The Conspiracy Club

"They are not wrong. Merely cursed with the need to be right"

— Seraphis Nightvale, Librarian of the Last Home.

This is not a formal organisation.

No charter exists. No records are kept—not officially, though their walls groan beneath the weight of unfiled theory. There are no titles, no votes, and certainly no agendas beyond the quiet, recursive study of a single, profoundly average man: Dave, Wanna Pint? .

He is not important in the way legends are important. He has no myth. No miracle. No history worth recounting. He is simply there. Always. Unchanging. And for those with eyes too curious or thoughts too stubborn to let that lie, that is the problem.

The Conspiracy Club formed not with ceremony, but by gravity. One patron noticed Dave had never spilled a drink. Another recalled that they’d never seen him pay for one. A third wondered aloud if he had, in fact, always been here.

A room was found. A kettle appeared. And the spiral began.

The Room That Watches Back

Room 3B was once a guest room. It now behaves like a nervous hypothesis—quiet, overstuffed, and one revelation away from collapse. The walls are laced with red string. The floor is cluttered with notebooks, empty mugs, and theories written in handwriting that frays toward madness near the margins. There is always tea. The window always overlooks Dave, regardless of the room’s orientation.

Time moves normally here. Or rather, it pretends to. Spend long enough inside and your thoughts begin to echo. Conversations loop. One chair subtly changes shape depending on who tries to sit in it. The Maids do not enter. They claim the resonance is unstable. I agree.

Room 3B is not dangerous.
But it is absolutely not safe.

What They Think They’re Doing

Officially, the Conspiracy Club studies patterns. They log every known instance of Dave speaking. They chart the foam patterns in his pint. They measure the tilt of his chair, the heat of his soup, the direction he nods and how often. No one has yet found a direct correlation between these things and cosmic disaster—but the fact that disaster has not yet occurred is, according to them, proof that the system is working.

They do not seek to understand Dave. Most have accepted that understanding is, if not impossible, then profoundly inadvisable. They merely observe. They notice. They theorise, in low voices, about whether Dave is a fixed point in the Pattern, a failsafe left behind by some dead god, or simply an anomaly so persistent that reality folded around him to avoid embarrassment.

These discussions are never conclusive. That’s not the point. The point is to keep watching. Just in case.

The Man in the Centre

Dave is… ordinary. He is painfully, almost offensively normal. He wears the same clothes each day. Sits in the same chair. Sips the same drink. He smiles, nods, shrugs, and sometimes mutters vague opinions about the weather.

He has never paid for anything.

He has never spilled a pint.

He has never once, in all the Club’s observation, been interrupted by resonance, madness, divine attention, or plot. And that makes him impossible.

Those who look too closely at Dave often experience what the Club refers to as “Spiral Collapse.” The symptoms include conceptual vertigo, emotionally significant biscuit cravings, and an urgent need to reorganise the stringboard. In severe cases, it leads to Custodianship.

The Axis Custodian

There is always one. Not a leader, not a prophet, not even a volunteer. Merely the one who looked too long and failed to look away.

The current Custodian is named Elwin Modrelf. He once mapped places that did not stay still. Now, he tracks pint-foam geometry and soup behaviour with the same dedication others apply to battle strategy. He maintains the Master Davelog, corrects string misalignments with unnerving precision, and wears a ceremonial hat during major theoretical destabilisations. No one asked him to do any of this. No one else can.

He wanders, now and then—down the stairs, into the library, across the orchard if the sky isn’t too loud—but he does not leave the Inn. Not because he’s forbidden, nor confined. Simply because he doesn’t.

The last time someone asked why, he replied:
“What if I missed something?”

That was enough.

A Singular Incident

Some years ago—though time is difficult near Dave—an old man entered the Inn. No one saw him arrive. He spoke only once, to Lars, and asked:

“Is it safe?”

Lars, who answers to no one, replied: “Yes, old man. It’s safe.”

The stranger turned to Dave, nodded, and said:
“Alright, Dave.”

And then he left.

The Inn fell silent.

The Conspiracy Club has not recovered. The chair the old man sat in is now formally warded. No one speaks of the exact implications aloud. One of the Club’s stringboards is dedicated solely to that sentence.

Why This Matters (And Why It Shouldn’t)

The Conspiracy Club may seem harmless. And in most measurable ways, they are. They do not act. They do not interfere. They are not evangelists, soldiers, or fools. They are simply… paying attention.

But in a place like the Inn, where belief shapes reality, attention can become weight. Focus can become force. A pattern, once recognised, begins to tighten.

If Dave is a story without a cause, a constant without context, then those who notice him may be weaving a cage around something that was never meant to be caged.

Or perhaps they are simply delaying the inevitable.

And perhaps that, too, is enough.