Lineage

I stepped into the doorway of the tower I’d called home for all these years, hearing the sounds of water dripping and the wind howling outside the ancient stone tower. It had been created, along with the rest of this city, as part of the fortress it was built to be as the world’s first free city state. Falketurm had enjoyed around thirty years of order in its cold, snowy loneliness, but after a while, the people became sick of their poor conditions, barely being able to scrape by the never-ending winter and feeling anger at the fact the promise of prosperity and great living by the leader of the city state had been a bold-faced lie.

Eventually a rebellion kicked off, as it always does in these kinds of stories, and power changed hands, those who disagreed were executed, and the city’s been doing that for around five hundred years now, essentially locked in a constant power struggle between the city’s underworld and the ruling party of the day. And with the loss of the ruling party of the day, each of the main three gangs that ran the underworld would be scrabbling and slicing at one another to get the the throne of this place for themselves.

They were all just as bad as each other, none of them being any good for the city by normal standards, but any of them taking over the city would be one thousand times better than the Baron still being around. As a way to keep everyone filled in, I’ll explain each of the three of them, their leaders, and how they operate.

First off you had the most dangerous of them all: Mickey ‘Steelhide’ McGraw, an immigrant from the central-east of the world who grew up on a farm, got a taste for gangland murder and money, and eventually settled down in this shithole. He’s the one that runs the city’s bareknuckle boxing tournaments, dog-fighting arenas, and anything to do with betting on something getting murdered. He was a man that didn’t bother himself with the whore trade or businesses, wasn’t a smart enough man for that, and he’d let you run your business as long as you threw him seventy percent of your profits. If you didn’t, he’d murder you, your family, and then burn your shop down. Not my favourite kind of person, but he was likely to stay in power for a while due to how tough he was.

Secondly you had ‘Madame Mystique’, or Adila Khalifa, a Middle-Eastern Sorceress who ran the city’s brothels and breweries, having the men of this city by the balls for both her astounding beauty and her control over their delicacies, charging extortionate rates for her girls and and alcohol but knowing the desperate fools in this place would fork over that money in a matter of seconds to feel something warm on and in them for only a few hours. She was definitely the most ruthless of the group, even compared to Steelhide, and was known to be extremely cruel in her punishments, torturing men who tried to underpay or avoid paying entirely, as well as being publically admitting of slaughtering and mutilating her own girls if they so much as disappointed her in their work.

And last but not least, you had Alexander Williams, a noble from the same cobble of kingdoms Mickey was from, but from a much richer estate. He was born into a crime family that ran the capital city of his home country, eventually picking up his roots and several thousand gold before planting himself here, taking control of the entire city’s business. From butchers to bakers, blacksmiths to bookmakers, Williams had them all in his book and them all in his palm, ready to raise or crush them depending on whether or not they pleased him with their revenue. He was certainly the richest of them all, but lacked the muscle the others did, often preferring to solve his problems with bribery and blackmail, this being the fact that has kept him as one of the Big Three when he could so easily be killed off, that and his stranglehold over business that would make the city’s economy die were he to himself.

So we had a power-struggle that could never end between The Batterer, The Bitch, and The Bureaucrat. One never being able to take care of the other due to the equal, or not, ground they fought each other on. Though there was one thing that would make a rather large difference in their powers:

An outside party.

I figured that I was the one to kick off this little power vacuum and the war to fill it, so I figured I was going to be the one to fill it as well. The only question was… who did I choose to back? The madman who played nice until angered, the two-faced Queen of Whores who played nice until her money was threatened, or the Rich Snob who played nice until his books became unbalanced.

The choice had no good outcome for the city, but it was still better than allowing countless civilians be hurt, maimed, or killed in a gang war.

So… which was it to be?