Try adding a Place On Ground component to your combatant's prefab.
Check your mecanim settings (not in ORK) again, you probably have some other state set as default state (the orange one) or some transition that's happening right away ...
The interaction HUD currently can't be displayed at the object's position - but you can do things like that by adding child objects (with your exclamation mark) to your NPCs and enable/disable them when needed through the event system (e.g. trigger enter/exit events).
One possibility would be to add those events to the Interaction Controller and let them be started by other objects than the player.
