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 Sisters

  No one knows what they are or where they came from. Maybe they’ve always been here—festering in the corners of the Grease House, feeding slow and quiet while the city looked the other way. But with scraps running thin and fat in short supply, they’ve started to stir more. Show themselves. There are three of them.   Auntie looks like a corpse hung upside down for too long—limbs swollen, skin waxy, always slick with tallow. Her mouth is stitched shut with butcher’s twine, but she speaks through the smoke that curls from her pores when she’s fed. Sister is the one that moves. When she slithers, the pipes groan. Shaped like a leech wrapped in ragged aprons, dozens of trembling fingers trail behind her. She sees through scent, heat, and how your shadow clings to the fat-slick tile. Maw Maw is oldest. Her skin’s like sausage casing stretched too tight, her face a blank slab of scarred fat. When fed—kidneys, mostly—she opens a slit under her chin, revealing rows of gnashing teeth that grind while she chants in a voice not her own.   If you bring them the right gifts, they’ll feed—and divine. Auntie loves rotted tripe, warmed until it steams. Feed her and she’ll breathe out secrets no one should know—betrayals waiting to happen, memories someone paid to bury. She’s never wrong, but her truths are always partial. Sister prefers the blood of freshly killed things. If pleased, she shows you what’s possible—what you could become, what the Veil might demand. But she lies. Not always. Just enough to leave doubt behind. Maw Maw hungers for kidneys, especially sheep. When she’s full, she speaks with the dead—but only those whose remains passed through fat. And they don’t speak loud. They mutter in layered tongues, and you’ve got to lean in far too close to catch what they’re saying.  

Hooks

• 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.