North End

## Critters and Criminals

Posted by: Vision Fist

The North End is a part of Saint Paul with a strange mix of industry in the west, parks and feral creatures around Lake Como, and increasing lawlessness farther east. It’s hard to define as separate from the East Side , but the biggest thing you’ll notice immediately is how much space you have, and how much weaker the Mob’s  control is.

The farthest east, and most East Side-like portion, is Payne-Phalen. This area is poorer, with a large part SINless . It’s home to much of the non-Hispanic immigrant population, including Hmong groups from China, Eastern Europeans, Filipinos, Anglo-Utes, Tir Tairngire exiles, and Chicagoites, to name a few. The gangs in the area are kept on a remarkably short leash by the Mob, so if you’re making your protection payments, it’s a safe place, despite the low income level. Still, the police don’t come here often, which makes it a good place to do quiet business, with the emphasis on quiet. When people do have trouble, they know that instead of calling the SPPD, they should get ahold of the local Mob underboss. If you are the trouble, the soldati aren’t going to read you your rights, if you know what I mean.

West of Payne-Phalen is the North End area that sits between Dale and I-35E, between Payne-Phalen and Como. It’s actually west of the city’s dividing line, but culturally operates more like part of the East Side. It tends to be a low-income, rougher area, with a corridor of low-end bars and pawn shops along Rice Street. The Mob’s control weakens here, and small gangs  proliferate.

Como, on the other hand, west of Dale, is a residential area mostly noted for the park around Lake Como. Really

   pretty place. There apparently used to be a free public zoo here, but it went down with Crash 1.0 , and the animals escaped. Some of the species took to the area better than others, so you sometimes see some odd creatures in the park area. It’s hard to say what came from the zoo and what came in from outside the sprawl, but I’m pretty confident the leopards and hyenas came from the zoo.

In any case, hellhounds and barghests roam ferally in the area, and there are some known thunderbird nests. A few herbivorous animals also seem to have claimed a place here, like hedgehogs, which are from Europe, and macaques (monkeys) from Hokkaido in Japan.

That’s part of the reason the city hasn’t thoroughly undertaken to wipe out the predatory animals; doing so would have the potential to let the introduced small herbivore population grow out of control, and the predators mostly just loot garbage and eat small animals anyways. Unprovoked attacks on humans in the past have been very rare, and responded to selectively. Granted, when you’re SINless, if a leopard eats you it’s not going on any government chart. It also can’t hurt the animals’ case that they bring in tourist dollars to the Como Park area, which support a variety of nearby businesses.

*The gangs here, many of which have very neo-tribal motifs, often try to tame some of the predators as guards, attack animals, or even fighters for paracritter fighting rings, and they’ve had mixed success.*
- Juba

*As you’d probably expect, some of the zoo animals’ descendants manifest as animal shapeshifters . My contacts among the native species shifters back in Dakota country and here in Minnesota tend to see the newcomers as rivals and invaders, not friends and allies.*
- Red Hawk

West of that is, well, very little. Going north on Snelling out of Midway, the main thing you pass is Energy Park Drive, an industrial-corporate area. While several corps have facilities here, they each have their own solid bloc of territory, so it’s not terribly balkanized. The interiors of these blocs often have corporate whitelabs working on research, so extractions and datasteals here are as common as sabotage runs. In the farthest northwest is the Saint Anthony Park neighborhood, which borders and shares a lot of traits with Minneapolis’ Northeast, but lacks the Vory  control.

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