Located on the 276th sunward floor of the Harrington Torque, one of the kilometers-tall spindle-scrapers that criss-cross Nova York.
INTERIOR
The interior décor is black-on-black with every single item limned in a blue light. In the UV spectrum, however, the club is a polychromatic disaster; a nouveau style that’s being referred to as “invisible pollocking”.
GHOSTS: Those subscribing to the Black Light’s custom AR channel (for a nominal fee) will find that the club is “haunted” by a number of spectral blue spirits who float here and there. These are all delta forks developed from egos that only survived the Fall as vapors.
LAYOUT: There’s a hemispherical bar area with tables studded across the floor. The dome of the bar is a dance floor designed for people wearing grip-pads. There are also two lounge areas (one for VIPs). The employee-only area contains a kitchen, storage, a break room, and the manager’s office.
ACTIVITY: During the day, the Black Light is largely deserted with just a few desultory drinkers. At night, the bar and lounge areas are thickly crowded. (The recent incident only created a sensation and increased the club’s demand; people are reporting that real ghosts are haunting the place.)
INVESTIGATION TEST – BAR: Will find the protoplasmic vomit (see below).
INVESTIGATION TEST – KITCHEN: Will find the component recently added to the drink fabber (see below).
CHARACTERS
MANAGER – EVANDER MOON: A gruff man in a splicer morph; blue, pseudo-prehensile dreadlocks and a slight potbelly. He’s convinced that the whole thing was a prank; some sort of “living art” piece somebody is prepping in anticipation of the Intergalactic Art and Culture Show. More than happy to take the free publicity, though.
BARTENDER – PAULA BANWIN: Friendly face in a dark-skinned splicer. She’s still badly shaken by what she experienced during the incident (which included a detailed vision of her watching TITAN drones kill her family and her original body… events she has no memory of because she escaped Earth as an infomorph fork before they happened).
Paula keeps a lifelog. She’s been teasing the events of last night and hasn’t publicly released all the footage, but they would function as surveillance footage (see below).
CLUE – SURVEILLANCE FOOTAGE
Can be obtained from the club’s security system, Paula Banwin’s lifelog, or possibly from other witnesses.
FOOTAGE: Average night at the club. Then all the lights spark brightly; people in the room and various items are clearly drawn towards a point near the center of the hemisphere (as if drawn by a strong gravitic field). People are clinging to tables or to each other and screaming. A few items implode, sending dull shards of safe-glass and ceramics careening around. Then, abruptly, its over; gravity reasserts itself and everyone falls (albeit slowly) towards the floor.
PERCEPTION (+30): One person (and only one person) is unaffected (Modya Oborskaia). Modya remains at her table. Her eyes are wide, but her pupils are rolled back to reveal only the whites of her eyes (which slowly turn red).
Rolling the footage back will reveal that Modya had just arrived and taken her first drink. (The drink was, of course, made in the drink fabber, see below.)
Rolling the footage forward will show that, after the incident, she stumbled away and vomited into a modern art piece that’s been extruded from the wall of the club. (The protoplasmic vomit she spewed up is still there, see below.)
CLUE – DRINK FABBER
Located in the kitchen. Standard model, but a strange, fluted canister made from some sort of black polymer compound has been added to it.
CANISTER: The canister was installed by workers from Neuralite and added epsilon psike-out to everything the fabber made. It has an inventory taggant attached to it that clearly identifies it as coming from a Neuralite storeroom.
Surveillance footage can reveal the person installing the canister. If successfully traced, it will turn out to be Neuralite employee named Evren Nissel (he knows nothing; he was just told to install the canister).
OPENING THE CANISTER: The canister is completely sealed except for the intake and output valves. Breaching the canister will trigger a self-destruct unless an encrypted passkey is broadcast. If the canister is opened, the chemical residue inside can be subjected to medical analysis (see Node 3).
CLUE – PROTOPLASMIC VOMIT
Located in a modern art piece that’s extruded from the wall of the club. Modya vomited into the art piece after the incident.
The vomit is semi-gelatinous and looks something like a decaying jelly fish. In substance, it’s made up almost entirely of protoplasm – as if a huge mass of cells had their plasma membranes stripped from them.
The vomit can be subjected to medical analysis (see Node 3).
