Scene begins focused on a large, metal door in the middle of what appears to be a junkyard, perhaps. The door is at an odd angle (facing partially toward the sky). It opens and a kid (mid to late teens) stumbles out, breathing heavily. He takes a few more steps before he stops to catch his breath, hands on his knees and mostly facing the ground. Behind him, a chair can be seen a ways back into the darkness of the doorway. A girl appears out from the open door behind him, and walks away to the left or right without stopping and without the boy noticing. The player takes control of the boy here, and he navigates his way through the junkyard(?) until he reaches a catwalk-like scaffolding and bridge across a large, mote-like gap that seems to be surrounding the entire area of junkyard from which he came. Light (green?) emits from below, and a cutscene here shows a few things. First, the boy wonders where he is, and why he was in the chamber/room he came from. Then, looking around from this height above the large chasm, he begins to feel dizzy and eventually passes out. Everything goes black.

When he comes to, he is either outside his house/apartment or in his own bed. He remembers everything clearly, but dismisses it as a dream or acts like it didn't happen. It is soon revealed that he lives alone with his father (and maybe sister or brother). When he first sees his father again, his father tells him that a girl either brought the boy to the house or tells the father to get him where she found him unconcious, at an intersection of 240 Path. (all the streets here have a common name (may not be path) and end in only one zero, so after 240 is 2410, 2420, etc.) This causes the player (and probably the boy) to think that the events of the night before may not have been a dream before. Because he never saw a girl, he asks his father who it was, but fatherman is only able to give a vague description since it was dark and late. Secretly, she is the same girl who is seen at the very beginning. She does not meet the boy face-to-face until at least a decent while into the game.

The boy goes to school as usual the next day (or the same day if he talks to his father in the morning). While he is in class, he over-hears some gossip about the "Crater" having gone offline "again." This is nothing significant or new to him. The Crater is something that is mostly just a speculative, formless idea to the majority of the public that has some inner connection to the entirety of the city, and when it is "active" or "online," a lot of things in the city supposedly work more smoothly or turn out better/more positively. All news television and radio stations report when the Crater is active or inactive, but it is widely unknown where the information comes from, or why the public needs to know about it. The Crater goes online and offline at seemingly random intervals, so it's always somewhat of a hot topic for gossip when the status changes.

The boy slowly begins to realize that he hasn't recalled hearing about the Crater being active in a few months, yet he has heard of it going offline several times in that timeframe. At first he doesn't think much of it, but he notices more and more strange things seem to be happening around the time he hears the next few offline-Crater notices. He attempts to find out some things by going to that intersection of 240 Path, first at day after school, then a second time later on at night. Eventually, he meets the girl who found him there on his way to/from 240 Path (quite a distance from it). How he knows it's her, or whether or not he does at all is subjective, but he ends up talking and/or walking with her eventually (maybe after seeing/noticing her walking or standing alone by herself multiple days). He may begin to spend more time with her at other places, inviting her to his house, his school, asking her about her school and such. At some point during a meeting when they are on more sociable terms, she tells him something to the effect that he belongs at or must go to the Crater, that he is the core and the essence of the city. This may come out slowly over the course of many meetings.

Possible plot twist: The girl walking behind the main character in the beginning is actually the body of the main character - who is a girl stuck in a boy's body. She doesn't realize she's in a boy's body at first, for some reason. Whether or not the body she's in belongs to the thing that took her body, who knows.


Gameplay outline idea:

Instead, the world of junk and destroyed buildings and such is the real world (of the future). Throughout it, you are able to find certain objects (or "ghosts" of certain objects) which remind the main character of places from his past, or his original/real life. The memories these objects trigger cause him to go unconscious, sending him "into" the world of his memory as a sort of dream. This world is likely more colorful, and all its areas *may* share the same theme, or alterations of a central theme. If he is able to talk to all of the normal people or interact with all the objects in that particular dream area (within a time limit, perhaps?) then he awakens in the corresponding area of the junk world, and can find the "real" object there, which gives him something like the effects in Yume Nikki. In this way, you figure out more about his past, how he got to where he is, what Crater was/is and why it was affected by him. An example scenario would be:

You encounter the ghost of a bicycle basket in the junk world. This sends you to a dreamy memory world, beginning near a parked bike on the edge of a highway. Off the side of the highway is a large, open field. If you search, you can find a "person" or shadowed/disconfigured representation of a person in the field, most probably a friend of yours. It could say something simple and vague like "There's nothing here.." or, it could say nothing at all and get the point across with animations and/or noises. Wandering too far outside the field causes you to wake up in the main junk area, but talking to the person results in blacking out soon afterward, and waking up in a junk world representation of the same field and highway. Somewhere here can be found the bicycle basket, which allows you to carry or store one thing at a time. Something like all that.

If no time limit, then simply wandering outside the dream boundaries causes the screen to get darker or lighter until it is entirely black or white, and you wake up back in the main junk world area. Some people/creatures/objects in the dreams may require certain effects to interact with, and some effects or different choices may result in being brought to another dream, or waking up in a different junk world area.

Possible plot device: At some point early on, a character or dream-related entity begins showing up frequently in the memory worlds. Perhaps it begins to seem like a friend to the main character, but in the end it betrays the character in some way, or doesn't help the character in a situation where it seems like it should and runs away.

Use the old "Floating Tiki Castle in the sky" story as a basis for one of the dreams, maybe one deeper in the dream world.

Everything else, UNDECIDED!





Random other story idea:

One of the main characters are found spending their life riding a train (in the city? goes between city and country?). They leave it from time to time, but are always called back to the train within at least 24 hours. Called back by what? Something inside, something only they can hear or sense. This person could be amnesiac to their life before they started living like this, but it would be more interesting if they weren't. What could be interesting is if they remembered everything before that point at the beginning of the story, but slowly began to forget it all over the course of it. If this isn't the protagonist, then the protagonist finds this person and develops a relationship with them. If this is the protagonist, you slowly (reluctantly at first) find more and more things to do (and that you eventually want to do) outside the train, and being called back to it becomes an annoyance and eventually an antagonistic idea which the protagonist struggles against.

Ridiculous plot: One person must keep another person from remembering something, but they don't know what that something is. If the other person remembers it, then they will die laughing. The first person has a nightmare about it.