Woot! The LAST page of Volume 3!! It’s a wrap!!
This is another one of those scenes I have been dying to get to for many years: the big reveal of the other clone!
As I mentioned a while back, I juggled the order of the three endings for this volume and finally settled on the one depicted so I could go for maximum impact. While it would’ve been nice to end on a Roka/main crew scene, I thought it would work better to have them review the camera logs from the Tique Amara BEFORE this last reveal. This would serve two purposes: (1) it would remind readers that there was a second spilled tank in the Amara cargo bay and a person was in one of the escape pods floating in space way back in Volume 1, and (2) it would give Roka and company plenty of opportunities to use the word “Amara” when referring to the Tique Amara. I thought if I did that, then when Amara shows up and actually uses her name here, readers would be better primed to know exactly where she came from.
The tricky thing was to hint at her place on the Rogue team throughout their story while never actually showing her until the end. So I wanted one rogue (Maeki) to refer to her as “Rook” so as to not give away her name. I thought “Rook” would be a good choice since it would be short for “rookie” but without knowing that, readers would just accept it as a cool name or nickname. To throw people off, I also had Maeki call others by nicknames, like “Pokey” for Ozomo. I wanted Hiura to have a scene where she said “she doesn’t like that name” but stage it in a way so that readers think she’s talking about “Pokey,” where she’s actually talking about Amara not liking being called “Rook.”
I’m curious if any readers ever really picked up on the character’s absence despite being discussed throughout the book. They repeatedly refer to Rook and in one case, Hiura mentions “the five of us,” although I had only shown four of them. I do really love things like this and I have the entire series planned so that there will be many little details that can be missed on a first read that you will actually catch on a second or third time through.
For right now, I liken Hiura and her crew to the early Daenerys Targaryen storyline in Game of Thrones (a series I still consider my favorite TV series despite most other people hating it at this point). Similar to that storyline, Hiura’s crew is not directly connected to Roka’s crew, nor do they immediately intersect with them. No doubt they will cross paths at some point, but for the time being, they are there to have their own adventures while also building more of the universe that will come into play.
Thanks everyone for reading Volume 3 here on RunnersUniverse! And a special thank you to everyone who has chimed in with comments. You have no idea how much it means, for someone working in a vacuum, to be reminded on occasion that people are actually out there reading and enjoying your work!
Can’t wait to have the physical book finally in my hands!
