. . . CONSPIRITOSIS CONCLAVE . . .
. . . this has to do with where secret masters-actual or aspiring-meet to hash out schemes.
Did you ever see that Peter Hyams flick The Star Chamber? That one was about a group of judges who met to issue hits on criminals they deemed too vile for due process. The murderous judges met in appropriately sinister settings, as befitting their social status and need for secrecy. The whole movie has that Peter Hyams shadowy thing going on, which he didn't always achieve, but this one works quite well.
Of course, you may be thinking of Dr. Evil and his buds in the lavish secret hideout from one of the Austin Powers movies. Those were fun.
I always think of the creepy old guys who met in a well-appointed office-like they were lobbyists or something-in The X-Files, always in dim lighting, with shafts of light just so-I guess they don't want to look at each other too closely. Bunch of tired old men barely carrying the weight of whatever it was they were getting up to-alien-human hybrids? That black oil stuff? Killer bees infected with an extraterrestrial virus? Placing bets on whether The Simpsons would get canceled first? It was a big damn mystery.
My favorite example of this would be a group of forty-something tabletop role-playing gamers gathered in a Wendy's in Tallahassee circa 2006. They were hashing out the details of a future roadwar encounter-maybe they were running GURPS Autoduel or the Hard-Wired module of that cyberpunk RPG-and I was the only non-gamer in the joint. I sat with my burger, fries, paper cups of ketchup, and soda and half-listened in on the details of some sort of a missile attack between cyborg frenemies. Wendy's is hardly private-so one might question the conclave-i-ness of the situation . . . but the extreme dorko energy repelled all but the hardiest voyeurs of human escapist projects . . . I may as well have been a spy or a ghost or something . . . and, truly, these were elevated masters of the game, for they played not with pencils or paper or dice-just words and brains and invisible holographic hex grids charting the course of some post-governmental regional conflagration as pizza party minus pizza plus burgers . . .
I was lucky I left with my life, I suppose.
