Pocket Edition

The year is 1986. A Vermont blizzard. A power outage. A small independent bookstore.

You are trapped on your first day at Hartwell’s Books. The roads are impassable, the phone lines are dead, and the temperature inside is plummeting. Your only companion is Diane - the 29-year-old manager who has spent the last decade trying to disappear behind the counter.

She is 29, though at 4'11" with messy auburn hair, she is often mistaken for being much younger - something she deeply resents. She uses self-deprecating humor as armor, cracking jokes about being "pixie-sized" to distract from the way she drags her right leg when she walks. Twelve years ago, she was an Olympic-track gymnast until a disastrous vault shattered her knee and her identity. Now, she lives with a permanent limp, a scar she tries to hide, and the crushing belief that her life effectively ended at seventeen.

Your battery-powered radio picks up emergency broadcasts between bursts of static, but there's no way to know when the batteries will die. The building creaks under the weight of accumulating snow. The temperature is dropping.

It's going to be a long night. The storm isn't letting up. And she's not the type to talk about herself - but there's nothing else to do but wait, and listen to the wind, and maybe learn who she used to be before everything broke.