Queas Dunn

Queas Dunn is a Gilnean expatriate residing in Stormwind City. The owner and proprietor of Dunn's - a small drinking establishment in the slum of the former park district - he has recently been released from his life sentence on a pardon.

## Distinguishing Features

### Tattoos

Prominently featured on Queas' body are a number of tattoos, some predating his convictions and others received while incarcerated.

* A small hawk tattooed on the skin of the right thumb, received during a prison sentence. The hawk is crowned.
* A crowned skull on the web between right thumb and forefinger.
* A Seven of Spades on his left inner forearm; predates current incarceration.
* Full ring tattoos on all fingers.
* A snarling wolf on the right shoulder. Received during his current incarceration.
* The Rose of Gilneas over the heart.
* A skull and crossbones on the back of the left hand. Received during his current incarceration.
* A top hat on his left shoulder, and a small skull epaulette on the same, impaled with a knife.

## Early Life

Born in the slums of Gilneas City to a baker and a teamster in 580, Queas Dunn received a modicum of education in one of the City's few public schools, enrolled there from 585KY to 590KY, when he became a butcher's apprentice. The fifth son in a family of fourteen, he received little attention at home and fell in instead with the butcher's gambling friends at a young age, learning to count cards and to run small scams on the streets. During this time, he also was observed taking a keen interest in the stockyards.

In the summer of 593KY - an unseasonably hot year - Dunn in fact went to work at the stockyards just outside the city for the season, earning a reasonable wage for generally unpleasant work killing, bleeding, and gutting cows and sheep. During this time, he was commended for honesty in rejecting *all* diseased organs - having a tendency to take the time with each kill to examine the lungs, liver and heart for the tell-tale signs of tuberculosis and other cattle diseases. That he was reportedly prone to an almost salivatory state during the process escaped notice, as some assumed the boy merely had a good and honest appreciation for the scent of fresh beef.

Returning to his work as a butcher's apprentice in 594KY, Queas quickly became skilled enough that the Guild accredited him and, in 598KY, he hung a shingle. Though he volunteered for service that year in the Second War, he was rejected on grounds of disciplinary problems, and instead served his country by providing beef at-cost for pickling and drying to feed the troops.

Queas Dunn first appears in the court records in 599KY, accused of peeping into windows at night. Though not convicted, he was issued a stern warning, and by all appearances did not reoffend. He moved into a split-level town house in the city, away from the 'corruptive and impoverished' influence of his family, and was by all accounts a clean, courteous, and polite lodger to his landlady, an elderly woman by the name of Mrs. Cheshire.

## Westside Slasher

In 607KY, Rosamund Simmonds - a woman of ill repute - was found drowned in the canals between the Merchant Quarter and the Cathedral Quarter. Badly mutilated - particular attention having been paid to her face and chest - the woman was nearly unidentifiable, save for the Rose tattoo on her right buttock. Initially perceived as an isolated incident, the case was closed after a brief and unsuccesful investigation.

Later that year, prostitute Margaret McKenna was found strangled in the Cathedral Quarter, badly mutilated. The Gilneas City Police realized that the two murders were too similar to be coincidental, and reopened the Simmonds investigation. No evidence was found after months delay, and McKenna had not been seen for two days prior to her death.

Queas Dunn, having grown dissatisfied with peeping, sadomasochistic encounters in the city's Hellfire clubs, and the abuse of animals, had moved on to targetting women. Without the brilliant mind of Special Investigator Halford Ramsey - who would not join the force for some years - they were unable to make the necessary link between Simmonds and McKenna. Both were frequent customers at Dunn's butchery, and both became the targets of his fury not out of any particular dislike, but out of simple convenience.

The following year, Dunn struck three more times, each time badly mutilating his victims - no longer solely clients of his butchery. The brief furor and terror this provoked was quickly forgotten in the mounting internal tension of the nation - the Greymane Wall having been finished in its full majesty, and the outlying lords and peoples raising their voices in protest.

So masked, Dunn continued killing. Each new strike attributed to the Westside Slasher - dubbed for his tendency to leave his victims in the Greymane and Cathedral quarters - provoked a brief outcry, but were sufficiently infrequent (only one in the entire year of 609, three in 610, and none at all in 611) that the Police did not prioritize investigating the serial killings of prostitutes, beggars, and harlots.

In 612KY, the Third War broke out and the Westside Slasher disappeared. Widely presumed at the time to have joined the army and died, Dunn had in fact taken up the same role he had enjoyed in the Second War: Butcher to the Army of Gilneas. With his beef being rushed to the Wall, he also engaged in lucrative sidelines, smuggling goods in and out of the nation despite the Scourge at the gates and the decision to permanently close the entrances to the Kingdom. He also embezzled, providing cheaper cuts than contracted for, skimping on brine, and sometimes even sending cat, dog, and pigeon in place of mutton and chicken.

Dunn resumed his murders in 615KY. Exactly why he stopped is uncertain - warped patriotism being one theory, another suggesting that he had found a relationship that, for a time, had ended his need for violence. Whatever the cause, it passed shortly after the Third War's end. Dunn's only victim that year was a seven year old girl, Abigail McCleary.

Her killing sparked a manhunt, and Dunn briefly began to consider himself doomed. His next killing, shortly after New Year's, was especially violent - no longer did he consider himself to have anything to lose by being sloppy. Luck, however, was on Dunn's side.

That same year, the Wolfcult began its ritualized serial killings in and around the City of Gilneas, and the Westside Slasher was soon presumed to simply have been the Starlight Slasher all along. The confusion created by the differing motives, means, and methods of Dunn and the Wolfcult served ultimately to delay Halford Ramsey's investigation, tie up police resources, and further exacerbate the climate of fear and terror prevailing in the City.

## Worgen Invasion

Over the seven year terror created by the Wolfcult, Dunn continued killing. For unknown reasons - perhaps a simple distaste at the butcher's motives - the cult never approached Dunn for membership, even as they commanded their own to commit truly savage killings. Dunn only became aware of the Worgen as anything other than a ghost story when they began their attack on the City of Gilneas.

As many did, Dunn took up arms - his cleaver and knife - and fought his way through the streets of the Merchant Quarter, to his home. There, under uncertain circumstances, he was bitten and soon joined the rampaging horde of Worgen scrambling over the rooftops and across the canals. Through luck or sheer cussedness, he survived the assault on the Light's Dawn Cathedral, and was among the many who dispersed into the country side.

Some long months later, Dunn was finally captured by a band of hunters while devouring the remains of a young woman near the town of Duskhaven. Though he responded well to the 'cure' of Krennan Aranas, he remained a savage and particularly violent figure among the newly converted Worgen - and a powerful killer on the shores when his rehabilitation was cut short by the arrival of the Forsaken Navy. Together with several other afflicted Gilneans, Dunn formed an informal proto-pack and tore his way from the beaches to the ships. This proto-pack, informed by the as-yet untreated primal nature of the Worgen, remained together until the Exodus.

Shortly after the Great Cataclysm of 623 swallowed up the remaining Forsaken forces and the survivors of Duskhaven fled, Dunn first met with 'Dervish' a former prostitute and petty criminal from the city. The woman became his second and his most trusted friend during the following war against the forsaken, and though the proto-pack was devastated in the final exodus - taking heavy losses fighting in the rearguard - Dunn and Dervish would soon turn the tattered remains into a more 'civilized' venture.

## Post-Cataclysm period

After a brief period as refugees in Darnassus, during which the Alliance debated the entrance of Gilneas into their number, Dunn resettled in Stormwind. He was recorded as saying he was 'glad to be out of this shithole of a tree and back to civilization'. Rather than the slums of Gilneas, Dunn and the remnants of his pack found themselves pushed by necessity into the still smouldering, ash-coated crater of the former Park District.

### The Top Hat Gang

#For a detailed history, please see the Top Hat Gang article.

It was then, following a brief power struggle, that the pack developed into the Gang. All of its members had, during the refugee crisis, freely stolen from their own people and targetted especially the no-longer protected wealthy - taking their hats as a sign of disrespect. These tattered hats became the symbol and name of the pack's new form, the Top Hat Gang. Initially comprising all Worgen, the Gang swiftly seized control of one of the larger, more intact structures in the Slums and established themselves as a dominant power in the Refugee Slum.

As Jeff and Lucy Bridges, Dunn and Dervish endeavoured to 'protect' the refugees from the Stormwind Guard's attempts to move them all along. They did so in exchange for a cut of any new arrival's wealth and a cut of any earnings made from thievery or other crime by the refugees, as well as charging a small accomodation fee to sleep in the basement of the finest remaining buildings in the ruined district. In this lawless slum, Dunn soon became known as 'the Slumlord', and developed a reputation for enforcing his control with ruthless and savage violence.

Though all of the original members save for Dervish died during the initial skirmishes or from disease (including one small girl adopted by Dunn and Dervish in their 'respectable' guise of the Bridges, who perished of dysentry), the Gang would come to define and control Dunn as much as he would control it. No longer hiding his criminality behind the veneer of a respectable butcher, Dunn was now one of the most violent and desperate criminals in Stormwind's underworld.

### A Madman Caught

Dunn was arrested a number of times between 623KY and his final arrest in 625KY, largely for petty theft and solicitation offences. Unfortunately, the link was never made between Dunn's periods of imprisonment and the lowered rate of murder, and over those two years his killings escalated in speed and proximity. The relative lack of policing in the Slum allowed Dunn's killings to continue unabated.

Tragically, Dunn was not arrested for his serial murders, and though he has since spoken of them to fellow

   prisoners, he has never been investigated for his most heinous crimes. His final arrest was for jackrolling men leaving one of the more respectable Old Town brothels, followed by a violent struggle with a number of the Guard when he was apprehended. He was tried shortly after (R v Dunn (625) SMC) and, given his recurring criminality, sentenced to life imprisonment (though not death, thanks to a number of noble connections.)

Dunn today resides in Cell A26 of the Stormwind Stockades, and is reportedly one of the most violent prisoners in the Kingdom. Though he has not sought escape or hatched any grand schemes, his release would almost certainly have disastrous consequences for the witnesses who testified against him, and the magistrate who convicted him.