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You exit the bathroom, down the stairs, and out of a broken window on the first floor of the office complex. There are a half dozen tents and hammocks arranged in different cubicle dens of the first floor, readily visible through drywall that's been skeletonized from rot and scavenging, illuminated by mining lamps and candle lanterns. There is a scaffolding stairway of rebar and pallet planks leading down from the ledge outside the window, down to what could only be described as a shore of trash. Billions of wrappers and bottles and toys and scraps of clothing, all compacted together by decades of their own weight and mass, along with the lapping tide, and petrified with heavily polluted saltwater. There are fires in oil drums, strings of mine lamps arcing back and forth through the streets, and neon signs in the distance and even on some of the ruins, giving the smog looming just overheard a pale, incandescent glow in violets, greens, and blues.
Old Charlie is, yes, home to the most desperate and doomed of mortal society, and many of the inferior supernatural beings in the city. It's also home to some of the best restaurants, and especially bars. <span class="mu-s">Lotti Dah's Super Cyber Sing-a-Long</span> is one such bar. At least in your book.
It's an actual hole in the wall - the front door is buried under rubble and trash, so a new one was made by breaking down a new entrance in the alley and installing a revolving door taken from a nearby derelict hotel. The interior is lit by the same florescent gloom as that of the streets, with signs and holo-ads glowing through wisps of cigarette smoke, or clouds of synthetic fog. The main room is just a shabby bar with some tables, and off to the right is a short corridor leading to a cyber-cafe. On the left, however, is the main event, Lotti's karaoke parlor, with a second smaller bar on the far end and tables for a few dozen patrons (though even on a good night it rarely fills them), and a stage that was clearly originally made for a stripper. There's a holo-caster set up with the jukebox console and built right into the ceiling, and when someone performs a song, a hologram of the original artist is projected onto their form and synchronized with their movement. It can't make you sound any better than you do naturally, but the visual effect is impressive and sometimes funny. As you enter, you see that a glowing Linda Ronstadt, in the full blush of youth and perfect attire, is singing Different Drum from atop a rusty bar stool. Her voice betrays the illusion, however, being that of a rather tone-deaf Vietnamese woman in her late seventies.
>Cont'd
