Twentieth-Century Earth Construct (The Royale Hotel Simulation)

A pocket reality that replicates twentieth‑century Earth as the opulent-yet-faded interior of a mid‑century hotel called The Royale. Amber lobby light warms patterned wallpaper and threadbare carpet; period fixtures and analog accents suggest a lived-in past. The setting seduces with tactile nostalgia—soft jazz, a distant elevator ding—while cutting through that comfort with abrupt discontinuities: static, severed comms, and spatial seams that reveal artifice. The construct functions as anachronistic theater and a containment mechanism, turning historical detail into a tactical trap that forces urgent moral and investigative choices aboard the starship.

2 events

2 rich involvements

Detailed Involvements

Events with rich location context

S2E12 · The Royale

From Investigation to Extraction: The Lobby's Quiet Verdict

The Royale lobby functions as the operative setting where hospitality and menace collide: warm lighting and period detail present nostalgia while social scripts and offstage anxieties reveal a constraining, artificial containment that traps the away team within an enacted narrative.

Atmosphere

Faux-warm, slightly antiseptic; polite surface conviviality undercut by thinly veiled tension and uneasy mechanical repetition.

Functional Role

Meeting point that becomes a turning point — a stage where the away team realizes the environment is a constructed threat rather than a benign location.

Symbolic Significance

Embodies the episode's core: nostalgia and prior comforts masking an engineered prison; the lobby symbolizes how story and control can suffocate real agency.

Access Restrictions

Open to the public in appearance but behaviorally and narratively constrained; entry seems allowed but the environment enacts scripted limitations on agency.

amber, mid-century lighting and threadbare carpet soft jazz and distant elevator dings a visible REGISTRATION sign and staffed front desk small human actors moving with performative normalcy

S2E12 · The Royale

Lobby of Empty Faces

The Royale hotel simulation functions as the overarching theatrical space where period hospitality and encoded violence meet Starfleet investigation; its textures, ambient performances, and normative cues lull the away team before Data's scan exposes the emptiness beneath the tableau.

Atmosphere

Polite, artificial calm punctured by underlying tension and a growing sense of unreality.

Functional Role

Containment arena and deceptive stage that lures the away team into interacting with a scripted narrative rather than genuine inhabitants.

Symbolic Significance

Embodies a predatory nostalgia — a pastiche of human comforts that conceals the construct's imprisoning and theatrical mechanics.

Access Restrictions

Appears publicly accessible to guests and staff, but functionally controlled by the hotel's scripted operations.

Fluorescent lighting that flattens texture and enforces institutional artificiality Ambient period cues (polite small talk, jazz vibe implicit) that mask danger Background 'people' moving in rehearsed patterns The smell suggestion of stale smoke and antiseptic implied by earlier notes

Events at This Location

Everything that happens here

S2E12 · The Royale

From Investigation to Extraction: The Lobby's Quiet Verdict

In the Royale lobby Riker pivots from exploratory curiosity to survival protocol when Data, cut off from the Enterprise, orders an immediate withdrawal. The bellboy’s nervousness and the Assistant Manager’s …

S2E12 · The Royale

Lobby of Empty Faces

In the Royale's polite, fluorescent lobby the away team collides with the hotel’s scripted civility — a fastidious assistant manager, a jittery bellboy and other Kafkaesque extras who recite lines …