the dream of the underground show pitch
I dreamed.
It started out as a web series. A man with an usual hobby: there were a few abandoned underground installations nearby. He would find his way in, go to the bottom, then challenge himself to find his way back up without ever using stairs/elevators/etc - he was constantly cutting his way through the ceilings, MacGyvering solutions up. Lots of first-person views with narration over it. Lots of cameras dropped here and there to watch him doing stuff.
Then the plot thickened. There were old experiments in there. Changed humans. Who wanted out, who wanted things he'd found. Just one or two or three. All fast, each deadlier than the last. He was hunted through the place, having to take them out one by one.
Until he defeated the last one in a way that had him and the last experiment thrown into a parallel world. An industrialized world, full of city, full of highways, where he knew nothing of the language. He had a moment of realization when he saw the same word on a packet of snacks and on a truck; he followed the truck and discovered the snacks were some kind of curled potato snack, began to decipher the language. Hid the envelope full of Dark Secrets (which may have been slightly malignly sentient?) from the underground installation's depths in the back of a file cabinet in the trucking office, while befriending the truckers and learning the language.
Then there were other shenanigans in this parallel world. The whole place felt vaguely run-down; not quite post-holocaust but post-something. A little post-communist Russia, perhaps. Standing on a rarely-used freeway overpass, throwing fireworks at soldiers who were firing back with live weapons, because he was just supremely devil-may-care and wanted to impress some gang of juvenile delinquents. Getting chased by some pack of semi-tribal lunatics, caught, and thrown into a weird death trap of some sort of little sprawling complex of asbestos-lined rooms they were ritually setting on fire, that was hung far off the ground. He managed to escape by finding a place it was *just* close enough to the massive pile of mattresses? part of it was hanging near, and sliding out of one of the many mockingly large windows in it. (There was something about how this death trap was designed as a huge instrument, where his agonized dying screams would mix with the air pulled through by the flames to create music, as would his screams if he chose to leap from its large windows to certain death below.) The people who'd put him in there gave chase, he avoided/killed most of them, and then was caught by a last few. Apparently he'd blinded one, and their code demanded that he must now serve as that one's eyes… he was being dragged off to further adventures as I woke up. And what about the nemesis from the underground complex this started in, who may have been thrown into this parallel Highway Exchange World with him?
How would he get home? Because clearly he would, the whole thing was told as first-person narration. Well, maybe I'll find out in some other dream.
Originally published at Egypt Urnash. You can comment here or there.