TABERNA ANCHORAE

The Anchor  ·  Inn and Tavern  ·  Service Town, Portus Lacus

"The Anchor is where the base’s social life and the town’s civilian life meet on the terms the civilian side sets, which is the only ground where they meet on equal footing. The naval rating who eats here is not at the base. The supply family member who drinks here is not at a supply meeting. The result is the most genuinely relaxed social environment in the settlement, which is the environment in which the most professionally significant conversations take place without anyone appearing to intend them."

— G.C.P.S.A., Descriptio Aethermarchae, 1197 A.P.

The Taberna Anchorae is the Service Town’s primary inn and the base community’s primary off-duty social establishment: the tavern that has been open since the fifth century under successive owners who have all maintained the same essential character — a place where the base’s personnel decompress from the operational environment without leaving it, and where the civilian service community processes the day’s work in the proximity of the people they are working alongside. The current proprietor, Gaius Ancora, fifty-four, in his twenty-seventh year, runs the establishment with the specific social intelligence of a man whose profession has been listening to naval personnel for twenty-seven years and who has developed, through that listening, a situational awareness of the base’s operational state that the Admiral’s own intelligence section would find useful.

Gaius’s knowledge is entirely passive and entirely accurate: he does not seek information, he does not share what he hears, and he has the specific capacity of a long-tenured tavern proprietor for retaining the content of conversations that occurred in his establishment years before anyone realised they were significant. He has, in the past four months, retained the content of three conversations that he now suspects are significant, and he is deciding what to do about them.

Design

Twenty-four rooms across the upper two floors, ranging from the single sailor’s room to the larger rooms used by commercial repair customers staying during extended work at the yards. The common room holds thirty tables, the bar along the northern wall, and the specific atmosphere of a room that has been processing the emotional weather of a naval community for five centuries: the relief of a returned patrol, the tension before a deployment, the specific resignation of a career sailor’s relationship with institutional hierarchy. Gaius has been reading this weather for twenty-seven years. He is rarely surprised by what happens in his establishment and always capable of predicting, with reasonable accuracy, what kind of evening a given configuration of customers will produce.

Founding Date

5th century A.P.; current proprietor 27 years

Type

Inn

Parent Location

PORTUS LACUS

Owner

Gaius Ancora

Rooms Available
24 rooms: third-floor singles (12), second-floor doubles (10), commercial suite (2).
Naval posting season: always occupied.
Between major yard contracts: available at short notice.