“And whiche they weren, and of what degree,

  And eek in what array that they were inne…”

  —GEOFFERY CHAUCER, The Canterbury Tales

  function annotate205(){ codex.updateEntry(“All Great Inns | Every story needs a hall, a host, and a touch of humor. Also, booze.”); }

  // Remarkable how Middle English sounds as confusing today as middle schoolers speak. Rough translation: There are people, there is an inn. Geoff had one—and now, so do we.

  The sound of the lock opening was followed by a bunch of things all at once. There was the chime of a quest being completed, and the bright ding of a level up, and then the deafening grind of stone on stone. The floor lurched beneath them, a mini-earthquake as it tore free from the earth and ascended, moving sluggishly towards the light above.

  Remi didn't have time to think about rewards. He dropped his butt to maintain his center of gravity—elegant it wasn't, but thankfully effective. At least Nel was facing away and didn’t see it. He saved himself some teasing. The makeshift elevator kept rising, rumbling toward a yellow glow that pulsed overhead.

  He felt almost weightless, like he was floating towards the sun rather than being carried upward by stone. Just before he and Nel breached the portal, system text flashed across his HUD.

  [LOCKROOM COMPLETE]

  Entering Saferoom Great Hall

  The weightlessness cut out instantly. The room snapped around them—walls, ceiling, air pressure, everything appeared at once. It was disorienting as hell, truth be told, to have a room blink into existence where you’d expected open sky. This place rarely gave a rats-ass about gentle orientation, which was why, once the transition had stabilized, the warm rush of relief that flooded him pleasantly surprised Remi.

  It felt like returning home after a long day of work: welcoming and familiar. It was a feeling he didn't expect to feel in the Crucible, and he hated to admit it, even to himself, how good it felt to feel welcomed by anything here.

  Remi slowly took in his surroundings. The room was a hodgepodge of both his and Nel’s identities. It was a Frankenstein’s monster of a room—cyberpunk meets Bodleian library, circuitry meets candelabra. Shelly described the monster as evil stitched to evil; this was more like neon fused with parchment.

  The room was a large octagon. On one side and to his left, there was a massive fireplace that was the source of the room’s beckoning warmth. It was made of stone with a wood mantel, and looked like it had been lifted right from the halls of Odin. Opposite it was a large bar, but where the former was rustic, this was sleek and modern, all glossy plastics and neon blue edging that refracted light in liquid waves. It was by far the largest structure in the space, spanning three of the room’s sides.

  The neon lines continued to wrap around the room, melding into holographic bookshelves that were made of light, and yet held aloft very real-looking tomes. Three doors interrupted these shelves. The one immediately behind Remi was large and brass and looked like the miniature version of the door that had opened into the locked room. The other two were crammed opposite each other, nestled impossibly close together. It was as if the architect had been drunk and tried to fit two doors into the space where one should fit. It worked, but felt wrong.

  The sound of clinking glassware drew Remi’s attention back to the bar. He watched in amazement as a bottle floated off a shelf, drifted through the air, and poured a measure of amber liquid into a waiting glass. Only then did Remi notice the man sitting before him—a detail he should not have been able to miss.

  If Remi had thought the room itself was strange, the man at its bar was outright bonkers. He was grizzled and looked like a survivor of countless battles. His white hair hung in tangled cords to his shoulders, with a beard so long it almost touched the bar’s surface. The whole thing looked like it could house a family of small birds. It was as if scarred Walt Whitman had clawed his way out of one of Remi’s books to sit here and work his way through the Crucible’s best whiskey.

  That sight alone would have given Remi pause, but both the man and the room were standard-issue strange for the Crucible. What wasn’t standard was that the man was yelling at his own glass eye, which he held before himself, wedged between his thumb and two other fingers. He twisted the eye back and forth as he talked, as if he was pantomiming its response. Yup, this shit was bananas even for this place.

  As the man moved, the bar shifted with him; the room seemed to wait until he’d settled, like it was a gentleman pulling a chair out on a date.

  Remi looked at Nel, who shrugged. He could only return the gesture. They walked towards the old man, each eventually settling on a stool, one on each side of the man.

  This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

  “I know what I’mma supposed to do—thing of evil!” The man shook his eye. The iris flashed in the neon light, almost as if it were in fact alive. “This is my great room, and I don’t need you telling me what to do.”

  Remi stared forward and let the performance run. Out of the corner of his eye, he watched the man’s ocular domestic, looking past the spectacle and instead tracking how the space reacted to him.

  “Fine. If you’re going to be that way, you can just wait for me here.” With that, the man dropped the eyeball into the whiskey glass. Submerging it in the brown liquid.

  The man shook his head and muttered to himself. Remi thought he made out the word, two? And maybe too many. But he couldn’t be sure. He coughed gently.

  “Excuse me, sir.” The eyeball in the glass floated to face him, clinking against the side like an ice cube.

  “I'm not a sir,” the man said. He turned, fixing his good eye—and empty socket — firmly on Remi. “My mother called me Talanore. I’m Keeper of this hall. You’re not my mom, so you can call me Keep. The pretty lass on my left, however, can call me whatever she’d like.” He turned to face Nel, and Remi watched him wink at her with his good eye in the bar’s reflection.

  The old man flirting with a young woman was cringeworthy, but only having one eye made him look like he was rapidly blinking. The gesture became less playful and sleepier.

  Remi would have said something, but Nel didn’t need protecting.

  Her response of “Gross” left no room for doubt. To his credit, the man blushed and apologized.

  “I’m sorry; I was just trying to be friendly. It has been a while since I hung out with anyone of the fairer—.”

  “Just stop,” Nel cut him off before he could make the situation worse. “It’s fine. Tally.” Talanore blinked, confused at first, then seemed to understand. He’d been too familiar, and so Nel was returning the favor—levelling the playing field so they could move on.

  He smiled and looked back at Remi. “She is a smart lass, isn’t she?”

  “That she is,” Remi smiled.

  “Okay then,” Talanore said with a grin, “you two can call me whatever you want.”

  “Keep works,” Remi said as Nel simply nodded.

  Talanore nodded as well. “I guess we should introduce ourselves proper in that case.” He waved his hand, and the room shifted in response. The three of them slid to the center of the room, their stools transforming into comfortable chairs as they moved. A section of the bar moved with them, folding into a round table. Suddenly they were all facing one another. He picked up his glass and spoke to the eye inside it. “I didn’t believe you when you said we had company. Yes, I know. I owe you an apology, but we need to talk to our new friends first.” He shook the glass; the eyeball rolled around the rim. “Yes, yes, I know. You’re right. Where’s my manners?”

  He looked up from his conversation and waved his hand again, and two more glasses floated over from the bar, trailed by the whiskey bottle. The two glasses were quickly filled. For a minute, Talanore looked confused by all the cups. He put his glass on the table and pushed it in front of Nel.

  She stared down at the offered drink, and at the orb of glass bobbing in its amber depths. “Yah, that will not happen.” Talanore looked genuinely disappointed.

  Remi didn’t hesitate. He stood, leaned across the table and plucked the glass from in front of Nel. In a single fluid motion, he downed the whiskey. It burned as it slid down his throat, and it took all of his willpower not to react when the eyeball ran across his lips and lightly clinked against his teeth. He set the glass down and slid it back across Talanore, who adeptly caught the glass, smiled and nodded in approval.

  “Nice,” he said in response. Another wave caused his glass to refill. He passed Remi and Nel the fresh ones. He raised his glass in a toast. “To friends.” They drank to clinking sounds that appeared from around the Great Hall. Talanore reached into his empty glass and retrieved his eye. He shook it in the air and then plopped it into the waiting socket. The whole scenario was made even more ridiculous because he’d put it in backward, with the iris facing inwards.

  “Let’s get a good look at you,” he said jovially. The eye rotated in its socket, the pupil locking onto Nel. With his other eye on Remi, he was uncomfortably cross-eyed. “Stop it,” Talanore yelled at his eye. In response, it continued its movement to center on Remi.

  Nel leaned in, looking at the eye. “Is it alive?”

  “Not really, well, sort of; it’s complicated,” he said. “Mostly, it's nosy and talks too much.” He paused, listening. “Yes, I know. Fine. It likes guests and is excited to have someone to talk to besides me.”

  Remi had contrasting expressions. He couldn’t hide his confused expression, and she refused to mask her suspicious one. He saw Nel pop open her laptop under the table and ran something that appeared diagnostic. She closed the screen. Trying to hide what she was doing.

  For a moment, the neon along the shelves dimmed, then returned to normal. Talanore’s glass eye shifted slightly, appearing to stare straight through the table to where the laptop had been. Talanore’s good eye flicked toward Nel. “You know,” he said mildly, “snooping is rude, but you’re new.” He took a pull from his glass.

  With that, he segued back to the prepared portion of his script. “Right, back to the introductions.” With arms spread wide, like a ringmaster presenting to a crowd, Talanore boomed, “It’s called the Great Room. It, as well as everything in the Safe Space, builds itself around whoever anchors the space.” As he spoke, his eye seemed to focus for a second on each of them. He twiddled his thumbs as one brow crept higher than the other.

  As if the room were listening, the neon flashed, and the shelved bottles of alcohol leaned in. “As I am your designated guardian.”

  Remi cut him off. “We don't need a narrative nanny.”

  Talanore chortled. “No. From what I have been told, you two don’t really need as much of that, given your particular…” he paused looking for a word, “…skill sets. But most primaries need someone to act as a contact with the systems, hence, me. And while you both have other sources of information, I can still be a ready source of information even to you both. Think of me as more of a secretary than a nanny. I don’t really give a shit what you do, but I’m here to get the job done. If you need something, I can probably get it for you; if you have a question, I probably know the answer. Essentially, I keep this place running smoothly, but most of the time I'm just hanging out waiting for something to do. So I drink a lot.”

  To punctuate the point, the empty glasses on the table refilled. He picked his glass up and slammed it down with a loud belch before proceeding.

  “But now is not really the time for all of that.” Talanore looked longingly at his empty glass, but it refused to refill. “Work first, I guess.

  The light in the room rose a little. Gone was the old inn feeling as the room took on more of an office ambiance. The bottles on the bar sank into their shelves, replaced by books, and an old-fashioned typewriter whose keys were being pressed by a spectral hand. Apparently, it was business time.

  “I’m told you had your first narrative level up, which is exciting,” Talanore remarked. “I think in the hullabaloo you might have missed it, so let’s wind it back and let you do that part again.”

  Talonore’s eye spun like a top rapidly in its socket. The iris blurred into a solid black line. He waved his hand nonchalantly, and the room plunged into darkness.