Your company, with the lady in tow, continues through the dirty cobblestone streets of the Hive. Being careful, in your weakened state, to skirt the territories of some of the Hive's more nororious gangs, you make your way to Beggar's Square.
it is obvious where the name comes from - the large courtyard is thronged with the hapless and homeless, clad in filthy rags and silently holdng out beggar's bowls as you pass. their sooty, scabby, and oftentimes leprous faces concealed by the tattered folds of their cloak-cowls. by agreement of the Hiver gangs, Beggar's Square is neutral territory - no one may harm another here, lest they draw the wrath of all the gangs upon them.
Tall, ash-streaked brownstones and tenements rise up on three sides of the Square, all of them mashed tightly together so that there is barely space for a child to squeeze between them. Sometimes there is not even that. Striped awnings hang over street-level storefronts; there is a Chiurgeon's Office here - The Helping Hand - and a used-clothing shoppe with iron bars over the windows; a small Missionary Church, an open lot where gutter-merchants hawk various wares from wooden stands, and a large, three-storey pub - The Prohibition.
Even though no ganger can extort coins from the beggars here, there are still many of them - gangers, that is - present. You see the colors of the Chimney Blackbirds, the Tempest Street Irregulars, and Dissolution, among many others. Of course, there are also a fair number of Hivers here who hold no such affiliation; old men leaning on tired canes, a pair of young girls with painted faces shilling their physical wares to passers-by, sooty-faced children playing a game of stickball, and many other desperate, despairing denizens of the Hive.
