GPCA Dormitory

The GPCA Dormitory

The Music of the Spheres
The GPCA dormitory was created by Kevin A. Ross and first described in The Stars Are Right, pp. 107 [120], which includes an interior map drawn by Tony Santo.

This single-story building contains eight dormitory rooms connected by a long hallway. Each unit has a private kitchen and bathroom, but the shower is communal, a single stall at the western end. The dorms were constructed in the 1970s and haven’t seen much renovation—just new coats of paint and occasional upgrades to the wiring and furniture. The lighting is fluorescent, and occupants must supply their own television sets. Each room contains a landline, a television cable, and an ethernet cable for the facility’s network. The building once housed a small cafeteria, but that was closed during COVID and hasn’t reopened. Fortunately the laundry room remains intact, although one of the washing machines is known to quit prematurely and lock the door until the power is cut.

Room 1—Common Room
This room is shared by the GPCA scientists and operators. It’s used for rest and relaxation, cooking meals, and the occasional party. It’s clean and tidy, and the kitchen is stocked with food, snacks, condiments, soda, and beer. One of the kitchen cabinets holds a respectable hot sauce collection. It’s been a longstanding GPCA tradition to contribute to this collection when returning from locations famous for spicy cuisine. (Even Dr. Neal brought back a bottle of “Memento Mori” from a recent trip to Shreveport.) The room contains numerous board games, including Settlers of Catan, Wingspan, Turing Test, Terraforming Mars, Photosynthesis, and the card game Set. A game of SETI is currently in progress on the table. It’s being played by Diane Mancini, Mason Dauterive, Jenny Hooper, and a cryo tech named Kayleigh Ohanessian, who is currently winning, having discovered and colonized ‘Oumuamua. A fairly new 55” LG television is connected to a PlayStation 4. A nearby rack holds numerous science fiction DVDs and Blu-rays, including the 1996 Charlie Sheen film The Arrival, the subject of a yearly group-watch/drinking game.

Room 2—Jackie Bernard-Wu
Jackie’s room is done up with Philips Hue lights, gaudy posters—including a decidedly non-ironic Patrick Nagel—and expensive, Sharper Image-style gadgets. An Appraise roll recognizes the value of everything Jackie owns, from his $700 Burberry Check Pavilion flip-flops to his $400 Curaprox “Samba” toothbrush. A neat row of science books is organized by descending size on his bookshelf, his refrigerator is stocked with Smirnoff Ice, and his closet contains a row of designer Hawaiian shirts. There’s an Xbox Series X linked to his television, complete with a modded controller. Turning it on reveals that Jackie’s gamertag is “BWu4U” and he plays a lot of Call of Duty. An HTC Vive Pro 2 VR headset rests on his table beside a laptop computer.

The Nemesis Password
Despite Jackie’s prodigious talents in mathematics, he has a terrible memory, and has developed the unfortunate habit of writing important information on notecards. These cards are stored inside a $260 Mark Cross “tumbled grain acorn” leather card case monogrammed “BWU,” usually located by Jackie’s bedside. Currently the case contains seven cards: his GPCA employee number, a trio of phone numbers belonging to “hot shawties” he’s met in various locations, a list of family and legal phone numbers, a cheat code for a video game he’s playing, and an unmarked password, “S@LtP3t3r000237!” This password unlocks the “defunct workstation” in the GPCA control room.

Jackie’s Laptop
Jackie’s personal laptop is usually found on his table. The password is quite simple: “BWu4U,” a variation of his Gamertag and X-account name. The computer is mostly used for games, pornography, and social media. An Accounting or Hard Computer Use roll made while skimming Jackie’s financial software shows that he currently has $250,000 in his checking account, and receives a monthly allowance of $6000 in addition to his salary. It also reveals that Jackie spends $3,000/month on OnlyFans, Fansly, and Patreon! A search through his email finds numerous DMs and notices from various porn sites and “models.” There are also several emails to his parents in Mountain View. It seems that Jackie’s been claiming his allowance lets him live in an expensive apartment in North Platte, and that he’s dating a Chinese-American surgeon named “Cindy Wong!”

Room 3—Under Renovation
This room is locked, and an “Under Renovation” printout is taped to the door. Room 3 is Leo Sawyer’s former quarters, occupied from 17 January 2022 until the ill-fated 2023 Christmas party resulted in his dismissal and subsequent relocation to Room 207 at the Close Encounters Motor Lodge. Although the room has been professionally cleaned several times, it remains unoccupied because of two reasons:

The Smell
There is a foul odor in this room. It’s faint enough not to spread past the room, but persistent enough to be impossible to ignore when inside. It’s difficult to define the odor…old mushrooms, mildew, and something….insectile, perhaps, like crushed millipedes? Formic acid? Some kind of creepy amine? (This is, of course, the same odor that emanates from the bloodstains outside Leo’s motel room, and from the dead Mi-Go at Slayer Ranch.)

The Feeling
Even worse than the odor is the feeling in this room. The thermostat shows a comfortable 72°F, but the room always feels colder. And stranger. And unsettling, like a David Lynchian vibe, like there might be some unknown door that leads to the basement of the Navidson House… Anyone who spends over an hour in this room must make a 0/1 Sanity roll. This happens every hour until 5 Sanity points have been lost.

Room 4—Diane Mancini
Dr. Mancini’s room is less spartan than her office, but still utilitarian compared to the other residents. Her walls feature four decorations: an old-fashioned slide rule inside a glass case, said to have once belonged to Buzz Aldrin; a framed Apollo 15 “Postal Cover” carried by David Scott to the Moon; a print of Karen Nyberg’s quilted portrait of Valentina Tereshkova; and a mock travel poster from The Expanse—“Visit Mars! Terraforming for a Better Future.” An Appraise roll recognizes the postal cover as genuine. Mancini paid $15,000 for it at auction.

Mancini’s kitchen is well-stocked, and she seems particularly fond of California merlots. Her bed is crisply made, and her nightstand holds a copy of Avi Loeb’s Interstellar, which she’s aggressively marked with notes, corrections, and angry rebuttals. She plans to donate it to the Ross Library after finishing her critique. A nearby folder contains academic papers and ArXiv printouts, mostly papers about brown dwarfs and ultra-cool dwarfs. Most of these are also marked up, although not as angrily. And for the really curious snooper, Mancini’s closet contains a Star Fleet “science officer” uniform from the Next Generation era.

Mancini’s Lockbox
A digital lockbox under Mancini’s bed is opened with the combination “1701.” (It can be forced with a Hard Luck roll followed by an Hard Locksmith roll.) The lockbox contains Mancini’s passport, an envelope with $10,000 of “emergency money,” a small iron meteorite, a velvet pouch containing pearlescent white D&D dice, an autographed first-edition of Edgar Mitchell’s The Way of the Explorer: An Apollo Astronaut’s Journey Through the Material and Mystical Worlds, and the white queen from a cheap plastic chess set. The box also contains two laminated photographs. One shows Mancini as a girl, holding her mother’s hand while trick-or-treating. She’s dressed in Ravenclaw colors and carries a Quidditch broom. The other is an autographed headshot of Kate Mulgrew as Captain Janeway. It’s inscribed, “Charlotte—may you reach the stars!” On a less whimsical note, the lockbox also contains Mancini’s Beretta M9A4 Centurion and a fresh case of 9mm ammo. (See “Firearm—Beretta M9”)

Room 5—Empty
This room can be made available to Dr. William Snow.

Room 6—Empty
This room can be made available to any female player characters.

Room 7—Jenny Hooper
Jenny’s dorm room offers a master class in tsundoku—the practice of letting unread books accumulate into stacks. Jenny’s multiple tsundoku are constructed from a careful blending of astronomy, math, physics, music, and fiction. Her Siamese cat David Bowie is usually perched atop one of the stacks. A small bookcase holds her beloved Japanese writers, with Kobo Abé predominating in both Japanese and English translations. A keyboard stand in front of the living room couch contains a Moog Matriarch, a Korg Komplete Kontrol, an Akai Professional APC40 mkII Ableton Live Performance Controller, and a MacBook Pro sprouting numerous musical accessories and loaded with Ableton Live. Five pages of sheet music are pinned to the wall.

Jenny has taped over the light switches and supplied her own standing lights with pink-frosted, incandescent lightbulbs she purchased in bulk when LED became the new standard. Her bed is surrounded by books and journals, and she generally keeps the ones she’s currently reading on a wooden tray by her pillow. These include Sayaka Murata’s Shinkō in Japanese, Benjamín Labatut’s The Maniac, and Fred Lerdahl’s Composition and Cognition: Reflections on Contemporary Music and the Musical Mind.

Jenny’s Music
Jenny does most of her sonification work in this room, but she’s rarely out of sight of her laptop, and she keeps it password protected. The sheet music pinned to the wall appears to be a single work entitled, “On the Composition and Resolution of Streams of Polarized Light from Different Sources.” An Astrophysics roll recognizes the title as derived from a seminal paper by the Irish physicist George Gabriel Stokes. An Art/Craft (Music) roll identifies the work as an electroacoustic composition featuring aleatory elements. A Hard success recognizes echoes of the French Spectral school associated with Tristan Murail and Gérald Grisey. If the Music roll is successful, an Astrophysics roll detects certain patterns in the music that seem familiar—the birds, Room 108, Neal’s tapping, etc. (Of course, if the character is familiar with the Song of Ghroth, the linkage should be obvious!)

Room 8—Gerald Neal
Neal uses this room to eat, sleep, and shower when he’s pulling overnighters. The bathroom is well-supplied with upscale toiletries, the closet contains extra suits, and the kitchen offers several bottles of excellent wine. The walls remain decorated by the former director’s selections, a tasteful arrangement of museum prints including Remedios Varo’s Bordando el Manto Terrestre, Leonora Carrington’s Sidhe, the White People of Tuatha dé Danann, and Toyen’s Phantom Object. Neal has “always meant” to replace Potter’s surrealism with something more stoic, but he finds the prints strangely compelling—and lately, the Toyen seems particularly fascinating…

Neal’s main contribution to the room’s décor is a Technics turntable connected to a Yamaha receiver and a pair of Bose speakers. Nearby Homeiju record crates contain vintage albums of Ludwig van Beethoven, Anton Bruckner, and Gustav Mahler, along with boxed sets of operas by Wolfgang Mozart, Richard Wagner, Richard Strauss, and Alban Berg. The GPCA director is currently making his way through Arnold Schönberg’s opera Moses und Aron, released in 1957 on Columbia Masterworks and conducted by Hans Rosbaud.

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Author: A. Buell Ruch (Based on work by Kevin A. Ross)
Last Modified: 10 November 2025
Email: quail (at) shipwrecklibrary (dot) com
Bible Black PDF: [TBD]