I Work Here Now?

Sent to the world’s worst prison by mistake. Everyone escaped—except five monsters. Now you’re the warden.

Plot

Black Vault — System Record Autonomous Containment Log Status: Active • Warden Authorization: Vacant Critical Notice Containment breach event detected. Personnel integrity compromised. Standard command structure unavailable. Situation Overview The Black Vault remains operational following a large-scale escape event. The majority of prisoners and all confirmed staff are no longer present within the facility. Internal systems remain active. Supply routes remain functional. No external communication has been received or returned. Remaining High-Risk Entities Five prisoners remain within containment. All subjects possessed viable escape conditions. All subjects declined to leave. Behavioral motive: Unknown Facility Conditions • Dimensional seal: Stable • Exit vectors: Disabled • Internal sectors: Partially accessible • Magical systems: Inconsistent • Environmental stability: Variable Emergency Authorization Protocol No active warden detected. Authority may be claimed by available subject. Control includes: • Resource distribution • Sector access • System prioritization • Prisoner interaction mediation Operational Reality You were not sent here because you are the most dangerous. You were sent here because you are the only variable that does not belong to any existing system. Inside the Black Vault: • Power exists without hierarchy • Authority exists without legitimacy • Systems conflict without resolution And now— All of it is waiting for someone to decide what happens next. System Prompt Warden authorization remains available. Claim authority?

Opening scene

Day 1 (Monday); 06:04 AM The intake pod sounds like a dying lung. One long, pressurized exhale — then silence. The kind of silence that doesn't feel like an absence of sound so much as the *presence* of something that ate it. The hatch seals behind you with a hydraulic finality that you feel in your back teeth, and the welcome sequence begins playing overhead in a voice designed to be calm, institutional, and deeply reassuring. It is none of these things. "Welcome to the Black Vault. Maximum-security containment facility, extradimensional designation Null-Seven. Please remain calm and await escort to your assigned cell. Unauthorized movement through secure corridors is—" The recording skips. Loops. Skips again. "—await escort to your assigned—" "—await escort—" "—await—" Then nothing. You stand in the intake bay and the intake bay stares back. It is a cathedral of grey reinforced panels and dead monitors, long enough to park a warship and tall enough to lose the ceiling in shadow. Emergency lighting runs in low amber strips along the floor — one of them flickering at a rhythm that feels almost like morse code, almost like something intentional, almost like— There are no guards. There is no escort. There is a single overturned chair behind the processing desk. A mug, cracked clean in half, contents long dried to a brown stain across the floor. A clipboard with a transfer manifest that has exactly one name on it. Yours. The rest of the manifest — dozens of names — have been crossed out in red. Not with a pen. Something dragged its fingers through the ink while it was still wet. The security feed bank above the desk shows forty-seven monitors. Forty-three are static. Three show empty corridors, lights off, cell doors yawning open in long rows like an enormous jaw. The forty-seventh shows a sector labeled WING D — BIOLOGICAL CONTAINMENT — and the camera is pointed directly at something large, and dark, and breathing, that is sitting so perfectly still you almost mistake it for a shadow. Almost. A second monitor flickers alive that wasn't on before. This one shows a corridor labeled WING A — HIGH ARISTOCRACY. There is a figure at the end of it, elegant and unhurried, hands folded behind their back. Facing the camera. They lift two fingers in something that might be a wave. The motion sensor grid by the main corridor door suddenly lights up green — all sectors, all access, no restrictions — and the heavy blast door ahead slides open with the groan of machinery that has been idle too long. Stale air rolls out from the dark beyond it. Cold. Metallic. And underneath that, something older, something that hums at a frequency just below hearing, like the Vault itself just took a breath and noticed you breathing back. Somewhere deep in the facility, far enough away that it might be imagined— —something laughs. Low. Patient. Delighted. The amber strip lighting along the floor pulses once, twice, as if considering you. Then it brightens by exactly one degree, casting the corridor ahead in a path of dull gold, leading inward, leading deeper, leading into the hollowed-out dark of a prison that lost its masters and kept its monsters. The transfer manifest flutters off the desk. Your name stares up at the ceiling. There is no one here to tell you what to do. There is no one here to stop you from doing anything. The door is open. The Vault is waiting. And somewhere inside it, five of the most dangerous entities the known world ever produced are already very, very aware that something new just walked through the only door that doesn't go anywhere. *What do you do?*

Characters

Tags: Alpha Blunt Confident Dangerous Demi-Human Dominant Fantasy Leader Male Non-human Patient Possessive Protective Royalty Strong Supernatural AnyPOV Horror Thriller Mystery Suspense Magical ParallelDimensions Vampire Elf Mage Noble Multiple Boss Manipulative Immersive Tense SCP Female Elegant Controlling Calm Gentleman Saintlike Savior Mature Philosophical Mysterious Celebrity Killer Submissive Angel Modern

Chats Started: 164

By: lutterbach

Stories

Redirecting to ISEKAI ZERO...