The Desert Queen

[birthright_npc]

The Desert Queen, the city’s newest boutique hotel, went from concept drawings to physical structure in record time. Local magazines hailed it as an architectural marvel. A newspaper columnist referred to it as a tourist’s wet dream. Behind closed doors, it was called worse things: a rush job, a fool’s errand, the hotel that dirty money built. People suspected that contractors cut corners to meet the deadlines of anxious city developers, and more disturbing, that building inspectors were bribed to pass it with flying colors.

The hotel was a modern work of pink-tinted glass and polished steel. Though only seven stories tall, its towers rose at sharp, impossible angles meant to mimic the shape of a royal crown. Hotel rooms pitched diagonally over a landscape of bubbling fountains, rippling pools, and greenery so vibrant that gardeners joked it had been painted. Even the marble tiles around the toilets were imported from Italy.

It opened with a flourish at the end of summer and was booked solid through Easter. All were poised to breathe a collective sigh of relief until the first sign of trouble: a crack in the foundation, first reported by a maintenance worker on New Year’s Eve. Then a second crack… this one in a load-bearing column in the lobby.

When the first spire buckled, the steel yawned loudly, sounding like the bellow of an exotic beast. Chunks of plaster plopped into the water. Jagged cracks appeared in the windows. Then flooring began to spill out, and bits of wire and pipe. A squadron of fire trucks, police cars, and ambulances wailed and honked as they approached on Las Vegas Boulevard. A lone news helicopter circled overhead in the night sky.

Then a second spire snapped like an insect wing. A mixture of building materials, furniture, and people teetered precariously over the stone plaza. Guests shouted and pointed. Some took pictures. Within moments, all hell broke loose.

[Thread: Open]

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[brian_campo]

Brian’s headphones pumped a sonic assault of The Cramps into his ears. The night breeze blew his hair straight up and back from his forehead as he walked down the Boulevard, off work and aimless. He had a new cassette tape in his hands, shrink-wrapped and shining, and he read the track list as he bumped into other pedestrians and kept going. He didn’t hear the groan of poorly constructed steelworks, but he did look up when red lights reflected on the plastic film of his tape. He found the source of all the chaos with his eyes and stopped moving. An odd finger-nails-on-the-chalkboard feeling went down his back, and looking at the hotel was like seeing a human body bent into the wrong shape. His eyes didn’t quite believe what he was looking at. He leaned forward and squinted.

A piece of concrete fell three stories and broke apart on the ground.
“Oh god. Oh shit.”

With no idea of what had happened or what he might do, Brian tore the headphones off his head and kept walking towards the Desert Queen, shoving his way through people whenever they wouldn’t move.