AUTHOR'S NOTE

I've decided to write this little addendum for several reasons, the foremost being as a purely selfish note of apology/explanation for the severely crappy quality of this story. If you really don't care to know the background on this, then just skip this little note.

Rise from Darkness was my very first Metroid fic, and one of the first fanfics I ever actually wrote. Time has not been kind to this story, as the writing is severely lacking and the plot is neither original, nor all that good. I also don't find that the almost cartoonish levels of violence and vulgarity play out well. I was only fourteen when this was written, and it is very very obvious.

So why all this hate for my own fic? Lol, I don't hate this story, not at all. It holds a very special place for me and was a very significant step in the way I approached writing. But it has deep flaws, and I want to address those flaws directly by saying that it was merely because of the time it was written. This was most likely the fastest thing I ever wrote, but something I knew exactly where I was going with and how I wanted to pull it off. That is a complete rarity for me. If any of you have looked at the other stories archived here, they're either unfinished, or rather short. The idea of an unstable and very dark characterization of Samus appealed to me, and at that point, it had never been done before.

Obviously it has been done since, and much much better. The archive here has grown by leaps and bounds, and many other writers have put their mark on the fandom and have written seminal classics. This thing is like a crusty and senile old man in comparison to the youthful, fresh kids out there today (lol).

The story you just read is not in any way different from the original posted all those years ago. The only thing I've done is fixed some rather painful grammatical and spelling errors, though I'm pretty sure I haven't caught all of those either. My characterization of Armstrong Huston was completely different than his appearance in the Nintendo Power comics. This was because at the time I wrote this, I had only read the comics once and couldn't substantially remember anything about his personality. I used him because I needed an outside perspective of Samus, and I needed someone slightly familiar to the reader rather than an OC because I doubted my ability to have a compelling enough character to be the reader's stability in the face of Samus's madness. Canon since then has grown as has the cast of characters in the Metroid universe, but there really weren't any other humans other than Samus back then, and the comic was the only source I had.

Though I had given a lot of consideration to giving this a rewrite, it was frankly pointless. There is no way I could rewrite this to any level of quality, and I like it just the way it is in its completely shitty form

If you still enjoyed it, then I'm beyond happy that this story can still resonate with readers after all these years. To all the people that have reviewed this, and those I've talked to through email, I'd like to give you a special thanks because the support you showed a fledgling writer was a fantastic feeling.