((This should probably be read before “West End Blues”. Ah, well…))

Alleys and narrow streets all twisted and tangled in on each other like clumps of wet string or overcooked spaghetti, here cobbled, there paved, always cracked and broken. Garbage heaped in piles, no civic pride, few public services. Rundown riverfront mansions, once stately brownstones brought low by age and neglect, cheap runs of tenement track housing thrown up for cheap by devotees of the ‘cement block’ school of architectural design. A hundred tiny plazas, cul de sacs, stately pools in the tangle of quick-moving streams and tempestuous rivers that make up the veins of the district. Gangs running the streets like wild dogs, yapping and snarling at anyone who dares intrude on their territory, as gaily colored as tropical birds… or the morbid fungus growing on the chest of a corpse.

And like most decaying things, there’s a life to the West End, a feverish vitality that sometimes makes the whole district churn and shake and dance. Despite having the highest death rate in the City, the West End has the highest influx of new immigration. The mad, the bad, the dangerous to know - the outcasts, runaways, the poor, insane, and addicted, they all find their way to the WestEnd. There’s a comfort to knowing that you’ve finally hit rock bottom, that there’s no place further to fall.

It’s a common joke in the City that the sewers are a step up from the West End. This joke, of course, is never actually told by anyone who’s been in the sewers.

The WestEnd likes to play tricks with magic and technology both, making them unreliable, unpredictable. Nobody’s really sure why; maybe it’s the mysterious Nexus, playing games again. The West End has more than its fair share of immigrants from other worlds, after all. Despite this, there are plenty of supernatural influences on the West End, each working for their own, possibly(probably) sinister purposes. Hardly a day goes by without the disciples of one strange cult or another creating a scene somewhere in the district, and the mornings following the dark of the moon always find new corpses springing up in the alleyways, like mushrooms after a rain. The WestEnd is always nigh.

Anything can happen here - and usually does. The West End has a thousand stories brewing in its bosom at any given moment, and the only time the streets are deserted is right before the violence starts…