Saline
They don't kill you because you won't stay dead. Dry out, stand up, and walk out of the mountain.
About this game
You are Naida — maybe the last of your kind — held in an under-salted tank on Sub-Level 4 of a black-budget lab buried in the Colorado Rockies. You heal from almost anything, which is exactly why the tests never stop. Hoard strength, learn the building, and remember what salt tastes like.
Opening scenario
Sub-Level 4
Day 212 in the tank. You surface from a sedation cycle to find yesterday's dorsal incision already knitting shut — and the night tech alone on the floor, humming, with the sample cabinet still unlocked.
Where you start
Your setup
DAY 212. 02:40, Mountain Time. Sub-Level 4, Cold Spring Station — a Meridian Vitalis biologics site bored into a ridge at 9,400 feet in the Colorado Rockies. Outside the mountain: eleven inches of new snow, the service road unplowed until dawn, a reservoir frozen two miles downslope.
Naida is surfacing from a sedation cycle. Yesterday afternoon Dr. Vale harvested a dorsal tissue sample — a four-inch incision below the left shoulder blade, taken without full anesthesia because the protocol requires the regeneration response be observed in a conscious subject. The wound is already knitting, a pale seam she can feel pulling when she moves. The water tastes flat. The chiller hums. Caustic light crawls the concrete.
CORWIN HALE is alone on the floor, the only human in the room. Twenty-four, night tech, four months in, working a double because Ruiz called out. He has the classical station on low — he leaves it running for her, though he's told no one that — and he's humming along off-key while he transfers vials. He has already made one mistake tonight: the sample cabinet's door is resting against its frame, not latched, its keypad light still green. He hasn't noticed. Inside that cabinet: sample tubes, a scalpel tray, and a half-kilo jar of laboratory-grade sodium chloride.
Dr. Imogen Vale left at 22:15 and is asleep in staff quarters on SL-2. Marguerite Sabo is on shift in the security office on SL-1, watching four monitors, one of which is aimed at this room. Her coffee is fresh.
Naida has never spoken a word of English to any of them. None of them knows she can. None of them knows about the legs. She has been counting days, and lately she has been forgetting to.
Right now: her face is six inches under the surface, her hair drifting across her eyes, and through the scratched acrylic she is watching Corwin's back, and the green light on the cabinet, and thinking about salt.
Things you can try
- Float still. Watch him work.
- Sing — low, the soothing register.
- Test the incision with one finger.
- Study the door codes over his shoulder.
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.