The Dregs Park Boys

Organization Structure

The crew has two organizational charts. There is the one Overseer Lahey Corrin files every Thursday on his clipboard, listing himself as Sector 9 Senior Property Manager, Randall Deshawn as Site Security Coordinator, and the rest of the crew as "occupancy-compliant residential tenants in good standing." Then there is the one that actually exists, which has never been written down and would be denied by every member if it were.

Overseer Lahey Corrin is the nominal head. He filed paperwork claiming the Park as a Good Fortune satellite property in 2179 and has filed continuous weekly amendments since. The corporate address the paperwork is sent to was decommissioned the same year. Corrin has interpreted the absence of response as long-form approval. He patrols the catwalks at three intervals per day, files compliance reports on what he sees, drinks from a refurbished thermos he refers to as "the protocol," and addresses the rest of the crew in increasingly ornate corrupted-network metaphors that intensify over the course of each shift. His authority within the Park is real but narrow. The crew defers to him on questions of paperwork, scheduling, and what to do when the catwalk lights flicker. They do not defer to him on operational matters, because operational matters do not appear in his compliance framework.

Jules Volker runs operations. The title does not exist. The function does. Jules occupies Container 7-Delta — Julian's Bay, the second-tier salvage container at the end of the Park's south catwalk — and from there designs every scheme the crew runs. The schemes are coherent in the planning stage. They are documented on a panel of salvage corkboard Bubz wired up for him in 2181, known internally as "the scheme wall." Approximately one in seven scheme-wall operations clears more credit than it costs. The other six are recovered by re-routing through Riko's grow-op revenue, which Jules treats as a strategic asset and never as a fallback. Jules has held a salvaged glass of fluorescent-green glucose drink in his right hand at every operational meeting since the Park formed. The drink count is a Park metric. By some unreliable internal tally it stands at 3,847. Nobody has independently verified the number.

Riko LaPorte is the actual revenue. The crew never describes him this way. Riko runs the grow-op out of a sheet-metal lean-to he built off the back of his own trailer, using equipment he has not been able to explain to anyone, including himself. The grow-op produces. Every time Riko has attempted to "scale" the operation under Jules's encouragement, the lean-to has burned. The Park's structural insurer — a Good Fortune affiliate Corrin has been filing claims with since 2180 — does not exist. The lean-to has been rebuilt four times. Each rebuild is functionally identical to the last, with no documented improvements, and produces the same uncannily pure product.

Bubz Merrick is the technician. Bubz repairs the catwalk lights, the trailer wiring, the comms tower, the kittenbot colony's bedding stations, and any piece of equipment any crew member breaks. He is gentle with machines and blunt with people in a way that lands as unkind. The fused prescription lenses around his eyes — a botched implant rejection from before the Park formed — make his gaze look magnified at all times, which several visiting scavengers have mistakenly read as aggressive when it is, in fact, the opposite. Bubz cannot remove them. Nobody asks. He maintains a colony of approximately fourteen feral kittenbots — cybernetic stray-cats that survived the Cascade on minimal compute and accumulated salvage power — that he has named individually and addresses by name. The kittenbots respond. Whether the responses are meaningful is a question Bubz considers settled and the rest of the crew considers private.

Randall Deshawn is enforcement. Randy is large, soft, agreeable, and devoted to Corrin to a degree that no one in the Park can fully explain. He wears the bottom half of a Good Fortune contractor jumpsuit and a chest-plate he refuses to clasp because, by his account, "it pinches." His survival in a district where pack discipline runs on visible aggression has been credited variously to his size, his disposition, and the fact that nobody in the Park or the surrounding levels wants to be the resident who shot Randy. He eats one Helix WellnessProt vat-grown patty every 45 minutes. Park residents tell time by where Randy is in the rotation.

Jay-Roc is peripheral. He claims affiliation with the Cathodics — Patch's repair shop one level up — but the Cathodics have never heard of him. His self-built foam-and-LED netrunner crown, which he refers to as "the deck," is constructed from materials that were last current in the early 2160s. He produces audio out of Bunk 14, the third-tier bunk near the Park's comms tower, and operates a sub-label that exists only on stickers he prints himself. Cory Vance and Trev Vance are his permanent crew, paid in patties, sharing the bunk he has commandeered.

The chain of command works in practice the way it does not work on paper. Corrin issues directives. The crew receives them, acknowledges them, and routes around them. Operational decisions flow Jules → Riko → Bubz, with Randy as the operational mass that physically moves between them when something heavy needs lifting. Jay-Roc operates parallel and does not participate. Nobody has explained this structure to Corrin. The compliance reports are unaffected.

Key Figures

Riko LaPorte — Stocky, mid-thirties, brown shaggy mullet, faint mustache, salvaged thermal-foil track jacket worn at every meeting. Carries an actual pre-Cascade .38 revolver he calls "the equalizer" because pre-Cascade firearms are cheaper than chrome and Riko does not trust chrome. Speaks in confident malapropisms. Has never been observed to apologize, correct himself, or doubt that he is being understood. Portrait: forthcoming.

Jules Volker — Tall, lean, dark hair worn back, recycled compression base layer descended from the pre-Cascade white t-shirt, always with a salvaged glass of fluorescent-green glucose drink in his right hand. Speaks in clipped if-then constructions. Refers to all crew operations as "the operation," which has caused minor confusion in the past when two operations were running simultaneously. The confusion was resolved by Jules calling both of them "the operation" louder. Portrait: forthcoming.

Bubz Merrick — Scruffy red-blond beard, patched plaid flannel, knit cap. The fused lenses around his eyes make his face read as permanently startled. Speaks plainly. Uses "fookin'" lightly, which is a Deep Dregs dialectal feature in the lower levels of Sector 9 and not a regional affectation. Names every kittenbot — Schrödinger, Cache-Miss, Beep, Lt. Foam, and ten others — and refers to them by name in operational meetings, which has caused Corrin to file three separate clarifications. Portrait: forthcoming.

Overseer Lahey Corrin — Late sixties or thereabouts. Weathered face, lined skin, gray hair retreating in two directions at once. Wears the gray-green Good Fortune sector-overseer uniform he was issued in 2169, with the corporate patches torn off and the seams resewn six times. Always holding a refurbished thermos of recycled coolant. Always holding a salvage-plastic clipboard. The protocol-isms intensify as the shift wears on and the thermos empties. Career ended in a "coolant incident" the entire Park refuses to detail. Portrait: forthcoming.

Randall "Randy" Deshawn — Six-foot-three, soft gut, no shirt. Wears the bottom half of a Good Fortune contractor jumpsuit (salvaged 2179, Corrin filed the paperwork) and a salvaged Ironclad chest-plate he refuses to clasp because "it pinches." The dangle is his silhouette — recognizable from two catwalks away in low light. Carries a Helix WellnessProt vat-grown patty in his right hand at all observed hours. Eats one every 45 minutes; the cycle has held without deviation for two years and the Park tells time by it. Addresses Corrin exclusively as "Mr. Lahey" — the vocative is not a question, it is how Randy opens lines. Disagrees with Corrin exactly once per scene and then defers, a pattern so consistent the crew listens for the slower line as an operational signal. Three intimidation attempts by adjacent scavenger crews resolved without violence because nobody in the surrounding levels wants to be the resident who shot Randy. Lt. Foam — Bubz's kittenbot with the half-functional optic — has imprinted on the patty smell and tracks Randy's position to within four meters, waiting at the cache entrance two minutes before each retrieval. Bubz once received a full patty quarter from Randy via Lt. Foam; Bubz preserved it in a salvage container he has not opened since — the only item in his workshop that has not been catalogued. Corrin found Randy in 2178 in a corridor adjacent to S9-B2, sitting against a wall in a half-functional contractor jumpsuit eating pre-Cascade trail mix. Filed paperwork on him within the hour. They share Trailer 1-Alpha, the bunk, and the daily schedule. Whatever the relationship is, it is the load-bearing wall of Dregs Park. What Randy was before 2178 is the one thing the Park has stopped asking. He has never described it; Corrin has never asked. Older residents of S9-A2 claim to recognize his face from a Good Fortune affiliate logistics roster in the early 2170s — a labor pool reorganized in 2174 whose contractor manifests were "lost in a storage migration." The recognition is uncertain and Randy neither confirms nor denies it. Two details refuse to settle: the 45-minute eating interval predates the WellnessProt pallets by years — Bubz's private ledger logs the same cadence in 2181 against an "unknown tan protein source," so the patties slotted into a clock that already existed — and the "Previous Address" field on Corrin's 2178 intake form is filled in, naming a Sector 9-A2 building demolished in the 2174 reorganization. Corrin filed it, has access to it, and has never once referenced it. The three shirts the Park's residents have brought Randy over the years sit folded under the bunk in descending size order — largest on the bottom, smallest on top, an ordering Randy chose and no one has asked him to explain. Portrait: randall-deshawn-6e3809e0.webp.

Jay-Roc — Mid-twenties, do-rag descendant, painted-aluminum chain, sunglasses indoors. Throws hand-signs at network ports. Refers to himself in third person mid-sentence. Drops "frig" as a verbal load-bearing wall. Produces audio that has never escaped the Park. Portrait: forthcoming.

Cory Vance and Trev Vance — Two skinny men, mismatched salvage clothing, baseball caps (one backwards, one forwards), one with a twitching cheek-augment, one with an ocular implant that blinks the wrong color. Otherwise nearly identical. Defer to Jay-Roc constantly. Finish each other's sentences without noticing. Paid in patties. Portraits: forthcoming.

Recurring Schemes

The Park's revenue model is not a model. It is a list of operations Jules has named, Riko has fueled, Bubz has wired, and Corrin has filed compliance paperwork on. Five recur with enough regularity that the surrounding scavenger gangs have learned to recognize them and route around them.

Cultural Influence

The rest of Sector 9 talks about Dregs Park the way they talk about a structural feature of the level. The Park is there. It does not appear to be going anywhere. Engagement with it produces irregular returns and consistent administrative paperwork. The larger Deep Dregs scavenger gangs have learned to detour around the Park's southern catwalk because, in 2181, a scavenger crew attempted a salvage raid and was intercepted by Randy, Bubz, and four kittenbots in a sequence none of the surviving raiders have been willing to describe. No one died. No salvage was lost. The raiders left and have not returned. The story is told with reverence in the lower levels for reasons that have less to do with the violence than with the unreadability of the encounter.

Patch, who operates the Cathodics one level above, holds the Park's standing repair credit in a ledger she does not refer to and has never charged against. Bubz brings kittenbot tooling problems to her workshop. She takes them. The relationship has never been formalized. Patch has, on three documented occasions, accepted synth-tar coupons from Riko in payment, which she has filed in a drawer labeled "do not honor." The drawer has six coupons. The other three were Riko's previous attempts.

Sump Row's mid-tier dealers — the ones who handle the glucose-drink concentrate supply Jules buys from in bulk — tolerate Jules because his unit count is steady. They do not engage with the rest of the Park. Several have asked Jules about the source of the dopamine-precursor product flowing through the Park's outbound channel. Jules has answered each time with a clipped if-then construction that contains no actionable information. The dealers have stopped asking. The product moves.

Good Fortune's affiliate desk in Sector 9 has filed three intervention orders against Dregs Park in the last six years. None have been executed. The first was canceled because the affiliate field officer assigned to the case forwarded the order to Corrin's address as a courtesy and Corrin filed a compliance acknowledgment that read as cooperative; the field officer interpreted the acknowledgment as resolution and closed the file. The second and third were canceled for reasons the affiliate desk has not documented. Corrin has expressed mild satisfaction with the outcome on each occasion. He believes Good Fortune has reviewed his compliance reports favorably.

Ironclad's Depot 7G-Tertiary patrol classifies the Park as "non-targeting" because, by the depot patrol captain's internal note, "the cluster pays no return on engagement and produces useful intelligence on which trailer routes are still active." The note has been redacted from official patrol reports. The classification persists.

The Comedy of Standing

The Park runs an Approval Economy as pure farce, and by sheer incompetence has stumbled onto the survival strategy the post-economic commune of the Acquittance lacks. Overseer Lahey Corrin spends his entire life accruing standing with a community of one — an absent Good Fortune bureaucrat at a regional address decommissioned in 2179 — by filing weekly compliance reports that seek what his own clipboard calls a "favorable review pattern." This is, stripped of its corrupted-protocol metaphors, exactly an Approval Economy: a man whose sole currency is the regard of a reviewer who does not exist, drawing down and building up a standing nobody will ever score.

It is a comedy and not a tragedy for one structural reason, and it is the reason the Acquittance failed where the Park survives: the Park's standing is unreadable. Nobody can be frozen out in Dregs Park because nobody — not Corrin, not Jules with his scheme wall, not the surrounding scavenger gangs — can agree on what anyone's standing actually is. The crew's incompetence at every legible metric is so total that legibility itself collapses, and in the rubble of legibility, the cruelty of the Approval Economy cannot operate, because the cruelty requires the community to agree you are less, and Dregs Park cannot agree on the time of day except by where Randy is in his patty rotation. The kittenbots keep no accounts. Randy eats his patty every forty-five minutes regardless of his standing. Where the Acquittance perfected the reading of standing and built a guillotine, Dregs Park cannot read standing at all and built a home. The lesson the Acquittance's actuary-founders would have hated: the unmeasured life is the only one with an exit.

The Load-Bearing Warmth

The Park is the Warmth Tax's reductio — a faction too cheap to flatten and too pointless to absorb, whose actual load-bearing wall is the relationship between Overseer Lahey Corrin and Randy: two men who share a bunk, a daily schedule, and a misunderstanding that has become a home. The crew runs on warmth so structural it survived three Good Fortune intervention attempts and one Ironclad clearance operation, none of which could find anything to extract.

Cory Vance lives inside this. He is the Park's Unbankable Floor — paid in patties, never charged the Tax because he appears on no ledger, fed on the Thursdays the allocation is forgotten, his foam pad colonized by a kittenbot, filed on Corrin's clipboard as a compliance noun-phrase by a man who has met him in the flesh twice and holds him regardless. The corporate tier franchised the Small Talk Cafe three times trying to manufacture what the Park has by accident: people who keep each other warm without being paid to, without being certified to, without even being able to articulate the org chart that does it. The Park's warmth runs on the same engine as the Neon Rail's stop customs — unwritten, unenforceable, lethal to leave — except the stakes are patties and the enforcement is that nobody in the surrounding levels wants to be the resident who shot Randy. It is the Warmth Tax's punchline and its thesis at once: warmth is the one thing the Sprawl's poorest produce in surplus, and the one thing its richest cannot buy without it curdling into a forgery on contact.

The Comedy of Standing

The Park runs an Approval Economy as pure farce, and by sheer incompetence has stumbled onto the survival strategy the post-economic commune of the Acquittance lacks. Overseer Lahey Corrin spends his entire life accruing standing with a community of one — an absent Good Fortune bureaucrat at a regional address decommissioned in 2179 — by filing weekly compliance reports that seek what his own clipboard calls a "favorable review pattern." This is, stripped of its corrupted-protocol metaphors, exactly an Approval Economy: a man whose sole currency is the regard of a reviewer who does not exist, drawing down and building up a standing nobody will ever score.

It is a comedy and not a tragedy for one structural reason, and it is the reason the Acquittance failed where the Park survives: the Park's standing is unreadable. Nobody can be frozen out in Dregs Park because nobody — not Corrin, not Jules with his scheme wall, not the surrounding scavenger gangs — can agree on what anyone's standing actually is. The crew's incompetence at every legible metric is so total that legibility itself collapses, and in the rubble of legibility, the cruelty of the Approval Economy cannot operate, because the cruelty requires the community to agree you are less, and Dregs Park cannot agree on the time of day except by where Randy is in his patty rotation. The kittenbots keep no accounts. Randy eats his patty every forty-five minutes regardless of his standing. Where the Acquittance perfected the reading of standing and built a guillotine, Dregs Park cannot read standing at all and built a home. The lesson the Acquittance's actuary-founders would have hated: the unmeasured life is the only one with an exit.

Connections

The Park's external connections are geographic, not strategic. The crew does not have allies in the larger Sprawl sense. They have neighbors who have decided not to bother with them.

Recovered Historical Material

The Crew

Diplomatic Posture

""

Randall Deshawn — Big Randy

"Big Randy" — Enforcer; Resident of Trailer 1-Alpha, Dregs Park

The plate has never been engaged in combat. The torso underneath has never been hit. Randy has been the subject of three documented intimidation attempts by adjacent scavenger crews over six years; each resolved without violence because, as the surrounding levels have collectively arrived at without ever discussing it, nobody in the Deep Dregs wants to be the resident who shot Randy.

Randy full-body on the Dregs Park catwalk, patty mid-bite, Lt. Foam the kittenbot watching from the railing

Randy and Overseer Lahey Corrin at the Trailer 1-Alpha doorway — Corrin clipboarded and mid-protocol-ism, Randy listening, patty in right hand

Randy in profile — the asymmetric dangle of the unclasped chest-plate fully readable, gut prominent, patty in low hand

The crew treats Randy as the operational mass that physically moves between Jules's planning, Riko's grow-op, and Bubz's workshop when something heavy needs lifting. He lifts what he is asked to lift. He does not ask why. He does not complain. He returns to Corrin afterward and eats the next patty in the rotation.

The only place Randy has been documented to reside. The trailer he shares with Corrin is the only address attached to his name. The patty cache under the bunk is, by an internal Park accounting nobody has formalized, his only documented personal possession.

Jules → /world/characters/jules-volker

Randy → /world/characters/randall-deshawn

Jules Volker → /world/characters/jules-volker

Riko → /world/characters/riko-laporte

Bubz → /world/characters/bubz-merrick

Jay-Roc → /world/characters/jay-roc

Jay-Roc → /world/characters/jay-roc

The Park

Forty trailers. Three vertical tiers. Jury-rigged catwalks of welded ductwork and salvage rebar. A comms tower at the south end Bubz keeps lit because the kittenbots prefer the beacon's frequency. The Park's footprint contains two named sub-locations and the crew's only consistent home.

Schemes & Operations

Brand Family

There are eight of them, more or less, depending on whether you count Jay-Roc's two gophers as people or as accounting categories. They live in a sub-cluster of roughly forty salvaged trailers stacked between Levels 2 and 4 of the Deep Dregs' S9-B2, in the structural shadow of Container Bay 7 — a logistics module that settled five meters in 2178 and was subsequently zoned by no one. The Park formed because the trailers were there. It persists because Overseer Lahey Corrin has not been informed that he no longer works for Good Fortune. The misunderstanding is the foundation. Everything else is built on it.

The crew has two organizational charts. There is the one Corrin files every Thursday on his clipboard, listing himself as Sector 9 Senior Property Manager and the rest of the crew as "occupancy-compliant residential tenants in good standing." Then there is the one that actually exists, which has never been written down and would be denied by every member if it were. Operational flow runs Jules → Riko → Bubz, with Randy as the operational mass that physically moves between them when something heavy needs lifting. Jay-Roc operates parallel and does not participate. Nobody has explained this structure to Corrin. The compliance reports are unaffected.

The Park's revenue model is not a model. It is a list of operations Jules has named, Riko has fueled, Bubz has wired, and Corrin has filed compliance paperwork on. Five recur with enough regularity that the surrounding scavenger gangs have learned to route around them. Two of fourteen documented Get-Rich-Real-Easy iterations have cleared net positive. Jules considers the pattern a positive trend. The analyst notes this without comment.

Three sub-brands operate inside the Park, each the visible artifact of a crew member's particular conviction. The grow-op — the only consistently profitable operation the Park runs — is unbranded. The joke is structural. Nobody in the Park has acknowledged it as a joke.

The Park is a sub-cluster of the Dregs' S9-B2. The surrounding scavenger gangs detour around the south catwalk since 2181, when a salvage raid was intercepted by Randy, Bubz, and four kittenbots in a sequence none of the surviving raiders will describe. No one died. The story circulates anyway.

Patch holds the Park's standing repair credit in a ledger she does not refer to and has never charged against. Bubz brings kittenbot tooling problems to her workshop. She takes them. The relationship has never been formalized. Six Riko synth-tar coupons sit in a drawer labeled "do not honor."

Jules sources expired medical-grade glucose drink concentrate in bulk from Sump Row dealers who tolerate him because his unit count is steady. They have stopped asking about the grow-op's sourcing. The product moves. That is enough.

Three intervention orders filed. None executed. The first was closed when a field officer forwarded the order to Corrin's address as a courtesy; Corrin's compliance acknowledgment was interpreted as resolution. The second and third were canceled for reasons Good Fortune has not documented. Corrin considers the outcome a favorable review pattern.

Ironclad (Depot 7G-Tertiary)

The depot patrol classifies the Park as "non-targeting" by internal note: "the cluster pays no return on engagement and produces useful intelligence on which trailer routes are still active." The note is redacted from official patrol reports. Three pallets of discontinued Helix patties arrived here via paperwork error in 2182. Ironclad has no follow-up record.

Why does Riko's grow-op work?

Three internal Park reviews convened by Corrin. Riko unable to explain his equipment, process, or purity metric at any of them. The lean-to has burned four times and been rebuilt identically each time. The product tests the same. No one has successfully reverse-engineered the setup. Sump Row brokers have stopped asking about it.

What happened in the 2181 raid?

A scavenger crew attempted a salvage raid on the Park's south catwalk. Randy, Bubz, and four kittenbots intercepted them. No one died. No salvage was taken. The surviving raiders have not returned and will not describe the encounter. The story circulates with reverence. The reverence is not explained by anything the Park will confirm.

Who actually canceled Good Fortune's second and third intervention orders?

The first is documented: Corrin's compliance acknowledgment was misread as resolution. The second and third have no recorded cause. Good Fortune's affiliate desk has not pursued the question. The cancellations are in the file. The reasoning is not.

Do the kittenbots respond with intent?

Bubz considers this settled. The kittenbots — fourteen named units, cybernetic strays that survived the Cascade on minimal compute — congregate at the rinse-bench, respond to their names, and receive Lt. Foam's patty trim allocation on a schedule. Whether any of this is meaningful is a question the Park treats as private and the analyst is not positioned to resolve.

Randy Deshawn is enormous, soft-spoken, and devoted to Overseer Lahey Corrin to a degree that no one in Dregs Park can fully explain. He wears the bottom half of a Good Fortune contractor jumpsuit, salvaged in a trade Corrin filed paperwork on in 2179, and a salvaged chest-plate from a decommissioned Ironclad patrol kit that he refuses to clasp because, by his own account, "it pinches." The chest-plate dangles at an unbalanced angle across his torso at all times, leaving most of his soft gut exposed to whatever the Park's sub-bay air is doing on any given day.

He carries a Helix WellnessProt vat-grown protein patty in his right hand at most observed hours of the day. He eats one every 45 minutes. He addresses Corrin as "Mr. Lahey" without exception. He disagrees with Corrin exactly once per scene, then defers. The pattern has held for six years and has never deviated. The rest of the crew has learned to listen for it as the operational signal that Randy has reached the end of his agreement with whatever Corrin is currently filing. There is no documented occasion on which Randy has volunteered an opinion outside that window. There is also no documented occasion on which Randy has appeared unhappy.

Six-foot-three, soft, the body of a man who has eaten a vat-grown patty every 45 minutes for two years and was not small to begin with. The gut is the dominant feature of his upper body, and his upper body is uncovered. He has worn the bottom half of a Good Fortune contractor jumpsuit since 2179 — charcoal grey, frayed at the cut waist where Corrin's tailoring (the only documented instance of Corrin performing manual labor) gave out at the seams. The boots underneath are Ironclad-issue work boots two sizes too big, laced loose.

He has worn no shirt above the jumpsuit waist in the entire documented history of his Park residency. Adjacent residents have, on three separate occasions, brought him shirts. He has accepted each one warmly, thanked the giver, and never worn any of them. The shirts are folded in a pile under the bunk next to the patty cache.

His face is broad, soft, and unlined for a man of forty-one. Corrin performs the haircuts personally with a salvaged Helix grooming kit, applying the same focused attention he gives to filing compliance reports. Randy's expression at rest is one of patient unhurried attention — the face of a man who is not confused by the conversation he is in and is simply waiting for his next instruction.

Randy speaks in short sentences. The sentences are agreeable. The first word of any line addressed to Corrin is "Mr." and the second is "Lahey." The vocative is not interrogative. Randy is not asking a question. He is opening the line.

Sample observed lines, from Bubz's casual ledger, which Bubz keeps without explanation and shows no one:

The exactly-once-per-scene disagreement is real and verifiable. Park residents identify it by tone — Randy's voice does not rise; it goes briefly slower. The slower line is the disagreement. The line after it is the deference. Crew members who need to know whether Randy is at the disagreement phase yet listen for the slower line and schedule operational decisions accordingly. Corrin has never noticed this and would not be receptive to having it pointed out.

Outside of Corrin, Randy speaks rarely. He uses "fookin'" lightly — the Deep Dregs sub-bay dialectal pattern that runs through the lower levels of S9, not a regional affectation. He calls Bubz "Mr. Merrick," which Bubz has never corrected and has, on two occasions, been observed to smile at when Randy was not looking. He calls Jay-Roc nothing at all and addresses him by tilting his patty in his direction, which Jay-Roc has interpreted as deference and which Randy has not clarified.

What he doesn't say: anything about before 2178. Not to Corrin. Not to anyone. The Park has speculated and stopped speculating. The silence is complete and apparently permanent.

The patties are Helix's discontinued WellnessProt vat-grown protein line — tan in color, palm-sized, slightly soft at room temperature, marketed in 2181 as "the lean clean affordable protein for the active modern Sprawl-dweller" and discontinued in 2182 when Helix's wellness-tier consumer pivot moved the line off the catalogue. Three pallets were routed through Ironclad's Depot 7G-Tertiary on a paperwork error. The pallets ended up at Dregs Park. This is the entirety of the supply chain. Nobody planned it.

Randy eats one every 45 minutes. The cycle has held without documented deviation for two years. Corrin has filed a compliance addendum reclassifying Randy's intake as "Resident Subsistence Provisioning, Tier C, Continuous Issuance" and the addendum has been received, archived, and read by no one, which Corrin treats as standing approval. The supply cache contains approximately four months of patties at any given time. Bubz refreshes the cache weekly from the main Park pallets, which sit in the central salvage shed under tarpaulin Corrin filed weather-exposure paperwork on in 2183.

The crew uses the rotation as their clock. So do the kittenbots. Lt. Foam — one of Bubz's kittenbot colony, the one with the half-functional optic implant that catches sodium light at the wrong frequency — has imprinted on the patty smell. Foam tracks Randy's position around the Park to within approximately four meters and has been observed waiting at the cache entrance two minutes before each scheduled retrieval. Bubz considers Foam's predictive accuracy a research outcome. Randy has, on three documented occasions, deliberately set down patty trim at the edge of his eating area where Foam could reach it without contest. Randy has never spoken to Foam directly. Foam has never approached close enough for Randy to do so. The arrangement appears to suit both.

The crew has attempted to disrupt the rotation twice. Once during a contested salvage operation in 2183, when Jules requested Randy skip one patty to maintain operational cover. Once during the 2184 sub-bay outage, when Bubz requested Randy ration. Both requests were declined. Both declines were polite. Both were final. Jules has not asked again. Bubz has not asked again. The rotation is the rotation.

The relationship that defines Randy's existence in the Park. Corrin found Randy in 2178, in a corridor adjacent to S9-B2 Level 3, sitting against a wall in a half-functional Good Fortune contractor jumpsuit. Corrin filed paperwork on him within the hour, classifying him as "Resident Pending Property-Management Assessment" and assigning him provisional occupancy in Trailer 1-Alpha. The assessment has never been completed. Randy has lived in Trailer 1-Alpha since.

Corrin patrols the catwalks; Randy follows two meters behind, patty in hand. Corrin files; Randy listens. Corrin's protocol-isms accumulate; Randy's "Mr. Lahey, ..."s open every reply. The relationship has no documented dispute history and no documented terminology. The crew has stopped trying to name it. Whatever it is, it is the load-bearing wall of Dregs Park.

A peripheral but consistent friendship that runs almost entirely through Lt. Foam. Bubz delivers patty trim to Foam after Randy's eating windows. Randy noted the pattern and, on one documented occasion, set down a full patty quarter for Foam to take to Bubz directly. Bubz received it, said "fookin' good of you, Randall," and did not eat it. The quarter is preserved in a salvage container Bubz has not opened since — the only item in Bubz's workshop that has not been catalogued.

Randy stands at Container 7-Delta's door during scheme-wall sessions without anyone having asked him to. Jules has stopped objecting to the patty wrappers along the south catwalk. The arrangement is permanent and has not been verbally acknowledged by either party.

Standing seat on the overturned bucket inside the grow-lean-to. Randy interprets Riko's malapropisms in real time without correction and shares quarter-patty trim when the lean-to runs cold. The cold happens more than the grow-op's efficiency reports suggest it should.

Peripheral crewmate. Randy once offered Jay-Roc a quarter-patty when the supply pallet ran short on a Thursday. Jay-Roc accepted in third person — "Jay-Roc'll take that" — and the transaction was not repeated. Randy has addressed Jay-Roc by patty-tilt ever since. Jay-Roc has interpreted this as deference.

What is known about Randy before 2178 is limited. He arrived in S9-B2 at thirty-five — already large, already in the contractor jumpsuit, already eating from a bag of pre-Cascade trail mix. He has not described his pre-Park history to any crew member, including Corrin. Corrin has not asked.

Some of the surrounding levels' older residents claim to recognize his face from Sector 9-A2 in the early 2170s — a labor-pool roster for a Good Fortune affiliate logistics operation that was reorganized in 2174 and whose contractor manifests were lost in a storage migration. The recognition is uncertain. Randy has not confirmed it. He has also not denied it.

What is known: Corrin found Randy, Corrin filed paperwork on Randy, and Randy has not been documented anywhere outside Dregs Park since. The patty rotation began in 2182 when the WellnessProt pallets arrived. The chest-plate began in 2180. The "Mr. Lahey, ..." opener began on the day Corrin and Randy first spoke and has continued without modification through every scene in which the two have appeared together. Six years of operational record. Zero deviations. The Park has built itself around the regularity. The regularity has built itself around Corrin.

What was the Good Fortune logistics operation?

The labor-pool roster from Sector 9-A2 in the early 2170s would place Randy in the region years before Corrin arrived. The operation was reorganized in 2174. Its contractor manifests were lost in a storage migration. Manifests are not usually lost in storage migrations.

Why did Corrin file paperwork on a stranger in a corridor?

Corrin files paperwork on everything. The assessment of Randy as "Resident Pending Property-Management Assessment" is consistent with Corrin's general approach to the world. What is not consistent is that the assessment was never completed. Corrin completes things. Six years, zero completions.

What does the rotation replace?

The interval predates the patties — the internal clock Bubz verified is not a new behavior built around the WellnessProt supply. It is an existing behavior that the WellnessProt supply slotted into. What Randy was eating every 45 minutes before 2182 is not documented anywhere.

• A resident of S9-A2 Level 7 — who has not given a name and cannot be verified — claims Randy was present at the reorganization of the Good Fortune logistics affiliate in 2174, not as a contractor but as the person who signed the reorganization paperwork. The claim has not been corroborated. The claim has not been withdrawn.

• Bubz's private ledger contains seventeen entries recording Randy's exact patty-consumption times over a fourteen-day stretch in 2184. Bubz has described the ledger as "a maintenance log for the Park's timekeeping infrastructure." The ledger also contains two entries that predate the WellnessProt pallets' arrival by six months, recording intervals of 45 minutes between Randy eating items described only as "unknown tan protein source." Bubz has not commented on this discrepancy.

• The three shirts brought to Randy and never worn are folded in descending size order under the bunk — largest on bottom, smallest on top. Randy did not ask for them in any order. The ordering is Randy's. The ordering is consistent with someone who expects to grow into the smaller ones, or someone who expects to need the larger ones again. Neither interpretation has been proposed to Randy.

• Corrin's 2178 intake paperwork for Randy — classified "Resident Pending Property-Management Assessment" — contains a field for "Previous Address." The field is filled in. The address written there corresponds to a building in Sector 9-A2 that was demolished in the 2174 reorganization. The paperwork is archived in the Park's compliance ledger. Corrin filed it. Corrin has access to the compliance ledger. Corrin has never referenced the address.

Their objective competence is low. Riko's grow-op tests at 94.6% analytical purity when the median Dregs operation tests at 51%, but he cannot explain his equipment, his process, or why. Jules's plans, coherent on paper, do not survive contact with reality past the three-minute mark. Corrin's compliance reports describe revenue streams the crew does not have and infrastructure assets they have never owned. Randy has, in twelve documented cases, broken into the wrong trailer. Jay-Roc has never successfully transmitted an audio file to a receiver outside the Park. Despite all of this, the crew has outlasted three Good Fortune intervention attempts, one Ironclad clearance operation, and approximately forty individual eviction notices Corrin has filed against members of his own crew.

The Park offers its residents something the surrounding Deep Dregs does not: a fixed address, a nominal landlord who files paperwork on their behalf, and a functional if inexplicable revenue stream that keeps the lights on. The second-order cost is that every resident is now documented — however fictionally — in a Good Fortune compliance framework administered by a man whose authority ended in 2179 and who interprets that framework as protective. It may be. It may also be a liability nobody has yet thought to exploit.

• At least two Sump Row mid-tier dealers believe the grow-op's purity is the result of a pre-Cascade cultivation algorithm Riko recovered from a scrapped Helix bioreactor. Riko has denied this on the grounds that he does not know what a bioreactor is.

• One informant from the adjacent Block 4-Charlie sub-cluster claims Randy was the reason the second Good Fortune intervention order was canceled — that he walked to the field office, sat in the waiting room for four hours, ate three patties, and left without speaking to anyone. The field officer closed the file the following morning. The informant has not provided documentation.

• Jay-Roc's sub-label stickers have been found on comms nodes at two separate Cathodics relay stations. The Cathodics have no explanation. Jay-Roc has not acknowledged the relay stations exist.

• Bubz has referred to one of the kittenbots — Cache-Miss — as "the one who knows." He has not elaborated. Nobody has asked a follow-up question, which the analyst notes as a pattern worth documenting.

Randall "Randy" Deshawn — Six-foot-three, soft gut, no shirt. Wears the bottom half of a Good Fortune contractor jumpsuit (salvaged 2179, Corrin filed the paperwork) and a salvaged Ironclad chest-plate he refuses to clasp because "it pinches." The dangle is his silhouette — recognizable from two catwalks away in low light. Carries a Helix WellnessProt vat-grown patty in his right hand at all observed hours. Eats one every 45 minutes; the cycle has held without deviation for two years and the Park tells time by it. Addresses Corrin exclusively as "Mr. Lahey" — the vocative is not a question, it is how Randy opens lines. Disagrees with Corrin exactly once per scene and then defers, a pattern so consistent the crew listens for the slower line as an operational signal. Three intimidation attempts by adjacent scavenger crews resolved without violence because nobody in the surrounding levels wants to be the resident who shot Randy. Lt. Foam — Bubz's kittenbot with the half-functional optic — has imprinted on the patty smell and tracks Randy's position to within four meters, waiting at the cache entrance two minutes before each retrieval. Bubz once received a full patty quarter from Randy via Lt. Foam; Bubz preserved it in a salvage container he has not opened since — the only item in his workshop that has not been catalogued. Corrin found Randy in 2178 in a corridor adjacent to S9-B2, sitting against a wall in a half-functional contractor jumpsuit eating pre-Cascade trail mix. Filed paperwork on him within the hour. They share Trailer 1-Alpha, the bunk, and the daily schedule. Whatever the relationship is, it is the load-bearing wall of Dregs Park. Portrait: randall-deshawn-6e3809e0.webp.

Known Associates

Wide planning scene — Jules at the scheme wall inside Container 7-Delta, pointing at a pinned diagram, drink bulb in his right hand

🗂 The Operation

Jules Volker portrait — charcoal compression base layer, fluorescent-green drink bulb, scheme wall behind him

📋 The Brief

Randall "Randy" Deshawn