Themyscaira -- Game Concept -- Teen RPG

What follows is the script for an opening sequence of a science-fiction game concept I have given the working title Themyscaira. It is loosely based on the Grecian Amazons myth. It’s a setting that could lend itself to a variety of different types of game, but at present I’d probably pitch it as a point and click puzzle solving political thriller, aimed at a teen female market. 

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Scene 1 — The planet Themyscaira, the planet for Them

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Deep space. And then from nowhere, the wispy form of a galaxy. It grows in view. Star systems fly by in a blur. A bright green-blue planet shoots into full and solitary view. A pause to admire that view, and then down, down, down to—

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A ruddy pink sky laced with yolky cirriform clouds, but it isn’t dusk. It is, rather, an alien sky on an alien planet. This is Themyscaira, home planet of an alien race who call themselves Themans or more colloquially, Them. As the Greek myths we humans are familiar with suggest, they appear outwardly to be a race that is composed entirely of human women. Under the surface, however, they are in fact a completely unrelated species of alien hominid, that just happen to all look like human women. In the trillions upon trillions of happenings that happen throughout all possible worlds and all possible universes, these coincidences can occur, as if material planes and extant possibility will reach out tendrils like curious flagella, and touching, will exchange ideas. Convergent evolution writ large.

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They as an intelligent race have been conscious for millenia, and have not wasted any of that time. We see Their technology at a most astounding time in Their history. Themyscaira’s skies are benighted with buildings of arresting style and grace. It’s as if Zaha Hadid herself were a Theman architect in disguise, and not even a particularly praiseworthy architect at that! Fluid ovoids arching up high into the air in the most densely populated cities like palm to palm to palm: groups of hands raised in unison. 

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The roads are paved with giant live amoeba. Live silicate bodies create flat, wide, surfaces of road which clear organic matter by absorbing digestion, the inorganic are moved aside by tiny protruding lobes pushing away underneath. Vehicles are whizzing by quietly. Vehicles that appear to be enormous pond-skater insects, gliding silkily forward on the tips of their chitinous toes. Their hollowed out carapaces are comfortably appointed interiors for between 1 and 8 Them: leaning back dozing, reading something from a tablet screen, enjoying a piece of fruit whilst watching the scenery go by. For after all, the only sensible system of transport is one in which insectoid vehicles are self driving. 

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A peel of thunder, a flash of lightening. The inclement weather causes the traffic to slow to a crawl on the busy city avenue. Water sluices down the window of one particular vehicle, intermittently blurring and focusing the face behind. Young, freckled, with dark hair and dark eyes, they are rather somberly dressed for a person of their age, if one’s reference point is human girls and human age. They blink, and their reflection on the interior of the window looks directly back at you. 

They are, it seems -- you. 

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[Them Official 1] Madam President, we’ve arrived. 

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A delicate skittering turn by the vehicle maneuvers the party of 6 into a covered drop off area in front of a gleaming spiralate building. The car’s carapace opens its gull-wing door and you step out onto a plushly carpeted walkway leading up to a huge set of double doors. You and your party of aides and assistants are given no berth whatsoever, as every person you pass in the corridor seems to have been cooling their heels for your arrival. They try to catch your eye, to initiate conversation. Is it called lobbying because they like to haunt the lobby? It ought to be renamed corridoor mugging, really.

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A second set of double height glass doors swings open for you, held open two by uniformed ushers. The room is a circular auditorium. Rows of seating surrounding a central podium, filled with people in formal clothing. The ceiling opens to the roiling heavens in clear moulded glass — the same spiralate shape you saw from the outside points backwards away from the central podium at a skyward angle. It’s clear now that the whole auditorium is in the shape of a conch, the focus of its spiral is the raised dais on which you now stand.

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All eyes are on you as you breathe deeply and begin to speak. 

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[End Scene]

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[The scene cuts away to a more interactive UI of the game which explains your character and your role in Themyscaira’s politics, and a tutorial of the point-click navigation and narration system.] 

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