and the occasional supply hiccup that means a Buy-Low Foods can either be a small joint filled to the brim with goodies that go quickly or a small joint that looks like it was just raided by hurricane preppers. Both are bleak in their own discrete ways.

Carnation-Seattle Ranch

Type: Dairy Farm

Location: 3165 Northeast 60th Street, The Verge

Description: Welcome to the Seattle branch ranch of North America’s largest dairy company! Yes, friends, somehow Redmond has a hand in where actual milk from real cows comes from. If that doesn’t make you switch to soy, I don’t know what will. Why does this matter to you? The ranch straddles the Seattle-SSC border. As you might expect, the Redmond section is primarily industrial aspects of the business, fenced and guarded, while the SSC has the more bucolic pastures needed for dairy farming. Seattle employees are only permitted on-site during work hours and are ferried to and from the ranch by choppers. While the ranch, itself, values its ongoing SSC land-use deals, the employees are sometimes open to bribes for smuggling purposes. That makes this a prime spot to cross the border without raising any red flags.

Chips'N'Tech

Type: Cyberclinic

Location: Redmond Way & 154th Avenue Northeast, Touristville

Description: Chips'N'Tech is a worldwide chain by Korean company Monobe International that offers products that are almost exclusively produced by other corporations through exclusive distribution contracts.

The Chips'N'Tech recipe for success appears to be based on the ability to handle the goods you want directly and through hyper-realistic VR showrooms where you can 'manipulate' a to-scale version of the object in an environment with realistic physics.

This doesn't mean any of the goods are actually worthwhile, and most of the items available at Chips'N'Tech are geared towards the lowest common denominator and none of them are intended for anything outside consumer-grade use. The firewalls on the commlinks will not protect advertising spam, for one, and to use one of those devices for hacking would be like using a carrot as a knife.

Hollywood Simsense Entertainment

Type: Simsense Studio

Location: Northeast 145th Street & 168th Avenue, Hollywood

Description: This place in Redmond manufactures cheap simsense gear and even cheaper chips to play on it.

They also have their own studios where sims are produced, mostly porn and snuff-sims, using “actors” recruited off the streets of the Barrens.

The Seattle Mafia controls Hollywood Simsense and moves their product, selling to chipheads all over the metroplex. There’s never any lack of would-be actors or just Barrens kids willing to take any chance for a hot meal and some trinkets. Since those trinkets often include their first hits of BTL, they quickly end up willing to do whatever the director wants when he yells “action!”

Life-Eez Appliances

Type: Factory

Location: West Morrison Street & Stewart Avenue, The Verge

Description: The Life-Eez factory makes domestic cooking and cleaning appliances. Materials and finished goods are generally transported in and out by cargo tilt-rotor aircraft.

Life-Eez is noteworthy primarily for their employment of metahumans and changelings, which has earned them the anger of various fringe Humanis groups who have picketed and even bombed the factory in the past.

These factories have toxic environments and next to no safety accountability. They’re more likely to fire someone for suffering a work-related injury because they won’t be able to work as hard, and to cover up a work-related death by selling the corpse off to some organleggers. It’s slave wages, no benefits, and no job security, and yet it’s still considered better than nothing in Redmond.

Monohan Vehicles

Type: Factory

Location: Black Nugget Road, Brain Heaven

Description: The Monohan factory complex in Redmond turns out military and police vehicles for Ares Arms, a division of Ares Macrotechnology.

Raw materials are brought in by tilt-rotor aircraft to the factories’ heavy ferrocrete landing pads, while finished vehicles are driven out in large, guarded convoys to ship out around the world.

The Monohan family made a mint off the sale of their company to Ares, even got to keep the name as a boutique subsidiary under the Ares Arms umbrella and stay on as management. Those of them who still want to work, that is. The youngest generation of Monohans are filthy rich and spoiled accordingly, local celebrities simply for their ability to throw their wealth around.

Redmond Center Mall

Type: Shopping Mall

Location: Redmond Way & Avondale Way, Touristville

Description: Redmond Center was envisioned as part of an effort to revitalize the Redmond economy by improving tourism. A two-story mall opened in 2049 with an attached ten story luxury hotel. It has given visitors a place to go (and stay), and attracted quite a number of disaffected Redmond and Renton teens looking to loiter somewhere. Unfortunately, the Center has fallen on hard times as tourism in Redmond has fallen off, at least of the sort interested in malls and shopping, or able to afford staying in hotels.

The mall was built with a series of hidden tunnels underneath like a bomb shelter, in the event it needed defending from a mob. The Yaks use the tunnels as a combination warehouse and safehouse for hiding things, but they could also turn the place into a virtual fortress if they ever needed to.

Squatters' Mall

Type: Shopping Mall

Location: Northeast 8th Street & 244th Avenue Northeast, The Verge

Description: Known fifty years ago as “Information Plaza,” this massive shopping mall was opened just a couple years before the Crash of ’29, which took the whole place out almost overnight.

As jobs (and therefore shoppers) evaporated in the neighborhood, the stores closed like lights winking out until the entire mall was a ghost town. Unable to unload it, the developers defaulted and abandoned it and the squatters eventually moved in.

Now the place is like a homeless condoplex, with sometimes entire families living in the empty storefronts, holding trading bazaars in the food court and rotunda, and selling BTLs, household and personal items, or even themselves out near the entrances.

The place is too deep in the Barrens for the police to bother with it, and nobody wants the land as yet, assuming they could untangle its ownership from years of bankruptcy and probate.

The Squatters’ Mall is nowhere near as organized as the Crime Mall in Puyallup, but you can sometimes find some worthwhile black market goods around here.

The Guiding Hand

Type: Lore Shop

Location: Northeast 145th Place & 126th Avenue Northeast, Sophocles

Description: This small, profitable lore shop was once owned by a talismonger that went by the street name of Topal. Gunned down at a junkyard during a deal gone wrong after spending a week of acting erratically, Topal's business has passed onto his former business partner and best friend and is now run by a small group of magicians who call themselves the Sons of Sophocles.

The Guiding Hand enjoys a good bit of prestige among the locals thanks to a wide net of contacts, patrons, and Topal's amassed knowledge base, which lives on thanks to him writing everything down and having a well-developed sense of organization.

Medical

Dr. Bob's Quickstitch Clinic

Type: Clinic

Location: 150th Avenue Northeast & Northeast 36th Street, Touristville

Description: “Dr. Bob’s” is a name that has been around Redmond for years, although there seems to be no evidence an actual “Dr. Bob” ever even existed. It’s just a name, one used by a few practitioners over the years. But the name means something in Redmond: quality care with discretion, no strings attached.

While they’re not known for their augmentation work, you get fixed and watched over while you recuperate, all at reasonable rates.

The old doc in charge, Dr. Tran, had to beat feet when he let a Crimson Crusher die on the table while he was tending to minor human flesh wounds. The new manager is Dr. Cara Mordren, officially retired from CrashCart, unofficially in business for herself.

Organ Grinders

Type: Morgue

Location: Northeast 85th Street & 164th Avenue Northeast, Touristville

Description: Organ Grinders is a metroplex-wide chain of legal chop shops for metahuman body parts, either from living people or the dead.

If you're hurting bad enough for nuyen, then this is the place where you can sell a limb or an organ for some quick liquidity. They're also fantastic places to dispose of inconvenient bodies while making a little cash on the side.

The Organ Grinders branch in Redmond is the closest thing the Barrens has to a morgue, and the manager is willing to hold onto bodies for a fair wage on a time-and-space limited basis.

The Body Mall

Type: Clinic

Location: Issaquah-Beaver Lake Road & East Beaver Lake Drive, Brain Heaven

Description: If you need to go under the knife and you’re on a budget (or on the run, for that matter), then the Body Mall in Redmond is your first, and possibly only, choice.

Located right near Glow City on the fringes of Brain Heaven, the Body Mall used to be a hospital but now all four floors are broken up into a bazaar of medical practices from cut-rate cyberware and biomods to patching you up after a firefight or treating those bites and scratches the devil rats gave you.

The docs at the Body Mall don’t ask questions and prefer to be paid in cash, although some do barter.

The whole place looks like a beggar’s bazaar of medical services, with quality ranging from fairly decent to Tamanous gut-front. Some of the docs in there make more money selling their failures than building reputation for a job well done.

You can find the odd do-gooder here, if you know where to look. Former DocWagon folks, even the occasional combat medic who runs the shadows when they’re not running their clinic.

Hollywood Hospital

Type: Hospital

Location: 153rd Street & 154th Avenue, Hollywood

Description: Depressingly typical for a Redmond hospital, this place is underfunded, understaffed, and definitely below code in terms of cleanliness and patient care. A lot of the personnel are unlicensed or not completely trained, although most are pretty dedicated.

Chief administrator Dr. Edison Olszewski holds the record for having worked at Hollywood for some thirty-six years. He was a combat surgeon with an elite MCT unit, but they kicked him out for giving aid and comfort to the enemy (in other words, showing a gram of human kindness). He’s remained dedicated to keeping Hollywood open and running as best he can.

The hospital, like any in the Barrens, also needs a lot of security since it is a scavenger’s paradise. Even what limited medical supplies and equipment they have would fetch big cred on the black market so a lot of their already small budget goes to hiring muscle to protect it.

Redmond General

Type: Hospital

Location: 164th Avenue Northeast & 85th Street Northeast, Touristville

Description: The United Corporate Council and the metroplex government established Redmond General in 2049 as a community improvement project, and both have poured money into maintaining it since then, more for the PR victory than anything else.

The hospital is still the cleanest and most modern of any in the district but they have understandable difficulty in keeping staff and what people they do have look to take advantage of the system.

The administration has had more scandals involving black market dealing, organlegging, and illegal operations than ten hospitals this size.

Page updated

Google Sites

Report abuse