(One week after the warriors return)
"This here is your spinal fluid, and the hope is that it will have similar properties to Zeke Yeager's when ingested by an Eldian." He was currently being given the rundown of how spinal fluid worked by Dr Emmaline Watt, one of the head researchers of the Titan Biology Research Society.
She had medium length black hair that curled just passed her shoulders, she wore a white lab coat over her green shirt, with a black skirt that went past her knees, with a pair of black heels on her feet.
"Now this here." She moved across the room to what looked to be a very complex piece of machinery, heels clicking on the floor as she did so. "Is barely just out of the prototype stage, it was first used by the Marleyan Army on the Scouting mission on Paradis a couple months back. It diffuses spinal fluid into a gas, and as you'll know, it was very successful in the field test."
"As you can see, this one has been modified slightly to be fixed to the wall here, unlike the handheld version used in the field." Dr Watt explained. "Now, all I have to do is empty the vial of spinal fluid into the machine." She unscrewed the lid and emptied the vial of liquid into the machine, then placed the empty vial into a tray to be disposed of later.
"So it just... turns it into a gas?" Lukas asked the doctor. "What happens to anyone else that breathes it in?"
"That, is a very good question Mr Tybur, one that we don't know the exact answer to, however, we believe it to be the same as the Titan serum." She told him, strolling over to a red button on the wall next to a large window that was blocked by metal shutters.
Pressing the button, the shutters slowly began to slide upwards, revealing a concrete pit that had to be at least thirty metres deep, with a singular metal door down at the bottom.
"The Titan Biology Research Society was given a huge boost in funding when Zeke Yeager's abilities were found out, along with Annie Leonhart's Female Titan ability copying capabilities." Dr Watt explained. "What you're looking at is a state of the art Titan research chamber. This is the lab section, with the viewing platform up there on our right. This is where we turn Eldian criminals into Titans to experiment on. The door to our right allows a Titan shifter to enter when we need the Titans disposed of."
Right as she finished speaking, the door right at the bottom of the chamber opened up, and out stepped five Marleyan soldiers, all wearing gas masks, each of them escorting a prisoner in handcuffs.
Reaching over to another switch, Dr Watt started speaking through a microphone in the wall. "Thank you gentlemen. Leave them there, Mr Tybur and I can take it from here." On cue, the prisoners were put face down on the floor while the soldiers exited the chamber, closing the door behind them, and not long after, the prisoners were on their feet, begging to be let out of the concrete chamber.
"You mind me asking what they did?" He asked as Dr Watt moved to the gas machine and turned it on.
"Will it make you feel better turning your fellow Eldians into Titans knowing what their crimes were?" She responded with as the gas began to creep down the walls of the chamber. "We're about to find out if your spinal fluid is like Zeke's, they'll either transform as soon as they breathe it in, or they'll live long enough to hear you scream. Does it really matter what they did to deserve this fate?"
He watched as the criminals were engulfed in the mist created by his spinal fluid. "I don't suppose it is." He shrugged. "What they did is irrelevant in comparison to what Marley can learn about my Titan powers today, right?"
"Of course not, and it seems like they aren't transforming instantly. We may have yet another huge discovery on our hands." Dr Watt picked up a clipboard that contained her notes and a pen to write it down as the both of them observed the criminals below, who were still banging on the door. "Now, please press the button and scream into the microphone. Zeke's worked that way as well."
Pressing the button to turn the microphone on, he then turned back to Dr Watt. "How loud do I need to scream?"
"From what we've learned, as long as they hear it, it should work. You probably don't even need to scream here, just telling them to transform should do it." She informed him of previous results.
"You lot, transform into Titans." He spoke through the microphone, but nothing happened to them, they just continued to hit the door, trying to break it down even harder once they heard his voice.
"Okay, maybe you should scream." Dr Watt spoke up again.
"Ahem." He cleared his throat before opening his mouth again. "HAAAAAAAAAAAAH!" Again, nothing happened down below.
"Try opening the door and doing it." The doctor suggested, following him over to the door as he opened it.
"Please don't do it!"
"HAAAAAAAAAAAAH!" But once more, nothing happened to the five criminals.
"Hmm, that's interesting." She noted what had happened, or rather, what hadn't happened down. "They haven't transformed, maybe your spinal fluid requires a special kind of concoction rather than what we used for Zeke. Obviously that will require a lot more experimentation and testing that you'll need to be present for. I can have my team start work later today, all we'll need is some more spinal fluid from you... what are you doing?"
Dr Watt watched as he bit down on his finger right next to her. Her hands went to protect herself, not that it would do anything, it was more instinctive rather than anything else as the light engulfed both the room they were in and the chamber down below.
However, she soon realised that she was still alive, and that was because he hadn't transformed, rather he'd managed to get the criminals down below to transform into Titans, with two being a full fifteen metres, one a ten metre and the other two around five metres tall.
"Oh, you really had me there. I thought you were going to transform for a second there." She let out a nervous laugh as she scribbled down what had happened. "How did you know causing a wound would get them to transform."
"I just did." He shrugged as the Titans turned to face them, though there was nowhere to climb, meaning they were just reaching up a wall to no avail. "It was instinctive, like your reaction to guard yourself just then."
"Interesting." She wrote that down. "Try commanding them, see if that works."
"Hey, sit down." He ordered the Titans down below, but just as he suspected, none of them listened to a word he said, not even repeating the commands or biting his finger to draw blood worked.
"Well, it certainly isn't what we hoped for in regards to the testing, but you can command Titans to appear without the need of a scream, which could give you an unlimited range." Dr Watt summarised. "The lack of control is concerning though, Zeke must have been a very special child, because even you, the holder of the Founding Titan can't command your own creations."
"Shame, I really wanted to make them do some star jumps." He remarked as he looked at the decaying corpses of the Titans he had just finished crushing in the chamber. "Unlimited range though? Are you telling me I could lie in bed and still rain hell on the other side of the world?"
"It's just a theory, but yes, that's the idea." She confirmed. "You'd need to coordinate with the Warrior Unit to make sure you don't unwittingly unleash Titans upon them or any other units in the area."
"Naturally." He remarked in response. "Are you always this eager to further your knowledge about Titans and their powers? Or is it a patriotic thing for you?"
"I'm just happy to be contributing to such a respected field such as Titan biology." Dr Watt responded. "My hope is to one day have a way of removing Titan powers and transferring them without the need for a Titan eating someone. It's just so gruesome, I can never watch it."
"Don't tell me you're showing sympathy for Eldians Dr Watt." His face was dead serious. "Do I have to report you to Commander Magath for that?"
"The Commander of the Warrior Unit agrees with my vision for Titan science." She told him rather curtly, not phased in the slightest with his threat. "He feels it is rather unfortunate for Warriors who have served Marley for so long to be eaten while chained to an altar." She told him. "If I hadn't watched you turn into a Titan moments ago, I'd have thought you were Marleyan with the way you talked just then."
"My blood may be Eldian, but society sees me as one of them, not an Eldian with the blood of the Devil." He reminded her. "I'm more Marleyan than you will ever be Dr Watt, figuratively speaking of course."
"Biologically as well." Dr Watt spoke as they both exited from the room and towards the elevator that brought them down here. "Your family hasn't been marrying Eldians all this time, you probably have the blood of most races somewhere in your veins."
"Probably." He shrugged. "Does that make me less of a monster though?"
"You aren't a monster." Emmaline responded. "Your family is special, you drove King Fritz away into exile. Your family has atoned for the sins of your ancestors, it's the rest of the Eldian race that hasn't."
(Eleven days after the warriors return.)
"The sheep trampled the Devils on their way to Salta."
He was stood outside a bar in the the coastal city of Odiha near Marley's southern continental border. Having been directed here by an old doctor that he had tracked down in the days following the experiments with Dr Watt.
After the experiments, he'd been given some documents by one of the family guards that he'd asked them to go get. From that, he was able to find out that one survey ship had gone missing about thirteen years prior to the attack on Paradis. There had been one body found, a Public Security Officer, Gross was his name and he'd been eaten by a Titan.
Though because there were no signs of anyone else having died, and because he had a habit of staying behind to have some 'fun' with the last few criminals that would be turned into Titans, the investigation concluded that he'd fallen off the edge and the ship had been sunk on the way home, but it was never determined how.
It only took one look at the ships manifest to know who he needed to look into next. Of the criminals, two stood out. Grisha Yeager, and Dina Yeager, now it all made sense, Zeke and Eren were related after all, they were brothers, but he swore he remembered that Eren's mother was called Carla Yeager, not Dina.
Then, a look at the Officers on board told him everything he needed to know. Eren Kruger, one of the senior Officers of the Public Security on board. Knowing what he knew, it didn't take a genius to figure it out. Eren Kruger was an Eldian, and after tracking down his records and the doctor that had cleared his blood test, the puzzle pieces were all starting to fall into place.
It wasn't difficult to get the old retired doctor in his seventies to admit that he wasn't Marleyan like his records showed, but in fact an Eldian who had faked his blood test, and quite possibly hundreds of other blood tests, including Eren Kruger's. The old man even confirmed that he had faked a blood test for one Eren Kruger, even going so far as to tell him that he'd continued to do it until his last day as a doctor.
He'd done it for the Restoration of Eldia, having Eldians roaming around as Marleyans was beneficial to their cause, even if the last remnants had been rounded up and shipped off to Paradis thirteen years ago. Apparently he'd given fake blood tests to children of Marleyan couples as well, just because he felt like it wasn't his place to split a family apart because of a blood test, meaning that there were Eldians that didn't even know they were spawns of the devil.
After finding out that Lukas was also an Eldian, having to show off his Titan healing powers to prove it, he told him of a place in Odiha, a bar to be exact, one where he heard the last of the Restorationists were hiding out in, having escaped from Liberio before Public Security arrested them put them on a ship bound for Paradis.
"The sheep trampled the Devils on their way to Salta." That was what the man had said to tell the ones in the bar, as a sort of passcode to let them know that he was there to meet with them.
"The Rasberry Ripple. They even spelled raspberry wrong, what's that all about?" The only downside to returning home after six years was that he wasn't allowed to drive himself anywhere, he needed someone to fo it for him.
"Williams, get back in the car." Lukas told the guard that was with him, now wearing plain clothes as to not give away his appearance. "I'm going for a drink, I don't need you babysitting me every minute of the day."
"Someone doesn't travel across the country to just, 'get a drink.' Despite what you may think, we are not idiots." Williams responded with. "We may be chosen to guard the Tybur family because of our physical appearance first of all, but we are smart too. They don't just pick the beefiest and brainless ones."
"Get back in the car before I make you Williams." Lukas threatened him.
"Ooo, I'm so scared of you all the way down there." Lukas' height of barely six foot was much less than Williams' stature of six foot six. "I'm well paid to guard you, not follow you around like a duckling, if I couldn't take you in a fight, then I'd be straight out the door."
"Just get back in the car and wait for me." But Williams refused to budge, so he had to try another tactic to get rid of him. "If you get back in the car, we'll stop for chocolate on the way back. I hear Odiha has those imports from Hizuru that you love."
"Say no more Lord Tybur, take all the time you need." His extraordinary sweet tooth was the one way that Lukas could get his way when he was around.
Now, back to the bar. Williams was right, Raspberry was spelled wrong, or maybe it was intentional, though that didn't matter, what mattered was going inside and speaking to whoever was around.
Pushing the door open, the sound of bells ringing above let anyone in the bar know that he had entered. It was strange for a bar to have bells, usually it would only be shops that had that kind of thing.
"We're closed. Come back later." The woman behind the bar told him, a cloth in hand as she wiped the wooden surface clean, but when the sounds of bells didn't come again, she had to look up to see who it was. "You're cute, but we're still closed. You'll have to leave."
The woman behind the bar had reddish brown hair, tied up into a ponytail and parted at the front. She had brown eyes and fair skin, she sported a red bandana tied around her forehead and under her hair. He could see she was wearing a blue, sleeveless turtleneck top.
There was one other person in the bar, a man with blue eyes and spiky blonde hair. He was wearing an apron over his clothes as he wiped down the tables in the back corner of the bar.
"I'm not here to buy drink." He spoke as he approached the bar, dragging two fingers across one of the freshly cleaned tables, as if to inspect it for dirt. "I was told a story by an old man about this place. The Rasberry Ripple, you know raspberry is spelled wrong, right?"
"It's supposed to be like that." The woman eyed him suspiciously as he approached slowly, the other male in the room having also stopped cleaning the tables. "It's a play on words, like the ice cream. My last name is Rasberry, but without the P."
"I see." He leaned against the bar, setting his forearm down to steady himself. "I was told this place was a... friendly place to come." He spoke. "Do you know many fairytales from Southern Marley?"
"Can't say that I do." The woman, now identified as a Miss Rasberry responded. "I'm from Acirfa all the way up north, I wouldn't know anything about southern fairytales."
"You might know this one, it's one where the sheep trampled the Devils on their way to Salta." Now the room had an eerie silence to it, neither him nor her wanted to speak another word.
"I can't say I've heard of it." Her voice said one thing, but her eyes told another story entirely. "Must've been told about the wrong place."
He heard shuffling behind him, and he turned just in time to stop what would have been a blow to the head that would've knocked him out. The blonde haired man had tried to hit him with a wooden baseball bat that he'd pulled from somewhere.
His arms definitely fractured after suffering the blow, but the pain was much more bearable when he knew it would heal. The blonde man tried to swing for his head, but Lukas easily ducked and tackled him to the ground, knocking some stools over in the process. He wrestled him for the bat, before a sharp pinch in his neck made him start to feel a little drowsy.
Standing up and reaching for the pain, he pulled out a small dart that was secreting a clear liquid. "Oh shhh-" He didn't even finish speaking before wobbling backwards and falling against the bar, where he saw a rifle in the woman's hands, which incidentally was the last thing that he saw.
"Cloud, get up and help me move him."
The door to the bar opened and Williams walked in, it had been forty minutes since Lukas had went into the blasted bar. "He better be shit faced." The huge man thought as he walked in, but to no surprise of his own, the only person in the bar was the barman behind the counter.
"Hey, you didn't happen to see a guy come in here about forty minutes ago? About six foot, dark hair, face like a baby, acts like a prick."
"Minus the acting like a prick part, yeah." The barman confirmed for him. "Came in, told him we were closed, but he asked to go out the back as soon as he came in."
"And you let him?"
"Didn't see the harm in it." The barman shrugged. "Now I'm not too sure what to think. Huge guy like you comes in asking after him."
"I'm his bodyguard, not his murderer." Williams informed the man, looking around the bar, everything had a clean shine to it, clearly having been washed very recently. There was a kitchen through a window behind the bar, and opposite the bar, there was a baseball bat hung up on the wall, but no sign of Lukas anywhere.
"Shit." Williams cursed. "Mind if I go out the back?"
"Sure." The barman moved to open the door into the kitchen for him. "Turn left at the end there."
Exiting out the back into the alley, Williams had a real big problem on his hands. They alley had three directions it split off into, not to mention the ladder to the roof across the alley, and the drain cover that was ever so slightly ajar.
"Cheeky bastard, trying to make me go down there." He thought as he stood on the drain cover to close it. "Unless he did that on purpose to make me think that he hadn't gone down there, when in reality he did."
Williams let out a huge sigh of frustration, he knew what he had to do, so he peeled the drain cover off and went down to look for the prick he was supposed to be guarding.
(Forty days after the warriors return)
The four Warriors had been gathered up, Reiner the Armoured Titan, Annie the Female Titan, Pieck the Cart Titan, and Porco the new Jaws Titan, and they were meeting with Commander Magath, there had been some... interesting news spreading across the globe since yesterday.
The door to the room swung open and in came Magath, marching into the room with a newspaper in hand, slamming it down onto the table for them all to read. The main headline on the paper read : Un-Coordinated?
"This was the headline all over Hizuru yesterday morning, it has now spread like wildfire all over the world." Magath had a grim look on his face. "What I want to know, is how the press in Hizuru have managed to find out that we can't use the power of the Founding Titan?"
"You think it was one of us that told the press in Hizuru?" Reiner was the one to ask.
"No, I don't think it was any of you, I don't know how they got their hands on this highly classified information." Magath responded as he took a seat at the end of the table. "Marley has been celebrating for over a month with the recovery of the Founding Titan. The loss of the Beast and Colossal Titans were offset by the new threat we had over other nations, but this news coming out puts us in a very difficult position."
"How come?" Porco spoke up. "They have no proof of this, it's all just speculation, right?"
"It is for now Galliard, but it seems that the Mid-East Alliance is willing to gamble their forces on this so called speculation. They've begun mobilising their Army in the east, and their destroyers have left port, this tells me that they didn't get their information from the local barmaid."
"So then it was someone inside the Marley Government that divulged information that they shouldn't have." Pieck summed up.
"That is exactly what I fear." Magath confirmed. "A nation doesn't prepare for war off shoddy information, they've been conversing with Hizuru, someone in our government told them about our lack of control over Pure Titans."
"General Calvi believes that we can force them into a quick and decisive surrender if we attack first and crush their forces at the border." Magath continued on with. "That's what you're here for, you have until the end of the day before we leave for the border. Hopefully this will be a short war, for all our sakes."
"And what if it's not a short war?" Annie finally spoke up.
"Then I don't know if the power of the Titans will be enough to win us this war. Many other nations have been developing anti-Titan weaponry for years now, it's only a matter of time before Titans become obsolete in terms of warfare."
"What about Lukas?" Annie asked. "I've seen what his Titan powers can do close up, with him on our side, surely we can use him to destroy the Mid-East's fleet before it can do any damage to our fleet."
"That would be the ideal situation, but he's still not budging on his stance, he thinks we'll come crawling back to him for his Titan abilities on the battlefield." Magath grumbled out. "We'll have to prepare for battles in a different way entirely without Zeke or Bertholdt, we'll be relying on you two a lot more from now on." His attention was directed at Reiner and Annie.
"We won't let you down Commander Magath." Reiner assured him.
"Good, because from now on, you'll be replacing Zeke as the War Chief of the Warrior Unit." He told Reiner. "You are Marley's shield, you'll be more involved more often than ever before."
"Commander Magath!" Koslow, another Marleyan soldier had burst into the room. "The Mid-East Alliance have declared war and begun invading the eastern borders of the motherland. Their fleet of destroyers have already destroyed one of our naval bases in the region, they sunk four of our destroyers and crippled two of our battleships. Fleet Admiral Harper has ordered the second fleet to retreat towards Odiha for repairs and to assess the damage."
"Looks like there's no time for goodbyes anymore." Magath and the Warriors all stood up once Koslow had delivered the news. "How hard are they pushing through the region?"
"Our forces are losing ground fast Commander." Koslow reported. "They mobilised much faster than we had anticipated, we weren't ready for an attack this quickly."
"It'll be those bastard train lines they've been building." Magath grumbled as they exited the room, the four warriors in tow. "Braun, take Galliard and go round up the Warrior Cadets. Leonhart, you and Finger get the Panzer Unit and the Eldian units on board the trains, do it in half the time it would usually take."
"Yes Sir!" The Warriors split up to do their tasks, while Magath could only hope that they could mobilise their army and the other two fleets in time to stop the Mid-East Alliance's advance before they took the canal pass south of Odiha.
A/N - Now, I know what you guys must be thinking about the introduction of characters from other series. The way that I want the story to progress and develop, with much more importance put on the Marley Arc than the attack on Liberio, I didn't want the Arc to be filled with faceless characters when some of them will have a great deal of importance, so I've decided to use the likeness and names of characters from other series.
I hope that's not a huge issue, because at the end of the day, they're just characters in a story.