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Hotel Metropol

The Hotel Metropol is a luxury hotel in Moscow where Dick "The Biz" Baxter is held in comfortable captivity during The Radford Horrors. Its opera house is where President Boris Yeltsin questions him in a reserved box.
Type Location (hotel and opera house)
Aliases Metropol; Moscow hotel; Metropol opera house
Region Moscow, Russia
Holder / occupant The Biz, under guard
First appearance Radford Horrors 01

Description

The hotel has aftermarket bars on the windows, a survivable drop outside, and downspouts the Biz notices when he scouts it. It contains an opera house with upper-level reserved boxes, one of which Yeltsin uses (Radford Horrors 01).

Radford Horrors 03 does not repeat the hotel's name, but the Biz is still held in the same room with the same guards: three guards rotate through eight-hour shifts, one a hard-ass and two pleasant, and room service brings vodka. A sleepy bellboy staffs the lobby (Radford Horrors 03).

History of events there

The Biz's captivity

The Biz is introduced in Radford Horrors 01 lying on a king bed in a terry-cloth robe with champagne, stroganoff and blini. He has watched Russian-dubbed Los ricos también lloran (The Rich Also Cry) for about three hours. His guard sits crying at a little table, eating the borscht the Biz would not eat (Radford Horrors 01).

The story has jumped from January to April. His January captors, who beat him and asked about Bill Clinton, are gone. The new, friendlier captors ask only about aliens and seem to know many specifics. The Biz quietly scouts the hotel, hides bed sheets and chats up the guards, but does not actually want to escape, since he fears having to explain months AWOL if sent home (Radford Horrors 01). See The Biz's guards.

Yeltsin at the opera

An officer with clean, unaccented English tells the Biz that the president wants him in his opera box in an hour, "clean and sober and properly dressed," and hands him a Russian-style suit. The Biz is seated beside Yeltsin during an opera he guesses to be a comedy about Tsarist-era royals (Radford Horrors 01).

Yeltsin tells him the Metropol is now inferior in creature comforts to the remodeled Baltschug Kempinski, "but you cannot beat an in-house opera." He explains the cosmic microwave background and says Soviet detectors spiked the previous year and were triangulated to the Marblehead nuclear incident. He asks about the weaponized worms and a second organism, the people who were not people at the Ballard, Utah ranch (the Biz explains skinwalkers), and a broken, half-melted device identical to the team's "flashlight" laser weapon. He closes by asking about Andrew Howard, and the Biz leaves out Howard's supernatural abilities (Radford Horrors 01).

Back in his room, the Biz finds Roseanne still on and feels less likely to be killed (Radford Horrors 01).

The night drive

In Radford Horrors 03 the Biz, still a bit drunk on room-service vodka, is woken by banging. An officer throws in laundered clothes and says he must be ready in five minutes. In the lobby, at about 3 to 3:30 a.m., Yeltsin calls him "Richard" and says there has been "an unusual aircraft crash in Oryol Oblast" he wants him to see. The convoy then leaves for the Oryol crash site and is ambushed (Radford Horrors 03).

Inhabitants

Appearances