NOVEL NEXT Lore drop: The Vault of Faces
The Vault of Faces lies hidden far from prying eyes, buried in a location known only to Ryan & Ryan and their most trusted inner circle. Its precise coordinates are a closely guarded secret, protected by disinformation and layers of corporate misdirection. Some whisper it exists beneath a dead zone in the Wilds, others claim it drifts within a sealed arcology known only to the Nine. Whatever the truth, its inaccessibility is absolute, which is why it is spoken of as though it were myth. The vault is real, it is guarded, and it is untouchable.
Within its labyrinth of corridors stand endless columns of preservation tanks, each holding a face, perfected visages suspended in clear fluid, their expressions frozen in immaculate calm. Every tank also contains the proprietary facial imprint that allows Ryan & Ryan to replicate those features with surgical precision. To the corporation, each face is not merely a design, but a weaponized contract, beauty transformed into intellectual property.
The earliest prototypes remain preserved there, crude and imperfect, relics of Ryan's first attempts at sculpting identity into commodity. They sit beside the later refinements, and finally the flawless Ryan model itself, which serves as the template for all clerks on every showroom floor. The vault is both archive and arsenal: a record of the evolution of corporate beauty standards and a tool to enforce absolute dominance over identity. Ryan & Ryan does not create fashion, it dictates what the world will see, what it will consider attractive, and ultimately, what it will obey.
No outsider has ever been permitted to see the vault. Access is restricted to Ryan alone and the handful of individuals chosen to serve as their inner circle. Even clerks, who all wear the perfected Ryan face, are denied knowledge of what lies beneath the company's control. For them, the vault is legend. For the Nine, it is inevitability. No monopoly of this scale could exist without such a place. The existence of the vault is not questioned, because it does not need to be. It is simply assumed, the natural extension of Ryan & Ryan's absolute control.
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What unsettles the Green Zone is not the thought of the preserved faces within, but of the ones missing. Every few decades, an identity template vanishes from circulation. Entire campaigns are erased, advertisements deleted, and customers quietly reassigned to new standards without explanation. The forgotten faces are not remembered as obsolete fashion, they are remembered as nothing at all. They are wiped so cleanly from records that even those who once wore them often struggle to prove they ever did. The vault decides who is remembered and who is forgotten, what beauty survives, and what beauty is erased. Some whisper that the vault itself is alive, pruning its collection like a gardener trimming weeds, reshaping the very concept of perfection by deciding what no longer deserves to exist.
To the public, the vault is invisible law. Those who purchase a Ryan template never truly own it. They borrow it, they wear it, they live behind it, but their faces remain the property of Ryan & Ryan. A face is not a self, it is a license. The truth is whispered quietly in the Green: your reflection is not yours, it belongs to Ryan. To believe otherwise is the greatest lie of all.
Stories circulate of people who once wore a Ryan model that no longer exists. They pass unnoticed, as if faceless, as though the world itself no longer registers them properly. Some are ignored in conversation, others are overlooked in crowds. The vault has no need to kill them. It simply erases the legitimacy of their appearance, and the world follows suit. Even the System, indifferent and blind, seems to falter when faced with their forgotten visages, logging them as statistical anomalies. For those individuals, life becomes exile not through geography, but through erasure.
This is the true power of the Vault of Faces: it is not simply a collection, not simply a record, but an engine of reality. It decides who exists as someone and who fades as nothing. The Green Zone is built upon its judgment. To the Nine, it is sacred. To the Legion, it is a perversion. But to everyone forced to live within its reach, the vault is not a place at all. It is law written in skin.