(for reference:<a class="link link--internal" href="http://bluemoonroleplaying.com/forums/viewtopic.php?f=21&amp;t=14381">OOC Thread</a>)<br/><br/>The city of Tarak first heard about it when the refugees started streaming in: Retton Falls had fallen.<br/><br/>The strongholds of the Original Races werenât totally impervious to the Night Plague.  They were defensible and formidable, but every so often, enough orks and goblins and trolls and ogres and whatnot manage to get together and get organized enough, they successfully invade someplace.  Naturally, in such a situation, the populace either dies or flees, and those that make it to another city are housed and fed and cared for, because itâs a basic compact of modern civilization that everyone has to stick together.<br/><br/>And the surrounding cities start making preparations, because within a year, the looted city will be merely infested with the indolent leftovers of the Night Races who werenât called instinctually back to the wilderness, and a concerted effort will be able to wrest control of the city back from them.  It usually took a few years more to ferret out the last hiding monsters and clean up the last of the damages done, but the city would be in the hands of its builders again, and they would shore up their defenses and patch the weaknesses that the invasion had revealed.<br/><br/>But in this case, with the Falls, that was still in the future.  Right now, boatloads of people were flooding in through the River Gate, unwieldy packs of all their worldly possessions on their backs, large families trying to ride herd on their smallest kids, and the Guard and the City Records Service bureaucrats rushing everywhere, trying to keep the peace and find places for everyone to sleep.  Up in the Sun Levels, the Council was conferring with the Guild, setting up conferences with the other cities in the area, forming an ad-hoc War Council to start the preliminary work on re-taking the Falls in due course.  To the Tarak officials, the arrival of the refugees was a nightmare.<br/><br/>To the Tarak merchants, both above-board and undercover, the arrival of the refugees was a dream come true.  Their customer base had just expanded by a third or so, at least short term.  Even those thieves who had enough heart to avoid actually stealing from survivors whoâd already had their homes wrested from them were able to use the influx of people as better cover for their usual activities.  Prices for luxury goods tripled overnight after the first barge full of escapees arrived at the docks.  Such was the open-market economy.<br/><br/>On the other hand there were more beneficial side-effects.  Though Tarak itself had never fallen, it had played host several times over the centuries.  The City Records Service knew to bust out additional sewage-bots and farmer-bots from storage, to tap into municipal stores of Food Bowls and Water Flasks.  While luxury goods were suddenly immensely expensive, basic requirements of life were suddenly much easier to find and afford.<br/><br/>But not everyone who came through the River Gate was an urban peasant or merchant or dispossessed noble.  Some had shadier histories, and darker motivations.  The Falls was a city, just as varied and complex as Tarak, and its citizens were equally varied.   And some of them had been here before.<br/><br/>The few friends idly watching the stream of refugees from a balcony high up in the River Shaft didnât have any idea who or what was comingâ¦ or already here.  This high up, the noise of the newcomers echoed, but was distant enough that the murmurs of the Tarak citizenry passing by on the thoroughfare behind them was equal competition.  The balcony was a small overlook, built where a large passage ran near the Shaft; there was a staircase not far away, back in the Warrens, and it was just a dozen or so feet lower than could officially be called the Sun Levels.  It was a good place to catch a view without being close enough to feel like you had to be personally involved.