This was my favorite scene of this chapter to write. Leon managed to rhetorically bulldoze over Trinity and Luca, but Ms Shepard is proving herself a pretty equal match for him. And also, she’s scary as all heck.

Again regarding worldbuilding, I did want to keep things a little vague for the setting so readers could imagine a lot of how this world functions. The concept of governance is already a complicated subject in solarpunk circles, with the spectrum of ideals ranging from a kind of communal anarchy to a united communist world-government. And that’s really cool!

At least for this setting, given that this is still an Earth dealing with a population still in the billions, one that not only has various unique home-grown world cultures to deal with, but ALSO various alien peoples that have settled onto it, there ARE some kinds of government structures in place. Likely still various different ones, though certainly more out of a respect for self-governance and representation than hard-line jingoism. The exact functions and “look” of this I leave more up to the reader, as it’s not directly important to the wider narrative.

One worry I had here, though, is that Ms Shepard may give the impression of the future’s governments being corrupt and/or inefficient. I also leave it up to the reader how Ms Shepard feels about those institutions, but realistically, her assessment here is more-or-less a statement of facts. If you were a part of these systems and some random teenager told you time travel was real and to arrest some random women (particularly with little meaningful evidence), you probably aren’t going to immediately act on that. Even in a setting that’s had alien invasions and zombie outbreaks, that’s still gonna warrant at least SOME skepticism.