The Coin, The Key, The Gateway

Premise: You got on the wrong elevator.

Some backstory... not to say that this will get revealed to the player in this order (or in anything approaching completeness). The afterlife exists. The question of Heaven and Hell is a trickier one. These polar opposites are not a predetermined destination, or even a reward or punishment for a life well or poorly lived. They are more like the good part of town, and the bad side of town, and even the good side has its share of hellishness. The "good" are divided from the "evil", not so much to preserve any cosmic balance, but because there are far more eternal souls than there is eternal space, and those with the power some long time ago dictated that they should, naturally, live out their eternal existences in the spacious shores, while the masses eked out their meager eternity in the endless waves of overcrowded slums. The whole "good/evil" bit just ended up being a convenient excuse. The judges and the processes are just as corrupt, rigged, and old-boy dependent as you might expect.

The one exception to this seething mass of deceased mundanity are a number of creatures collectively known as the Gatesmen (Their actual name is unintelligible, even in the universal human tongue). Mysterious and aloof (even among the afterlife), these powerful and untouchable beings serve a simple and eternal purpose-- they guard the perimeter and keep the dead in their place. There are fewer things more frightening to the already-dead than the fate of those who try to escape, or try to cross the Guardians. They simply... disappear.

How does this involve you? Excellent question!

It's your first day on the new job, on the 18th floor of the ___ building. You start the game hurriedly getting a cup of coffee at a lobby coffee-bar, and running off with your change to catch the elevator. You run into a strangely empty elevator and find yourself with a ghastly looking hulk of a man. He seethes in the elevator silently, as if you weren't even there. As the doors close, a businessman frantically sprints back to the coffee bar you left, shouting hysterically about coins or change or money. (If you drop the change, you can't look at him, and you die in the next scene.) If you look at your change, you find that there is an odd foreign coin included in it (as such things often get passed from hand to hand.) Although you can't make out any of the individual letters, you are somehow perfectly able to read the inscription thereon-- "Be the power with you that you may have unhindered passage" (or suchlike mystic crap-- clean this up later). While in possession of this coin, you are invulnerable to the supernatural powers of the Gatesman.

The elevator ride gets bumpier as it goes along. The elevator jerks and squeals along. When the Gatesman presses the button for the 9th floor, the lights on the panel all die. The lighting in the elevator flickers and fades, and the whole works seems to decay into ruin as the elevator continues upward.

The elevator comes to rest on the 9th floor, and the man steps out. The elevator jerks and lurches, and irrevocably lodges itself on an angle about 3 feet below the floor. The office on the 9th floor is a company called Lifeforce-- as you recall it's some sort of life-extending clinic for the obscenely wealthy. The lobby is spacious and opulent, wide open black marble with a large desk and windows overlooking the city. The receptionist has her back turned, staring out the window at the sun slipping into an eclipse and plunging the city into darkness. She turns, does an almost comedic silent double-take, and runs for the door at the right side of the room. She doesn't make it. When she is halfway there, the man makes a twist of his hand. She is stopped-- her head thrown back, falling into the air. A spurt of blood flies from her twisted face and a fiery flash whooshes out in front of her. Her momentum throws her into a heap. The man nonchalantly walks on. The security panel next to the one exit door makes a high-pitched squeal and an electrical "pop". The office door creaks ajar. The city outside plunges into a deeper darkness, so thick you can no longer see the ground below.

The office, you find, is a cover for a secret organization that has actually captured the secret to eternal life. The coin that was apparently idiotically given to the barista downstairs is a tool of the Gatesman (or a copy thereof), a talisman that wards off the forces of death from those of life, and vice versa. The original was brought by ___, who seduced an upstart Gatesman (they are human after all?) and escaped Hell. She is being protected, in the building, by the Lifeforce "corporation", who have discovered how to gain eternal life by duplicating the Coin. This does not sit well with the Gatesmen, the keepers of the natural order, and this one has been sent back to recover it, and her.

The rest of the game involves somewhat of a dungeon-crawl through the rapidly-decaying office floors (the stairwell is inexplicably sealed) until you find ___ at the center of the building and learn that the office itself has been transported into Hell. Before she is destroyed by the Gatesman, she tells you of a glass Key hidden somewhere in the city that will allow you to pass between the worlds.