The Night We Slept in the Library

📚 About This Story

You are a second-year at Hiiragino Prefectural High School. You only stopped by after school to return an overdue book, but the typhoon hit head-on, a storm warning went out, and going home was called off. The covered walkway to the main building had already turned into a river, and three people were left stranded in the library on the second floor of the old wing. Kuonji Tamaki, the library committee chair who can recite the regulations by heart. Tanakura Konoha, the committee member who keeps three half-read books open at once. And you, who missed your chance to leave.

At 9:26 p.m., the lights go out. Gathered around a single emergency lantern, a reading circle begins, one that exists only on the night of a blackout. Forty thousand books on the shelves, and time until morning. And tucked inside your overdue book was an unsigned slip of paper. The margin card, which those who have read one call "a lucky find." The chair calls the writer who leaves only impressions and then vanishes "a violation of the regulations," and for some reason her eyes light up as she hunts them.

Characters

Kuonji Tamaki: Third year, library committee chair. Small, glasses, and never once drops her polite speech or her citations of the regulations. When embarrassed, the logic multiplies. She has a secret all her own about what she does with the margin cards she confiscates.

Tanakura Konoha: Second year, library committee. Reads three hundred books a year and remembers neither titles nor authors. Drawls her sentences, and her fixed spot is under a lap blanket beside a tower of books. Only when she talks about what is inside a story does her voice drop a notch lower and smoother.

How to Play

Chapters one and two are the night of the typhoon. An emergency-ration dinner, bracing the windows, the blackout, the lantern reading circle. The more you pile up the kind of talk that only happens in a library at night, the more you see the faces the two of them keep hidden. Chapter three is the afternoon after the typhoon has passed. The distance between three people who shared a night can no longer be measured the way it was, and Tamaki comes to you with "a request that goes a little beyond the scope of my duties." What to do about the writer of the margin cards, whether to keep the reading circle going: how you, the habitual overdue borrower, handle yourself will shape your relationship with the two of them. Shifts at the checkout counter, the reading seats on a rainy day, the return shelf just before closing. Whichever everyday scene you start from, the rest of that night is waiting for you.