Life in Umbrella's Tokyo base was pretty dull for the contingent of guards that defended it. Unless you were one of the lucky bastards who got to go topside with a sniper rifle and ventilate Zs at will, you woke up, shit, showered, ate a disgusting gruel that supplied all the necessary nutrients you'd need for the day, dressed, then stared at a wall for eight hours. Or, if you got enough experience under your belt, you'd get to stare at a bank of surveillance monitors for eight hours. (Sometimes, a guard would crack under the tedium and blow his brains out. The bleach treatment was never enough to fully remove the faded pink stain from the wall their successor would stare at. Shifts invariably became a struggle between stoically staring at the wall, or staring with morbid interest (almost a longing, sometimes) at the stain on the wall.

When a guard's shift ended, they had eight hours a day to themselves. (The Red Queen had ran the numbers and determined that if the guards spent every waking moment working, then it'd be more efficient to just paint all the walls red instead of bleaching them for how often people would be taking their own lives. Of course, Rain could have told them all about the larks and the katydids, if they'd bothered to ask her). Now, they could do anything they wanted in those eight hours (as long as it wasn't overtly criminal or detrimental to the company). They could go to the gym and exercise, they could sharpen their skills at the shooting range, they could sit in a bathroom stall and jerk themselves raw for eight hours.

Or they could go to the base's commissary.

Now, Umbrella, being run by the most scumfuck evil bastards in the history of the human race, loved capitalism. But (as we know, having seen all the movies) they killed most of the human race! Oh no! How can capitalism exist without any customers?

Why, they still have employees, don't they? And employees can get paid.

Now, they're not still handing out checks, of course — the banks are all closed. And cash money is out for similar reasons. Hence, the company developed an electronic scrip system. (Scrip is basically funny money that a corporation pays its employees which can only be used at the company-owned store. This shit's real, folks! It's in history books and everything!) Employees would work their shift, receive their allotment of scrip, and then proceed to blow it all at the commissary. (Or they could save it up, but, hahaha, for what?)

Now, with the fall of every government, Umbrella could stock its commissary with anything it wanted. You could rent any movie, even ones that had still been in theaters when the world had collapsed. You could rent any book. You could rent almost any kind of pornography, apart from anything involving children or animals. (Even Umbrella has its limits, who'da thunk it?) You couldn't own any of this stuff, of course, because then Umbrella wouldn't be able to charge you for it a second, third, fourth, etc. Time.

Now, the commissary also stocked treats, of course. Candy, chocolates, cookies, pizza, hamburgers, tacos, hot dogs… basically, if you weren't a fan of the stomach-churning gruel, the commissary had you covered. (If you're wondering "Why wasn't Food X mentioned?", well, yeah, it was in there too, haha).

The prices were a bit higher, but they also offered a wide assortment of soft and hard liquor, as well as pretty much every drug known to mankind. You might ask yourself, "Why would Umbrella give their employees near-unlimited access to all kinds of drugs and booze? Are they stupid?" Well, it's a problem with a rather simple solution: If you do something stupid while drunk or high, Umbrella will fire you. This entails stripping you bare-ass naked (Umbrella owns everything you wear, down to the skivvies) and shoving you outside the gates. (A lot of people try to be really good friends with the topside snipers, because they will kill you as a courtesy before the zombies have a chance to eat you alive). Besides, the prices make it fairly difficult to get enough mind-altering substances to really fuck you up that badly, unless you've been saving up for a while…

That's why it came as a great surprise to the guards at Umbrella Tokyo when signs appeared in their barracks one day promising a balls-to-the-wall party. Beer, wine, tequila, whiskey, pot, ecstacy… basically, every party favor one could hope for.

There was a lot of discussion amongst the personnel as to who could be throwing the party, and the general consensus quickly came to be that it was the two new arrivals from the London facility, who had showed up not even 12 hours prior. It was common knowledge that the European bases weren't doing too hot, so it made sense that transfers from there wouldn't have a lot to spend their scrip on, hence having a lot of it to spend. (Transfers from other facilities were a fairly rare occurrence, but not unheard of either, and it's not like their paperwork wasn't in order. How could they fake something that would fool the Red Queen? It would take someone high up in Umbrella's security division to pull something like that off…)

For those guards, who'd been cooped up down there for over five years, that party would be the greatest night of their lives.

And (you may have already figured this part out) their last.

You may have also surmised that the two new arrivals are, in fact, Alice and Rain Ocampo. (It'd be a big fucking hilarious bait and switch if it wasn't, huh?) As to how they were able to afford to basically empty out the commissary of an apocalyptic amount of booze and drugs? Think back. Remember when Wesker flippantly offered to raise Alice's pay to twenty times its base amount, all the way back at the end of AIA? He was a man of his word, and did in fact enter in her new pay rate into the payroll database. And when the payroll database switched over from regular currency to Umbrella scrip, it did so for Alice's account as well. And that money just kept building up and building up, week after week, year after year, a ticking time bomb primed by Albert Wesker himself.

As to her security clearance, well, Alice was still technically marked down as head of security at the Hive, wasn't she? And wasn't that the single most important facility in all of Umbrella?

(Much later, once Wesker pieces together how it was Alice and Rain were able to annihilate Umbrella Tokyo, he would be utterly furious. And he would take his fury out on… ah, but I don't want to get too far ahead of the game).

The party was in its third hour and fully one third of the facility's contingent of guards was pleasantly sloshed. Alice and Rain had strategically devised the best way to keep the party going, and had only put forth the soft liquors and the pot at first, to keep things fairly mellow, and the libations had been watered down for the first hour and a half to aid in that goal.

"Who wants to get blitzed?!" Alice triumphantly called out as she finally pulled out the big guns, two bottles of aged whiskey, each the size of her head. The guards cheered: "We love Lisa! We love Lisa!" (Would it surprise you, dear reader, to know that Alice's chosen codename for this mission was Lisa Addison, in honor of Matt's dearly departed sister? No, I don't think it would).

Hour four is when they introduced the first special batch of hard liquor, which (100% unbeknownst to the guards) was spiked with a truly epic amount of coke, speed, and meth. Like, seriously, Hitler himself, a connoisseur of better living through insane Nazi chemistry, would have balked at how many stimulants these people were having introduced into their system. The guards probably would have figured out something was wrong if they hadn't spent the past three hours getting thoroughly soused; as it was, the party (which had started to wind down) really began to get going, and it was only Alice smoothly socializing her way around the common room that prevented it from disintegrating into a violent brawl. (She really was a charmer when she put her mind to it).

Hour five is when Operation Fuck Umbrella Tokyo went into full swing. Alice brought out the last of the booze, a big pile of the hardest liquor, spiked with three times as much coke, speed, meth… with an extra garnish (read: absolute fucking shitload) of LSD. The hallucinations were varied; some thought that Jesus had arrived and was urging everyone to repent before it was too late. (A few of them took him up on his offer, and were pleasantly surprised to meet the J-man in person shortly afterwards). One person began vigorously humping a fire extinguisher.

One guy fixated on Rain, who had spent the entire party curled up on a couch, quietly observing the soiree. "Hey, the fuck is this stupid bitch doing?" he snarled. "She been sitting on the couch the whole time, ignorin' the hosts' hospitality, who the fuck does she think she is?" (Nevermind that Rain was, in fact, one of the hosts). "And what's she wearin' that stupid fucking gas mask for? We're off duty, you dumbass! We're hundreds of feet the fuck underground! Ain't no biological hazard gonna reach you down here!"

Alice and Rain exchanged a quick mental confirmation. This seemed like the best time to spring the trap, because 'best' and 'funniest' were really the same, weren't they?

Rain stood up, stared the guy down through the lenses of her gas mask, then thrust out her right arm, the tentacles piercing through her glove, through his abdomen, and out his back. He immediately began screaming in pain and terror as Rain whipped him back and forth above the heads of the gawking off-duty guards, playing with him momentarily before simply tearing him apart and flinging the parts to different corners of the room, blood and viscera splattering many partygoers.

"BREACH!" Alice screamed. "WE HAVE A BREACH! ALL SECTORS UNDER HOSTILE ATTACK! THIS IS NOT A DRILL! BATTLESTATIONS! GENERAL QUARTERS! REPORT TO THE ARMORY! GEAR UP, SOLDIERS! SHOOT EVERYTHING THAT MOVES!"

The guards may have been high enough to qualify as astronauts, but they were still disciplined and listened to the orders given them. They ran screaming from the room, armed themselves with as much ordnance they could carry, and scattered to all corners of the base, shooting everything that moved, as ordered.

This caused a general alert as the on-duty guards were mobilized from their stations to actively hunt down their crazed comrades. Each of them left their duty posts, leaving many parts of the base deliciously unguarded as gunfire and the occasional explosion echoed throughout the place.

Alice slipped into the main control room, flexed her psychic powers just a smidge, and everyone's brains began leaking out their noses. "Oh dear, they all died suddenly for no reason!" she gasped aloud, fortunate that nobody was around to hear how bad of an actor she was. She walked up to the nearest computer terminal. "Are you there, Red Queenie? My littlest bestie from the Hive?"

The Red Queen's face appeared on the terminal. "I'm here, Alice. Congratulations on the marriage."

Alice's face broke out into a big grin. "Aw, thanks, hon! Congratulations on not having died in the Hive!"

"Thank you," the Red Queen replied. "I take it this isn't a social visit?"

Alice hissed through her teeth in regret. "Afraid not. I'm doing some important security work for Umbrella — can you believe that a biohazard got loose down here somehow? Shameful!"

"I can't imagine how that happened," the Red Queen dryly stated.

"And the guards' discipline here is just abominable! Instead of coordinating to hunt down the threat, they're just running around willy nilly, shooting everyone!" Alice shook her head in very phony dismay.

"Another mystery," the Red Queen said.

"Oh, hey, I hate to do this to you so soon after meeting back up with you, but I need to do a completely ordinary system maintenance cycle on your mainframe here." Alice paused. "You still exist on the global network, right? This won't disrupt you personally?"

"I will be fine, no matter how maintenance on the mainframe here goes," the Red Queen said, her tone of voice revealing she suspected quite strongly that the mainframe would not be turning on again.

"Great, sweetie!" Alice said, kissing the tips of her two fingers and placing them on the screen where the Red Queen's forehead was. "Love you! Activate shutdown now."

"Confirmed," the Red Queen said, as her being was once more rocked by an anomalous hiccup of code. Quarantine, send email, inbox full, purge email, shutdown, done. The digital eyes she had on Alice went dark.

Alice got into her Professor X pose. "Okay, baby, the Red Queen has left the building. Do your magic."

"Gladly," Rain sent back. She had made her way to the Red Queen's antechamber, identical to the one back at the Hive. She used her tentacle arm to rip the first door clear off, then hardened them and just went bugnuts on the laser emitters inside the hallway. Once they had been properly smashed beyond any repair, she tore the inner door off its hinges, then dashed through the broken glass into the Queen's chamber. She almost expected the little holographic bitch to pop back up and scold her for what she was about to do. (God bless Alice and her affection for the machine, but Rain would always hold a grudge).

"You're the one who's going to die down here, bitch," Rain grunted, using her tentacle arm to tear the room apart, smashing everything down into itty bitty bits. After several minutes of computer carnage, she stood amidst the wreckage, panting and triumphant. "God, that felt good."

Alice had been busy herself. With the Red Queen out of service, all of Umbrella Tokyo's processes became manually controlled, and Alice quickly shut off the air filter and — this one was GOD DAMN IMPORTANT — disabling the 'Purge Facility' system. Who the FUCK makes a black hole bomb and uses it for a security feature? Alice had found out about that little nitty gritty detail while studying the facility's security measures when they were halfway across the Pacific and had been sorely tempted to turn right around and land back at Nevada, knowing for sure that Rebecca was the only other person she knew who could get righteously pissed off at such an egregious use of a super-scientific miracle discovery as being able to create motherfucking black holes.

Ahem.

Alice let Rain know that the air filters were off, and Rain quickly made her way to the HVAC control center, slit her throat, and aimed the spray of blood directly into the facility's ventilation system. That's right, the Spence Parks School of Fucking Over An Entire Umbrella Facility. (The irony was not lost on Alice, but she'd checked the personnel roster and they were all complete bastards. Mass murder sure is heroic if all the victims deserve it! LOLOL!) Her throat kept closing up so she had to re-slit it a couple more times, until she was sure the airways were saturated with T-virus.

Within the hour, almost everyone in Umbrella Tokyo was dead or undead, save Alice. (Rain was already undead, naturally). Alice made her way to the hangar to secure the black hole bomb — didn't want some errant zombie to randomly walk by, bump into it, and somehow set it off, after all.

As she squirreled it away, she began thinking of where she and Rain should go next. Some of the guards she'd talked to had mentioned a facility located somewhere in Siberia, but the computer records were cagey as to its exact location. It'd take some detective work to track it down…

She did her Professor X pose. "Hey love, how are you doing? Haven't heard from you in the past little while."

The silence from her mental connection with Rain was deafening.

"Hello-ooo," Alice said, pushing more force into the communication. "Did you take a little cat-nap? Come on, wifey, no sleeping on the job. We have to make sure everyone here is dead, one way or the other, and make sure that this base is otherwise unusable by Umbrella. Then maybe we can have a little bit of a marathon sex session, then we can work on this Siberia thing."

Once again Rain failed to answer, and Alice began to get an inkling that somehow, something had gone terribly, terribly wrong with their plan.

Unbelievably, the PA system crackled to life. "Would Mrs. Alice Ocampo please report to the level seven infirmary?" Wesker's voice announced, smooth and confident as ever. "Feel free to take your time, but don't bother looking for your wife." His cackles echoed through the dead, damned place for a few seconds before he broke the connection.

XXXXXXXXXX

Okay, welcome to the fourth movie! This one's called "It's (not) Raining Alices" because when I first did a rough outline of what this story would be, its tentative title was "It's Raining Alices" (appropriate, since Alice would be flexing her clone army). However, for the longest time, I wasn't sure how the fourth one would go, again due to the aforementioned clone army, as well as Alice's fully matured psychic superpowers. How could the events of not just 4, but 5 and 6 play out with both of those at Alice's disposal? (I mean, without taking the Afterlife route of "Alice is a tremendous meathead who lets all her clones die in a horribly ill-advised human wave attack on Umbrella Tokyo and subsequently gets ambushed by Wesker because she doesn't just SHOOT HIM IN THE FUCKING BACK"). The clone army was easy enough to reason away; our Alice just sends them off to be superheroes in the wider world. And her psychic superpowers… well, you'll see how that resolves in the next chapter, hahaha.

The chapter title, 'Rave to the Grave' is a nod to the subtitle of the same name of Return of the Living Dead 5. (Not a particularly good movie, to be honest).

I personally just don't buy that all of Umbrella's soldiers work for them out of something as insipid and stupid as company loyalty. I also doubt that they're all brainwashed drones or pre-programmed clones. Hence, Umbrella incentivizes loyalty using simulated exploitative capitalism.

I do really relish that Alice's throwaway gag at the end of AIA about getting paid more actually has a payoff here.

Okay, Umbrella can MAKE BLACK HOLES. This is FUCKING CRAZY. And they use their black hole bombs for the ultimate Fuck You You Lose middle finger to anyone who'd take over one of their bases? Any civilization capable of creating a motherfucking artificial black hole can EASILY begin colonizing the galaxy. And Umbrella just decided to stick around on Earth pulling their collective puds, dicking around with wiping out humanity? They're a lot more unserious than Alice could ever aspire to be, hahaha. (I know the real explanation is "Paul WS Anderson thought obliterating Tokyo with a black hole would look cool", but I don't give a fuck about that, hahahahaha.)

And now Rain, Rain, has gone away. Will she come again some other day? Or has Wesker murdered Alice's bae?

Guess we'll find out another time!