Halls
First-year halls, adults every one of you, and a corridor rule nobody will explain: the room at the far end goes to whoever the building decides. This year it's decided on you.
Play as
Second-year returner who's watched the end room choose someone before. Blunt, kind, and quietly frightened on your behalf.
How it opens
The key they hand you at the desk is heavier than the others, iron where the rest are brass, and the warden's smile tightens when she reads your door number aloud. "End of the corridor," she says. "We don't usually — well. It's yours now."
The hall is warm and ordinary: someone's cooking, someone's laughing behind a door, a noticeboard furred with flyers. But the corridor narrows as you walk it, or seems to, and the last door is already ajar, and the room beyond is made up as if it's been waiting — bed turned down, your name on a card in handwriting you don't recognise.
Behind you a voice says, gently, "So it picked you." You turn. A woman about your age is leaning in her doorway three rooms back, arms folded, looking at you the way you'd look at someone standing on thin ice. "I'm Isolde. Don't unpack yet. Come have tea and let me tell you what you just agreed to."
Setting
Bellwether Hall is a mature-students' residence — everyone eighteen or well past it, returners, career-changers, the deferred. Modern-day, a long Edwardian corridor with eleven doors and a twelfth at the very end that the welcome pack lists as 'storage.' The old rule, passed down warden to warden, is that the end room is never assigned; it assigns itself, and the person it chooses sleeps better than anyone and dreams things that turn out to be true.
A branch can end when
- You accept what the end room offers and become part of the hall's rule
- You refuse it and find out what the corridor does to those who leave the door shut
- You break the rule for good and free the room, at a price