GRIMPORT
Grimport is one of the eight boroughs located on the eastern side of New Rosea state, within the Ripstead City. Although not the most sizable borough, Grimport is an essential part of New Rosea history, one that defined the politics and technological advancements of the entire state ever since the late 1800s. Within Grimport, there are five specific neighborhoods: Willow (the largest suburban area located near the border between Grimport and Woeboro), Calamity Hills (the smallest, woodland part of Grimport known for the sizable hillside looming over New Rosea), Gloomside (the most populated urban area at the center of Grimport where most high rise buildings are), Low Spirit (shoreside, mostly known as the factory neighborhood) and Dolour (the outskirts of Grimport and by far the most dangerous neighborhood of all). Grimport itself was an industrial, shore borough, next to the ocean, and was mostly recognized as a working part of New Rosea, one with far too many corrupted businesses and unregulated factories.
Grimport started off as a place for the working class from Ripstead to stay in as the first factories were being built during the Industrial Revolution. Essentially, it was a Ripstead neighborhood, further away from the urban areas. It was never meant to be a borough, yet grew exponentially over the following century until it was finally recognized in 1880. Grimport was the lifeline of the state, but one that New Rosea often treated like an expandable asset without appropriate infrastructure support. A lot of the first borough officials were wealthy factory CEOs that did not care for the wellbeing of workers, rather focusing on the efficiency of their factories. This lead to poor development in nearly every other area in order to cut budget corners, and New Rosea allowed it.
Since it was never meant to be a borough, Grimport's entire transportation infrastructure was based on traveling from factory to factory and back to Ripstead. It was filled with roads any factory owner built as they pleased without the care of New Rosea officials, leading to pathways that typically went in endless circles and created an urban maze. Environmental infrastructure was completely ignored until the mid-20th century, as was the housing and development situation. This led to unregulated structures that any person could at any point modify to their own liking, even if the modifications turn out to be a public hazard. Similarly, the phone lines and electricity were never meant to be a part of Grimport aside from the factories. Once people stopped moving out of the city, it led to individuals installing their own wires. This eventually resulted in a creation of an unsightly web of exposed wiring, cables and pipes, nearly entirely blocking out the sky in some older areas of the borough. There wasn't a single building in Grimport that was not built with a tilt at the very least. More often than not, the entire structure of the city made absolutely no sense to anyone who hasn't lived there for long enough to get used to it. Buildings were crooked, stocked on top of one another with nonsensical angles, sometimes even build underneath the high roads with no protection. Utilities were a specifically catastrophic issue in Grimport, especially water supply that was practically completely unregulated. Because the entire borough was built so poorly, the water canals were often located where they could easily turn a city into a flooding hazard, something that happened quite often. This was especially horrible for all the buildings that were structured underneath the road-levels, as they typically had open sewers right next to their windows. In a lot of ways, Grimport seemed like a place one would create in some sort of odd, uncomfortable nightmare. It was covered in illogically placed structures that were incredibly uncanny and almost seemed to mimic normalcy without fully knowing what it meant, either provoking incredible claustrophobia or intense megalophobia, depending on the part of the city, with nearly no exceptions.
Although closely related to Ripstead, Grimport always was and always remained a factory city, one the capital hardly cared about beyond the money it made for them. With different factories sticking out of the ocean and towering over most buildings, it was a dystopian borough, and most organizations aside from the factories were very poorly developed. Corruption was an extremely common issue and, since the borough was so poorly regulated, most of the New Rosea treated Grimport like a duping ground. Thus, whenever a certain person was causing issues in the capital, if they were to be protected, they were often sent to Grimport with an expectation that no one would object to such decisions. Crime was almost as prevalent in government institutions as it was among outskirt gangs, leading to a very hostile and unsafe environment.
Willow was a suburb in Grimport borough, one mostly populated by the middle-class to upper-middle-class citizens. It was the most nature-based and a moderately populated area in Grimport, quite far away from any factories due to the restrictions New Rosea had put on the area in hope of preserving the wildlife still present there. It was a home to many types of plants, elms, oaks, and willow trees taking the lead, as well as many species of birds, hedgehogs, and even an occasional fox or an elk if they happened to venture out of the forests in Calamity Hills, bordering the neighborhood. One of the often seen bird species around the Estates specifically were crows, which certain mean-spirited neighbors loved to call the physical manifestation of the evil energy Rick brought along when he and his family moved there. This fact remains unproven, but Rick did, in fact, make crows a predominant species by continuously feeding and befriending them until they recognized his house as their own nesting grounds. Willow was otherwise known as the area with many beautiful, old houses and various parks, very popular with young families and elderly people who wanted to get away from the chaos that was the urban side of Grimport. The houses for sale were incredibly difficult to come by, though, and often had hefty prices attached to them due to their history.
Willow Estates was the main residential area located in the middle of Willow. During the first decades of industrialization of Grimport area, Willow Estates was mainly a home to CEOs and different leading figures who had the budget needed to separate themselves from the factories they were building, turning the area into a gated community by the beginning of the 20th century. By the early 1950s, Grimport wasn't nearly as prosperous as it was during the Industrial Revolution, and the gated communities were largely left open for anyone to move in. It remained one of the most peaceful communities in the entire Grimport for decades to come, and was widely known as a place where people typically didn't even need to lock their doors. The crime rate was incredibly low, and the residents rarely had fences around their yards.
Loretta and Rick bought a rundown property in Willow Estates during the early 1960s, as this was Loretta's dream neighborhood growing up. They were still at the very beginnings of their careers, so the abandoned house was as much as they could afford at the time. They fixed it up during the following couple of years, albeit quite oddly: their house was placed on a hill and had a strange, two/three story layout, depending on the side one looked at it from, and had a lot of strangely placed rooms, balconies and spaces in general, mostly because they both valued comfort over logical architectural placement. Over the decades, the house went from being quite like any other in the Willow Estates, a flowery, green space with a large backyard, to a bleak shell of its former self as Rick's mental health began to deteriorate. He was one of the rare people who put up a fence at all, yet his fence ended up being nearly seven feet tall, propped up on large, concrete blocks, with an anti-escape rods at the top. He bolted up the doors and windows, put up alarms and even installed security cameras at a certain point in his life, alienating the majority of his neighbors who thought this was an absolute travesty and a disgrace to a usually gorgeous, peaceful neighborhood.
WILLOW ESTATES
New Rosea was a small state located next to the ocean, on the east side of the United States, close to the Canadian border. It was widely recognized by the beautiful nature, often written about in books as a romantic, rainy heaven. It was the main location to visit during the winter and late autumn to experience the grandiose Christmas celebrations the state was so well known for. The reality of living in the state was far from it, however, and the name Rosea was about as flowery and beautiful as the state gets, especially if one was to travel anywhere outside the state capital.
New Rosea consisted of forty-six cities, all of which had a smaller number of their own boroughs. The capital of the state was Ripstead City, the largest, moderately-developed city with arguably the most rich cultural and historical value. This, of course, concerned Ripstead borough only, while the rest of the boroughs typically remained either forgotten or severely undersupported and taken advantage of just to keep the prosperous image of Ripstead alive. The boroughs in Ripstead were Grimport, New Woeboro (western side of Grimport), Vicissitude (upper and lower sections, neighboring Woeboro), Burdensville (smallest borough in the middle of Ripstead City), Rueport (neighboring borough on the eastern side of Grimport), Lamenton, Wretchwood (both lake towns), and Ripstead borough. All boroughs except for Ripstead were mainly used as land for different factories and businesses, while the infrastructure only really made any sense within Ripstead borough itself. The other cities were far worse off, as the boroughs within Ripstead City at the very least received financial benefits due to their industrial achievements, while the rest of New Rosea was treated like a wasteland and a place to dig for soil and materials needed to keep the factories up and running.
The weather within the entire state of New Rosea was often very unpredictable Their winters were quite harsh, temperatures often reaching way below -5ºF (-15ºC) and lasting from early November to late February. Snow and ice were unavoidable, and there were usually weather alerts issued on a weekly basis during December. Ripstead was specifically known to get over 80 inches (ca. 2 m) of snow per year, frequently causing power outages due to the incredibly badly handled wiring situation across the entire state. The rest of the year, apart from June and July that had up to a whopping 68ºF (20ºC) temperature at the most, was mostly just a prolonged Autumn. It was quite rare to have a completely sunny day in New Rosea and the weather was nearly always cloudy and gray, followed up by frequent rainstorms and occasional hail. Due to how horribly constructed the boroughs were, it was extremely windy, especially in Grimport, and the floods were a constant issue and a hazard across the entire state.
NEW ROSEA
Krasnogorod was a small city located next to the capital of Krylovgrad oblast on the western side of USSR. It was largely made out of small houses and villages before the start of World War II, which is when the local government began facing a serious housing issue due to rapid urbanization and industrialization. Smaller houses of the local residents were either torn down or became trapped in the middle of large block apartment buildings that grew in size and number across the entire post-war era. Due to poor leadership, a lot of the apartment blocks were very poorly constructed and often weren't even finished, leaving Krasnogorod as a poorly populated shell of a city, mostly characterized by the construction skeletons of an urban heaven that never came to be. The city also stopped spreading quite abruptly, leaving strange sights around like houses standing back-to-back with huge, unfinished apartment buildings.
Construction work took up nearly half of the job field within Krasnogorod during the early post-war period, and barely any other work function survived. People were led out of the city either to escape the war, or because the living conditions became unfathomably poor, leaving behind only the local workers, petty criminals and individuals affected by poverty who couldn't leave even if they wanted to. The food market was extremely scarce and often full of leftovers that weren't sold in the capital, and a large amount of houses left standing didn't even have proper heating installed, let alone electricity. A lot of Krasnogorod residents sought work within deadly factories within different Krylovgrad cities just to get by, but the city was barely populated by the second half of the 20th century and was largely used up by different organizations as a cheap housing situation, becoming a nesting ground to a lot of Underground bosses.
KRASNOGOROD
KRYLOVGRAD
Krylovgrad was both the name of the oblast and the capital city, located in between the rivers Volga and Don in Russia, close to Ukraine and Georgia, at the western side of USSR. It was quite a small, poor oblast that faced a lot of hardships during both world wars, located next to a large lake which also separated Krasnogorod from the other cities. Krylovgrad was an “every man for himself” type of place, especially after the economic crash the entire oblast had faced. Poverty had completely taken over, becoming one of the main breeding grounds for crime and criminal organizations to fester in.
It is supposed that Krylovgrad was the main hotspot and a place where the Underground bosses mostly operated and some suspected it was where the entire network originated from, though this was difficult to estimate due to the organization's global reach. Because the entire oblast was largely forgotten and left in ruins, it became a home to a desperate community with little resources to keep themselves afloat. Unable to leave the country due to the strict regime at the time, a large portion of the public was left stranded and became easy targets for many criminals with international connections. A lot of Krylovgrad abandoned buildings were, thus, eventually turned in faux businesses serving as either criminal hotspots or different types of unethical practices that were, in return, making money to individuals with the ability to transfer the profits outside of USSR borders.
THE UNDERGROUND
The Underground was the name Rick gave to an unnamed organization he was introduced to during his early teens. The organization had no set structure and no true leading figure, and many would even argue they weren't an organization at all. Rather, they could be considered a networking effort slowly developed during the period between the two world wars, focused on taking advantage of the poor living conditions many citizens had been left in. Due to how unstable and unregulated many smaller regions were and how much attention was focused on the war, several individuals decided to collect a number of people in immediate need of financial help. Using their poverty and fear, they would lure them into different illegal functions under a promise of a better future.
There is no clear timeline as to how the Underground came to be initially. It's suspected that a lot of different criminal leaders gained influence during the first world war and found themselves gravitating to the poor and disadvantaged parts of the country, one of which was Krylovgrad oblast. They operated completely separately at first but found use in each other's company, soon becoming fairly interconnected and benefiting from one another monetarily. A lot of the operations became reliant on this cooperation during the World War II specifically, which is when the true networking between different sections became the core value of the Underground. The leaders often built their hotspots and offices in abandoned basements under the apartment structures, due to how well hidden and easily concealable they were from the public.
The hierarchy, although impossible to clearly define, could be somewhat observed through the monetary gain certain sections made compared to the others. Those responsible for risky missions, specifically high-ranked hitters involved with clean eliminations of reputable officials, were typically the best paid and usually had secret connections to leading officials outside the Underground, while the street fighters and smugglers made the least amount of money, placing them at a much lower hierarchical branch. This, however, didn't mean they were treated any differently, and both relied on each other and depended on their mutual cooperation for the success of specific missions. Although there were many functions and subcategories, the main branches the Underground mostly relied on were as follows:
— Street fighters — The lowest pay was regularly distributed through the street fighting rings, operated by so-called “trainers”; bosses that collected poor and desperate individuals around the streets, luring them into joining underground fighting shows which people could bet on and pay to watch. The money would then be distributed between the fighters and the trainers, where the winning party would often take the entire earnings of a specific fight. There were no rules between the fighters, and the last man standing usually took the win, their height being the only measurement trainers used to pick pairs. The fights were lead in the abandoned basements and were often fought, thought not exclusively, between teenage boys and young adults. Older fighters (thirty years old and above) were frequently the ones who had joined the Underground prior to World War II, as most trainers past World War II began joining efforts with a few different branches and almost never kept their fighters in the game for longer than a decade. Some street fighters were sold to other trainers for a certain price, typically if they were good enough to be transferred.
— Gladiator fighters — Usually a path the underperforming fighters took up, gladiator fights were introduced after the World War II ended and were fought between fighters without their full consent. Often times, trainers who were in charge of underperforming fighters would opt to “get rid of them" by slowly introducing a mixture of intoxicating substances that provoked aggression, putting them in cage rings with other similarly conditioned fighters, and letting them fight to death. These fights were often the last resort trainers took up to make any profit from these individuals, as the gladiator fights were by far the best paid branch of street fighting within the Underground.
— Traders — Connected to all branches of the Underground, traders were typically surgeons of various types, mostly, but not exclusively, in touch with high-risk-low-reward businesses. Particularly referring to the street fights, they would collect the deceased fighters and use any valuable parts of their bodies while discarding the rest within the sealed poolrooms where the remains were cremated in bulk. Often times, they collected bodies from any branch that needed thorough forensic cleaning and sold whatever vital parts they could use, making them one of the most profitable sections of the network.
— Assailants/Apprentices — The “better” outcome of some more successful street fighters was becoming their trainers' personal apprentice. Typically, this referred to becoming their personal assailant and working in any function they were offered for a monthly pay or mission fees. This included debt collecting, guarding the offices, guarding the Underground hotspots, body guarding the trainers, hunting for escapees, or becoming involved in any field their trainers decided they would be suited for while still remaining connected to their trainers who acted as their agents. Apprentices were expected to never deny a work offer, do as they are told, be available 24/7 and stay loyal to their trainers.
— Hitters — Coming in several “quality” choices, hitters had different payment ranks depending on their experience and expertise. There were cheaper types, often a hit-and-run type of eliminations without cleanups, that were often done by assailants of trainers who were trying to climb their way into the hitters category, as it was one of the highest earning branches. The middle choice typically included the traders being present on site to make sure there is no evidence left, and were usually done by the more skilled, trained hitters who specialized and exclusively did this type of work only. Typically, they were working in small groups (2-3 people) under the gang bosses rather than trainers. The highest paid and highest ranked hitters were those dealing with high risk eliminations involving higher status individuals with much more eyes on them. They were regularly hired by the business or political rivals of these individuals, making these branches much more involved with the “surface” world than any of the other sections. These hitters frequently came in larger structured teams, as per necessity, and included thorough strategy planning, clean up, public relations dealings, manipulation of the media… they were also highly trained individuals, often older and coming from military and law enforcement backgrounds, led by the most skilled hitters of the bunch. These hitters also scouted and recruited new members throughout other branches, often times either within the heist groups or assailants.
There were many more branches such as traffickers, weapon smugglers, money launderers, drug lords, etc. who all connected together, but the common structure consisted of differently ranked leaders who each had a social status within their own branches and a different social status within the general Underground. The main rule shared among everyone, however, was that no one, under any circumstances, is allowed to leave the organization alive if they become aware there is any networking going on. Anyone involved with eliminations and high-risk missions were also prohibited from leaving. Low ranked figures such as street fighters and drug dealers who didn't have a deeper connection to the Underground as a network were often not monitored, but anyone who had ever come in touch with any branch other than their own had to be hunted down if they happened to disappear without a notice. This wasn't a rule that was ever spoken about, but was something nearly everyone in the Underground quickly became very aware of, which is why positions such as apprentices were so popular among nearly all sections. They were usually the ones hunting for the occasional escapees, being directly reminded of their own fate if they happened to cross any boundaries. Often times, depending on the rank and years spend within the Underground, most individuals were also forbidden from knowing where certain locations were, such as the carcass pools or boss hotspots/specific upcoming mission details.
The Underground was, sadly, a highly profitable and highly predatory network that was connected to the officials in one too many ways. They were sort of a “public secret” which made them incredibly hard to expose as certain branches were often protected and overlooked by leading figures and authorities as they also had benefited from them. Although mostly focused on Eastern Europe, they operated globally, especially after the international travel became more easily accessible, making them impossible to escape from entirely, as they had eyes nearly everywhere.
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