This started out as a draft for the Wanderer's Library Scavenger Hunt Contest, which is their equivalent of JamCon. While my initial draft had something, I wanted to spend more time on it and make it something better. I held off on posting it, rewrote a significant portion of it, and left it in a sandbox for a few months to work on other things. I eventually came back to it and… well I guess that's obvious.

The hardest part of this was finding the balance between the serious sections and the comedic sections. If done well, the juxtaposition should make the funny parts funnier and the serious parts serious-er. If done poorly, both fall flat. The advice I got from GremlinGroup was to cut the jokes that felt like they were trying to be jokes. For example, the underlined section in this sentence was removed: "Hourly aftershocks, looters in ruined cities, survivors inevitably turning on each other and suggesting that maybe humans were the real monsters all along, the usual."