Arcane Intern

Arcane Intern (Unpaid) is a creator-hosted Twine story about landing an entry-level publishing job and discovering that the office's hierarchy is genuinely magical. You read, choose, and work through a compact sequence of tasks toward three endings.

What is Arcane Intern?

The opening looks like another grim stop on the unpaid-intern circuit: an application, an interview, and the promise of coffee duty. Then a sigil makes the hidden workplace visible, and routine publishing chores acquire dragons, enchanted corridors, and coworkers who guard their power as closely as any office veteran guards a useful contact. The structure stays deliberately manageable—an introduction, three task-centered sections, and a conclusion—while linked choices let you explore how much the intern learns, whom they help, and what they do with that knowledge. The fantasy garnish is playful, but the sharper joke is that magic has not improved workplace politics one bit.

What you can do there

• Read linked story passages
• Choose responses and actions
• Replay to seek three endings

Why we picked it

It turns the humble hyperlink into an employee handbook for a secret magical bureaucracy. The premise is specific, the current creator-hosted page remains reachable, and its 2015 IFComp placement plus Best Story finalist recognition show that the little office spellbook left a real mark on interactive-fiction readers.

How to get the most from it

Start with Apply, then follow the linked choices through each assignment. Read the optional conversations instead of racing down the to-do list; the story's best texture lives in the collision between petty office rules and impossible creatures. A returning-player shortcut on the title screen can jump between chapters when you come back to hunt for another ending.

Good to know

This is a text-first 2015 Twine work with three endings, light puzzles, and a mostly guided shape rather than a sprawling decision tree. The original creator-hosted page still returns successfully, but current controls, device support, saved progress, audio, accessibility, and runtime privacy behavior have not been verified through play.

Who made it, and when?

Astrid Dalmady is the credited creator or organization. The earliest supported launch date we found is 2015.