A place like Mos Eisley probably has a very wide variety of merchandise of all sort on offer – not only pre-owned landspeeders, but certainly also many types and kinds of information, usually overpriced.
But finding information on a being like Nyarlathotep requires a trip to a different sort of place. Nyarlathotep, after all, originates from a place beyond comprehension, rooted in ancient mysteries a reasonable mortal should not ever endeavor to fathom. Mos Eisley, for all its corrupt charms, just isn’t a place fit for unearthing that kind of information – since that’s a call only for truly legendary lost cities.
Fortunately, there are many such fictional cities to choose from for use in a movie script. Atlantis. El Dorado. Timbuktu. Bielefeld. Just to name a few. But I’ve already used Atlantis in an earlier chapter, and El Dorado is only appropriate if you’re looking for hidden treasure (specifically golden), not hidden information.
As for Timbuktu…well, let’s say it’s legendary stature has suffered quite a bit since no longer being a forbidden city. Things are valued more highly when they are out of reach…now that you can freely travel there, it’s just a small town of 50.000 inhabitants in a country with a Human Development Index of 0.428 and a massive Islamist insurgency problem. Not really legendary material anymore.
That left Bielefeld as the prime choice of location for the hidden Temple of Nyarlathotep. The town’s inconspicuous nature makes it a particularly good choice for hiding a temple there, actually. For even back when many people still believed in the existence of Bielefeld (the fact that it’s made up did not become general knowledge until the mid-90s), it was described as a remarkably unremarkable town, with little to distinguish it from similar, actually existent towns. Nobody would expect a hidden temple in a town like that, which is just perfect if you’re trying to hide one!
The Queen and her twins have little trouble in finding the town, apparently – or at least no more trouble than they’re used to dealing with by now. They have a spaceship, so I guess they simply used one of the fake highway exits to locate the town – the fact that these exits are permanently closed “for construction” wouldn’t have affected them.
Once they were inside the town, they only had to make an effort to dispell the illusion of the town’s existence by disbelieving in it very hard. The inhabitants didn’t try to stop them, mostly because the town apparently has none. Wolfram von Bielefelt (an alternate spelling of the town’s name) is the only person of any note connected to the town, if only by name. And given how unbelievable Wolfram is, meeting him* might actually have made it easier to disbelieve in the town as a whole.
With Bielefeld’s illusionary existence fading, the hidden temple is revealed…and, yeah, it’s the Al-Khazneh temple that’s actually located in Petra, Jordan. As far as hidden temples go, that thing is so spectacular that it would be hard to come up with a fictional equivalent that beats the reality – that’s why it features so widely in all sorts of works of popular fiction. I couldn’t imagine that Nolan Nobucks Production would eschew going with the obvious in a case where even much more affluent production companies don’t.
More on Monday.
*Given how similar the twins look to Wolfram, including the uniforms, I toyed with the idea of ‘revealing’ Wolfram as their long lost younger brother, but ultimately felt it would have been too gratuitous a distraction. XD