Dungeons & Grandma's

Her stomach settling with each step, as if the moment too had been waiting for her all along.

The door does not close behind Eileen so much as seal... like an envelope accepting it will never again be opened for love.

Turning right Eileen finds a corridor that stretches ahead with quiet formality... too polite to echo, too proud to bend. The air carrying the weight of long-past perfumes and freshly pressed certainties. There are no candles or sconces, but the walls glow gently, as though recently complimented.

Eileen moves from the door without rush. The beat behind her ribs is quiet now, never having been one to outrun a room. She lets the hush settle around her shoulders instead, adjusting her shawl not from nervousness, but instinct... the same motion she might make before opening a window or scolding a kettle that refuses to boil.

So she walks, simply, with timing. Until she meets a bend in the corridor... where something waits, as if waiting for her?

Turning, she finds a figure... upright but wavering, like steam trained to dress for dinner. Its clothing is formal, but made from a material that can only be described as stitched from old appointment letters and fine mourning lace. Where its face should be, there is a blank scroll, gently unfurling.

It then speaks directly into her mind, in a voice that tastes like pressed juice.
"Ah, you've arrived. Lovely."

Eileen tilts her head. "Have I?" she says aloud.
"Oh yes. Precisely on time. A scandalous thing to be, of course, but there it is."

The scroll butler unfurls with a bureaucratic grace... too elegant to be hurried, but too practiced to be sincere.

THE DISTINGUISHED DELAY
Bearer of Roomful Permission
The Absence Between Sentences
She Who Was Not Expected, But Was Scandalously On Time

Each line writes itself in a calligraphic hush, and Eileen tilts her head again, to the routine, "You've got a flair for the poetic, dear."

The scroll butler flicks once, like a dry cough.
"These titles are not poetic Distinguished Delay. They are assigned. Assigned once a line has been written and not a moment before."

"Well," she muses, "then someone's been eating too much poetry. One might say that those titles don't sound quite right."

The scroll butler snaps shut, but the voice remains in her mind.
"Correct," says the scroll butler. "But one cannot say that they are inaccurate."

Before she can question further, it gestures down a side corridor, where the air ripples faintly with ceremony.
"If you would follow me, Distinguished Delay. There is a small matter of calibration. The selection of your utensil, you understand."

Eileen tries not to smile, even as her laughter makes a peep, "I don't," she replies pleasantly, a polite giggle lingering on her tongue.
"Perfect," it says. "Then you're ready."

Proceeding down the hall, Eileen takes their time... much to the chagrin of the scroll butler, who glides several paces ahead. Still, Eileen feels differently about their pace and attempts to bridge the divide.

"You know," she says softly, glancing toward the drift of the scroll's edge, "when I was little, I watched a man in the capital try to read a proclamation to thirty thousand people in the central square. The proclamation was written on seven of the largest scrolls I've ever seen. Carried by seven different clerks with seven different attires. One of them even fainted near the end. But the crowd applauded anyway. Not for the words, dear. For the drama of the collapse."

The scroll butler's head tightens slightly. Not approval, not disapproval, something closer to interest. The story carrying a familiarity that even it seems to recognize. Like a wax blot on parchment that shouldn't mean anything, but still reminds you of someone last spoken to, long, long ago.

"Point being," she adds, as though to herself, "sometimes it's the pause before the page turns that keeps people listening. Not the pace from which the page is turned."

The scroll butler flutters for a moment, its scroll head opening and closing a number of times, until finally it manages to stop in front of a doorway... which opens without touch.
"This room is a formality," says the scroll butler in an almost assuring tone, while trying to change the subject.

"I've noticed," Eileen murmurs, as she pauses before entering.
"It is required by the Hospitality Archives that all unexpected entrants undergo ceremonial calibration prior to reception."

Stepping in, Eileen finds herself not in a vault or in a hall. But in what she can almost describe as a room made into a sentence... long, flat and deliberately paced. The walls giving off a hum of sanctioned quiet. Nothing echoes here, nothing insists, just the machinery of readiness, laid carefully over silence.

At the heart of the space lays a table that is longer than function, but not longer than formality. At its center is a single setting: one plate, centered. A napkin folded into the shape of a creature neither alive nor extinct, but clearly created out of compliance with the ritual. Its folds changing slightly as she enters, as if aligning to her gait.

But what has her interested are the forks, which surround it like teeth around a story. Thousands, perfectly arranged. Not for eating, not for elegance, clearly for recordkeeping.

Some are faintly warm. One vibrates, reacting not to her touch, but her nearness. Another is pinned under a translucent sheet labeled: "RETURN TO STORAGE UPON FAILURE."

One fork attempts to duplicate when passed briefly becoming two, then folding again into itself, shamefully. Almost as if it was unhappy with itself.

Whereas the tablecloth in comparison bears no stains, only transparent indentation marks... where previous forks may have sat, been chosen or dismissed. One of the indentation is a little larger too and seems representative of another napkin shape which had failed to comply and had been taken away in what feels like a fluttering flap of despair.

Eileen breathes in. The air is curiously dry... like parchment not yet signed. It smells of oxidized silver and dust that never settles. But she doesn't stop, she continues instead looking over the forks, forcing breath to move through her body. Breathing like someone who's waited through worse rituals than this. Like someone who's learned... intimately, that some ceremonies aren't actually meant to welcome, just to contain the shape of what they expect you to be.

Her rhythm, practiced, even and intentional, forcing a space of energy to buffer around her, while every fork waits patiently, gleaming with assumption.
"You are to select the appropriate utensil Distinguished Delay."

"For what?" She asks carefully, her words polite but insistent,
"We do not serve courses anymore. We serve continuity."

Looking back to the butler who waits by the threshold, she waits for some sign of further clarity but receives only a single sentence instead.
"This is a test of taste."

She leans forward now without hesitation, not confidently, not defiantly, just without shame and when she does she feels the butler looking at her from behind, in a way that tries fruitlessly to unnerve her. As if to say the room itself waits in attendance for a choice that is already long overdue. The room too responds, not with flickering chandeliers but with a table shift that happens almost imperceptibly, as if bracing itself for what must be an inevitably incorrect answer.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

Yet the forks wait, patient and silent. Glancing at them each she sees none are labeled. Some have three tines, some six. One appears to be made of smoke held in a rigid shape. Another hums when she looks too long at it. There are no clues.

One of the forks on her far right reminds her of her late husband's handwriting. Another on her left reminds her of a child she once comforted during a thunderstorm. None remind her of dinner though or continuity for that matter, whatever it was that they were trying to imply. So she picks the smallest one instead, not because it's nearest, not because it's beautiful or has a particular shine to it. Simply because it feels like it's trying the least.
"...Acceptable."

"Only acceptable?" Eileen asks out loud, a chuckle flowing forth from her lips.
"Remarkably so."

Laying the fork back down, gently in the same way she sets a pen down across a half-written letter. Eileen takes a moment to turn towards the butler, who has not moved from the threshold of the room.

"Which one would you have picked?" she asks, not as a challenge, but like someone finally giving space to a voice that had always gone unheard. The butler rustles in a bureaucratic response that is both canned and formal. "I am not permitted to express preference."

She waits with no expectation, just… long enough to let the silence breathe. She then chuckles politely adding, "I certainly don't have time to keep score and even more I don't bite." After a moment, the scroll butler curls inward at the edges.
"The napkin," it admits.

Eileen nods. "I think that's an excellent answer. No tines, which means no stabbing — and everyone still gets to decide for themselves what counts as a meal.

But the butler does not respond, so she adds. "I hope I've passed this strange calibration of yours."

"Distinguished Delay, you've already been permitted. The calibration was simply to see whether the ballroom still remembered how to judge."

"Oh." Eileen says with a voice betraying her perplexity. "Well. Did it?"

The butler gestures once in a formal manner toward a narrow archway veiled in something too dense to be called mist and too polite to be fog. The butler adding their opinion only after, Eileen steps through,
"Barely."

The shift is quiet. Not a change in air per se but rather in posture, like the corridor itself straightens a little as if preparing to be seen by someone who would comment on the dust. And then she arrives at the overlook.

The balcony curves around the ballroom's uppermost tier like a crescent moon, wide and deliberate, wrapped high in a place meant for observation rather than participation. The railing is wrought iron, shaped like the tail end of a sentence, and the floor beneath her feet whispers softly with each step. It does not echo though for even the sound here has been trained, as though instructed to behave in the presence of something vast.

She looks out over the rails to see the room for what it is. Each table below angles inward, arranged with a precision that discourages conversation. The layout listens without inviting speech. It curves not for comfort, but for obedience. Whatever this place is, it was not built to welcome anyone. It was built to notice who didn't belong.

Its architecture too is unmistakable. The room is shaped like an eye.

A vast elliptical chamber, symmetrical to the point of unease, with its center marked by a polished black dais that gleams like a pupil. Around it, concentric rings of tables rise in tiers. Some are stacked physically atop one another, forcing the seated and the hovering to occupy the same vertical breath. There is no comfort in the arrangement, only a vision to be maintained.

Which is somehow comforting given that above, set into the apex of the domed ceiling, the metaphor becomes literal. A single ceremonial eyeball gazes downward with perfect stillness. Its iris gleaming with pale gold, its pupil narrowed to a point. It does not blink or shift or glisten. It scans, slowly, gently in a rhythm of paperwork breathing.

And yet somehow, layered above this central eye floats translucent echoes of it, hundreds or more, each slightly misaligned. They shimmer like ink bleeding through vellum, ghostly replicas of past iterations that record in their own time, or perhaps of it. They do not move in unison, but in slow interference. They flicker with the permanence of ritual, not memory.

No one beneath the eye are looking up at it. Not anyone seated or floating or dancing. Not even the brazen ones whose laughter is just a little louder than etiquette prefers. It makes the ceiling feel like a rumor.

It becomes clear to her then, though perhaps to no one else, that the Eye is not watching the room. It is deciding whether the room should continue and when she breathes in, the air tastes of steam and unfinished music.

She turns her attention to the ballroom floor.

There is a line, long and ceremonial, winding across the chamber from end to end. Ghost nobles wait within it, each in various stages of presence. Some are vivid, ornate, steady in their transparency. Others are soft at the edges, the kind of presence that forgets itself.

At the far end of the queue, standing too upright, hands clenched around the folds of her cloak, is Xozo. Her lips moving in silence, as if reciting something she only recently learned but has yet to understand.

Xozo's posture speaking louder than her mutterings. The way she adjusts the folds of her hood with stiff precision, as though mimicking a gesture she's seen but never worn. Other nobles drift in and out of place, cutting in front of her without eye contact, without friction. Xozo yields each time, automatically, without question. She steps back because she has always been taught to. And yet still, she tries. A performance of dignity assembled from mismatched instructions. The cadence of someone fluent in a language they were never allowed to speak.

Eileen begins walking the curve of the overlook. Her fingers trailing along the railing, palm open to the cold. The wrought iron meets her touch with a chill that is almost tender. It wraps itself around her hand like punctuation, without even a hint of restraint. Several times, she pauses to squeeze the metal gently, not for herself, but for the railing which needed to reassured, this she knew.

Below she eyes two nobles murmuring behind painted fans shaped like coiled bylaws. Their voices rise just high enough to be overheard by the ceiling, but not by conscience itself. One is vague and translucent, the other crisp at the edges like a bureaucrat freshly refiled.

"Whisperbane's failures, it looks like. Her line always rushes. You can smell the trying."

The second responds with a voice flat from disuse. "Oh, the downlines. Trained to arrive early, but never on time."

Their laughter is soft, not cruel or kind. The sound of courtesy chuckled out of tradition, both of them agreeing with the statement, neither of them impressed with each other's candor. The kind that fits neatly into the margins of a meeting, where nothing is ever quite said but everything is known.

They do not look at Xozo. They do not look at anyone. And so they miss the quiet rocking of Xozo's feet, the way her thumb digs too hard into her palm, a grounding motion learned long ago. Still Xozo's tries, she adjusts her cloak, she checks the line, she steps forward again when it stutters, even if it stutters only long enough to fold back into itself.

Another noble cuts in again and without any consequence. Xozo yields.

Eileen now finds herself pressing her palm to the railing again. This time for herself, a single stillness beneath the hush of ceremony. In the same way one might steady a teacup during an earthquake.

Or perhaps shoving an earthquake into a teacup.

Until above them all, the Eye begins to shift.

The change is small. Most wouldn't notice it.

One of the translucent overlays above the Eye fades slightly while another deepens. The central pupil adjusts its angle by the smallest margin, a flick of attention that does not feel like noticing so much as recalibrating.

But the room feels it.

A waiter pauses mid step, then continues as if nothing happened. A chandelier above tier three tilts by a fraction, correcting its sway with the elegance of something that forgot it was being observed. No guest looks upward. No voice acknowledges the change. But somewhere inside the architecture, something files the shift away.

Beside Eileen, the scroll butler appears once more. No footsteps, no rustle of arrival, just instantous presence. He bows without meeting her gaze, parchment arms folded in quiet preparation.
"The ballroom will receive you now."

She does not reply. She does not look at the Eye, or the chandeliers, or the nobles whose posture has become just slightly more alert. She watches Xozo. But only for a moment. Then she smooths a corner of her shawl and begins her descent.

The staircase curls downward in a broad spiral, not steep, not grand, but ceremoniously aware of itself. Its steps are wide and shallow, made for performance disguised as grace. Eileen walks with the unbothered rhythm of someone who has never questioned whether the tea would be warm when she reached the table.

Each step lands like punctuation in a sentence the room had forgotten it was writing.

Below her, the atmosphere begins to shift. Conversations taper, postures realign even as no herald announces her. A man seated two tiers down tugs at his waistcoat. A noblewoman near the western alcove adjusts her gloves as though caught slouching by a memory of chastisement from childhood.

Eileen does not look at them though. She watches the stairs instead, the way the marble reflects the soft shape of her boots. She knew it was important not to fall, polished steps were after all the bane of the elderly plus she had spent a lifetime already being stared at by things that never learned how to be gentle.

At the base of the stairs, the scroll butler waits. Or perhaps it is another instance of him, manifested like a thought placed just where she would next require it.
"You are received," the butler says, not aloud, but in the quiet logic of her inner ear.
"The Rite of Continuance will now resume."