poppyhaze

no first use policy

  • she/her/tā

会说中文 ✨ QC at Falcon Safety Products ✨ will never be a famous writer



Isekai'd protagonist finds themselves in a bunker with an automated message that starts playing, with a mechanical slideshow that tells them they're the Hero, and the deep underground facility they're in is an automated ritual to save their society.

Long ago, their prosperous fantasy magical society was overrun by terrible invading monsters ate magic users to reproduce. They fought a thousand year war but they were losing by attrition. Out of options, their leadership created one last plan.

They would seal a few thousand of their best people in magical sleep using monster cores harvested from the enemy and wait out the war. When all the biomass on the surface is consumed, the monster population would drop to manageable levels over the centuries, and when they eventually wake, they'll retake the world.

One hitch, there were only enough monster cores to put them to sleep, not wake them up. So they set up the isekai plan to take someone from another world, and with automated training golems and recordings, they would have them harvest monster cores on the surface to revive their people.

It takes hundreds of monster cores to revive even one person, so the bunker has a plan to encourage that. All of the areas are sealed off except the ritual, training, and living quarters for the summoned person, food is dispensed freely for the first few months it takes to train, but after that, a monster core is required to get a few days of food. These are banked to begin the revival process.

The bunker can produce preserved food from underground farms in an automated fashion, but only enough to feed a handful of people at best. So they have to fight if they want to eat, and it's just jars of vegetables, millet, and mushroom stews. There's also entertainment that reflects the best of their culture, recordings of plays, books, music, solid gold records to play on a grammophone, etc.

And finally, this ritual has been going on for 600 years, in the 22 times the bunker has had charged enough geothermal energy to summon someone, not a single hero has managed to collect enough to revive even one person. Any social or political questions you are free to make up.


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