The Red Backs
Prostitution ring in Khazigur, primarily at the southwest end of the Quags close to the West Curtain Wall. in addition to the women, the gang includes a variety of brawlers, liquor runners, racketeers and scumbags. Gang has been partially, if not entirely infested with by Wererats; most of the men can be assumed to carry the disease, while the women may carry that and all manner of other diseases as well. While the gang boasts that the name comes from their frequent lashings at the hands of the torturer's guild for their many crimes, which would lend them a certain status in the Quags, most people assume it refers to the fact that their whores are so cheap, they have to go through so many customers to make a living that it turns their backs red.
Insignia
The tattoo that Red Backs use to identify each other is a small red 5-cornered shield or pentagon shape with a stylized whip in the center. Men will generally have it on the right side of their neck and/or the inside of their right wrist; women in the gang often have it placed more discreetly inside their right thigh, on their right hipbone, or on the right side of their lower back. Generally it will be there along with a showy mix of other tattoos that vary a great deal, but the 5-sided figure with the whip or curving letter B is a constant, if not consistently identical, identifier.Structure
Loosely organized groups of 5-10 prostitutes and 5-10 'handlers' answering to a 'captain'; seven captains are known. The captains answer directly to the boss, a mangy, overweight were-rat named Tuft who lives in a confiscated warehouse close to the Southie docks of the Quags, in Khazigur. The gang has made forays to other cities but has no significant presence outside of the Quags, other than buyers who occasionally turn up for the unsold dregs of slave auctions to turn into their whores.
Public Agenda
The Red Backs look for money first, and the advancement of wererat lycanthropy for the benefit of growing the guild as a disturbingly close second. Cheap whores are their specialty, not information gathering, fencing, or some of the other uses that criminals may have to the authorities; as such, they tend to remain particularly victimized by what guards there are in the Quags, and have few powerful allies or advocates compared to some of the other criminal organizations in the Empire. They may also share some of the agenda of the Kylmen, as were-rat lycanthropy is closely associated with the people and armies of Kylma.
Assets
The Red Backs enjoy de facto ownership of seven ramshackle properties scattered in the South Quag; Six of these were properties of uncertain landlord ownership that the credit banks have written off, and the seventh, their warehouse, is the remnants of a copper pipe factory that closed down, defaulted, was repossessed and then - likely after threats and extortion - was signed over by the Quag Bank to Tuft a couple of years ago, before that bank itself was absorbed into the Imperial bank, which recognizes prior claims. Five of the remaining properties are places with enough privacy to be useful for the financial transaction of sex, and the last one is a safe place to meet people away from their other assets, to help avoid discovery by any of the various people or groups who might wish them harm.
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