Rosebriar: Thornton Industries

We begin our exploration of the dark industrial corner of Rosebriar with Thornton Industries. This successful industry poisons the community it keeps alive. Meanwhile strange workings occur within its labyrinth.

Thornton Industries

Don't drink the water. It's gone bad.

Description

Miles of steel tubing snakes across the vast facility. At the barbed wire topped gates tanker trucks come and go at all hours. Tall smoke stacks belch out white clouds continuously, sending acid rain east while worse toxins leach into the soil. On the ground, an acrid odor hangs in the air. The corpses of a few trees stand near the fence, bleached at the roots. Men in hard hats and hazmat suits spray down stained concrete and shovel up pale dead earth. The worst of it gets thrown in "the Pool", a black expanse where nothing alive exists.

No one lives here, unless you count working eight extra hours of overtime to count for residence purposes. A purely industrial area, it doesn't even attract the street gangs from Heywood. They enjoy breathing too much.

One of the more recent industries in town, Dr. Nicholas Thornton establish the chemical factory in the late 60s, just as the Works began to fail. Thornton Industries went through a few different owners as it merged and expanded. Currently it belongs to a huge multinational conglomerate.

The town relies on the money it generates and looks the other way when the inevitable chemical spill occurs. The company reciprocates by giving generously to the local hospitals, especially the cancer wards. Both suffered a brief scare in 2003 when the factory shuttered briefly following a panicked decline in stock prices (the executive board of the parent company, including an elderly Dr. Thornton, were reported dead in a plane crash on their way back from a corporate retreat in Alaska). The residents of Rosebriar breathed if not easier then more freely once business resumed.

Local Hedge

Thick tubular vines outline the twisting paths in this part of the Hedge. Caustic liquids seep from the constrictive foliage while off the path the earth gives way to deep consuming mud. Even the trails themselves often end in patches of quicksand. Numerous Goblin Fruits and other Oddments hang from the slimy vines. No one dares eat them. Everyone knows they are deadly poisons.

Movement in this maze suffers a -2 penalty due to sticky earth and tight corridors. Searches for hazardous Goblin Fruits benefit from a +2 bonus as nearly everything here is poisonous.

Damnation City Stats:

Physical: Access -2, Safety -2
Mental: Information -3, Awareness -3
Social: Prestige -4, Stability 1

Razor ribbon tops the chain-link fences to dissuade causal visitors. Day and night convoys of tanker trucks move in and out, transporting raw materials and finished goods. Other chemicals go on long lines of rail cars to other facilities. Toxic sludge leaks from some of the miles of snaking tubes on the sprawling chemical plant. Security focuses more on keeping people working than spotting trouble. Between the noise and the size of the metallic labyrinth, one could easily hide anything here. Few people want to look into it and fewer want to see what might happen if things go wrong.

Vice: Greed. Thornton Industries focuses on extracting the most profit from the facility as possible, even if it leaves the area of toxic wasteland. Safety can be sacrificed for efficiency, lives for profit, and the community for the health of the corporation.
Virtue: Calculating. At its best, the company focuses on efficiency. Minimizing costs sometimes means doing the right thing like ensuring fewer spills so as to spend less cleaning up. Careful attention to the books and cautious investments has helped the company remain profitable while the rest of the industry rusts away.

Site: The Pond

Type: Industrial
Background: The clean up crews use this black pool to collect toxic sediment from the worst of the chemical spills that occur on site. Supposed to be regularly drained and scraped out, years have gone by between cleanings. In winter it freezes over with a sheen of green ice. In spring the waters surge and sometimes spill out into the nearby river. The worst occurs in summer as the pool slowly dries up, concentrating the toxins into a black tar. Any birds or insects that land on it suffer swift and painful death.

Slowly the concentrated toxins have burned into the spiritual landscape. A hole exists on the other side, a void that destroys everything completely. It is expanding. In the Hedge, changelings find a calm pool whose waters bring only death. In the Underworld, dripping water burns even the dead. Elsewhere things like demons crawl from its ebony chasm.

Back at the factory the surface occasionally ripples, even on windless day. The pool isn't empty.

Story Seeds:

• Scales Removed: The parent company of Thornton Industries includes several pharmaceutical companies in its portfolio. One of these devised a drug that enables ordinary humans to see through supernatural illusions, such as the Mask. A couple of years ago, they planned a massive trial for this drug BSNX-8 at a college town in the Pennsylvania. The results were inconclusive. Or rather no one recalls why they thought a town sat there or what this college was called. Given that some of the earlier trials resulted in permanent psychosis, the research has been shelved for now. Several drums of the material ended up in storage at Thornton Industries. And they are leaking.

• The Poisoner’s Plot: word has spread of a Goblin Fruit so toxic, it can slay even the True Fae. A Hob called Bitters Bane claims to know its location, which he will sell at the Thistle and Skeins, Rosebriar's Goblin Market, next week. Is he telling the truth? Does it do what he says? If so it must lie in the most deadly section of the Hedge abutting the chemical plant.

• The Dragon of Sticks and Cobwebs: this story begins by introducing a friendly NPC changeling to the group. After proving himself helpful to them, he asks their help in disposing of his fetch, who still holds his old job at the chemical plant. Unfortunately the fetch escapes, perhaps due to mortal interference or some other threat. Soon after their friend disappears, having tried to take the fetch down on their own. Unfortunately in the struggle they both end up in the Pond. In desperation the fetch kills and eat him. After escaping into the Hedge, it begins to mutate. In its hunger it devours poisonous Goblin Fruit and anything else magical it can find. Growing ever more toxic, its body swells and distorts, becoming more of beast than man. As the toxins and cancers burn it up on the inside, it rages across the town destroy everything fae in its wake. Something must be done now before all magic is devoured.

NPCs:

Merchant of Death: The Hob Bitters Bane sells poisons and their cures from a wheelbarrow he pushes around the Hedge. The rusty conveyance bears a wooden super structure festooned with bottles, flasks and leather bags filled with herbs and concoctions. This travelling apothecary carries many of wares are of his own making. He often commissions others to hunt for rare poisons or their ingredients, paying out in cures to common venoms or toxins.

The Living Dream: Thornton Industries includes facilities and warehouses for some of its parent companies operations. In a vault beneath an incinerator, a man sits in a tiny cell, bound in iron chains. He doesn't eat much and spends most of his time sleeping. Every few days a tray of food is slipped through a slot in the door. Every three months he is fed lethal levels of drugs to put him a dreamless sleep. Then they clean him and the cell. His keepers are instructed not to talk to him and are swapped out after each cleaning. Thus far no one has probed further.

Who is he? He calls himself the Dreamer. A particularly innovative research team was working on restoring life to critical injured patients. Somehow their singular focus and collective dreams accomplished what mere technology could not: they reanimated the dead.

Orders came down from the head office. Long standing protocols came into effect. The Dreamer was isolated, the team dispersed. He was shipped to Rosebriar where they believed his supernatural contamination could be limited by the existing wasteland.

What they don't realize is that in his dreams the Dreamer walks free. Thus far he has only invaded the minds of unknowing mortals but it is only a matter of time before he finds someone or something that can free him.

The Operative: Dr. Myra Konrad runs a tiny part of corporate security from a small room on the south end of the complex. Her team copes with even less space. The bulk of their building is needed for storage and rendering down 'raw materials' for transport.

Thornton Industries includes the Cheiron Group among its owners, part of the vast conglomerate with its fingers in everything. They've noticed a statistical spike in supernatural activity in Rosebriar and sent a team to capture and study anything interesting.

Dr. Konrad handles planning and logistics for the squad of four, putting most of her time into the back room. There she chops up briar wolves, eviscerates Hobs, and vivisects changelings to see what makes them tick. Then she packs them up and sends to the R&D facilities.