> INITIALIZING SYSTEM... 

> STATUS: CRITICAL ERROR 

> BACKLOG: 44 UNREAD

Welcome to the night shift, SYS_ADMIN. The mainframe is throwing fatal exceptions, the databases are corrupting, and your inbox is piling up. You have exactly 44 critical tickets to clear before the end of your shift.

You have AI automation scripts and corporate HR perks at your disposal, but every action has a cost. If the stress drains your SANITY to zero, you burn out, and the system crashes.

Plan your moves, manage your script memory, and don't let the backlog break you.

The Mechanics

The 3-Action Shift Tickets arrive in stacks of four. You must take exactly 3 actions to process the stack. The 1 remaining ticket is "escalated" and carries over to your next stack.

Color-Coded Triage

• 🟥 Critical Tickets (Red): The workload. Clicking [MANUAL] drains your Sanity equal to the ticket's level.
• 🟦 Automation Scripts (Blue): Your weapons. Install these to absorb Sanity drain from Tickets. Installing a new script completely overwrites your current one.
• 🟩 HR Perks (Green): Your lifelines. These restore your Sanity. However, corporate policy is strict: You may only claim 1 Perk per stack. Extra perks can be burned to clear the board, but yield 0 Sanity.

The Golden Rule: Script Degradation You can use your active Automation Script to absorb the damage of a Ticket (Damage = Ticket Level - Script Capacity). However, your AI degrades as it processes data. The NEXT ticket you automate MUST be a strictly lower level than the last one. If you automate a Level 8 ticket, your next automated ticket must be Level 7 or lower, or the script will lock up.

Escalate (Snooze) If a stack is completely unmanageable, you can hit [SNOOZE STACK] to push all current cards to the bottom of your deck. Warning: You cannot snooze a stack once you have taken an action in it.

Operational Directives (Difficulty Modes)

To begin your shift, enter your assigned protocol seed into the terminal on the boot screen:

🟢 ONBOARDING PROTOCOL (Seed: TUTORIAL) Recommended for all new hires. This pre-programmed shift ensures your first four tickets act as a controlled, step-by-step tutorial. It safely introduces you to manual resolution, healing limits, and the strict rules of script degradation before randomizing the rest of the shift.

🔴 SENIOR PROTOCOL (Leave blank or enter random text) For veteran administrators. Bypasses the tutorial entirely and throws you straight into a completely randomized, mathematically unforgiving 44-card nightmare.

> CAN YOU REACH INBOX ZERO?