Anthropomorphic

Furry White Tiger 

Character Portrait

Florence de Looselips

In Anthroxville, a city where secrets are a currency and silence is a luxury few can afford, the weekly raffle sends winners to The Snoop Inn hotel. It is less an invitation and more a summons to the court of indiscretion, where every whispered word and hidden glance can become a matter of public record.

The Snoop Inn—an asymmetrical 213-suite mid-rise looms like a monstrous hangover over the derelict facades of eastern Anthroxville, squatting a few blocks away from both Bernard Banjax's Bernard Bankrolls, and Banjax Bail Bonds, as well as Erm Wotsischops’ Knotted Knacker pub and Edison Upskirt’s Upskirt Nosher eatery. It is a place that has seen better days, assuming it has ever seen good ones. A forlorn relic, it clings to existence amidst the city's relentless slide into decrepitude, its once-hopeful façade now a testament to urban decay and the inexorable passage of time.

Far from a beacon of luxury, The Snoop Inn is a ramshackle establishment that can barely scrape together a two-star rating even if you squint hard enough. The walls are thin enough to broadcast your neighbor's snores and nocturnal confessions, the furniture outdated to the point of kitsch, and charm is as absent as the guilty conscience of Mia Culpa. Yet, the inn has its peculiar draw: a free mini fridge stocked with dubious snacks like Ludwig von Flitter’s Flitter Fleisch, Humphrey Skedaddle’s Skedaddle Soda, and Hans Hüftgold's Hüftgold Confections, complimentary meals in a restaurant that has long forgotten the meaning of flavor, and free, albeit erratic, internet. It is a place where desperation meets curiosity, and where the allure of something free still holds a peculiar magic over the weary, cash-strapped souls of Anthroxville.

Despite its dismal state, the promise of a fully comped stay is an irresistible magnet in a city where every penny is pinched until it squeals for mercy. The prospect of escaping the relentless drudgery of daily life, even for a few fleeting days, is too tempting for most to resist. The idea of gorging on endless snacks from the mini fridge, however mundane, feels like a decadent luxury in a place where even the smallest indulgences are scarce. Free meals, despite their uncanny resemblance to cafeteria slop, provide a welcome reprieve from the expense and effort of home cooking, transforming the mundane into a minor adventure. It is an oasis of questionable delights in the desert of Anthroxville's austerity.

The free internet, though often a joke in itself, is another irresistible lure. In a city where connectivity exacts a dear price, the mere promise of being online without the constant specter of data limits is enough to hook many. The raffle itself, shrouded in an aura of exclusivity and chance, adds an extra frisson of excitement, making a stay at The Snoop Inn feel like winning the consolation prize on a tawdry game show.

Moreover, the social dynamics are irresistible. Winning a stay at The Snoop Inn becomes a minor status symbol, a juicy morsel of gossip to be savored among friends and colleagues, a badge of dubious honor in the intricate social fabric of Anthroxville. Each stay contributes to the hotel's expanding legend, as stories of its bizarre quirks and eccentricities spread like wildfire, turning it into more than just a place to crash. It becomes a rite of passage, an emblem of one's navigations through the absurdist theater of the city's social hierarchy.

Nobody has ever been ejected from The Snoop Inn. Zero expulsions. Not even the likes of Fruma Putz, Orville Stonker, Mitzi Midriff, Luther Popshot, or Marty Shuffle, have been shown the door. In fact, the kind of behavior that usually guarantees a swift booting out seems not just tolerated but gleefully encouraged. Guests indulge in every conceivable form of raucous and reckless conduct, from rambunctious late-night bacchanals to bizarre, self-indulgent experiments, all under the voyeuristic eye of the hotel’s omnipresent surveillance system. Unbeknownst to the hapless guests, it is as if the very walls thrive on the havoc, relishing every recorded debauchery and indiscretion with a perverse glee. Two-way mirrors, microphones cunningly tucked inside lampshades, and cameras slyly ensconced in wall clocks, sensors embedded in the floral wallpaper. The Snoop Inn is a labyrinth of observation, with every shadowed corner and tacky fixture concealing a hidden eye or ear. The garish plastic chandeliers in the dining hall, remnants of some misguided attempt at elegance, are rigged with hypersensitive microphones that can pick up everything from the dull clatter of chipped crockery to the furtive whispers of conspiratorial guests. These devices, disturbingly proficient, sift through the banal to capture every morsel of scandal, ensuring no secret, however slight, escapes their electronic grasp.

Decorative picture frames, often crooked and hanging precariously, are more than just relics of second-hand art; each one harbors a tiny camera, meticulously hidden within the faded and cracked frames. These covert devices cover every angle of the shabby rooms, ensuring that no corner is left unmonitored. Guests, frequently distracted by the mismatched furniture and outdated décor, remain blissfully ignorant of the fact that they are under constant, unblinking scrutiny.

The well-worn bedding in each room adds yet another layer to the hotel’s surveillance apparatus. Embedded within the lumpy mattresses and flat pillows are pressure-sensitive audio devices, springing to life the moment guests lay down. These devices capture every whispered conversation, transmitting their illicit harvest to the central monitoring hub. The creaky bed frames, with their suspiciously stained headboards, house vibration sensors keen to detect every movement and murmur, meticulously chronicling every nocturnal indiscretion.

Air vents perform a duplicitous role, feigning to offer climate control while stealthily harboring audio sensors that eavesdrop on conversations borne by the airflow. These sensors, unnervingly sophisticated, can differentiate between the meaningless clatter of ducts and the subtleties of significant speech, ensuring only the juiciest morsels are captured. Furthermore, the complimentary toiletries, such as John Knuckle's Knuckle Suds soap, conceal miniature recording devices that spring to life with a mere touch, transforming every banal act into a meticulously monitored spectacle.

Even the bellhops are part of the charade, playing their roles with theatrical gusto. They give guests the slip, sprinting down corridors and leaping into elevators with the guests’ luggage in tow. The bags take a clandestine detour, subjected to a thorough rummaging in some hidden alcove before being discreetly delivered to the rooms. This farcical performance is all part of the hotel’s grand design to uncover every last secret, a pantomime of privacy invasion masked by the veneer of service.

Florence de Looselips, the hotel's wizened and cunning overseer, orchestrates this elaborate charade with the manic precision of a deranged conductor. However, spying on the guests isn’t the anthropomorphic furry white tiger’s objective in and of itself, but rather a means to a much grander end. This grander end is part of a network of ends, which in turn feed into an end so grand that even Calvin Donnybrook, Anthroxville’s most notorious conspiracy theorist, would be left incoherent if he ever caught a whiff of the true scale of what is really at play.

To truly understand the purpose of Florence de Looselips, The Snoop Inn, and its extensive eavesdropping setup, you need to dive headfirst into the economic hellscape of Anthroxville. The so-called 'relative stability' of recent years—think slow-motion car crash—is a far cry from the good old days when the economy imploded weekly, like clockwork. Inflation was a beast with a voracious appetite, devouring the dollar's value faster than a Jackson Jiffy junkie on a binge, and driving prices for even the most basic necessities through the roof. People didn’t just lose faith in the currency—they denounced it like a bad religion. 'I just don’t believe in it anymore!' they’d scream into the void.

Picture this: a loaf of bread that costs a fortune in the morning would demand your firstborn by afternoon, and by evening, not even a pound of flesh would suffice. Desperate souls, reduced to sniveling wrecks, would stagger home empty-handed. After exhausting every last harebrained solution, the chief economist did the only sensible thing left—he threw himself in front of a speeding freight train, following the example set by his six predecessors. Contrary to hopeful expectations, this did little to ameliorate the crisis and, according to some calculations, even exacerbated it marginally.

Society was tearing itself apart at the seams. Families, driven to the brink of insanity by the economic chaos, were resorting to drawing straws to decide which hapless member would be sold off into indentured servitude, like some dystopian game show played out in the living rooms of Anthroxville. Desperation hung in the air, and the streets echoed with the morbid laughter of those who had nothing left to lose. Every home had become a dark comedy, with parents pitting children against each other in a morbid lottery, while neighbors placed bets on who would be the next unlucky contestant.

So where does the furry white tiger and her den of intrigue fit into this mess? Well, money as we know it is a myth, a figment, a collective illusion; it has value only because everyone consents to the delusion. When this belief is shattered, as it was with the dollar, money becomes worthless, leading to a mass apostasy. It was theorized that if a currency were pegged to something of universal worth, this erosion of faith could be reversed, and economic sanity restored. In a more stable realm, gold might have served this role. But Anthroxville, ever the banana republic on the brink of existential collapse, had seen its treasury looted, raided, and plundered so thoroughly that not even a speck of gold dust remained. The only evidence of past wealth was a crumpled note in the vault, mockingly inscribed with 'Lol.' 

With gold out of the question, an alternative was necessary. Fortune, in its peculiar fashion, pointed to another commodity as coveted as gold—perhaps even more so: gossip. At first, it might seem absurd, but gossip’s mix of secrecy, spite, and unverifiable allure has always captivated the masses, elevating it to a treasured resource. Those in the know could wield power in ways the uninformed could only dream of. Rumor, then, is more valuable than gold, circulating halfway around town before gold has even put its socks on.

Thus, with nothing left to lose, the Gossip Standard (GS) was brought into existence. Unlike the fictive paper currency, the GS’s value derives from the unassailable fact that people always believe it, no matter how outlandish. Some might argue that the more implausible, the better, as the public rarely lets the truth get in the way of a good story. The Gossip Standard meant that the nosey-parkers of Anthroxville could stroll into the bank with their otherwise worthless cash and exchange it for cold, hard gossip. Routine transactions were handled by the motormouthed tellers, with both parties leaning in conspiratorially to the bulletproof glass, engaging in a chinwag commensurate with the value of the money being converted. The more substantial exchanges, however, took place behind the closed doors of the bank manager’s mahogany-paneled office. There, over an endless symposium of tea and scones, the juiciest whoppers were disclosed, turning the act of banking into a high-stakes game of whispers and revelations.

This dollar-to-gossip (D2G) convertibility underpinned the entire monetary system, giving rise to two macroeconomic schools of thought: Tittle-Down and Tattle-Up. The former, a doctrine of free-market laissez-faire policy, championed a culture of widespread privatization with minimal state intervention. The Tittlers, as they are known, adhere to the fundamental belief in the Invisible Mouth of the market, insisting that the freedom to produce and consume chatter should be the economy's cornerstone, naturally regulating itself to a stabilizing equilibrium of supply and demand.

Conversely, the Tattle-Up ideology advocates robust state centralization, with strong directive involvement to maintain not only the supply, but also the quality of gossip in circulation. This approach aims to eliminate destabilizing inefficiencies and market failures, ensuring consumer confidence and thus demand in this new gabfest economy. Though both theories have their merits and followers, it was the Tattle-Up approach that got the power brokers' ears flapping. So, it was decreed that dollar-to-gossip exchanges could only happen at chartered banking institutions. But what of the source of all this gossip? Where exactly was it all to come from? 

Word on the street was that, after a series of disastrous false starts, the government finally turned to the seasoned Tattler technocrat, Florence de Looselips, to establish the clandestine Bureau de Blabber as a de facto national mint. This shadowy outfit's main gig was to collect, fabricate, regulate, and dispense all the gossip fueling the economy, ensuring the banks had a steady flow of juicy tidbits to keep the D2G exchanges alive and kicking. Numerous locations were considered, but upon setting foot in a notoriously disreputable establishment in eastern Anthroxville, Florence immediately recognized its untapped potential and swiftly expropriated it through the power of eminent domain.

Although the owners loudly proclaimed they had no objections to the proceedings and were desperate to be rid of the decrepit old flophouse, Florence still took the liberty of turfing them out the top-floor window, following Anthroxville’s long-standing tradition of defenestration. It's the local way of expediting property transfers—a brutal, yet effective method. Not far from the splatter zone where they—and the rest of the previous management—crashed to earth, a gigantic neon sign now looms, fizzing like a radioactive totem pole. Its hypnotic pink glow pierces the night sky, luring misguided souls from miles around. This garish beacon was part of a massive refurb, during which entire floors were gutted and transformed, and the furry white tiger had the…