the man or woman seated wearing hat in this photo is the hotel 9 owner and sole proprietor.
nobody knows where this person lives. nobody knows their name. nor what they look like aside from what may be gleaned from this photo.
presumably there is high level yakuza and or deep state level intelligence affiliation of some sort but maybe not.
the proprietor is the only person alive who frightens Arthur.
identity of the swimmer is unknown but I suspect it's Evangeline.
For anyone currently involved with, working on, or having to do with the 9 story Hotel project. We are in the process of migrating the bulk of the work and community surrounding the Hotel to Discord from The Locals, since the Locals is harder to navigate even than Discord, I would suggest you join up. The server is fully populated and set-up for work, talk, and collaboration.
This is the discord invite, it is good for the next seven days, after which I will probably post another one:
Let's see if I'm not as dumb as I think I am. This is the Google doc link for FRACTALS, the Delphine and Balthazar story.
Little iffy on the first section. I think it's good for characterization and to set up some of the relationships, but maybe it could be streamlined or brought into the main narrative. Feels slightly more like the opening of a novel than a story but I'll let others weigh in.
Hope y'all dig it!
EDIT: I was talking with another writer and wanted to clarify something I should've mentioned above. (Trying to avoid spoilers.) The ending of this is purposely ambiguous, in that another writer could pick up with the next story from another character's point of view, Delphine could achieve either of the possible goals (or none of them), or anything in between. And it's kind of subject to change based on what the next story is or what the overall project needs from these characters. TL;DR: If the ending doesn't quite land with the project from a 30k-foot view, no worries, we ...
Newest Althea story, AKA The Room With the Teeth
https://open.substack.com/pub/cjstockton/p/biting-down?r=1ck2p&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
