That's what I ended up doing. I do feel a bit silly having gotten stumped by such a trivial thing, but I guess I'm just very used to working during the pragma section for initialization tasks. Otherwise the experience out of the box is incredible. I find a lot of libraries tend to be overly complex, but once I got past this small hurdle Apollo works as expected with little fuss or fanfare. It was mostly just a technical detail I got hung up on because while the cheat sheet seems to make it pretty clear you just need to call lua_state_create() to get started, my issue was that because it wasn't working I didn't know if I was missing some detail or if it was something else and, as it turned out, it was something else.
I don't know how vital it would be, but a "hello world" in Apollo would've got me digging into the extension earlier and fussing less over missing documentation which is what prompted the initial post. Given the lack of similar I'm probably an outlier though I won't be upset to see it in an updated version.