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turning 03 · doors at dusk · the rocks were here first

Turning 03, and you can hear it from the road

Looming Rocks Amphitheatre

Two rock faces, a stage between them, and a great deal of very old stone that was here long before the stage was.

HOW LOUD DO YOU WANT IT?

Starts wherever your device says. Nothing moves, flashes, or plays until you say so.

Set amidst towering rock faces, Looming Rocks impose with their immense solidity. They give off an ancient and alive aura. Some say the rocks are sentient and full of lore from centuries of hosting storytellers and stages. They possess an unknowable intelligence that long pre-dates the humans drawn to them. The rocks saw the Sithen emerge, eons ago.

Why the rocks glow

The rocks are covered in lichen. In modern times, folks discovered that UV light made them fluoresce in a dazzling display. Charged during the day by a solar array with batteries, the stage production at Looming Rocks includes UV spots and floods that make the rocks glow at night.

The floods stand on the ground and point upwards, which is why everything out here is brightest at its foot and goes dark towards the top, and why there is nothing overhead at all. The lamps are violet. What comes back is not.

On the rocks tonight

Eleven full shows, every one of them played outdoors — ten at Red Rocks and one at ACL Music Festival in Zilker Park — and six of them posted by the artist or the band themselves. Nothing is fetched from YouTube until you press something. The desk below moves along the bill without loading anything at all — you can read the whole running order, and every runtime on it, without a single request going to YouTube. Once something is playing, the desk changes the picture instead, because by then you have asked for a stage.

THE STAGE IS DARK

The running order — eleven acts, shortest 57 min, longest 2 hr 6 min

Every one says how long it runs before you press it, which matters more here than anywhere else on this street: these are whole concerts rather than songs. Nothing is hosted by us. Each is on somebody else’s channel and that channel is named.

The bill takes suggestions: a whole concert played outdoors, filmed, best of all posted by the artist or the band themselves. Send it through the Stimpunks contact page or in our community. It is checked first to see that it plays, that it can be shown here, how long it runs and that it was played outdoors, because the desk says how long before anybody presses anything and a session played in a studio belongs in The Live Room.

The door policy at the foot of the rocks

Whose this all is

The real venue is Red Rocks Amphitheatre, an open-air amphitheatre near Morrison, Colorado, about ten miles south-west of Denver, owned and operated by the city of Denver. It is formed by two enormous sandstone monoliths — they have names: Ship Rock and Creation Rock, with the smaller Stage Rock between them — and it seats 9,525. Read off Wikipedia’s article on it on 2026-09-22. The room started there and is for outdoor music anywhere now, so the bill says where each show was played, and every one of them was played outdoors. Austin City Limits Music Festival is held in Zilker Park in Austin, Texas, and is a different thing from the television series it is named after, which is taped indoors — those sessions are on the desk in The Live Room, the street’s room for music played in a studio.

Looming Rocks is not Red Rocks, or any other real place. It is a room on a made-up street that is extremely fond of the real ones — our executive director goes to Red Rocks whenever she can — and Stimpunks has no connection to any of these venues or festivals, is not endorsed by them, and is not describing them. The amphitheatre in Colorado is a real thing that belongs to a city; this one is a room on a street that rearranges itself for whoever turns up.

None of these artists, their labels or the channels hosting these recordings is affiliated with Stimpunks, and none of them endorses us. The full running order with channels and links is in the liner notes.

Job marker — a flood lamp at the foot of the rock

You have found a job marker. The Adventurer’s Guild is a shopfront on the street, and it posts jobs that send you round these rooms. Take the code below to its board and that job is done. Nothing here is scored, nothing expires, and one is a perfectly good number of jobs to do.

The job: What the rocks give back

Before the code: The rocks at Looming Rocks glow under the UV floods, and the room is careful that the stone itself is not what glows. What is?

Hint 1

It is not the stone and it is not paint. It is alive, and it is growing on the rock.

Hint 2

It is the thing a walker would call a crust or a patch on a boulder.

Last hint

Fungus and alga living as one organism.

Give me the answer

The answer is The lichen. The lichen. Many lichens fluoresce under ultraviolet light — they take light you cannot see and give back light you can — and it is a real technique for telling species apart in the field. The rig, the solar array and the sentient rocks are this street's invention; the fluorescence is not. The room separates those two halves in the same paragraph, and its tool refuses to name any particular species, because nobody here has checked which one glows what and a confident Latin name beside a colour is the format most likely to be believed.

Taking the answer is a real way through this, not a lesser one. Nothing is watching and nothing is written down.

Quest code: FLUORESCE

Hand it in at the Adventurer’s Guild →