Editing Baroque Blue (section)

====The Bad====

The only thing worse than a punk is a punk who can kill you from 200 yards away... with ''mind bullets''. While not everyone here has that level of competence, they can completely outclass any ordinary resistance. 

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=====The Red Queen=====

The Red Queen is the newst player in Baroque, and she is making a huge splash. Once Karen Monash, she nearly married Julius Raith. She was exposed by Justice Flagg himself, and fled, costing Raith Junior his chance at being Senator.

Not only has she weathered the wrath of the Raiths, the enmity of the Cammorae and the opposition of the Midnight Samaritan, but she has thrived. This is probably because everyone who ever meets her wants her love. Playing suitors against one another, she has stripped them bare, absorbed their empires and moved to the next target. Her crew call themselves cards, the elite and longserving taking the roles of other Alice in Wonderland characters. They tend to avoid the traditional profitable arenas for criminals - little gambling, drug dealing or the like. Instead, she involves herselves in bank robberies, art fraud, enormous insurance fraud, that sort of thing. She also prides herself on extorting exortionists, demanding a cut from the hard men that run rackets within a hundred miles of her joint. Those that don't pay suffer her trademark decapitation.

Her effrontery is building up to open war... that's bad. She is '''''fucking insane'''''... and that's much worse. There is no way to define just how crazy this broad is, her genius with chemistry and electronics matched by her fetishes and odd rules. Think the Joker's mindset and chemical expertise combined with Poison Ivy's powers and bearing.

=====The Cheshire Cat=====

The Cheshire Cat is her major domo and go-to guy. Always dressing in those snazzy suits, always running the Kitty Kat Klub. He always remembers your name, warns you when it is a bad time to see the Lady upstairs, always has a free drink for you and a brown package if your a cop. Everyone loves the Cat. Course, he needs to be nice, seeing as he is one of them muties. Looks like the Cat from Red Dwarf, only with sharper teeth. No way he could survive outside Inferno. Some say he is an Ultra, one of those mutants with weird abilities. Turning invisible and moving real fast are most often touted as his powers, but nobody can think of a time he ever got into a fight.

=====The Card Gang=====

Unlike the other big players, the Red Queen doesn't recuit as many competent members into her operations as possible. She instead actively excludes nearly everyone. She demands that there never be more than 52 employees in her entire outfit, bottom to top, and so to recruit the best and brightest, she kills a few employees every month. In consequence, the highly skilled looking to prove their worth flock to her. 

Criminals really are that stupid.

The Card Gang deal only in high-profile, high profit-crimes. Any one of their scores would be the crime of a lifetime for your normal thug, but their work is so expensive, they need to repeat such performances just to maintain their equipment and pay for their bosses extravagant lifestyle. Of course, they receive significant remuneration themselves.

The big question is - if 70% of the profits of crime belong to the Cammorae, they outnumber her hundreds to one and she has adopted an organizational model that prevents her from ever being real competition, why do the Cammorae care so much about her? Why is there talk of vendetta?

Because the Red Queen has absolutely no compunction about taking her profits from Cammorae holdings. She robs those they offer protection to, she robs a Made Man making his delivery to the capo, she steals the seveneenth century painting from Mr. Corrado's close friend in the Raith Estates. Since she arrived, she is attack, attack, attack, the only respite the two times the Midnight Samaritan put her away for a few months.

=====The Cammorae===== 

Fifty years ago, this was run by guys under the thumb of New York's Five Families. However, under concerted attack from the Midnight Samaritan and the Masks that were bringing unnatural power to bear, they swallowed their pride and reached out to groups that shared similar fears and operational guidelines.

Since they expanded to groups not Sicillian or Jewish, they have taken in Carribean, Mexican, Turkish and Irish leadership, not to mention accepting women into their ranks. They have been reaching out to the Chinese and Russian mobs, but Jade Mirror and Masha Voyevoda have both stood firm on the issue of operational independance.

Despite all the madness and shakeups - above all else, the ruinous fall of the Mediccani crime family - these guys stay at the top of the totem pole. They run pornography, pier theft, loansharking, illicit gambling, HMO fraud, extortion, labor racketeering and most of the drug trade. These methods aren't flashy, sure, but they amount for 75% of the financial gain of crime, and that sort of money buys power.

'''Gaetanno "Joey" Corrado , Anthony Passeria, Vito "Karma Karmine" Lucchese, Al Masseria''' and '''Nicky "Pussyface" Maranzano''' run the First Four Cammorae, the oldest remaining crime families in Baroque. They have strong ties with Empire City, New York, Emerald and Chicago. The Commission, and "Our Friends in High Places" will only ever talk to the First Four. That makes these Cammorae indispensible to the other, flashier and perhaps more powerful families, as they can call in firepower from other cities, and have a much easier time fencing, smuggling and buying legitimacy. Simultaneously, they realise they are far too weak to go it alone, so they bury their prejudices and at least pay lip service to the Second Council of Trent.

While it isn't worth listing the 48 guys with the name of capo, or the 500-odd soldiers who go by the name of the First Made Men, to indicate their real Sicillian blood and Mafia legacy, expect a whole lot of names like Paradios, Cefalu, Gotti, Persisco and Russo. These guys are dull. That is because they are OG, and they don't appreciate fuckups.

'''Terressa "Terrible Terry" O'Rielly''' the widow of Danny O'Rielly, leads the O'Rielly Clan. She has a huge crew of roughnecks at her disposal, with perhaps more Made Men than any other single Cammorae. Of course, they only go to prove that quantity is not quality.

'''Ahmed "Sultan" Agha''' commands the almost-autonomous Ninth Cammorae. Ahmed lives like a sultan in the closest thing to a mansion in his neighborhood. He has a large group of soldiers whom he calls The Sultan's Personal Army. All of these men are ex-military, and they too live in the more luxurious life. The Army "protects" the Middle Eastern immigration areas, including Littlest Persia. While he runs a sizable protection racket, most of his money comes in smuggling over 80% of the cities heroin from his allies in Turkey. He also has the loyalty of the Three Assasins, perhaps the most mysterious and effective killers in the city.

'''Esperanza "Brujah" de Velázquez''' runs the Eleventh Cammorae. Largely populated by Hispanics and Carribian criminals, they are the biggest power in the Messandre District district. They have a reputation for dabbling in the unnatural, and rumour has it some of their enforcers deliberately get infected with RTIP. 

Breaking all the previous rules, she is a woman, not of Sicillian or Irish descent, who has never fired a gun in her life. Traditionalists say she used the Evil Eye on the former capo, Don Mediccani. Others say she poisoned him, other that she merely bribed him. Reagrdless, after his mysterious dissapearance, his heir decided she offered much to the organisation. The Council of Trent has never looked back. She is perhaps the biggest single name in organised crime, her gang having close to a monopoly on the drug trade, arms dealing and an absolute monopoly on extortion in the Messandre District.

'''Mister Skitz''' runs the Thirteenth Cammorae, a dangerous crew who scar themselves ritually as they make the obligatory Blood Oath. While everyone takes care of their own problems as much as possible, these guys are getting reputations as bag men and hard hitters, not to mention some of the only people tough enough to muscle commands on the Inferno.

Medically speaking, Mister. Skitz is two people - the world's most extreme pair of surviving conjoined twins. Despite having only the one skeleton, he has three eyes, two sets of vocal cords, three arms, mismatched colours of hair and a gaping trio of leathery holes where his nose should be. ''Do not mention his appearance, of display disgust.'' This makes Mr. Skitz very angry. You don't want to make Skitz angry.

On a bad day, he can barely move. He has headaches, a cacophony of discordant mumbles matching the sounds in his head. His spine is a twisted thing, visibly pushing against the silky-white skin on his back. He shoots in futility at his tolerant and disdainful henchman, struggling to breath through his clogged nostrils.

So why was he made the leader of the 13th Cammorae, against all tradition and in defiance of all standards? Simple- on a good day, his three eyes give him amazing sight and accuracy, and he can fire three immense guns at once. He has two sets of muscles, making him inordinately strong. He has two brains all mushed up together, working in concert, making him a brilliant tactician. At these times, an animal charisma exudes from him, and he prowls the streets, recruiting minions from the poor, disenfranchised and crippled and seducing women, beautiful as you've ever seen. Some say he has two souls, one of which takes on all the sin they do, the other destined to storm the very gates of heaven when he dies.

=====Vorhee===== 

The Vorhee have extensive operations in Baroque, mainly in armsdealing and designer drugs. They are also perhaps the biggest orgainsed player in the prostitution business, where they'll offer anything as loose trade. Vory captains, however, are a disorganised, fractious lot, each vying for power and respect, happily poaching each others best men and most profitable business', smiling as they trade blood for blood.

The only thing preventing civil war and keeping the Cammorae off their backs is Masha Voyevoda and her company of former Spetsnaz killers. While she isn't exactly in charge, it is she which the other captains go to when a deal must be struck, and more often than not, she forces both parties to the bargaining table sooner rather than later. She also seems to have the subtle support of the Mask known as Streetwalker, who has so far kept players like Mister Skitz and the Red Queen off her back.

=====Halloween Jack=====

This is the granddaddy of all streetfreaks and guttermasks. Once an albino doctor from the 1940s, he was first dubbed "The Nightingale Killer" for his habit of killing nurses. The police discovered the deaths were caused by sonic damage to brain tissue.

Halloween Jack has discovered a sonic wave that causes childhood fears to seem to come to life. In the highly superstitious town of Baroque, this power is nigh-absolute. He used to throw pumpkins that blasted the sound, but in the 80s, he embedded the device in his vocal chords, and now his very words now can carry the effect. With age, his albinism has worsened. He now only emerges at night, and even then wears a pumpkin head to protect him from incident light.

Rumour says the Brujah has hired him to "deal" with the Red Queen, and it is a faceoff the entire underworld craves to watch.

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