Number, Please

A 27-passage solo gamebook. You are the night operator at a small-town Ontario telephone exchange in January 1957, three months before the town goes to dial. Eleven at night to seven in the morning. Every call comes through you.

The exchange is two rooms above the hardware store on the main street of Cressley, Ontario. A board, a cot nobody uses, a hot plate, and a window over the town's one traffic light. Two hundred and twelve subscribers on forty-one lines, most of them party lines out on the concessions, where four and six and nine households share one wire and tell their calls apart by the ring.

Tonight the radio says freezing rain after midnight. In April the dial equipment already crated in the Legion hall goes in, and the board goes wherever boards go. Until then, every call in town goes through a person, and tonight that person is you.

A farm wife with a feverish child who doesn't want to wake the doctor for nothing. An old man whose line keeps ringing with nobody on it. An overseas call from a soldier in Germany, eleven minutes booked, for a mother asleep at the end of a party line. And the ice, settling onto a hundred miles of wire.

NUMBER, PLEASE is a numbered-passage gamebook in the classic turn-to-84 tradition, played with one die and a pencil. STEADINESS tracks how well you're holding together through the shift. Codewords carry what you did at midnight into what happens at five. The Board at Night fills the quiet hours with the small calls in between, and each one goes into your Operator's Log. There is one hazard in the book, and it is weather. Nothing in this book is your enemy.

Three endings. Each one asks you to write something down.

You need: One six-sided die, a pencil, a notebook, about an hour.

Format: EPUB with live passage links, tested to the EPUB 3 standard. Reads on Apple Books, Kobo, Google Play Books, and any EPUB reader; send-to-Kindle compatible. The Operator's Log and The Board at Night are built into the book. PDF version is suitable for print and play gamebook enthusiasts.

Price: PWYW — $3 suggested.

Credits:

Text, design, and illustration: Julian Grant (illustration made with Midjourney). Built with Gamebook Builder by Shaine Hinnant (amphitheatermatch) — https://www.etsy.com/listing/4585447685/gamebook-builder-interactive-fiction. Published by Julian Grant Games