Thank you for taking the time to read this story. The idea started off as a comic book concept, became an audio drama (the pilot's on youtube actually) 'cause I'm a slow (and not very skilled) artist, but I found the audio drama too annoying to make so I gave in and made it a novel cause I really wanted to put my ideas down.

The prologue was almost copied from the audio pilot, so it doesn't quite grasp the medium of a novel too well, but I hope I've improved during Arc 1 and hope to continue in the future. 

Being a comic reader, one of my struggles when writing was the exposition dumps and making the character descriptions flow naturally, if you've got any tips for them they'd be much appreciated. I hope I've got the character's personalities across well, I'd love to hear your favourites too. 

Originally, this arc was going to be called: "imbalance", and talk about power vacuums, Sven was going to be part of a gang. But as I wrote episode 2, the idea of the radicalisation pipeline felt more fitting since it let me weave in the themes of correcting mistakes, fractured families, and wanting to belong - which I tried to make mirror/inspire Naomi's story. The Craig stuff was a bit iffy for me, 'cause I wasn't fully sure how to tie everything together satisfyingly, but I hope this ending was sufficient.

Had a lot of fun writing from Naomi's perspective, enjoyed playing up the internal monologue of a person in love, going to enjoy doing a different angle on that during the next arc from Janet's perspective. Aiming to start writing that in late August, but follow my Instagram to hear updates.

Any thoughts and/or criticism would be much appreciated, I had a lot of fun writing this, and I want to keep improving. Also, if anyone wanted to share their own experiences for this next arc e.g. being deaf, being queer, being a POC - that could help inform my writing better. Also, if you're a bigot then polx off, grow up, do better.

Speaking of, in case anyone was confused:

Polx, Britz, Whalfer, Shilk are all substitutes for swears, 'cause I couldn't be bothered marking my work as explicit.

So closing off, I just wanted to again thank you for reading my work, please share it and support it if you enjoyed. I'll try to release arcs all at once, so the story feels more complete, follow my socials for updates (@jerrykakkanattu on everything). 

I'll leave you off with a: let's do like Superman and make a better tomorrow 🫰

-> Jerry Kakkanattu, 18 years old, UK.

P.S. thank you to MattyBBaines on Royal Road for being the first person to comment on the story, hope you're a good person 🤙