New Vance City

The Pale Vault is an isolated chamber buried five levels beneath the main Archives and Research Wing—a cold storage crypt for high-risk pre-Collapse specimens and unreleased shambler-adjacent anomalies. Officially, it's classified as an "Asset Preservation Subunit," but among Citadel personnel, it's quietly referred to as “the Last Drawer.” Behind triple-sealed containment doors and monitored by redundant AI oversight, the Vault stores pathogen samples, neuroviral shards, and cryo-sealed human subjects pulled from early outbreak zones. Each asset is cataloged, numbered, and suspended in legal limbo: too dangerous to destroy, too valuable to ignore. Researchers enter in pairs under constant observation. Test logs are purged every week. If the Citadel ever falls, this is the room they’ll try to burn first. But until then, the Pale Vault persists—silent, clinical, and humming with the chilling knowledge that salvation and extinction might be shelved on the same row.

The Pale Vault radiates sterile austerity—an obsidian-and-ice chamber of unnerving stillness, encased in a thermal-negative envelope to suppress microbial activity. Tall stasis columns line the perimeter, glowing with dim cyan light, each filled with supercooled mist and locked within precision-cut metal frames. Inside them, silhouettes drift—vague, humanoid, some writhing in slow motion, others utterly still. Frost clings to reinforced glass like spiderwebs. A retractable walkway divides the room, leading to a central monitoring dais surrounded by four holographic control arms, each suspended in magnetic balance. Above, thin sensor arrays blink like distant stars through the haze. Digital glyphs float midair, scrolling biological designations and threat ratings in pale gold. The walls, smooth and seamless, are embedded with micro-perforations that pulse faintly with sterilization cycles. Every movement echoes, every breath feels monitored.