u/TheTerribleTimmyCat

Something odd, but hardly unexpected, occurred at 12:11 on the night of Wednesday, September 23rd at the studios of WNHP-TV: “New Hope’s News Source!”.  In the lobby, under lights dimmed until morning came again, display cases grazed a plain of polished granite tile in between groves of potted plants.  Not for the first time Reina Martinez, one of the guards stationed in the lobby, considered those plants as she made her way over to one particular case.  

Snake plant, cast iron plant, and dragon tree.  Common, despite those fantastical names.  You saw them everywhere. 

She saw them every night that she worked, in their polished brass pots, quietly going about the work they had been placed there to do: Protection.  All of them were there to protect, and here in this case was the item they guarded against the evil, stupidity, and ill intentions of the world seething outside the lobby’s giant glass walls.   

WNHP’s weather predictions had never been any more or less accurate than anyone else’s, but the station was immensely proud of its history all the same.  This, despite the fact that New Hope weather came largely in only two flavors: too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter. The only question was whether you would get wet if you went outside in the heat or cold, and they got that answer right about as often as they didn’t.  

Amid accoutrements that tracked weather forecasting in New Hope from newspaper to radio, to television and onward was an exquisite antique barometer with a thermometer above a dial whose needle could swing from “Very Dry” on the right to “Stormy” on the left.  Large numbers in fancy gothic script, twenty-eight at “Stormy” all the way up to thirty-one at “Very Dry”, were spaced around the edge, with smaller increments numbered in between.  At some point there had been another, shorter needle to track those smaller numbers, but it was now lost to time. The thermometer and dial peered out of bubbles of crystal nestled among delicately carved wooden feathers and flowers, and the whole mechanism was as long as her forearm.  This was the fifth time she had checked it since coming on shift at eleven.  

So far the long needle had held steady, pointing at “Fair.” 

On her circuits around the lobby, she’d kept her hands balled in the pockets of her uniform trousers, to ensure they stayed moist with perspiration.  Now, with no one looking, for the fifth time she took one hand and plucked the barometer’s smaller needle from the blouse pocket underneath her badge. She opened her other hand and placed the needle on her palm.  

In the glass case, the needle on the barometer dial swept hard to the left, from “Fair,” past “Change,” “Rain”, and “Stormy,” and kept going until it was lodged between twenty-six and twenty-seven, slicing between the words “aneroid” and “barometer” at the very bottom. 

Reina sighed, deep and weary, slid the needle back into her pocket and got out her phone.  She checked the time and sent a text, then continued on with her patrols, just as she would all through the night, and just as she did every night - always in the lobby - before the eve of the full moon.       

With luck, maybe this time the mannequins upstairs in their pancake makeup wouldn’t have anything to talk about. Maybe no one would die.

Something odd, but hardly unexpected, occurred at 12:11 on the night of Wednesday, September 23rd at the studios of WNHP-TV: “New Hope’s News Source!”.  In the lobby, under lights dimmed until morning came again, display cases grazed a plain of polished granite tile in between groves of potted plants.  Not for the first time Reina Martinez, one of the guards stationed in the lobby, considered those plants as she made her way over to one particular case.  

Snake plant, cast iron plant, and dragon tree.  Common.  You saw them everywhere. 

She saw them every night that she worked, in their polished brass pots, quietly going about the work they had been placed there to do: Protection.  All of them were there to protect, and here in the case was the item they guarded against the evil, stupidity, and ill intentions of the seething world outside the lobby’s giant glass walls.   

WNHP’s weather predictions had never been any more or less accurate than anyone else’s, but the station was immensely proud of its history all the same.  This, despite the fact that New Hope weather came largely in only two flavors: too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter. The only question was whether you would get wet if you went outside in the heat or cold, and they got that answer right about as often as they didn’t.  

Amid accoutrements that tracked weather forecasting in New Hope from newspaper to radio, to television and onward was an exquisite antique barometer with a thermometer above a dial whose needle could swing from “Very Dry” on the right to “Stormy” on the left.  Large numbers in fancy gothic script, twenty-eight at “Stormy” all the way up to thirty-one at “Very Dry”, were spaced around the edge, with smaller increments numbered in between.  At some point there had been another, shorter needle to track those smaller numbers, but it was now lost to time. The thermometer and dial peered out of bubbles of crystal nestled among delicately carved wooden feathers and flowers, and the whole mechanism was as long as her forearm.  This was the fifth time she had checked it since coming on shift at eleven.  

So far the long needle had held steady, pointing at “Fair.” 

On her circuits around the lobby, she’d kept her hands balled in the pockets of her uniform trousers, to ensure they stayed moist with perspiration.  Now, with no one looking, for the fifth time she took one hand and plucked the barometer’s smaller needle from the blouse pocket underneath her badge. She opened her other hand and placed the needle on her palm.  

In the glass case, the needle on the barometer dial swept hard to the left, from “Fair,” past “Change,” “Rain”, and “Stormy,” and kept going until it was lodged between twenty-six and twenty-seven, slicing between the world “aneroid” and “barometer” at the very bottom. 

Reina sighed, deep and weary, slid the needle back into her pocket and got out her phone.  She checked the time and sent a text, then continued on with her patrols, just as she would all through the night, and just as she did every night - always in the lobby - before the eve of the full moon.

With luck, the mannequins upstairs in their pancake makeup wouldn’t have anything to talk about this time.

If an active shooter event was occurring in a park in the downtown area of a major city, what might be going on at an art museum about two miles away on the other side that downtown area? Would the museum go on lockdown, or would it still be open? My characters need to get into that museum to investigate an evil artifact, while some of the evil that artifact can cause is actively occurring elsewhere downtown.

The shooting began as my characters were riding a train into downtown from an outer neighborhood. By the time they arrive, the situation is still active, but another character two blocks away from the action has told them by phone that he can't hear any more gunshots. As they leave the train they can hear sirens, and see security guards at a convention center standing outside scanning for trouble. The museum they need to get to is across a public square. But... by the time they get there, will the doors be locked, or will it still be business as usual, considering the shooting is on the other side of downtown?

“With pleasure, because it’s important,” said Bennea, “Are you all from here, in New Hope? What do you know about what happened at the Hotel Elizabeth in 1946?”

They all were, more or less in the case of Abel, and said as much. As such, they all knew about the Hotel Elizabeth.  Not the city’s most famous disaster, not the explosion that leveled half of downtown in 1908, but in the top five. 

One of hundreds built to welcome visitors coming to town for the 1903 World’s Fair in Thoreau Park it had been, for a time, the city’s biggest hotel: twelve hundred guest rooms, a panoply of restaurants, bars, shops, and dining rooms, a theater, and the famous rooftop ballroom and roof garden where revelers could dance and drink, and occasionally drink too much and vomit over the parapets from thirty-five stories up. Overlooking Grand Square, it had boasted its own stop on the World’s Fair Line and the modern DOPT station still bore the hotel's name in memoriam. 

In memoriam, because at 4:56 on the evening of Thursday, October 24th, 1946, the Hotel Elizabeth had, for no reason that ever satisfied anyone, simply collapsed.  

One photo, taken by a photographer for the New Hope Herald out with a reporter conducting man-on-the-street interviews about some now-forgotten new municipal ordinance, showed the collapse itself. From a vantage point just two blocks down Parade Street, the photographer captured the cascading blur of the facade and a good third of the hotel building tilting forward like a slab of ice calving off a glacier.  Thousands of photos showed the aftermath, the elevated tracks and the intersection of Colorado Avenue and East Parade Street buried under a mountain of ruin; blasted trees and bent lampposts and crushed benches in Grand Square; shop windows blown in, flattened cars and wounds gouged in the facades of buildings nearby. And there were some of the human toll, including one photo that circled the globe to land on front pages from New York to Christchurch, New Zealand. It showed a snarl of twisted girders bowing down as though desperate to heft up a slab of cement on the ground before them. From beneath the slab protruded a single pale leg, its foot still wearing a high-heeled shoe. 

Some people, from vantage points in towers nearby, reported a bright flash just before the collapse. They said it seemed to come from inside the great glass pavilion that housed the ballroom on the roof.  With that as their clue city inspectors and engineers swarmed over the ruins, in the end concluding it was some sort of cataclysmic gas explosion which razed the Hotel Elizabeth and with her, ended nearly two hundred lives.    

No one accepted that, but something had to have caused it, so everybody uncomfortably agreed to pretend. The alternative, that such a staid old guardian of downtown could just fall down, was too awful to contemplate. The Hotel Elizabeth disaster thus took its place in the pantheon of great conspiracy theories. Since 1946, every now and again someone somewhere would bring up the dry facts and desiccated calculations in leaked city reports which, if you read them carefully, gave no indication that anything had blown up anywhere within the building. Instead, there was every evidence that the structure had been crushed from the top down. For a while conspiracy theorists preferred to posit that the hotel had been a test of some kind of secret Soviet weaponry, but as the decades unspooled, aliens eventually became the favored explanation. They remained so today. The warning shot, as it were, and in time they would surely return to flatten entire cities everywhere. Best buy your gold and kit out your bunker now, and beat the rush.  

Abel found himself remembering ads, oozing patriotism like gonorrheal discharge, for meals-ready-to-eat on one such page with that kind of missive on the Hotel Elizabeth’s demise, and snapped back to the here and now. Myrrh was reciting the facts as the official record listed them: Up until that Thursday the Hotel Elizabeth had been a large, tall building. By nightfall, it wasn’t. 

“Fall down, go boom,” she summed it up dryly, “No one really knows why.”

If you drive on 25 north of Travelers Rest, you know what I'm talking about. There's a fireworks store that has a big sign saying they also sell Japanese maples. They don't seem to have a website, but if anyone has some info on that place, prices, and if they have a decent selection, I'm all ears. I have recently accepted the Japanese maple into my heart, and I need some good sources so I can really tart up my yard.

You know, in a classy sort of way.