The Angles out of Space

A plot outline I wrote in about two hours as a pitch to an artist.

Main Character: A physics professor that was involved in a ritual ten years ago that opened a dimensional rift and got his friend killed (so he believed)

Antagonist: the friend who was sucked into the rift and believed dead now returns, changed by the alien world beyond and determined to sacrifice the rest of the people involved in the ritual and permanently open the rift and let loose the outer dimensional horrors upon the earth

Relationship Character: A female reporter following a string of murders that seem to happen around the MC. Works to try and get the MC to forgive himself and stand up to the Antagonist using the magic he used to be good at.

Prologue

Ten years previous. A group of college kids dabbling in occult lore open a dimensional rift, into which one of them is dragged in. The main character is shown hiding in fear as the other two are running and screaming.

Act One

1920’s era America, New England.

We see the old house where the failed ritual took place. The rift reopens and a man walks out, we do not see their face.

A mental hospital. We find one of the kids from the prologue, a woman, staring out the window. The man from the old house comes in and talks with her, the entire scene from his POV so that we still cannot see his face (look at the flashback scenes in Alan Moore’s providence series). From the conversation, we find that the man who we cannot see is the boy who was sucked into the rift in the prologue. Using dark magic, the man gets the girl to kill herself at the hospital.

The MC is a physics professor at the university. As he teaches a class, one of the students from the prologue, whom the MC has not spoken to since the incident, comes in after his class finishes. They talk for a bit before the friend tells him that their friend in the mental hospital has killed herself. He tells the MC when the funeral is and then leaves the MC alone to think back on the night of the ritual.

We see a flashback of the beginning of the ritual, in which some oddly shaped object is floating and glowing in the air as the students all stand around it. There are some fearful comments, most of which shot down by the man who gets sucked into the rift (Antagonist). The rift opens up violently and tentacles begin to stretch out, groping madly for something to drag into its dimension. The flash back ends.

At the hospital, the RC is on the scene of the apparent suicide trying to get some information from the police who seem to think it was just a suicide, nothing unusual about it. While she tries to press for more, we go again to the AC POV as he seems to be watching her from some ways away.

At the funeral, the MC and Friend talk and discuss the ritual they performed together ten years ago. The RC overhears some of this and is immediately intrigued. She decides to try and find out more.

RC meets up with the Friend and tries to get some info out of him, but he dodges and refuses to answer her before running off. The RC then looks at the MC from afar and begins to plan on ways to get him to talk.

The MC is wrapping up another physics lesson and at the end of it, the RC comes up to him and begins to subtly flirt with him, getting the MC to agree to dinner with her.

At dinner, the RC tries to probe him for information about the suicide. When MC finds out what she is doing, she reveals that she is a reporter trying to find information for a story. MC grows angry and storms off. The AC is revealed to once again be watching her, however this time his POV leaves her and follows the MC.

We then go to the MC’s Friend’s house. The AC goes inside and the Friend, more prepared than the woman in the hospital, tries to fight him off by shooting him. The AC stumbles back and then uses a kind of mystic hypnotism to switch bodies with the Friend. We then for the first time see the AC’s original body as it crumples to the ground with the Friend’s consciousness within. The AC leaves with his new body as the Friend dies in the old one.

Act Two

The police are at the Friend’s house to which the RC has shown up trying to get information about what happened. The police dismiss her and carry on.

The MC is called down to the police for questioning about where he thinks the Friend is, as the police obviously suspect him in the murder. They tell the MC that the dead body was found next to a name written in blood, which is the first name of the man who was sent to the other dimension in the Prologue and was the original owner of the body now dead at the Friend’s house. MC goes white as a sheet as he tries to talk his way out of police custody.

Managing to free himself, he goes outside where he is confronted by RC who begins to grill him over what’s been happening. The MC agrees to explain the situation with her.

Back at the MC’s home, the MC explains that he and three other grad students, the Friend, the AC, and the girl at the hospital, had been assigned the task of studying an artifact found in a dig in the middle east. The artifact was a crystal trapezohedron that was supposed to have mystical powers. The MC was looking at it through a geometric and mathematical standpoint to understand it’s physical properties and how it affects things around it, of which it had various effects upon different substances. The AC was a religious studies major and was looking into the culture of the people who worshipped it and their rituals. The Friend is a geologist student studying the crystal's properties. The AC had come up on a ritual said to “activate” the Trapezohedron. The three of them, with the AC’s girlfriend to round out the number, performed the ritual and opened the rift. The AC was sucked into the void, the Girlfriend had gone insane after looking into the rift trying to save the AC, the Friend had tried to stop the ritual and ended up covering the Trapezohedron which closed the rift while the MC had hidden.

As the MC finishes he explains that the body in the friend’s house was the AC who was sucked into the rift. At the end of the explanation, the AC, now in the Friend’s body, enters, revealing he was listening to the story. He then fills in what happened next, that he was a being from that plane and that his kind could not survive on this plane in its current state, and that he had taken over the body of the original AC in order to force his way through when the time was right, and that when the stars align on the next full moon, he will be able to perform a ritual that will change the makeup of this universe to allow the other creatures from that dimension to overrun this world.

Midpoint

The MC now tries to confront the AC, to which he finds himself completely unprepared. The AC uses his unnatural strength to fling the MC around like a sack of potatoes. The RC attempts to help but is shown to be just as ineffective. AC takes the RC and nearly kills the MC by trying to switch bodies with him, but the MC uses an occult talisman That he had in his desk from the Friend that repels him and the AC leaves with the RC for the old house that the original ritual was held in to await the coming full moon in which the stars will align to allow for the rift to be opened.

The MC returns to his office to try and formulate a plan to save the RC. He finds her notes and begins to see that she was looking into a spell that could be used to close the rift once opened. The sacrifice to close the rift would need to be the caster who opened it.

MC begins to do further research using the books he had locked away from the RC. In the books, he finds an anointing ritual meant to protect his mind from the entity taking him over.

After performing the ritual, he finds an invocation that is supposed to strengthen him to a power equal to the AC by summoning a rival entity to grant him the strength. The rival entity agrees to help him, but at a cost to be drawn from him in the future.

Now fully armed, the MC goes to confront the AC at the old house. Upon arrival, however, he finds that the AC has summoned several creatures from the other dimension known simply as the Watchers. The MC hears screams from the RC inside and these motivate him to fight his way through the creatures.

Act Three

Climax

The Antagonist has begun to open the rift in space-time with the Trapezohedron used in the previous ritual ten years previous. RC is tied up as the MC attempts to fight his way through the minions of the AC. As the rift opens, the RC pleads with MC to use the incantation. MC swallows his fear and takes up the RC’s notes and begins reading the incantation that is supposed to close the rift. Instead, a second rift opens next to the first. The MC is shocked, thinking he has just made things worse when the two rifts appear to be swallowing each other. The AC, in a blind fury, attacks the MC. as they fight, they get closer to the two rifts. The AC is thrown from the MC into the convergence and as the two rifts devour each other, we see the entity separated from its host body before it’s two parts are swallowed by the two portals, after which they close. MC and RC are holding each other against the force of the rifts, and as the force dissipates, embrace each other.

Resolution

MC puts the Trapezohedron on his mantle with RC beside him. We have a calm scene of them coming together before going to bed together

Epilogue

As the MC and RC try to sleep, the MC suddenly begins hearing a voice calling out to him. He follows the voice to where he left the Trapezohedron. From the crystal, MC believes he can see the AC’s original body, the one that was sucked in during the prologue, and shines a flashlight on the Trapezohedron. When the light hits the crystal, the light fractures like a prism, but instead of a rainbow, the light disperses into almost holographic reflections of the AC upon the walls of the living room.