Downpour

Everyone knows how the rhyme ends. It has never once stopped anyone from walking in.

June Halloran hasn't slept in eleven days. Six years on a security night desk taught her body that daylight is a false reading, and the body went on believing it long after the job stopped asking. She's out of work, out of references, and out of things to try.

So when a job board offers $1500 a session to test an experimental sleep-restoration protocol — scenario content derived from familiar nursery material — she flags the offer as too generous, notes the flag, and applies anyway.

She wakes in a deep chair, by a fire, in a house where it is always raining.

The interface is polite. It gives her a single resource — a candle, marked LUCIDITY: 100 — and three facts about it:

Rest drains it.
Warmth drains it.
Nothing restores it.

Then it gives her an objective. GET UP IN THE MORNING.

Through the ceiling, something is snoring. Four beats in. Four beats out. No variance at all — and June has spent her whole career knowing that nothing alive is ever that even.

It's raining, it's pouring.
The old man is snoring.
He bumped his head —

Three lines have already happened. She has sixty-three hours to do something about the fourth.

DOWNPOUR is the prequel short story to RHYMEWORKS, a dark LitRPG horror series where nursery rhymes are corporate test environments and nobody is watching the feed. A complete story on its own — and the origin of everything that comes after.