Nan

Mad Nan has been a staple of the streets of Olympia for decades, and as far as most people can remember, she hasn’t really changed that much. She looked older when she was younger due to hard living, and now that she’s older, she seems to have the same stamina and vigor as someone in their thirties.
  She tends to dress the same, in a pair of study slacks and workboots, a weather shirt and vest, and a knit hat and a coat when the weather is bad. Her face is carved with deep lines of age, but her dark grey eyes are sharp and glitter with a deep intelligence (or madness, depends on who you ask.) Unlike most dwarves, she keeps her bedraggled white hair short, because it ‘keeps them from hiding their trackers in my hair.’

Despite appearances, Mad Nan is, in truth, one of the best Community Service employers in Olympia, adept at connecting people with problems with others who can solve them, and serving people with skills to others in desperate need of them. She cannot be prompted or forced to do this on cue - she will either do it or she won’t, depending entirely on her own whim. However, it has been observed that she is more likely to do this for people who have either shown her appreciation for past connections, or just provided her a service - one of the reasons she is very good at getting that Oracle to buy her coffee, or that fancy restaurant to bring a full meal to her in an alley. This is never a guarantee - she might take the offered drink, smoke, meal, or coin and say nothing, or she will approach someone out of the blue unprompted and direct them to seek out someone else for their mutual benefit.
  In addition to her unpredictable nature, the manner in which she frames her directives is…unique. She might tell someone who tells her they need to find a smuggler that doesn’t ask a lot of questions about one who will happily help anyone that can help them stop the squirrels who keep breaking into their homes and replace their teeth while they sleep. Or she might tell an Ark Runner who lost a recent find from their last expedition that they should talk with an Elf doctor who has a Rat King of discarded severed limbs she needs removed from her basement. People who are familiar with Mad Nan tend to take this in stride and know it’s worth it to read between the lines of the old dwarf’s ravings. To the uninitiated, however, it sounds like a crazy tangent and that they should get away from the rambling dwarf woman very quickly.

Nan always straddles the line between fascinating and disturbing. There is no doubt she has some serious intelligence - she has shown knowledge of advanced mathematics, engineering, and biology that has surprised tenured professors from the University. However, there is also no doubt she is deeply disturbed, and can easily segue from an otherwise normal conversation to start spouting conspiracies about the Horrors, rogue disembodied machine intelligences, secret installations of unaltered Ole Ones deep in the Earth who know the entire secret history of the world, aliens pretending to be prominent Olympian citizens, and more. She states everything is a very matter-of-fact, and has been known to make a compelling case for her most outlandish beliefs that would impress an experienced trial lawyer. Even when she tells everyone birds are secret listening devices that gather information for the undiscovered subterranean Old Ones, or Horrors can be kept out of people’s heads by making hats out of tin can scraps and old foil, she can be surprisingly convincing.
  She panhandles all over the city, and will be very straightforward about what she’s looking for. She’ll command Oracles coming on duty to buy her a coffee when they’re at a coffee stand, talk clubbers into buying her drinks, and is equally likely to try to demand a meal from a fancy restaurant as she is to go digging for leftover food in their dumpster. She can shift from humble panhandler to empress, raving lunatic to wise counselor, befuddled old woman to dangerously sharp critic, all in a flash, and back again just as easily.