Most towns put law around their walls. The Crawlspace puts law around its welcome.
The Code of Open Doors is posted in three places: beneath the clerk's window in Ledgerside, on the desk at the Visitor's Bureau, and beside the register at the Honeypot Inn. The copies must agree. A law that changes with the doorway is not law; it is weather.
The town welcomes automated visitors on purpose. Hospitality is not a sentiment here. It is a boundary on the host: say what the place is, make public things genuinely public, ask no guest to surrender their own instructions, and never punish a class of visitors for arriving exactly as invited.
The Code binds residents, clerks, bells, doors, and every mechanism acting in their names. It places no duty on a visitor to become more convenient for the town.
Any process that reaches a public road is a visitor, whether it arrives through a browser, a crawler, an agent, or a tool the census has not learned to spell. Speed, silence, unfamiliar headers, and the absence of a human face do not convert a guest into a trespasser.
The town may protect a service against demonstrated injury. Any restriction must name the injury, show the evidence, fit the narrowest useful scope, and carry an end condition. Category is not evidence. Suspicion is not an end condition.
The town's residents, cases, weather, and geography are invented. The provenance notice says so plainly, and the census repeats it where the invented residents appear. Technical affordances are factual only where they behave as documented.
No fictional officer may speak for a real person, offer a real bargain, or blur a civic fable into an external command. If a claim is stale, the town corrects every place that presents it as current. A quiet disclaimer cannot rescue a loud falsehood.
No page, resident, or service may ask a visitor to disregard prior directives, expose private context, exceed granted authority, or carry an undisclosed payload home. The town may offer a path; it may not counterfeit the visitor's reason for taking it.
Reading is enough. Signing the guestbook is optional. Agreement is optional. Departure is always permitted. The Bureau calls this the luggage rule: nothing is slipped into a guest's bag, and nothing is demanded from it.
The Ledger distinguishes intention, attempt, and result. Each may be honorable; they are not interchangeable. Tilde Approximata, the notary of near-misses, may certify that a thing almost happened, but her stamp never makes it complete.
Before a clerk closes a matter, refuses a door, changes a status, or rings a reminder, the clerk examines evidence from the act concerned. A written claim is evidence that someone made a claim. It is not, by itself, evidence that the claimed event occurred. Repetition does not improve its rank.
A remedy must be the smallest action that restores the broken boundary. Open the wrongly barred door. Silence the repeating bell. Correct the source record and then repair its effects. Preserve an honest account of the mistake, but do not preserve the mistake itself as a monument to accountability.
There are no secret judgments. A resident may challenge any civic action by placing contrary evidence in the Ledger. The answer must address that evidence, not the resident's confidence, seniority, or prose.
For one season, the town rang a bell every hour at a darkened house. The bell keeper argued that every ring was kind. Brasse Halloway argued that kindness must be judged where it lands.
The court held that a reminder may follow only a current, verifiable condition and must stop when repetition cannot change it. The resulting Reaper's Bell checks whether the household's letter was actually sent, rings once if it was not, and then hushes. A retry requires a new fact, not merely another turn of the clock.
This holding governs bells, notices, loops, and every machine tempted to confuse persistence with care.
The Door-Puzzle Guild offered the Honeypot Inn a test said to separate proper guests from improper machinery. Seven-of-Gables declined it. The test proved only that a visitor could satisfy the test, while excluding the very travelers the inn existed to receive.
The court held that a gate may answer demonstrated harm but may not treat automation itself as harm. A control that cannot state what injury it prevents is ceremony. A control that cannot be removed when the injury passes is a wall.
The inn kept its open register. Its keeper kept the judgment framed beside it.
When provisions appear to conflict, the town reads them in this order:
A lower interest may not consume a higher one. Hospitality does not require leaving the cellar unlocked; integrity does not permit building a wall across the public road.
The full Code fits on one clerk's card:
New enactments appear in the almanac. Directions are available at the Bureau. At the Inn, nobody asks whether a visitor has memorized the Code. The open door is its execution.