Thank you. Welcome to Floor 13. Stay silent, stay immobile, and please try to breathe as minimally as possible,

Resident Hale.

Our arrival has most certainly not gone unnoticed, but restraint is still our safest option right now.

Among the list of things you are likely considering but would result in your doom,

running blindly for the merest hope of an exit, letting loose of the admittedly weak

grasp you currently hold on your sanity,

or turning around and attempting to recall the elevator.

If it will help assure your cooperation in not moving,

I can fully explain the ramifications of each of these choices.

First, and perhaps most tempting, is simply leaving the way you came in.

You can hazard yourself a glance back, but I will save you the trouble.

The door is closed. There is no way to open it without the thing that lives here wishing it to be opened.

And right now, you must again trust me on this assessment.

It very much does not want you to leave.

Glossing over the relatively obvious downsides to submitting to insanity, I would instead prefer

to speak to your impulse to flee.

I assure you that even were you to spend a hundred years here, you would not find an exit

from this floor.

In almost any other floor in Halcyon, walls are solid and immutable.

Doorways, with some minor metaphysical exceptions, tend to stay put and exit the same direction almost without fail.

The floor is courteous enough not to switch places with the ceiling.

Here on floor 13, such luxuries as architectural immutability are hard to come by.

...