Always Afternoon · the bathhouse
The Mosaic
The bathhouse is cold and dry and the pool has been empty longer than anyone can account for. The floor is the reason to come. It was a picture once — you can still make out the ghost of it in the dust — and at some point people stopped repairing it and started re-laying it, a few tiles at a time, with whatever they felt like.
There is a box of tesserae by the door in eight colours. The custom is that you set a few and you do not lift anyone else's.
How the floor works
Every tile you set is written down, in order, with the time and an anonymous mark for the hand that set it. Nothing is ever erased: a tile laid over an older one just sits on top of it, and the whole sequence stays readable underneath. That is why nobody can deface the floor — they can only add to it, and additions can be lifted later.
The floor-master is strict about pace: five tiles a minute, thirty in an hour, per pair of hands. This is not a queue you can wait out of; it is just the rate. Set the ones that matter.
The faint pattern under everything is the old floor. You may follow it or ignore it. Nobody left instructions.