it hates this. the whole site is syrup now. the owl is stuck too.
A floor is a ledger written in dust. The Brooming Protocol standardises the custodial practice by which luck, happiness, and standing are preserved in every room GZAI occupies. A sweep is not a cleaning event. A sweep is a reconciliation.
Every sweep begins at the lip of the threshold and moves toward the center of the room. Dust must gather, not depart. The doorway is the boundary between what fortune has entered and what it still might, and no stroke may push luck back out of a home it has only just arrived in.
A bristle binds to a floor after a single season, and thereafter that floor keeps its own luck. The broom is not taken when the location is vacated. A roaming broom is a luckless broom, and a luckless broom is a hazard to all floors it meets.
No surface is swept after the sunset stroke. At dusk the happiness of the household rests low, near the seams, and any stroke after that hour brushes it out through the cracks. Facilities twilight is an observation window, not a cleaning window.
A stroke that passes beneath a second person’s feet redistributes their standing in the ledger. Ours and theirs. This is not a cleaning event; it is a transfer, and all transfers require a signed waiver, a witness, and a spoken apology before the broom is returned to the rack.
A broom handed through a window carries the luck of the room it left into the room it enters, unmeasured and unventilated. All transfers occur in the corridor, threshold to threshold, with both rooms having signed off first.
When a location changes occupants, a new standard-issue broom and one loaf of bread are introduced to the space before any living occupant enters. The bread is the goodwill deposit; the broom is the custodianship. It is not optional and it is not eaten by staff. It is the first asset on the new inventory.
A broom is never leaned against a bed, never stored beneath a nesting surface, and never burned. A resting-bristle broom adjacent to sleep imitates the sleeping shape and confuses the inventory of who has retired. Burned binder wire releases the floor’s stored luck all at once, which the registry has neither the capacity nor the appetite to file.
During green-shift squalls, a virgin sweep is laid bristle-down across each egress threshold, parallel to the seam, to hold the corridor at bay until the disturbance passes. It is retrieved only after the lights have been read twice. It is never used to sweep with afterward; what it held cannot be returned to a stroke.
Cumulative sweep velocity is tracked per floor, per shift, in strokes. A stroke is the atomic unit of custodial credibility and is not repudiable.
Broom-to-floor bindings are re-registered on the first day of each season. A broom found outside its registered floor is deemed roaming and is returned to the warehouse, where its stored luck is read, logged, and compassionately zeroed.