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
The rent is three months overdue, the plane needs fuel, and the phone has not rung since spring. Then it rings.
On the other end is a doctor who studies what ruins were built to do, asking about a temple in the Ucayali basin that appears on no official survey. He mentions, without much ceremony, that the idol chamber is still active. That he can hear it from where he is standing. That this is not a figure of speech.
Rufus Hightower™ takes the job. He takes most jobs. That is generally where the trouble starts.
Rufus Hightower flies anything with wings, usually on money he has already spent. Competent, broke, and allergic to the sensible option, he is exactly the man people call when the destination is not on a map. His own assessment of the career: a man with a plane and no work is just a man with an expensive parking problem.
Rufus Hightower
The world he moves through runs on one rule. Some objects resonate. A brass compass hand-made in Vienna in 1924 goes strange near magnetic stone. An obsidian fragment chipped from a temple keystone hums when you bring it close to that compass. Glyphs on its back describe offerings placed in a correct order, and an inner sanctum that opens for anyone patient enough to get the sequence right. None of this is framed as magic. It is framed as engineering nobody has bothered to explain, which is considerably more unsettling.
What sits at the far end of that resonance is the real problem. The idol is not treasure. The idol is a key, the thing on the other side of the door would like it back, and it has opinions about the people who took it.
The stakes climb the way they should in this kind of story. From unpaid rent, to a temple that objects to being robbed, to men in federal suits standing on an airfield saying the word portal like they had rehearsed it. Somewhere past all of that there is a very good drink waiting, and the crew fully intends to reach it.
Convergence Points is the continuing arc of the universe, told so far through a trailer and a playable side-scrolling demo.
The expedition's flying boat
A rumor comes up the coast about an idol older than the maps, sitting in a jungle tomb nobody leaves. The crew goes and takes it. They find it gold, cold, and humming like a live wire, and the moment Rufus lifts it, the tomb wakes up.
The plan was simple. Get the idol, get out, 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 idol returned and the thieves kept, permanently. He takes Dr. Funk and holds him in a stronghold, which turns a heist 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. The idol goes quiet, like nothing happened. 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.
Convergence points are the places where two worlds touch. Objects carry them. So, occasionally, do people.
$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.
Rufus's Better Judgment
Rufus's girlfriend, and the fixed point he keeps flying back toward. 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, and she is still there when the plane finally lands.
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.
Funk's Questionable Experiments
Crispy cheese-and-potato croquettes with rotating sauces developed by Dr. Archibald Funk. Results may vary. Appetite generally improves them.
Huli-Huli Expedition Chicken
Fire-grilled chicken with ginger, garlic, pineapple, scallions, coconut rice, and grilled vegetables.
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.
Whitaker's Last Transmission
Bourbon, pineapple, ginger, black tea, lemon, and smoked spice, served beside a brief burst of intercepted radio audio.
The Archibald Funk
A rotating experimental cocktail built around an unusual seasonal ingredient. Every version gets a numbered field-test card.
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.
What 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.
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.
Collectible Pin Set
Pith helmet, jeep, tiki, and the expedition badge. Collect the evidence.
Expedition Case
Travel-worn tin, stickered from ports the crew should probably have avoided.
Expedition Pennant
Adventure awaits. Terms and conditions decidedly not included.
Expedition Playing Cards
Aces of skull, compass, volcano, and a very good drink. The joker rides a crocodile.
Expedition Bandana
The whole territory in one square of cotton. Temples, a volcano, the jeep, and the route between them.
Rufus Hightower™ and its associated stories, characters, artwork, and original materials are © 2023–2026 Justin Bunnell. All rights reserved.
