You'll have to ask Mister Juan if he wants to share that information, I don't think I should give it away if he doesn't want that information revealed.

Just out of random curiousity, what spell was it?

Oh hey Shade.

Yeah, I got a minute. My shift on overwatch ain’t started yet.

Five Corners? Yeah, I’m from Five Corners.

No, I doubt you would have heard of it. We kinda had a saying. Nobody lives in Five Corners.

I know weird, huh? Kinda had to be from there to understand, but you don’t live in the corners, you survive. Ya, didn’t end up there unless you had nowhere else t’go and that is saying something in the ‘gate. Guess it doesn’t even really exist anymore anyway.

Huh? What do I mean ? Well, it used to be where 8-Ball, Corsair, BP, HeartBreaker and Steel Demons turf met. Since some of those don’t exist anymore the name don’t really fit no more does it? Can’t really give you a better location than that, since turf boundaries are kinda fluid ya know.

Anyway, you survived in the Corners by knowing who was who, what was what and how to be invisible. You fly any colors in five corners and you would get a bullet in the skull before you made it a block. So if you declared, you were pretty much moved out of the corners and into your new turf.

What’s there? Nothing really.

About the only building left standing that is worth anything is the Kings Arms. Was an old hotel at some point. Mr. Chen somehow managed to keep the place neutral ground. Probably because they actually had some running water, even some that was drinkable. The old man had threatened to poison the water if anyone tried to muscle him out and I guess nobody wants to test him on it.

No, I wouldn’t call it safe. It was more like one giant crack house really, but if you were a local you probably knew enough people that you wouldn’t get shived in the night. Probably. Some of the families took turns watching each others backs. If you knew who they were and were liked by them, you could live feeling reasonably safe. It was how Rags and I got by.

Mr. Chen? I was pretty young when I lived there, but I remember he was a nice man. His family had been there before I was born and did there best to help when they could, but really that was pretty minimal. Just keeping the Kings Arm’s from falling is work enough.

Hey I gotta go, my turn at watch. Catch me later if you wanna know more.

History of the LoCoS as told by Ray "Ink" Delgado

(eventually I'm going to get this punched up as an actual couple of paragraphs and timeline for the Feeder gangs section of the wiki, currently its done as a Shade's journal entry)

(Ink is clearly drunk or high telling this story, so Shade may wonder at the exact details.)

"Jou wanna know what, ese? How I got into the life, man that's no story. Now, how the Locos got started homes, now there's a story!"

"First off there were the cousins. Luis, Carlos and Santorio. They got started rolling on the old block as head busters and knife men for this old school bunch o' homies called the 4DogCrew. They got in cause Santorio's big brother Paco was una hombre grande for the crew."€?

"See Paco was bangin' el hefe's sister so el hefe got all up in Paco's grill over the chica. So hefe was this dude called Frank, he thought he was mob or some shit. So Frank did a big job and left Paco's pistola for the Star to find. Paco got a quarter outta that shit, then Frank had some vatos of his shank Paco in the yard upstate."

"Santorio was piiiiiiissssed, ese! Like even almost six years later he was still pissed. So Santorio started raggin' on Frank anytime he and his cousin were alone. Luis thought that takin' out Frank was good idea, right, and then Luis talked Carlos into it and Carlos did the planning. Carlos was a scary dude when it came to plans and shit. Carlos made like they caught some PLague rats up near an old warehouse in the Crew's turf. Frank and a couple of his homies went up to check it out and the cousins wasted them all!"

"Anyway, Carlos offered the rest of the Crew the same choice, get behind him and the cousins or get wasted. Couple of vatos had to get geeked, but most of the crew fell in line. Then they sorta started pushin' around some of the other bangers just to let everyone know what went down."

"So, Carlos knew some vato who knew another ese, who knew someone else from back in Colombia and that got them El Coyote, who brought in like four, five keys of Nova a month, mano'! So they was rollin' high then. So most of the mano's I knew were kids from the block or old Crew bangers. First there was Paulie, he was Crew, then Gonzo was this sketchy ese from the block, then Knives was one bad ass with the blade, and so it grew, jou know how it grows when jou rollin' high. I came along a couple o' years back after Sertado passed. Couldn't make it on my own, jou know."

"And that was el LoCoS, ese, hermanos to the end. Arriba mano's, adios."

I still have the Wiki NPCs floating around on my hard drive somewhere. Did you want me to continue stating them up?

I leaned against the cool metal sheeting surrounding the rooftop crenellations of the new gang headquarters. Beyond the darkened area of the park, I could make out the pockets of light and sound which marked the surviving neighborhoods of Kingsgate. Smoke curled lazily from my cigarette, a luxury this time of night rather than the necessity daylight turned my addiction into. I inhaled deeply, feeling the burn and swell of muscles across my back, feeling the otherworldly itch scrape down the nerves of my arms. The night was my time, the time of hunters, of predators. Footsteps at the head of the stairs drew my attention, and I glanced back over my shoulder to find Shade making his way towards where I stood. The two of us watched the city in silence for several minutes.

"Do you ever wonder," I began, "how you ended up here? Do you ever think back over all the intermediate steps on the path that brought you to this point in time? Do you wonder at the mistakes made, at the poor decisions, the bad calls? In the loneliness of four a.m., do you look back and try to see what would have happened if only you'd gone left instead of right? If only you'd said you were sorry to her and took her back, if only you hadn't killed that one because of what he'd said?"

"Doesn't everyone?" replied Shade with a shrug. I nodded. Minutes passed again.

"What if I don't?" I asked. "What if my hands were guided only by the laws of the jungle? What if the only consequences I considered were those that affected the pack I lead? Does the predator path make me a monster?"

"Why do you care?" asked Shade, answering a question with a question. I thought for a moment. That was a good question.

"Because there should be meaning to it all. Not a moral or a theme or a lesson at the end of the story, but a meaning to the endless suffering, pain, hunger, failure, death. The sweat and toil and aching desire of the thousands of lives here in our tiny corner of the universe should count for something. Something beyond the inevitable hopeless defeat." I spoke slowly, carefully articulating a thought that very rarely surfaced in my consciousness.

"Shouldn't meaning come from within rather than without? A life lived with purpose is a life of meaning," offered Shade. I dragged on my cigarette, rolling what he said around in my brain. It was the conclusion that I'd reached long ago about what it was that I intended to do. Those who came after me wouldn't know it, but I would know. I would know that I'd lived my life with a purpose, that I'd adhered to a code, and upheld a law unto myself. And that was what was important. I flicked the butt of my cigarette over the edge of the building.

"I told Father Ron today that I was going to bring peace to Kingsgate."

Shade said nothing, merely raising his eyebrow. I chuckled.

"Yeah, I know, kind of an odd thing to say considering that I was one of the players responsible for bringing war to the city twice. And I'll do so again at some future point. But, in the end, I will bring peace. I asked for his help."

"What did he say?"

The corner of my mouth twisted down at the memory. "He was unconvinced. Optimistic, but unwilling to offer help without seeing some kind of initial gesture on my part."

"What kind of gesture?" Shade sounded as skeptical as Father Ron.

"Something which proves my motives as peacekeeper are true I suppose, protecting the innocent or some such. I'll know it when the opportunity arises." In truth, I had no clear idea yet how I was going to convince Father Ron that I had the interests of the people of Kingsgate in mind. But, then, sometimes you have to take the long view. Silence reigned between the two of us again for a minute, broken only by distant sirens.

"What are you going to do?" asked Shade.

"I intend to usurp and absorb the surviving gangs in this city. I will crush the leadership of the Ultraviolet Nights before I enlist their soldiers as my shocktroops to take down Raider Nation. I will burn the 162s out of their dens and tunnels. I will make the Heartbreakers our personal harem. I will crucify the Steel Demons. Every gang that stood against the Hammerpack will be erased. Every gang member that stands with the October Ravens will be spared. But there will be only one gang that emerges from the Third Kingsgate War. We will control all of Kingsgate. We will bring this city the only peace that it will ever know." Again I spoke with a quiet certainty. This was the future that I had divined for myself, the path upon which I was set. Anything less was defeat.

"We'll see," said Shade.