Roby said, “Now, somehow, I have become quite a someone—Lady Shirechester! Made for fire-festing, paid for trial-testing—and master of this house and outside thereabouts!” She had not prepared a speech for the moment, so she played it by elbow—but no one heeded her, for, at that moment, there was a hustle and a bustle amongst the gathered servants.

First came forth from the gathered crowd the Head Housekeeper, Yumpton Alecc, a causal lady of pandoric proportions. “Miss Lady,” she said, “there are bill collectors at the door! Whatever shall we do about it?”

Roby turned about and thought a silly thought. “Let them collect Bill!” she said.

Bill thought this was a little unfair. “Whyn't William this time? I done grew out of 'Bill' in my ol' boyhood years!”

“I made a joke, you see,” said Roby, “or you do not see, but it is a fault of me, so I give apologies! No further attempts shall be made.”

Next came forth the Boss Butler, Gandlemas Hoptrophone, a pactrimal man of macroscopic gesticulations. “Your Ladyship. First of all, someone's made wine out of two men and left the barrels in the wine cellar.”

Roby whirled around and thought a somber thought. “I know nothing of this strange crime,” she said, “nor less of this strange wine!”

“Nor do I,” said Gandlemas, “but my question is, shall I pair them with fish or meat?”

“Fish is meat,” said Roby.

“Fish is meat!” shouted Gandlemas. “Let all the playboys know this decree from her Ladyship! And manwine, thus, is fit to accompany both!”

Yumpton emerged again and said, “The bill collectors demand an audience!”

Roby spun thither and thought a convoluted thought. “Then,” she said, “show them the theater and plant them astage, and soon we will meet them and witness their play, and if it is pleasing we shall have a season of lovely performance and no more abhorrence.”

Lastly from the crowd came the Prime Valet, Odorless Beige, a smooth personage of subtle renown.

Roby twirled whither and lost her train of thought. “I suspect the next vexing question to be the most perplexing,” said she in a gathering corner.

“No question,” said Odorless, “just wanted to know if I could get you anything.”

“Yes!” said Roby with some cheer, for this was a question with a clear answer. “An egg cream and fish and chips.”

“That sounds good,” said Odorless.

“Get two of each, and one is for me, and one is for you, so you can eat too,” said Roby.

Yumpton came back and said, “The bill collectors' play was a flop! Critics are tearing them apart! Now they want to renegotiate their contracts!”

“Oh!” said Roby. “We must see to these collective fellows. It seems they cannot be dispensed with little hellos.”

So Roby, Yumpton, Gandlemas, Odorless with two egg creams and two fish and chipses, and all the other employees of the house went as one to the theater, which had been disassembled and converted into the gym, and now the bill collectors were playing a fast-paced round of B-ball, and were beating themselves by a score of all to nothing.

“Well now—” began Roby, and also ended Roby, for Odorless stepped before her and addressed the invaders, and spoke louder and stronger than she did.

“Behold!” came the booming voice of Odorless Beige, “for the lady of the house has arrived, and in this realm her word is law, so make your case before her and beg, trembling, for the sparing of your miserable lives, if you so dare to remain where you stand, ye pitiful mortals!”

“Well,” said Roby, “perhaps that speech is to akin to violence! It is a more fine thing to say names and become as an alliance!”

“Gotta let 'em know where you stand, ma'am,” said Odorless.

Now the bill collectors came forward, and Bill shrunk to the back of the party, and Odorless bowed and stepped aside so that the bill collectors stood before Roby, all in a line, all dressed in nice smart suits. They all stamped their feet and clapped their hands and threw their heads back and said, “Madam! Ahem! We have been trying to contact you about your car's extended warranty! Ahem!”

“There is not a car of me,” said Roby, confused.

“She ain't got a vroom-vroom machine!” shouted Odorless.

The bill collectors all stamped their feet and clapped their hands and threw their heads back and said, “Madam! Ahem! Your phone number has been preselected to win a stay at one of our luxury five-star hotels! Ahem!”

“That is an odd thing indeed,” said Roby, “for no telephone is of me, and, if one were, I know not what number it would be—except one. That seems like enough.”

“She ain't got a ring-ring machine!” shouted Odorless.

One last time, the bill collectors all stamped their feet and clapped their hands and threw their heads back and said, “Madam! Ahem! Your assistance is needed in moving hundreds of millions of dollars out of my endangered country! Ahem! Please provide your bank account information as a show of good faith, and we will transfer all the gold in Altrapia to your ownership, of which you may keep half! Ahem!”

“Gold?” said Roby. “I cannot eat gold.”

“She ain't hungry for your bling-bling rocks!” shouted Odorless. “That's three strikes, fellas!”

Then the gates at the far end of the room were opened, and a hundred raging gila monsters stormed out, each bearing a dozen sharpened pistols, and they chased down the bill collectors, suspecting they were just scamming the nouveau riche. That they were was just a neat coincidence. But when the gila monsters saw they were in the B-ball arena—that's the technical term—they stopped as one, and went into huddle, and quickly devised a change in plans.

“We challenge you,” said the gila monsters to the bill collectors, “to a match of B-ball!”

The gila monsters arrayed on one side, and the bill collectors on the other, and Gandlemas threw fifty basketballs, fifty footballs, and fifty baseballs into the ring, and the match began in earnest, and balls were thrown and kicked and dropped and grabbed all about the field.

Roby watched all of the accelerating transpirings happening under her newfound roof with a sense of passing diversion and a lack of limestone. “The life of a lady of the manor is an odd one indeed,” she uttered. “It is an odd one in deed.”

Odorless shrugged. “They probably just got the wrong address. This happens all the time.”

“To think,” said Roby, still all in awe, “that one could have in hand an egg cream and a fish and chips as soon as one has the want! The life of a lady of the manor is an odd one indeed.”

“What's odd about it?” said Odorless. He smirked. “Not used to hot meals? Well—I guess being a member of the nobility comes as a shock if you, y'know, weren't one before. It's the good life, m'lady!”

“That is a truth,” said Roby. “And here is some more. I have an announcement, and now I pronounce it: as I am the lady of the house, and the master hereabouts, it falls upon me to make the decree that guides all of thee, naturally. My new rule is this, for I have a wish, and not much is better than hot chips and fish! All you should have it, simply by habit, and you should be glad it fills all your mouths, so then, says I, from this day hereby, you all are by rights master of this house!”

Now, what Roby meant, of course, was something along the lines of the abolishment of a class system, and equality for everyone—that there should be no downtrodden servant class, that there should be no birth-given nobility, and that everyone should have as much as they need, especially in the realm of egg creams and fish and chipses. It was a heartwarming and charming ideal, albeit probably naive—or, perhaps, it was naive to think that it needed to be any more complicated than that to attain justice.

However, that's not what Roby said.

Everyone rolled up most of their sleeves.

“As the master of the house,” said Bill, “I declare that I and I alone am the master of the house.”

“Not so fast,” said Gandlemas. “As the master of the house, I declare that my masterhood is unstrippable.”

“That's the gaudy claims of a pretender,” said Odorless. “As for me, as the master of the house, I hereby pardon myself and set myself free to leave and rejoin society!”

“As the master of the house,” said Yumpton, “I declare the bill collectors hereby sentenced to death by ninety-nine car pileup!”

“We're using them!” said the gila monsters. “As masters of the house, we are playing B-ball! So if you could all please keep quiet so we can concentrate...” The gila monsters didn't finish their sentence, because they had already resumed concentrating.

Now, if there's one thing the estate baron needs, it's a small army of servants, so each of the ex-servants-turned-masters hired their own butlers and housekeepers and valets and grooms and coachmen and scullery maids, but as soon as they each entered the house, Roby's rule took effect and they all became masters themselves, and so needed further servants of their own, which in turn became masters, and—blah blah blah, so on and so forth. Before long, there were over a billion people in the house, and the latest masters were pretty upset that there was no room for their own servants, and so they threatened to quit, but their masters wouldn't hear of it. The house reached maximum capacity and was so overflowing, in fact, that some people had to make their bunks on the spice rack above the stove, and some in hollowed-out books, and some in unused basketballs—

“There are no unused basketballs,” said the gila monsters, grabbing the overlooked balls and adding them to the game. But, it was too little, too late. The final buzzer sounded, and by a score of thirty-nine trillion to negative six, it was the bill collectors who were victorious.

“Bureaucracy always wins,” they said. “Now—it must be noted that the house is parked in a handicapped spot. The parking fine is a dollar. Who is the owner of the house?”

“I am,” said the myriad masters en masse.

“Then you each have to pay a dollar,” said the bill collectors.

Now, under the rulership of the old Lord Shirechester, the manor had become quite a wealthy place, but under Roby's misguided attempts at stewardship, the vault had been split amongst its over a billion lords and ladies, and each of them had barely a penny apiece, and none among them could afford the one dollar fine.

“Then it's the law for you!” said the bill collectors, and they called the police officer, who arrested everyone and threw them in jail overhand. They began to bicker and place blame—as nobility is wont to do—and each pled their innocence, but the police officer wasn't listening, and had already plugged his walkie-talkie into the microwave to listen to the song of plasma as he tried that thing with the grape.

Before long, it was Odorless who finally said, “This is all the fault of Roby Lopkit, who slew Lord Shirechester, and whose foolhearty rule has sown such chaos!” Notwithstanding that ere her naive blessing they had all been servants sharing a quarter between them, it was with truth that Odorless spoke, and so they sought to extract their revenge, and they each withdrew a secret knife from their boot, and they turned to Roby to strike, and they all lunged at her and stabbed her a hundred times, and then they checked to see that they had killed her, but they had not killed anyone, and merely struck at a sad-looking stain on the jail floor that resembled Roby overmuch. And then they realized Roby was not among them and had not been for a while.

Roby was settled into the driver's seat, and she put the house into reverse, peered into the rear-view mirror, and backed out of the parking spot into the street, then threw it in drive—it was an automatic—and started again down the highway at an inconspicuous and legal speed. As she drove down the street, she played with the radio, and found a nice station with songs about miscellaneous cheese. She smiled, and looked up into the sky, and then the gondola carrying Mario the gondolier crashed through the roof and blew up.