The Velvet Lounge
Neuro-Noir Splatter
sref 563925082
Beneath the shuttered Pythia Cinema coils The Velvet Lounge, a labyrinth of parlors that festers beneath the city's amnesia. Deep underground, masked curators, obsessive directors, and desperate patrons mingle as stolen neural tissue floods their synapses with visions of exquisite ecstasy. This neurofilm bypasses the brain's defenses, slipping past self-reference mechanisms so seamlessly that viewers mistake the wet weight of implanted sensations as their own inner monologue. At the lounge's necrotizing core, the master Curator obsessively seeks salvation through the Bicameral Master Loop, a final neurofilm designed to rewind humanity's collective consciousness to an ancient mythic state, splitting minds into a speaker and a listener; the right hemisphere supplying a flawless 'god-voice' of instinctual certainty, and the left writing its obedience as autobiography. Should the Loop complete its screening, every mind within the city will fracture into prophet and disciple, a psychic plague that won’t stop until all are one. Tonight, the Curator descends into the pit for its premiere...
WORLD ELEMENTS
Neurofilm: Cultured cortex slurry harvested from volunteers and victims alike, feeding lounge patrons cinematic hallucinations. Entry to a neurofilm screening demands biological collateral: a fingernail of cerebrospinal fluid, a vial of tears, a strand of hair, or signed consent for post-viewing cortex harvesting should the film prove fatal. Each screening leaves behind a viscous crimson aftersludge of biological waste, the psychic runoff of a thousand stolen dreams.Neuroneedles: Pens filled with liquefied aftersludge, allowing lounge-goers to trade freshly formed visions as collectible memories. Most become addicted, requiring thicker, more saturated qualia remnants to feel the high with each use.
The Bystander Doctrine: Velvet Lounge protocol forbids intervention during neurofilm trance. Any violation risks Ekbom Syndrome outbreaks (a nasty false memory when a patron believes a neurofilm has infected them with parasites), endangering the stasis of the evening's activities.
Glyph Script: Subconsciously readable glyphs secretly embedded in neurofilms, designed as preparatory conditioning for the Bicameral Master Loop. Each exposure narrows cognitive pathways in order to dismantle the experience of unified consciousness.
LOCATIONS
Grey‑Reel Room: Archive of classic neurofilms with a faint scent of vanilla and vinegar. Favorites include CORTEX FETTI VOL. III, DREAM HEMORRHAGE, THE LUMINOUS MIND, and HIEROPHANT'S FALL.
The Velvet Pit: A sunken lobby room where brain‑fluids ferment in brass vats, their bubbling creating the Lounge's signature soundtrack—thoughts decomposing in real-time. Only the Curator and his assistants are allowed in the room.
The Lacquer Ossuary of Crimson Statues: Former patrons petrified mid-thought into hardened sludge sculptures, their minds broken by too many neurofilms rewiring their nerves. These vestigial remains are only removed at the end of each quarter, giving patrons enough time to “learn the lesson of solipsism” and why only through shared Loops can society function as one.
The Rewind Ward: A derelict hospital wing used by the Capgras Apostates as a de-programming center. "Patients" are exposed to a chaotic barrage of unedited reality: uncut footage of traffic jams, live stock market tickers, hours of raw nature recordings. The goal is to flood the mind with so much unstructured "noise" that the elegant, seductive "signal" of the neurofilms is drowned out, forcing a brutal and agonizing cognitive reset.
FACTIONS
Synners: The known but unspoken truth of the Lounge's addiction, the Synners do the dirty work of heading into the city to capture, dissect, and transport new films to the patrons each night. Their identities grow frayed and porous with each mind they unspool.
Capgras Apostates: Ex-lounge members who regained sanity and now wage guerilla psyops from the city’s forgotten corners, hoping to extract those lost to the underground. Masked in reflective material to avoid cognitive hazards, they circulate "samizdat" neurofilms—short, jarring loops of unaltered reality designed to crash the user's trance and trigger violent lucidity.
The Patrons Circle: Ultra-wealthy donors who fund the Lounge in exchange for "virgin viewings"—first exposure to each new neurofilm before it's diluted through multiple screenings. They wear specialized brass viewing-helmets that filter the experience, preventing full addiction while maintaining the high.
CHARACTERS
The Curator: The Velvet Lounge's enigmatic founder, directing every evening's screening in crimson velvet tuxedo. Charming and ruthless, pursuing the Bicameral Loop at any cost. He believes his deceased daughter's consciousness lives fragmented across seven specific neurofilms and can only be reassembled by collapsing reality into a single, infinite screening.Red Rictus: Infamous Synner whose face shimmers with a madness that burns the air; known to perform brain extractions under the deepest secrecy and highest price. Has access to the cortex of politicians, athletes, artists, investment bankers, serial killers, military personnel, and even animals—each mind a different vintage, each memory a unique texture.
Velvet Echo: A loyal Lounge singer whose lullabies subtly restore or erase memories depending on her melodies. No patron leaves her parlor unaffected.
Detective Lucia Silbermann: Town authorities dismiss vanishings as sleep disorders, but Lucia can't ignore reality. With her husband missing and blood weeping from faucets city-wide, she's determined to infiltrate the lounge and confront its horrors.
STORIES
Silent Witness: Detective Lucia Silbermann infiltrates the lounge, discovering her husband's body trapped mid-trance. Can she unravel the neurofilm's grip and rescue him without succumbing herself?Loop Sabotage: The Capgras Apostates plan a daring raid, attempting to steal the Bicameral Master Loop before tonight's catastrophic premiere.
October Harvest: A desperate Synner begs his peers to sabotage the latest batch of cortex, claiming that viewing it risks spreading a devastating mental contagion, that it came from someone who died mid-film, their consciousness still broadcasting the infection.
Neurofilm Samizdat: An anonymous artist begins creating their own "neurofilms,” from raw, authentic experience, not harvested cortex. These chaotic, emotional broadcasts are seen as a virus by the Lounge, a "truth contagion" that threatens the Curator's controlled reality. The Apostates see the artist as a messiah; the Curator sees a heretic and sends his Synners to capture the source before their entire system of control unravels.
?
BIG QUESTIONS
Are neurofilms just advanced-stage brainrot algorithms?If consciousness is merely the brain's commentary track on decisions already made, who is directing the film?
When memories can be edited in post-production, does an authentic identity even exist?
If transcendence requires the dissolution of the self, is it salvation or just a more beautiful form of annihilation?
Is surrender to a god-voice worth it if it dissolves the pain of being singular?
CULTURAL REFERENCES
Giallo Cinema Movement - FilmsThe Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976, Julian Jaynes) - Book
Videodrome (1983, David Cronenberg) - Film
Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989, Shinya Tsukamoto) - Film
Strange Days (1995, Kathryn Bigelow) - Film
eXistenZ (1999, David Cronenberg) - Film
PROMPT GUIDE
Main aesthetic (--sref 563925082):
Important to pair with grounding keywords like "underground lounge," "red resin," or "neural wires." Core aesthetic uses no style weighting (--sw).Personalization Codes: Photo code: --p eg1dl45 and Overall one: --p okz8wvj
Alt srefs: Swap these in place of the main sref or as multi-sref blends.
--sref 1492896252 (Pulp Cinema): Retro, pulp-posters, unforgiving splatters. Detective storylines, character portraits, dramatic confrontations.
--sref 3052376189 (Gold Opulence): Gold maximalism, filigree details, luxury lifestyle. Patron Circle scenes, showing wealth's corruption.
PROMPT ATOMS
Architecture/Space: art deco cinema, underground parlor, labyrinth, bubbling fermentation vats, sunken lobby rooms, film posters,
wet glistening surfaces like cultured tissue, saturated reds, psychological horror atmosphere Body/Horror: cortex extraction, mid-trance paralysis, inverted consciousness, parasitic false memories, synaptic ecstasy, ego death, frayed identity, biological wires, lacquer statues,
Conceptual: bicameral split minds, implanted god-voices, memories lost, cognitive hazards, contagions, hallucination, rituals, free will is gone
Substances: red resin, viscous neural slurry, hardened sludge sculptures, wet neural tissue, oozing, dripping