Intermission & Podcast Update

Dawn is stranded eighteen floors beneath the surface, and her only way back is sealed behind a door built to hold back the sea. She has one advantage left: whoever is running Neara Station doesn’t know where she is. She intends to keep it that way.Every light in the station switches on at the sound of movement. So Dawn measures the silence, finds the exact volume the sensors can hear, and teaches herself to move just beneath it, one careful step every two seconds. She makes her way through hall after hall of empty rooms, built for a hundred people who left nothing behind.Then, somewhere in the dark ahead, a door starts swinging on its own. And a small, familiar sound begins to answer her.Content note: peril, explosions, and severe damage to a mechanical body.Part three of The Daemon of Neara Station, in First Light: An Audio Drama. Written, narrated, and produced by Scott McGowan.

Inside the dome, Neara Station is beautiful: artificial palms, light split into colours no human eye could see, wildflowers pushing up through the tiles. It is also wrong in ways Dawn can measure but can’t yet explain. Her footsteps sound too low. The air feels heavy. Her clearance works once, and then the door refuses her. Dawn solves the puzzle one test at a time, and the answer explains exactly why she was the one sent here.Then the elevator takes her down, past the bedrock and into the open ocean, toward floor fifty-one and the orders she was told not to open until she arrived. Somewhere in the descent she loses contact with the Colony. Then a message comes through anyway, and it’s almost right.Someone else is in Neara Station. They know where she’s going, and they don’t want her to get there.Content note: peril, and flooding in an enclosed space.Cast:Allayne McGowan as JunePart two of The Daemon of Neara Station, in First Light: An Audio Drama. Written, narrated, and produced by Scott McGowan.

Rubyn has been sleeping badly since he started his tech training, and Dawn has noticed. She’s started noticing a lot of things lately. Small moments of understanding that land with a tiny, pleasant jolt, and that she has quietly started collecting.This morning, the Guild’s jobs board empties before she reaches it. The contracts have been pulled, and the reason is classified. Then a message arrives, signed only with a single initial: there’s a job for her instead.It takes her to a remote island on the planet’s surface, under a punishing sun, with an escort who hasn’t been told where they’re going. When the gleaming dome finally rises out of the water, her escort goes quiet. She knows the name. She knows Dawn is going in alone. And before she leaves, she offers Dawn something nobody asked her to: a way to call for help.Content note: strong language and a brief, non-graphic fight.Cast, in order of appearance:Sean Hiebert as RubynElliot Letts as BillNancy Macdonald-Kerr as VictoriaAllayne McGowan as JunePart one of The Daemon of Neara Station, in First Light: An Audio Drama. Written, narrated, and produced by Scott McGowan.

A behind-the-scenes update rather than a new story. Scott talks about how First Light started, what it's taken to produce the podcast so far, and why the next story - The Daemon of Neara Station - needs more time to do properly.No episode this week, and no weekly schedule for a bit, but there's plenty more First Light to come. Thanks for listening.

The firefight is over in seconds, and it isn't Victoria's aim that ends it. When the dust settles, the thing they came to recover stirs to life in the dark - barely powered, unable to move, and speaking in a flat machine tone that puts Victoria's finger back on the trigger. A damaged prototype is still worth more than none. She's ready to make that call.What stops her isn't mercy. It's a single observation the machine makes about her - one thing it can see that no one else ever has. What follows is quieter than a gunfight and lands twice as hard: a recognition passed between them in words older than either of them, and a decision that turns a recovery job into something none of them planned.Four days later, Em still won't take his prototype back. She hasn't left Rubyn's apartment, and she isn't going to. And in the small hours of the morning, she asks Rubyn a question about forgetting that neither of them is ready for - and answers it, in five words, with the first thing she has ever wanted for herself.This is where she begins.Content warning: gun violence, including a captive threatened at gunpoint.The final episode of Book 2 of First Light: An Audio Drama. Written, narrated, and produced by Scott McGowan; featuring the voice talents of Sean Hiebert as Rubyn and Nancy Macdonald-Kerr as Victoria. Also featuring the original audio track, "Silverlight Dais", by Taylor Moorey (Dead Weight Citizens Brigade).

The man in the ridiculous hat finally names the job. Something of his has been stolen - a prototype, still in development, that he calls her. Bandits are holding it out on the planet's surface and demanding a ransom in gold, and he doesn't want them dead. He wants it recovered. And recovering it, he warns, may take some convincing - which is the real reason he needs Victoria, for a reason that lands harder than either of them expects.The trail leads to a dead place: a city-sized construction project abandoned when the tunnels beneath it started swallowing workers whole. Rubyn and Victoria go in without lights, feeling their way through the dark past things left behind to warn them off, toward a silver glow and a vast stone chamber that shouldn't exist. And propped beneath an archway at the heart of it, in midnight-blue armour, is what they came to find.Content warning: gun violence, and disturbing imagery including desecrated human remains.The second episode of Book 2 of First Light: An Audio Drama. Written, narrated, and produced by Scott McGowan; featuring the voice talents of Sean Hiebert as Rubyn and Nancy Macdonald-Kerr as Victoria. Also featuring the original audio track, "Silverlight Dais", by Taylor Moorey (Dead Weight Citizens Brigade).

Rubyn is halfway through patching up a leg a wolf nearly took off him when his POD rings. Private number. No name. Just a voice with the kind of authority that doesn't ask twice, and enough knowledge of a Hunt that went very wrong to prove it isn't a wrong number. There's a job. It won't say what. It won't say who's offering it. And it already knows more about him than he's comfortable with.Victoria has questions of her own. She vets her clients; she doesn't work for men who hide behind anonymity. But the pay is real, the caller was insistent that she's the only one who'll do - and she made one condition of her own before agreeing. So the two of them walk into the quiet grey heart of the Sciences district, where the security cameras thin out and the shadows sit wrong, to meet a man who won't come into the light until he's ready.When he finally does, he's not what either of them expected.Content warning: "Finders Keepers" contains graphic violence and gore, including animal attack, gun combat, and depictions of human remains.The first episode of Book 2 of First Light: An Audio Drama. Written, narrated, and produced by Scott McGowan; featuring the voice talents of Sean Hiebert as Rubyn and Nancy Macdonald-Kerr as Victoria.

Dawn slips into bed earlier than usual, and Rubyn - half-asleep - braces for one of her late-night questions. He doesn't expect the one she's actually come to ask. She's been thinking about what passes between people who care for each other, and she's reasoned her way to a conclusion: she wants to strengthen the bond between them, and she believes she knows how.What follows is quieter and harder than either of them is ready for - a conversation about wanting, consent, and what it means to be cared for, between a man who isn't sure what he feels and a machine who isn't sure she's permitted to feel anything at all. And in one unguarded second, Rubyn sees something in her face he can't explain, and can't stop thinking about.Content note: frank discussion of sexual activity and themes of consent. No explicit content depicted.A standalone story in First Light: An Audio Drama. Written, narrated, and produced by Scott McGowan.

Dawn has her answer - or she's almost certain she does. One more trip to the station, a few diagnostic tests to confirm it, and the puzzle that's killed seven people comes apart in her hands. She's ninety-eight percent sure. It's the last two percent that worries her, and the thing she keeps reminding herself: don't get so caught up in one thing that you stop paying attention.A storm has rolled in over the station. The door opens for her. And in the dark, with the data closing in around her, she finally meets the thing that everyone's been calling a ghost - and learns what it actually is.What follows leaves the Guard with questions Dawn won't answer, an apology owed to the one man she was told never to disobey, and a quiet ritual waiting for her at the end of the line.The conclusion of The Last Samurai, Book 1 of First Light: An Audio Drama. Written, narrated, and produced by Scott McGowan.

The station isn't empty when Dawn arrives. The door is open, and inside there's blood - a Hunter who should never have been cleared to be there, killed with a precision no animal could manage. The Guild's scanners confirm what they always do: no lifesigns, no assailant, nothing. Just Dawn, a body, and a gap in the information that's no longer a gap but a chasm.The whispers of a vengeful spirit harden into something Hunters now trade as fact, and the Guard moves to bury it before it starves the Guild of contracts. Dawn keeps her own counsel and keeps watching - the board, the rumours, and a small red sticker outside the Guild that simply will not come off. Somewhere in the noise, a connection is waiting for her to notice it.Episode two of First Light: An Audio Drama. Written, narrated, and produced by Scott McGowan.