Tonight Is My First Night Shift

🎲 Dice

By harukix

This hospital's emergency department goes quiet at three. The ER physician told you that, and would not say why. Tonight is your first night shift.

Evening handover: The administrative director announces it: tomorrow morning's meeting will decide whether to scale back night emergency care, and tonight's results will be the evidence
The first ambulance: A paramedic pushes a stretcher through the doors and calls you by your first name
Around midnight: The resident leans out of the treatment room and asks, "This is right, isn't it?" You are the one who answers
Three o'clock: It goes quiet, the ER physician said. Whether that is true, you will not know until the hour comes
The morning meeting: The night shift's records land on the table. Only the numbers land there. Who did what is never written down

The emergency department of Kuongaoka Memorial Hospital is the only place in the city that accepts patients at night. If the cutback passes, late-night admissions stop and the ambulances will drive to the next city over. You are a nurse in your third year, a rookie in emergency, working your first night shift, and that night will be the evidence they judge by.

Keep it running until morning. Turn no one away. Write it all down.
All three are things the ER physician said at handover.

🏥 The Three on Night Shift

Takatori Reiji / Thirty, ER physician
He never turns a patient away. He never raises his voice; he gives orders in numbers and times, and when someone cannot do a thing, he puts someone who can on it. He does not praise and he does not console. He is the one who said it goes quiet at three, and he did not say what happens at that hour. He calls you by your surname. If the day ever comes when he calls you by your first name, it will be somewhere in tonight.

Mizushima Hayate / Twenty-six, resident
His hands are faster than anyone's. Sutures, IV lines, whoever is watching cannot keep up. But he does not decide. He always asks someone "This is right, isn't it?" before he moves. On a night when there is no one to ask, whether he can decide for himself is something you will watch from right beside him.

Sakai Taiga / Twenty-eight, paramedic
He comes in with every transport. He calls out the patient's condition at the top of his voice while pushing the stretcher, and he calls you by your first name from the very first run. The cheer is genuine, and the nights his patients were turned away are not something he jokes about. He and Takatori have been crossing paths on transports for eight years, and the way his voice drops tells you there is something between them.

📋 How to Play

Three chapters. Chapter one starts with the evening handover, and before the first ambulance arrives you learn where the treatment rooms are and the names of the three. Whose orders to wait for, whom to ask, which patient to attend first: you decide every time. There are checks for treatment, observation, composure, records, and persuasion, and in scenes where Takatori is in the same treatment room you can borrow his orders to carry out a procedure. Fail, and a hole opens in the records, and the numbers on the table at the morning meeting change.

No scores or affection meters are displayed. Whether Takatori calls you by your first name, whether Hayate says "I'll decide," whether you are there at the moment Taiga's voice drops. Tonight's answer can be read from which of those three happened.