Omega Mart: Supernatural Search
Charlie’s Paranormal Experience provides a seasonally spooky way to explore Omega Mart
There are two parallel worlds inside Omega Mart, the superdupermarket located with the menagerie of immersive experiences at Area15. One is the market itself, where Omega Mart has exclusive rights to sell a range of products and produce from footwear for walking on eggshells to mild texture food-substitute cereal to tattooed turkeys. The other is the backroom area occupied by Dramcorp, the enigmatic entity behind Omega Mart that is currently occupied this Halloween season with sighting reports of the elusive Charlie Dram.
The Dram family invites the public to help find or otherwise encounter its wayward scion through November 2 by meeting at Omega Mart for 4 p.m. search parties based on a tour designed by Charlie himself, dubbed Charlie’s Paranormal Experience. Charlie grew up fascinated by comic books, Daikon Posable Plushie toys and the mystic arts. One day he found a heretofore undiscovered hidden entrance to Dramcorp’s operations center and never came back out.
Assisting in finding traces of Charlie means navigating the maze of Dramcorp’s secret passages, hallways, immersive art installations and supernatural phenomena. Members of the group are given special headphones so the guide’s narrative and instructions can be heard at all times, or turned down momentarily for a bit of individual exploration.
After a few minutes perusing the market shelves the group is led through one of the hidden entrances to the employee locker room, where the next step is through a portal into an entirely different dimension, or dimensions. Guides, representing the Society of Peripheral Studies, slow-reveal conspiratorial clues and objects to be found.
An indescribable object may be hidden in an ice cooler, a scepter (or was it “scarab?" someone else found it) in a Dram employee’s desk or a croissant-shaped curiosity up high behind glass. Clues to the fate of family patriarch Walter Dram and CEO Cecelia Dram’s role in it come together like pieces of a puzzle. Curiosity about Marin Dram, missing under mysterious circumstances since January 2021, may remain unresolved by the conclusion of the search.
Explorers will feel the cosmic energy of The Source though. Dramcrop capped the Source Well and rerouted it’s power into Omega Mart environments such a 7 Monolith Village, a 36-foot rock canyon with projection mapping creating enchanting imagery on the walls, and The Runoff Stream, an infinity-mirror river backlit by 15,000 LED, beneath guests’ feet.
The Factory, “a cyber-spiritual facility,” is the futuristic playground of Omega Mart with hands-on contraptions and sound-generating consoles located throughout the Wonka-esque realm. A series of Tik Tok videos paying homage to the Alien franchise could easily be shot here, as it resembles the inside of a space trawler designed by H.R. Geiger while in a whimsical mood.
Whether traces of Charlie can be detected in the Factory or the among the Easter Island-like heads inside the hall of immersive art installations depends on the collective intuitive potential of the search party. Regardless of the results, surviving Charlie’s Paranormal Experience does garner guests impressive pins from the Society of Peripheral Studies. It’s a wise way to discover Omega Mart for the first time and likely won’t be the last.
