Urban Darkness RPG

Gothic City ranks among the most dreadful cities in existence. Dirt, decay and depravity fill its many streets and allies, crime and poverty reign supreme. As glorious as its cathedral and high rise skyscrapers may mix into a blend of the venerable and modern so disheartening is the filth and soot that clad the less prestigious parts of the metropolis in a terrible mourning dress of sad black. For days the sun cannot be seen through the layers and layers of smog that the man-devouring factories exhale through their never-sleeping maws of concrete in the form of vents. Desperate and completely dehumanized criminals, thieves, muggers, rapists, killers and worse, stalk the urban preying-ground on the hunt for the last honorable citizens ready to do anything for a short fix of good life. But deep inside the bowels of the city there rests a troubled soul in a safe haven.

A sleazy backyard that once had belonged to a butcher’s shop had become a retreat for a special visitor to Gothic City. Between stained old cardboards, a rusty bicycle frame, empty crushed cans, a heap of holey plastic containers formerly containing god-knows-what and other disposed relics of human consumerism fine white strands extended in straight ways. Every single one was a unique piece of art, masterfully woven to build a comfortable hammock, a cocoon even in which a potential observer could detect a slightly moving shadow through the threads. Despair.

For weeks the petite girl had been able to sleep well one night, to forget that she was on the run from so many things, to ignore how her feet ate mile after mile of asphalt that rolled by in grey memory. In this strange material she had found warm rest roughly two feet above the soiled concrete. Secure in her own little part of this world she drifted through the entrancing realm of dreamless deep sleep. Content with only sleeping she rolled around from time to time to wrap the warming cover around her.

Her much needed time of peace came to a sudden break when her world was suddenly toppled. From one moment to the other the horizon suddenly turned upside down and reality hit her again in the form of the hard backyard ground that painfully slammed into her side. Reflexes sharpened through her long time on the road kicked in. Almost automatically her fingers found cloth and tore into it. Screaming the attacker and she rolled over the floor, desperately holding on to each other. In their sight brick walls, grey concrete and the black starless sky combined to a swirling chaotic miasma of colors.

Her head still swirled, her senses only begun to gather when she finally found herself on top. Only now did she realize that beneath her was… a little girl?

She was dirty and clad in rags, grease strains adorned her little face like tiger stripes, her hair was an unkempt red mess, her unclean fingernails dug deep into Despair’s black attire in an attempt to get away, to flee. Terror shone in her brown eyes, her mouth stood white open screaming loudly in a high pitch. To see a young girl, a child, like this was horrifying. In this moment she knew only the atavistic instinct of flight, something had shaken her to the core. Frantically her legs kicked in the air in a hopeless attempt to make another run. Seldom before had the Angela Atra seen such horror. And as a soundtrack to to this bizarre scene the ever same words fled the eight year’s old mouth:

“Let me go! Let me go! He’s coming! He’s coooooooooooomiiiiiiiing!!!!”

Panic gripped the older girl. What was happening here? What could frighten a street kid to that degree? What could still scre a little veteran of one of the most abhorrent cities in the world? Not what… She spoke of “him”. Who?

The answer came as abruptly and violently as the event that had led to this question. A strange symmetry. The first moment she did not event comprehend what happened. She only gazed into the bleak night sky of the dreaded metropolis. It was almost beautiful how the buildings formed a picture frame for the painting of nocturnal darkness. Somehow this almost compensated for the stars that were blacked out by Gothic City’s legion of lights. But why did she look at this picturesque scene? Did she not have the sight of a terror filled girl before her one second ago?

All this was so confusing. And she became so tired. Slowly darkness began to creep into her field of sight, take more and more of it. Only in the fringes of her mind did she remember something coming near her, colliding with her forehead. Had this made her so tired? Maybe. She could not tell. Sleeping was so important right now. Even the screams of the little girl as she was picked up and carried away moved far away. She heard her screams but they were so incomprehensible. She wanted to act on them, lift a hand, but the physical concussion was so severe. Inevitably she succumbed to it. The last thing she saw was a vague, shadowy silhouette turning around to her. One arm held a kicking and screaming bundle. The other was raised towards her to admonishingly wave a finger.

When she finally awoke she found herself on the same spot on the ground, unmoved and untouched. If it had not been for a single detail and the headsplitting pain in her skull she could have believed it all to be a dream. Possibly she had fallen out of her makeshift hammock. But there was one single thing that convinced her of her own memories as much as she doubted her own sanity.

And this detail was a single button she had ripped of the homeless girl’s jacket. As a testament to the whole story it still rested in her hand and the little star on it had left a small, quickly vanishing imprint on her soft alabaster skin…

“Where the hell are you, Naomi?” Kurt thought, his flustered mind running through the worst thoughts after not seeing his adopted daughter for three days.

Sure, she was independent and able to cope by herself, at the mere age of fourteen she had escaped a child fighting slavery ring and managed to ward off being placed as a more… Immoral type of slave, but she was still a girl, and susceptible to the evil of Gothic City.

“Arg,” he shook his head, having searched everywhere in Gothic and even sent out multiple police patrols to locate her. This wasn’t right, this wasn’t normal… He couldn’t lose Naomi, not to Gothic, the thought was unbearable. Pacing up and down his office, his hands clutched at his phone waiting for a call, waiting for something to come to light.

It did.

“Hello?” He said, swiftly placing the phone to his ear and listening intently. “Hello, Pendragon,”

The words sounded frail, like a homeless man. It was, in reality. One of Kurt’s many points of contact all over the city (and country). He had access to the FBI, the CIA, and all of the Gothic Police Department officers, but in a strange way, his most useful contact base was the homeless. They could get by unnoticed, and feedback large amounts of quality information straight from the ground.

“I have information regarding the missing child, your mission child.”

The Gothic archers heart stopped. “W…where do you want to meet?” He asked, his mouth suddenly going dry with worry, a feeling of dread welled up within his stomach, and he shook his head, closing his eyes in anticipation of the worst.

“Nowhere. I can’t be seen with the commissioner, the phone will suffice.”

Suffice?

This man sounded too well spoken for a simple homeless man, but that was Gothic. Even the most well-spoken, educated, and man of status could be made jobless, homeless. One could be a millionaire one day, and a broke man the next. It was a tough city.

“Okay… Just, what do you know?” With a gulp, Kurt Pendragon took a seat upon his desk and prepared for the worst, his hand shaky, his heart pumping vigorously. What was he about to hear?

"Rumor has it, that there is a certain place within the city, most of the homeless community steer well away from it. An alleyway, or something. Apparently... When you walk in, you don't walk out."

The Emerald Archer creased his brow, was this kind of pathetic joke?

"And before you speak back, Kurt. Just know. This ISN'T a joke, it's true... Ask any tramp you know, they'll all say the same -- There is another rumor... A whisper, that there is a man hunting little girls in the city, oh, but not for those reasons, no."The informant chuckled. "He, she, whatever, may be affiliated with these rumors. That's all I know, Kurt."

And as quickly as the call started, it ended. With Kurt feeling very, very confused.

He would have to investigate further.

The nocturne encounter had left a grave impression. Compelled by it Despair had decided to dive headlong into the very belly of the beast called Gothic City. Sleep was not an option anymore. Instead of rest her night became filled with the intestines of the back alleys.

Homeless camps in the artificial twilight of flickering, defect streetlights. Nearly unidentifiable booze bottles that were lifted to pour disgusting liquid into slack jawed mouths. Stories of trauma, abuse and personal loss shared around burning trash cans. People flashing makeshift blades in the darkness ready to defend sleeping-boxes to the death simply because they did not have anything else. Fever, flies and dead dogs all around, testament to the inhuman conditions the poor inhabitants of this less glorious part of the metropolis were forced to live in. Puke, bloody piss, black shit, pus and even more unsavory body fluids covering the ground that she walked over. Almost like a goddess the Angela Atra seemed to glide through the city mere inches above the soiled concrete, not touching anything while her paper white skin shone between the run-down brick walls.

But it were not tales about the white goddess that went around. Rather the opposite. The deeper she delved into the cesspit of trash, human and otherwise, the more dark rumors flew towards her. Some were pure nonsense. A secret cult of blind mutants sacrificing rich white girls. Elvis living the life of a derelict hobo in the streets of Gothic City. A tentacle monster crawling out of the sewers at night. A crashed UFO in the deepest and dirtiest heart of the slums. A madcap in green fighting crime with arrow and bow. But then there was one single story that kept resurfacing over and over. People were afraid to tell it, at first it was nothing more than a narrative of a deranged drunkard infront of a mission.

While others had stood there in line for soup he had stumbled around and had endlessly ranted about the black man who had taken away his son at night. He had gripped others by their thick coats and had screamed into their faces, bashing one of them over the head with his empty vodka bottle. Skeptically Despair had watched him from the shadows. Shaking her head she had already wanted to leave but then she had noticed one thing: Nobody had reacted to him. Not even when he had assaulted the other man. They had just turned their head and had behaved as if he had not existed at all. As if he had been invisible. Or as if he had spat out a truth no one wanted to hear.

Following her intuition the White Specter Of Gothic City as she was already known by then had followed the approach. And found out that it was more than the simple story of a crazy man. It was an urban legend of the homeless community. Behind closed doors they would whisper it as if to make sure whatever was subject of their saga would not hear it. Of a being of pure abyssal darkness that hunted the young, the weak, the innocent. The cause varied but it was never a benevolent one. More and more she was drawn into circles of… questionable qualities as she got to know more about the legend. Like a vortex it sucked her in, slowly became an obsession. She wanted to know more of it. Like stained glass window the dark mosaic connected before her till she was finally able to salvage a name from it that more than one person could agree on:

Potwór

Now she sat on a rooftop and watched the enticing lights of Gothic City in the night. Beneath her was the filth that was the poor quarters of the city, in the distance there was the promise of wealth and glamour. Once it had been her world, before the… incident. Now it only seemed to mock her as she hunted a thing that officially did not even exist. Something she knew only the name of. The same name that teased something in the back of her head, brought back memories of language lessons long gone by in the time where she had still lived in the lights far away. Not Latin, something Slavic, Russian maybe or Polish. She needed books. Lots of them. And there was only one place to find them: The Gothic City Public Library.