Inkblood Inc. (Episode 2)

In New Casca, the largest city in the Last Nations, the People live beside their new siblings in a hodgepodge of ancient tradition and new infrastructure. Highhouses of wood and leather dot the landscape alongside buildings of steel and stone. Ink combustion engines power automobiles and the machinery of factories; ink batteries light the lamps of the stone-paved streets. The high-fashion, high-class artisan district clashes with the nearby slum reservations. At night the streets empty, patrolled by the constabulary who protect the people from scoundrels and gangrels and things that prowl. Or they try to.

Past the quarantine zone -- where carriers are stacked in droves, forced to live in second-class poverty and squalor, forced to scrabble just to get by -- guarded and watched by the same towers that guard and watch the carriers is Inkblood Inc. When a carrier dies, when a scoundrel is found, city hall calls on the inkbloods to do what they do best, what only they can.