antechamber

Well, there's someone in your mansion's antechamber right now who is more than willing to help you select the right people...

The warning "The cake is a lie" is scrawled in blood inside a hidden antechamber, inside one of the levels. Somehow I feel like there are parallels here that you stumbled on more or less accidentally.

Except in my head they were also levitating in the midst of a vast antechamber paved with demihuman skulls, while bathed in a murky, sourceless flame whose flicker caused the wall reliefs to seem to dance, and stab at the probe with wicked implements of shadow. So I suppose disappointment was inevitable :\

Journalism is not an exciting merry-go-round of overheard deals and eavesdropping in antechambers — or, to put a more modern spin on it, hacked accounts and leaked documents. If it were, journalists would be universally mistrusted and would never get invited to any parties, which make up a significant portion of our food-and-drink budgets as journalists’ salaries are generally low.

Org/wiki/Vasili_Blokhin Blokhin initially decided on an ambitious quota of 300 executions per night, and engineered an efficient system in which the prisoners were individually led to a small antechamber—which had been painted red and was known as the "Leninist room"—for a brief and cursory positive identification, before being handcuffed and led into the execution room next door. The room was specially designed with padded walls for soundproofing, a sloping concrete floor with a drain and hose, and a log wall for the prisoners to stand against.