They stepped through the next door and immediately regretted it. Not because of a trap. Not because of a sudden burst of flame, or a lizard with boundary issues, or even a dance floor asking too many personal questions. No, this was worse.

  This was... an administrative space.

  The room—if it could be called a room—stretched impossibly in every direction. Walls flickered in and out of theme, desks hovered slightly above reality, and filing cabinets marched in procession down what might’ve once been a hallway, now partially consumed by genre drift. The floor was tiled in existential gray. The lighting hummed with the precise energy of a decision that had been pending since the dawn of paperwork. A large sign floated overhead. It shifted fonts three times before settling on something appropriately tired:

  DEPARTMENT OF NARRATIVE SORTING

  Please Wait Quietly. Someone Else’s Arc Might Be In Progress.

  Derrin blinked. “Oh no.”

  Behind him, the door vanished with a pop and a small shrug of magical indifference. Sir Wobblethighs let out a slow breath and reached instinctively for his sword before remembering that bureaucracy, like true love and plague wards, could not be slain with steel.

  Calla gasped. “It’s... it’s beautiful.”

  “I think it’s waiting,” whispered Derrin. “Which is worse than fighting.”

  A ghostly clerk floated past them, arms full of scrolls and muttering, “No, no, this one’s meant to be tragic-comic, not comic-tragic, who’s been misfiling again—”

  The party had not so much entered a queue as become a queue. Lines branched off from other lines. Rope barriers looped in and out of themselves like anxious intestines. A flickering kiosk buzzed intermittently with the cruelest command known to sapient life: Take a Number. Then Wait. Possibly Forever. They did.

  Derrin held their number in both hands like a child clutching a cursed relic. “Four hundred and seventy-three.” The small kiosk let out a polite beep. Now Serving: 3. They stood in silence, the sheer weight of bureaucratic despair slowly settling on their shoulders like a damp legal blanket.

  In the line ahead, a gnome wearing a chainmail bathrobe turned around and gave them a polite nod. “First time?” he asked, voice raspy with multiverse fatigue.

  Derrin nodded.

  The gnome gestured to the shadow beside him. “That’s my subplot. Been waiting here for resolution since the Third Edition.”

  The shadow waved gloomily and muttered something about character arcs being retroactively overwritten. Next in line, a very tall woman with the antlers of a minor forest deity and the name tag “REDACTED” sighed heavily.

  “They keep trying to put me in romance,” she said. “I eat my lovers. You’d think they’d notice the pattern by now.”

  “I was once a prophecy,” said the kobold behind them, wearing a hat labeled FORESHADOWING IN PROGRESS. “Now I’m just a footnote. They downgraded me to ominous weather.”

  Calla smiled brightly. “You’re all so interesting. I think this might be my genre.”

  Wobblethighs squinted at a sign labeled “QUESTLINE STABILITY METRICS: DO NOT TAP THE GLASS”

  “Mostly by accident,” muttered the gnome. “Or divine audit.”

  Just then, the kiosk buzzed again. A spectral assistant floated by, dropped a stack of unfinished narratives on Calla’s head, and flew off yelling, “These are misfiled under narrative whimsy, not thematic anarchy! Honestly, do they not teach structure anymore?!”

  Calla beamed and began leafing through the top scroll. “Ooh, this one’s got a haunted umbrella in love with a baritone. I’m keeping that.”

  Derrin slowly backed into the velvet rope and whispered, “System, any guidance?”

  The air shimmered reluctantly.

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  > Narrative Congestion Detected.

  > Plot Advancement Delayed.

  > Suggestion: Embrace Interlude Until Tonal Consistency Returns.

  > Reminder: Questlines Left Unattended May Be Reassigned.

  “I hate this place,” chittered Pip, who had emerged from Calla’s hood and was now hiding inside a broken suggestion box.

  Morinxandar, of course, remained silent. But somehow, his muffiny presence managed to radiate shared disappointment. In the far-off distance, somewhere beyond a queue that fed into another queue which fed into a survey about queue satisfaction, a small bell dinged.

  “Now serving: Four.” Everyone groaned. And so, they waited.

  The line hadn’t moved in twenty-three minutes. Derrin had counted. Not because he was impatient, but because he’d run out of things to pretend to be doing and there was a clock on the far wall that occasionally reset to a symbol that looked vaguely like a shrug. He was slouched near a potted plant that was either plastic or permanently cursed into rootless immortality, flipping his number slip over and over in his hand. It had started to fray, much like his faith in progress.

  Calla, sitting cross-legged on a bench that squeaked every time she shifted, had been humming for the past five minutes—a tune with neither rhythm nor sense, which, like her, was stubbornly unique. She stopped mid-hum and tilted her head toward Derrin.

  “So,” she said, as though the thought had just danced into her head wearing a beret, “how’d you get into cleric-ing?”

  Derrin blinked. “What?”

  “You know,” she said, waving her scarf like a wand, “praying to the emotionally unavailable, chasing divine voicemail replies, casting mildly helpful spells. What made you think that’s the career path?”

  He hesitated, caught off guard by the earnestness behind the question, and not quite ready to admit that the answer involved loneliness, a muffin, and repeated rejection from every other person he knew along all the other gods on the pantheon list.

  “I... always thought maybe, if I just found the right god,” he began, “someone would notice me. Not love me, necessarily. Just... know I existed. Cleric-ing seemed like the only way to make that happen.”

  The gnome in front of them turned slightly, adjusting his chainmail bathrobe and squinting over his half-moon spectacles. “Sounds like my first marriage,” he muttered.

  Calla snorted.

  Behind them, the kobold in the “Foreshadowing in Progress” hat chimed in. “Existential validation is a known system exploit. Dangerous business. That’s how you end up prophesied by accident. Or worshipping a goose.”

  The woman with antlers sighed again. “I just wanted to be seen as more than an apex predator with a tragic backstory. And maybe start a candle business.”

  Derrin smiled faintly, but it didn’t quite reach his eyes. “It’s not about the power. It never was. I mean, sure, healing’s nice, but mostly I just wanted to matter.”

  Calla watched him for a long moment, the usual sparkle in her eye softening into something quieter. “You do,” she said gently. “To us. To me.”

  The gnome gave a theatrical cough. “Not to sound jaded, but don’t make promises in a queue. Nothing’s real in a queue.”

  “Right,” Calla said, sitting up straighter. “Then let’s talk about something that is real. Sir Wobblethighs—how fragile is reality these days, on a scale of one to metaphorical papier-maché?”

  The knight, who had been whittling something from a piece of narrative driftwood (possibly a ring, possibly a very small spatula), looked up and blinked slowly.

  “Well,” he said, brushing shavings from his lap, “the monastery’s looms have started unraveling on their own. Not just the sacred threads, but also our welcome mats. The monks—what few of us are left—spend most of our time patching metaphysical seams and trying to convince the young not to take up emotionally stable careers.”

  He looked around the room like he expected the walls to collapse mid-sentence. “The Shardlands are held together by hope, habit, and hand-stitching. None of which are in good supply. We’ve been waiting for the Great Re-Stitcher for centuries now. But if they don’t show soon…”

  He trailed off, gaze distant.

  Calla blinked. “Wait, wait—hold on. You’re telling me reality is literally unravelling and instead of, say, training a successor or building contingency plans, you are on a Holy Grail quest for a cup that makes tea slightly too hot?”

  This story originates from a different website. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.

  Wobblethighs raised an eyebrow. “A man’s got to have a hobby. Besides, I’m retired.”

  “That is...” Calla said slowly, “the most beautifully self-aware form of denial I’ve ever seen.”

  “And,” Wobblethighs added, “it’s not just any cup. It’s a symbol. A placeholder for meaning. Also, it might give good back support. No one really knows.”

  A ghostly bureaucrat floated past just then, its translucent hands loaded with forms titled “Narrative Clarification Request – Form 88R”. It paused mid-glide and peered down at them through spectral bifocals.

  “Fascinating,” it murmured, scribbling something onto a clipboard. “You’re the party from chamber seventeen, yes?”

  Derrin nodded warily.

  The ghost squinted again, lips pursed in semi-corporeal judgment. “Still undecided. Genre tag fluctuating. Are you a tragedy with comedic flair? Or a coming-of-age tale wrapped in malfunctioning destiny?”

  “We’re a work in progress,” Calla offered brightly.

  “Most existential crises are,” the ghost replied, drifting away with a thoughtful hum. “I’ll reclassify you as ‘Genre: Fluid’ for now. Carry on.”

  As it passed, Pip squeaked from the confines of the suggestion box, still reading the fine print on a scroll titled “Refund Policy for Unused Plot Hooks.” He sneezed violently, curled back into a ball, and muttered something about unauthorized flashbacks. The queue inched forward. One step.

  Derrin sighed. “Maybe it’s not about being chosen. Maybe it’s about choosing to keep walking anyway.”

  Calla nodded. “And maybe it’s about dancing badly or boldly in every room until someone joins you.”

  Wobblethighs adjusted his armor and patted his pouch where the statue’s love letter still resided. “Or maybe it’s just about getting through the line.”

  They stood in silence for a moment longer, each bearing their own emotional baggage, dreams half-stitched, and hopes smudged at the corners—but still present. The overhead screen buzzed. Now Serving: 12

  Their number was still 473. Derrin slumped slightly. Calla offered a snack—a raisin that may or may not have achieved sapience. Wobblethighs leaned back and whittled on. And in the corner, the shadow of the narrative began to stir.

  ****

  Time passed. Not in a meaningful way. Not in the way that builds character or tells a story or moves the plot forward. Time passed like an underpaid intern with a broom: inefficiently, distractedly, and mostly in circles. At some point—which was both five minutes and four subjective eternities later—a spectral archivist wandered by. He wore a translucent cardigan, glasses with no lenses, and the air of someone who had once cared deeply about his job and then misplaced that care in a stack of misfiled destinies. He paused beside the party, hovering mid-glide.

  “You’re the... metaphysically confused party, yes?” he asked in a tone that suggested he was used to disappointment.

  Derrin looked up from his twelfth failed attempt to mentally pray the queue into moving. “We might be.”

  The archivist reached into a shimmering satchel and produced a thick manila folder labeled in barely legible script:

  Endgame: Cup of Minor Discomfort

  Please handle with mild indifference.

  It was dog-eared, coffee-stained, and had several aggressively pink sticky notes clinging to it like traumatized barnacles. The map inside was drawn in what appeared to be crayon and labeled only in riddles and casual insults. One arrow pointed to “The Place You’ll Regret Missing” while another simply said “Definitely Not Here.”

  “Good luck,” the archivist said. Then he evaporated into a sigh and a faint smell of misplaced deadlines.

  Before anyone could open the folder, however, a bell rang. Not the usual kind, but a dramatic, over-chimed courtroom bell that echoed like someone had been waiting a very long time to use it.

  A scroll fell from the ceiling and unrolled with dramatic flair:

  NOTICE OF CLERICAL ERROR 47-B:

  This party has been mistakenly filed under “Unintentional Gods.”

  Prepare for trial.

  The floor dropped. The rope queue screamed. Calla clapped, because she assumed it was part of a show. They landed with a soft whumph in a vast amphitheater made entirely of litigation. Desks hovered menacingly. Quills circled like vultures. A ghost judge slammed a gavel made of old regrets.

  “Charges?” he asked.

  A different ghost (possibly his brother, or his paralegal, or both) stood up and said, “They disrupted narrative continuity, accrued emotional damage without authorization, and failed to file Form 12-D: Genre Consistency Statement.”

  “I object,” Calla said immediately.

  “To what?” asked the ghost judge.

  “I’m just trying to be relevant.”

  The gavel slammed. “Objection noted. Relevance not found.”

  Then, without warning, the floor warped again. Lights dimmed. Mood music shifted. Their clothing changed. The world shimmered and— They were in a noir detective mystery.

  Derrin found himself in a trench coat two sizes too large, standing beneath a flickering streetlamp. It was raining melodrama and unresolved metaphors. Calla had a cigarette holder with a candy cane in it. She didn’t know why. Wobblethighs wore a fedora on top of his helmet and carried a revolver made entirely of monologues.

  A disembodied narrator began muttering over their heads: “In a city where nothing made sense, three strangers tried to rewrite their own fate…”

  “We have to get out of here,” Derrin hissed.

  “Agreed,” Wobblethighs said, “the lighting is deeply unflattering.”

  “Wait,” Calla said, eyes wide, “I think we’re not in our genre anymore.”

  “No,” said the kobold from earlier, now a hard-boiled bartender cleaning a glass with a sock. “You’ve been reassigned.”

  “How do we get reassigned back?” Derrin asked.

  The kobold shrugged. “Solve the mystery, or break the narrative.”

  So, naturally, they broke the narrative.

  Calla launched into an interpretive dance so wildly off-tone that even the narrator began stammering.

  “Uh… she… uh… she danced… through the shadows…? No, wait—her hips swayed with the pain of—actually, she flailed. She’s flailing.”

  Wobblethighs, ever helpful, threw a desk out a window with a cry of, “I object to this décor!”

  Derrin raised his holy symbol and shouted, “Blessed Interruption!”

  Reality hiccuped. The noir setting folded like origami, and they landed in a janitor’s closet marked Narrative Overflow.

  A glowing sign blinked above them:

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  > Congratulations! You Have Escaped Erroneous Genre Reassignment.

  > Narrative Thread Recovered.

  > Quest Progress: 51%

  > Warning: Genre Boundaries Temporarily Unstable

  > Experience Points Awarded: 0

  > Reason: You Took Too Long

  > Moral Gained: Do Not Engage with Bureaucracy While Conscious

  Derrin sat up and rubbed his head. “Did... did we just get genre-mugged?”

  Calla nodded. “And I think I might be slightly noir now. Is that normal?”

  Wobblethighs picked his hat off the ground and gently dusted off his helmet. “I don’t know what that was. But I miss the lizard.”

  Pip peeked out from inside Morinxandar’s travel pouch and squeaked a single, heartfelt sentiment that, if translated properly, meant: “Never again.” And so they moved forward, wiser in the way of bureaucracy, wearier in the legs, and now slightly more suspicious of sudden costume changes.

  ****

  The chamber they found themselves in was round, which, frankly, felt like a threat. It had that ominous symmetry that suggested either ritual magic or amateur interior design. The walls were made of ancient stone and gently glowing worry. Two identical doors stood across from each other, both promising poor decisions in different fonts.

  One door bore a plaque that read:

  The Hall of Not-Quite Final Bosses

  Because You're Not Ready Yet, And We All Know It.

  The other was labeled:

  The Gauntlet of Mildly Hazardous Obstacles

  Warning: Please Sign the Emotional Liability Waiver Upon Entry.

  The party stood in silence for a moment, collectively considering how they got here and whose fault it was. The silence was eventually broken by the distant sound of a ghost sighing in another department.

  “Well,” said Derrin, arms crossed and holy symbol dangling from a frayed bit of rope, “we should probably consider the implications of—”

  “Nope,” Calla cut in. “We are absolutely not debating again. Last time, we nearly died trying to define ‘strategic retreat’.”

  “I said we advanced sideways with dignity,” muttered Wobblethighs, examining the slightly scorched edge of his cape.

  They did, in fact, try to vote. Wobblethighs chose the Hall of Not-Quite Final Bosses because he “wanted to get it over with and possibly meet an ex he hadn’t properly defeated.” Derrin chose the Gauntlet of Mildly Hazardous Obstacles because it sounded like a metaphor for his entire life. Calla chose both, because she believed in narrative duality and wanted to see what happened if they walked diagonally between the doors. The vote ended in a draw, which was impressive, since there were only three of them and two choices. So naturally, they flipped a coin. Unfortunately, it landed on its edge and rolled mysteriously toward the door labeled “Gauntlet.”

  Calla cheered. “Democracy wins!”

  They opened the door. There was a deep, ancient rumble. Not the kind that said danger is coming, but the kind that muttered, you really should’ve stayed in bed today. As they stepped through, the air shifted. The corridor became stone. Old, temple-like, sacred-yet-suspicious stone. Cracked walls. Suspiciously sloped floor. Braziers that lit themselves as soon as you looked at them wrong. Derrin turned just in time to hear a low grinding roar and see the source of the rumble.

  A boulder. Round. Purposeful. Very fast.

  “Oh no,” he whispered. “Oh no no no.”

  Calla blinked. “Is that rolling?”

  “It’s judging us,” said Wobblethighs, already sprinting.

  The boulder was, indeed, rolling—and very much in their direction. But as they bolted downhill (because of course it was downhill), they noticed something even more concerning. The boulder was already chasing something else. A panicked goblin in ill-fitting explorer gear was screaming ahead of them, waving a map and occasionally glancing behind him to shout, “IT’S NOT EVEN A GOOD RELIC!”

  The corridor twisted. The party ran. The boulder rumbled. Calla danced. Derrin prayed. Wobblethighs cursed the god of inertia. Morinxandar, from his pouch perch, seemed to absorb the entire event in stoic silence. Until, in a moment of pure, carbohydrate-based courage, he bounced free from Derrin’s pack, struck a tilting stone lever with a crunch, and triggered an ancient mechanism that flipped a floor panel—catapulting the party sideways through a crumbling fresco titled “DO NOT PRESS THAT.” They landed, in a heap, in a field of poppies.

  Poppies, growing under a fractured skylight with absolutely no reason to exist underground. They smelled faintly of warm cinnamon and philosophical mistakes.

  No one moved for a while.

  Calla stared at the ceiling. “I feel like my soul has been exfoliated.”

  “I think I have a sprained identity,” Derrin mumbled.

  Wobblethighs groaned, then pulled a single, heroic muffin crumb from his breastplate and placed it reverently back into the pouch.

  “Morinxandar,” he said solemnly, “is the real hero.”

  The boulder, somewhere behind them, hit a wall with the satisfying finality of something that never wanted to roll again. They lay in silence. No system messages appeared for a long while.

  Then, finally:

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  > Quest Progress: 58%

  > Congratulations: You Survived The Gauntlet of Mildly Hazardous Obstacles

  > Notes: We Didn’t Think You Would

  > XP Awarded: 0

  > Reason: You Took Too Long, And Honestly That Was Mostly Panic

  > Emotional Insight Gained: Questionable

  > Moral: Do Not Trust Coins, Maps, or Doors That Label Themselves

  Derrin coughed. “I hate everything.”

  Calla stretched her arms toward the nonexistent sky. “This was the best chapter yet.”

  Wobblethighs grunted, then smiled faintly. “At least we’re not in a queue anymore.”

  And somewhere, deep in the ruins of whatever temple this used to be, a second boulder quietly woke up. But that’s a problem for the next chapter.