This attempt at a novella is inspired by my love of Memphis rap music from the early 90's. Specifically the song Blinked on a Blunt by the Immortal Lowlifes. I found the artwork for the cassette tape fascinating. Lil Noid's Load my Clip from Paranoid Funk is also a favorite of mine. It's a genre dear to me, just as much as inky black metal.
The four shuffled along the loose gravel road, eyeing the surrounding buildings with subtle suspicion. Oakfingers trailed behind their four masters, ready with wands to pillage and plunder. The day's elixirs were sold and the gold piled up, all that was left was a raid, a chance to spill red Ichor all over the gravel.
Greyhawk readied his Goat's Horn. Faust brandished his Brimstone Repeater. Berwyn and Elkhart ready behind them with relaxed and defiant postures. The Oakfingers began to spread among the buildings, taking their positions. Deep in the district of Binghampton, their most bitter enemies hadn't yet made their presence known.
The Midnight Bachelors had defaced them by spilling the skullcaps of a few younger Oakfingers out in Greyhawk's Whitehaven territory, anything that could signal weakness to other groups had to be dealt with maliciously. More than a few Bachelors would need to get surrounded by stencils and bagged. Word spread that the battle of the year would be taking place in Bachelor turf, others seeking a name or simple spilling flocked and made themselves seen and heard. Southern Warlocks of Orange Mound. Gimisum Phantoms of Engelwood, even Judases and Stilletos found their way there. A cauldron was brewing and would soon begin to boil over, all within the forest of outstretched hand signals.
In the distance silhouettes were beginning to form, as they got closer nearly everyone could recognize Master Magnificent and his second hand, the Most. Leaders of the Bachelors, gilded with thick bronze chains and circlets. The rest of their overwhelming numbers slow behind them, decked in Tyrion purple silk and glimmering rings
This fictional version of Memphis has a variety of gangs at the time of the story, December 1976. The city itself is a patchwork of neighborhoods controlled by various street gangs with varying levels of organization, some of the neighborhoods are ones I've heard in various Memphis rap songs, others are entirely made up and based on certain sections of other cities in the United States that I'm familiar with.
All the gangs in the story are first, The Almighty Unknowns, which is the gang all the main characters belong to. They reside in the Whitehaven neighborhood and are comprised of four leading members, being Greyhawk, aged 16, Berwyn, the oldest at 18, Faust, the youngest at 13, and Elkhart, 17. Due to my general knowledge of how Chicago street gangs operated at around the same time period, every gang in this story has their own business cards that they either give to prospective members or leave behind at crime scenes. Their gang card reads, Masters in crime, killers sublime.
The four leaders aren't really distinct from one another in authority, but they all exert control over underlings of various ages they refer to as Oakfingers
who use their wands
to commit low level crime. They speak mostly in slang and derive most of their income from drug dealing, selling elixirs
to fiends, burglary/home invasion, and prostitution. I'm not writing a story about good people doing good things this time, that's something I keep trying to stress to myself. They each have their own personal weapons which they've given a colorful assortment of names, the Goat's Horn, Cloven Hooves, Brimstone Repeater, and White Windstaff. These are an AK-47, a double-barrel sawed off shotgun, a MAC-10, and a Mossberg pump action respectively. They refer to spilling skullcaps
when speaking of point blank, to the head summary executions. The leader is curretly somewhat of an apprentice to a pimp by the name of Iceberg Razorwind who runs a local club known as the Red Beetle.