TITLE
The Hotel Meridian — Going Up

PROMPT
A scroll-driven story set inside the elevator of an invented 1931 Art Deco skyscraper hotel, "The Hotel Meridian", sixty floors tall. Scrolling is riding: the page is fixed like the inside of the lift car, and the scroll position is the floor. Concept: a building told as a vertical sequence of doors opening on brief scenes; the elevator machinery is the interface.

Mood: luxurious, nocturnal, a little haunted, witty. Palette: lacquer black #0B0B0C, brass gold #C8A04A (with a lighter highlight #E7CC84 for engraved lines), burgundy #7A1F2B, ivory #F0E6D2, verdigris green #1F3B3A. Dark page, lit by the gold. Texture: fine vertical brushed-metal lines on the doors, a subtle marble veining on the floor strip.

Composition (fixed viewport): the elevator doors fill the screen: two tall brass panels engraved with a symmetrical Art Deco sunburst-and-chevron pattern drawn in SVG line work. Above the doors is the signature object: a semicircular floor indicator, a brass arc graduated with a tick and a small lamp for every floor from L to 60, with engraved numerals at the notable floors (L, 7, 12, 19, 27, 33, 41, 52, 60; floor 13 has neither numeral nor lamp), and a black arrow-hand that sweeps across an ivory dial face as you scroll, with eased, slightly springy motion and a soft mechanical tick as it passes each floor. On load the hand swings down to L as the car lights flicker on. To the right, a column of round brass call buttons for the notable floors (clicking one scrolls there smoothly with the doors held shut in between; the button lights ivory); where 13 would be there is only a blanked-off screw-head cover, which works anyway and glows burgundy. To the left, a wall panel carries the large current-floor numeral in a lacquer window, a status line (floor name, "Ascending", "Descending"), the sound knob and a brass capacity plate ("nine persons or one grand piano"). Motion cue: thin horizontal lines streak past in the gap between the doors while travelling, speed proportional to scroll velocity.

Story: at each of about ten notable floors the car "stops" for a stretch of scroll: the doors slide apart (transform driven by scroll progress with easing; they open fully, hold, and close again as you continue) to reveal a vignette drawn in flat Deco illustration (SVG shapes in the palette, each with one piece of looping motion) with a short caption typeset below in the doorway: Lobby (a revolving door turning, the night porter's bell); 7, The Cartographers' Club (a wall of maps, a globe spinning); 12, the Ballroom where it has been 1934 since 1934 (silhouetted dancers rotating, a mirrored ball throwing dots); 13, which the hotel insists does not exist (the doors open on bare brick and a single swinging bulb; they shut quickly); 19, the Aviary Suite (parrots on brass perches); 27, Housekeeping, where lost umbrellas go; 33, the Night Kitchen (copper pans, steam, a cake being iced at 3 a.m.); 41, the Swimming Pool in the Sky (ripples, a lone swimmer's line); 52, the Observatory Bar (a telescope, a cocktail named "The Last Tram"); 60, the Roof (the doors open on the city far below, searchlights sweeping, the hotel's neon sign seen from behind, dawn starting). Captions are specific and literary, two or three sentences each, in the voice of a discreet lift attendant named Mr. Abernathy.

Typography: Deco display capitals drawn with geometric proportions: tall, thin, widely tracked sans (Futura/"Century Gothic"/"Gill Sans" stack, uppercase, letterspacing 0.35em) in gold for floor names; large stylised numerals for the current floor; captions in an elegant serif italic (Georgia/Palatino) in ivory. The title screen at scroll zero: the closed doors with "THE HOTEL MERIDIAN" engraved across them and the instruction "scroll to ascend" shown as a small engraved plate with a downward chevron that bobs.

Details: the car sways by a pixel or two when stopping; the indicator arc's lamp glows for the current floor; an optional sound toggle (off by default) adds a low hum, door rumbles and a bell "ding" on arrival via Web Audio; at the top, a "Return to lobby" brass lever sends the car down in one long accelerating glide with the hand sweeping back. The night porter's bell in the lobby can be rung by clicking it. Phone: buttons become a horizontal strip beneath the doors, the floor numeral and sound knob sit in the top corners beside the dial, and the wall panels are dropped; short landscape screens place the caption beside the vignette. Reduced motion: doors cross-fade open; no streak lines or sway.

DESCRIPTION
The viewer stands inside the lift car of the Hotel Meridian, a sixty-storey Art Deco hotel of 1931, and scrolling is riding. The screen is fixed: two brushed-brass doors engraved with chevrons and a rising sunburst, a semicircular brass floor indicator above them, verdigris wall panels either side, a strip of veined black marble underfoot. As the page scrolls the indicator hand springs from floor to floor, shaft lines streak through the gap between the doors, and at ten floors the car stops, sways, and the doors slide apart on a small flat Deco scene with one looping motion each: a revolving door, a spinning globe, waltzing silhouettes under a mirror ball, a swinging bulb on bare brick, parrots on perches, dripping lost umbrellas, a cake being iced at 3 a.m., a lone swimmer under the moon, a tram crossing below a telescope, and finally the roof with the hotel's neon sign seen backwards against the dawn. Each scene is captioned in the dry, discreet voice of the attendant, Mr. Abernathy. The mood is luxurious, nocturnal and slightly haunted; the whole page is lit by brass against lacquer black.

VISUAL TECHNIQUES
- Fixed-viewport CSS grid "car" with a tall invisible scroll track; scroll position is mapped through a timeline of title, stop and travel segments to floor number and door openness
- Floor indicator built procedurally in inline SVG (60 ticks, 59 lamps, engraved numerals, ivory dial, brass gradients) with a hand driven by a damped-spring simulation and a blurred lamp glow that follows the current floor
- Door engraving (chevrons, title band, sunburst, ziggurat steps) generated as SVG line work at the exact pixel size of each panel, drawn twice for an incised highlight-and-shadow look; brushed metal from layered repeating gradients
- Doors moved by transforms bound to a single CSS custom property, which also drives vignette scale, caption reveal and the light spilling into the car
- Ten hand-drawn flat SVG vignettes in the five-colour palette, each with CSS keyframe loops (scaleX "revolving" wings, clipped scrolling continents, dash-array mirror-ball dots, pendulum bulb, stroke-dashoffset icing, wave translation, mirrored neon text with blur glow, rotating searchlight beams)
- Canvas streak lines in the door gap, positioned in "shaft space" so their speed and motion blur follow the car's velocity
- Marble floor veining and film grain from feTurbulence filters; stepped Deco wall panels via clip-path and layered box-shadows
- Tall, thin Deco numerals made by vertically scaling a light geometric sans; widely tracked gold capitals; ivory serif italic captions
- Web Audio synthesis (off by default): filtered oscillator hum tied to speed, brown-noise door rumble tied to door velocity, tick per floor, three-partial arrival bell
- Entrance sequence in which the car lights flicker on and the hand settles to L; reduced-motion mode cross-fades the doors and removes streaks, sway, spring and loops

INTERACTION MODEL
Scrolling (wheel, touch, keyboard) rides the lift: the indicator hand, floor numeral, status line and lamps follow, streaks run in the door gap in proportion to speed, and at each notable floor the car sways to a stop, the doors open over a stretch of scroll, hold, and close again as scrolling continues; floor 13 opens briefly on brick and snaps shut, and the roof stays open. The round brass call buttons (a column on wide screens, a strip under the doors on phones) send the car to a floor in one eased run with the doors kept closed on the way; the destination button glows ivory, and the unmarked cover between 12 and 19 takes the car to the floor that does not exist. On the roof a brass lever, "Return to lobby", slides across and sends the car down in a long accelerating glide with the hand sweeping back; any manual scroll input cancels an automatic run. The brass knob toggles sound (hum, door rumble, floor ticks, arrival bell). The porter's bell on the lobby desk can be clicked to ring it. All controls are real buttons with visible focus states.