Rusty Lake: The White Door
You are the new keeper of the White Door — a sanatorium that takes in the sleepless and the haunted. By day you treat them. By night you do the other work: for Mr. Crow and the silent Mr. Owl, you reach into your patients' dreams and cut out the black cubes — the residue of memory, which does not belong to this world, and which they want. A great many of them.
The days run on rails: eight time-slots from waking to sleep, staff tending patients, a ledger that must balance. Beneath that, the surreal arithmetic of the Door — extract a memory and a black cube enters the vault; fail, and the contamination rises, the walls move, and something gets out.
- 🕯️ Run the ward by the clock: 8 slots a day — meals, rounds, memory training, lights out — assign staff to patients each slot
- 🧠 Cultivate each patient until a dream is ripe (viability ≥ 80%), then perform the extraction — clean, if you're lucky
- 📊 Balance funds, reputation, contamination, Mr. Crow's favor, memory energy, and your stock of black cubes
- 🧑⚕️ Manage staff by loyalty — recruit, dismiss… or worse; the clever ones wake up in the dream, and become something we don't want
- 🐦⬛ Take Mr. Crow's commissions, endure Mr. Owl's wordless inspections, and survive the things that go wrong at night
Lose your funds or your reputation, let contamination reach 100%, or let Mr. Crow's favor hit zero, and it's over. Do the work well, and perhaps you'll learn what the door is really for — and forge a white cube against it.