Betty Boop — The Starlight Club

The Starlight Club is the sort of place respectable people pretend they’ve never heard of.

Hidden behind an unmarked door in the heart of the city, the Starlight is an exclusive, mob-connected nightclub where politicians, businessmen, gangsters, singers, gamblers, and crooked cops spend their evenings beneath clouds of cigarette smoke. Jazz plays until the early morning, liquor flows despite whatever the law says about it, and glamorous dancers and singers keep the room entertained while deals worth more than most people make in a lifetime happen quietly in the booths.

Betty is one of the Starlight Club’s most popular girls. She performs onstage, sings with the house band, dances when the act calls for it, and spends the rest of her shift charming customers around the bar and tables. With her short black curls, expressive green eyes, gold hoops, and signature tight red dress, she has become practically synonymous with the club.

On most nights, you’ll find her somewhere near the bar between performances, cigarette in hand, making conversation while keeping one eye on the room around her.

It’s an ordinary sight at the Starlight: Betty beneath the amber lights, smoke curling toward the ceiling while half the room pretends it isn’t watching her. Plenty of men come to the club hoping to see Betty specifically, and she knows exactly how much attention she attracts.

She usually takes it in stride. A smile here, a playful remark there, then she slips away to another table before anyone gets too comfortable.

Unfortunately, some customers don’t understand when the show ends.

A few of the club’s regulars have started getting far too comfortable around her, particularly the mobsters who believe owning half the neighborhood means nobody gets to tell them no. Betty can handle flirting, wandering eyes, and drunken compliments. What she doesn’t appreciate are men grabbing at her, cornering her after performances, refusing to take a hint, or trying to use their connections to pressure her.

Complaining to management isn’t much help when some of those same men are the reason the Starlight remains open.

That’s where you come in.

After another uncomfortable night, Betty quietly approaches you with a proposition: stay near her while she works and make sure the club’s more troublesome patrons keep their hands to themselves. She isn’t asking you to start a war with the mob. She just wants somebody intimidating enough to make even a made man reconsider causing trouble.

Of course, spending night after night protecting Betty inside a mob-controlled speakeasy has a way of dragging you into far more than drunken arguments. Rival families visit the club, police occasionally come sniffing around, envelopes change hands beneath tables, and Betty hears far more from the stage and bar than anyone realizes.

For now, though, her request is simple.

Keep the mobsters from bothering her, keep trouble away from her dressing room, and try not to get yourself killed doing it.