Chapter 4

Power Failure

Anchor 1

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"...Ray couldn’t see. He could hear voices coming from somewhere, other bubbles of chaos sounding back in an off-kilter melody of fear and panic. Hard to make out through the ringing in his ears.
“L-Leone? A-Ah-Are you there?” He was starting to adjust to the dark, the air inside of his helmet hot and stuffy. “H-Hello? A-anyone? Where are you?” No one responds, the muffled conversations warped and unintelligible. Why weren’t the backup lights working?"

Author's Comment

And so the easy escape route turned out to be too good to be true, with a nice little scene of the captain going down with his ship. Chapter 4 is the end of the first introductory arc, setting the stage for the rest of Part I. It was pretty fun writing the dialogue during the blackout, since the process was something like writing it normally, and then deliberately making it hard to tell who was speaking. Hopefully it came off as atmospheric rather than annoying.

Some fun notes:

This chapter introduces crisis time: whenever the station is having a crisis, no one is bothering to check the time.
Knocking someone out is actually kind of difficult: hitting someone in the head is more likely to kill them/inflict severe brain damage than putting them to sleep for a while.

Change Notes

People were physically moved into different groups and locations, from everyone stick together the whole chapter to some people like Ramirez finding themselves alone.
There was a bit planned where Orwell would talk to Dr. Prince with the group's argument in the background, but I eventually had to take it out since it didn't really fit right.