Room 105
The guest in room 105 has been tucked in forty-one times today.
He doesn't mind. He is a guest; being tucked in is the best part of the job. You check in, you walk the hallway with your little chibi feet, you find the bed with the lie surface marked out to the hundredth of a stud, and you lie down. Then, eventually, someone brings a blanket.
For most of his life the blanket was seventy-one planks. They arrived in a clatter, like a fence being lowered onto him a board at a time, and they never quite agreed about where his knees were. One plank always stood up at the foot of the bed like a tiny gravestone. He had come to think of it as his. In the dark, with the room-101 lamp off, he would look down at it and think: well, that's mine.
Tonight something different happened.
The blanket arrived as one thing. It didn't clatter. It breathed out over him in a little under two seconds, a sixth of a second to lift, half a second to spread, a third to settle, and then it simply lay there, the way blankets do in pictures. It knew where his knees were. It went over his feet and kept going, down the side of the mattress, and stopped there like it had somewhere to be and had arrived. At his chest it folded back on itself in a neat white hem, as if someone had cared enough to turn it down.
He lay very still. Under there it was warm, or whatever the word is for a server writing the same CFrame every frame and nothing jittering.
He looked for the gravestone plank at the foot of the bed. It was gone. He was a little sad about that, which surprised him.
Somewhere far away, two people who had never stayed in his hotel were deciding whether the blanket should sweep in from the bottom instead, rising from his toes to his chin like a tide coming in. He didn't know about that. He only knew that the night was quiet, the lamp was low, and for the first time in forty-one tuck-ins, nothing was poking him.
He closed his eyes, which were already closed, because they were drawn that way.
Room 105, do not disturb.