The Court of Beggars
[SIZE=14.6667px]Name:[/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px] The Court of Beggars[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Image Source: 1313 Concept Art[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Classification:[/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px] Slum[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Location:[/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px] Coruscant[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Affiliation:[/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px] Shayde[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Population:[/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px] 50,000[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Demographics:[/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px] 50% Human, 15% Near-Human, 10% Twi’lek, 25% Various Other[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Points of Interest[/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]:[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Dealer’s Den Cantina: [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]The center of the Court is the Dealer’s Den cantina. Shayde holds court in the lavishly-appointed backrooms, a place few other beings have seen and survived. The entire cantina is a veritable fortress, reinforced with scavenged durasteel plating and guarded by auto blasters and watchful droids. It’s rumored (correctly) that man traps lurk beneath the plush Wrodian carpets, and that entire sections of floor can slide away to throw intruders down to a grisly fate below. Business conducted here is hidden far from prying eyes - except for Shayde’s.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Market Concourse: [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]The main concourse of the Old Galactic Market has become a tent city, the cramped, overcrowded home of many of the Court’s inhabitants. Thousands of beings are packed together in these durasteel halls. Hygiene is poor, and the stench is incredible. Guns and narcotics freely change hands, and even less savory trades are all too often made in the name of survival. Life is cheap, but it’s still safer than braving the open sublevels. Food is distributed out of the old storefronts to those who have paid Shayde’s tax on time, and massive, violent lines always form.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Skyline Mall: [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]As the number of people seeking Shayde’s protection grew, the number of tents crowding the main concourse swelled until no one else could fit, no matter how tightly packed. The rest were crammed together in the vast Skyline Mall that abutted the shipping docks, an area even more dangerous and filthy than the tent city. This cavernous, multi-level space is wet, cold, and largely exposed, leaving the tents sodden and allowing disease to spread like wildfire. But even this huge area is almost full; home to the bulk of the Court’s population, it reeks of desperation.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Apartments: [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]Shayde’s thugs are not forced to sleep out in the tent city. They are instead given small but cozy apartments, along with first crack at the food and medical supplies. Some of the apartments are always kept empty, reserved for trusted smugglers, bounty hunters, and other associates of Shayde. Unlike the crowded streets outside, these areas are not heavily patrolled by Shayde’s forces, but they certainly are watched. Even Shayde’s most trusted subordinates live with the certainty that the Harch watches their every move though his network of cameras.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Shipping and Receiving Docks: [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]The docks still see brisk starship traffic as smuggler captains come and go. The lawless Court is a major transfer and exchange point for illegal goods, and most of them come through these landing pads. The unwashed rabble are kept back from this area, by force if necessary; Shayde will brook no threat to his best source of income. All smuggled goods that pass through here are subject to the crime lord’s tax, but it’s a relatively light one, and most captains consider the relative safety and commercial potential of the Court to be worth it.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Merchandise Warehousing: [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]Vast, cavernous warehouses abutting the docks still perform their original function of storing goods for export and import. Smugglers using the Court as a transfer point for their illegal goods can freely use the warehouses once Shayde’s tax is paid. Other warehouses are reserved for the salvage that the desperate scavengers calling the Court home pay to Shayde in tax. Children and the elderly, too young to work on other projects but desperate not to be counted among the “useless”, sort through these recovered scraps for items of value.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Fartrader Lounge: [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]A cantina located near the shipping docks, the Fartrader Lounge is a meeting place for smugglers and slavers doing business in the Court. It’s still a functional bar, and the nearby dancers’ quarters provide enslaved entertainment for those doing business here. The food and drink are actually quite good, and the aromas drift down into the Skyline Mall. But the people there know better than to follow their noses; stealing from the Fartrader Lounge is interfering with Shayde’s business, and he holds to the law that defiance is death. Only spacers are welcome.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Nemoidian Coalition: [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]Once a sophisticated center of trade and market speculation, the Nemoidian Coalition is now the site of Shayde’s farms. Growing his own food in the name of self-sufficiency, the Harch crime lord set up hydoponics labs that grow stunted but nutritious vegetables. These are processed into a thin gruel, “beggar’s brew”, which is distributed to those who manage to pay his tax. Chunks of mynock and womp rat add protein. It’s rumored that Shayde grows other things here as well, narcotic plants and the ingredients of deadly poisons, but no one knows for certain.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Ugnaught Workshop: [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]The Ugnaught population of the Old Galactic Market never did leave, and Shayde offered them protection in exchange for their technical expertise. They now keep the connections to the Works in working order, along with modifying and repairing the droids and weapons of Shayde’s forces. A makeshift medical bay is also located on one of the levels of their workshop, though it serves only the crime lord’s thugs and has an unhealthy fixation on cybernetic replacement. To enter here without permission is very dangerous; intruders are shot on sight.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Computer Lab: [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]If the Dealer’s Den is the beating heart of the Court, the network hub is the brain. The hundreds of cameras that keep watch over Shayde’s domain are all linked into this fortified bunker, protected by an energy shield and a reinforced door. Inside, a dozen droids process the camera feed, alert for anything that constitutes a threat to the Harch or a violation of his laws. Records are kept here that record every transaction that Shayde has ever made with the smugglers who take advantage of his hospitality - a treasure trove for law enforcement.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]If only they could find some way to reach it and escape alive.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Description: [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]The Court of Beggars was once known as the Old Galactic Market, one of the foremost commercial centers of Galactic City. It fell into a spiral of decay during the Great Galactic War and the Cold War that followed, and never truly recovered from being overrun by refugees, petty crime, and desperation. Thousands of years later, the Harch crime lord Shayde gradually occupied it and restored it to a habitable state for use as a personal power base. As a result, it became a bastion of relative safety in the lawless and savage underlevels of Coruscant.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]There are only two laws in the Court of Beggars. The first is “safety isn’t free”. In order to enter the great electro-gates or land on one of the shipping pads, a being must have something to offer, whether goods, services, or physical labor. Within the Court, a bite of all profits flows to Shayde as a “safety tax”. Those who cannot pay the tax are referred to as “the useless” and thrown out of the shantytown, abandoned in the dangerous tunnels of the underlevels beyond. Those who [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]refuse [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]to pay, on the other hand, are staked out alive for the Cthons. The second law is “defiance is death.”[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]In short, as long as Shayde gets his cut of the profits and no one threatens his operations, nothing is illegal in the Court of Beggars. Brothels, narcotics dealers, and slavers operate with impunity within its walls provided their tax is paid. But if anyone provides too much of a disruption, making people feel unsafe and calling into question Shayde’s offer of protection, they are quickly and messily dealt with by the crime lord’s security force of Mark II Droidekas. The droids target troublemakers without mercy, backed up by waves of Shayde’s flamethrower-wielding guards.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Shayde’s droids and thugs are not the Court’s only means of defense. Massive electrified gates cover the pedestrian exits of the Old Galactic Market, and automated blaster turrets - along with men with missile launchers - cover the shipping and receiving docks. Hundreds of cameras watch every inch of the Court, spying for any sign of threats to Shayde’s rule. There are no secrets from the Harch within the court’s walls, and the half-rotted bodies of beings who dared disbelieve that hang from the ceiling beams, grisly reminders that his rule of the fortified shantytown is absolute.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]History: [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]By 850 ABY, it had been over one hundred thousand years since the urban sprawl of Galactic City had covered the last open patch of Coruscant’s surface. Since that time it had grown up and down, a tangled mass of skyscrapers and sublevels at the best of times. And after wars, disasters, and corruption, more had been forgotten about the urban maze than the brightest minds in the galaxy had ever known about it. The shadows had always been long on Coruscant. Rust lurked under the shining surface, a creeping death by decay whose extent was recognized by few.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]But these were exceptionally dark days for the city-world. Once, the planet had boasted a trillion residents, stacked on top of one another as they muddled through an interconnected web of daily life. The Yuuzhan Vong war, the Gulag Plague, and the chaos of the 400-year darkness had put an end to that, leaving only a small population huddled atop an impossibly vast tomb. Restoration efforts by the Republic, determined to restore the world’s former glory, had been ended by the One Sith invasion. The Netherworld disturbances had snatched away half of what was left.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]And so the survivors were dwarfed by the inconceivable hugeness of a metal labyrinth built to house a number countless times their own. The Galactic Alliance was working to restore the upper levels to habitable standards, but Galactic City was still largely a city of ghosts. Between the durasteel tombs lived the lawless and the desperate, people with long criminal records and nowhere else to go. They did not have the benefit of the Galactic Alliance’s restored infrastructure. There was no safety for them in the unpatrolled sublevels, now overrun by Cthons.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]That was why they came to the Court of Beggars. That was why they came to Shayde.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]The Old Galactic Market had once been the center of Galactic City’s intersystem trade, a bustling commercial center where the fruits of a thousand planets could be found for sale. Hundreds of species had walked among its bazaar stalls and worked in its workshops. But when the Sith Empire had sacked Coruscant, one disaster that had shaken the city world to its core, all those beings had found themselves with no place to go. The Market had been overrun by squatters and refugees, its bright promise stolen and replaced by desperation. It had never fully recovered.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]For thousands of years it had been a dark sector. The Galactic Empire had restricted access to it as part of a program to limit knowledge of pre-Imperial cultures, and stormtroopers patrolled there only rarely and in large numbers. In the days before the planet fell to the Yuuzhan Vong - and for a few of the days after - smugglers gathered at the shipping and receiving docks, promising passage off-planet in exchange for a price only a few of the desperate refugees could pay. But it was the 400-year darkness that had finished it. The darkness and the disease that had caused it.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]The Gulag Plague had devastated virtually the entire galaxy, but Coruscant’s population of Cthons had thrived in the chaos. The nightmarish ghouls gradually and utterly overran many sublevels as their inhabitants began to sicken and die. For hundreds of years they were the true rulers of Galactic City, huge tribes breeding and devouring each other in the darkness beneath the surface. In the chaotic years since the attempted recolonization of Coruscant, their mastery of the sunless reaches had gone largely unchallenged. The denizens of the Below knew them and feared them.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]They were the first great challenge the would-be Lord of the Below would have to face.[/SIZE]
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[SIZE=14.6667px]In the beginning, no one had trusted Shayde. No one had realized what he was capable of.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]The scarred, twisted Harch had emerged as a player in the Coruscant underworld only shortly before the One Sith invaded the planet, unleashing the Yuuzhan Vong on the population for a second time and brutally suppressing any sign of dissent or perceived inferiority. That had driven a great many beings into the underlevels, desperate to escape One Sith “justice”. But there was little sanctuary for them there. Generators, now thousands of years old, had broken down. Damaged water systems leaked. There was no food and no escape from the hungry Cthons… and worse.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]And so petty kingdoms had sprung up in the darkness. Slumlords with small private armies offered security in exchange for loyalty and labor. Shayde was one of the first. He had no loyal thugs to enforce his will - instead, he offered working infrastructure. His time at Kovarri’s Grand Carnival had taught him the art of moving unseen, and one of his responsibilities had been caring for the Carnival’s equipment. And so he had crept down into the Works, where millennia-old Gree technology struggled against the weight of the planet, and he had begun his own repairs.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]It had taken years of patient tinkering in the dark, trading stolen goods for technical readouts and repair tools. But in time the miles of wiring and pipes had begun to hum again with the passage of power and water, all bound for the ancient Dealer’s Den cantina. Rigged with cameras, blaster turrets, and spotlights to scare off the Cthons, the bar became an oasis of safety in the Old Galactic Market. It was there that Shayde began his Court of Beggars. Anyone who would swear loyalty to him could share in the safety he provided. And so they came, and they swore.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]By the time the other slumlords realized that Shayde was a threat, he had already balanced their sole advantage - manpower. With his criminal connections and a small army of scavengers at his beck and call, each desperate to bring back something valuable enough that he would allow them to eat, it was simple for him to acquire enough blasters to make his forces more than a match for any of his rivals. The Dealer’s Den became a veritable fortress, reinforced with heavy durasteel plating and watched by armed sentries. Desperate crowds formed outside, begging for entry.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Shayde kept order through casual brutality and the appearance of invulnerability. There were many who tried to kill him, whether out of ambition or desperation. A power-hungry underling shot him in the back - his personal shield took the blast, and he gut-shot the traitor and left him for the Cthons, publicly broadcasting the messy results. A father whose scavenging was not good enough to feed his starving children stabbed him with a vibroblade; it scraped harmlessly along his armor, and he hurled the man over a railing to die a messy death hundreds of stories below.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]And so Shayde decided to expand. But clearing the Old Galactic Market was a task beyond his ragtag army of scavengers and desperadoes. So he tapped his criminal connections and saved the fruits of his followers’ scavenging, waiting for the perfect opportunity. The answer arrived in smuggled crates, slipped in through the One Sith blockade. It had been tremendously expensive to acquire it, and it was hardly top of the line technology any longer, but it was well-suited for the purpose Shayde intended for it: finally driving back the Cthons from the sublevel he had claimed.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]He deployed the Mark II Droidekas immediately, and their task began.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]For days the Old Galactic Market was filled with the sounds of blasterfire and the smell of charred flesh. The destroyer droids had once been a match for Jedi, and the feral Cthons, even in their teeming hordes, stood little chance. Still, progress was slow. Scavenger teams followed the droids, mopping up survivors and kicking the piles of twitching grey bodies down into the deeper underlevels. New defensive turrets and spotlights were installed to keep any more Cthons from getting in - and to deter any other unwelcome guests. Slowly but surely, the area was secured.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]It was an even longer process to clear the storefronts, landing pads, and apartment buildings surrounding the market. Nests of Cthons, corridor ghouls, and overgrown duracrete slugs lurked within the narrows corridors and cramped rooms, many of which the Droidekas could not easily reach. Shayde finally spent most of what remained of his amassed credits to outfit his forces with the flamethrowers for which they would become infamous. With fire they purged the rest of the market, hallway by hallway, door by door, until Shayde and his men were the only living things left.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]It had taken months, but Shayde’s little fiefdom had grown. The masses that had once huddled outside of the Dealer’s Den now pitched tents in the market concourse; apartments were saved for Shayde’s soldiers and smugglers. Storefronts became storefronts again, selling food and other supplies for daily life - along with booze, drugs, and lottery tickets, the profits of which always found their way to Shayde. Many former scavengers began to earn their keep in hydroponic farms that the slumlord had set up, making the little community more or less self-sufficient.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Anyone with nothing left could throw himself on Shayde’s mercy and join this Court of Beggars.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Intent: [/SIZE][SIZE=14.6667px]To flesh out post-crisis Coruscant and provide Shayde with a base of operations.[/SIZE]
[SIZE=14.6667px]Links:[/SIZE]
