Arkham Lounge Turn 4 Part 2: The Cinema, the Scholarship, the Singer, and the Cop. (Patreon)

[ ] Chief Garret: The Kanes still hadn't forgiven the Lounge for the Redfeather incident, and the latest news had given the affluent family to earn Josiah a permanent place on their enemy list. Garret was their pet dog: chief of the Bowery precinct in their pocket, one who was willing to bend the law when it suited their employer and convinced that making life harder for Josiah would make his bosses happy.

MODUS OPERANDI: Expect violence and the fist of the state such as inspections, raids, and harassment by the cops, as well as the occasional bit of extortion as this guy attempts to earn brownie points with the rich and shitty by making your life hell. They aren't aiming to put you out of business, but if it happens, it happens.

[X][HOT] The East End

-[X] The Burlington Educator's Scholarship, available to any resident of East End willing to pursue a degree in teaching. Beyond helping the people of East End directly, it would help to provide more and better teachers to Gotham's Black schools.

[X][ACT] The Lady of Moon and Stars: Decked in a luxurious-looking stage costume of blue and gold, and a half-mask in the shape of the moon on her face, Violet will sing a number of either dramatic, operatic melodies or haunting love songs (staying far away from the burlesque and the bawdy) while a stream of coloured lights shines upon the stage and a background painted to resemble the night sky.

[X][SUPPLY] Put out feelers in smaller farms in the area; primarily food suppliers, but also corn oil and similar products.

[X][BAR] Diversify Spirits

-[X] Cheap Alcohol (if possible, source from the farmers)

[X][HANDY] Complete the Gluckenmotor

[X][FUN] Call On a Someone

-[X] Violet

[X][PERSONAL] Acquire film equipment

!!!!GOTHAM!!!!

Historybooks would always remember Arkham Lounge as being at the forefront of integration in Gotham, one of the first businesses in the city to unequivocally announce they would serve any and all customers.

Of course, this decision was not without consequence, and in the months after, Josiah had to spend his time scrambling to find suppliers. Bleeding money, the magician would personal travel up and down Gotham River, even venturing to its tributaries and sources and going up and down the coast.

Word traveled fast, and Josiah found many doors and markets closed to him…except for those belonging to black farms and communities, or those whites sympathetic to his stance. He might not have been able to buy food for his kitchen from Gotham Market, but there was an entire states worth of farmers who would happily sell to the man, allowing Mark to once again expand his menu, dropping the oysters and seafood he had once had upon the menu and swapping it for onions, potatoes, rice, and lots of chicken and pork, along with a random assortment of fresh vegetables  and other meats depending on whose farms they had bought from.

The cold room came in handy here: it meant that the more fragile stuff survived longer to make it to the customers plate, and then their belly. Mark’s specialty: pork-and-rice stew replicated from a cajun cook-book he had bought from a trader up from louisiana. The cook lacked any peppers to add spice, so instead he substituted pepper-corns: the end result wasn’t quite the same as what the cook-book described, but according to the papers from around then, the meal really wasn’t that bad.

Helped that Josiah continued working on getting the Gluckenmotor, as it was called, built. Sure, the man had to keep bleeding money, but now the St. Majeste could easily make multiple stops in a day. Of course, Josiah was a gotham boy: he was never gonna stray far, not long, but even for a homebody mobility has benefits.

And while he looked for food suppliers, the manager also spent time scouting out a source of beer: he was looking for quantity, not quality. Something he could sell as cheaply as possible: without something on the menu for the scabs too poor to afford witches brew, Josiah was losing revenue and his reputation for affordability.

Still, the man might have went the other direction: there’s affordable, then there’s cheap. In the end, Josiah would find a very cheap supplier. One of the farms he was getting food from: it was a bit of a sweetheart deal, the farmer giving Josiah the swill at a slight loss for Josiah giving them a bit of preference when it came to buying food and a few other favors. The place was Farm Bowman, located deep in Slaughter Swamp. The people involved were Clan Bowman, a mixed race family led by Elder patriarch Malachi Bowman. Insular and clannish, they sold the Lounge much of their produce: corn, corn products, peanuts, sugar-cane, pork and ham, and the clans specialty moonshine, which was fairly strong if it was a good batch, grotesquely cheap at the price Josiah had managed to sell of them, but highly variable in quality, prone to inducing brief bouts of blindness, and occasionally causing brief moments of complete idiocy.

The stuff was, frankly, bad. But Josiah was able to sell it for lower than he could Stouts, meaning almost anyone could afford it. Sure, a few people would get sick here and there, and sure, it meant that he began attracting new flavors of sleeze, like the drunk looking for something to chug themselves stupid and the cheap creep who was a little bit too low class to get in any other house of vice more expensive, but it also meant those who would normally be too poor to afford a good night out at other places were able to enjoy themselves.

And lemme tell you, Gotham City isn’t sort of people down on their luck, and for a few of them, life was going to get worse.

Alright, you were only going to get away with not causing health problems so long. Birds, dry ice, neurotoxins sold as beverages, and now you have dubious moonshine and food sourced from dozens of farms. Eventually that was always going to come to a head unless you devoted AP to improving health and food safety related things.

That time is now. The good news is, you get to shape what form this takes. Action-code [HEALTH HAZARD].

[ ] ROTGUT: Some people who went to the Lounge would suddenly begin to drop dead. Not immediately, and not many, but even if no one was pointing fingers yet, the only amount of people that aren’t unsettling to have start dropping around you was zero.

[ ] Plague Den: Legally, the Lounge was not liable if someone got sick. However, legal liability doesn’t necessarily care about material realities, and because of Josiah’s actions the Lounge would become a place where sickness thrived, especially in the humid summer months.

[ ] Cauldron of Madness: A unique chemical reaction between some of the lower quality Bowman Moonshine when consumed with Witches Brew and a few other substances had a very, very low chance of triggering a severe enough reaction such as to resemble temporary psychosis.

Of course, the Gluckenmotor had more benefits than just letting the Lounge go far: it let Josiah further electrify the St. Majeste. Now, even at full steam, its lights remained on, powered by the strange little engine created by Frau Gluck, ran off all manner of petroleum product: chiefly kerosene and distilled gasoline. Not exactly environmentally friendly, but certainly forward facing, and it meant that even as the food got cheaper, the Ambiance got better.

For our dear manager, it wasn’t just enough to be modern: Josiah wanted to be on the cutting edge. From a traveler he had heard of film technology: the nickelodeon, something the guest had seen displayed at chicago during an exhibition of technology. Now, back then movies were rarely longer than thirty seconds, flickery and brief recordings that could capture only the briefest bits of action: a horse pulling a carriage, a man lifting a weight, a bearded guy laughing. But Josiah didn’t care about things like practicality: the actual value of the technology as it existed was secondary to its status as the newest technological novelty. And so Josiah would take a few days out of his schedule to travel, going up the coast to New York just long enough to fetch himself a genuine kinetoscope.

Now back then, there were a few different suppliers: the technology was in it’s infancy, but in many ways that just made it uncharted territory, one that was eagerly being explored by the likes of both famous rat-bastard Thomas Edison and slightly less bastardly types such as the Lumière brothers in france.

The capitalist entities that affect culture through their business practices hadn’t fully adopted projection yet: you still had a lot of people using the old peep-show machines, the type that could only service one or two people at a time. But this was also the era of the Eidoloscope, the Cinematographe, the Projecting Kinetoscope.

The movie projector was every year becoming more and more popular, adopted as a way to increase how many people could watch a film at once. It was this machine that would eventually dominate cinema for almost a century, housed in every movie theater in America, but it’s reign had not yet begun.

Alright folks, you want to get into film? Time to decide what that looks like.

[ ] Cinematographe: Purchased from a pair of french inventors who called themselves the Lumiere brothers who Josiah had contacted, this projector was apparently a prototype they were no longer exhibiting in favor of a more refined model. It still worked fine, being capable of playing all the modern formats, and it came with its own catalog of short films by the brothers made to help exhibit it, and a handful of copies of one or two films by actual film-makers that Josiah had managed to gladhand that the magician thought would play well with his bars aesthetic and audience, even if it’s price tag was hefty and expanding his library would be a pain in the ass.

What is Josiah using? Action code [Film]

[ ] Projecting Kinetoscope: Good old Thomas Edison. Even if he was a rat-bastard, the man understood economy: his projecting kinetoscope not only was affordable, Josiah was even able to make a deal with the rotten geezer himself, allowing him to exhibit the films created by Edisons studio before any other theater in Gotham, at the low price of a small percentage of the ticket revenue. All it took was indulging Edisons interest in the occult: in that regard, he and Josiah were kindred spirits, pun intended.

[ ] BARTOMATIC FILM DEVICE: When a technology is in its infancy, you get a few people like Harrison K Bartholomew, or Mr. Bart as he would be known to the history books, an independent inventor and film-maker who successfully created a prototype for a new device, an extremely large combination camera and projector that despite being wheeled required two people to move. Despite this, in theory the device supposedly possessed the ability to not just show off film, but create them, though it did neither particularly well. Mr. Bart had agreed to sell Josiah the patent for the machine along with the prototype if the manager agreed to help finance both Mr. Barts studio as well as his research into refining the device into something actually sellable.

It wasn’t advanced enough yet to start taking Vaudevilles jobs yet, to the unknown relief of Josiah’s latest two performers: all Josiah could really use it for was to provide novelty demonstrations to show off the Lounges electrical systems. Still, these Arkham Nickolodeons would prove modestly popular with the Lounges patrons: it was still something new and novel, even if Josiah’s library of film was still lacking.

It was during one of these shows that two individuals would get to talking: Mark Jacobs and Oswald P Burlington. The former had found themselves increasingly in the orbit of the Benevolent Lodge through their mutual friendship with Scotty O’Roark, the two figures finding a degree of solidarity in their shared status as those put outside the racial hierarchy with an interest in literature, though their tastes and specific position differed.

This meeting of the minds would prove somewhat beneficial to the residents of East End: when Jacobs and Burlington conversed in the moments where the two found such a situation to spark conversation, the topic would turn to Jacobs work at East End library and the state of education in the african american communities. Burlington decided that there was no problem that couldn’t be solved via money, and so created the Burlington Educators Scholarship, which would pay 1,500 dollars a year for any resident of the east end seeking a degree in education, an amount that would gradually increase with the cost of tuition in the United States. Specifically, the amount of money the scholarship, paid for by trust created by Burlington, would dispense would be tied to the average yearly cost of attending Gotham University.

Sure, long term, there would be problems, the biggest being the dissolution of Burlington’s rail empire and the slow decline of trains in america at the hands of the automotive industry resulting in the scholarship having to slash how many people it could help, but for several decades it would still prove a pretty helpful leg-up for people in the area, ensuring that East End residents interested in higher education would have an another avenue available to it. Each year would find these east enders filtering into the educational systems, staffing libraries and schools that were underfunded, understaffed, but at the very least weren’t underqualified.

Of course, that was for later: in those months, all the Scholarship really was was two people making calls and writing letters, finding recipients and arranging for the pay-outs. The first students that would pursue a degree at Gotham University using the grant would begin attendance next fall, at the earliest: until then, its creators needed to prepare.

Of course, all these events were side-shows for the main event: Violet Hall would find herself promoted to a headlining performer with her new ‘Dame Luna Des Étoile’ act. Dressed in an amateur costume the singer had made herself consisting of a blue dress and moon-mask against a backdrop of stars painted by the house handyman, Violet sung slow, mournful songs of grief and pain and loss.

When it comes to quality most people who knew her think she was a passable singer at best: what Violet was good at was conveying emotion. Her low, haunting contralto spoke of terrible pain and grief, the woman serenaded the audience with songs of love lost at sea and curses of greed…

…Impressing her employer, Josiah, who found in the woman a mind equally as conniving as his own when nourished with the waters of inspiration. Initially, he had merely been attempting to be social, hoping that Violet Hall’s veterancy would make her amicable, hoping to provide suggestions for her first headliner.

And yet the native Bludhavenian had a keen mind for theatrics and manipulation, the pair of them refining the act through collaboration, Josiah helping improve the costume by applying his years of experience working behind the scenes for Hermann by creating an elegant looking blue gown and shawl as well as operating the special effects, like the new electrical stage lighting, the Magician incorporating colored lenses and smoke machines to provide a more ethereal ambiance.

It was a hit. Dame Luna would become the talk of those who saw it, the mournful, atmospheric song resonating with many in Gotham.

Alright, so, this was a good act: ultimately the kind of thing you have plenty of useful props for like the angled lighting. Sure, the costuming and backdrop weren’t as good as could be and Violet is frankly a so-so singer otherwise, but this isn’t something you need a lot of technical ability for, especially since the audience is probably going to be a little sloshed to begin with.

Now, Violet isn’t exactly a particularly deep character: she was created to be, essentially, a semi-generic starting entertainer. The secret GM only character sheet I have for Miss Hall is only a few sentences long.

Now, I could bullshit a few lines and make stuff up, but that doesn’t really feel satisfying. So I’m going to flip the script, and give this opportunity to you, dear reader: I want you to come up with one significant character trait or personal detail about Violet Hall.

Here are the rules: first, Hall is non-powered. They do not secretly have magic, technology, or other forms of otherworldly or enhanced abilities. Second, you cannot contradict anything already established: sorry, no retcons. Thirdly, this has to be something our friend Josiah could learn pretty casually: no deep dark and dirty secrets with all the details, just him putting something together during conversation. He’s observant, but not psychic. Action code [HALL]

[ ] Insert detail here.

Chief Garret. A living example of the observation that getting older made a man meaner, the seventy year old had been in his younger years a soldier in the union army during the civil war. Now, unlike the Kanes, this affiliation wasn’t skin-deep, the product of economic and geographic realities. As vile as he was, the man was a patriot, one who had went to war against the confederates out of a genuine sense of disgust at the thought of secession.

Returning to Gotham, whatever sympathy he had had for blacks would evaporate in the years afterward: the decades of economic hardship he suffered hardening his heart alongside with the material realities of working as a Gotham Cop eroding his general capacity for empathy, until eventually a man who had once marched for emancipation found themselves spending their sundays wearing a white hood.

When he found himself in the Kanes pocket is an open historical question, but by the time Josiah found himself incurring their ire he was little more than the families own personal police puppet, the Kanes hand so far up their ass they were able to operate the police chief of the bowery precinct’s mouth.

Racism and corruption, mixing together to create a brave, bold blend of sleeze. Add in unchecked authority and social position and you have the cocktail that was Gothams finest, and none of the drinks on that particular menu were as hard to swallow as the rotgut blend that was the soul of Elizer K Garret. And now Josiah was in the chiefs sights as a man with a reputation whom Garrets employers had reason to want troubled, one that was a race traitor to boot.

It started with an unprompted raid: suspicions that Josiah was running a tobacco smuggling operation, supposedly. Another would see the manager arrested, thrown into jail due to a tragic case of ‘mistaken identity’ that would end in Josiah only barely skating by a resisting arrest charge. Other times, Garret would have his goons harass the staff, the Davis cousins finding themselves stopped and frisked on a daily basis by police hanging around the docks and the waiter finding themselves put into the hospital by a cop with a too eager nightstick.

Now, I’d say that Garret didn’t actually care about putting the place out of business, but that’d be a lie. Again, white hooded prick: if he had his way he’d probably have Josiah strung up, but for now his goal was to show what happens to race traitors and impress his boss, so it’d be more that he didn’t have a VESTED interest in closing the lounge. If Josiah had crumbled and gave in, the Chief would probably have let up, at least a little: start collecting protection money sure, but his greed was a bigger motivator than his hate.

But Garret had unwittingly put himself up against the immovable object: Josiah and his stubbornness meant he would never accede to the demands of any man who dared presume command himself. Perhaps if Josiah had been more humble he could have survived, but Professor Arkham had not built his career on capitulation, not to Alexander Hermann, not to Abigail Roth, and certainly not for Elizer god-damned Garret.

Time would see which of them would come out atop.

No vote here: from now on though you’ll start seeing more active opposition.