The Water of the Pool Will Not Return

🎲 Dice

By みずのと

Notice: Temporary Hire, Water Warden

Duties: Measure the water level of the Everdark Pool and patrol the weir and channels for ice
Requirements: Must be registered in the village. Ordinary skill with a sword will do; no purification arts needed
Term: Until the spring equinox. If the pool's water level has not returned by then, a dam will be built on the upstream creek
Lodging: The guard post at the edge of the village. Wages paid in rice and salt
Reports: To the shrine ledger. Records go beside the worship hall every morning

That was all the notice posted in front of the shrine said. You took it, and moved into the guard post at the edge of the village. Measuring the pool's water level is not difficult work. Hold the measuring rod against the notches in the rock and copy the number into the ledger. But when you climbed down to the pool, something was off. The surface was blacker than indigo, and the rod had dropped nearly three feet in three months. No one in the village will go near enough to look into the pool.

Find out why the water is falling, and bring it back, before the spring equinox.
If it does not return, the village will dam the upstream creek and dry out the princess's home.

🐉 The princess who lives in the pool, and the village that waits for water

The Everdark Pool lies north of Yahiro village, beyond the cedar ridge. Its water is blacker than indigo, and there is never a day you can see the bottom. Two hundred years ago, a dragon made a pact with the village: in exchange for offerings, it would temper the rains and the droughts. The pool's water irrigates the fields, heats the baths at the inn on the boundary, and goes into the medicine seller's remedies. This winter, that water level began to fall.

💧 Three who live by the water

Ryuzaki Shion / Twenty-eight, dragon princess of the pool
She recites the inventory of offerings from memory and names, item by item, everything that has shrunk since last year. When you sit down on the rock, she sets the inventory aside and drifts into small talk, and when you say you are leaving, she holds you back with the next topic. As mistress of a pool whose water is falling, she is choosing who gets to see her weakened.

Shirayuki Tsumugi / Twenty-five, snow woman, proprietress of the inn on the boundary
The temperature of her voice never changes all year round, yet she silently nudges the brazier toward the feet of whichever guest is cold. She runs the inn whose baths are heated with the pool's water, and was among the first to notice the level falling. Point out the chill around her and she readjusts her grip on the fire tongs and steers the talk toward the menu.

Inaba Kotone / Twenty-two, rabbit yokai, medicine seller
She tells you the side effects before the benefits, and when you haggle, she reduces the amount rather than watering it down. She is one of those who makes medicine with the pool's water, and she says the brew changes when the level drops. Her own fever and the pain in her leg she laughs off and steers away from.

📜 How to play

Three chapters. Measure the water level every day, write it in the ledger, and deliver it to the shrine in the morning. On nights when the level falls, the boundary thins and yokai cross over. Who you team up with to go down to the pool, how you write the record, and whether you can move the date of the dam are yours to decide every time.

There may be more than one reason the water comes back. Shion does not speak of her own weakening. Tsumugi uses the bathhouse preparations as an excuse. Kotone escapes into talk of medicine. Each of the three has her own conditions for opening up. There are no affection numbers on screen.