"Pitch #1 - The Substance of Fire"

by Dom B.
2001.12.06

As promised this week, here is the first of three pitches for my book/graphic novel ideas. I'll post the other two on Friday. Wow, three articles this week! And I've only been unemployed for two days!

Bear with me, I have some plot points worked out more than others, and these are just short plot outlines. Any input you have, would be great...but I have a request: Don't just tell me it sucks or it's great, tell me some Why's and some What's....

Pitch #1 Detox

In truth, there was any single great cataclysm, any single great catastrophe. There was history. The burden of this history simply became too great, and the social structure just evaporated. This happens to humanity, and it has happened to great civilizations all through history's long march.

There was a new dark age, and the huge corporations were the only ones who could put humanity on life support. So there was a Rise after the inexorable Fall, but how long this Rise would last was an unknown quantity.

Society was renewed, but was now something less than the relatively progressive and enlightened atmosphere it once was. In the first hundred years after the Rise science exploded, but now, we've reached the top of the plateau. Science is dying, hand in hand with Art. Because, you see, to bear all that weight of history and fickle human nature, we are cogs in a colossal corporate machine, a network of city states.

In the dark times before and after the Fall, there were revolutionaries, and there were dictators, trying to breathe life back into humanity through their misguided obsessions and the blood of countless innocents. Dictators and revolutionaries both long dead. In a manner of speaking, at least.

Sebastian Templar is going to find his life very different in a few days. Unknown to him, he is the clone of a bloodthirsty, brilliant, and thoroughly dead tyrant. A tyrant whose cult exists to this day, a secret society who lost the clone years ago and is methodically searching to bring their born again savior back into the fold. That is, if they can find him before the underground army sworn to hunt down and kill all his followers, and the scion of the tyrant himself, to avert further catastrophe. And all Templar wants is a normal life.