Relaxation Vault

The Relaxation Vault as seen in Portal.

Relaxation Vaults are rooms in which test subjects are temporarily held in stasis before and after being put through testing. Test subjects would have to be extracted from the Extended Relaxation Center and into the Relaxation Vault, and at the conclusion of testing, test subjects would most likely be put back into their Extended Relaxation Chamber.

Relaxation Vaults mostly contain beds, tables, toilets, and generally can only be entered and exited by means of a portal. These vaults appear in both Portal and the single-player campaign of Portal 2.

Appearances

The Relaxation Vault serves as the temporary housing for test subjects after they are deployed from the Extended Relaxation Center. GLaDOS has also stated at the end of testing in Portal that the Relaxation Vaults are supposed to be stationed at the end of a test, most likely to carry test subjects back into extended relaxation before they are needed for testing again. However, due to her obsession of killing humans, GLaDOS instead opts for killing Chell by lowering her into an incinerator at the end of testing.

In the beginning of Portal, Chell awakens to find herself in a Relaxation Vault in Test Chamber 00 at the very beginning of the game. After being briefly introduced to the testing environment by GLaDOS, an orange portal opens and she is free to walk into the first test chamber.

During Portal 2's single-player campaign however after Chell is reawakened by Wheatley in the beginning of the game, she is transported to the remnants of Test Chamber 00, and falls into her Relaxation Vault where she must wait until prerecorded message by the Announcer finishes playing, which triggers an orange portal to appear.

Another Relaxation Vault is seen in the chapter The Escape, as Chell falls bait into GLaDOS' trap to enter the Central AI Chamber. This Relaxation Vault is used to control Chell from moving beyond it and contains only a toilet seat, most likely GLaDOS' subtle way of telling Chell to not wet herself.

Development

In the early stages of Portal 2, when the game was originally a prequel titled F-STOP, a piece of concept artwork involving Relaxation Vaults for robots was created.