A friend of mine is pitching some walking tanks game idea at his school as a term art project or something, yada yada. There's a story and some characters and a whole bunch of code, design stuff that doesn't matter on this forum.

I'm posting this because I suddenly have a moment and feel like writing. This is an exercise for me, might as well spam the forum while I'm at it.

The cast:

---The Mayor (of Portville)


When asked her real name, she answered, "the more labels you have for yourself, the dumber they make you". She won the election by a landslide as an independent thanks to her catchy bumper sticker slogan; "Fuck Tea, Fuck Parties! Mayor for Mayor 2213".

Unfortunately being the Mayor of Portville doesn't pay much and, ever since she signed the Free Weed Act, not a lot of work either, so she does some mayoring on the side up in Spaceportville.

Here she is wearing a tie over her space suit.

She once spent a year in a bunker with an annoying stranger because she thought aliens were invading. They were, in fact, just filming a nature documentary. The confusion started when their producer insisted that humans go on "stampedes" and had the director fire a laser into a crowded mall to get the "perfect shot".

As a live witness, one might expect her to appreciate their dedication to dramatic effect.

Unfortunately, she's the kind of person who watches World Federation Cockfighting and only goes to theme restaurants so things like artistic license went right over her head (along with the smoking remains of a guy she was just getting up the courage to talk to) so she ran off and hid like some kind of a child.

As if that isn't enough, even though she insists she doesn't watch M*A*S*H, she always laughs whenever city militia leader Frank Hank does his Radar impression.


---Antagonist (Name Pending)


General Badguy heads the Baddiebad National Army, from the nearby city-state of Flannelton. His people are upset that children as young as 26 are receiving TV signals from Portville featuring subversive "jew television" like Seinfeld and advertisements for morally questionable luxuries like flavored cough syrup.

After one too many offenses including a 24-hour Bugs Bunny Marathon that repeatedly featured jokes about cross-dressing and the introduction of the Cartoon Porn Network, it was clear that Flannelton needed a Hero.

General Badguy found himself a team of dedicated young men (40+) with enough Moral Outrage to power an M-1 Abrams tank.

He then - after disconnecting his crew from their MO-DC converter cables - drove that tank straight into to Portville and demanded they take down the satellite dish.

But el Ruma de Santiago was defending his title that night and the Mayor wasn't about to miss that, so she called in the big guns.



---Frank Hank

The folks of modern Portville aren't the most martial of generations, so when they realized they needed help defending themselves, they used a time machine to bring 1970s rocker / war hero Frank Hank to the 22nd century to be the head of the city militia.

Once, Frank Hank accidentally let an 11-year-old girl into the militia on account of her fake ID.

Nothing very bad happened though, aside from the war, and Frank Hank defended himself noting just how hard it is to find anyone with both a driver's license and a clean drug test, noting that he wasn't "going to fill [their] only four tanks with hippies" and that her new robotic arm replacement is "pretty rad, like Luke Skywalker".

This goes through stage 1 (skip the grey), then we stopped there and worked on unrelated stuff for a pitch, but basically the bad guys show up, Frank Hank fights them off using a walking tank, and then there is a plot where the bad guys clone the tank in question.


It closes with this which I'll put here cause it's plot related and I guess plot is important or something.

(Bad guy) "That robot’s power is simply... Amazing! I must have one!"

(Frank Hank) "Hah, no man, I got it from an amusement park. Walking tanks are actually a terrible idea. In fact-"

(Bad guy) "In the Battle of Britian the English pretended the effects of their radar was simply a special diet of carrots for night vision. Don’t think I’m so easily fooled by your disinformation campaign. We’ll be back."

(Mayor) "Excellent work, Frank Hank! You better get back quick cause el Ruma de Santiago is defending the title in half an hour!"

(Frank Hank) "Gotta pass, ma’am. Looks like I better get ready to defend my own title."[/quote]

And then it's war, and stuff, between the city militias.

I don't normally write down any backstory, the post here was just typing to amuse myself and was actually meant to be semi-self-contained. It did get some laughs IRL so I'm happy with it.