The dwarven quarters

And then there were the annoying bits of poetry sung over what sounded like broken guitars by the dwarven proletariat. Calling them poems was giving them too much credit for often they were loud screeches or embarrassing noises that the performer had managed to coax into a coherent pattern. An alien would have concluded that the dwarves communicated solely based on their armpit-based and rear vocalizations. As the lord like saying this was not the disease it was the symptom of the more fundamental problem: the dwarves were garrulous creatures who wanted to be heard with little means of expression in the city for they were banned to communicate outside strict work protocols at their jobs and their voices were not welcomed within the civil society. The societies were not particularly civil themselves, but a form of communication and art that was mostly based on excretion-based vocalizations was a bit much even for them.

When JJ moved into the city his apartment was in a majority-dwarf neighborhood. Despite what the fellows at work joked, living there had its benefits. He discovered his neighborhood to be much safer than anywhere else in the city for every pickpocket and thief worth his damn knows to keep his profile low in a neighborhood of assassins. The bars were good the food wasn't as bad as it was made out to be, and the women... The women were just so...great. Dwarf women were much more...confident...JJ found out the first week of his stay, than humans. It wasn't just them though, even human women roamed those streets with extraordinary nonchalance considering the bad name the neighborhood had for itself among the cityfolk. You don't create trouble when you can't be sure the frail-looking elderly woman you're about to apprehend is not a legendary vanquisher of dragons or some such. That had been a legend in itself, that particular person...for any other form of identity had been erased by the processing...was hung out to dry, insides gutted, on a clothesline for weeks. Memeh the dragonslayer suffered no fools.