Warning! This blog post will contain spoilers for anyone who hasn’t finished reading Allie’s Return yet. Skip this post if you haven’t finished reading the story.
Just like for Oceania: The Underwater City, I thought I’d share some of the deleted scenes I edited out of the final version of Allie’s Return. This will be the last post for Allie’s Return, so I hope you enjoy it!
Having the world of Oceania already developed made writing Allie’s Return easier, but I still had some doubts about how I wanted to depict certain scenes in the novel. One of those scenes was the city-wide announcement when Allie returns to city level after her deep-sea ecology class trip outside the city. At first, I considered gathering the entire city in Central so the mayor could address everyone at once. However, the more I thought about it, the more I realized it was a stupid idea. If four million people gathered in one location, it would be too much weight concentrated in one location of the city and could cause a structural catastrophe. So I decided to take the following paragraph out:
Feeling awkward walking around in a highly-sophisticated wetsuit, we joined a line of people boarding one of the trains that had switched from pink for the Art District to black for Central. Every seat was taken and I was lucky to find a spot where Rosa, Katrina, and I could sit together. None of us spoke on the way to Central. The heavy buzz of expectation resonated throughout the train car, keeping everyone quiet, but fidgety.
At the Central train station, people crowded in so closely that it was nearly impossible to walk. Every body pressed so closely to the body next to it, that we swayed nearly as one organism. I tried to keep in contact with Rosa and Katrina, but the three of us were pushed apart and lost amongst the crowd.
Although it appeared that Central wouldn’t be able to hold of the citizens of Oceania pressed together so tightly, bodies began to spill out into the concentric circles until everyone must have been preset.
Originally, Allie’s Return was shorter than it is in its final version. I felt like the story was long enough and had surpassed the size of Oceania: The Underwater City too much, so I hurried the ending. As I read the book again during editing for my second draft, I realized that the ending needed to be gradual enough that it gave the reader some closure and tied up a loose end I hadn’t realized I’d missed. So here is the original ending to Allie’s Return:
“What are your names?”
“I’m Dylan Baker and this is Allie Baker. We’re brother and sister.”
I glanced over at Dylan, wondering why he hadn’t given them my real name. He gave me an imperceptible shake of his head, which could have easily been interpreted as a nervous twitch.
The same guy spoke into a radio and soon we were allowed to get up. We were escorted to downtown. The entire city was dead, quarantined like Chicago, I assumed. When we reached the ICDP, they didn’t allow us inside but instead took the Myxine sp. from us outside.
“There’s an enzyme in the gut of these fish that hold the key to the plague cure. You’ll find that this enzyme is what has been keeping the elderly woman who’s the oldest surviving infected person with the plague alive. I have a file here with all of the explanations. I also have the pills that the woman was taking that helped her to withstand the viruses for so long.” Dylan handed everything over to the worker with the mask across her face.
“Thank you,” the woman muttered. “We’ll look into it right away.”
The door was shut to us and the military men ushered us away from it. They told us we were to wait outside in case they needed us again.
I looked over at Dylan. “Well, we did all that we could.”
Dylan nodded at me. “Yes, we did. Now it’s up to the Land Dwellers.”
This is it! You’ve just finished the last blog post regarding Allie’s Return. I hope you’ve enjoyed the blog posts of the last few months. If you did, leave me a comment or send me a message at elizataye@gmail.com and let me know. If you didn’t like it, be sure to email me and let me know why. I always love hearing from my readers.
The next blog posts will be for Shark Station, book 3 of Oceania: The Underwater City. If you want to know more about the book’s release and when the blog posts for it will begin, visit https://elizataye.com/news/.
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