The Dollhouse
Written by: Tahoma
A cliche name for sure, but as far as dens of iniquity go the Dollhouse is an ample cut above the competition, and not just because they actually keep the place clean. Set up in the remnants of a Bunraku Parlour on the outskirts of the sprawl, this cosy underground business advertises itself as a cooperative-owned nightclub with "exotic dancers, escorts and masseuses" that cater towards those who have a taste for chrome and body-modification, gyrating with their cyberware with the same lack of shame or subtlety as they have with what's left of their original flesh.Don't let the flashy designs fool you, though. The cyberware might be made for looks and hollistic comfort, but they still keep some of nasty combat hardware underneath in case of trouble.
Works just as good at deterring handsy customers too. Nothing gets a customer to respect boundaries like having their fingers confiscated.Of course, we're not just here to talk about strippers - we're here because the Dollhouse provides us a service beyond some good old-fashioned hedonism. The proprietors' have made the Dollhouse one of the places to be for fixers, gangers and anyone else who wants to discuss less-than-legal business with discretion and privacy, courtesy of the club's soundproofed booths and nonjudgemental staff. They'll even have their boys and girls chauffeur you there and back and hold packages for you, if you cough up the NuYen and ask nicely. The perfect place for an up-and-coming shadowrunner to start looking for work, if you don't mind paying thirty bucks for a cocktail...
Alterations
The original Bunraku Parlour had all of their front business areas out on the ground floor while the basement was reserved for metahuman chop-shop work and other yak ventures. These days, the ground floor is mostly parking for cars and limos, while the club's moved almost entirely underground. Unsurprisingly, the cybersurgery rooms are still mostly intact, mostly to keep the staff's cyberware in good condition but also available for regular street-doc business for select customers.
Architecture
The good news is that the Dollhouse makes it a point to avoid Raleigh's gaudy art-deco/nouveau fad in their interior design. The bad news is that instead, they've crammed as much neon and faux-chrome panelling into their rooms as humanly possible. Bring sunglasses, chummer.
History
The current owners of the Dollhouse don't make it a secret that the place used to be a Bunraku parlour, which for those of you who don't know, is a Yakuza racket that uses personafix chips on kidnapped/trafficked people to make them into ideal hosts and prostitutes against their will. The gang running this particular operation, the Ruby Horns, weren't even Yakuza, just an ambitious, no-name tusk gang hoping they could get in good with the Yaks by having a try at the Bunraku gig themselves.
The Aoyamas were in Raleigh round this point in time, right?
They were, but they chose to keep their distance from the Rubies' parlour, on account of that place being a poorly managed timebomb.Unfortunately for the Horns, they never really got to find out if one of the Yakuza clans would be impressed by their work. When they couldn't snag new victims from the barrens or have some imported from overseas to replace damaged goods, they started snatching people off the street, and they weren't picky about who they picked up either. It wasn't long before they picked up the wrong person, and got the attention of a fixer, Castor Volhard, who wasn't at all happy at having some of his most reliable contacts kidnapped and surgically altered into forced prostitution. Castor got together some shadowrunners in retaliation, but it wasn't a shadowrun of any kind: It was a half-dozen of Raleigh's most dangerous razorboys and street-samurai. kicking down the doors to the hideout-turned-bunraku-parlour and killing every last Ruby Horn in the building without quarter or mercy. It was swift, done without any collateral damage, but it was brutal beyond words.
The securicam footage still makes regular rounds on those matrix sites, the ones filled with the gore and stuff. Couple of those runners each grabbed a limb of the Ruby Horns' honcho and pulled as hard as they could, literally tore the bastard in half at the waist. Not that he didn't have it coming, mind you, but yeesh...'Course, Castor had a new issue once he'd rescued the captive bunrakus. A lot of 'em could leave and go back to their old lives, but there were still a sizeable number of captives who were trafficked from elsewhere, had their identities wiped and fitted with specialist, high-maintenence cyberware. The fixer spent a lot of his days after that trying to get as many of them back home as possible, but there was still the matter of keeping more than a dozen people sheltered and fed after most of his spare cash was spent on hiring the shadowrunners in the first place. One of the now-free girls, a Japanese Human calling herself Wakayo Smith, decided to take some matters into her own hands. The parlor was cleaned up, bodies (or what's left of 'em) dumped out for the dogs to eat, and Castor was asked to set up some jobs. Nothing high-risk or exciting, just some safe gruntwork that Wakayo and the remaining former-captives could do to pay for food and medicine while waiting for Castor to do his thing. This little scheme kept on going for a few months, until the place was starting to look like an actual business instead of a desperate shelter, which Wakayo decided to roll with: The place was slowly remodelled into a nightclub while Castor put in a few good words to get a legit business-license, and the Dollhouse was born.
Seems kind of crass to call the place that after all they'd been through with the Bunraku stuff, ain't it?
I asked Wakayo about myself, this one time I was overlooking a deal going on there. She just said that I had to have been there to understand it. Inscrutable little fucker, is what she is...Once all the former bunrakus that wanted to leave had left, Wakayo decided that her and the others that chose to stay would own the place cooperatively, with Wakayo herself simply acting as a figurehead and arbitrator. New staff were hired on, but the Dollhouse made it a point to prioritise hiring people who've had it rough the way they have, especially the ones who have some chrome (wanted or not) that needs maintenence they couldn't otherwise afford, and to make sure that only the staff who want to dance are doing the dancing, while the rest are set up on jobs like chauffeuring, security or what have you.
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