Welcome back to #mothershipmonth. Every week day this month I’m producing part of a supplement for Mothership, set on Callaway Falls, an abandoned (mostly…) luxury resort turned mining colony. This week we’re looking at major locations at the ruined resort, and the wild life that’s moved in as well as some plot hooks for what really led to the downfall of Callaway Reef.
Reception
The Reception pavilion at Callaway Reef is the size of some hotels. Designed to mirror the approach to St Peter’s Basilica (Or, as Ashe Kayinga maintained, a gladiatorial arena), the building is raised at one end of an enormous circular piazza. During it’s heyday, hospitality robots, Carter androids and human staff would bustle around the colossal space. There were four unique gardens, four bars, a pair of stages and an executive Platinum level flyer pad.
Once a month, that’s still true. The Custodian team come in and check the forcefields around the gardens and use the generators to push the ton of sand dropped on the piazza aside. In a moment of very dark humour Calli Packett has painted one of the mobile generators like a small, round yellow face and drives it around the piazza, mimicking a video game her great great grandmother loved.
The rest of the time, the Piazza belongs to the Kayinga foxes. Pitbull sized herbivores, the foxes were the first animal encountered on Callaway Reef and a large colony has taken refuge in the Piazza. They bio-luminesce to communicate and at night you can see their lights flashing on the surface from their burrows.
Points of Interest
The Burrows
The fox tunnels at Reception exist on two levels. There are ten miles of temporary burrows on the surface, destroyed every month by the cleaning crew. But under the surface there is closer to twenty, and these tunnels are precise, rigid and very well hidden. The Custodian’s current theory is that the foxes’ bio luminescence is intended as a trap, drawing Groundhawks into the sand where they’re slow enough for multiple foxes to take them down and drag the carcasses to the lower tunnels.
Red
Red is everyone’s favourite bartender, and has been designed to be yours too. The last hospitality robot left standing, Red’s laconic nature is disarming even as he spends most of his time under two feet of sand. Red was also part of a backup system set up by Ashe Kayinga. He recorded video of everyone who ever drunk at the bar and that video remains stored on his servers.
The White Ledger
The picture of discretion, Callaway Reef had two ledgers. Red was the public guestbook, White was the real guestbook. Never recorded, only ever written by hand and kept under lock and key. It was not recovered by the extraction teams. This is because it’s been buried at the core of the Burrows.