The title's pretty self explanatory, but I'm wondering who the "Oliver" is that is spoken of in the general event cards. For instance, it says on one card "Move Oliver to such and such"... blah blah etc. There's no mention of an "Oliver" in the manual, and as far as I can tell, there doesn't seem to be any sort of physical representation of him. So my either/or question is 1) What does this phantom Oliver piece look like and what's the deal with it? or 2) Why is there explicit instructions to "move" him if there is no physical token of him and he's ultimately irrelevant?

Yarg.

Addendum:

I apologize if this question has been addressed elsewhere, I could not find any mention of the phantom Oliver in the search function.

Oliver is the street urchin who helps Rachel finding leads on bounties. He's the blond kid.

The names for the NPC tokens are only found on the back on the character sheets, which can be a pain until you've memorised who's who. Thankfully, some helpful chap has made this reference over at Boardgame geek: http://files.boardgamegeek.com/geekfile_view.php?fileid=39140. Hope that helps!

Thanks for the answers. I did manage to figure out that Oliver was one of Rachel's npcs (after the fact, of course). As you may have guessed, Rachel was not in play during this trial run of the game, so I hadn't even thought to look over her NPCs and such. Now, however, it raises more questions. Does it matter whether or not Rachel is in the game concerning this card? What if Oliver is dead by this point in the game?

I was also under the impression that NPCs were not actually part of the game board (other than Jimmy and What-Her-Face reporter gal). Is this deal with Oliver just a one time thing, or are all the NPCs supposed to be represented on the board? Should I stop asking so many inane questions and just figure things out for myself?

If you read the event carefully you'll see that the npc token acts as a marker for the event. Esssentially this is another use of the token. The rules explicitly state that a eliminated NPC (this usally happens through plot resolutions) causes the event to end (either immediatly if the npc is dead when the event is drawn or whenever the npc is eliminated).

Unfortunetly the rules don't speak to the case whe the npc's owner is not in play.

From a story-telling angle, the world of New Angeles is always comprised of all the detectives and NPCs - only that in some case the detectives are played by YOU. As such, the other NPCs still exist. Thus, even if a detecive is not in play, his or her NPCs can still act (and will). Otherwise, you'd always have to have Floyd in game in order to net the nice sport car.