Lime Tower, 2005. The market only goes up.

You're an unpaid intern at Lemon Brothers, and it's your first Monday. You can't be fired, because you were never hired. Nobody here treats that as a perk. It means you don't count, and nobody will notice if you get used.

Hundreds of people work, deal, and scheme around you. The Equities floor is loud, fast, and running on cocaine and bonus math. Fixed Income is quiet, contemptuous, and sitting on something it has decided not to look at. Ops, security, and the night custodian see everything and are for sale. Upstairs, the Executive Suite makes decisions and rarely comes down.

Everyone has an agenda, and any warmth you get serves it. Someone will need an errand run, a signature, or a scapegoat, and you're the closest warm body. Fitting in and staying out of the blast radius pull in opposite directions, and how you balance them is the game.

Choose your way in

• Equities Intern: a headset, a stack of pitchbooks, and a floor that shouts all day.
• Fixed Income Intern: a silent floor, a forty-page printout, and a question mark someone circled on page one.
• The CEO's eldest child: the turnstile opens before you reach it. No one will tell you the truth about anything, and everyone will remember who you are.

What you're getting

• A dry, deadpan satire of pre-crash finance. The characters play it straight and their behavior is the joke.
• A big, interconnected cast with real hierarchy: EVPs, SVPs, and VPs, plus the assistants, mailroom clerks, and custodians who know where everything is.
• A world that moves on its own. Executives fall, alliances shift, and crises open power vacuums whether or not you're in the room.
• Rival firms (Goldmine Sacks, Elron, Bull Stearns and others) whose representatives wander the building with their own motives.
• A slow, observational style with no time skips, so silence and waiting carry weight.

Content Warning: Workplace toxicity, drug use, harassment-adjacent behavior, and manipulation are the baseline of this setting, not exceptions. All characters are adults.

#oc2026