July 23, 1998
Doctor John Clemens was sick.
They were all sick. The virus had been released into the ventilation systems, and there was nothing they could do. Quarantine had come down fast and hard, once it had been detected by the first of them. The lab animals were getting sick. Containment for the test subjects might hold, if they were lucky.
John Clemens didn't feel lucky. If there were a silver lining to any of this, John Clemens would be too far gone to care about any of that soon enough.
John was beginning to feel feverish. He knew, clinically, that he was cool and clammy to the touch. It didn't matter. The virus taking hold in him was rupturing the smaller blood vessels throughout his body. He could see the evidence of it in the blackened lines beginning to creep up his arms.
He was so tired.
John pushed back from his computer workstation, trying to remember what he was trying to do. Ada. He had written the letter. Begged whoever came next to...what? Avenge them? Umbrella? Laughable. No. He'd die down here, with the Tyrants and the rest of their secrets.
...wait.
There was something...
...something about one of the tanks. In the lab next door.
Humanoid, no visible mutations. Female. Legacy research subject, under no-tampering strict orders from the highest levels. When Birkin had been forced to stop working with 'the woman' who had been a surrogate to his G-Virus, he had wistfully mentioned that they were wasting the research potential of the sleeping subject. Spencer, however, had been firm on that count. The Russian had been sent in to 'gently' remind the younger researcher not to overreach, and Wesker had shortly thereafter left for the Intelligence Division. Fractured and redirected to the NEST, Birkin's ambitions had been refocused to the G-Virus, and Spencer had tightened his grip on the Mansion facility through his ex-Soviet recruit.
They all knew the stories. It was more of an urban legend of the place, but the amount of protocol and security surrounding the woman in the tank told its own story. Had she been less well-known, less networked into the external and external aspects of the company, she likely would have been purged from the records entirely.
Hell, the codename Spencer had conferred upon the subject - Project Placidia - had given the subject a doomsday air, calling upon the fall of Rome for the seal to be broken. Spencer seemed to be waiting more for a means of controlling this subject, if one existed, or might exist in the future.
Well. Not John's future. John stumbled to his feet, swaying for balance. There were little blank spots in his memory already. Petite-mal seizures. He'd shut down sooner than later.
He could still work a keycard access point still. In the meantime, Rome was falling. Barbarians at the gates.
Somehow, he found himself in front of the woman's tank, carrying a small duffel bag full of supplies. He couldn't remember collecting any of it. He couldn't afford to let that matter anymore.
Little wonder they had isolated her so. No one would mistake this woman's family lineage on looking at her. He felt an odd pulling inside of him towards her. An interaction with the virus?
Good god. If she had been as cogent, as integrated as the stories suggested, this room was both the best place to ensure her sleep, and the very worst one if she awoke. The thought was terrifying.
Had been terrifying. Umbrella had to pay for what they had done. Would do. If they were this disposable, then what of the world?
He was one of the most senior researchers here on an ongoing basis, and thus the one with the emergency overrides. There had been a massive upgrade in the computer systems three years ago. The Russian had one. He had another.
It seemed...so much easier to focus just this moment. He let out a breath he hadn't realized he was holding, and keyed in the codes. Set the tank to begin draining, and revive the subject.
He looked up. The woman looked so small in there. Would she even be able to wake?
A warm feeling came over him, entirely separate from the fever. Something calming, gentle. He whimpered. It would take some time for the tank to allow revival. He'd have gone under by then. He was so close now. His skin was already crawling from the sickness. John let the bag slide off his shoulder with a dull thud to the ground. If he turned before she woke, he might attack. Then again, given this feeling...he might not.
John sighed. "Give them hell for us, Miss." This was all he could do. He let his keycard fall to the floor. He fumbled a moment longer and pulled his wallet from his pocket, letting it fall as well. He wouldn't need it anymore. Best to leave, John, where he could still do something real, before he was sloughed out of his own shell.
He thought of Ada. His brain must beginning to shut down; it didn't hurt quite as much as it did a moment ago.
Turning, he shuffled back toward his workstation. That door wouldn't have sealed back yet, he could make it back in time if he was quick and lucky. The least he could do now was to make sure he wouldn't hurt anyone else after he was gone.
The room was dark. lit only softly by the lights of the computer controls, and the emergency lighting by the doors.
And, oh yes. The tanks of monstrous mutated humans, serene and slumbering all around her. Each to their own tank.
She had awoken naked, on a circular platform. Something in the recesses in the floor of the platform suggested that she had inhabited a similar tank quite recently.
She...had done something. Hidden something. Bad enough that...it merited a place like this?
No.
Dangerous enough to...that wasn't quite it either. The creatures themselves looked horrifyingly fearsome themselves. Whether they had done something seemed irrelevant.
Was...she dangerous? She caught a reflection of herself, faint and startled, in the tank glass next to hers. She looked...small. So pale she seemed almost bleached. A bit odd, but not really frightening. That person in the reflection had a name, a history. Somewhere. She...didn't quite have it yet. Names and places swirled, slipping away when she reached for them. She had a bracelet on her wrist, inscribed with a name and a logo that swam in and out of focus.
She was cold. She ached all over, with the shadow of pain promising worse, and soon, behind her eyes. A fragment of memory whispered at her, and she saw a small duffel bag on the floor, abandoned. She sat up cautiously, unsure if the creatures around her would wake.
None did. But...something nearby...was.
Lots of somethings. She didn't want them to find her. (Whoever she was. Save it for later. Cold.)
She eased herself off the platform, stepping down - then collapsing on legs that had seen almost no use in the last decade and a half. They burned briefly, blood reasserting its proper flow. Pins and needles shot over her body in a wave, and she squirmed at the discomfort.
A moment later, the feeling passed. Her head still ached, though. Cautious, she reached for the bag, pulling the zipper open.
These were...gym clothes? Sweatpants, t-shirt. Thin athletic shoes. The clothes were large, but she could at least manage a drawstring. Something about that gave her a profound sense of relief, though she elected not to examine the feeling too closely. No underwear. She'd have to deal without it. Something told her that she was lucky to get this much.
Other items. A compass. Utility belt.
Large knife.
Someone wanted her to have a knife.
Where was everyone, anyhow? She didn't want to run into anyone -not like this - but the silence, coupled with the sense of the noise around and above - were setting off all kinds of alarm bells.
Other objects were on the floor nearby. A keycard. A few steps beyond that, a wallet. She rose tentatively, picking up the lanyard with its plastic card. "Umbrella," She murmured, reading the name off the card. "John Clemens." Did he let her out? Where was he?
Her eyes fell on the wallet. John had left it there. He was...gone. Not gone. Subsumed into something made of hunger and teeth. Her head began to pound.
How did she know that?
Umbrella.
So much trouble all of a sudden
There was an incident, but...Marcus was quite convinced that his mischief had rather luckily failed.
Tell me more about the headaches.
You're being very helpful while your niece is being feted in New York.
Ghouls...they made. They know.
Sorry about your da.
Sonnetroppe doesn't leave survivors.
It won't go the way you think it will.
She stood still for several minutes, staring at the card in her hand. One of the scientists might have noted her elevated heat rate, her trancelike state, the utter stillness that stretched over several minutes, as if she had run down. Pretty little windup toy, shelved for future study.
She breathed out. In.
Out. Opened her eyes.
Marigold Ashford blinked. Looked around once more, sharply. The keycard suggested she was still in the Mansion, but...something was wrong with it.
"Guess your monsters got loose, eh, Frankenstein?" she chuckled darkly to herself. It was that or start crying, and she had work to do if she were going to get anywhere at all.
Her head was still foggy, aching. She didn't dare try the terminals in this state. They looked strange, sleek, like a television show set. A set of lockers were set to the side of the room. Marigold set to prying open as many as possible. Even if there were no more keys, she was sure to find something.
Forty-five minutes passed. The duffel bag had taken on some shape with the amount of pilfered goods she had recovered, ripping aluminum doors open and rifling through as many as she could reach. A half-hearted attempt to put them back into place was attempted.
She retreated to a small space between two bookshelves , half-hidden behind a desk. She felt exposed in the open room . More importantly, there had been a box of granola bars and some jerky in one of the lockers. A few bottles of water had been in another. Not much, but she couldn't see then wanting a kitchenette in here of all places. She had found a pot of cold coffee off to the side, draining the tarry liquid as fast as she could. Hydration and getting some strength back were more important than palatability right now.
The desk itself yielded more treats, a box of bullets, and a small handgun. Too small for the room's current residents, but if something happened- better to go out fast, she supposed. She busied herself with loading the magazine, trying hard not to think of what she might have to do next. Tiny little thing. The knife might serve her better, in all honesty.
Something was outside. larger, calmer than those in and around the mansion. Watchful. She'd balked at the idea of moving upward through that space, but the door to the outside seemed sealed. Marigold went still, then stuffed her snacks back into the back, closing it up and scooting under the desk for cover.
She found herself wishing that she'd looked harder for weapons.
The heavy automated gears of the service exit began to churn. Marigold took a deep breath, and waited for an opportunity to present itself.
Sergei Vladimir, founder of the UBCS corps, head of the t.A.L.O.S. project, and loyal acolyte of Oswell Spencer, strode into the lab from the outer service entrance, flanked by his two re-engineered T-103 tyrant bodyguards. A few hours earlier, he had run into his old rival at the old training facility. Although the man had slipped past him as the training center had begun to cycle into a self-destruct sequence, Sergei's grim cheer was returning back to the forefront. Wesker wasn't as subtle as he seemed to believe he was, although admittedly the secretive culture at Umbrella provided admirable camouflage. Still, he'd seen that type before. Time would prove him correct as far as Wesker's traitorous inclinations went, he was quite sure. What was important now was to secure the critical specimens here before that happened.
And the data, of course. Decades of research data in a lovely removable bank of servers. He had come with the equipment necessary to ferry all of it safely out of this place, away from to chaos of the breach.
It was really too bad, about this place. Spencer had created a marvel of a facility. Sergei had done his best to cultivate this little garden of viral might, out of his own genetic contributions and on the shoulders of the giants before him. Doctor Birkin would have to be handled delicately after X-Day was concluded. That was fine. He had operatives on hand that could handle that part of the mission. They had the data, and they would rebuild. That was the way of empires.
He had been down here many times. The bestial glory of the completed tyrants lay before him, all laid out within the manifest to be reclaimed from the lab. The T-102 specimen would remain; one last test, should if any of the X-Day combatants made it this far. Satisfaction growing, he keyed int the terminal and initiated the program to connect the loader to the tanks. One of the Tyrant guards stepped forward, ready to easily maneuver the precious cargo into place.
Spencer had one specimen, code-named 'Placidia', on storage here. Her actual details were scrubbed from the database, but anyone with eyes and the ability to see the old photographs in the front lobby could see the resemblance to the Ashford heiress. There had been an incident in the early eighties, he'd heard from hushed whispers. Chance encounters with a family member of hers, down in the South Pacific, had yielded more. Spencer had extracted the samples he needed from whatever she had become, and had locked down any further work, for fear of a security breach. Even Doctor Birkin, obstinate little man, had agreed that extreme control measures would be needed to work further with that one.
Placidia's tank was nestled squarely between the legacy T-102 specimen and one of the T-103 subjects being prepped for evacuation. And Placidia's tank was empty. Checking the records, one of the researchers had extracted her - quite recently, as well. But she wasn't here.
The other bodyguard, Ivan, prowled the room. His loyalty was unquestioned. This was his entire purpose, to serve, to protect. There was something else in the room. He would locate it, and deal with the disturbance as required.
He came across a desk across the room. Pitiful little hiding place. He stepped around it, seeking a target. Behind him, his brother (he didn't have a word for such a thing, but the other was as another limb) continued his work securing the tanks. Sergei stood before the terminal, contemplating this new mystery.
A small, pale face peered out from their hiding place. Curious. A bubble of calm.
Ivan's loyalty to his master was total. But this creature tapped into something that went beyond programming. Evasion. Escape. They would pose no threat to their master if they weren't impeded.
Acceptable parameters.
Meanwhile, Sergei's review of the video feeds showed 'Placidia' slipping from the platform to the floor. Staring off into space. Reviewing the contents of the bag before her and stumbling out of the camera frame towards the lab door. Presumably, into the belly of the beast.
Sergei frowned. Had he looked behind him at that moment, the mystery would have resolved itself. The guard loading up the tanks had paused for a moment, but they had always been sensitive to his moods. If the specimen had moved further into the mansion...he grinned, vicious. The man who had captured her in the first place would be coming through the mansion the hard way, soon enough. He still had a mission to do. Why not let one more angry little girl (Miss Trevor had been sighted in the vicinity, the more, the merrier) handle the situation for him? Pure poetry.
He never saw the woman sprint silently past him, up the ramp towards the exit.
His guards would never allow such a thing.
The training facility was nearby - close enough that she could follow the train tracks back to town if she were quick, and quiet. Marigold pushed aside the horrors of what she had just seen; there were monsters, without as well as within. If she kept her head, they didn't seem interested in bothering her. A curious thing, but not the priority.
She raced up the hill towards, it, then stopped, stepping away from the trees. Things that gave her cover would do the same for others. And something in the trees was watching her.
The training facility itself was in sight. Gunshots rang out periodically in the distance. Whatever was causing the creatures to avoid her was limited to herself, it seemed.
A young man in an odd, elaborate outfit stepped out of the trees. She might not have recognized him had she not met him decades earlier, but the effect was still startling - and alarming. She drew her knife, reflective, ready to attack.
The young man held his hands up, placating. He stepped out of the trees with a self-assured smirk on his face. "Miss Ashford, I wasn't sure you were going to make it to my little party. It's *good* to see you up."
Something about the man felt wrong- fragmented somehow, oily, hungry - but she knew the voice, if not the festive tone. "Doctor Marcus?!"
The man's smirk widened into a grin.
