~ start 3dbec2ab-824b-4443-b62e-1b54f34388f3
if is_quest_accepted and are_quest_requirements_met
	Narrator: *The boarded wing stands the way you left it, except the gap in the boards has been nailed shut again. Clean work. New nails. No hammer marks. Nobody mentions it.* [#end]
		*Whatever the wing had for you, you're holding it. Sister Meredith is at her bench down the hill (location 30,10).*
elif is_quest_accepted
	Narrator: *You wait out the light. The working wing empties, the widow locks up, and the hill goes quiet except for the mine breathing below.*
		*The boards over the side door pry easiest at the bottom. Somebody has done this before you, often, and left the nails loose.*
	- Slip through the gap => corridor
else
	Narrator: *The boarded wing waits at the end of its footpath. Cold comes off the door gap the way it comes off well water.*
		*Rats and roof-rot, the widow said. The path says somebody visits the rats.*
	Narrator: [#quest_info=00c4d4a6-cd8d-4c06-96f2-a46f71fa2f46]
	if is_quest_accepted:
		Narrator: [quest: accepted]
			*The bottom board shifts under your hand, loose on its nails, as if it were left that way for whoever came next.*
		- Slip through the gap => corridor
	else:
		Narrator: [quest: declined] [#end]
			*The wing keeps its own hours. The footpath will still be there. So will whatever walks it.*
=> END

~ corridor
Narrator: *Inside, the dark has a schedule to it. Your light crosses coat hooks, a fire door, the mouth of a stairwell. Dust lies deep and even everywhere except the middle of the floor, where a path is polished through it - small feet, or careful ones.*
	*The air is chalk and cold iron. Somewhere above, a board ticks. Settling, or counting.*
- The office by the entrance => office
- The cloakroom => cloakroom
- The library corner => library
- The stairs down, to the boiler room => boiler
- The stairwell up, to the classrooms => upstairs
- Leave the wing for now
	Narrator: *Outside, the night air is warmer than the corridor was. It takes until the ore rows for your shoulders to come down.* [#end]
=> END

~ office
Narrator: *The office took the roof-leak worst. The files have swollen into bricks of paper, but the cabinet drawer marked V slides easy. Oiled. Used.*
	*An enrollment card, 1987. Vega, Rosa. Born 1979. Guardian: Vega, M. - the address struck through in old ink. The mine row. Under attendance, someone has kept marking the years. The card has run out of room.*
Narrator: *A staff file lies open on the desk, consulted recently. Ellison, June. Hired 1985. In the margin, in pencil, a child's verdict: nice. draws stars.*
	*The last stamp reads OCT 1988 - DECEASED. Filed in the same drawer, same system, no wasted motion. You think about who was left here to do the stamping, and you put the file down.*
Narrator: *By the door hangs the visitors book, the old world's first rule: everyone signs in. After October of '88 the pages are signed by one hand only. Daily. Small and round at first, then year by year longer and harder, the same name wearing down to initials.*
	*The latest line is dated this morning.*
- Back to the corridor => corridor
=> END

~ cloakroom
Narrator: *Forty hooks at child height, each painted with an animal so the little ones could find their coats without reading. Forty shapes of dust. The fox hook is clean.*
	*A coat hangs on it. Wool, a woman's cut from no decade you can name, brushed and dry in a room that eats everything.*
Narrator: *You reach for the pockets and stop yourself. The coat hangs the way coats hang when someone means to come back for them shortly.*
	*Under the fox, faint, scratched into the paint by a short person a long time ago: R.V.*
- Back to the corridor => corridor
=> END

~ library
Narrator: *The library is one corner and three shelves - the mine town never spared more. The books have been read to death and mended with wax paper and pitch.*
	*Wedged behind the atlas, where an adult would never bend to look, a diary. Oilcloth cover. The first pages are a child's careful print.*
Narrator: *Went to school today because it is Tuesday. Nobody else came. I did the pages for the whole class so Miss Ellison has less to grade when everyone is back.*
	*Several entries run like this. Then: I stopped writing the names of who is back. Nobody is back. I do the pages anyway. If I do them right, it means it is still a school.*
Narrator: *Further in, the print has grown. A man came up the footpath today. He talks like the radio does between stations, near-words underneath the words. He didn't try to take anything. He asked what I was learning.*
	*I asked him my composition question, the one Miss Ellison starred. Why can't all the people of the world be friends. He was quiet so long I thought he'd gone. Then he said he asked it once too. He said he found out the answer, and that finding out cost everything there is.*
Narrator: *He knew about the fire before it came. He didn't say it that way but I could hear it underneath. He said sorry like the sorry was his to say.*
	*Second visit. He showed me arithmetic Miss Ellison never did. Need is stronger than like, he said. People can't be friends. But everybody is a friend to the one holding water when there's none. He made me work the problem until I got it right, and then he looked sorry again.*
Narrator: *The child's print ends there. The next page is the same hand grown harder, and it isn't a diary anymore. It's inventory. Cans, cartridges, favors - each with a name against it, each with a price.*
	*The last written line in the book isn't numbers. He stays down by the boiler where it's warm. He thinks I don't know. Everybody thinks I don't know things.*
- Back to the corridor => corridor
=> END

~ boiler
Narrator: *The boiler room is the warm heart of any school, and this one is stone cold and still feels lived in. A bedroll gone to gray powder. Pre-war tins opened with a knife and stacked neat, labels turned outward like a shop.*
	*The children upstairs say Red Rosie lives down here. Children get the address right and the tenant wrong.*
Narrator: *Along the boiler's iron jacket, scratched in with the same knife: letters. Not yours. An alphabet with its shoulders squared, row under row, patient as sums.*
	*One row has been gone over twice, the strokes deep and sore. You don't know the words. You know that pressing that hard means the same thing everywhere.*
Narrator: *By the bedroll, a tally of days is cut into the wall. It stops mid-row - no mark of finishing, the way counting stops when the counter has left, or quit counting, or been counted.*
	*Above the tally, small, a five-pointed star has been scratched by a different, smaller hand. Higher than a bedroll. Right where a visitor standing over a sleeping man could reach.*
- Back to the corridor => corridor
=> END

~ upstairs
Narrator: *The stairwell climbs through boarded window-light, slats of moon lying across the steps like rulings on a page. The classroom wing runs the length of the upper floor.*
	*The polished path in the dust goes one way here. All the doors stand shut except the last.*
- The desk rows in the first room => desks
- The open classroom at the end => classroom
- Back down to the corridor => corridor
=> END

~ desks
Narrator: *The first classroom is dead storage. Desks in rows, lids shut on forty small lives. Carved initials, a painted animal, a rubber band gone to wax.*
	*One desk lid lifts smoother than the rest. Inside, workbooks. Years of them, the same hand aging through the arithmetic.*
Narrator: *The early pages are school sums. Then the sums grow units - cans, rounds, favors owed. Word problems no teacher ever set. If a man needs water and I have the water, what does the man have? The working is shown. The answer is underlined twice.*
	*Names start appearing against the figures. Some names have paid written by them. Some have will pay more next time. One page says only: everyone pays the house.*
Narrator: *On the inside of the lid, in red crayon gone dark as dried blood, a child's drawing of this schoolhouse. Square, proud, a sun above it. No people in it.*
	*You have seen the shape before. Pressed in wax on crates men lost fingers for opening uninvited. Inked on the deep-red scrip that traders swear by. You never thought to ask what the red house was.*
- Back along the wing => upstairs
=> END

~ classroom
Narrator: *The last room is swept. In a building drowned in dust the floor here is clean to the boards, and the air holds the ghost-smell of chalk freshly clapped.*
	*One desk in the middle row is wiped and squared. On it a workbook lies open to a blank page, a pencil beside it, sharpened to a working point. The wood of the pencil is not old.*
Narrator: *The blackboard carries tomorrow's date in a teacher's copperplate, and beneath it the assignment:*
	*Composition: Why can't all the people of the world be friends? Write neatly. Show your working.*
Narrator: *Two seats in this room are open to you. The clean desk, sized for a nine-year-old. And the teacher's desk at the front, a red pen lying capped beside a stack of pages waiting to be marked.*
- Sit at the clean desk => student
- Stand at the teacher's desk => teacher
- Neither. Not yet => upstairs
=> END

~ student
Narrator: *You fold yourself onto the small chair. Knees against the desk frame, shoulders hunched - the body of every grown person who ever came back to a classroom and found it sized for who they used to be.*
	*The pencil is warm, the way wood goes in a held hand. Nobody has held it. You write the date. The room listens.*
- Write: They can. Someone just has to go first => graded_hope
- Write: Need is stronger than like => graded_need
- Leave the page blank => graded_blank
=> END

~ graded_hope
Narrator: *You write it bigger than you mean to, the pencil biting in. It looks like a child's answer. You let it stand, because it was one, once, in this room, and it earned a star.*
	*You stand up, and the room is only a room, and you feel foolish exactly the way you're meant to.*
Narrator: *At the door, something makes you look back.*
	*On your page, in red, a star. Five points, drawn hard enough to press through to the next leaf - the way you draw when it matters that it's true.*
- Leave the desk => drawer
=> END

~ graded_need
Narrator: *The words come easily, which is its own bad news. The working shows itself: water, holder, drought. You underline the answer twice, the way the house style demands.*
	*You stand. Cold walks the rows once, desk by desk, and is gone.*
Narrator: *At the door, you look back.*
	*Under your answer, in red, in a hand colder and more perfect than the copperplate on the board: WELL DONE. It is the correct answer. You know it is. That's the part that follows you out.*
- Leave the desk => drawer
=> END

~ graded_blank
Narrator: *You set the pencil down parallel to the workbook, the way careful children are taught to. The blank page lies there like a held breath.*
	*You stand. The room lets you get all the way to the door before the feeling makes you turn.*
Narrator: *On the blank page, in red, two words: SEE ME.*
	*There is no date on it. There is no room number. You take a quick inventory of everywhere you plan never to be alone in again.*
- Leave the desk => drawer
=> END

~ drawer
Narrator: *At the front of the room the teacher's desk drawer stands open. It was shut when you sat down. You would swear to that in any room but this one.*
	*Inside, alone on the drawer's paper lining, a workbook. 1988 pressed into the cover, and a name in block letters: R. VEGA. Set out the way an example is set out - this is how the work is done.*
- Take the workbook
	Narrator: *You lift it clear.* [#give_item=00c4d4a6-cd8d-4c06-96f2-a46f71fa2f46|c796e5bf-fdee-4204-a00b-2cb5533a6f2b]
		*In the middle pages, a composition - What I want for the world. The handwriting climbs uphill with hoping. The red star is pressed in deep enough to read by touch.*
		*The last page is dated the day of the fire. The sentence stops halfway through a word, and seventy-seven years have not finished it.*
		*You received an item [Rosa's Workbook].*
	Narrator: *You close the drawer. Somewhere below, a chair scrapes back, unhurried - the sound a room makes when a student is dismissed.* [#end]
		*Sister Meredith is at her bench down the hill (location 30,10). The walk has never felt so supervised.*
=> END

~ teacher
Narrator: *You come around the teacher's desk, and the room changes size. From up here the desk rows look like ledger lines. You understand something about her that you did not want as knowledge.*
	*The stack of waiting pages is not old. Mine-town children's homework, this month's dates, left on the sill by kids who will not knock and will never say thank you. The wing does the pages. The wing has always done the pages.*
Narrator: *You take up the red pen. It writes on the first stroke - full and fresh, in a room sealed for lifetimes.*
	*You mark what you can mark. Sums, mostly right. Spelling, mostly hopeful. On the worst page you draw a star, because the worst one tried hardest. The pen knows the shape already.*
Narrator: *At the bottom of the stack, older than everything above it, a workbook. 1988 pressed into the cover. R. VEGA in block letters.*
	*The last page is dated the day of the fire, and the sentence on it stops halfway through a word. It has waited under other children's homework for seventy-seven years, ungraded. The teachers went in the fire. There was never anyone over her shoulder again.*
- Mark the unfinished page: WELL DONE => teacher_marked
- Leave it. Some pages aren't yours to close => teacher_refused
=> END

~ teacher_marked
Narrator: *You write it in red beneath the stopped sentence, in the space a teacher leaves for exactly this. The pen is steady. Your hand is not.*
	*Below the floor, chairs settle. Many, unhurried, a class arriving to its places. Somewhere in the wing a bell rings once, sweet and cracked. End of day.*
- Take her workbook => teacher_take
=> END

~ teacher_refused
Narrator: *You cap the pen and set it down. It rolls, slow, to the desk's edge - and stops there, held by nothing, like a thing waiting to be picked up again.*
	*The room takes a breath and does not let it out. Whatever is owed on that page stays owed. You get the sense the wing prefers the debt.*
- Take her workbook => teacher_take
=> END

~ teacher_take
Narrator: *The workbook comes away from the stack easily. That much, the wing allows.*
- Carry it out
	Narrator: *You square the graded pages on the sill where the children will find them, and you tuck her workbook under your arm.* [#give_item=00c4d4a6-cd8d-4c06-96f2-a46f71fa2f46|c796e5bf-fdee-4204-a00b-2cb5533a6f2b]
		*In the middle pages, a composition - What I want for the world. The handwriting climbs uphill with hoping. The red star is pressed in deep enough to read by touch.*
		*You received an item [Rosa's Workbook].*
	Narrator: *On the way down the hill you do not look back at the boarded wing, and it costs you something not to.* [#end]
		*Sister Meredith is at her bench (location 30,10).*
=> END

~ start cb9b4c5a-a0cc-474d-9936-90f044d6afc3
if is_quest_accepted and are_quest_requirements_met
	Meredith: *She is at the purification bench, the donated workbook squared in front of her like an accusation she has been keeping company.*
		*You set the 1988 workbook beside it. Cover to cover, the whole library of one life.*
	Meredith: *She reads the composition with her lips moving, the way she reads scripture. At the star, her thumb stops.*
		What I want for the world. 
		*She begins a verse - And the waters shall - and does not finish it. You have never seen her fail to finish one.*
	- Tell her what the wing keeps
		Meredith: *She listens without once calling it blasphemy, which from her is a kind of screaming.* [#complete_quest]
			A child sat down in the ash and kept school for the dead. And we sang, half a mile downhill, and never once climbed up.
			*She counts out your pay herself, coin by coin, like penance.*
		Meredith: The books stay with me. Both of them. Some things should not go back into circulation.
			*From under the bench she takes a padlock - new, oiled - and fits it to the donations box, working the shackle twice.*
			Offerings can be handed to me directly. In daylight. From now on.
		Meredith: *Before the lid closes, she reads the donated workbook's last page once more. The red is not old.* [#end]
			WELL DONE. SEE YOU SOON.
			*She turns the lock like a word she isn't saying.* 
			May the pure waters cleanse your path, wanderer.
elif is_quest_accepted
	Meredith: *She looks from your empty hands to your face and back.* [#end]
		The wing gave you nothing? Or you lost what it gave. Go back up the hill (location 30,10). Things given from that place want delivering.
else
	Meredith: *She glances up from the gauges, then at the workbook on its shelf.* [#end]
		The school is not done with you. I can tell. Finish your lessons, wanderer.
=> END