The story thus far…
Got this idea from Robert E. Howard, who wrote his stories in installments that were sold monthly, and thought to myself "what a great idea! Now I can keep new readers in the light and let older readers maybe find something new they might've missed!" As this is just a basic outline, I tried to write it in the order of the story, but the story does jump around a lot chronologically, so bear with me. Tenses will be off here and there, but what the hey, this is just a synopsis. So here it goes…
Ada awakens in a solitary cell, where she finds her wounds bandaged and mostly healed. Her memory slowly comes back to her, and she realizes she nearly died during the Raccoon City incident in RE2. Someone on an intercom begins speaking to her, and invites her to meet face to face. Curious, she complies.
Within the modern (but nearly empty) facility, she follows a nurse named Cindy to meet with her benefactor. There, she comes face to face with a man believed dead: Albert Wesker. Wesker speaks highly of her in a professional regard, and invites her to stay and heal, possibly even join his team. Ada decides she doesn't like Wesker much, but decides to see how things play out.
Meanwhile, Leon, with Sherry and Claire, are limping out of the tunnel from the RE2 ending. While walking, Leon becomes annoyed with the girl's incessant whining, and hopes never to have to deal with someone like that again (RE4 fans know he will, soon enough). After reaching the woods, the trio is stopped by a squad of Umbrella's clean up squad, who are out to wipe out any possibly infected survivors. Most of the squad hesitates, seeing a little girl and a young woman; apparently the men weren't expecting to find any survivors at all. But the leader is all business, and begins to raise his gun to kill them himself. Leon uncharacteristically hugs Claire tightly, and she feels the rumble of the missiles nuking the city behind them. The squad of men are stunned, knocked off balance, but Leon and Claire are already back on their feet and firing their weapons into the squad's ranks.
Having killed or injured them all, Leon is despondent and wishes to be left alone, despite Claire and Sherry assuring him he did the right thing. They walk in silence for a ways, until they come upon another clean up operation, this one strictly military and federal, non-Umbrella related. Sherry notices this from her parent's Umbrella days, and Leon decides it's best to take their chances with them.
Ada is wondering herself what she should do, sitting with nurse Cindy, who is about to give her an injection. Asking what it is, Cindy reveals to Ada that it is an antibody meant to stay the growth of her virus which threatens to take over and destroy her body. Adding to this revelation is the fact that Ada is being kept alive by that same virus. When she confronts Wesker with this, he tells her it was she who asked for his help, and that it was Leon's fault Birkin was dead, the only other man capable of making the serum. Without Wesker's serum, Ada will die a horrible death.
Back in the outskirts of the city, Leon is pulled aside by federal agents, who extend him an invitation into a new government organization. He modestly declines, eager to begin his new job, which is to take down Umbrella. The agents coerce him into it, threatening Claire and Sherry, who are now under the power of the government. Leon reluctantly accepts his fate.
Ada, meanwhile, is still struggling to accept hers. She wonders if Wesker is telling the truth, and asks her new friend nurse Cindy about it. Cindy reveals her and her husband were test subjects of Wesker's, and that Wesker kept her husband alive long enough to torture him to death while she watched. Terrified of the man, Cindy becomes even more anxious when she discovers Ada mentioned to him where she learned the truth. She is summoned by Wesker and never seen again.
Claire and Sherry are worried about Leon, the young woman beginning to wonder if she has feelings for the man who helped them escape. He comes back from the tent a different man, and yells at Claire, telling her to leave. He takes Sherry from her, where he promises Claire she will be safe. Sherry begins to cry at his change, and Claire can only comply, dumbstruck by this shift. She disappears into the woods among the commotion.
The two agents take Leon and Sherry to a medical facility, where they draw her blood. Later, he is separated from the girl and taken to the office of an important man in the government. The man tells Leon that the deal he made with the agents is off, since Sherry has living family in the country, who came to take her back. By law, there is nothing else they can do, and it would be best to let her adapt to her new home. Leon becomes angry, and the man offers Leon a position in the ORE, an organization created to work directly under the President. In exchange, the man will arrange letters to be exchanged between the two, if Leon participates in the program. It is only after deal is struck that the man is revealed to be Secretary Graham, a man who will later become President (in RE4). The agents later let it slip that Graham was the one who recommended the President nuke Raccoon City.
Claire's troubles have just begun. Another squad of Umbrella soldiers come upon her trail, and are chasing her throughout the woods. She uses all the survival tips her brother taught her to escape them. Believing she lost them while hiding in a tree stump, she crawls out hours later to come face to face with one. She surprises him, and considers taking his life with her knife, but at the last second goes for his shoulder instead. Pinning him down, she has another chance to kill him, but feels pity for the balding man. She puts pressure on his wound and the two feel a strange connection. Only when his other squad members close in on her is she forced to run again. Leaping off a high waterfall in the dark, she loses them for good. It never occurred to Claire that her knife was tainted with T-Virus blood from the city incident, and so the man is infected, who later infects the entire group. They all die days later in quarantine.
Claire stumbles upon a lonely cabin in the woods, and after finding no one in it, decides to use whatever she can find. She finds faded pictures and old letters within the cabin, and grabs the few supplies she can find. (For RE:Outbreak/File 2 fans, this is the cabin found in the Flashback scenario) Moving further along, she finds the crumbled remains of the abandoned hospital (also from Flashback), and skirts along its ruins to find a path leading out of the mountains. She eventually makes her way back to her dorm, where she cleans up and packs up her belongings. In her rush to get out and find her brother, she never hears her phone ringing behind her.
Fast forward a few months. Ada is on her first mission for Wesker, to infiltrate Rockfort Island while his commandoes assault the Umbrella facility (in RE:CV). She makes her way across the water and through the facility, only to find roadblock after roadblock in her way. With Wesker's advanced equipment, she is able to make due, but this is a far cry from the skilled Ada we see in RE4.
Leon begins his own first mission, a foray in an Arctic Umbrella facility. He is green, but accompanied by a hardcore bunch of ORE soldiers. Most notably among the group in Leon's fireteam is Carlos Olivera from RE3 and Billy Coen from RE:Zero. Another familiar face coordinating with their captain is a Lt. Jack Krauser. The captain begins to wonder if he can trust his old friend Jack Krauser anymore.
Ada faces off against a Bandersnatch, a creature she'd never heard of. She is nearly killed due to her overconfidence, but once she gets down and dirty, she cuts the creature to pieces with an advanced knife prototype. Looking at the strange creature, she begins to wonder if Wesker wants her out of the way by not preparing her for this. Wesker contacts her, and tells her to change their plans to capturing an Ashford. Alfred is heading for the airport hangar, so it's up to her.
Leon's fireteam does well against the first wave of zombies, but are forced to a high catwalk. After wiping out the undead horde, Billy clambers down the ladder, eager for action. Halfway down, he is attacked from the dark shadows by a new type of Licker, one that has a barbed tongue, with acidic drool, and most importantly, is a patient hunter. Billy, in his position, is no match for the advanced creature, who beheads him. Carlos and Leon kill it in a blind rage, and discover themselves surrounded by more of those Lickers. It seems they hunt in packs as well.
Searching through the Ashford facility, Ada comes upon Claire Redfield, who is looking for her brother Chris. The two fight briefly, with Ada gaining the upper hand, but just barely. She expresses admiration for Claire's skill, but treats her like a kid. Claire asks if Ada has seen her friend Steve, someone even younger than her roaming the facility. Ada points her in the right direction, and in exchange Claire tells her that the only seaplane is locked by a strange puzzle device, and that finding one Ashford will inevitably lead to another (wink). Thanking her, Ada tells Claire that if she has a chance, to take the plane right away and not wait for her. As she is leaving, Ada calls her "Claire" and asks to her to "tell Leon she said hi". It occurs to Claire she never told Ada what her name was, but Ada is already gone.
Wesker calls Ada again, this time with orders to kill Claire. Ada reluctantly agrees, but after closing her connection with Wesker, she draws out the last puzzle piece and releases the plane for the girl to make her escape. Ada has decided to go along with Wesker's plan, but to sabotage it wherever she can. This is after Alfred makes his escape in the jet plane, and Wesker announces his plan to pursue the Ashford. Ada also plants a tracking bug on the plane, just in case.
A few hours later, Ada hears someone else approaching the island. Hiding, she sees the ruggedly handsome face of Chris Redfield, out to find his sister on the island after receiving an email from Leon telling him she was in danger. Chris exhibits a fair amount of skill on his approach to the island, and Ada can't help but be impressed. That all changes, however, when she witnesses him drop his backpack filled with survival gear during his climb. She decides to watch over him and make sure he gets his shot at Wesker.
Later, Ada gets a call from Wesker, who has just gotten his ass beaten by Alexia, the other Ashford, who had been incubating the virus for over a decade. Ada ridicules him for his failure, and he becomes understandably upset by this. Ada is able to deflect his anger towards the Redfields when she reveals Chris is on his way to Antarctica for Claire.
The story shifts to Sherry, who is being held in a scientific facility and cared for by doctors and scientists. The doctors can find absolutely zero mutation in her body, and are puzzled by this. Bickering breaks out amongst the brains, and one child psychologist in particular, named Linda, is passionate about treating Sherry like a person, not an experiment. Still, Sherry's trust in adults is all but nonexistent now, so she barely opens up to anyone.
More time passes, and still no results for the young girl. Some of the doctors want to quit, the excitement from this project long gone. Sherry notices the change in their attitude, and begins to enjoy herself a bit more, now that she's not under the microscope. Linda still treats her the same, and encourages the young girl's aptitude for bioscience, which first blooms as she approaches 'womanhood'. She gets Sherry books and magazines on the subject, and Sherry is engrossed by them.
Leon and Claire reunite in London, a year or so after the city incident. Leon has completed his ORE training, and Claire has joined with her brother to investigate Umbrella's European operations. The US branch of Umbrella had been liquidated eight months earlier by the US government, who froze their assets and halted the sale of their stock. With the US corporate branch dead, Leon believed his work mostly done, and with ORE, he could help eradicate the last bits of the evil corporation. The two survivors feel the rekindling attraction they left behind in the city, and Claire understood Leon had pushed her away back then to protect her. Still, Leon is a bit awkward around pretty girls, it seems, after a long and lonely training regiment.
The issue of Sherry comes up, and Claire's despondent that she is unable to receive correspondence from the girl without jeopardizing her and her brother's safety. Leon pulls out the letters he had gotten, and expresses the strange feeling he got when reading them. Claire, studying them intently, comes to the conclusion they weren't written by Sherry. She comes up with another idea, and leaps up to run off. Leon follows.
Later, they find themselves in the apartment of Claire's brother Chris, sitting before the computer where the beautiful Jill Valentine taps furiously away at the keyboard. Leon immediately falls for her, and his awkwardness is only further complicated by Claire poking fun at him in front of her. Jill cross references everything Sherry wrote in her letters with a geographic database, looking for consistent weather patterns, mountains, landmarks, and so forth, to extrapolate her location. Chris introduces Leon to their last team member, Barry Burton, a kind but goofy fellow. Claire takes this opportunity to get Leon alone, where she begins to tell him about her fateful meeting with Ada, who she believes is working with Wesker. Further complicating matters are her own growing feelings for him, as she can tell he was quite fond of Ada.
Note: I'll probably do one more of these in 5-10 chapters, because I have the impending conclusion coming up pretty soon. Time frames might be a bit off, but this IS Resident Evil I'm working with here. Nothing major though, maybe a few months off for the careful reader to notice. Sherry's age right now is the big problem. Anyways, to new readers, hope you found this useful to catch up. And to the regulars, hope you maybe found something you missed the first time around. I sometimes try to be too subtle for my own good.
