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“You ever slip in old grease? It don’t wash off, not really. The smell clings. The shame does too.”

Description - Exterior

The Stockyards Grease House squats behind a rusted iron fence on the eastern edge of the old yards. Brick walls slathered with grime, windows painted shut with decades of smoke and oil, and a crooked stack vent belching low, bitter steam. The loading docks are warped and sagging, still stained with decades of blood runoff and fat spills. The smell hits you a block away—burnt lard, rot, and something that maybe never came from an animal.

Description - Interior

The inside is darker than it should be, even with overhead lights still twitching to life now and then. Concrete floors slick with years of hardened fat, grates that never fully drain, and vats—some open, some sealed—dot the floor like silent watchers. The old industrial boilers still hum faintly. In the far room, the vats have names carved into their sides. And they’re warm. Nobody touches the pipes anymore—they rattle when you’re not looking.

History

Once a vital part of the Yards’ rendering system, the Grease House collected every drop of leftover fat, bone sludge, and gristle from the kill floors to process into tallow, soap base, and cheap fuel. When the packing houses shut down, this place never got boarded up—just “quieted.” Uncle Carm kept it. Not for profit. For power. Rumors say there’s something beneath the foundation. Something that fed on waste and never stopped.

Owned By

Carmine "Uncle Carm" Lucchesi’s crew. Still listed under a fake industrial shell, but no one questions it.

Run By

Richie "Mans" Mancuso, Carm’s right-hand man. Oversees the place like a church—quiet, angry, devout.

Employees

• Rollo Vetch – Night watch. Doesn’t speak. Carries a hammer, never uses the same route twice.
• “Spats” Barbera – Grease hauler. Always covered in smears. Swears he hears things in the vats.
• Lita “Steamface” Morales – Oversees boiler maintenance. Half her face is scarred and always damp.
• Tommy Greel – Junior runner. Lost two toes to a pipe valve that “opened itself.”

Regulars

• Fear Crew hardboys dumping tools and bodies that don’t need questions
• Independent Veil practitioners collecting grease for “binding work”
• Curious teens looking to impress—and usually leaving with burns or worse
• A pale man in a butcher’s apron who shows up during storms and disappears just as fast
• CPD Arcane Division field monitors who keep trying to set up a sensor array… and keep going missing

Notes

• The main vat (“Number 5”) is warm year-round. No power flows to it. The surface ripples when no one's near.
• The pipes under the floor don’t match any blueprints. They shift—slowly—and sometimes hum.
• Every month, a crate gets delivered to the back dock. No markings. No pickup. Carm's crew moves it in silence.
• The grease has been seen moving against gravity on more than one occasion. It responds to pain.
• One of the boilers sings—high-pitched, wordless—at exactly 3:03 a.m. on full moons. Even if it's off.
• Some swear the whole building breathes—and that the last guy who tried to demolish it got pulled into the floor.