The Sticks

The Sticks is the city slum, filled mostly with aging tenement buildings. The fortunes of people in the Sticks waiver somewhere between lower-class and homeless, and crime is commonplace. A lot of the violence is connected to vigilante justice, as the Sticks are the domain of the The Red Letter, who police their feeding grounds with efficiency.

The Sticks is one of the oldest parts of town, with many of the buildings originally belonging to wealthy families. It was prized real estate, as it was perched on higher ground and the wind blew the smell of the river – and the ash from the industrial yards – away from the Sticks. Even during the Great Depression, the area that would become the Sticks was considered a haven for the wealthy.

Until, of course, the November 5 riot. By 1934, 20% of the city was unemployed, with at least half of that destitute. In frustration and desperation, the impoverished lashed out at the wealthy, setting fire to the rich parts of town. The Sticks took the worst of it, with two entire blocks being lost to the inferno. Though order returned within a few days, few of the upper-class felt safe in their homes in the hills. What's more, the city couldn't afford to repair the damage that had been done until 1940.

And so, the Sticks became a shadow of their former glory. For the Invictus, giving the slum district to the Red Letter was an easy and effective option. It would put the rebellius neonates of the Carthian Movement out of sight and out of mind, where they belonged. Aware of this, the Red Letter now hold on to the Sticks as a badge of honour, tagging their territory to ward off intruders from other covenants.