<span class="bbc_size" style="font-size: 14pt;"></span><div align="center"><span class="bbc_u"><strong><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: Garamond;">ACT I.  SCENE I.  SOUTHWARK TAVERN.</span></strong></span></div><br/><div align="center">(http://i49.photobucket.com/albums/f258/siegfried1922/133861992_60d4dc5cd8.jpg)</div><span class="bbc_font" style="font-family: Times New Roman;"><br/>Dreary.<br/><br/>Southwark is dreary through to its rain-washed soul.<br/><br/>Rind of the Moor Lands.  Cradle of Summer Plagues.  <br/><br/>Path's End.  Peat Quarry.  Sore on the Tip of Good Lands.<br/><br/>Southwark is said to be many things, none of them useful.  None appealing.  It carries the wet, sad, weight of the rain in the very mention of its name.  <br/><br/>They say that Southwark is ugly, and on its muddy slouch the evidence is carved:  Shanty buildings with string to shut their doors; the gape of empty farms, their silos filled with harvests bulging and alien with mold and rot; the windows and roofs slouching, blind under the rain; slouching as if ashamed as their colors are all washed away, and lines are rinsed into their surface, and the rot pokes through in little gray blisters.<br/><br/>They say that Southwark is broken; and only to look around it is to see it cringe and crumble, and see that is true:  The men look as though they have had their shoulders and faces pushed in from birth; the women drag their eyes along the ground and numbly expect to be hit; the children are too wise with hunger; and all the voices, the work, the stares and the skin of Southwark's people are washed threadbare.<br/><br/>They say that Southwark is soulless:  The same fields that grow moldy, lean harvests each year are swollen with rotting growth.  The same signs hang over stores that closed years before.  The same last names work the stinking peat fields as they have for generations, and it is though the same faces - made wrinkled and white by the constant pull of the rain's cool hand, eyes washed out like kettles - hover, anxious, static, in the Southwark Tavern, drinking the same piss-bitter beer, telling no stories, before walking in the same muddy tracks home again, to ignore their children's cries the same, to beat their wives the same, to dream the same gray dreams of Southwark.<br/><br/>And you are here, in this nightmare of rain without beginning or ending or edge.  And the cities of the burnished West, the hoary North, the South glistening and fecund under her mantles of steam, the spiced vastness of the East - those cities do not dream of places like Southwark.  They have dreams of vistas aching and bright to be pierced by polished sailing ships, of spires touching Heaven's cheek, of paint and gold and swords.  <br/><br/>Here, Southwark has only the rain, and you have Southwark Tavern:<br/><br/>Slouching.  Whispering.  Hungry.  Bitter.  Staring.  No longer waiting, but just staying.  Hurting without origin or end of hurt.  <br/><br/>Amber lit.  Stinking.  Haggard.  Wet.  <br/><br/>But you also have something they need:<br/><br/>Hope.<br/><br/>You heard that three young women were taken from their houses by some massive, hulking humanoid thing.  You heard of it because it was the only story worth telling that had come out of Southwark in memory.  And you suspect you can find these things, as their tracks are not yet washed away, and they lead across the bog into the hills.<br/><br/>The Foreman of Southwark has said that anyone brave enough to follow those tracks and go into those hills and bring back the head of one of those things, will be 3,000 gold richer.<br/><br/>And so you have a job.<br/><br/></span>