The Undertrash

An Underground District of Warring Outcasts and Abandoned Oddities
Under the City there is a place to which the truly desperate turn, those who have been rejected by society or could not fit with the norms and demands of the ‘overland’. Some took too hard a hit in their personal, financial, or professional lives, pushed into the margins. Others decided to drop out of the rat race, finding it easier to opt out than rebuild.

Here, everything discarded finds a home: people, secrets, and trash. Here, there is value even in the most reviled things. Here, someone can shed their old life like the skin of a reptile.

And it is here, in The Undertrash, away from the prying eyes of the authorities and social norms, where misfits make their own rules.

Places of Interest:

• The Broken Streetcar Lines - There are miles of abandoned and forgotten streetcar tunnels and infrastructure underneath the City. Access to these tunnels via the City is regularly bricked over and shortly after forgotten, but a few entrances remain open. Now, graffiti scrawled on the tunnels’ walls hides secret knowledge, if you know the words and symbols to look for...
  
  
• The Maws - Maws are places of possibility. Because of the relative thinness of the Mist within the Maws, the laws of reality and biology bend and the forces of the real and the legendary ebb and flow to release powerful waves of mystic essence. During such events, living creatures in the vicinity of active Maws are affected. Mutations are common but the creation of new Rifts or Conjurations are also a possibility.

Locals:

• Yasmin Farhat / Ereshkigal, Mesopotamian Goddess of Kur, the Land of the Dead
  The Cold Queen lives up to her moniker by being the most influential person in the Undertrash. She rules over a community of homeless adults and children called the Marginals within a series of interlinked tunnels. Yasmin wants her territory to encompass the whole underworld and she doesn’t care for the happenings in the City above except when those events can bolster her own power. To that end, she has no compunctions to stealing things of value for her people’s use. She has no time for selfish fools like Romsia or Grund.

• Marcus Romsia / Mithras, the Bull-Slayer, Roman/Persian god of secrets and soldiers
  Marcus craves power, and he believes that the Undertrash is where he will make a name for himself. He has honed in on the district, realizing that the Marginals have been overlooked by most crime syndicates, despite their worthwhile information and resources. To him, the Undertrash presents an ideal location where he can use his sort of wanton violence with abandon and test his physical acumen, with no regards to the City’s law enforcement authorities.

• Jakub Grund / Grendel, from the Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf
  Jakub is a hateful person. He hates his state of affairs. He hates the people of the City. He hates other Rifts. He wants to be left alone, but even when he finds solitude in the Undertrash, he broods and plots and schemes, out of spite. He is willing to work with Marcus Romsia and his thugs because it advances his own agenda. From Grund’s perspective, Romsia is easy to manipulate – just suggest riches and point in a direction and watch Romsia go.