Officially owned by Sanctuary Entertainment and a loose confederation of the alumni who funded the construction of the Xavier Campus, the Apocryphon Café is operated exclusively by members in good standing of Gamma Lambda Mu and Gamma Lambda Phi, all of whom are amply compensated for their time. The establishment is first and foremost a cybercafé offering a number of paid public terminals and wireless Internet access, as well as a selection of sandwiches, burgers, salads and snacks, all of surprisingly high quality. The owners and operators know what geeks like, and they know geek food most of all, so the café offers only the best food and drink.

But the first floor cybercafé, located in the east wing, is only the beginning. The second floor of the east wing contains a massive array of LAN terminals, consoles and televisions, all of which are frequently used for very popular prize tournaments of the hottest multiplayer games around. As well, the individual machines can be reserved and rented out for smaller groups who just want to play a few rounds of the latest fighting game or what have you.

The west wing, however, is where the real action wing. Standing three stories tall, the west wing's first two stories are given over to a vast arcade offering everything from classic Pac-Man machines to such favorites as DDR and Guitar Hero, from motion-capture based fighting games to state-of-the-art motion simulators. The centerpiece of this area is the Core, a highly advanced virtual reality simulator run by the very best in supercomputers, a cylindrical tower of lights, circuits and cooling systems that soars across both of the west wing's lower two floors. Thirteen seats surround the Core's base, connected to advanced helmets, gloves and sensory interfaces, allowing over a dozen players at a time to plug into a virtual environment that's advertised as better than real -- and well worth the hype. The Core holds a stable of half a dozen programs covering a number of genres, including sword & sorcery adventure, near-future cyberpunk, grand space opera, Lovecraftian horror, modern-day superhero adventure, and grand military drama set during World War II.

In addition to this stable of available programs, the Core is home to the Gamma Lambda computer junkies' flagship project, EARTH³, a comprehensive simulation of the entire world, featuring a number of 'improvements' allowing for 'real' magic, Matrix-style action, and any number of other things that aren't generally possible in the real world. Not everyone who works on this project is fully aware of its true purpose; in fact, the ultimate goal of the EARTH³ development project is a closely-guarded secret, causing rumor to swirl about it freely. There are those who claim that the project is intended for some arcane military use, though no one is quite sure what that would be; others, somewhat more prosaically, argue that the simulation is simply a default interface and open-ended multiplayer game designed for a next-generation virtual reality system that will eventually be released commercially. The wildest of the stories claims that the project is much more than a game, more than a simulation -- in fact, it's a portal to an artificially-created second Earth, to which select portions of the human race will be evacuated following some future cataclysm. Whatever its true purpose, all anyone knows for sure is that the Core, EARTH³ and all the other games are beautifully designed and incredibly fun to play -- the waiting list for time on the Core is impressively long.

The third floor of the west wing holds a small bumper car court and -- inside the dome that caps the whole building off -- a vast laser tag arena with a number of walls, towers and obstacles that can be rearranged into nearly any configuration. As might be expected, the laser tag at the Apocryphon is especially popular; it's not quite as popular as the Core, but there's still a respectable waiting list for its use and reservations are strongly recommended.