$IDEQU3ST — Sidequest, a crime dramedy

sidequest.onion · the job board

A mini game set in the world of Sidequest. Play Adam’s Episode 1 objective: turn $8,000 into $50,000 in three weeks without getting caught. Your progress saves in this browser.

$15Tin-world shadow economy, with no flag, no taxes and no borders

15 yrsbetween the prologue and the present day

7former high-school pranksters, back together

0known owners

The pitch

Uber met the Silk Road. Fifteen years later, they run the world.

Picture a freelance marketplace with one rule: there are no rules. You can rescue a lost pet on Tuesday and help pull off an international incident on Friday. You’re paid in untraceable K.U.M. You earn XP. Your five-star rating opens more doors than your diploma ever did. It looks like a video game. It runs like the shadow economy that quietly replaced the real one.

Now meet its newest player. Adam Dawnbringer is twenty, a college kid and grocery clerk making $589 a week, with a hero complex, a pickup truck he’s embarrassed by, and a date that died the moment she saw it. He wants a $50,000 supercar in three weeks. His mother wants him to earn honest money. His friends want him to say yes to Sidequest. And his father, a military veteran who went missing chasing dirty money, left him one inheritance: life is like a video game.

So Adam does what any reluctant hero does. He gets the band back together.

When the legal economy offers scraps, an illegal game becomes the most rational career path.

Adam Dawnbringer, played by Garrett Sessoms

The tone: Mr. Robot’s paranoia × Barry’s heart × Baby Driver’s needle drops × GTA Online’s interface. Live-action series with first-person moments and a hand-built game HUD.

Two eras

Version 0.1 to version 4.0.

The story spans fifteen years of one platform’s history: from an invite-only tool for criminals to the job market everyone uses and nobody admits to.

Fifteen years ago · the prologue

A black-market terminal and a backseat offer.

Before the holograms and the leaderboards, Sidequest was a raw text terminal with two options, START GAME and EXIT, known only to fixers and smugglers. Cain Dawnbringer is a veteran driving rideshare for tips, raising a five-year-old son and losing a slow war against his bills.

One night an old war buddy slides into his backseat.

“It’s a cold world, Cain. You gotta cheat the system if you want to win. How about a Sidequest?”

Today · Season 1 Part 1

Mainstream culture. Still illegal.

Sidequest now has holographic Quest Brokers, a Mystery Box job randomizer, co-op missions, zero-trace payouts and a HUD over everything. Radio hosts argue about people calling Sidequest instead of the police. Gen Z treats a five-star rating like a résumé.

The son is twenty now. He has never been told what that first job cost his family. That is where the story begins.

How Sidequest works

A $15 trillion economy needs rules.

A market that size can’t be a lawless void. It has onboarding, currency, ranking, dispatch, escrow and enforcement. It looks like a video game on purpose. Somebody writes the code, and as the in-world broadcast puts it, no one knows who’s really in control.

01
The invite
Nobody finds Sidequest by accident. A friend sends a link, and it only opens in an encrypted Cyber Realm browser. Fifteen years ago the invite was a man in a camel coat. Now it’s a group chat.
02
The Quest Broker
A holographic broker snaps his fingers and says “Welcome, New User.” Your HUD boots up: a mission log, a rating and an XP bar over your actual life.
03
The contract
Browse jobs by pay, tier and skill, from finding a lost pet to things nobody writes down. Or hit the Mystery Box: a randomized job with a bigger payout, where you don’t see the details until you’ve committed.
04
The crew
The best-paying jobs are Co-Op. They need a driver, a hacker, a locksmith or muscle. Everyone takes a cut. That’s why an old prank crew suddenly looks like a business plan.
05
Escrow
The client pays in K.U.M. (Knox Ugwu Monetaries), a zero-trace currency. The platform holds it in escrow until the job is verified. 345 K.U.M. is about $3,500. Fail the job and the escrow freezes.
06
The rating
Every job ends in stars and XP, scaled by an AI difficulty score. A five-star profile unlocks elite brokers and bigger contracts, and earns more respect than a university degree. It is the new résumé.
07
The rules of engagement
Unseen admins take a tiny cut of every transaction and enforce strict rules. Scammers get banned. Disputes get settled. It’s ordered anarchy, and it runs better than most governments.
08
The heat
It’s still illegal. FBI Team 4B is chasing the network with half the staff it needs. Every job adds a little attention, and nobody knows exactly where the line is until someone knocks.

Try it on the job board

The hypocrisy

Everybody uses it. Nobody admits it.

That is why Sidequest has survived fifteen years of federal crackdowns. Nobody in this world is recruited by a supervillain. They’re recruited by a bad month.

Gen Z, 18–30

In publicJust another gig app, with faster payouts.

In privateEntry-level pay can’t cover rent, let alone dreams. Felonies start to feel like quests.

The shrinking middle

In publicOutrage. Sidequest is ruining the kids and law and order.

In privateTeachers, office workers and even cops wear masks at night to pay down debt. Any neighbor could be a Quester.

The comfortable

In publicCondemnation of “lazy youth criminals.”

In privateA private black-market concierge for leverage, vendettas and cheap dirty work.

FBI Team 4B

On paperSworn to dismantle the Cyber Realm.

In realityUnderstaffed, with training cut from 18 weeks to 8, thirteen open cases, and trillions in untraceable money within reach.

Season 1 Part 1

A prologue and three episodes.

Comedy up front, a family mystery underneath, and choices that keep getting more expensive. No spoilers past the setup.

A man types into a laptop in a dark room

Prologue

The worst job interview ever held

A warehouse that exists nowhere. A man in a camel coat hiring desperate people, with questions like Have you ever hot-wired a car? And one about a donkey. The donkey is coming back.

Episode 1

Player One

A date that dies in a parking lot, a $50,000 goal, and a motivational guru who fires Adam from a job he hasn’t even started yet, before 9:00 AM.

Episode 2

The Pressure

Legal side gigs go badly. An ex pays $200 to say what she’s been holding in for years. Across town, a coffee-shop date where both people are lying.

Episode 3

Choose Your Player

Getting the old crew back together takes three scenes, and every one of them is a disaster. The final scene doesn’t belong to Adam.

Time slows. A choice appears. Ep. 1, the parking lot. He clicks the key fob, and a pickup truck beeps.

The ABC Squad

Seven skills. Seven reasons to say yes.

Former high-school pranksters whose old tricks are about to meet real stakes. Their skills fit together easily. Their motives don’t. Every one of them is carrying something the others haven’t been told.

Adam Dawnbringer

Player 1 · the networker

A reluctant leader with golden-retriever energy who can sell anything to anyone except himself. The supercar is the goal he can name. His missing father is the question he can’t put down.

Percy Jackson × Ultimate Spider-Man × Griffin Bing

Brock Turismo

The driver

Scruffy, pragmatic and calm at 100 miles an hour, with the clutch gene. Completely uncool around Felicia.

Baby Driver × Han Solo × Sokka

Chester Wiseman

The brains

A day-trading strategist in a quarter-zip who is always five moves ahead, and hooked on volatility.

Tony Stark × Tywin Lannister × Lester (GTA V)

Diego Cicatriz-Olvidado

The wild card

Human roulette with absurd plot armor and a snack obsession. The funniest person in any room, and the hardest one to read.

Deadpool × Michelangelo × Shaggy

Felicia Wall

The hacker

A sarcastic coffee-shop hacktivist, a master social engineer, and the laziest genius alive, until somebody provokes her.

Shikamaru × Elliot (Mr. Robot) × Go Go Tomago

Gemma Gazelle

The locksmith

Bubbly, in athleisure, hugging her friends while she cracks a safe that isn’t hers. Her sunny smile doesn’t tell you everything.

Ludwig Dieter × Arya Stark × Anna (Frozen)

Eric McSharry

The muscle

A quiet poet who lets his fists do the talking. He skips stones at Memory Lake and talks to someone who isn’t there.

John Wick × Red Hood × Winter Soldier

Brock Turismo (Isaac Corrigan) and Gemma Gazelle (Emily Kahl) complete the squad. The portraits include supporting characters and are not the full credits.

The case file

The game has an owner.

Sidequest runs inside the Cyber Realm, the most encrypted network ever built. Federal agencies call it the Second Silk Road. Its creation myth begins in Nigeria, with a builder the world came to know as the Trojan Stallion. Officially, he’s dead.

His house exploded in the largest raid in FBI history. So why did his account just log back in?
Who writes the rules, holds the escrow and runs the brokers of a $15 trillion illegal economy?
What happened to Cain Dawnbringer after he pressed START GAME, and where is he now?
Why does a motivational guru keep all of his research on paper?
Which member of the squad is keeping the biggest secret?

Writers’ room archive · eyes only

01
02
03
04
05
06

The mythology behind Season 1 is already written, across multiple seasons: an origin, a pact, a coup, and heirs nobody expects. It stays classified until it’s on screen.

Literary inspirations

The books underneath it.

On the surface, Sidequest is a heist comedy with a game interface. Underneath, it’s in conversation with some very old stories about fathers, brothers, gifts that aren’t gifts, and what poverty makes reasonable.

The Odyssey

Homer

The epic opens with a son, Telemachus, setting out to find a father who never came home.

Adam says he wants a supercar. What he’s really on is the oldest quest there is.

Genesis 4

The story of Cain and Abel

The first question after the first crime: “Am I my brother’s keeper?”

War buddies, a crew of old friends, a twin. The name Cain was not chosen by accident.

The Aeneid, Book II

Virgil

Troy doesn’t fall to a siege. It falls to a gift it wheels in through its own gates.

The Trojan Stallion never breaks in. It starts with an email, then a small charge.

Things Fall Apart

Chinua Achebe

Tradition, ambition and a new economic order colliding in southeastern Nigeria.

The Cyber Realm’s creation myth begins in Nigeria. So do the writer’s own roots.

Oliver Twist

Charles Dickens

Fagin doesn’t need to threaten anyone. Hunger does his recruiting for him.

Nelson’s warehouse is the same gate, fifteen years before the world catches on.

Crime and Punishment

Fyodor Dostoevsky

A broke student convinces himself that one crime is the rational choice, then has to live with it.

Every Sidequest job is a small Raskolnikov argument, with XP attached.

Neuromancer & Snow Crash

William Gibson · Neal Stephenson

Cyberspace as a place, and a gig economy run like a game, decades before either existed.

The Cyber Realm is what happens when that future arrives as an app.

American Kingpin

Nick Bilton

The true story of the Silk Road, and of the federal agents convicted of stealing from the market they were sent to shut down.

Team 4B’s temptation is drawn from the real record.

“Social Structure and Anomie”

Robert K. Merton, 1938

Strain theory: when society blocks the legitimate road to success, people invent other roads.

The show’s whole thesis, in one essay. Sidequest is the other road.

One world, many screens

Built to run for years.

Sidequest was written as a world, not a one-off. The show bible covers two eras, fourteen fully profiled characters, the rules of an entire economy, and season mysteries with answers already written. That gives one property room for many formats.

In post · the series

Season 1 Part 1

A prologue and three episodes, shot across about 28 days in Raleigh and Wilmington.

Possible · a prequel

Fifteen years ago

Cain and Nelson’s era is its own crime drama: the warehouse, the terminal, the first jobs.

Possible · the procedural

Team 4B

The same events from the other side of the case, with hunters who are tempted too.

Possible · interactive & VR

Squad missions on Alacrity Player

Take a job alongside the ABC Squad. Choose whose lead to follow, what to share, and whether to trust the offer.

Possible · play

A game-shaped world

K.U.M., XP, brokers, the Mystery Box and mission contracts are mechanics already, which makes them ready for games, live events and merch.

Owned · the IP

An Alacrity Original

Owned by the company that builds the engine. Sidequest’s production problems are why Pure Alacrity exists.

Formats marked “possible” are creative directions, not announced releases. The series is the first way into the world, and it works on any ordinary screen.

How it’s made

Cinema with a game’s nervous system.

Mostly third-person cinema, cut with first-person moments: waking HUD boot-ups, fight flashes and character switches. Spatial audio is recorded on set with an ambisonic array and a binaural rig. The HUD is designed by hand in Blender and After Effects. The look pairs punchy 1980s contrast with vivid 2000s colour. The sound is “nostalgia of a new age”: 2000s rock, orchestra, pop-punk, electronic jazz and rap.

D.C AgwuWriter / Executive Producer

Harry MarshallShowrunner

Martin McGowanDirector / DP, Episode 1

Tommy BowersCo-writer / Episode Director

Jacky D. OttoChief Editor / Co-writer

Walker DixonHead of Visual Effects

Mason DailHead of Sound Design

Release status

In post. Final Episode 1 is unreleased.

Season 1 Part 1 is in post-production: sound, graphics, captions, credits and delivery. The release date will be announced when it’s confirmed.

The production history

Three phases, from Raleigh to Wilmington.

Sidequest began before Pure Alacrity existed. About 28 shooting days in total, across the beta, the main production and pickups.

1 · November–December 2024

Raleigh, community college. The early Episode 1 beta.

2 · 2025

May, Wilmington: the commercial scene. June–August, Raleigh: most of Episodes 2–3 and parts of Episode 1. November, Wilmington: the prologue.

3 · January–October 2026

Wilmington pickups. Additional photography.

Where Pure Alacrity came from. Pure development began in January 2026, after most of the footage for Episodes 1–3 had been shot. Making the series by hand, with every change rippling through schedules, budgets and call sheets, is what led D.C Agwu to build his own production software. Pure did not plan or run the original 2024–2025 shoots.

Uber met the Silk Road. Fifteen years later, they run the world.

Version 0.1 to version 4.0.

A black-market terminal and a backseat offer.

Mainstream culture. Still illegal.

A $15 trillion economy needs rules.

The invite

The Quest Broker

The contract

The crew

Escrow

The rating

The rules of engagement

The heat

Everybody uses it. Nobody admits it.

Gen Z, 18–30

The shrinking middle

The comfortable

FBI Team 4B

A prologue and three episodes.

The worst job interview ever held

Player One

The Pressure

Choose Your Player

Seven skills. Seven reasons to say yes.

Adam Dawnbringer

Brock Turismo

Chester Wiseman

Diego Cicatriz-Olvidado

Felicia Wall

Gemma Gazelle

Eric McSharry

The game has an owner.

The books underneath it.

The Odyssey

Genesis 4

The Aeneid, Book II

Things Fall Apart

Oliver Twist

Crime and Punishment

Neuromancer & Snow Crash

American Kingpin

“Social Structure and Anomie”

Built to run for years.

Season 1 Part 1

Fifteen years ago

Team 4B

Squad missions on Alacrity Player

A game-shaped world

An Alacrity Original

Cinema with a game’s nervous system.

In post. Final Episode 1 is unreleased.

Three phases, from Raleigh to Wilmington.

1 · November–December 2024

2 · 2025

3 · January–October 2026

Press Start.