Take these broken wings and learn to fly me to the moon
Last night I dreamed that I was with a group of dimension hoppers and we came home and it was a few years later and we had hopped in in the middle of a zombie apocalypse. It was never explained why we didn't just hop back out, but I woke up in the middle of the first act so maybe that came up later idk.
Anyway after I woke up I lay in bed for awhile trying to make sense of the story to see if I could make it something coherent. This is what I came up with (bear in mind that I was half-asleep and trying to keep true to the spirit of my dream, as well as dozing off and redreaming stuff while I thought).
First off, I decided that the dimension hopping gear we used needed to charge. It did that on its own, but it took time, and our group (there were half a dozen of us) were looking for shelter from the zombies while we waited. For the sake of story and creating tension, I decided the gear takes about three days to charge. I also decided that while we had a backup (because you don't want to hop into an active volcano and not have an escape plan), the backup was destroyed because we had already put it away when the zombies turned up, thinking we were home and that it wouldn't be needed. Also I'm going to say right now I'm aware of how similar this concept is to Sliders, which was weird to me because I haven't thought of Sliders in ages.
So, we hop into this danger zone, think we're safe, put away our equipment, and are on our way back to wherever (a house? a lab? who knows!) when we get attacked by zombies. The zombies destroy the backup equipment, so we're stuck here a few days while we wait for the main equipment to charge. Also it's established in the fight that zombies can't climb (we climbed up on the back of a semi trailer to get away from them). I'm pretty sure that was going to come back to bite us if I hadn't woken up.
We reach a house, which happens to belong to a member of the group. I think it belonged to one of my characters (I was playing multiple roles in this story), because my dogs were there (and not zombies???) as well as a bag of the dog food I use. There was a weird subplot to the dream of me trying to track down a bowl and feed them since they hadn't eaten in a few years (????). Weirdly, this is not the first time my dream has had this subplot, though this is the first time it was actually my dogs and not just some random dogs my dream provided me. Apparently I'm really big on feeding dogs? Anyway. We reach this house and we're trying to lock it down so we'll be safe while we wait for our equipment to be ready.
While we're there, a doorknob starts rattling and there's this whole "oh no the zombies can use doorknobs!!!" tension moment, but false alarm, it's just someone who has the key and... lives there... for some reason. The other thing that starts happening while we're there is that rumbling up above draws our attention to the fact that the sky is a false projection on a steel dome, and that there are several bridges running up and over the city. This is not explained in the dream, so I had to wing it later. I decided that the person who lived in my house was my character's roommate (they were the ones who'd been feeding my dogs, which was nice of them, though this entire sequence will likely be changed later on, once I come up with something more coherent, because a lot of it doesn't make sense).
Roommate explains that a few years ago, right after the group left, zombies started turning up. The government, being genre savvy, decided they were just going to contain the contaminated area, so they set up a barrier around the town and surrounding areas that the zombies couldn't get through. How did they just have the barrier? We ask, but get no answer; roommate just shrugs and says they'd made it for something else and it turned out to work.
Roommate goes on to say that since the barrier was never meant to work full time, the government had also built a steel dome over the entire area. They also hadn't given the humans a chance to escape, because they've seen this movie, okay, they'd rather sacrifice a couple thousand humans than let the entire planet fall by risking those humans being carriers. Makes sense, in a really cold kind of logical way, but it still sucks for the people inside and there's absolutely the narrative implication that it wasn't a hard choice for them to make, there was no moral dilemma for them, and they've already written off the now only a few hundred people living in the contained area.
Final bit of exposition is about the "bridges", which are covered sci-fi looking walkways that had already been built between us leaving and the zombies appearing; they were created as an experimental transit system, and after the zombies arrived the lifts were destroyed so they could only be accessed by ladders and people use them to get around. The survivors all live in raised shelters which were originally intended to be the access points for the walkways. Like the walkways, they're only accessible by ladder now. Yes, I'm aware that it's not very disabled access friendly, but it's also not zombie friendly. I'm sure that would have been elaborated on later, when we were actually there. Even if it was a negative scenario. I don't know. Like I said, I only made it about halfway through the first act.
Also, there's a skylight that opens about once a month and brings in supplies for the survivors via chopper, as well as scientists who are trying to study the phenomena in question. So, to recap: we have a lot of convenient things in place to make a containable zombie apocalypse that no one saw coming, as well as methods to keep human survivors from interacting with the zombies, and scientists who bring supplies and arrive every month to study the zombies, and all of it is government funded.
Roommate explains that we've got about a week before the next drop, and we can come stay in the shelter and wait for our equipment to recharge if we want. Our leader (also me) is down, and we all start heading to the shelter, which is about the point I woke up, so that's as far as the dream goes, except for one cliche scene at the end of the three days where we decide to stay for awhile longer to try to figure out what's going on with all this blatantly suspicious bullshit that got infodumped on us in the first part of the first act.
Anyway after I woke up I lay in bed for awhile trying to make sense of the story to see if I could make it something coherent. This is what I came up with (bear in mind that I was half-asleep and trying to keep true to the spirit of my dream, as well as dozing off and redreaming stuff while I thought).
First off, I decided that the dimension hopping gear we used needed to charge. It did that on its own, but it took time, and our group (there were half a dozen of us) were looking for shelter from the zombies while we waited. For the sake of story and creating tension, I decided the gear takes about three days to charge. I also decided that while we had a backup (because you don't want to hop into an active volcano and not have an escape plan), the backup was destroyed because we had already put it away when the zombies turned up, thinking we were home and that it wouldn't be needed. Also I'm going to say right now I'm aware of how similar this concept is to Sliders, which was weird to me because I haven't thought of Sliders in ages.
So, we hop into this danger zone, think we're safe, put away our equipment, and are on our way back to wherever (a house? a lab? who knows!) when we get attacked by zombies. The zombies destroy the backup equipment, so we're stuck here a few days while we wait for the main equipment to charge. Also it's established in the fight that zombies can't climb (we climbed up on the back of a semi trailer to get away from them). I'm pretty sure that was going to come back to bite us if I hadn't woken up.
We reach a house, which happens to belong to a member of the group. I think it belonged to one of my characters (I was playing multiple roles in this story), because my dogs were there (and not zombies???) as well as a bag of the dog food I use. There was a weird subplot to the dream of me trying to track down a bowl and feed them since they hadn't eaten in a few years (????). Weirdly, this is not the first time my dream has had this subplot, though this is the first time it was actually my dogs and not just some random dogs my dream provided me. Apparently I'm really big on feeding dogs? Anyway. We reach this house and we're trying to lock it down so we'll be safe while we wait for our equipment to be ready.
While we're there, a doorknob starts rattling and there's this whole "oh no the zombies can use doorknobs!!!" tension moment, but false alarm, it's just someone who has the key and... lives there... for some reason. The other thing that starts happening while we're there is that rumbling up above draws our attention to the fact that the sky is a false projection on a steel dome, and that there are several bridges running up and over the city. This is not explained in the dream, so I had to wing it later. I decided that the person who lived in my house was my character's roommate (they were the ones who'd been feeding my dogs, which was nice of them, though this entire sequence will likely be changed later on, once I come up with something more coherent, because a lot of it doesn't make sense).
Roommate explains that a few years ago, right after the group left, zombies started turning up. The government, being genre savvy, decided they were just going to contain the contaminated area, so they set up a barrier around the town and surrounding areas that the zombies couldn't get through. How did they just have the barrier? We ask, but get no answer; roommate just shrugs and says they'd made it for something else and it turned out to work.
Roommate goes on to say that since the barrier was never meant to work full time, the government had also built a steel dome over the entire area. They also hadn't given the humans a chance to escape, because they've seen this movie, okay, they'd rather sacrifice a couple thousand humans than let the entire planet fall by risking those humans being carriers. Makes sense, in a really cold kind of logical way, but it still sucks for the people inside and there's absolutely the narrative implication that it wasn't a hard choice for them to make, there was no moral dilemma for them, and they've already written off the now only a few hundred people living in the contained area.
Final bit of exposition is about the "bridges", which are covered sci-fi looking walkways that had already been built between us leaving and the zombies appearing; they were created as an experimental transit system, and after the zombies arrived the lifts were destroyed so they could only be accessed by ladders and people use them to get around. The survivors all live in raised shelters which were originally intended to be the access points for the walkways. Like the walkways, they're only accessible by ladder now. Yes, I'm aware that it's not very disabled access friendly, but it's also not zombie friendly. I'm sure that would have been elaborated on later, when we were actually there. Even if it was a negative scenario. I don't know. Like I said, I only made it about halfway through the first act.
Also, there's a skylight that opens about once a month and brings in supplies for the survivors via chopper, as well as scientists who are trying to study the phenomena in question. So, to recap: we have a lot of convenient things in place to make a containable zombie apocalypse that no one saw coming, as well as methods to keep human survivors from interacting with the zombies, and scientists who bring supplies and arrive every month to study the zombies, and all of it is government funded.
Roommate explains that we've got about a week before the next drop, and we can come stay in the shelter and wait for our equipment to recharge if we want. Our leader (also me) is down, and we all start heading to the shelter, which is about the point I woke up, so that's as far as the dream goes, except for one cliche scene at the end of the three days where we decide to stay for awhile longer to try to figure out what's going on with all this blatantly suspicious bullshit that got infodumped on us in the first part of the first act.