On the very southern edge of Darkest Vancouver is Kent Street. It is quite literally on the other side of the tracks from the rest of Vancouver. Whether it’s the ‘wrong’ side of the tracks depends on where you’re standing.
North of Kent Street at its western end, the tracks run between Kent and the rest of Vancouver, while south is the arm of the Fraser River separating Vancouver from Richmond and the airport. Further east, the tracks switch places with the road, but the neighbourhood stays about the same until you get close to Burnaby.
Between Kent Street and the river is industrial, old-school hard-times working industrial. Mixed in with the wholesalers, body shops and warehouses, though, are places too odd to afford more upscale digs that are settling in comfortably here – an antique store, a builder of scale models, a cafe. At night, a few of the autobody shops turn into speakeasies with crews of regulars who don’t take kindly to slumming posers.
The tracks still run, and there are huge piles of raw material – wood chips, minerals – right beside the river. Once you go far enough east, you run into homes, older houses and newer townhouses. The people who live here tend to be practical and tolerant to a fault, making homes in a working neighbourhood that most of their fellow city-dwellers wouldn’t even consider acceptable.
This is where the real outsiders live. The weres who aren’t so cool, especially the water weres like the were-seals, who appreciate the river right there. The car wizards, the real ones who just don’t give a fuck, who frequent the best mechanics in the city down here. Hunters who are so monomaniacally focused on their specific targets that they’re comfortable hanging around others touched by Apeiron, who keep their ridiculous weapon caches hidden in the trainyards. Immortals who are tired of dealing with the rest of the city, who have found the perfect weird little store to run to interact with people in a very specific context precisely to their liking. The technomage biker gang whose clubhouse is a very well-kept ‘abandoned’ warehouse.
And they all get along, and fight for each other. Because this is THEIR place, damn it.
What Can You Do Here?
Old Hrytzck has his metal shop here. If your blade is broken, he can fix it, and usually for the cost of a favour that isn’t even that onerous. Who’s trying to drive him away, and what are you going to do about it?
Those giant heaps of industrial minerals and sawdust are just begging for a duel up the slopes, lighting crashing down and throwing shrapnel or starting fires!
Just hang out in an after-hours bar run out of an industrial warehouse, and meet the people that make even Darkest Vancouver’s supernatural community uncomfortable. You might meet someone you used to know.
somanyrats 