shine street 0: Heart Of The City December 30, 2009

The Old Corkscrew River twisted through the city in a haphazard line that was notoriously difficult to navigate. It was one of the many oddities of the city of Shrug that it had grown in size in spite of its river and not because of it. The riverfront was not a place that anyone wanted to live, but people lived there nevertheless – the river clamped on both sides by Shine Street, home of some of the less savoury denizens of this metropolis. If you lived by the river you were pretty much born to do so – the innate knowledge you needed hardwired in by birth and ready to run by the time you had to fight to survive, which was often a hell of a lot earlier than most expected.

Shine Street was the oldest street in Shrug – a stab of poison that was equally as hard to navigate as the river it wrapped around. East Shine was home to the Brotherhood of the Rising Sun, Oriental fetishists who were rumoured to pray to the severed head of Fu Manchu and to have gained their power from feeding on the flesh of a pack of Black Shucks that they had bred purely for food.

West Shine was the home ground of Davy Keen and the Flick Knife Kings amongst others; more of a rag-bag selection of miscreants than the uniformity of their eastern neighbours. They were both dangerous but for different reasons – East Shine was dangerous because it was organised and could bring all of the consolidated power of an organisation to bear upon its enemies, whilst West Shine was a threat of chaos and the danger arose from you never knowing who exactly it was that you were dealing with.

And what of Shrug itself? Well, what could be expected of an apple with a maggot at its heart? Shrug PD were equally divided amidst the crooked, the apathetic and the scarily earnest – it made for an uneasy mix. The populace split along similar lines. Racial divides were not so distinct and generally weren’t of much relevance when it came to working out allegiances – that shit was decided more on a monetary basis; when cashflow met patrilineal lines of descent it wasn’t often that family ties won out. How could it be that way? Well, shit, your family constituted the bastards responsible for bringing you into this fucked up place and your gang or your employers represented a way to pull yourself out.

The nine-to-fivers were few and far between in Shrug but they did exist and not all of them were ostriches burying their heads in routine – in a way they had probably picked the hardest life of any of the people who lived there. The strongest infrastructure was that commandeered by the criminal classes; anything official was sluggish and scared and more often than not totally impotent.

Shrug was a breeding ground for criminals and that was generally what people came there to shop for. There wasn’t anyone looking to reform the place; there was no one that stupid and no one with that much money to throw at the plethora of problems that hobbled the place. Move there and you could be considered somewhat retarded; move away and you were a lucky sonnuvabitch; prosper, and you were one tough and lucky bastard; die and you were just one more uncared for statistic. It was the nature of the place – always had been and always would be. Shine Street was its festering heart.