Haven Rules

A System Apocalypse LitRPG

EXIT 126 Any Who Ask Book One of Haven Rules FREE ON ROYAL ROAD

Nothing can force its way in. Anything can ask.

Twenty minutes into the end of the world, a night-shift diner cook becomes Keeper of a Haven. At four in the morning, the waitress who went home hours ago is standing in the snow, smiling, asking to come in.

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Any Who Ask, Book 1. Coming to Kindle Unlimited in November 2026 from Weathered Bell Press.

Cover of Any Who Ask, Haven Rules Book 1: a cook at a diner grill looks toward the glass door, where a hooded figure in a pink scarf presses a hand to the frosted glass. A sign by the door lists three rules.

Integration has begun.

Your world has been selected for incorporation.

Class assignment is in progress. Native fauna is being revised.

Local resistance is expected and has been accounted for.

Survival is recommended.

Earth wasn’t invaded. It was annexed.

3:14 a.m. Central, a Tuesday in March. The announcement reaches every person on the planet at once, in their own language.

The System is an indifferent cosmic bureaucracy. It assigns classes, seeds dungeons, and revises the local wildlife into things with too many joints and a level floating over their heads. The grid, the internet and every government are gone inside a week. Nothing landed. The world changed owners and kept its furniture.

One building on this road can’t be taken by force.

The Blue Plate is a 1971 roadside diner on the north frontage of I-80 in western Nebraska. Twelve stools, six booths, a front door that sticks in the cold, pie of debatable vintage. Open twenty-four hours.

About twenty minutes after the announcement it becomes a Haven. Its threshold holds against anything that tries to break through, for as long as three Rules are kept.

The threshold doesn’t stop cold, hunger, sound or sight, and it doesn’t hide the diner from anything watching.

HAVEN

NEXT EXIT

FOOD
SHELTER
HEARTH

Three Rules. Each one costs something.

Rule OneNo blood shall be drawn beneath this roof

It binds every creature inside, guest and monster alike. The Keeper first. He can’t defend his own Haven from within it.

Rule TwoAny who ask for shelter shall be given it

It doesn’t tell honest from deceitful, or a friend from a thing wearing a friend’s face.

Rule ThreeThe hearth shall not go cold

The hearth is the flattop grill. It runs on propane, and the propane is outside.

At 4:02 on the first morning, something asks.

It’s wearing Dot’s long brown coat and the pink scarf her granddaughter made. Dot went home sick at midnight. Rule Two says to open the door. Rule One says that whatever comes in can’t be touched.

Revised
fauna

Next 5 miles

The lot belongs to what the System made.

“Native fauna is being revised” was the System’s phrasing, and people kept it because it was less frightening than the alternatives. Everything outside the threshold is fair ground.

Hollow StalkerLV 3–8
There’s a coyote somewhere underneath. It tested the door once, learned it holds, and stopped testing. Now it sits in the lot and waits.
Ash CrawlerLV 5
Under the snow on the two hundred feet between the diner and the Sinclair. Crossing the asphalt is a decision, not a walk.

A Keeper levels by keeping the door open.

Mack Doyle earns experience for guests sheltered, meals served and nights held. He can’t fight under his own roof at any level. Growing the Haven takes Haven Points, and those only come from letting more people in.

The numbers are kept. Every meal out of the larder, every gallon of propane and every point of experience runs through a ledger, scene by scene.

Haven: The Blue Plate — Tier 1

ThresholdHolding

HearthBurning

Larder212/480 meals

Propane504/720

Capacity3 of 12

Haven points40 of 500

Mack Doyle — Keeper — Level 1

Endurance12

Might9

Grace8

Insight14

Temper11

SkillRead the Room

Opening values on the first morning, base attributes before designations.

Under the roof when the lights went out

Mack Doyle: Keeper
Gus Reyna: Hauler
Priya Raghunathan: Mender
Tomás Herrera: Unclassed

Mack Doyle, forty-one, night cook. Answers a question with the smallest true thing. This is his 2,847th night behind the counter, and he has never once closed early.
Gus Reyna, long-haul trucker, parked forty feet from the door with a reefer full of frozen chicken and a working CB. A Hauler only advances by leaving.
Priya Raghunathan, ER nurse. Her car stopped four miles down the frontage road. She walked the rest and asked to come in at 5:40 on the first morning.
Tomás Herrera, nineteen, alone at the register of the Sinclair across the lot. Two hundred feet of open asphalt away.
The man in the gray coat. Corner booth, since a little after midnight. He asked for water. The glass is still full.

The road goes on past the diner.

Haven Rules is planned as a five-book arc with one point of view throughout: Mack’s. Book 1 covers the first thirty days after the Integration.

EXIT 126Any Who Ask Book 1, on Royal Road now
NEXTBook 2 Being written now
AHEADBooks 3, 4 and 5Planned

EXIT 126 The Blue Plate

The light’s on. Mack has kept it on for 2,847 nights.

Any Who Ask by Thomas Alton. Inside a warm diner, a cook looks toward the glass door, where a hooded figure in a pink scarf waits in the snow. Beyond the window a truck sits in the lot and a creature labeled Hollow Stalker, Level 3 watches.

OPEN 24 HOURS

No blood shall be drawn beneath this roof.
Any who ask for shelter shall be given it.
The hearth shall not go cold.

The hours card has hung by the register since before Mack was born. The three lines in ink are new. Beneath the third there’s an inch and a half of card with nothing on it.

The flattop went on at ten, and by midnight it had settled into the sound it made all night. Mack had noticed that sound exactly twice in eight years, both times when the gas got interrupted and it quit, and both times the silence brought him out of the walk-in at a run. He could tell the grill’s temperature by how a drop of water traveled across it. Tonight the water skated, which meant nothing needed doing.

Snow started sometime after eleven. He’d noticed it on the window glass before he noticed it in the air: small, dry flakes coming in at an angle across the lot, the kind that don’t stick and then do.
The opening of Any Who Ask

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Book 1 is running free on Royal Road, with new chapters through November 11, 2026. Patrons read ahead.