Rabbit
Ask anyone who drinks at the Shamgrala Tiki Bar and Armory about the girl behind the counter, and you will get a story rather than a straight answer. Rabbit is a real person, a Rover raised in a Church of the Telling Visions caravan, but along the edge of Murder Gardens she has also become a story people tell, buffed a little brighter with each retelling. Strip away the embellishments and the bones still hold: a caravan child who walked out of an Infection farm alive, crossed the width of the Aysea on foot and fear, and ended up pouring drinks on the deadest ground in Harbormarch. These days she answers to Thumper more often than to Rabbit, the callsign the Blacktide gave her when they counted her as one of their own.
She works the bar at Shamgrala and runs it like a Rover runs a trade night, which is to say as logistics with alcohol for cover. She counts the bottles, keeps the tabs honest, and cuts off anyone who has not paid, and she is quick enough and mean enough that the room lets her. That instinct, reading a person's face before they give themselves away, is the useful half of a caravan childhood; the other half is the reason she can keep a room full of armed drunks from turning into a stabbing gallery unless the stabbing was scheduled. The Hunters mock her by a rotating handful of names, Wagon Rat, Columbia, Holy Trouble, and once Saint Rabbit of the Flaming Mouth, and she wears all of it as a form of belonging. She still keeps her mother's yellow-and-purple scarf knotted at her wrist, and an old wagon splinter lodged in her thumb still aches when the weather turns.
How she arrived is the part the tale dwells on. She escaped a Stack-run Infection farm through a drainage culvert, fled west toward the Holy City of Vestige, and was pulled off the street there by Big Mamma Green of the Blacktide, who effectively adopted her into the crew at Shamgrala. She tried leaving once, found only marsh and cannibals waiting, and came back, which the Blacktide took as proof enough. The rest of her induction happened by accumulation rather than ceremony: a plate left at the bar, a blanket kicked her way, a shotgun pushed into her hands because she was standing closest.
Under all of it she carries one unhealed wound. Her caravan family was taken by the farm, and the only fate anyone can confirm is her younger brother Pip's. Months into her life at Shamgrala, a courier delivered him to her rendered into a small bottle of Infection, a cruelty arranged by the route-paper clerk Brindle Kear, complete with a taunting letter. Whatever became of her mother Ma Wren, her father Da Harlan, and her Aunt Mercy is not part of the story anyone can tell her. What Rabbit took from the box was a fixed and quiet resolve, and the tale ends where her account ends, with a promise to destroy the people who did it.
That is why the story sticks around Murder Gardens the way it does. In a district that measures time by who comes back and who does not, Rabbit is a survivor who came back, stayed, and made herself useful, and the Blacktide have decided her private war is now the house's business too.
She works the bar at Shamgrala and runs it like a Rover runs a trade night, which is to say as logistics with alcohol for cover. She counts the bottles, keeps the tabs honest, and cuts off anyone who has not paid, and she is quick enough and mean enough that the room lets her. That instinct, reading a person's face before they give themselves away, is the useful half of a caravan childhood; the other half is the reason she can keep a room full of armed drunks from turning into a stabbing gallery unless the stabbing was scheduled. The Hunters mock her by a rotating handful of names, Wagon Rat, Columbia, Holy Trouble, and once Saint Rabbit of the Flaming Mouth, and she wears all of it as a form of belonging. She still keeps her mother's yellow-and-purple scarf knotted at her wrist, and an old wagon splinter lodged in her thumb still aches when the weather turns.
How she arrived is the part the tale dwells on. She escaped a Stack-run Infection farm through a drainage culvert, fled west toward the Holy City of Vestige, and was pulled off the street there by Big Mamma Green of the Blacktide, who effectively adopted her into the crew at Shamgrala. She tried leaving once, found only marsh and cannibals waiting, and came back, which the Blacktide took as proof enough. The rest of her induction happened by accumulation rather than ceremony: a plate left at the bar, a blanket kicked her way, a shotgun pushed into her hands because she was standing closest.
Under all of it she carries one unhealed wound. Her caravan family was taken by the farm, and the only fate anyone can confirm is her younger brother Pip's. Months into her life at Shamgrala, a courier delivered him to her rendered into a small bottle of Infection, a cruelty arranged by the route-paper clerk Brindle Kear, complete with a taunting letter. Whatever became of her mother Ma Wren, her father Da Harlan, and her Aunt Mercy is not part of the story anyone can tell her. What Rabbit took from the box was a fixed and quiet resolve, and the tale ends where her account ends, with a promise to destroy the people who did it.
That is why the story sticks around Murder Gardens the way it does. In a district that measures time by who comes back and who does not, Rabbit is a survivor who came back, stayed, and made herself useful, and the Blacktide have decided her private war is now the house's business too.
Mental characteristics
Personal history
Rabbit was raised in a caravan of the Church of the Telling Visions, the Rover faith that holds the world will eventually confess its route lines to anyone patient enough to listen. Her family carried trade goods and oilcloth-wrapped scripture along the eastern routes: her mother Ma Wren, a matriarch known for yellow-and-purple scarves and an unbreakable nerve; her father Da Harlan, so constitutionally honest he could not lie cleanly even to save the family time; her younger brother Pip, all elbows and opinions; and her Aunt Mercy, who trusted that the Signal always left a way through. She was seventeen when the caravan hauled a paid delivery three months west to Dominus Columbia, and seventeen when that city sealed its gates against the Omni Plague, converting the run into a stranded contract with no destination left at the end of it.
The failure was what doomed them. Because the delivery had collapsed while the protection advance was already paid, Stack City enforcers declared the caravan a financial loss and seized the family as recoverable assets, taking them alive to an Infection farm. Inside the deceptively ordinary facility, the captives were sorted by health, Strain, and value. Pip was pulled into a separate line, the one for younger bodies said to recover and be cycled; Da Harlan came back from a first extraction gray-faced, with green veins standing out under the skin of his neck. Ma Wren held her nerve even then, passing Rabbit the family's caravan signal with a thumb against the red knot at her wrist, a code that meant stay calm, keep track of the route, and break for it the moment an opening appeared.
The opening came on the second night, after Aunt Mercy engineered a distraction. Rabbit drove an attendant into a supply cart, slipped under a sedated guard, and dropped feet-first into a drain channel that ran out to the tidal runoff beneath the service lanes. Ma Wren covered the escape by shouting "Run Rabbit run." Crawling through filth masked her scent well enough that a Hunter Zombie in the pipe never found her, and she surfaced through a broken grate into the open Aysea, choosing west because it felt farthest from the men with ledgers.
Vestige nearly ended the run. Starving and down to one boot, she reached the Holy City and was fed broth at a communal kitchen despite being an unsanctioned Telling Visions outsider. Then she was recognized: Brindle Kear, a route-paper clerk from her caravan past, spotted Ma Wren's scarf at her wrist and set boots to chasing her. The pursuit turned her flight into a spectacle across the Empyrean, through toppled devotional candles, a shattered stack of records on the Chorus Floor of the Hall of the First Chord, and finally a crate of ritual fireworks let loose in a wagon yard. A green-glowing woman who had laughed at the whole disaster from a balcony was waiting in a freight wagon and told her to climb in. It was Big Mamma Green of the Blacktide Hunters.
Rabbit woke at the Shamgrala outpost on the edge of Murder Gardens, among Hunters in bright tactical shirts and patched armor and the Baywalker Ossuary authority Hector "Fuck It" Ausera. The Blacktide told her plainly she was not a prisoner, recruit, debt stock, or holy property, and was free to go. She left once on principle, met only marsh and cannibals, and returned. With Shamgrala's previous bartender gone, she took over the failing bar, sorted the fictional tabs, posted debts in public, and enforced them with a serving spoon; Big Mamma Green surveyed the reorganized room and said only "She'll do." When Rabbit finally pressed her handprint into the red paint of the wall of returned friends, Big Mamma named her callsign Thumper and marked her a full member of Lucy's Chosen.
Months later, still hunting for word of her family, she got a lead through Garrison Black, who quietly worked the northern vice channels to buy Pip back. The found family invested in the effort without saying so. But the delivery day brought a lone courier with no child, only a wax-sealed box and a letter in Brindle Kear's hand. Inside was Pip rendered into a single labeled bottle of Infection, a cruelty Brindle framed as the generous act of a bigger man. Garrison Black executed the courier where he stood. Rabbit ended her account beneath the red hand wall, with the bottle and the letter in front of her and a resolve to destroy everyone responsible.
The failure was what doomed them. Because the delivery had collapsed while the protection advance was already paid, Stack City enforcers declared the caravan a financial loss and seized the family as recoverable assets, taking them alive to an Infection farm. Inside the deceptively ordinary facility, the captives were sorted by health, Strain, and value. Pip was pulled into a separate line, the one for younger bodies said to recover and be cycled; Da Harlan came back from a first extraction gray-faced, with green veins standing out under the skin of his neck. Ma Wren held her nerve even then, passing Rabbit the family's caravan signal with a thumb against the red knot at her wrist, a code that meant stay calm, keep track of the route, and break for it the moment an opening appeared.
The opening came on the second night, after Aunt Mercy engineered a distraction. Rabbit drove an attendant into a supply cart, slipped under a sedated guard, and dropped feet-first into a drain channel that ran out to the tidal runoff beneath the service lanes. Ma Wren covered the escape by shouting "Run Rabbit run." Crawling through filth masked her scent well enough that a Hunter Zombie in the pipe never found her, and she surfaced through a broken grate into the open Aysea, choosing west because it felt farthest from the men with ledgers.
Vestige nearly ended the run. Starving and down to one boot, she reached the Holy City and was fed broth at a communal kitchen despite being an unsanctioned Telling Visions outsider. Then she was recognized: Brindle Kear, a route-paper clerk from her caravan past, spotted Ma Wren's scarf at her wrist and set boots to chasing her. The pursuit turned her flight into a spectacle across the Empyrean, through toppled devotional candles, a shattered stack of records on the Chorus Floor of the Hall of the First Chord, and finally a crate of ritual fireworks let loose in a wagon yard. A green-glowing woman who had laughed at the whole disaster from a balcony was waiting in a freight wagon and told her to climb in. It was Big Mamma Green of the Blacktide Hunters.
Rabbit woke at the Shamgrala outpost on the edge of Murder Gardens, among Hunters in bright tactical shirts and patched armor and the Baywalker Ossuary authority Hector "Fuck It" Ausera. The Blacktide told her plainly she was not a prisoner, recruit, debt stock, or holy property, and was free to go. She left once on principle, met only marsh and cannibals, and returned. With Shamgrala's previous bartender gone, she took over the failing bar, sorted the fictional tabs, posted debts in public, and enforced them with a serving spoon; Big Mamma Green surveyed the reorganized room and said only "She'll do." When Rabbit finally pressed her handprint into the red paint of the wall of returned friends, Big Mamma named her callsign Thumper and marked her a full member of Lucy's Chosen.
Months later, still hunting for word of her family, she got a lead through Garrison Black, who quietly worked the northern vice channels to buy Pip back. The found family invested in the effort without saying so. But the delivery day brought a lone courier with no child, only a wax-sealed box and a letter in Brindle Kear's hand. Inside was Pip rendered into a single labeled bottle of Infection, a cruelty Brindle framed as the generous act of a bigger man. Garrison Black executed the courier where he stood. Rabbit ended her account beneath the red hand wall, with the bottle and the letter in front of her and a resolve to destroy everyone responsible.
The Rover girl and narrator of Life In The Big Shitty, who escaped an Infection farm alone and carried her story from Vestige to the Blacktide.
Callsign
Thumper
Also Known As
Wagon Rat, Saint Rabbit of the Flaming Mouth
Strain
Rover
Faith
Church of the Telling Visions
Role
Bartender, Shamgrala Tiki Bar and Armory
Affiliation
Blacktide Hunters (Lucy's Chosen)
Origin
Telling Visions caravan
Type
Narrative figure (survivor's tale)
Status
Active at Murder Gardens
Children
