Probable Scenes: The Moulin Rouge

The Moulin Rouge: The Door

You see what must be a wide room or hallway extending far to your right and left. Boxes are piled everywhere; metal pipes run left and right haphazardly along the ceiling. There is some light coming from your left, from around a corner about ten or fifteen yards away.

Water drips from metal to metal before reaching the floor or the boxes; the drip-drip-drip echoes down the hall.

The wall you came in on is covered in doors. There are a dozen or so doors next to you on your left. To your right, the doors go on forever, each of them marked with an arcane symbol.

The door you’ve just opened is marked with an odd, stylized butterfly-like symbol, two misshapen ovals composed of concentric lines all converging on the butterfly’s missing body.

They arrive through one of many doors. Their door is marked with the sigil of an extremely stylized butterfly-like pair of concentric circles (a Lorenz attractor). There are many other doors with stranger symbols, including one with a highway symbol and “49” written in it. These open onto the two roads that lead to the crossroads. The doors appear to go on forever, although if they try to follow them to the right, they’ll find that it’s an optical illusion. The hallway and the doors shrink as they move down, ending two hundred yards to the right. There are still a couple hundred or so doors, though.

The basement is an “L” shape. The corner is fourteen yards to the left (as they walk out the door). The basement is about six yards wide, and filled with junk.

Meet Joe Louis

Depending on when they look around the corner, you may have to adjust the order of these paragraphs.

You hear a voice coming from around the corner.

“You’re a rug-thrower, Joe,” you hear in a high-pitched whine, like metal wire drawn suddenly taut in winter. “A high-priced monkey in a red suit. Nothing will ever come of it. You know that. Your “partners” know it. They’re gonna dodge and shimmy and leave you alone in the ring again.”

A big man, a warrior, is tied tightly to a small chair about twenty yards ahead of you. Two men, one wearing a dark green plaid jacket, the other wearing a gold jacket with orange lines, are pacing in front of and behind him, talking to him. One leans over to whisper to him, while the other berates him.

“Look at your world,” says the man in the dark green jacket. “Diseased. Cancerous is the perfect metaphor for your world, Joe. It is at war with itself. It is dying from within; and your people will be the first to go, Joe. Understand that; then understand that we offer a solution. We offer a cure. There is a disease here; we provide the antibodies.”

“And you can choose to help, “ says the other man. “Choose unity. Let this be the moment that hope begins. Join us. Let us help you. All you need to do is invite us.”

His head lolls backwards, and you can see blood and bruises on his face.

“No.”

Around the corner, it is 20 yards to the chairs where Joe Louis, the Moulin Rouge’s doorman and partner, is bound and gagged. The swarm are trying to convince the boxer to accept them, so that they can use him to commit the Moulin Rouge massacre.

Joe Louis’s interrogators are swarm hosts trying to convince him to let them in. Remember that while the two of them are together, their magic resistance is 4, and in an eight-yard radius.

Leaving Paradice

There are only two doors in this part of the halls, bare metal things with a single square of glass in them crisscrossed with tiny filaments. Joe leads you to one of the doors, and leads up metal stairs painted green. Up several flights of stairs which clang as you step upon them and echo loudly on all sides, you come to a solid blank door which Joe pushes open.

People mill about a long hallway; masks hang on walls, and green, grass-like barriers or short walls line the sides of the hall. Some women are dressed in grass-like skirts. Men look at you confusedly as Joe leads you through two tall, wide, glass doors lined in metal; the doors slide forward with a simple hush and you are in the cool, natural night of this strange world.

After 20 yards of stairs (ten yards straight up) they come through a side door into the entrance of the Paradice Island Lounge. This side door can only be opened from the basement side. Among the birds of paradise are tiki masks, fake grass barriers, and waitresses in fake grass skirts. The exit is a pair of wide glass doors guarded, on the other side, by a pair of bouncers. The bouncers will probably be a bit confused about the strange group exiting their casino, but they will make no attempt to stop people from exiting, only entering again. They are normal humans.

The door, on the hallway side, is a secret door, shaped to appear as nothing more than a panel in the tiki-themed wall. It has no handle and normally cannot be opened from topside. Forcing it open is extremely difficult; finding it is a normal perception roll, but since they likely will know that it’s there they’ll get a bonus of 4 to see it when and if they return.

When they exit the Paradice Island Lounge, the neon lights of the Moulin Rouge are visible across the tracks.

That symbol on your matchbook hangs in the air in the night. He leads you towards that light in the sky. As you move towards it, the crowds begin to thin, as do the lights. You pass through what appears to be a border crossing of some kind, with pairs of metal lines protruding from the gravel. When you cross the border, you notice that most of the skin colors are darker, and except for the oases you’re moving towards the lights are dimmer and fewer in number.

They’ll need to go down a moderately busy street, passing lots of people, and across some railroad tracks, to get to the Moulin Rouge. As they move towards the tracks, the crowd thins.

Entering the Moulin Rouge

A gigantic sign across the roof sheds light across the lot, a wide expanse filled with bulbous wheeled contrivances. The sign reads “Moulin Rouge”. A little lower and to its left more writing says “Casino Dining Theatre”. A smaller sign above the lot by the road reads “Moulin Rouge presents Tropi Can Can. A dazzling revue with cast of over 50 by Clarence Robinson. Your host Joe Louis.”

There is a ringer at the front door, Wally Sagor, keeping track of possible targets. He’s a swarm host, and he won’t be happy to see Joe coming back with help.

At the entrance, a man in red and black, with yellow lines, stands welcoming visitors.

“Joe, entertainers use the side entrance.”

“I can use the front door in this joint. Who are you?”

If the player characters are all dressed up in armor, though, he’ll have a comeback:

“What about them, Joe? Whoever they are, talent uses the side entrance.”

“Yeah, okay, you got a point.”

Louis will rush them through, and will then split up with them to go upstairs and talk to management about emptying out the casino. They should see him again in the scene, “Baby in the Corner”.

Inside the Moulin Rouge

Massive clusters of crystals hang down from the ceilings emitting a bright light over the hallway. The ceilings are lavender, covered in row after row of stylized yellow blades or flowers resembling ornate spear-heads.

You step through an arch down wide stairs into a room filled with people and gambling tables. Wheels spin; dice roll; men in black and red yellow-lined suits deal cards. The room is filled with tobacco smoke; everyone is laying down brightly-colored coins to place and collect their bets.

There is a café here (the Café Rouge), a stage, a bar, and a theater, as well as the casino area. In the west end is the hotel area, and between the hotel side and the casino side is a large pool.

There’s a stage, and people sit at tables around the stage drinking and talking. The walls are covered with drawings of ladies dancing, and windmills, and tightly-packed streets with tall buildings.

There is a little girl on stage, wearing a shimmering gown with a long plume on her head. She’s singing a song about the follies of youth, and how she’s glad she’s not young any more. Only a few people at the tables are paying attention, but those who are, are laughing hysterically. Two boys only a little older dance around her, and their feet hitting the stage make a loud staccato noise like gunfire. You’ve come in just at the end of their act; they bow and are replaced by a strong, lithe man with a chicken, surrounded by twenty or more dancing women; all of them wearing very little.

They should have just enough time to see the sights before the crowd panics. “He’s got a gun!”

The Massacre

The massacre is likely to be a running battle inside the Moulin Rouge, around the gambling tables, stars, women, food, kitchen, garden? The Moulin Rouge is packed between 10 PM and 2 AM, to the point where you can barely get through the casino area.

The swarm want to wait until 2 AM to start the massacre, because that’s when the white stars show up. Any swarm in insect form can use the air conditioning to get to anywhere in the Moulin Rouge very quickly, as if it were a direct line.

There are two swarm hosts performing the massacre, plus Austin Ellis if he’s available. One of them is Joe’s replacement at the door. The doorman (Wally Sagor) will kill as many high-profile people as he can. Austin Ellis and Miss Emma Willis will try to find Deanna. If there are any swarm from San Francisco, they may or may not take part. They’ll be on the lookout for the player characters and for Deanna.

Baby in the corner

This is a chance for the player characters to rescue Deanna Carmen—as an eight year old girl. Hopefully some of the Autumnal Swarm in bug form are available for this scene. You’ll want two or three of them. Eight-year-old Deanna is protected by Joe Louis with Frank Sinatra and Sammy Davis Jr. providing backup. Her guardian, Gerald Gardner, is already dead. They outnumber their attackers three to two, but they’re moving very slowly (or if the characters are in the slo-time zone, their attackers are moving very quickly). Only Joe Louis can really fight, and he’s already injured. Sammy Davis, Jr. is even wearing an eye patch over his left eye—he lost it in an accident almost a year ago.

Given the opportunity after the fight, Deanna will touch them to see if they’re real (try not to do this in a manner that triggers an attack from the player characters). Preferably, Deanna will do this to the same character she did/will do this to in San Francisco.

The little girl reaches out her hand and touches you on the chest with her fingers, as if to make sure you’re real. “I’m Deanna,” she says in a quiet voice.

The Moulin Rouge: The Summit

Because of his “interview” with the Autumnal Swarm, Joe Louis knows a little about their presence in the Paradice Island Lounge.

1. He was caught because, when they first tried to kidnap him, he called the police. The police turned him over to Paradice casino manager John Ryder.

2. They wanted him to start the killings.

3. The Paradice is some sort of hive of bugs. It’s a headquarters of sorts for them.

4. The mafia is in on it, and the bugs were talking to some mafia figures while they were holding him.

5. They use some doors in the basement to travel all over the place. Places he’s never heard of, like Hanoker, and some places they just called “the frozen city” and “the road”.

6. There doesn’t seem to be a swarm of them—he saw or heard referenced maybe four or five others (you may want to adjust this depending on how many bugs escaped from San Francisco to here, and whether they would have been mentioned in Louis’s presence).

The Irish Band

This encounter is specific to our group. You won’t find it useful to use exactly, but it’s an example of how the roads turn in on each other. In our game, one of the characters is a descendant of the Clanricarde, and has gone on a quest for Clanricarde’s stone (unsuccessful at the time of this adventure). So, I introduced a version of the Clanricarde legend heavily modified for this campaign. An Irish band is extremely unlikely in the Moulin Rouge, but one unlikely thing in service of the adventure is worthwhile. As one of the regulars will say about the folk group, “that’s what comes from letting Harry sing that folk music here.”

“Sure as Christ, you sound it.” (About them being related to the Clanricarde.)

“I thought I recognized the Connaught in you! Joey, a drink for my brother here.”

“Don’t worry, it’s on the house for the band. If they keep inviting Irish singers they’ll go broke.”

“The Clanricarde disappeared hundreds of years ago. No one knows where they went.”

“Castle? No, they disappeared, son. The Burkes, the castle, and the grave are gone. Where they went and when they return, no one knows. Across the western seas or down the faerie road, one legend is that they’ll return when the West needs them, but it’s ever a hard road for the Irish and they haven’t returned yet.”

“The Clanricardes drove the Fir Bolg out of Connaught, with the aid of St. Grellan. When the Fir Bolg broke their treaty and the Irish went to war, St. Bridget prayed to God and opened the earth to swallow the Fir Bolg army. The Clanricardes established the ancient castle at Ard Rathain, dedicated to Christ and St. Bridget; they worshipped at the temple of St. Bridget in Comharba.”

“The Clanricarde and his men fought with St. Ruth at Aughrim, and died defending the village of Aughrim on the Irish side of the Shannon river. His wife, son, and mother were spirited away from Ardrahan under the noses of the British, but what happened to them no one knows. The earldom was forbidden by the British and has never been restored.”

The band’s accent is familiar to Highland characters. The Irishmen will call Highland characters “Celts” for their accent.

Leaving Las Vegas

They will probably want to break back into the Paradice to get home, and might also choose to try crippling the swarm here in Vegas. Assuming that Louis, Davis, and/or Sinatra survive, the newly-formed Summit will support destroying the Paradice. Louis knows from his “conversation” with the swarm that the Paradice is a virtual train station for bugs. They’ll want to make sure that any innocents leave. They know about fire alarms and the best time to avoid crowds (anytime in the late morning would be best—people have awoken to go about their business but have not yet started to crowd the casinos and clubs).

The door they used to exit the Paradice basement is a secret door that doesn’t open from this side. Magic might well be used to open it; or they can use the same door that Joe Louis was taken into when he was captured: the side entrance, metal stairs astride the building and open to the night lead into the casino’s second-floor offices. There is a small hallway; one door at the end five yards down; one door on the left; and two doors on the right. The immediate door on the right is the office of John Ryder and Jane Lyon. The door on the left is a records room, with file cabinets. The far door leads down to the casino. The far door on the right leads to the stairwell, which goes down four flights of stairs (27 yards) to the basement. Of course, this will mean getting past John (if he’s still around), Jane, and possibly armed mafia hoods as well as any surviving swarm insects and swarm hosts. There may be more insects involved in the Paradice than were involved in the adventure, depending on how long they wait and what they’ve done. Joe can give them a crude map if they want to take this more dangerous route.