Crime and the City

Chinatown
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This district is home to Colonial Bay's large Chinese community; as much Chinese as English is seen on signs and perhaps more Mandarin is spoken. Most famous is Ming Street, curving round from Beach Street to Wharf Street, always full of tourists, especially at its northern and western end. This is practically a street market, with hawkers extolling their wares to passers-by, and signs and banners advertising everything from fresh duck to herbal supplies, restaurants and bakeries and other businesses. The Heavenly Dragon Palace and the Buddhist temple are among the more famous sights. But perhaps true Chinatown is south and west of Ming Street, where the tourists rarely go.

This frenetic sprawl of aged and somewhat dilapidated low-rise buildings is home to Colonial Bay's Chinese community. Garish signs in Mandarin and English advertise an array of souvenir stores, vendors of traditional medicines and treatments, various Chinese and western media (both legal and not-so-legal), and an exotic blend of spices, raw ingredients, and skilfully prepared Chinese food.

Recent small scale intrusions by Thai, Vietnamese, Korean, and Japanese enclaves have added novelty and variety without at all damaging the district's distinctive ambiance and it remains a popular destination with tourists and connoisseurs of Asian cuisine.

Chinatown is an open powder keg waiting to explode and the two rival Triad leaders are tossing lit matches around. There's been an uneasy surface truce between Pride's and Tim Lee's fractions for several years - largely due to Amber and Azure's threat that if the fraction war heated up she personally would go after Pride and Tim Lee and take them out permanently. However this truce was never more than skin deep. The Triads mostly kept their activities off the streets of Chinatown but never stopped plotting, scheming, and acting against each other. Now this fragile truce is unravelling.

Originally Pride Tien Leung was the undisputed leader of the Triads. Pride teamed up with Lady Nicky Winters to take over the city. People remember Nicky because she was the public face of the two but Pride was a full partner. For Nicky Winters taking over Colonial Bay City was a trial run for doing the same in Washington. After the plotting proved successful Nicky Winters handed control of the city over to Pride as she had agreed to do when joining forces with him.

However without the constant reinforcement of Nicky Winter's mental control on the Major and Chief of Police, beleaguered heroes managed to break the Major and Chief of Police free of control. Pride had to run and took refuge in the sewers of Chinatown. There he remains to this day by all accounts. Although he hasn't been seen publicly for years. The last sighting was by a boy named Trick, who was one of Auntie Rotten's meta kids.

Enter the ambitious Tim Lee, who saw a power vacuum in the Triad hierarchy and took advantage of the desperation of Chinese metas on the losing side of China's Civil War. Tim Lee arranged for thirty metas loyal to the old government of China to be smuggled to Colonial Bay in exchange for the metas agreeing to work for him.

Not all of these metas are especially loyal to Tim Lee. They are however mostly loyal to each other. And to the overthrown prior government of China. Indeed, Colonial Bay has become a base for activities against the new Chinese government.

With these metas backing him Tim Lee made a grab for overall control of the Triads. Two factors intervened to save Chinatown from full scale open war. Pride is smart, capable, cunning, and ruthless. Tim Lee is ruthless. Not especially smart though. Tim Lee never truly understood the sheer power represented by his meta minions. The second factor was Amber and Azure's threat to take out Pride and Tim Lee if violence erupted on the streets. A threat that Smiling Johhny White, Pride's second in command, and Tim Lee believed.

That left an uneasy balance in Chinatown. One where the city's heroes were having to be careful too. Deal with one fraction and that just hands control of Chinatown to the other fraction. There evolved a hands-off policy in regard to Chinatown for heroes and the CBPD. Leaving the Triads alone provided they kept matters quiet and off the streets.

That didn't mean efforts weren't being made to deal with or at least mitigate the situation. A group of Colonial Bay's heroes travelled to China to speak to the new government and returned with copies of the police and files for Tim Lee's metas. The moderate members of Tim Lee's metas were offered citizenship if they agreed to leave Tim Lee and move away from Colonial Bay City.

Harrisburg District
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This once middle-class section of town has fallen into disrepair: the rows of two-level homes are mere ghosts of the past. Some of the vinyl siding is cracked and faded from decades of neglect. Children play unsupervised in now weed-strewn vacant lots. Graffiti along brick walls mark the territory of various gangs trying to claim the neighborhood as their own. Harrisburg Elementary needs its tall security fence and guarded gate.

If southern Harrisburg is bad, the north is appalling. Many of the homes are boarded up, perhaps occupied by homeless squatters, and the gang graffiti is ubiquitous. Drug dealers and worse have brought their crime to the district. Few trees or shrubs remain, and lawns are weeds and broken bottles. Here dwell the destitute, the desperate and the homeless.

The destruction from the Horde invasion is still clearly evident. Little reconstruction work has been done. Not for lack of will from the inhabitants of South Harrisburg, or even finance. Lady Nicky Winters has donated much of her wealth to the district, and the Lorelei Harrisburg Restoration Trust Fund has added millions of dollars more. City Hall, however, in particular the City Engineer's department, refuse all applications from the district for planning permission. The only major restoration project completed was the rebuilding of the Harrisburg Elementary school by a team of heroes. On a smaller scale, Paragon has done a lot of good work in the district, especially with establishing city gardens where fruit and food can be grown.

This district really is a tale of two halves. North Harrisburg is effectively in a state of anarchy. The gangs run wild and unrestrained. There's little to no law enforcement of any kind. Drug dealers and drug labs are not unknown. Robbery is rare because there's little worth stealing, although North Harrisburg is home to criminals preying on neighbouring areas.

In direct contrast South Harrisburg is one of the most crime free districts of Colonial Bay. That's not to say that some of the inhabitants of South Harrisburg aren't criminals, but those who are commit their crimes outside the district. Poverty is endemic but the inhabitants of the district have a perhaps surprising strong sense of community. The Harrisburg Watch is liked and respected by the people, so the Watch gets to hear about everything that happens in the district.

The Watch's mission is to protect the people of Harrisburg. Gangs are left alone if they keep their activities off the streets and don't involve anyone not in the gangs. Drugs, in any form, are simply not tolerated in South Harrisburg. The Watch will forcefully evict drug dealers from the district, usually in a bruised condition. Drug labs are shut down and the people running them left on the edge of the district to be found by the CBPD.

There are known MAMBA agents living in South Harrisburg and it's very possible that MAMBA itself is based there. When the Horde overran Harrisburg, MAMBA agents fought, and died, on the barricades beside Watch members. The Clinic was evacuated by a MAMBA phasing tunneler. This hasn't been forgotten and MAMBA is welcome in South Harrisburg.

Heroes are generally not welcome in Harrisburg. Obviously so in the North. It's more complicated in the South. Spirit of Justice and Starguard heroes are welcome since those groups assisted during the Horde invasion and occupation. Other heroes who have helped, Paragon, Lorelei, etc. are also welcomed.

There's nothing worth the effort of stealing in Harrisburg. If you want to set up a base of operations then North Harrisburg is hard to beat. You'll have to either bribe the gangs to leave you alone or put on a display of force sufficient to make them back off. If you decide to hire a gang to protect your base, avoid hiring the Hellions or Road Ragers. Those two gangs hate each other and whichever gang you don't hire will be at your throats.

The Port
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The smell of salty air and marsh is the most apparent here at the port of Colonial Bay. To the left, the sturdy automatic cargo cranes stand tall and await the container freight vessels that transport goods into and out of the city. Most of the work is done by the large, efficient machines.

Over to the right, there is the Marina, where various pleasure craft and fishing boats rock gently in their moorings, tied by secure lines. The private vessels range in size from 16-foot cruisers to 32-foot yachts. The marina also rents out various water sport equipment as well as modern speed boats and fishing vessels for the day. There is one old-fashioned riverboat with paddlewheel propulsion, which provides pleasure cruises and caters to weddings.

From Memorial Day to Labor Day, sea lovers crowd the marina. During the rest of the year, the docks are peaceful, except for the fishing and cargo vessels.

The docks are firmly under the control of the Mafia. Heavy cargo still travels by sea. Transmat has mostly replaced air travel but has had little effect on sea trade. Skimming off just a few percent of the goods that pass through the docks yields tens of millions each year of income for the organization that controls the docks. Currently that's the Mafia, although the Yakuza have made several attempts to change that.

Behind the docks there are numerous warehouses, some security bonded, most not. The dock workers are rough and tough. Not all are members of the Mafia but everyone knows who is. Outsiders to the docks get a cool to cold reception. There's an almost clannish solidarity to the community of dock workers.

Places of interest in the district include the Red Rose Club, a wretched hive of scum and villainy, the Port Authority Building, and the Dock Workers Union HQ.

If the Mafia can be said to have a base of operations in the city its the famous Serafino's Restaurant. Owned by Jack Valentine, one if not the most powerful Don in the city, the restaurant is a meeting place for the higher echelons of Colonial Bay's Mafia. Those ranks were thinned out by Jacqueline Frost a decade ago but have long since been replaced by new Dons.