City Gangs and How to Find Them
Like any other major metropolitan area, Heaven's Fall is home to a myriad of gangs and armed groups seeking to profit from a post-glorious world. The list is simply too large to list them all - especially those ganglets that form around some kind of fancy theme in hopes to become part of corpo hitlists or to hit the VR newscreens spilling blood and credits. We grew some organs in meatvacs using the DNA of our once willing chief editor and tracked where they ended up, once our investigive undercover team fully passed as organleggers.
- The Syndicate : One would easily argue this is the largest gang in Heaven's Fall. The Syndicate is known for its vice dens, its extortion schemes, its very graphics VR reels, its honour-bound mentality, and its community outreach service. You know them - they're the ones with flashy clothes who walk the length and breadth of Wall Market. Big Dan's their leader - an uncanny fashion addict, ruthless in business. He did manage to loosely unite the bygone Triads under his umbrella, and given the leaded squabbles they've been through, that's saying something. Think sterotypical gang - you're probably thinking of the Syndicate.
- The Sisterhood : Second only to the Syndicate, this gang of Mewei and hyper-buffed Boshaari runs some of the docklands and operate smuggling rings around the city. They're big brutes - all about pumped up muscle and chemboosted nightclubs. Their brains work, though (makes sense when you realise they have a monopoly on a bunch of hormones they sell dirt cheap). They laughed and saw right through us when we tried to sell them our meatvac-grown organs, but still paid us for them, saying it's not everyday you get prime-grade artificial meat to test new cocktails on. You can't miss them - unless you have the aim of a shaking goat - but you sure can outrun them.
- The Foxes : They're a small gang, but you really can't miss the Foxes - beautiful dolls, fancy nightclubs, patriarchy-smashing weaponry, and a pervasive vaporwave aesthetic. Beyond their hold on the VR market, they run many of the city's vice dens and operate as some kind of doll union. They bought our organs to try and track down missing people and it took much convincing to help them understand that we had grown them in meatvacs, and not harvested them off dolls found on the street. For a moment there our chief editor nearly lost an actual limb.
- The White Rabbit Cabal : They are a much smaller gang, though they have considerable sway upon the Mewei population in particular, and the city's infrastructure more generally speaking. The WRC is almost exclusively a Mewei gang of hackers, ransomware builders and AI developers who seek - nay, worship - rogue AI swimming in the unreachable depths of the Old Net. Rumour has it that the Cabal is working on ways to reconnect all of the city's subnets to it so they can commune with them. They're hirable, for a fee, but never findable. Try to sneak in their Enclave jungle? If you survive the everyday violence in there, and managed to find a Cabalist hiding in the population, she'll probably already know you were coming before you even left your home. And you know they've got one of our chief editor's clone-leg in a jar in someone's office. Maybe one day they can clone his consciousness, and make it so he stops stealing from the staff fridge.
- The Dockworkers' Union : For legal reasons we're not calling the Union a gang, but one of our organs ended up in their yard, and it is not a secret that they operate some kind of dockland-based cartel. To the working class of Heaven's Fall, they provide critical financial and legal services in exchange for serving the Union for a time. They actually form some kind of fearsome opposition to some of the corporations, but too bad they're in cahoots with others, effectively acting as economic proxy soldiers for the highest bidder. Crates often disseapear - sometimes with tricked out fake organs - and are sold back on the black market. Now our fake leg has been grafted on some poor Feywood resident, and our signal messes with his implants, but we can't break our cover.
- The Gorgon Bois : They're actually a very small gang, but their blood-soaked antics captures the imagination like nothing else does (just watch the VR remakes of The Bloodening or Lurea's Lure if you're in the mood). We thought the meat-loving Gorgons Gorers would sniff us out - their whole spiel is gutting people, replacing vital meat bits with vital chrome bit, and organlegging, after all. But all those cyberimplants can't replace whatever neural network they weren't gifted with in the first place. They bought our stuff, and then begged us for more, and then kidnapped our chief editor in exchange for more. We ended up giving them the meatvac lab we contracted (we did give the workers a few minutes' warning) so hopefully they stop kidnapping people for a while.
And that's it - next week on Local48, more on the financial triads that terrorize the Upper City. You won't believe gang number 4!
