Story design - Concept art: In a cyber jazz bar

Big Johnny's Bar

{ A dystopian cyberpunk mobile game [prototype] }

As you enter the Big Johnny’s Bar, you immediately hear the tendering sound of high pitched trumpet and painstakingly easy rhythm of the drums. It is melting your perception with nearly unbearable silent beats of drummer’s sticks. It seems that time has stopped in nineteenth century, in this bar.

Damn those sixties! 

You have some limited cultural databases loaded in your internal SSD, thus you recognize the music style as “jazz”. The one and only, famous Miles Davis, form the days when colour of your skin mattered in every situation of your life. Jazz never died. The same could be said about the racism.

Flamenco Sketches is going to an end. You walk straight towards the bar. A dwarf trumpeter relaxes and smiles at you, greeting you with a small nod, his sweaty head shining in the dark.

The pianist and bassist take over and they rush the mood of the audience with Freddie Freeloader. You keep your cultural analysis tool running and read the trivia about the music just "by the way", while the barman is pouring you a drink. It is just water with lemon grass and protein shot.

Looking through the bar, you see a few occupied tables. The audience consists of all different races and sizes. They are all unexpectedly clean people. Women are neatly dressed and some men are stuffed in tight suits while others wear every piece of clothes they could get, from rags to belts of ammunition. 

This is bizarre; you think and pay for your drink. Is this really the runners bar?

The bassist is a motherload of body mass! You never thought that a human body can be so robust. You swear by the cyber gods of all coding languages that you can see tiny colourful sparks emitting from his fingers as he hits the strings of his double bass. He is surely a shaman of "funny" nature with power in both his hands and mind.  Everything you would not want to meet in a dirty bar brawl.

"The Johnny awaits you in the 4th coupé, sir." said a beautifully modded woman in dress so short and so red, you almost instantly forgot what she said and what is your name. She walks away, not waiting for any reaction other than your surprised lowlife stare she is so used to. Her legs could kill, or could be killed for. 

The loop of two clear notes followed by really colourful – especially when this shaman plays it – bass melodic part starts to repeat itself and your cultural tool recognizes the beginning of "So What".

With the same words in your head, drunk with the feeling of a good night and a good run, you stand up and walk away from the bar.

The Johnny is waiting. So what?