Mortal life in New London is a hard one. Ever since the collapse of its chemical processing industry in the 1950’s, the city has had to rely on tourism for most of its income, and the main attraction of the town is it’s gambling houses. People wishing for a taste of the hedonistic charm of Louisiana head towards New Orleans, with its much Romanticised cityscape and mystique, and those wanting to hit it big go to Vagas. New London attracts people who want to win, but who would rather lose their money in the swamps than the desert.

This heavy reliance on the tourist dollar has handed a lot of power to the casinos, especially the town’s main attraction, the Iron Mountain. Those who don’t work directly for the houses – as dealers, waitresses, hired muscle, cooks or anything else they need – tend to work for businesses relating to them, such as the hotels, tourist-trap markets and stalls, coffee houses, art galleries and such like. The cities energies seem mainly to be directed towards keeping the incomers just happy enough to spend all their money.

That being said, the city has its own well-developed infrastructure, with emergency services, water and electricity companies, telephone companies and such-like, and many locals find themselves falling into those professions as an alternative to the tourist industry.

The end result is an employment demographic of mainly low-skill workers, where one face can be pretty much replaced by any other. The few high-skill jobs tend to be taken these days by people coming in from the outside, looking for a place where they can put the worries of their former lives far behind them. New London is a place that forgives easily.

The combination of a high transient population, people prone to falling between the cracks and locals who’d rather be earning than learning suits the Court of the Night well. People disappear, people come and decide to stay, people change personalities so completely that their own families don’t recognise them . . . well, with all the voodoo nick-nacks you can buy for a buck-fifty, the gambling houses that everyone knows are more addictive than cocaine, the cheap boot-leg liquor, the mighty Mississippi . . . New London is just that kind of town, right? With the Court’s strangle hold on the city’s reigns of power, it’s easy enough to make any unfortunate details disappear.

But such a strangle hold is not without disadvantages. There are those people who just don’t know when to stop asking questions, those who are so beguiled by the town’s mystique that they’re willing to believe anything, and those who know exactly what to look for.