Syberian Sunrise✔️

AFTERWORD

Interestingly, Enzo was the very first character created out of The Shadow Wars.

In his original incarnation, his story honestly isn't that different from what we got. I mean, I've loved gritty dudes fighting crazy monsters with guns and whatever else they can get their hands on, usually in space, for...ever. Since before I even started writing fan fiction, or really writing at all. We can probably blame Aliens for this.

The seed for this story can be tied to a Newgrounds flash animation from like...2006? Maybe even earlier. I don't remember what it was called, but the basic plot involved a group of soldiers investigating a secret military research facility where an experiment has gone wrong and monsters have gotten out. I mean, that's so me it's ridiculous.

Memory is a strange, brittle thing, for me at least. If I recall correctly, Syberian Sunrise was in fact the original title of the story. It was one of those titles that just came to me out of nowhere, for no particular reason, and stuck. At one point I switched the title to Isolation, though. I know that one stuck around, that almost up until the actual writing of Syberian Sunrise its title was to be Isolation. But I ended up wanting that title for another series. (Someday. I still have that idea and it's actually super cool and dark.) I think at one point I might've switched to calling it Ataxia. And then I know that for a little while there, it was going to be called Survival-Horror, because that was the vibe I wanted to permeate the whole story. I wanted it to feel like a novelization of a survival-horror game.

The main difference between this version and the original was largely the direction (literally) in which the plot went. The story began at the bottom here, and went up to the surface. In the original version, Enzo would have started out on the surface, and spent about a third of the story trying to get the fuck out. He would've found a ship that was broken and be going about the process of fixing it, all the while Eve's character would've been like 'dude you really need to help deal with this, you're pretty much the only one who can, it's going to get so out of control' and Enzo's basically just like 'not my problem'. And then right as he fixes the ship and is preparing to just blast off, finally decides he can't just walk away, and then the story is about his journey pushing down level through level into the facility until finally confronting the Alpha. Obviously some of that narrative survived.

The history of Enzo also took a weird side turn. At one point I was going to write a series just called The Enzo Rain Chronicles, which was basically going to be stories following him as a mercenary in this Mass Effect-style galaxy, running around and having adventures. But that was just a whimsical idea that went nowhere.

At one point he was going to awaken on a space station in a distant star system overrun with monsters, with the local star going supernova within the next forty eight hours, and he had to escape. This obviously survived in Necropolis 3.

Finally, in the original incarnation of The Shadow Wars, Necropolis was going to end roughly how Necropolis 3 ended, with Greg and Kyra adrift, and then Enzo shows up and they have to team up and deal with the Augmented. But we all know how that turned out.

As for Enzo himself, this time around I wanted more of an antihero. Or really more of an asshole protagonist. Because of House, I was fascinated by the idea of a character with chronic pain. I wanted a character who's more of a jerk, but still ultimately will do the right thing. (Or will he?)

When I began writing this, I was at a weird time in my life. I had just finished moving back across the country from New Mexico to Missouri, and was settling into my new home life, which was considerably better than basically any other point in my life. Shortly after I wrapped up Ceaseless, my plans to start my own small publishing house with some friends, which had been in the making for months and months, exploded and was destroyed. And when it all collapsed, I was honestly relieved. Managing other people is just not for me. I can barely manage myself.

I knew this story would follow Ceaseless, and I was excited for it because I knew it would be the final one before finally allowing all the characters to meet.

With that in mind, enjoy the next story.