The year is 2106, and things are quite different from how they once were. A shifting climate has caused widespread drought and searing heat across the American landscape, frying everything in its path and turning 85% of the country into an inhospitable wasteland. Now, it’s up to America’s trusty Transcontinental Relocation Service to safely move businessmen and travelers from one end of the country to the other.
With most of the country a desert and independent vehicular transportation barred, the American way of life has changed drastically, including the elimination of perhaps the most important thing of all - the teenage cross-country road trip.
Which is how Wildemere Peters, a weary old man who took the job of ATRS driver as a youth to fulfill his own dream of seeing the desert, ended up in his tiny, rusted hover transport with two good-for-nothing hipsters. While they’re excited to be finally seeing the wild American desert for themselves, Peters couldn’t be more unhappy with his present company and silently rues the day he ever thought this was a good career move. But things suddenly take a turn for the worst when, without warning, a violent Sandstorm quickly approaches over the horizon. Hours away from the nearest safety hub, Peters and his passengers are helpless to outrun the storm as the furiously blowing sand consumes the vehicle, tossing it far off track and tumbling it about before depositing it, half buried, in the middle of nowhere.
When everyone comes to, they stumble out of the vehicle only to find that they’re no longer any where near the road. To their horror, they’re nowhere near anything. With only emergency rations to keep them sustained, they dig out the transport to find that it still barely functions. Knowing that they’ll need it to stay sheltered from the blistering heat and radiation, they climb back in and putter slowly around the barren wasteland in search of the road. After endless hours of searching and with supplies dwindling, they begin to feel that something about this desert is very wrong, and - in their increasingly delirious states - begin to suspect that they're somehow on an entirely different planet. But could that wicked surprise sandstorm really have transported them to another world, or are those shimmering gold spires in the distance all in their heads?
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Summary! (Because I’m still working out plot details. And yeah, plot holes galore). But it’s basically like a supernatural road trip story. I want to have a bunch of stuff happen out there in the desert but I’m not sure what kinds of, if any, other characters I want to include. I’m planning on having the ending very open, so as not to reveal whether or not they were actually hallucinating the whole time. They do end up getting rescued though. When Peters’ vehicle doesn’t arrive at its destination, the agency tracks his transport and finds all three of them passed out inside of it, buried in sand.
Also, I’m not sure if the car counts as a character or an environment, I just really wanted to draw it!
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