“You want to know where the city’s skeletons are buried? Look up. Tribune Tower’s got its fingers in every page and its eyes on every corner.”
Description - Exterior
A towering Gothic beast on Michigan Avenue, all flying buttresses and cathedral envy. The façade is spiked with stones from Troy, the Great Wall, the Pyramids—little trophies to empire and ego. Gargoyles leer down through soot and wind, some with faces too worn, or too recent, to belong to saints or devils.Description - Interior
The lobby is hushed power: marble floors, brass fixtures, oil paintings of men who wrote the city into existence. Security's tight but polite—until you ask the wrong questions. Up top, the newsroom never truly sleeps. Typewriters clack like teeth grinding. Rumor says there's a private penthouse library no one’s entered in decades. The air smells like ink, dust, and something more arcane.History
Finished in 1925 after a world design contest, the Tribune Tower was meant to be a temple to journalism, but somewhere along the way it became something else. Reporters died chasing the wrong stories. Architects whispered about hidden angles. When the Veil thinned after the War, the building didn’t flinch—it leaned in.Owned By
The Chicago Tribune Company, with the upper floors leased to deep-pocketed lawyers, publishing syndicates, and one shell company nobody can trace. Rumors say the Tribune isn’t the only one writing stories from inside.Employees
- Florence Baird – senior editor, eyes like scalpel cuts, has a source in every precinct
- Benny Marston – janitor since ‘31, talks to the stones like they’re coworkers
- “Copy Boy” Ellis – never seems to age, always where he shouldn’t be
- Frankie Doyle – archivist, rumored to have read every article ever printed by the Trib
- Agnes “Aggie” Prentiss – secretary, key to everything, and smarter than most of the men upstairs
Regulars
- Charlie Mullen – reporter with a nose for Veil leaks and a habit of getting shot at
- Detective Carmike – drops off untraceable photos, leaves with folded headlines
- Reverend Hale – comes to collect “errors of faith” from the Letters section
- Vinny Grecco – Outfit mouthpiece, likes to feed quotes to the Trib and see what sticks
Notes
- Stone #23, from the ruins of Babylon, is warm to the touch even in January
- A 13th floor exists, but only on the blueprints. Janitors refuse to speak of it
- The founder’s office hasn’t been touched since 1946—but the phone rings every week
- More than one reporter has vanished in the sub-basement morgue, chasing “back issues”
- A ghost editor—known only as “The Redliner”—is said to rewrite obits before people die
- The western wall sometimes bleeds faint ink after heavy storms. No one's found the source
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