Time Lift

Developed a TV series with my companion and apartment mates on my mission- it's a time travel mystery named Time Lift, about an elevator that a man uses to travel to hours throughout the day instead of stories on the building. Not as lame as it sounds! Actually pretty dope. Called "Lift" instead of "Elevator" because it sounds better. It'd be British, so in the same vein as Life on Mars and Ashes to Ashes, so it works out. Sort of a cross between those and Groundhog Day. 

There's even an episode where he's taken back to the 1970s when the office building was still a hotel (the office building is based on the JSMB, which used to be the Hotel Utah) and there's a bellhop, and the lift doesn't travel him through time when there's another person on it, so he has to figure out a way to get the bellhop out of the lift so he can travel back to the present. Why did he travel back to the 70s randomly? There's a frizzy haired woman there, maybe she'd know... but I'm getting ahead of myself, stumbling over my own thoughts as all our ideas come rushing back.

So let's go over it. A man (never named him, let's call him "~~~" because why not) discovers that the lift in his office building takes him to hours in the day instead of floors, within at least the day. Maybe this day is the day that he gets framed for corporate espionage, and so he needs to use this time to clear his name? Maybe. (Let's also call him !!!, because sometimes I misreach for the tilde key.) 

Aside from !!!'s getting arrested in the first version of the day, there's a few other exciting things going on that day. 

• The building gets robbed at one point in the day, and !!! realizes that he's the robber- like Prisoner of Azkaban when Harry's waiting there and realizes he's his own father when his real father doesn't show up, but with a ski mask.
• The power goes off during a storm later in the day- he gets trapped by that twice, once when he's taking the elevator through that patch in time, and once when he experiences it from the outside as he needs to go back in time. So he's sitting there in the elevator, power off, listening to himself on the outside pound and sob how he needs to go back. He realizes he doesn't really seem to run into himself a heck of a lot.
• There's a bunch of kids on a field trip earlier in the day, touring the offices.
• There's a party for someone at some point on one of the floors- he shows up every few minutes to grab more and more food for himself.

As the day goes on, !!! compiles a list of things that need to happen during the day, arranged more by minute within each hour with hours being more like physical locations: okay, it's :47, time to go to floor 15, 4:47 pm, where I need to talk to this guy- no wait I got held up, and it's now :51, guess I can go to this floor and do this thing which needs to happen. (The British system is to call the first floor above the ground level floor 1, so it would work out with 12 am being ground and 1 being floor 1, but there's a basement floor, so things still get thrown off.)

When ~~~ activates the elevator shutdown thing, it actually freezes time- but he's stuck in the elevator of course, since the elevator is also frozen between floors. He can use this time to sleep and plan at least. He uses the emergency phone when the elevator is shutdown, once, and there's a voice at the other end! It's a fellow time traveler! Or, traveller, because this is British! His name is BHG, the Bald Headed Guy. In the storyboards I drew up, his eyes also have black censor bars over them. Also BHG isn't his real name of course.

"Who do you work for? Some kind of... time... enforcement... agency?"

"...TEA?"

Only then the twist for one of the episodes is, "who told you that I was a time traveller? Where did you get that idea?" And BHG isn't really a time traveller!

And it turns out that he's just a resolution of paradox. Him, the BHG. There was a bag of M&Ms that went missing when ~~~ decided, early on, to test out the rules of time travel during the wee hours of the morning, throughout the day- it Schrodinger's Catted away in the drawer of the desk, after leaving one drawer open in the future and one drawer closed, and opening one drawer in the past (it makes sense in diagram.) And where did the M&Ms go? They poofed right in front of the bald headed guy. Songs came to him as a child, and his items would go missing- they would be the original items in paradox loops, like the compass in LOST. That compass was BHG's. Whenever the main character stopped the elevator for the night, time would freeze around BHG too. And though the BHG experiences time normally, and can see all the instances of the main character ~~~ running around not as one person but as many, he's the one who knows what's going on, even what's going to happen next. Not that he himself has got the timeline totally straight or anything.

BHG, though not a time traveller himself, would know the future by interfacing with a deck of Tarot cards- he wouldn't see them as cards, but he would look through them and see them as the events they depicted.

The BHG explains the mechanics of fnord time travel on a blackboard to !!!, but all fnord he sees is IRIS. Like "fnord" from fnord Illuminatus!, fnord IRIS has been appearing everywhere to !!!. Who is Iris? What is Iris? Twist: it might just be the BHG talking to Siri but going backwards in time from ~~~'s point of view as he sees it. Or maybe it's this frizzy haired woman that keeps on cropping up everywhere since the random foray into the 70s (it revealed to ~~~ something important about the building's past anyway, and his realization of it is the twist at the end of that episode (yes, just his realization, and not the important thing itself)) but who may be imaginary, since the BHG has no idea what he's talking about when asked about the frizzy haired woman.

It's the end of the day when this explanation is going on- it's implied, and turns out to be true, that you can't travel back in time again once you've passed midnight. They're on the basement level floor, and so there's no "down" button, only up- no going backwards in time, only going forwards. He races up the stairs to the lobby-level lift where there's a down button- but it's past midnight by this point, and he must now face the day after.

There's a second series, maybe, this time where he'd be acting in the role of the BHG to some new, female time traveller, possibly possessing of frizzy hair. And the original BHG might be the bad guy here? So turns out the events of the first series, the time loop, was used by a time prisoner, imprisoned in a looping causal chain, to escape the time loop into normal time. It was a pretty elaborate and awesome escape, especially seeing as how it happened every time, by definition- in an alternate universe? Yeah then I guess maybe there's more than one kind of time travel possible.

So yeah, that's basically Time Lift. I may be missing a few details, like the time he accidentally kills a security guard, stashes the body in a closet that goes through midnight, and undoes that scenario using time travel, and maybe some other details as well, but, that's the gist of it.