Chapter 120: Chapter 120: The Hero’s Solemn Oath Of Stationary Vigil.
Gilda’s weary "Don’t" cut through Sir Crumplebuns’s heroic declaration, leaving a silence in its wake that was heavier than any stone. The faint, smug chime from the wall of light still seemed to echo in their ears, a final, polite insult to Pip’s failed attempts. The acrid smell of disintegrated lockpick hung in the sterile air.
Pip, his professional toolkit and pride in ashes, had slumped to the floor, defeated. He had tried everything—skill, force, even a bit of acid. Nothing had worked. Their last, best practical option was gone, leaving them with only the glowing, impassable wall and the weight of their failure. Zazu, the elf scholar, looked defeated by a problem so profoundly stupid it defied all scholarly analysis. And FaeLina’s managerial brain had finally short-circuited, leaving her hovering like a sad, forgotten party balloon.
They were officially, completely, and utterly stuck.
It was in that moment of absolute, soul-crushing despair, with all avenues of action and trickery exhausted, that Sir Crumplebuns saw his moment. He remembered something his maker used to tell him, a secret stitched into his very fluff as a button eye was carefully sewn into place: sometimes, the most heroic thing a knight can do is simply wait.
"MY FRIENDS," he announced, his stage-whisper full of a new, profound seriousness. He hopped off Gilda’s knee and stood in the center of the small, white room. "THE BUREAU DEFEATS US WITH PATIENCE. WE SHALL MEET THEIR CHALLENGE WITH A PATIENCE OF OUR OWN. A HERO’S PATIENCE!"
He struck a magnificent pose, his Spoonblade held at a perfect salute. "I SHALL NOW PERFORM... THE HERO’S SOLEMN OATH OF STATIONARY VIGIL!"
Zazu’s jaw slackened. Pip chewed his lip. FaeLina’s wings trembled with a new, confused kind of horror. Even Sir Crumplebuns himself seemed to sag a fraction under the weight of his own declaration.
"What’s that?" Pip whispered to Zazu, his eyes wide.
"I believe," the elf murmured, a note of scholarly fascination in his voice, "that he is going to stand there until they give us what we want."
Pip blinked, his mind struggling to process the sheer, impractical heroism of it all. "Really? That’s the plan?"
"Almost never works," Zazu replied calmly, a faint, appreciative smile on his lips. "But it is very heroic."
Zazu’s words hung in the air, and Sir Crumplebuns, as if taking a solemn vow, began his vigil. He planted himself squarely in the center of the room, button eyes locked on the seamless white wall, his entire being devoted to the single, heroic concept of waiting.
The first minute passed in stunned silence. By the fifth, the team’s initial shock had curdled into a strange cocktail of pity, fascination, and bone-deep boredom.
Pip, unable to stand it, sighed dramatically and pulled a set of dice from a hidden pouch. He began gambling against himself, losing three games in a row and somehow still managing to look smug about his "strategy."
Beside him, Zazu evaluated Sir Crumplebuns’s posture like an art critic. "A bold use of negative space," he murmured appreciatively. "Quite daring."
FaeLina’s patience, however, had run out. She buzzed in the air nearby, her wings a furious blur, looking less like a fairy and more like a senior adjudicator preparing to audit Time itself for gross inefficiency.
Even Gilda, who was usually so steady, was getting tired of the waiting. She leaned her head back against the wall with a low grunt. "I once waited out a three-week siege at Blackrock Pass," she muttered to no one in particular. "This is worse."
They were all so lost in their own quiet frustration that none of them noticed the first sign that something was about to happen. It began with the ancient rules of the room, which were absolute, starting to bend. They were bending because someone was being very, very sincere.
Sir Crumplebuns was so focused on his ridiculous, heroic waiting that the air in the corner behind him began to change. A faint, golden light started to gather there, warm and gentle against the room’s cold glare. It smelled of summer afternoons and old magic. A tiny, shimmering crack didn’t just appear in the seamless white wall; it wove itself into existence, a thread of golden light pulling at the sterile white room.
From that golden thread, a new creature emerged. It was a Glimmerwing—a butterfly-like being made of pure curiosity, its wings leaving a trail of sparkling, golden dust in the air. It had been drawn by the sheer, absurd sincerity of the plush knight’s vigil.
The Glimmerwing fluttered around the room, its warm, golden light a soft contrast to the Bureau’s cold glare. Pip froze mid-dice-roll, his jaw hanging open. "What... what is that?" he whispered, his voice a mixture of awe and terror.
"I don’t know!" FaeLina squeaked from Gilda’s shoulder. "It’s not in any of the Bureau’s registries! It’s an unscheduled magical entity!"
Zazu, however, watched the sparkling creature with a profound awe, as if a page from a forgotten storybook had just come to life. "That is a Glimmerwing," he murmured, his voice soft with reverence. "I thought they were only legends. The old tales say they are not creatures at all, but living answers to a prayer that the world itself hears. They are not summoned by spells or power, but by a sincerity so pure it touches the heart of creation. They reward that faith, it is said, by granting a small wish—just enough to help the sincere one on their path."
As if hearing its name, the Glimmerwing landed briefly on Sir Crumplebuns’s brave Spoonblade, a silent acknowledgment of the knight who had summoned it. It then zipped over to the pedestal where the useless quill pen sat. It touched the nib with a delicate plink, and a single silver bead pooled there like a captured star, humming with a soft, internal light. With its work done, it vanished back through the crack in reality, leaving behind a last, lazy sparkle that faded like a sigh.
The team just stared at the pen. On the very tip of the nib, a single, perfect, shimmering drop of silver ink now waited.
The spell of confusion broke. Sir Crumplebuns, still in his heroic trance, puffed out his chest."BEHOLD!" he announced, his voice full of oblivious triumph. "MARK THIS DAY, FOR I ALONE HAVE OUTWAITED ETERNITY!"
"You just stood there," Gilda grunted. Her blunt words cut through his heroic moment, dragging them all back to the terrible reality: they had exactly one drop of ink.
FaeLina’s eyes went wide with a new and very specific kind of procedural terror. "One drop! That’s not ink, that’s a ’Class-Seven Item Deficiency Protocol’!" she wailed, her voice cracking with the horror of it all. "Next comes Form Q-12A: Emergency Droplet Allocation, Appendix R on Droplet Accounting Procedures, and don’t even get me started on the tri-annual echo-parchment enchantment audit! We have to choose!"
The paradox was back, sharper and more vicious than ever, and it seemed to paralyze them all. But as FaeLina spiraled into a nightmare of clauses and subclauses, Gilda was thinking. She’d seen forms like this before in the guild—ones that, once signed at the bottom, would seal themselves and vanish to their next destination. Bureaucracy, she knew, loved a completed form more than the truth inside it. A signature was a shortcut. It was a risk, but it was the only real chance they had.
And then—Gilda moved.
She strode to the pedestal and picked up the pen, the single, shimmering drop of silver ink clinging to its nib like a captured star. A collective, silent gasp went through the team as she turned. FaeLina’s wings froze mid-buzz, her managerial mind screaming a single, horrified thought: This wasn’t a plan; it was a mutiny against procedure itself.
But Gilda’s focus was absolute. She faced the massive, glowing wall of Form 115-C, her eyes ignoring the endless ocean of text.
Not the first line.
Not any of the seven hundred and forty-two sections.
Just the single, small, empty box at the very bottom of the page.
Signature of Authorized Petitioner.
With the steady hand of a warrior who had ended countless battles with a single, decisive stroke, she pressed the nib to the form. She made a single, sharp, downward line. Her mark.
The single drop of silver ink vanished in a silent flash, consumed by the form in an instant. For a single, heart-stopping moment, there was only a profound silence.
Then—
A deep, heavy, and deeply official GONG shattered the quiet, the sound so powerful it seemed to vibrate in their very bones. In response, the entire form was consumed by a brilliant, blinding white light. New text, in a much larger and more stern script, burned itself into the air:
[NOTICE: Unauthorized Irregular Petition Filed.]
[STATUS: Escalated to Adjudicator Level Hearing.]
As the final words settled, the very air of the room changed. It grew cold and stale, filled with the dry, papery scent of a million forgotten documents. A faint scratching, like a thousand quills writing at once, echoed from nowhere and everywhere. The weight of cold and ancient judgment pressed down on their shoulders.
The white walls dissolved into a vast, circular chamber. Three towering daises of polished grey stone rose from the floor, each holding a high-backed chair. The chairs were empty, and their emptiness felt like a silent accusation.
A voice, ancient and powerful and utterly devoid of interest, echoed from all around them.
"The Adjudicators will see you now."
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Author’s Note:
This is the Chapter where patience literally breaks reality—and only our plush knight was sincere (and absurd) enough to pull it off. Sir Crumplebuns doesn’t swing his Spoonblade; he simply waits. And somehow, against all reason, the universe decides that’s enough to bend the rules. It’s the most heroic act of doing absolutely nothing, and it’s exactly the kind of victory only he could earn.
I love the Glimmerwing moment. It’s this little burst of wild, beautiful magic crashing into the Bureau’s sterile white room. The Bureau can’t file whimsy under the right subsection, and so the rules slip, just a little, and something beautiful leaks in.
But the gift isn’t a solution—it’s a problem wrapped in a miracle. They have one drop of ink, which is somehow worse than having none at all. This all leads to Gilda’s final, desperate gambit. She sees the one, straightest, most dangerous path forward and takes it.
Next time: the ultimate showdown is no longer with a form, but with the judges themselves. The Adjudicators are here, and they are not going to appreciate shortcuts.
Thanks for reading, and get ready—this is about to get messy in the funniest possible way.