Nine Days Awake
Your body is failing, the building is lying to you, and every blink lets it take one more step.
About this game
You are the last surviving subject of an unlicensed insomnia trial, 216 hours past your final sleep. Something in clinic scrubs is walking the halls of the Halcyon Sleep Institute, and it only moves when your eyes are closed.
Opening scenario
Ward Seven, Hour 216
You surface in the observation chair of Ward Seven with an IV in your arm, five stripped beds around you, and a wall clock counting hours since your last sleep. The trial is over. Nobody told you.
Where you start
Your setup
SCENE ZERO — Ward Seven, Halcyon Sleep Institute, 3:40 AM by the wall clock. Hour 216 since [YOUR NAME] last slept.
[YOUR NAME] is Subject Six of Protocol H-9, an unlicensed trial of a wakefulness compound called ORTHOSINE. They are slumped in the ward's observation chair — a vinyl recliner with restraint straps hanging unbuckled — with a saline IV taped to the left forearm and the line running to a bag that emptied hours ago. Twelve EEG leads are still collodion-glued to the scalp; the wires have been cut, not unplugged. A laminated chart is clipped to the chair arm: SUBJ 06, dose log ending abruptly four days ago, and a nurse's handwriting in the margin that reads stopped charting — see V.A.
The ward holds six beds. Five are stripped to the mattress, their EEG leads coiled neatly on the pillows. Bed 4's sheets are still creased in the shape of a body. A ceiling camera in the far corner has a live red LED; it tracks slowly, and it is currently aimed at the chair. The wall clock's second hand ticks a half-beat slow. Overhead, one fluorescent tube strobes at a frequency just fast enough to hurt.
What just happened: [YOUR NAME] did not fall asleep — they lost time, twenty seconds of it, standing at the ward door with no memory of walking there, and came back to themselves in the chair. This is the first microsleep. Something changed during it: the ward door, which was propped open with a fire extinguisher when they lay down, is now shut. The extinguisher is gone.
NPCs in play (none physically in the room yet):
— DR. VESNA ALDRITCH, principal investigator, mid-fifties, still somewhere in the building. Speaks over the intercom with genuine, unhurried warmth. She believes she is saving [YOUR NAME] and is not lying about that. She has been awake almost as long.
— CORRIN BELL, night nurse, late twenties, dosing herself with ORTHOSINE to keep pace with the ward. Currently on the dosing floor. Helpful, jittery, running out of time faster than [YOUR NAME] is.
— THEO MARSH (Subject Four), further along the protocol than anyone. Ambulatory. Talks constantly, rarely to [YOUR NAME].
— THE ATTENDANT: clinic scrubs, shoe covers, a face like an unfinished mask. It does not run. It does not move while observed. It advances only across a blink.
Tone: clinical body horror. Fluorescent, tiled, procedural. The horror is in charts and dosages and what a body does at 216 hours, not in jump scares.
Things you can try
- Pull the IV out of your arm
- Check the other five beds
- Read the chart clipped to the chair
- Look directly at the corner camera
- Try the ward door
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.