Water Rats
The Water Rats are Lascarian tunnel-dwellers who inhabit hundreds of miles of flooded subterranean passages, air-pocketed chambers, and pitch-black corridors beneath the Iron Gardens. They are not a traditional gang in any structural sense. They are a force: brokers, smugglers, and suspected assassins whose reach extends through access pipes and tunnels that run almost everywhere in the region.
Surface-dwelling Yorkers interact with the Water Rats primarily at tunnel entrances, where silent sentinels watch and wait. The Rats deal with anyone willing to pay steep prices for goods and services available nowhere else. They broker supplies at extreme markups, sell access to underground passages that connect otherwise unreachable locations, and are rumored to accept contracts for eliminating targets that surface gangs cannot touch. Bodies not found on the surface or floating in the water are attributed to the Water Rats. If someone disappears completely, the tunnels took them.
The Rats are often the only Lascarians that surface-dwelling Iron Gardens Yorkers ever encounter. Yorkers who venture into the tunnels uninvited rarely return. The Water Rats' leverage comes from geography: they control the one dimension of the Iron Gardens that no surface gang can contest. Whether they serve as couriers for the Lineage League, assassins for the highest bidder, or simply guardians of their own subterranean domain depends on who is paying and what they can afford.
Surface-dwelling Yorkers interact with the Water Rats primarily at tunnel entrances, where silent sentinels watch and wait. The Rats deal with anyone willing to pay steep prices for goods and services available nowhere else. They broker supplies at extreme markups, sell access to underground passages that connect otherwise unreachable locations, and are rumored to accept contracts for eliminating targets that surface gangs cannot touch. Bodies not found on the surface or floating in the water are attributed to the Water Rats. If someone disappears completely, the tunnels took them.
The Rats are often the only Lascarians that surface-dwelling Iron Gardens Yorkers ever encounter. Yorkers who venture into the tunnels uninvited rarely return. The Water Rats' leverage comes from geography: they control the one dimension of the Iron Gardens that no surface gang can contest. Whether they serve as couriers for the Lineage League, assassins for the highest bidder, or simply guardians of their own subterranean domain depends on who is paying and what they can afford.
