Slogan Heir

A man working at a huge company best known for its slogan can’t figure out what it is the company actually does.

He eventually discovers that the CEO inherited the company but it had been so destroyed by the generations that all that was left was the name and the slogan,

The heir turned the slogan into a business, commissioning popular ads, getting it into comedy skits, making it a household terms. All the company does now is market the slogan.

The heir eventually sells the company for a huge amount of profit, leaving the purchaser to wonder what exactly they have bought.

Satirical TV series

Cooperative Hiccup

In an oppressive one party state, a mechanic with hiccups makes a mistake fixing a government vehicle which means the secret police fail to carry out a raid on dissidents. The mechanic becomes an accidental hero and the resistance movement adopts a new strategy of annoying tiny mistakes, using the secret sign of hiccupping as a password. The movement spreads and the country starts to become ungovernable. The secret police finally catch up with the mechanic and imprison him. This causes a general uprising and the government is toppled. The mechanic, who has not realised what is going on, finds himself made the new president. He still has hiccups.

A movie, I think

Suite Shape

A hotel has a suite of a peculiar shape that has in fact been designed in order to warp space, to create a room for an inter-dimensional traveller. A junior member of hotel staff, delivering room service, finds themselves wandering between hotels in parallel realities, in the company of this multiversal tourist, trying to get back to their own reality.

(I just reinvented Doctor Who, didn’t I?)

Maybe a comic book series?

or

A game in which you play and interior designer having to organise furniture in odd shaped rooms to meet increasingly bizarre demands from clients

Tactic Function

A battle damaged military robot gets separated from its squad and finds itself on a remote farm. It mistakes a shepherd boy for its commander and following its programming starts obeying his orders, applying its tactical ability to farm chores. Gradually it begins to question the use of tactics without strategy and what, if anything , the goals of its tactics ever were. But when the war returns to this remote valley, it must decide between its new found pacifism and using its old skills to defend its new friends.

This is an animated film, isn’t it?

Chimney Approach

Chimneys act as dimension al gateways - that’s how Father Christmas fits down them.

Go up them and you reach a snowy roofscape, where the gables are like mountain ranges and it is always Christmas.

Not a warm and fluffy contemporary Christmas, but an ancient, wild Christmas, full of fires and feasty and ferocious jollity. A Christmas that is just as full of strange frightening things: Perchta, the Kallikanzaros, Mari Lwyd, Krampus.

This is one for the Christmas Stories! (And I already know how I’m going to use it)

Formation Indication

A geologist believes that a peculiar rock formation is proof of the Silurian hypothesis: the remains of an incredibly ancient civilisation that pre-dates the evolution of humans. They put together a team that comes to the conclusion that the formation is a calendar on a geologic scale over millions of years, which is warning of something that is set to recur soon. But it is not a warning, it is a promise: the ancient builders are 'returning'.

alternatively
A palaeontologist gets put into a dream state and projects himself back into the body of a Tyrannosaur, in which shape he kills a bunch of dinosaurs and arranges their bodies to be fossilised in a particular way in order to spell out an insult to his rival.

A short story in a Twilight Zone mode

Denial Champion

An athlete at an international competition wins his event, but during the event there has been an invasion and his country no longer exists. He founds the State of Denial and is awarded the medal in the name of his new, fictional country. More people flock to join his new 'country', all people who have been denied success in something and won't let it go. Now their unconventional skills are going to be needed to make this new country work.

A movie or TV show, I think

Pan Defend

The princess is a picky eater.

In an effort to find something that she will eat, the Emperor has invited famous chefs from around the world to his court, sent wise men to dig out ancient cookery books, sent spies to steal recipes from foreign courts.

One young apprentice chef, the most junior in the palace kitchens, has a different idea. Armed only with his skills with a paring knife and defended only with makeshift armour made from pots and pans, he sets out into the wild beyond the Empire’s borders to discover new recipes for himself.

Accompanied only by an retired monk who he was treating to snacks from the kitchen, he frequently runs into trouble and monsters, but always finds a way out through cooking and eating together, finding a common ground in food.

The monk starts writing accounts of the cook’s adventures and sending them home to the palace, where he quickly becomes famous, unwittingly winning the heart of the princess.

(I think the retired monk might be the old Emperor, forced into retirement by his power hungry son)

Maybe a comic book series?