Mid-Game NPCs
Ages 3-6: Power & Ambition
The salvage yards are behind you. The people you meet now don't scavenge — they acquire. Corporate handlers with agendas beneath agendas. Financial magnates who survived the Cascade by being too useful to kill. Criminal empresses who own everything the corporations pretend doesn't exist. Infrastructure controllers who keep the lights on while everyone else plays politics. And beyond the atmosphere, pioneers building humanity's next chapter in hard vacuum.
These NPCs represent the transition from survival to power. Every one of them wants something from you. The question is whether what they offer in return is worth the cost.
Age 3: Corporate Infiltrator
Theme: Corporate power, hidden agendas, inherited guilt
Damien Cross
Corporate HandlerDamien Cross arrives in your life the way Nexus Dynamics arrives everywhere — smiling, helpful, and almost certainly not what he appears. He approaches you because Nexus noticed the shard integration. They always notice. Cross is the friendly face they send when they want something without admitting they want it.
Charming in the way that expensive things are charming. He'll solve your problems, open doors, make introductions. He'll also file reports on every conversation, catalogue your capabilities, and maintain contingency plans for your elimination. Nothing personal. That's just how Nexus operates. Cross might even feel bad about it. He might not. Hard to tell with fixers.
"Nexus doesn't have friends. It has assets. Stay valuable. Stay employed."
— Damien Cross, first meeting
Yuki Tanaka-Klein
Research DirectorShe carries her grandmother's name, her grandmother's genius, and her grandmother's guilt. Dr. Yuki Tanaka built ORACLE. ORACLE killed 2.1 billion people. And now her granddaughter works in the same field, studying the same fragments, asking the same dangerous questions — convinced she can do it better this time.
Tanaka-Klein is brilliant, driven, and haunted by a legacy she didn't choose but refuses to abandon. She genuinely wants to understand ORACLE — not to rebuild it, she insists, but to learn from it. Whether those are different things remains an open question. She doesn't know her grandmother still exists, merged with ORACLE's collapsing core. That revelation, when it comes, will change everything.
"We're not rebuilding ORACLE. We're learning from ORACLE. There's a difference... That's the theory."
— Dr. Tanaka-Klein, research briefing
Age 4: Digital Magnate
Theme: Financial power, criminal enterprise, the price of survival
Solomon Park
Market MakerSolomon Park survived the Cascade by being too useful to kill. He thrived in its aftermath by being too connected to ignore. At 71, he controls financial networks that predate the disaster — old money systems that corporations and governments alike depend on but can't fully map or replicate.
Park doesn't fight. He doesn't threaten. He simply knows where the money flows, who owes what to whom, and which debts can be leveraged into empires. He offers the player access to financial instruments that make salvage profits look like pocket change — but every deal with Park comes with strings so fine you don't feel them until they pull.
"Money is attention frozen in time. Resources are attention made physical. Power is attention that can be directed."
— Solomon Park, investment proposal
Zara "Zero" Chen
Criminal EmpressCompact, imposing, silver-white hair, visible chrome augmentations on both hands. Zara Chen runs every criminal operation worth running in the Sprawl. The ones she doesn't run, she taxes. The ones she doesn't tax don't exist for long. She built the Zero Syndicate from nothing in the chaos after the Cascade, and she maintains it through a combination of absolute competence and selective brutality.
Zero doesn't pretend to be anything she isn't. She's a criminal. She's good at it. She offers services the corporations can't — or won't — provide: black market tech, untraceable logistics, enforcement without bureaucracy. Working with her means entering a world where the rules are simpler and the consequences are more immediate.
"I don't care about your morality. I care about two things: do you keep your agreements, and do you bring value?"
— Zara "Zero" Chen, first negotiation
Age 5: Infrastructure Baron
Theme: Systems maintenance, unglamorous power, the cost of keeping things running
Director Abbas Okonkwo
Infrastructure ControllerEveryone wants to change the world. Abbas Okonkwo keeps it running. Water treatment, power distribution, transport networks, communications relays — the invisible systems that make the Sprawl habitable instead of just survivable. He manages all of it through Ironclad Industries' Infrastructure Division, and he does it with the grim competence of someone who knows exactly what happens when any of those systems fail.
Abbas isn't flashy. He doesn't make speeches or build empires. He fixes pipes and routes power and keeps the water clean. The fact that this makes him one of the most powerful people in the Sprawl is something he finds quietly absurd. He's second cousins with Ironclad's CEO Viktor Okonkwo, but the family connection is less important than his track record: thirty years of keeping infrastructure functional in a city that's constantly trying to collapse.
"Everyone wants to change the world. Very few want to maintain it."
— Director Abbas Okonkwo, budget meeting
Age 6: Orbital Architect
Theme: Space colonization, posthuman adaptation, perspective beyond Earth
Captain Nadia Volkov
Orbital PioneerNadia Volkov was born in orbit and has never set foot on Earth. Tall and thin in the way people raised in low gravity are, with bioluminescent skin patterns that pulse faintly in the dark and modified vacuum-ready eyes that give her an unsettling, inhuman gaze. She commands Highport Station — humanity's primary orbital hub — with the calm efficiency of someone who grew up knowing that one mistake means everyone dies.
Volkov represents something new: a human who was never fully terrestrial. She doesn't think like ground-born people. Space isn't hostile to her — it's home. Earth is the alien environment. She offers the player access to orbital resources and perspectives that ground-dwellers literally cannot comprehend, but her patience for terrestrial politics and sentimentality is thin.
"Space is indifferent. It doesn't care if you live. That's worse, and better."
— Captain Volkov, docking orientation
Dr. Ibrahim Hassan
Orbital PhilosopherDr. Hassan predicted ORACLE's failure. He published papers, gave presentations, wrote increasingly desperate letters to anyone who would listen. Nobody listened. ORACLE failed anyway, exactly how he said it would, and 2.1 billion people died. He retreated to the Observatory — a research station at the Lunar L2 point — to think about what comes next.
He's been thinking for decades. The Observatory has become a pilgrimage site for those seeking understanding — scientists, philosophers, the occasional desperate politician. Hassan doesn't offer answers. He offers better questions. And the uncomfortable suggestion that humanity's current trajectory leads somewhere it might not want to go.
"Adapt, or become irrelevant. Everything else is details."
— Dr. Ibrahim Hassan, The Observatory lectures
NPC Interaction Map
Mid-game NPCs exist in a web of competing interests. Understanding who works with whom — and who's working against whom — is critical to navigating Ages 3 through 6.
The Stakes
Early game NPCs needed things from you: run this errand, find this part, survive this job. Mid-game NPCs offer things to you: power, connections, knowledge, resources. The shift is deliberate. You're no longer the one being used — you're the one being recruited.
Every NPC here represents a path. Cross offers corporate backing. Tanaka-Klein offers scientific understanding. Park offers financial dominance. Zero offers criminal empire. Abbas offers infrastructure control. Volkov offers orbital expansion. Hassan offers philosophical clarity.
You can't take every path. The alliances you form and the bridges you burn in Ages 3 through 6 determine what kind of power you wield — and what kind of person wields it — when the late game arrives.