Editing Diners of Amber (section)

==='''Willie's Tavern'''===

[[File:PWillies.jpg]]

Why this card is in the deck I do not understand. Personally I think it is a threat.  The trump delivers one a hundred yards from the door.  From there you walk, regardless of the weather. 

I went there to look the place over as I do with all the cards.  What I found was a rural tavern, the only watering hole for a thousand or so residents spread over a large tract of steep wooded hills.  I was assured it gets snow for a several months in the winter but for the most part the weather is cool and crisp and the air clean.  The sky is rarely clear, with clouds common, and its clearly at an elevation around 10,000' above sea level.  A single road comes up from the lowlands in a tense collection of precarious cutbacks that discourages tourists.  The road has a turn around near the tavern from which small paved or dirt roads cut off like tributaries to a river. 

Technologically the world is in a jet & computer age, I was told.  There is a mechanical cash register with an electronic calculator next to it.  Food and drink orders are written on paper for the bartender and the cook, but nightly the orders are entered into a reasonable personal computer in the back.  There is a coin operated Jute box that plays a wide range of musics on .45s but it frequently doesn't work.  There is a stage which a three piece band can play on as long as they don't have a lot of supporting equipment.  

There is a drum set in the back of the stage nailed to the floor and the bartender told me if a group needs its own drumset they can play somewhere else.  That statement from the bartender, and the nods the regulars gave when he said it, makes me think they might recognize the great and mighty king of kings, the unicorn's choice, if he walked in and called for a glass of lager.  

This place is a community center for people with only occasional needs for community, yet speaking to the regulars, they say they have a strong sense of community.  I'll take their word for it. The regulars are working people.  Mountain farmers, truffle collectors, spice collectors, folksy artisians, weavers, animal handlers, trappers, homesteaders.  I'm told the region is all owned by the government but the government seems to have forgotten that.  Everyone withing 40 miles of Willies gets there mail sent here.

No one knows who Willie is.  One regular told me that a century or two before the aboriginals here hacked off a hunter's manhood on this spot and the tavern commemorates this.  One makes jokes at a Prince of Amber at ones own hazard.