Foragers in Wermspittle (I)

Foragers

Unlike the usual gangs of looters and scavengers, the Foragers either enter into the Corruption Trade or they get a lucky break and get the opportunity to join the ranks of the highly specialized hunters and urban-gatherers working the ruins of Wermspittle such as the sporemongers, dung-bundlers, worm wranglers, ordureists and vermin-trappers. 


Most Foragers aren't so lucky. They either become intimately familiar with the spoor, sign and traces of Loathsome Masses and their attendant by-products, or else they get dropped and have to try to eke out some sort of life among the cast-offs and refugees of the shanty-camps. A few, if they are still young enough, attempt to join the roving bands of Feral Children. No one is quite sure what happens to the rest. Some things are best left unexamined. Especially in the Winter.


Many would-be apprentices who've been brought into the Corruption Trade don't survive their first year. The competition among apprentice candidates seeking to escape from being a rank and file Forager is fierce and rife with sabotage, betrayal, and worse. It can make a real difference down the road if one has some friends in low places or if they have a few secrets up their sleeves -- the kind of secrets that can only come from real world experience and not just book-learning. They are a hardscrabble lot, ragged, oppressed and ruthlessly exploited by the Corruption Trade, but they still manage to survive. Somehow.

A Few Foragers You Might Meet

1. Jindru is a cute young girl, except for the livid scar across her left cheek that curls down her neck--the mark of an Eave-Leech that nearly killed her when she was still just getting started out as a Forager. That was two winters ago. She wears a ragged soldier's coat that has been roughly cut to be short enough for her to still walk in the thing. Her feet are bare, even in Winter, and she dreams of being able to take a bath someday.
2. Kusha is a hermaphrodite who was turned out from the Pinglassi Refugee camps clustered around the burned-out shell of Praetorius Asylum. They have found an old arsenal left-behind by one the old airship-crews. That's where they found the three pistols and curved dagger. Kusha flagrantly taunts the elders of the Pinglassi, deliberately violates their edicts and flaunts their authority any chance they get. It seems to be an obsession with them. With all of them.
3. Lemuel doesn't talk much, not since his tongue was bitten in half by a Gore-Worm when he tried to lick one on a dare. He soaks his fists in brine in order to not feel things that he hits and hits and hits.
4. Teish has long, black hair that would make an Eloi envious. Her mother tried to sell her into a brothel, but she ran away. Now she runs along the rooftops and manages to not be noticed by the bad things down below. Usually.
5. Barg is shorter than most, with heavily scarred hands missing their fingernails. They tend to stick to the shadows and never comes in from the cold, no matter what. No one knows for sure if they're even human, but they are very good at locating and gathering-up Wet Spots.
6. Gleemer always smiles, especially when she's pounding the brains out of someone's skull with the pair of hammers she always carries. She'll fight anyone. Anytime. People tend to just toss her some food or a skin of wine and hope she'll go away.
7. Tookinom is tall, gangly, exceptionally pale and can barely manage to speak anything that anyone else can recognize or understand. They have the most disturbing curdled-violet eyes and they stink of sorcery, but no one's ever seen them cast even a small cantrip.
8. Bozga is stout, heavily-built and olive-complected. She claims to be the daughter of some great warrior-queen from another world that everyone else is pretty sure she made up. She carries a two-handed sword that's at least twice too big for her, but she won't abandon it no matter what. Bozga never forgets a friend, and makes a point of killing her enemies at the first opportunity.
9. Shreem talks too much and has a nervous twitch. Some say he's Odd, others just think that he was touched by one of the Low Land plagues. Maybe his mother was exposed or infected while she was still carrying him. No one is sure. He talks to himself in three different voices and wields a small but wicked scalpel he salvaged from an old clinic. He won't go back there. Not for anything.
10. Trinda wears a makeshift mask and wraps herself in strips of old, musty tapestries and curtains. She moves quietly, discretely through whatever space she finds herself in, and leaves before anyone really registers that she was even there. The rats whisper her name in dread, as though it were a curse upon their kind.