Pitch
Hm. I've had an idea for a longer, pre-dystopian story that I would be continuing. Tell me if this outline is at all intriguing so I know if this is something worth starting and keeping up with. Just an outline don't expect anything special from it ofc.
OUTLINE:
The prologue will see us at the final day of celebration before the first launching of colonial sattelites towards into space, huge crowds gathering to watch as the hundreds of stations prepared to evacuate a burning earth. Finally, a day of hope! We follow the perspective of a traditionally omniscient narrator for this first section, as it's purely to hint at and introduce the basic premise of this earth.
As the rockets began to fire up and ignite, eventually launching into the sky, yells of delight turned into screams of terror as missiles rained from the heavens-- non traditional ones, one striking the side of each station and not exploding so much as releasing a greenish-glowing cloud into the air. Nonetheless, the stations fell to ground immediately with the effects, every single person inside dying from its effects.
The crowd watched in horror as the satellites began to fall back to earth, seemingly frozen, though the arcing of thousands more of those peculiar missiles caused the crowds to scatter crazily, hording and sprinting, to no particular avail. The missiles struck ground, releasing a glow as bright as the auroras, and all was still. The bioweapon- surely that was it -loosened a wave of something that spread over the surface of the earth, wiping it clean of life and weakening even the non-organic portions of the world, leaving it to erode.
CHAPTER ONE: Here we find out main character, Luke. He's a jack of all trades, doing whatever is needed for the government, which is where he works. He's well-trusted and quite respected by his employers, though they have no qualms about shipping him off to do busywork halfway across the world. He doesn't really mind, though, it takes his mind off things and gives him plenty of time to listen to music and chill, two of his favourite things.
He's pretty easygoing, but cares a lot for life in general, be it human, animal, plant- he just wants things around him to be happy. Other than that, he doesn't do much. He likes to get trapped in little worlds in books, stories, but there's not much else. He's just,,, content? Lurking on the back of his mind is always the beginning of another depressive episode, but he does well staying busy and doing things to keep his mind occupied.
Presently, he's on a digsite in Yemen, and he's finding it really difficult to stay happy with all the suffering around him. People are poor, starving. Hungry, and he feels guilty that he's never had to struggle like they have. On the next call he has with whatever government official sent him on his way, he makes a remark about the state of the country he's in, pleading with them to do something to ease the struggles of these people, to help their quality of life. He pulls a few strings, and is able to get some relief sent over, but a comment made by the official truly haunts him: "You can't save anyone, so why bother trying? You'll only hurt yourself."
That's a rough question for Luke to answer. He doesn't quite know why he keeps up with this regimen of caring so much about the people around him, so he fumbles the conversation and hangs up, a little rattled.
He has a dog that he loves to get back to from whatever journey he goes on, and the dog flies with him pretty much anywhere he goes. The dog's his emotional support animal, a motivation to hurry with whatever he happens to be doing at the time.
He's a bit uncomfortable leaving that dog alone at the campsite, especially with how poor the people around are- he doesn't want to risk it, but he can't bring him everywhere.
He hurries through observing the digging going on and rushes back to camp, breathing with relief as he sees his golden retriever there, panting heavily in the musty heat of the area, a couple of locals petting him and playing with him.
He's mostly just confused as to why he's out here in the first place, what's going on. As per usual, he hasn't been told much- anything -but the absence of information is a little strange even for him. He's pieced together that, well, they're digging for something. Something that shouldn't have been there in the first place. It feels- alien, to encroach in a country so recently devastated by civil war,
CHAPTER 2:
The mornings are even more awful than he would've expected. The cots are incredibly uncomfortable, and he has a big fucking golden retriever taking up most of the space anyways. It's like stepping out into a sauna, sweaty and warm when all he really wants is to step in a cold shower and slowly inch up the heat until it's just warm enough to relax him. Yemen's sauna doesn't seem to fit into that narrow box- there is a shower, however, which was quite nice. Not the best, but enough to wash off the lather of sweat that had filmed onto him overnight. Not that it's worth much-- after a quick breakfast of some bars he brought over (though he only ate a couple of what he had hoped to, it was far better to distribute them amongst the people who truly needed it. They looked like images he'd seen when combing through a holocaust museum) he had to go out to the dig site again, where things feel much... different. Nobody is freaking out, they're too used to the job for that, but there's just a foreboding atmosphere of something that doesn't belong, something out of place. The diggers themselves were visibly shaken, beckoning Luke closer with nervous movements.
As he closed in on the edge of the pit, the quivering and humming seemed to increase, both physically and audibly, making him want to step back and get as far, far away from this hole as he could. Nonetheless, this is what his job was. Ish. A gasp escaped his mouth as he saw what was buried underneath a thin layer of dirt and silt-- a missile casing like none he'd seen before, glowing green in the centre, split in two near the end. He didn't know what it was- surely nothing used by armies of man or beast, but he knew that he should consider himself lucky the thing hadn't been breached when it was exposed. That much was clear.
The missile itself was elegant, tapering off to a conic tip, though Luke couldn't see any kind of propulsion system that he understood at all. It was just... a model of some sort, that had to be it. Something used in some sort of science fiction movie that had been dropped and forgotten... twenty feet under the earth, somehow. The more he thought about it, the less likely it seemed to be.