A broke charter pilot, a doctor who studies what ruins were built to do, and an idol that hums like a live wire. An original 1930s-flavored pulp adventure that runs on film, games, cocktails, and rooms you can walk into.
Era & Aesthetic
Playable Demos
Events & Cocktail Program
IP & Characters
A rumor comes up the coast about an idol older than the maps, sitting in a jungle tomb nobody leaves. The crew goes to see it. They find it gold, cold, and humming like a live wire, and the moment Rufus puts a hand on it, the tomb wakes up.
The plan was simple. See the thing, photograph it, leave it exactly where it sits, get home. Then the floor gives way.
What follows is a purple sky, wrong stars, and a city of stone that never learned about straight lines. A priest called The Second wants the trespass answered and the trespassers kept, permanently. He takes Dr. Funk and holds him in a stronghold, which turns a survey into a rescue, which the crew approaches with characteristic elegance: then that is where we are going, we get him back, nothing fancy.
They make it home to real stars with nothing in the hold and nothing to show. The idol is still in its chamber, exactly where it has always been. Then the federal agents arrive at the airfield talking about dimensional technology, and the only thing Rufus wants in the world is a drink with a paper umbrella in it, and the bar is across town, and last call waits for nobody.
$9.99
per month · cancel anytime
Season One · Peru · 1937Expedition Letters is a physical-mail subscription from inside the Rufus Hightower Universe. Each month, subscribers receive a new letter written by Rufus Hightower and addressed to Anna Bell Darrow while Rufus travels on dangerous expeditions with the brilliant, and frequently troublesome, Dr. Archibald Funk.
These are personal letters sent home from an adventure still in progress. Rufus writes to Anna Bell about the places they have reached, the people they have encountered, the trouble Dr. Funk has caused, and the growing evidence that certain locations may be connected by something known as the Convergence Points.
Alongside Rufus's correspondence, subscribers receive a changing assortment of companion materials connected to the story. These can include illustrated maps, tropical drink recipes, stickers, telegrams, photographs, expedition documents, and other surprises from the field.
Each delivery tells a satisfying chapter while gradually contributing to a larger seasonal mystery. A map included one month may become essential later. A drink recipe may originate from a location Rufus has just visited. A name mentioned casually in one letter may return several months later with an entirely different meaning.
The first season follows Rufus and Dr. Funk through Peru in 1937. Rufus believes he is documenting another expedition. Anna Bell may be the first person to realize that he is walking toward something no map was meant to contain.
What Arrives Each Month
Written by Rufus Hightower to Anna Bell Darrow, mailed from wherever the expedition has reached.
Each delivery advances the continuing seasonal adventure and stands on its own.
Maps, stickers, photographs, telegrams, and other materials from the field.
Tropical cocktail and zero-proof recipes tied to the places Rufus has just visited.
Recurring names and details that reward anyone reading carefully across months.
$9.99 per month. Subscribers receive one new physical letter each month. There is no requirement to buy an entire season, and you may cancel at any time. The experience should feel like receiving ongoing correspondence from someone in the middle of an extraordinary journey, not like opening a conventional subscription box.
Follow the expedition. Read the letters. Mix the drinks. Watch the mystery unfold.
Expedition Enrollment Coming Soon
Subscriptions are not open yet. Pricing and contents shown here are the planned first season.
Charter Pilot & Expedition Lead
Flies anything with wings, usually on credit. Competent, perpetually broke, and constitutionally unable to take the sensible job. He narrates his own bad decisions with the dry calm of a man who has survived most of them, and carries a brass compass on the theory that a man can lie to himself but a compass keeps things honest.
Mechanic & Voice of Reason
Keeps the plane honest, and the books honest, in that order. Al is the one who points out they cannot afford to fly until they can afford fuel, and he is never wrong about it, which Rufus resents deeply and relies on completely.
Scholar of Dead Languages & Resonance
Reads the dead languages and studies what ruins were built to do rather than what they look like. He hires Rufus because the temple he needs is not on any survey. His idea of reassurance is explaining that he can hear the idol chamber from another continent, and that this is not a figure of speech.
Archaeologist, Lima
Knows the site the expedition is looking for, knows what it was built to hold, and has spent a career arguing that the answer to a sealed chamber is to leave it sealed. She joins the expedition because the alternative is letting people with less respect get there first. She is the reason the idol stays in its chamber, and she says so before anyone touches it.
Expedition Fixer & Keeper of the Record
Runs the expedition from the side of the world that has telephones. She arranges the money, the permits, the fuel and the lies told to harbour officials, and she is the one the letters are addressed to, which makes her the only complete record of where the crew has actually been. She has the unimpressed steadiness of someone who has heard every version of the story that begins with it was only supposed to take a week. More than one of them got home because she made a call they never found out about.
Industrialist, Ainsworth Industries
Money, marble, and a bank of microphones. Ainsworth moves through press conferences and paneled offices rather than jungles, which does not make him less dangerous to an expedition that depends on nobody important taking an interest in what it found.
Purple Priest of the Far Side
He wants the idol returned and the thieves kept, permanently. When the crew crosses into his city of stone he takes Dr. Funk and holds him in a stronghold, and when he finally goes down he does not go down for long. His fury follows them all the way home.
Figure of the Other World
Crowned, gilded, and entirely unbothered by anyone's expedition schedule. She belongs to the world on the far side of the portal, where the sky is purple and the stars are wrong.
Most brand worlds stop at the surface. A logo, a palette, a voice guide. A storyworld asks a stranger question, which is what happens if a business behaves as though it belongs to a larger universe.
The crew, off the clock
That question turns hospitality into a storytelling medium. A cocktail becomes an artifact recovered from an expedition. A menu implies a history nobody has fully written down. A prop on a shelf suggests something happened in this room before you arrived. A character introduced in a film turns up later in a live event, or inside a game, or behind a bar.
Anna Bell Darrow
The rule that keeps it from becoming homework is one I hold to hard. The goal is not to require an audience to understand the lore. The goal is to reward curiosity. A guest can walk in, have a great drink, hear a good band, and leave without ever learning that the explorer on the coaster has a name, a plane, and a mounting federal problem. Nothing was withheld from them. Another guest pulls one thread, finds the expedition dossier, plays the demo at home, and discovers the whole thing runs deeper than they expected.
Both had a good night. Only one found the door. That is the design working exactly as intended.
When it lands, the shift is the entire point. The audience is no longer only watching the world. They are standing inside it.
Immersive Tropical Restaurant & Adventure Bar
Hightower Hideaway™ is a two-story immersive restaurant, tropical cocktail bar, and live-performance venue set inside the recovered hangar of explorer Rufus Hightower.
At the center of the room, the battered forward section of a 1930s expedition aircraft has been repurposed into a working bar. Its riveted aluminum fuselage, cockpit instruments, salvaged gauges, and copper service counter still carry evidence of its final, somewhat unsuccessful landing.
Dining tables, leather lounge seating, palms, expedition maps, cargo crates, radio equipment, and recovered artifacts fill the ground floor. An upper mezzanine overlooks the aircraft bar and a small stage tucked beneath the balcony. Live music, serialized performances, environmental effects, and strange transmissions from unfinished expeditions let the room's story keep changing around its guests.
The Hideaway is not meant to feel like a themed restaurant decorated after the fact. The restaurant is part of the Rufus Hightower Universe. Menus become expedition records. Drinks arrive as recovered formulas. Artifacts contain clues. The performers may be musicians, or they may be characters who know rather more about Hightower's disappearance than they initially admit.
Guests can enjoy the Hideaway without knowing any of its mythology. Those paying closer attention may work out that the crash was not an accident.
The Hightower Expedition Board
Charred chicken skewers, glazed pork ribs, coconut shrimp, vegetable spring rolls, tropical fruit, pickled vegetables, and three house sauces. Built for sharing by a crew of two to four.
The Crash-Site Burger
A double smashed burger with smoked cheese, caramelized onions, pickles, shredded lettuce, and Hideaway sauce on a toasted brioche bun.
Whitaker's Sticky Ribs
Slow-cooked pork ribs with tamarind, ginger, brown sugar, citrus, and toasted sesame.
The Hightower Highball
Aged rum, Venetian Ginger Ale, lime, aromatic bitters, and a preserved citrus wheel.
Convergence Point
Dark rum, overproof rum, passion fruit, lime, cinnamon, and absinthe mist. Bright tropical flavor followed by something considerably stranger.
Anna Bell's Alibi
Gin, guava, grapefruit, lime, sparkling wine, and aromatic herbs. Elegant, convincing, and possibly incomplete.
Ginger Flight 9000
Venetian Ginger Ale, lemon, honey, aromatic spice, and fresh mint.
The Junior Navigator
Pineapple, passion fruit, lime, vanilla, and sparkling water.
The Uncharted Garden
Cucumber, basil, lime, green tea, and tonic.
The nonalcoholic list gets the same glassware, garnish, and theater as the cocktails.
The stage beneath the mezzanine supports intimate live music, radio-theater performances, expedition briefings, character appearances, and serialized Hightower events. On ordinary evenings the room works as an atmospheric restaurant and listening lounge. During programmed experiences the lights shift, radios activate, aircraft instruments flicker, and performers extend the mythology without interrupting anyone who simply came for dinner and a good drink. The objective is not to make every guest perform. The objective is to make every guest wonder whether something is about to happen.
Hightower Hideaway is a proposed hospitality concept, not an operating location. Names, ingredients, and offerings shown here are conceptual and subject to development.
Explore Hightower HideawayWhat actually exists, labeled honestly. Prototypes are prototypes.
Cinematic trailer establishing the crew, the idol, the portal, and the tone.
Pulp-adventure themed nights at Venetian Soda Lounge combining cocktails, storytelling, and interactive games. Running since 2022.
Themed drinks and expedition service that put the fiction on the bar instead of in a brochure.
Fictional correspondence, field journals, maps, and props used inside live events and the games as in-world evidence.
Playable point-and-click adventure. Rufus takes the call, packs the expedition, and solves the idol sequence in the map room. A working vertical slice, not a finished commercial release.
Playable action platformer following the tomb, the portal, the stronghold rescue, and the flight home. Built to test the story in a second genre.
Tiki mugs, enamel pins, expedition tees, cases, and pennants designed as artifacts from the world. Design concepts, not a live storefront.
Further episodes, characters, and locations building on the Convergence Points arc.
How can an original adventure story move beyond the screen and become something guests can enter, taste, play and continue exploring after they leave?
Build one flexible storyworld across several forms of participation. Rufus Hightower begins as a cinematic adventure, continues through playable prototypes and physical correspondence, and becomes part of the environment through cocktails, props, live events and hospitality.
The mythology should reward curiosity without becoming homework. A guest may simply enjoy the atmosphere, food, drinks and music. Another guest may follow a clue, open a dossier, play a game and discover that the room belongs to a much larger story.
A developing transmedia world with produced video, a completed live interactive mystery, hospitality events, playable prototypes, physical story artifacts and a complete immersive restaurant concept.
The completed live experience Who Killed Dr. Funk? demonstrated the world operating as a playable hospitality mystery through cocktails, physical evidence, recorded testimony, video, telegraph messages and live character interaction.
Rufus Hightower is an independently developed storyworld created to explore how narrative, hospitality and interactive design can operate as one connected guest experience.
Created the world, characters, visual direction, tone and continuing Convergence Points mythology.
Developed the central narrative, character relationships, environmental backstory, artifact copy, serialized story extensions and interactive mystery structure.
Produced cinematic material, promotional media, recorded testimony and story content used to introduce the characters and world.
Connected menus, cocktails, service language, props, live music and environmental effects to the fiction.
Developed playable demonstrations to test how the story and characters translate into interactive formats.
Tested elements of the world through themed events, cocktails, games and guest interactions at Venetian Soda Lounge.
Designed Who Killed Dr. Funk? as a distributed investigation involving suspects, motives, alibis, media, physical evidence, environmental clues and an evidence-based resolution.
Connected recorded media, an interactive payphone, television content, printed evidence and practical environmental elements to the guest experience.
The project combines original creative work with practical experimentation and AI-assisted visualization. Concept imagery is used to communicate intent. Produced experiences and working prototypes are labeled separately.
Elements of the Rufus Hightower Universe have been tested through live events at Venetian Soda Lounge since 2022. These events explored how much story a hospitality environment can carry without interfering with the basic pleasure of having a drink, hearing music and spending time with other people.
The strongest example is Who Killed Dr. Funk?, a completed interactive hospitality mystery that turned the venue into a playable investigation inside the Rufus Hightower Universe.
Guests investigated the apparent murder of Dr. Archibald Funk by gathering information from cocktails, physical props, recorded payphone testimony, environmental media and a live character. Rufus Hightower was missing. Four suspects were in play.
No single clue solved it. Guests had to compare accounts across different media and work out which ones agreed. The room never stopped serving drinks while they did it.
Explore the Who Killed Dr. Funk? Case StudyCertain combinations of material, location and frequency create measurable reactions between objects.
A single object cannot create a crossing. Several components must sit in the correct physical and acoustic relationship.
When the system reaches equilibrium, two locations briefly occupy the same physical point.
Every opening destabilises the surrounding area. Repeated crossings become less predictable and harder to close.
Some people keep a residual resonance after crossing. That person can become detectable to other Convergence Points even when carrying no artifact.
The phenomenon is treated as unexplained engineering rather than conventional magic. Characters may misunderstand it, but the story follows consistent rules.
Rufus Hightower began as a filmed adventure character. Testing the world through hospitality, live events, games, physical artifacts and Who Killed Dr. Funk? changed how I understood it.
The most important discovery was that immersion does not require constant performance. A believable room, a useful object and one unexplained event can create more curiosity than a lengthy explanation.
Each format also revealed a different weakness. Film established tone but kept the audience outside the world. Games created agency but needed clearer rules. Live events created immediacy but demanded careful pacing. Hospitality gave the world a permanent social purpose. Who Killed Dr. Funk? proved that these formats could operate together as a single guest experience.
Expedition Tee
Issued to anyone foolish enough to sign on. No refunds, no guarantees.
Hightower Tiki Mug
The drink waiting at the end of the story, in ceramic form.
Expedition Cap
Field-issue colors, compass rose on the flank.
Aloha Shirt
Standard uniform for a tropical port at midnight.
Rufus Hightower™ and its associated stories, characters, artwork, and original materials are © 2023–2026 Justin Bunnell. All rights reserved.
