[Author's Note] So, here it is - a new story with actual chapters and actual plot and oh my goodness what am I doing.
Basically, this whole story is just me getting super excited about implications and what ifs after reading up on New Hope, Mount Kadar, where the Locust came from, what the hell the Sires had to do with anything, and how Myrrah ended up as the Locust Queen. Bear with me, I promise it's not as boring as it sounds.
Also, Baird/Sam. Because I love them.
Also also, apparently I like starting fics with prologues from characters who never get a POV in the story again. Who knew.
Prologue: Alive Again
Azura, Serano Ocean. 10 Frost 17 A.E.
Jace didn't like being one of those guys who complained. Like, okay, everyone was entitled to have a shitty day or feel depressed or whatever, but the way Jace saw it, now that the Locust and Lambent were dead and the miracle fuel that was secretly a planet-wide living parasite had been wiped off the face of Sera, even at the best of times his life was pretty damn good. Plenty of his friends hadn't made it to the end of the war—Gil Gonzales, Tai Kaliso, Michael Barrick, Jonathan Harper—and his own family had been killed on E-Day. There were plenty of worse fates than sorting through a mountain of paperwork.
But still…
Man, this is fucking boring.
It had been fifteen months since the COG had discovered and liberated Azura, and they were still trying to catalogue all the shit that had been hoarded in Pinnacle Tower, the central building on the island. It wasn't anybody's idea of a good time so Royston Sharle had precious few volunteers to sort through the mountain of crap in the hotel's basement. As the head of Emergency Management, Sharle seemed to have taken it upon himself to comb over the stacks of paper and experiments left behind by the scientists on the off chance that something incredibly useful might turn up. And when Sharle put his mind to something, it got done. It also probably didn't help that Major McLintock, who had become the de facto commanding officer of Azura's garrison (to no one's delight), was breathing down the Emergency Management Chief's neck.
So that was how Jace and Clayton Carmine found themselves down in the dark, cluttered basement of Pinnacle Tower, attempting to categorize the random crap that belonged to the scientists important enough to be whisked away to Prescott's secret island. Only nothing here belonged to them anymore. Because they were dead—slaughtered by the Locust the way Prescott had imagined the rest of humanity would be. So much for the Chairman's contingency plan.
Jace heaved a loud sigh as he tossed an obnoxiously large research paper on the subtle genetic differences between two species of grass onto a pile he had dubbed Plant Junk. "How long have we been here?" he asked.
Clay—who was still wearing his helmet, even in the dim light of the basement—didn't look up. "An hour. Tops."
"Are you serious?" Jace picked up the next stack of papers. "No way, man. It's gotta be at least two."
"Hey, I'm the one with the watch."
Jace glanced at the title of the essay—Sera: A New Geological Survey—and dropped it at his feet. "Ugh, this is torture. What does Sharle think we're gonna find, anyway? A map to an underground bunker filled with magical disease-curing drugs?"
"I'd settle for a hidden supply of bacon," Clay quipped—but there was no mistaking the slightly wistful tone of his voice.
Jace chuckled. "You hold on to that hope, buddy. Most of this is way advanced science crap that we don't even have people for anymore. Do they really think guys like us are gonna be able to weed out the useful stuff from the boring shit?"
Clay shot him a look—or he probably did, anyway; it was hard to tell with the helmet. "What do you mean, 'guys like us'?"
"Y'know…" Jace waved absently. "Normal guys. Sharle really wants to find something, he should get Baird over here."
"Yeah, good luck with that. Hoffman'll never let Baird leave Anvil Gate for too long for anything less than an emergency."
Making a noise of agreement, Jace reached for the next paper in his pile. No one he had talked to had come close to finding anything interesting down here, let alone helpful. He supposed that one day some of the stuff down here would be needed, but after the grubs had killed all the scientists and experts hidden away in Azura, Jace didn't know if there was anyone alive who could make heads or tails of most of the information they were sorting through. It would be a long time before people had the leisure to study stuff like urban planning or the humanities again.
Jace had become so used to looking at a title and tossing it aside that when he glanced at the paper in his hand, he was already discarding it before his brain processed the words—and when he realized what he'd just read, he froze instantly.
It didn't look any different from the hundreds and hundreds of essays and experiment write-ups that Jace had sorted through. The font on the cover page was the same, boring, standard block font, formatted exactly the same as everything else he'd half-heartedly categorized. But Jace could feel his palms start to sweat as he stared at the title, hoping that he was somehow hallucinating or reading the words wrong.
Sires & the Locust: Our Genetic Future?
Implications from the New Hope Research Facility Archives
Dr Brett Austen, ScD
A chill went up Jace's spin, as if someone had walked over his grave.
"Hey." Clay had noticed the change in his demeanour, from angrily bored to suddenly tense. "What's wrong?"
Jace handed the paper to Clay wordlessly. The silence that surrounded them had become heavy with foreboding. Jace was suddenly very aware of just how many shadows there were down here.
"Don't look now," Jace said, "but I think we might have that emergency."