Gutter Rat

The Gutter Rat is a native mammal of Zaun, a small, hardy creature that thrives in the city's filthiest quarters and makes its home wherever squalor collects. It is most at home in the Sump Level, the sunless depths at the bottom of the undercity, and it feeds on whatever it can scavenge. In Zaun the name carries a second meaning, hurled as an insult at those born into the muck of the lower city. That double edge sits at the heart of the tale "Son of Ur." A chemtech-warped figure, his armored legs threaded with glowing tubing and gun muzzles, his human face venting pure alchemy through a tox-mask, hunts through the Zaunite depths and slays the chem-baron who once ruled there. Seizing a terrified young survivor, he names him the gutter rat, at home in the squalor, who survives, and demands to know which of them is stronger, the baron who lorded over the city or the ragged youth who endured it. The monster leaves the youth's friends dead, Scuzz foaming and Zori choking on poisoned air, and spares him for a single purpose. He orders the survivor to tell the city how he lived while a baron did not, casting him as the first of many witnesses. In that moment the gutter rat becomes more than an insult. It is the emblem of those the undercity was meant to grind down, the ones who outlast the powerful precisely because they were born to endure the filth.