Crusher 495
| Location: | 124th Ave & 143rd St Kingsgate, Redmond, Seattle |
| Lifestyle: | Squatter - Low |
| Biases: | None |
| Notables: | Eddy Kosky, senior partner & manager Bastien, head of security |
Crusher 495 has been around for more than thirty years in Redmond. Over those years it has been a restaurant, a nightclub, and a bar - but it has always been a place with no room for biases of any sort. It has always employed a large number of metahumans, particularly orks and trolls, and that has made it a target of various metaracists over the decades. It has been burned to the ground more than once, mobbed by racist groups many times, and been the target of more drive-bys than anyone can remember.
Today, Crusher 495 has expanded to cover most of the old buildings in this large parking lot. It is more than a venue for hard-thrash rock music and decent drinks. It also serves Kingsgate and the rest of Redmond as a sort of community center. Many of its buildings are set up to aid those who don't have anything, and its parking lot is the first stop for work trucks from out of the district every morning (a service those companies pay for, the entirety of which Crusher's management uses to fund other community-service initiatives).
There is no doubt in anyone's mind that Eddy Kosky and the rest of the Crusher's management are out to do something big: to turn around the Barrens, and to make peoples' lives livable while they do so. They are widely regarded as philanthropists, and even the harshest of the Barren's residents regard them with respect.
- The Crusher 495 Host: Crusher 495 has maintained a host since Crash 2.0 in '69. This host - which is not the establishment's business system - is an open-access host intended to provide a virtual space for denizens of the Barrens to educate themselves and gain experience in certain elements of the Matrix's systems that they simply can't access via the public grid. The club pays for a solid university library access that it offers free to its users, as well as providing a decent system for its members to take advantage of free vocational and academic training programs from a variety of universities. The users have also set up trading boards, allowing those who have extra to trade to those who do not in exchange for "system credits," and to use those system credits to buy other things themselves, effectively creating an internal currency good only within the host's trading board system.
Layout
- The Parking Lot: The parking lot is surrounded by barricades of all sort, all of them the strength and heft that will let them endure a high-speed ram from a vehicle. The only approaches are through two gates, which are guarded by security at all hours of the day.
- Soup Kitchen: The soup kitchen is the only part of the compound that lies outside of the barricades, deliberately left open for easy access to anyone who needs it without compromising the site's security. The food served here is all soya and mycoproteins, but they are warm, filling foods that are largely out of reach for many of the folk who the kitchen serves. The kitchen accepts but does not require payment, and it is not unusual for those with the means to pay for several meals when they eat here, to help offset the cost of feeding so many others for free. Even despite this, the kitchen does run out of food at meals, so the parking lot outside of the kitchen often begins filling up with the hungry of the district, queueing up before each mealtime. By local tradition, the old and the young are usually pushed forward in line.
