Auntie
Auntie is the enigmatic proprietor of Bagger Station. Through force of presence, Auntie has enabled a community of roughly a hundred mercenary groups to coexist—regardless of philosophy, personal history, or ideology—without falling into chaos. She knows the woes of all her residents and helps when she can. Auntie cares, but Auntie is not to be crossed. No one understands how Auntie knows everything that goes on inside her house, but rather than inducing paranoia, it has fostered trust and safety. Auntie has never worked against the interests of those she keeps under her roof, or violated a trust. She understands that trust is a balloon: one prick, and it’s irreparable.
Her own history she keeps to herself. Perhaps she considers herself more useful as a figurehead, an idea, than a woman with a past.
Auntie never forgets a name. Or a story. Or a piece of information. Many movers and shakers in Vertov and beyond evince a fondness for her, as if sharing an unspoken history, an intimate familiarity that only comes with time. Whatever the case may be, Bagger Station’s existence has never been questioned; work flows to it, and Auntie dispenses it.
Though rumoured to be a hundred or more years old, Auntie doesn’t look a day over sixty-five.
She is a woman of quiet power: quiet power in presence and personality, through good will, and quiet power in her build. Auntie is the gravitational center around which an accretion disk of dutiful misfits—a family, to be clear—has formed. For many who call Bagger Station home, Auntie is the only reliable point of stability they have ever known, and as such she is emblematic of all that is to be defended: order, trust, home, and tribe. Like any family, many residents don’t see eye-to-eye, but crossing Auntie is unthinkable. It would be akin to betraying oneself, to kicking the one strut that keeps the world upright.
