Chapter 2

Orientation

Anchor 1

OUR SERVICES

"...The new voice startled Cyril, and he whirled back around to face the now open doorway, blueish light spilling out into the corridor and framing the form of a short young man standing in the entrance. Dressed in an oversized SPECA security jacket, the (presumably) security officer appraised the crowd in front of him with a grimace, glaring at him from under the shadow of a grey cap.
His skin was an ashen gray in the light, making him even more terrifying than he was already."

Author's Comment

This chapter is and probably will be the hardest chapter to write in the novel. It was written with three different goals: one, introducing the station as a location; two, introducing the rest of the characters; and three, include enough information that technically speaking, one could figure out everything about Wayne's murder from just this (and the previous) chapter.

Some fun notes:

It's been completely rewritten at least 3 different times, with even more individual edit. Frankly speaking, I'm not even sure if it's still cohesive at this point.
For reference, Officer Park is around 5 to 6 ft (on the lower side), with Collins and Batiste nearing 7. I imagined the rest of the characters to be spread out in between that range.
Everything about futuristic radio technology terminology is made up. The TLDR version of the Greene and Ramirez's discussion is that the radio is better-just-buy-a-new-one broken.

Change Notes

A notable change from earlier drafts is the cutting of Orianna's longer monologues. While they included lots of world-building context and motivation, the info dump was a bit too much so bits of them were shifted into later chapters.
There was originally an idea of the cake being one slice short (ooh spooky) due to my character spreadsheet listing the last person as number 13, which lead to several hours of paranoid headaches over exactly how many people there were. Not my finest moment.