Center Mallsoleum

## Moorhead Center Mallsoleum

* **Location**: 510 Center Ave, Moorhead, MN 56560 UCAS
* **Background Count:**Rises and falls with the River, but generally averages around 4 (UMT Standard rating).
* **Access:** Classed as a 'Class A Watch Site', and Knight Errant Astral Security restricts access to site pending reclassification.

For more than a century, the Moorhead Center Mall has sat at the very edge of Moorhead, just before it meets the river. Built in the 1970's as part of the urban-renewal movement, it was meant to replace Moorhead's existing downtown and was built on top of residential neighborhoods that were demolished because they were prone to flooding. Both ironic and prophetic, it would later turn out. Moorhead also took the curious turn of building their city hall (see background above) in connection with the mall, a 1970's neo-brutalist high rise towering up out of the cheery retail space.

Like so many of the grand projects that Moorhead undertook to try and compete commercially with its neighbor across the river in Fargo  (a lineage that would later lead to the construction of the Glyndon Dome), the Moorhead Center Mall never quite performed as envisioned by its builders, and by the early twenty-first century, it was an empty husk of a place, with more storefronts empty than full, attached to a crumbling, overcrowded relic of a city hall that no longer satisfied the Moorhead city government's needs. The last mayor before the Awakening, himself a local small businessman, started looking for ways to sell the city-hall/mall complex and organized a series of 'indoor street fairs' and events in the mostly-abandoned mall to try and raise public interest (and, hopefully, selling price) in the moribund structure. This was at an opportune time as outdoor events were being increasingly disrupted by the degenerating weather situation.

Unfortunately, during the spring ofthe Awakening , the Moorhead Center Mall was packed with attendees for 'Moorhead 56560 Proud', an event organized to celebrate Moorhead's uniqueness from its neighbor across the river. This was, unfortunately, when the Red River Awoke and overflowed its banks, smashing all that formerly restrained it. The nearby Hjemkomst Interpretive Center was put underwater and the Hjemkomst  itself took to the waves. But the real damage was done in the Moorhead Center Mall, where, caught unawares, hundreds died and the the aging building was smashed beyond salvaging.

Given the extent of the damage, combined with a lingering sense of dread observers reported near the place, the Center Mall stood untouched and uninvestigated for years after the Awakening. A slowly rotting ruin in the heart of the rebuilding of Moorhead. The first official group to go in fled immediately, with contradictory reports of what they encountered. When a second group simply failed to return, shamans were brought in and they informed the city government that the deaths of so many, and the angry spirits trapped in such an unpleasant place had rendered the Astral Space unfit to live and the authorities quickly moved to seal the place off rather than go to the trouble and expense of dealing with it in any way.

Today, it stands at the edge of the River, mostly flooded out and filled with fish, radiating fear and festering in the middle of the thriving city Moorhead has become, a horror that long-time residents on the UCAS side of the border have simply learned to ignore, never speaking of or looking at the place if they can help it, an attitude that has definitely slowed or stopped any attempts to deal with the place, an unmarked tomb for all those who died there...

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