The Dead Café
Every city of a decent size has a place or two like this café, places where the wise and the weary, the hunted and the haunted, the reckless and the careless join in a common attempt to convince each other and themselves that they make a difference. These places are the safety valves of aggression and despair. The authorities ignore them because they keep the rabble off the main streets. They are the gathering places of the homeless, the penniless, the crazy, the suicidal, and the rebellious. And in the corners, with clinking glasses and cheap cigarettes, the plans to change the world are perpetually laid by people who have no means to do so.
The dark side of the big city has always lured adventurous souls to itself. Some to escape, some to vanish. Player characters, as well as anyone else seeking something they don’t quite know what is – from vampires to the meaning of happiness – haunt the joints of the night city. There are stories to be found here, for the daring and the apt. Stories which may be nothing more than footnotes to the main story-lines, but which deserve as much attention.
Characters on a rescue mission for some bigshot’s missing daughter, seeking a murderer, or out to eliminate injustice, may find themselves dealing with far more than they expected if you pay attention to what moves beneath the rippling surface of the city. There are whores here, thieves and backstabbers, drug dealers and addicts, homeless and desperate lowlives, mafiosi, and mercenary hitmen. Every great city has a dark side, and every dark side has its stories. Small events which can be tied to an ongoing story-line to add depth and flavor. Each human fate gone down the drain unfolds its own story. One which is no less interesting from the writer’s point of view than the main story-line.
Life, or rather, the unlife dominant in this city, comes into the story through the side plots depicted. From the basic benefits of having a number of red herrings and wildcard clues around to stall the solving of the mystery, to the greater perspective of portraying the entire filthy and desolate environment to the characters investigating it. People make the stories flow. Any conversation overheard, any whisky breath of a knocked-out whore, any fifth ace in the deck may spark off a story of its own, and provide the touch and feel that is the necropolis, the city of the dead.
Bells of freedom
In the corner farthest from the flabby sax player, a group of students meet, rejoicing in their freedom. As they occasionally break into half-drunken songs of freedom, liberty, and the dawning of a new era, the students have great plans for the tired old city. They will make it a better place for everyone. One student vows that when he has gained a position for himself in society, he will provide for the outcasts. He is not aware that before him, his father made those self-same vows, in that self-same chair. And like his father before him, the student too will soon forget his heated promises.
Those who aspire to become revolutionaries meet in the darkest corners of the bars of the city. Here they feel safe from the prying eyes of friends and authorities, to plot the downfall of the established government. Though only a fraction of these young, angry people ever take their inspired beliefs past a heated debate as to the injustice of the existing system, a few aspire to become terrorists or dangerous political figures. There are quite a few scenarios hidden here, as the characters find themselves involved with the young extremists – people who are considered undesirable by the government, and who have the power to actually ripple the surface of the great city. Young militants, young fanatics, suicidal would-be presidential killers, among others, may take their first steps on a long bloody trail in this place.
The majority of the angry young people flocking here will never make it past the talking. But there are many hours of fruitless surveillance for the characters, waiting near the target of a terror bombing or demonstration which never becomes more than an idea expressed over a glass too many.
If only I could go to Hollywood
The skinny redhead in the bar will mix you any drink you can conceive of. She knows them all by heart, and does not pause as to recall components or dosage. She never speaks. Her eyes stare beyond you, at something only she can see. Maybe it’s the small town she once set out from in youthful dreams of the big city’s splendors. Maybe it’s nothing at all. She wears a short black skirt and a blouse too tight over her chest, flattening her breasts rather than drawing attention to them. A few bangles shine on her wrists; a charm, a tiny silver horseshoe, dangles from one. Wishes of good luck from a boy whose name she can no longer recall.
Many are the fates of young people who have come to seek their fortune. They are penniless and friendless in search of dreams their small home towns could not fulfill. The neon lights of the city draws them like moths to a flame, and like most moths, they never become more than at best a brief flicker of light in a room filled with darkness. The starlets who were never discovered the stand-up comedian who can’t write his own jokes, the gambler who can’t maintain a poker face – the list is endless. Each has a story to tell, of why they failed, and how things could be different if just… From the writer’s point of view these people grow the more interesting if suddenly given a second chance. Is there any limit as to what a burned-out starlet would do in return for a chance to audition for Weather Girl? What if the present weather girl was once the starlet’s best friend who cheated on her in order to get the job? There is envy, greed, and anger aplenty here, and with desperate people, there are almost no limits to what ends they can be and have been used.
Need a killer with no motive? Offer the stand-up comedian a second chance to get that precious second interview, if he’ll only do you this small favor first…
42nd Street Blues
The guitarist of the house band plays the sad jive, his attention focused on his instrument. Occasionally his hand whips out to snatch a glass of whatever the bartender puts before him. He empties it without interest and without caring what’s in it. Only through his music can he be felt as a living, sentient being. Though once he had big dreams, his music is now as lifeless and dull as that of the second-rate band that backs him
The people who have worked at the café for a while have seen more than most others have nightmares about. While their stories are sad, they are abundant sources of information as well. If you will pay, obviously. But then, a bottle of gin or a few sweaty dollar notes is no high price to learn everything there is to know about the regulars.
These tales are mostly similar to the guitarist’s own, stories of dreams shattered and forgotten. But here and there there are things the guitarist saw, words he heard from the back room, slips of paper he was not supposed to see. He may not know what the drug dealers and the street gangs do, or to whom. But he does know what is said of them and which ones have what kind of reputation. Though he’s not likely to part with this information easily – open mouths may lead to night swims in the harbor basins – he can be bought.
Street warriors and plain clothes coppers
In the small smoke-filled room above the bar, the card sharks gather every night. Sometimes a new face has replaced an old one, but essentially they’re all the same. They steal your last savings with slick smiles. Some nights the men who guard the fire escape join in the game. Sometimes they win – they never lose. Ill concealed weapon holsters bulge beneath their sweat-stained shirts. Maybe the bulges are the reasons they’re so lucky.
Some nights the boys don’t play. They’re occupied elsewhere, perhaps with a quiet execution in the back room, perhaps downstairs or across the street, reminding the owners of the shops that there’s a fee to be paid for protection. Sometimes they have to withdraw that protection in order for the shop owners to remember their debts and loyalties.
The street has a law of its own as do the back rooms and the dark corners. Police officers doing plain clothes investigation as well as hired guns move aside each other, never knowing who can be trusted and who can’t. When you’ve been around a while you develop an instinct as to when it’s smart to keep your mouth shut. If you don’t, you only squeal once.
No matter why the characters ask questions, they very asking will make them targets of attention from multiple watchers. Street gang leaders may not like strangers moving on their turf. They may want a share of whatever they think the characters are up to. Mafiosi may be less ambivalent in their attitudes towards investigators, offering the characters the choice between a bullet and a ticket out of town.
At the café, people asking questions will meet those who know the answers, but are too afraid or too smart to talk. Scenarios are buried here too, as the characters must provide witness protection or get someone safely to a location and back. Protecting someone from the gang members of the region is one thing. Being stuck in a basement with a half-drunk whore with a bad attitude for two days is something else. Patience, simple as it is, is quite a challenge. Will the characters succumb to the temptation of just beating someone into talking? Will they bide their time in quiet suffering as their charge stalks the floor, yelling for a drink and complaining?
Choices and quandaries can be as major events as encounters with armed bikers or mercenary thugs. Place the characters in situations where they have to choose between rescuing one innocent or the other. Let them choose between two equally untrustworthy people, knowing that one of the two has been hired to do them in – but which one?
Necropolis
The city of the dead never sleeps. A writer with his finger on the pulse never runs out of sideline stories to set the characters running in the wrong directions. With a bitter taste in the mouth and weary eyes behind black shades, you move with the flow of the street. When you’re down and dirty with the boys, you just keep going down.
Because in doing so you supply the characters with all the motivation they will ever need to go on pushing upwards, for themselves, and for the great, big, mean city they live in.
