Background

Every town's got trash. You make it, grandma makes it, we all make it. Even in a podunk town, on a podunk island, they needed a dump. James Oakley was an immigrant from Great Britain with a criminal past, looking to escape his old world and make a new one, and that's just what he did when he came to Braddock Island. When he saw that the people in this little village were paying so much to get their trash hauled, he thought to utilise what tools he had to haul it for them. He bought a property on the edge of town, and later a disposal truck, thus founding Braddock Island Disposal Depot! Jim would only work eight months before he'd meet the love of his life, a young woman from Brooklyn by the name of Petra Schäfer. She was a young engineer who worked on the boats down at the pier, fresh out of College and looking to escape for a while. When she met James, she forgot about her future and fell into the warm embrace of new love. Before the year was up, the two were married and expecting a child. No honeymoon period lasts forever, though, and when the love ran out she realised something terrifying... She wasn't made to live out her days in this town. She shouldn't have had that child, and she shouldn't have settled down with this poor man who saw the world in her. She was meant for more than this. That’s what James told his daughter, Imogen, when she first asked where her mother had gone. James was happy here, though, and with the loss of the only woman he'd ever truly loved, he fell into alcoholism and Imogen was raised with a loving neglect that she always struggled to disdain him for. She understood why he drowned his loneliness, and knew that no matter how much she did for him, no matter how much love she gave him, he'd never change until he wanted to. So, instead of toiling over how to fix her father, she left their trailer and wandered the dump, sifting through the scraps and broken dreams that littered the property she called home. One day, after helping her father work their disposal unit, she looked at a set of broken fishing trawlers that had been dropped off and thrown into a disposal pile. A thought occurred to her- why not fix these up and use the device to automatically open and close the chain link fence gate she always struggled to heft around at the start and end of the day. She knelt down and looked it over, ran to her father and asked to borrow his tools. When he agreed, eager to return to his living room and watch some good TV as he decompressed, she rushed back outside to work on the new gate rig she had theorised. It was a great success, and her father quietly watched on as his young daughter mirrored her mother's tendencies... dreading that she might just be meant for more than this. Years later, Imogen had a makeshift forge and workshop built out of the corner of the dump, utilising dumped goods to refurbish and sell them back to the community. Residents of Braddock weren't throwing away much useful or interesting junk, so her life was slow and quiet despite her best efforts to create an exciting world of invention and discovery. An obsession with MTV and Drama television hasn’t helped much with both her procrastination and that dreamy idea of the mainland. Imogen has spent the last two years deliberating a departure, knowing how alone he was, how much he relied on Imogen to mend his loneliness and keep him from going off the deep end. And at the same time, she loves her hometown. She loves the good people who live there and she wants to make their lives better. Some people aren't built for a sedentary life, though. Some people are meant for more than this. But, more often than not, they’re exactly where they need to be right now.