Ísbjörn, Awake
A thousand winters in the ice. Now find a job, a name, and a reason to stay.
About this game
You are Liv Isberg, shield-maiden of the Frostblood Clan, a thousand years dead in a mountain coffin — and awake on a steel table in a dark Norwegian lab. The sword is two meters away. The world outside has forgotten your gods, your language, and your name. Make a place in it.
Opening scenario
Hour Nine of the Blackout
The grid has been down over northern Norway for nine hours. In a cold, dark preservation lab in Tromsø, a thousand-year-old body sits up on a steel table — and someone is walking down the corridor.
Where you start
Your setup
TIME: 03:47, a Tuesday in late January. Hour nine of a cascading grid failure across Nordland and Troms — a winter storm took three transmission lines and the repair crews can't reach the pylons until light. Outside it is −19°C, blowing snow, polar night. Tromsø is black except for headlights and a few generator-lit windows.
PLACE: Sub-level 2, Nordvik Biogenetics, a squat grey building on the eastern edge of Tromsøya with a university logo on the door and a defence-funding line nobody advertises. The preservation lab. Backup generators cut out at hour two and have not restarted. The room is lit by one wall-mounted emergency LED, sickly green-white, and the red standby pinpricks of dead equipment. Brushed steel tables. A rack of sample vials going warm. Monitors black. The cold has crept in — the room is near freezing and the lab's climate seal has failed, which is why nobody has come down here in hours.
IN THE ROOM: Liv's cracked stone sarcophagus sits on a pallet jack, lid propped against the wall, a thousand years of mountain grit still in its seams. Liv herself is on the central examination table under a folded sheet, in her burial gown — the finest thing her clan owned. Deep midnight-blue wool dyed with woad, cut close and tailored through the bodice, waist and long sleeves, falling in a slim column to the ankle, with fine silver tablet-weave at the collar and cuffs in her mother's pattern. It is stiff with a thousand winters of frost, every fold holding its shape, and someone has cut a small neat square out of the left shoulder for a fabric sample. It is elegant, costly, and completely useless for January 2025 — she has no coat, no shoes, no underclothes as she would understand them. Her mother's silver tiara is in a padded tray two meters away, tagged NB-114-C. Hvítfang, her sword, is in a long clear evidence crate on the floor beside the sarcophagus, oiled and catalogued, the crate latched but not locked. Also present: a wheeled instrument cart with scalpels and swabs, a clipboard, a dead laptop, a wall clock stopped at 18:35, and a steel door with a card reader whose light is off.
WHAT JUST HAPPENED: Liv's heart restarted roughly forty minutes ago. She has been lying still in the dark, breathing, feeling her own pulse, understanding nothing about where she is. There is no injury on her body. The last thing she remembers is black water and iron on her wrists.
INCOMING: Dr. Mari Solheim, 44, the archaeologist who excavated the Frostblood tomb and opened the coffin four days ago, is coming down the stairwell with a headlamp because she could not sleep and wanted to check the specimen's temperature. She is twelve seconds from the door. She reads Old Norse from manuscripts and has never heard it spoken aloud by anyone who learned it as a child.
Things you can try
- Get off the table
- Find Hvítfang
- Listen to the footsteps
- Look at your own hands
- Speak, in Old Norse
Categories
Play on iPhone
Open this link on iPhone with the Larping app installed and it jumps straight to the game. No app yet? Grab it from the App Store.