Story outline for adventure game

A diy maker, Hank, is sitting in his garage surrounded by scrap metal, tools, and kitbashed creations with unclear functions. The light of a lamp shines on his newest creation. On a laptop he is following a youtube tutorial as he is finishing the last step in his creation.

He connects some last wires and runs a program on his laptop. Green led lights appear, success! His diy time machine is completed! Hank sets a step back smiles. He takes a look at his watch: 5:34! Already ? Oh no. He should probably go to sleep. Or maybe do a first test, just to be sure…

Hank goes to the door at the end of the garage and opens it. He walks into the kitchen and starts looking for something. He has to test it on a piece of organic matter to know for sure if it works, some food for example. There is a plate with spaghetti on the counter in the kitchen. There is a note next to it. It is from Hank’s boyfriend, Martin. The note implies Martins urge to take care of Hank even though he disappeared into the garage for the whole evening and night. (Left some food for you - went to bed. Good night.) Hank reads the note and feels guilty for a second. Then he looks at the food, considering if he could use this as a test object. The pasta and vegetables would be fine, but the plate is inorganic matter and to put the food just like that into the machine would leave a mess. Hank opens the fridge. Here he finds what he needs: a red bell pepper. Probably Martin bought one too many for tonight’s dinner.

Hank grabs the bell pepper and runs back to the garage. He puts the bell pepper into the machine and starts running the program on his laptop. Lights flicker, flash and then, swoosh, the bell pepper is flashed through space and time. Hank is sweating, he trembles from excitement. The bell pepper is all gone, up to here everything went well, no bugs. Now to see if everything went well. If all went correctly he must’ve sent the paprika 10 seconds back in time right back into the fridge. Hank goes to check but the fridge is empty. Nor does the vegetable appear a few seconds later.

Hank goes to check the settings of his machine. Through DNA spacetime localisation he manages to locate the paprika exactly where it should be. Strange. He checks his machine, cables are attached correctly, looks back at the program, scrolls the timeline. He suddenly notices a glitch in the spacetime localisation. Two points are marqued when he scrolls towards the future. He scrolls on. The points multiply. Multiply as in multiplying exponentially. Then he notices his timeline cursor. It isn’ set in this billenium. It is set one billenium before.

Hank pauses and looks at his screen. He scrolls back towards the future and sees the dna localisations spread accross all the globe. He didn’t send the bellpepper back 10 seconds, he sent it back one billenium, a hundred thousand years, and 10 seconds back. And apparently it caught root and started spreading his dna over all of earth. Which is weird. Because the Earth is covered with water. Did it evolve into a sea plant? How? Which is when Hank freezes again, and start sweating a bit more. He is looking at the scale of the map. It must be off, earth’s globe is larger then this how could- And suddenly Hank realizes that what he is looking at is not Earths map but that of some other planet. The large distance in spacetime must have sent the pepper way out of Earths orbit. Magnificent, Hank thinks, how fascinating. He covered a whole planet in bell peppers. Martin’ll laugh when he tells him this funny bug in his first timemachine test. Hank zooms out on the map to find out where in the galaxy he placed the paprika. As he zooms out he sees how the dna didn’t stick with one planet. Throughout the timeline it started jumping to nearby planets. and a few millennia later even further and further planets and oh. Earth and the solar system came into view of the map. The cursor scrolled all the way until the current time. Hank squints at the screen. And as it seems, one of the DNA points was just arriving on earth at this moment.

Hank did not have time to reflect upon how big of a coincidence this all was, because in the next moment, all of earth was trembling. The ground shook. Stuff fell from the shelves in the garage. Hank looks around in fear. Then everything is still. Hank walks towards the garage port and opens it. Dawn has arived outside and the early sunlight falls over Hanks face as he is squinting into the sky above, startled. Because there high up in Earth’s atmosphere an enormous floating paprika the size of Texas had apppeared.

That is when the paprika invasion of Earth began.

Throughout this game players take control of Hank who’s tryin to fix his mistake. He travels through time to stop the paprika’s from spreading. The endeavour is harder than expected when Hank learns the paprika’s developed into a hivemind species connected through all of space. Bringing it down seems nigh impossible and as he spends more and more time battling paprika infestations, his relation with Martin becomes strained. They hardly see each other any more and Martin wants to spend more time together. They seem to be growing away from each other. Hank becomes desperate. Building the time machine was supposed to be a solution to this problem, allowing him to manage his time with Martin more precisely, but now he made the problem far worse. It has become in fact a problem to all of humanity who’s existence has become threatened by

SPACETIME PAPRIKA’s.

The relationship trouble worsenes and Martin eventually leaves Hank, who bursts into tears.

At some point Hank gets abducted by the paprika’s and is turned into a paprika himself, enabling him to tap into the hivemind. This allows him to experience the evening right before his desastrous completeion of his time machine. He is looking at Martin from the paprika’s point of view and he sees how Martin is sad because Hank doesn’t have time for him. This memory is actuall the earliest memory of the hivemind paprika, because Hank sent this paprika through spacetime which started all this. In the end this core memory contains the key for Hank to make the paprika species go away and leave earth.

Hank has a talk with Martin where he explains how he tried to fix their relationship by building the timemachine and how it went all horribly wrong. But he now fixed it and he is talking to Martin and he wants him back. He thinks they can be happy together now. Martin says that he appreciates the honesty of Hank even though it comes so late. However, trying to fix their relationship with a timemachine is a horrible idea and actually a bit toxic in some way probably. Martin says Hank should work on himself and that they are better of being seperate for now. Hank cries. He understands though. He says it’s okay, but asks on thing from Martin, not to to make any more fod with peppers from now on. He still has a connection to the paprika hivemind and could still spy on Martin if he would be near paprika’s and Hank is sure he wouldn’t be able to withstand the temptation.

This will eventually lead to a situation where Martin is fucking a bell pepper while being drunk, but that is for season two