Another highlight of the development for this chapter: the main NPCs! Foundation B is deliberately less populated than prior locations (the bulk of its action takes place around like, 10 or 11 at night), so the characters that we do see, I wanted to make sure were a bit more memorable.

The main people of interest were going to be A: one of the people in charge of the water park and B: the security team that’s after Simon. For the former, Nova as a character had pretty much existed for as long as I had the idea of Foundation B being under a water park. I knew I had to have some foil working right next door (so to speak) that Ms Shepard couldn’t stand.

Nova also gave me an opportunity to at least acknowledge the fact that I hadn’t really included many openly nonbinary individuals in the setting yet, which felt like an obvious missed element. Unintentionally, that combined with Trinity being openly trans would end up paving the way for some more gender-non-conforming elements that would seep their way into later sections of the story.

Now for the security team, I debated a lot on what I wanted to do with them. I didn’t really have a coherent “idea” on them until I stumbled upon the concept of making them a sort of Charlie’s Angels trio of ladies. They’re certainly not /THAT/ skilled – after all, most of their job is actually just checking through and fixing potential hazards – so it was fun to play around with how this group handles having to do the actual capital-S Security operations in capturing Simon.