A DETAILED ANALYSIS OF THE

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---- RESIDENT EVIL ----
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VIDEOGAME SERIES BY CAPCOM ENTERTAINMENT

Begun by Dan Birlew, 1998

Updated by Thomas Wilde with permission, 2000-2017

TABLE OF CONTENTS

1. Introduction, Disclaimers, and Legal Jargon

2. Legend (Frequently Used Acronyms)
3. Frequently Asked Questions
i. This Document and the Larger Series
ii. A Rough Timeline of Events
iii. RESIDENT EVIL
iv. RESIDENT EVIL 2
v. RESIDENT EVIL 3: NEMESIS
vi. RESIDENT EVIL: SURVIVOR
vii. RESIDENT EVIL: CODE VERONICA
viii. RESIDENT EVIL: THE MOVIE
ix. RESIDENT EVIL ZERO
x. RESIDENT EVIL GAIDEN
xi. RESIDENT EVIL: DEAD AIM
xii. RESIDENT EVIL: OUTBREAK
xiii. RESIDENT EVIL 4
xiv. RESIDENT EVIL EXTINCTION
xv. RESIDENT EVIL: DEGENERATION
xvi. RESIDENT EVIL: UMBRELLA CHRONICLES
xvii. RESIDENT EVIL 5
xviii. RESIDENT EVIL: DARKSIDE CHRONICLES
xix. RESIDENT EVIL: AFTERLIFE
xx. RESIDENT EVIL: REVELATIONS
xxi. RESIDENT EVIL: OPERATION RACCOON CITY
xxii. RESIDENT EVIL: DAMNATION
xxiii. RESIDENT EVIL: RETRIBUTION
xxiv. RESIDENT EVIL 6
4. RESIDENT EVIL
i. A Summary of the Basic Plot of RESIDENT EVIL
ii. Story Differences Between Chris and Jill's Scenarios
iii. RE vs. RE "2.0"
iv. Random Commentary
5. RESIDENT EVIL 2
i. A Summary of the Basic Plot of RESIDENT EVIL 2
ii. A Summary of the Conclusion of RESIDENT EVIL 2
iii. Claire A/Leon B vs. Leon A/Claire B
iv. The 4th Survivor
v. Random Commentary
6. RESIDENT EVIL 3: NEMESIS
i. A Summary of the Basic Plot of RESIDENT EVIL 3: NEMESIS
ii. A Summary of the Conclusion of RESIDENT EVIL 3: NEMESIS
iii. Different Paths
iv. Different Endings
v. The Epilogue Files
vi. Conclusions About The Conclusion
vii. Random Commentary
7. RESIDENT EVIL: SURVIVOR
 i. A Summary of the Basic Plot of RESIDENT EVIL: SURVIVOR
ii. A Summary of the Conclusion of RESIDENT EVIL: SURVIVOR
iii. Different Routes
iv. Conclusions About The Conclusion
v. Random Commentary
8. RESIDENT EVIL: CODE VERONICA
i. A Summary of the Basic Plot of RESIDENT EVIL: CODE VERONICA
ii. A Summary of the Conclusion of RESIDENT EVIL: CODE VERONICA
iii. Conclusions About The Conclusion
iv. The Ashford Family Diaries
v. Random Commentary
9. RESIDENT EVIL GAIDEN
10. RESIDENT EVIL: FIRE ZONE (Gun Survivor 2)
10. RESIDENT EVIL: DEAD AIM
i. A Summary of the Basic Plot of RESIDENT EVIL: DEAD AIM
ii. A Summary of the Conclusion of RESIDENT EVIL: DEAD AIM
iii. Conclusions About the Conclusion
iv. Random Commentary
11. RESIDENT EVIL: OUTBREAK
i. Introduction
ii. Scenario One: Outbreak
iii. Scenario Two: Below Freezing Point
iv. Scenario Three: The Hive
v. Scenario Four: Hellfire
vi. Scenario Five: Decisions, Decisions
vii. Plot Branches and Side Notes
viii. The Remain Hopeful Endings
ix. The Regretful Endings
x. Conclusions About the Conclusion
xi. Random Commentary
12. RESIDENT EVIL 4
i. A Summary of the Basic Plot of RESIDENT EVIL 4
ii. A Summary of the Conclusion of RESIDENT EVIL 4
iii. ASSIGNMENT ADA
iv. SEPARATE WAYS
v. SEPARATE WAYS, Chapter One: Ring the Church Bell
vi. SEPARATE WAYS, Chapter Two: Rescue Luis
vii. SEPARATE WAYS, Chapter Three: Retrieve the Sample
viii. SEPARATE WAYS, Chapter Four: Stop Leon's Assassination
ix. SEPARATE WAYS, Chapter Five: Obtain the Sample
x. Conclusions About the Conclusion
xi. Random Commentary
13. RESIDENT EVIL: OUTBREAK - FILE #2
i. Scenario One: Wild Things
ii. Scenario Two: Underbelly
iii. Scenario Three: Flashback
iv. Scenario Four: Desperate Times
v. Scenario Five: End of the Road
vi. A Summary of the Conclusion of RESIDENT EVIL:
OUTBREAK - FILE #2
vii. Multiple Endings
viii. Plot Branches and Side Notes
ix. Conclusions About the Conclusion
x. Random Commentary
14. RESIDENT EVIL: UMBRELLA CHRONICLES
i. Train Derailment
ii. Beginnings
iii. Mansion Incident
iv. Nightmare
 v. Rebirth
vi. Raccoon's Destruction
vii. Death's Door
viii. Fourth Survivor
ix. Umbrella's End
x. Dark Legacy
xi. Conclusions About the Conclusion
xii. Random Commentary
15. RESIDENT EVIL: DEGENERATION
i. Conclusions About The Conclusion
ii. Random Commentary
16. RESIDENT EVIL 5
i. A Summary of the Events of RESIDENT EVIL 5
ii. A Summary of the Conclusion of RESIDENT EVIL 5
iii. LOST IN NIGHTMARES
iv. DESPERATE ESCAPE
v. Conclusions About the Conclusion
vi. Random Commentary
17. RESIDENT EVIL: DARKSIDE CHRONICLES
i. Operation Javier, Part One
ii. Memories of a Lost City
iii. Operation Javier, Part Two
iv. Game of Oblivion
v. Operation Javier, Part Three
vi. A Summary of the Conclusion of RESIDENT EVIL:
DARKSIDE CHRONICLES
vii. Different Endings
viii. Conclusions About the Conclusion
ix. Random Commentary
18. RESIDENT EVIL: REVELATIONS
i. Prologue
ii. Episode 1: Into the Depths
iii. Episode 2: Double Mystery
iv. Episode 3: Ghosts of Veltro
v. Episode 4: A Nightmare Revisited
vi. Episode 5: Secrets Uncovered
vii. Episode 6: Cat and Mouse
viii. Episode 7: The Regia Solis
ix. Episode 8: All on the Line
x. Episode 9: No Exit
xi. Episode 10: Tangled Webs
xii. Episode 11: Revelations
xiii. Episode 12: The Queen is Dead
xiv. A Summary of the Conclusion of RESIDENT EVIL:
REVELATIONS
xv. Conclusions About The Conclusion
xvi. Random Commentary
xvii. The Conspiracy Explained
19. RESIDENT EVIL: OPERATION RACCOON CITY
20. RESIDENT EVIL 6
i. Introduction
ii. Leon and Helena
iii. Chris and Piers
iv. Jake and Sherry
v. Ada
vi. Conclusions About The Conclusion
vii. Random Commentary
viii. Plot Summary
21. RESIDENT EVIL: REVELATIONS 2
 i. Introduction
ii. Episode 1: Penal Colony
iii. Episode 2: Contemplation
iv. Episode 3: Judgment
v. Episode 4: Metamorphosis
vi. The Survivor
vii. Little Miss
viii. Alternate Paths
ix. Conclusions About the Conclusion
x. Random Commentary
22. Non-Game Sources and Unanswered Questions
i. Wesker's Report
ii. Wesker's Report II
iii. Unanswered Questions
23. Mistakes
24. Say What?!
25. About the Authors
26. Conclusion

==============================================
1. Introduction, Disclaimers, and Legal Jargon
==============================================

This document is an attempt to clarify and condense the story of the

long-running Resident Evil series of video games, which has one of the
most complex and muddled plots in modern pop culture. It's hopefully
entertaining to read, and will answer many (but by no means all)
questions that a fan of the series might have about its storyline.

Dan "President Evil" Birlew originally began this project in 1998.

Shortly thereafter, he went to work for Brady Games as a strategy guide
author, and after writing the official guide for Resident Evil 3, was
legally unable to update it. I came along in late 1999 and asked if he'd
mind if I took over, and he agreed. I had no idea what I was in for.

Every time I say "me" or "I" in this document, it's Thomas talking; every
time I say "we," I refer to the audience of RE as a whole. This document
is copyright 2000-2017, Thomas Wilde, except for those clearly labeled
parts that are copyright 1998, Dan Birlew.

All recognizable concepts and characters from the Resident Evil series
are copyright Capcom, and their usage in this document does not constitute
a challenge to that copyright. All rights reserved.

===========================================================================
SPOILER WARNING
As a document that extensively discusses the plot of the entire
series, this is one long unbroken string of unlabeled spoilers about
almost every Resident Evil game. It is not a good idea to read the rest
of this unless you are comfortable with this fact.
===========================================================================

I welcome feedback and contributions from readers, but consider the following:

- I am not interested in reading your "theories." This is mostly because the

Resident Evil fan community is a crazy corner of the Internet, and I tend
to get the worst of that.
- I am reasonably certain you do not have cool inside sources from Capcom,
even if your uncle does work there.
- This is a plotline FAQ and is not concerned with gameplay. If you're having
trouble with one of the games, I recommend looking elsewhere.
- This is a FAQ that is strictly concerned with the games. The novels, comics
and film franchise exist within their own continuities and have no bearing
on the games, and thus no bearing on this document. Alice Abernathy's
existence has made me want to punt a kitten since 2002.
- Yes, this is a big document, but please consult it thoroughly before writing
to me. It will take you much less time to use the Ctrl/Command-F function than
it will to wait for me to reply, and that function will not insult you.

====================================
2. Legend (Frequently Used Acronyms)
====================================

RE = the original Resident Evil (PSX)

RE:DC = Resident Evil: Director's Cut (PSX)
RE1.5 = the canceled beta version of RE2
REv.2 = the Gamecube remake of RE (a.k.a. "REmake")
RE0 = Resident Evil Zero
RE:O = Resident Evil: Outbreak
RE:O2 = Resident Evil: Outbreak - File #2
RE:UC = Resident Evil: Umbrella Chronicles
RE:DSC = Resident Evil: Darkside Chronicles
RE:ORC = Resident Evil: Operation Raccoon City (zugzug)
STARS = Special Tactics And Rescue Service. The police organization that
Chris and Jill belong to in the original RE. Down to one member
by the time of the Raccoon City disaster; subsequently dissolved.
RPD = Raccoon Police Department
BOW = Bio-Organic Weapon; an Umbrella in-house acronym used in
several files. Later games in the series use it as a catch-all
term for any virally-created monster.
BSAA = Bio-Security Assessment Alliance; European anti-terror group
founded in the early 2000s. First an advisory NGO; later revised
into a legitimate international paramilitary force under the
United Nations.
FBC = Federal Bioterror Commission; American government anti-terror
organization founded in the early 2000s. Dissolved after the
events of RE: Revelations with its agents and resources put under
BSAA control.
NGO = Non-Governmental Organization

=============================
3. Frequently Asked Questions
=============================

"You can't spell analyze without anal."

-- Ben Plante

After a few years, certain patterns emerge. These are the most frequently
asked questions that I've received as correspondence or discussed online or
in person. I've listed them here at the start of the document for the reader's
convenience and, frankly, for my own. I got tired of renumbering the whole
thing every time a new game came out.

Before e-mailing me to ask a question for this section, there are several
things that you should take into consideration:

1) Occam's Razor: don't use a complicated hypothesis when a simple one will
do just as well. A lot of fans of the series are accustomed to looking
 for vast conspiracies when common sense, even in this franchise, will
do more good. If you have a question, don't overthink it.

2) These are, first and foremost, video games, and obey their own sense of
logic. It may not make sense cinematically, for example, that a police
station is a strange maze of hidden keys, puzzles, statuary, and intricate
locks, or that an average American suburb has a massive cathedral with a
dungeon and a vast maze of old mining tunnels underneath it, but this is
a video game and behaves as such.

3) the series has been notorious for quite a while for its lack of attention
to realistic architecture. I am fully aware that there are never enough
bathrooms, that pre-ORC Raccoon City's street planning makes no sense,
and that Umbrella let unmedicated schizophrenics design their facilities.
This isn't quite as true of the games released after 2008 or so, but for
anything earlier than that, it's to the point where it's one of the fans'
running gags.

4) the Resident Evil series's roots lie in the 1990s horror trend in Japan.
It is basically a Japanese reinterpretation of American horror, sf, and
action films, and the combination of the two holds some of the series's
appeal. RE thus bears many of the stock characteristics of Japanese
pop culture: youth worship, tentacles everywhere, biology as an inherently
black science, conspiracies and hidden agendas at every turn, and so on.

Most importantly, a Resident Evil game doesn't feel the need to explain
much of anything. It's a tendency, in Asian horror/sf, to simply say that
a thing is, whereas in Western pop culture, we often say that a thing is,
and then explain what it is, how it works, and why it's there.

A lot of my more confused correspondence comes from people who're expecting

RE to take the latter approach, but it simply isn't going to happen. The
franchise runs almost exclusively on what its developers think would be fun,
scary, or awesome and they don't sweat the details. Neither should you.

5) For the last twenty years, there have routinely been translation errors in
every RE game that have confused the timeline, changed characters' names,
or in some cases, confused the plot entirely. Project Umbrella has been
making a habit of retranslating the files to achieve greater clarity, and
when there's a change, I'll probably refer to that.

6) I am not a Capcom employee and, while it may seem otherwise, I do not have
access to any more information than you do.

=================================
3i. Document and Series Questions
=================================

Q. How do all these viruses work?

A. This is probably the best place to start. The plot of the RE

series is mostly about viruses: who's got them, who's creating them,
who wants them, and what's being done with them.

All of Umbrella's viruses spring from the Progenitor, which

was originally discovered in Africa, contained in a rare breed of
flower that was jealously guarded by an isolated tribe. Ozwell
Spencer made sure to conceal the source of the virus from everyone
other than a select few research assistants, most of whom he had
killed shortly after the Raccoon City disaster in 1998. He then
made the mistake of writing about it in explicit detail in his
private journals, which fell into Tricell's hands after his death.

Spencer, Edward Ashford, and James Marcus established the Umbrella

corporation to support their further research into applications
for the Progenitor. Earlier games also referred to the Progenitor
as the "mother virus," and did so in a way where it was not clear
whether or not they were the same thing. This was finally clarified
in RE5.

The Progenitor virus, when it infects a host, drives the creature

into an uncontrollable frenzy; the tribe that guarded it would eat
the flower in times of war, turning them into fearless berserkers.
Further research into Progenitor yielded some minor results, such
as the mutated monkeys known as the Eliminators, but Progenitor-based
bioweapons proved to be impossible to control.

(A lot of us joked about this when it was revealed in RE0,

since Umbrella did not seem to have a great deal of control
over any BOW to begin with. To be fair, though, most of the
"production models" of BOW we've seen do come with some kind
of implanted control mechanism, and it even works most of the
time. It's just that the player's usually the target.)

James Marcus created the T-Virus in 1978 by mixing the Progenitor

virus with leech DNA, then experimenting on human test subjects.
William Birkin studied the virus for years, using it to create
bioweapons such as the Hunter and Tyrant. As noted below, Birkin
seems to have done more with the T-Virus than Marcus ever did,
which may explain why Annette thinks William created it.

When the T-Virus infects an organism, it mutates the creature

into an undead monster through a process of "reanimating dead
cells." Humans turn into zombies or Lickers, while animals may
become aggressive, cannibalistic, carnivorous, twist into a
new species, or just get much, much bigger. The T-Virus can be
transmitted aerially, despite the claims made in the Reporter's
Memo file in RE3, as well as via contact with the blood or
saliva of a T-virus carrier. Roughly ten percent of afflicted
humans are entirely immune to the T-Virus due to unknown genetic
factors; for the rest, the infection is generally fatal.

Its effects beyond that are best described as dramatic convenience;

the virus does whatever the plotline needs it to do, so its onset
time, symptoms, effects, targets, and lethality all vary. Some
characters succumb to the infection almost instantly, while others,
such as the cast of Outbreak, drag the process out for days. After
a carrier has succumbed to the T-Virus, it becomes crucial to the
organism's operation, to the point where anything that attacks the
T-Virus in its system can kill or injure it.

The T-Virus is also a part of the creation of monsters such

as Hunters and Tyrants. The exact method in which the T-Virus
is used has never been explained, but it's apparently what
makes these creatures possible. Most of the later-generation
viruses in the series so far, like T-Veronica and T-Abyss,
are made by combining the T-Virus with something else.
Umbrella was conducting research into other uses for the T-Virus
at the time of the Raccoon City disaster, although it took a back
seat to Umbrella's bioweapon research. This included the possibility
of it being a cancer cure, which is first mentioned in passing in
the "Flashback" scenario in RE:O File #2, and later becomes a plot
point in RE:DSC.

Umbrella possessed a number of methods to prevent or inhibit T-Virus

infection. Many Umbrella employees were given access to an unspecified
"antibody," which frequently but not always immunized its user from
the virus. There's also a reagent which will, if given to a T-Virus
carrier who's yet to exhibit any physical symptoms, prevent the infection
from progressing any further. This reagent is discussed in a file in
RE:O2, and is likely what was given to Jill Valentine in RE3.

As of 2005, as per Degeneration, the T-Virus is available on the

international black market. This has led to multiple "bio-terror"
outbreaks throughout the world. The T-Virus's existence and its
effects are apparently public knowledge.

Very few outright cures for the T-Virus existed at the time of
the Raccoon City disaster. One was the experimental serum codenamed
"Daylight," created by a college professor and a renegade biologist.
The other was being produced in-house by Linda, a scientist working
for Umbrella. Daylight is mentioned in the RE6 manga, which suggests
one of the Outbreak survivors managed to get a sample out of Raccoon
City, and it is implied that Linda survived as well. Umbrella was
unaware that either of these cures existed.

By 2005, the corporation Wilpharma has produced a T-Virus vaccine,

which is used to inoculate troops and protect outbreak survivors. It
is apparently rare enough that it does not see widespread preventative
use, and was created by the former Umbrella researcher Frederic Downing.
After Downing's arrest and the death of Senator Ron Davis, Wilpharma
folded and was bought out by Tricell. The effect this had on the
availability and reliability of the vaccine is unknown.

Albert Wesker and William Birkin discovered the G-Virus in

Lisa Trevor's body in 1988. The virus differs from the T-Virus
in that it causes constant mutations in its host; while a victim
of the T-Virus may mutate further with appropriate stimuli, the
G-Virus continually mutates its host to let it survive whatever
it runs into. In Lisa Trevor's case, the G-Virus enabled her to
live through exposure to Ebola, the T-Virus, *and* the Nemesis
parasite, among many other things, although it cost Lisa her
humanity and sanity.

By the time of RE2, William Birkin had spent ten years working on
the G-Virus, which turns its hosts into rapidly mutating killing
machines. It possesses incredible strength and resilience, and early
in its metamorphosis, can use simple tools. Damage that incapacitates
the G-Type just forces it to mutate into a new, more dangerous form,
and nothing short of total incineration will kill it. The detonation
of the train at the end of RE2 apparently did finish off William Birkin,
as Ada's G-Virus sample in RE:UC is a chunk of his corpse.

Disturbingly, a G-Type can also generate small embryos, which it'll

try to implant in any suitable host that it can corner. Once the G-Type
has achieved full maturation, its top priority becomes reproduction.
If G-embryos reach maturity, they'll quickly kill their hosts by
exploding out of them and crawl off on their own, usually to metamorphose
into another unique monster. The exception is if the G-Type impregnates
a blood relative; we don't know exactly what would happen, but the process
takes a lot longer and doesn't produce any immediately visible results.

There was an effective G-Virus vaccine, codenamed "Devil," which

was given to Sherry Birkin. Sherry spent her adolescence in the
custody of the American government as a walking G-Virus sample, as
the "Devil" vaccine only halted the virus's progress and did not
actually cure it. By 2013, the virus has evolved past the vaccine's
ability to keep it in check, which has given Sherry superhuman
recuperative powers.

Samples of the G-Virus made it out of Raccoon City courtesy of both

Ada Wong and HUNK, where they were delivered to both Wesker's unnamed
organization and Umbrella. By 2005, the G-Virus has become available
for purchase on the black market much like the T-Virus, but remains
both incurable and uncontrollable, making it a less attractive option
for a would-be terrorist.

The Nemesis parasite was created in 1988 by one of Umbrella's

French laboratories, as an attempt to circumvent the low survival
rate of test subjects for the Tyrant. While the Nemesis parasite
killed 100% of its hosts in 1988, that problem was apparently
solved by 1998. A Nemesis is smarter, faster, and far more durable
than a Tyrant, though it lacks its predecessor's raw strength.

The T-Veronica virus was created around 1983 by Alexia Ashford,

by combining the T-Virus with a dead virus that Alexia found in
the body of a queen ant. If it's used on a human, it'll quickly
create an uncontrollable mutant with homicidal tendencies, as
evidenced by both Alexander Ashford and Steve Burnside. The host
of T-Veronica may retain some humanity for a little while after
infection, but without further steps being taken, they'll quickly
lose their humanity.

If the T-Veronica host is allowed the chance to gradually come

to terms with the virus, however, they can learn to exist in
symbosis with it, and in so doing, will gain vast but poorly
defined superhuman powers. The original method, as used by Alexia
Ashford, was to enter cryogenic sleep for fifteen years, gradually
allowing her body to adapt to the virus. A second method was created
out of desperation by a medical team employed by Javier Hidalgo in
1999, which involved replacing the host's organs with fresh ones as
fast as she burned them out.

The specific abilities of a successful T-Veronica host have been

all over the map. Both Alexia Ashford and Manuela Hidalgo had the
power to generate powerful blasts of flame by exposing their blood
to air; Manuela in particular can toss fireballs that are roughly
on par with a rocket-propelled grenade. Alexia further rounded off
the package with shapeshifting, superhuman strength and damage
resistance, telepathic control of a number of tentacles of unknown
origin and construction, and some degree of extrasensory perception
that may or may not have involved her mutant ant colony.

The only remaining sample of the T-Veronica virus after Alexia's

death was in the body of Steve Burnside, which Wesker stole. Since
then, the virus has leaked onto the black market, was used by
Javier Hidalgo in an attempt to save his daughter's life, and was
acquired at some point for use in Tricell's research. The U.S.
government spent some time in the early 2000s trying to wipe the
T-Veronica virus out (cf. "Operation Javier"), but were unsuccessful.

The NE-T virus is mentioned in one of RE3's files, and is largely

considered to be a translation error in the US version. It was often
theorized to be the specific strain of the T-Virus that the
Nemesis used to infect Jill, but there's no backing for that.

By 2002, Umbrella's experimentation has yielded the TG-Virus,

a mixture of the T-Virus and Birkin's G-Virus. Those infected by
it retain their human intelligence, but mutate into something that
looks a lot like Alexia's final form. They're also protected by a
powerful electromagnetic field, which can only be breached by means
of a specialized particle rifle. In the event they're killed, the
G-Virus immediately kicks in, starting rapid, uncontrolled mutation.
It may have been destroyed along with Morpheus Duvall.

The T-Abyss virus was created at some point prior to 2004, through
the combination of the T-Virus and a virus, codenamed Abyss, that
was found in a predatory deepsea fish. In its normal state, the
T-Abyss was meant as a research project and wasn't particularly
dangerous, but it was later discovered that in concentrated form,
it became a dangerous mutagen.

Like the T-Virus, the T-Abyss's effects are inconsistent. Small

animals like fish turn into monsters within seconds of exposure,
while a lot of humans transform into "Oozes," humanoid creatures
that act like they're mostly liquid. Exceptions to the rule include
Skagdeads, which Jessica's Report identifies as the result of a
human who has a greater than normal resistance to the virus taking
much longer to succumb to the infection; Rachael, who's still
recognizably herself after infection and turns into a bullet sponge;
and Jack Norman, who doesn't mutate at all until he gets a second dose,
whereupon he becomes the heavily-armored Abyss.

The T-Abyss provides its victims with a degree of damage resistance

that's unusual even among the other kinds of bioweapons in the series
so far, with some types of mutant developing bulletproof carapaces
or shields. Simply wearing a T-Abyss mutation down with sustained fire
is inefficient at best, but they're vulnerable to concussive attacks
and targeted strikes to vital organs.

The T-Phobos virus was created by one of Alex Wesker's researchers

at some point prior to 2009 as part of an experiment, and was further
refined at her direction. Upon infection, a carrier could operate as
normal with no symptoms, until and unless that carrier began to panic.
At that point, due to the presence of relevant stress chemicals in the
carrier's brain, the T-Phobos would activate. Women would suffer and
eventually die, while men became enraged, homicidal mutants. Long-term
infectees would gradually wither away into rotten, skeletal zombies.

The C-Virus was initially created by Carla Radames in 2001, using

samples of the T-, T-Veronica, and Progenitor viruses. In its initial
form, it turns humans into the psychotic but generally intelligent
monsters known as J'avo. They make ideal shock troops, as they'll
follow whatever orders they were given prior to infection, even if
it means certain death. J'avo are consistently feverish due to the
presence of the C-Virus in their systems, and on death, many burst
into flames and crumble to ash. The longer a given J'avo lives with
the virus, the greater the chance that they'll mutate in response
to trauma, sprouting new limbs, armored plating, or even wings. They
may also enter a chrysalis phase, which renders them vulnerable to
fire but ends in their transformation into one of the more advanced
forms of C-Virus BOW.

In 2013, after six months of experimentation using samples from Jake

Muller and Sherry Birkin, Carla Radames perfected a second strain of
the C-Virus. This one could be spread via a heavy gas, and killed most
humans within seconds of exposure. The infected would subsequently
reanimate as zombies, albeit ones that were a bit smarter and faster
than the T-Virus edition. Much like the J'avo, there was a chance
that C-Virus zombies could mutate further, into monsters known as
Whoppers or Bloodshots.

Jake Muller's altered biology gave him full immunity to the C-Virus,
and a vaccine derived from his blood proved to be at least partially
effective. Much of Carla's research was destroyed in the Liansheng
outbreak in 2013, although the virus is still loose in the world.

Finally, a discussion of the viruses wouldn't be complete without

mentioning Ozwell Spencer's custom "Wesker Virus." We know next
to nothing about its creation except that it involved the Progenitor
in some significant way. Upon exposure, it allowed Wesker to endure
massive trauma and "wake up" a few minutes later, healed and endowed
with superhuman strength, agility, resilience, and speed. He's barely
more than a baseline human immediately after his "death," but three
months later he's the steel-bending speed freak we all know and love,
and he only seems to get faster and stronger over time.

Side effects of the "Wesker Virus" include red lizard-like eyes with
a penchant for glowing dramatically and a dependence on a precise
dosage of special serum to maintain the virus's stability. It is
implied that all the surviving members of Ozwell Spencer's "Wesker
Project" would be able to benefit from exposure to the virus.

It is also likely that Spencer's tinkering with the Wesker children

had further genetic effects. Jake Muller was born no later than 1992,
six years before Wesker's virus was activated, and still possesses an
otherwise-inexplicable immunity to the C-Virus.

Q. Wait, I thought the T-Virus did something else. Are you sure?

A. The very short version is this: yes, I'm sure. If you're reading
something that contradicts the above write-up, it's not correct.

There have been a lot of works that get the T-Virus confused
with something else, including the 1998 Wildstorm comic magazine.
It's also complicated by the existence of the live-action movies,
where the T-Virus can give a skinny white chick superpowers while
simultaneously drying up the planet's water supply and oh God my
eyes are bleeding again. As far as the games go, however, this
is how it all works.

Q. Why doesn't your character ever catch one of these viruses?

A. There are a lot of fan theories about this, ranging from the
anti-viral effects of tasty green herbs to the RE protagonists
possessing natural immunities (there's a throwaway line in Wesker's
Report 2 about the T-Virus just not working on some people) to
pseudoscientific gobbledygook about the T-Virus's infectiousness.
It is also generally agreed upon that any wound a character takes
that isn't in a cutscene doesn't "count" for storyline purposes;
for example, the only injury Leon canonically incurs in the entirety
of RE2 is from Annette shooting him.

The simplest answer, I think, is that in a game where the object

is to survive, it would be counterproductive if you were doomed
from the start. That being said, several games feature infection
subplots or mechanics.

Q. So how about these monsters, huh?

A. Many of the creatures you encounter in an average RE game

are escaped bioweapons, monsters deliberately created by
Umbrella's scientists for combat and ultimately profit, though
Umbrella itself did not get the chance to market its creations.
These monsters are usually made with the T-Virus.

The most successful bioweapons are arguably the Hunter (which

has come in five varieties: Hunter, Gamma Hunter, the poisonous
Sweeper, the much larger Elites, and the invisible Farfarello)
and the Tyrant. We've also seen a variety of Umbrella's near-misses,
such as the Eliminators and Torpedo Kids. Other deliberately-created
monsters include the Cerberus, Neptune, the mutated blood-drinking
plant codenamed 42, Jabberwock, and Anubis.

The most frequently encountered enemies in a Resident Evil game,

however, are zombies, made when a human catches the T-Virus. Once
a human's infected, the virus will eventually kill him, although
it can take a long time depending on a variety of different factors.
If an infected human is heavily injured, it's almost always going
to rapidly speed up the rate at which the T-Virus works.

For some reason, a carrier of the T-Virus can comfortably ignore

the loss of much of its vital bits, with the exception of the brain.
A body that's sustained serious brain damage cannot reanimate; a
carrier that's shot or stabbed through the brain dies instantly.
Unlike Romero's zombies, a T-Virus zombie can be killed by injuries
to other parts of its body, but it can take a lot to do so.

The T-Virus also works on dogs, sharks, bats, crows, and many
other animals in much the same way as it does a human: death,
followed by the immediate desire to find and eat living things.
Some animals may continue to mutate or grow, becoming giant
monsters or an entirely new species. Infected animals seem to
actually feel pain (i.e. the dogs yelping when shot), whereas
zombies do not.

Rats, on the other hand, are either mostly immune to the T-Virus
or just don't go crazy when they're infected with it. With the
obvious exception of Outbreak's opening movie, we've yet to
see attack rats make the scene in any RE. They're one of the
"monsters" in RE:O2's gallery, where you can see that they've
mutated slightly, and they appear occasionally throughout the
Outbreak games, but they aren't antagonists.

As of REv.2, the T-Virus also has long-term mutagenic effects.

After a long period of infection, a T-Virus carrier who "dies,"
unless incinerated or decapitated, will get back up as a faster,
more durable creature. The Arklay scientists called this a
"Crimson Head." One could presume that any T-Virus carrier
would mutate into a Crimson Head given time, but the process
apparently takes a couple of months, and in every other game
in the series, the zombies are at most a week old.

(The appearance of rushing waves of Crimson Heads in RE:ORC

is, like the rest of RE:ORC, considered noncanon.)

When the T-Virus hits the nonmammals, things start to get

a little weirder; something about the viral mutation apparently
allows an organism to bypass the cube-square law. Spiders and
fleas become enormous, worms grow to the size of large snakes,
snakes start attacking anything they can reach, and a few lucky
animals evolve into enormous killing machines. The giant worms
in RE3 and CV, the huge spider and giant snake in RE, and the
sewer 'gator in RE2 are all examples of this. One might also
lump RE3's drain deimos into this category, as well as the
Mega- and Gigabites in RE:O2.

Another example of an accidental creature is the Licker, which,

as noted below, is the result of a zombie getting a second dose
of the T-Virus, with a Crimson Head looking like a sort of
halfway point between a zombie and a Licker. Later experiments
conducted by Tricell's scientists further evolved the Licker,
granting it the ability to reproduce and moving it further away
from its genetic roots.

The Tyrants, the creatures that traditionally serve as bosses

or sub-bosses in RE, are constructed via the deliberate mutation
of a human subject, utilizing both the T-Virus and a chemical
called Beta Hetero Serotonin, which is found in the brains of
frightened teenagers; as per Survivor, every Tyrant produced
means that at least one teenager was abducted, imprisoned, and
subjected to brain surgery without benefit of anesthetic.

Only one in a hundred million humans is a suitable candidate

for being transformed into a Tyrant, with the rest simply dying
at some point during the process. RE:UC establishes that all the
Tyrants in the series, from the original model in the Spencer
mansion to the anti-tank version deployed in Damnation, were
produced using clones of Sergei Vladimir, who took and passed
the required tests for the Tyrant creation process. While this
does mean that Umbrella had viable human cloning technology in
the 1980s, it also explains the sheer number of Tyrants as well
as their general physical resemblance to one another.

Umbrella was constantly working to improve the Tyrant, refining

it through multiple production models. The Tyrant-001 was created
at the Arklay mansion, and died at the hands of Chris and Jill;
five months later, Alfred sics the T-78 on Claire.

The Nemesis project is an offshoot of the Tyrant research, and

dates back to 1988. An organism hosting the Nemesis parasite, if
he or she survives the infection, becomes the intelligent,
monosyllabic yet lovable killing machine that we know from RE3.
While a Nemesis lacks some of the Tyrant's raw power, it more
than makes up for the lack through intelligence and tenacity.

The Talos is the final production model of the Tyrant,

produced by Sergei Vladimir's Russian research facility in
2003. It combines the traditional virtues of a Tyrant with
an unusually high degree of speed and agility. Just to hedge
its bets, Sergei also sealed it inside a giant suit of riot
armor and handed it a rocket launcher. Further, while the
Talos will uncontrollably mutate following an initial "death,"
this appears to have been planned for as part of the design;
a mutated Talos abandons its rocket launcher in favor of
attacking with a set of freshly-sprouted tentacles.

Finally, a number of monsters from the games are abandoned

experiments or are considered obsolete. These include the
Torpedo Kids, the Eliminators, and a species of giant wasp.

The G-Type is discussed in the section on the G-Virus, above.

Las Plagas aren't viruses, and are discussed in detail

elsewhere in this document. All permutations thereof, such as
Novistadors, Gigantes, and Regenerators, are the result of
Osmund Saddler's experiments, which were carried forward by
Tricell after Saddler's death. As far as we know, the research
that created the Plaga monsters had nothing to do with Umbrella.

Q. Which characters are definitely still alive?

A. Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, Barry Burton, Claire Redfield,

Leon Kennedy, Ada Wong, Sherry Birkin, Carlos Oliviera, Nicholai
Ginovaef, HUNK, Ark Thompson, Lott and Lily Klein, Bruce McGivern,
Fong Ling, Billy Coen, Ashley Graham, Angela Miller, Sheva Alomar,
Rodriguez the helicopter pilot, Josh Stone, Parker Luciani, Jessica
Sherawat, Raymond Vester, Keith Lumley, Quint Cetcham, Clive O'Brian,
Morgan Lansdale, Helena Harper, Jake Muller, Ingrid Hunnigan, Moira
Burton, Natalia Korda, and (finally) Rebecca Chambers are all still
alive at this point in the series, or at least have never been
officially declared dead.

Q. Which characters are definitely dead?

A. Mikhail Victor, Annette Birkin, William Birkin, Greg Mura,

Peter Jenkins, Marvin Branagh, Ben Bertolucci, Enrico Marini,
Kenneth Sullivan, Ed Dewey, Kevin Dooley, Forest Speyer, Richard
Aiken, Joseph Frost, Dario Rosso, Alfred Ashford, Rodrigo Juan
Raval, Luis Sera, Ramon Salazar, Bitores Mendez, Osmund Saddler,
Morpheus Duvall, Vincent Goldman, Monica, Will, Bob, Carter,
Dr. Hursh, Andy, Jean, Tony, Murphy Seeker, Tyrell Patrick, Mike
the helicopter pilot, Luis Sera, Ozwell Spencer, Dan Dechant,
Sergei Vladimir, Ricardo Irving, Excella Gionne, Jack Norman,
Javier and Hilda Hidalgo, Derek Simmons, Gina Foley, Pedro
Fernandez, Gabriel Chavez, Neil Fisher, and Evgeny Ribac are
all dead, along with hundreds of thousands of zombies, townspeople,
random cops, and other assorted innocent bystanders.
Albert Wesker is dead at the moment.

Q. Which characters' statuses are unknown?

A. I'm hesitant to write off Lisa Trevor, Alexia Ashford, or Rachael

Foley as permanently dead, since all of them are established as
being almost impossible to kill. Wesker seems to finish Lisa off
in RE:UC, but when her whole deal is that she can't die, it's
difficult to take that seriously. Rachael is last seen skulking
around in the cabins of the Zenobia as Parker heads towards the
bridge, after the player has the chance to "kill" her on three
separate occasions, and is never conclusively slain. Finally,
Alexia's powers are flexible and ill-defined, so she could have
survived her "death" in CV somehow.

Steve Burnside appears to die at the end of Code Veronica, but

Wesker's cryptic comment to Claire in the final cutscene of CVX
suggests that Steve may yet return somehow.

Jack Krauser is ostensibly dead following his defeats at the hands

of Leon and Ada. There is room to contest this, of course.

At least one of the cast of the Outbreak games must have survived
the city and escaped with Linda, as seen in "End of the Road,"
and the inclusion of Daylight in the RE6 manga suggests at least
one survivor escaped via Raccoon University.

Manuela Hidalgo survives in the best ending of "Operation Javier"

in RE:DSC, but the canon ending is as yet unknown. It's very likely
that she lived, however.

Piers Nivans is most likely dead, but we never see the body. At best,
he's lost his humanity and is trapped inside what's left of a rapidly
flooding underwater laboratory which subsequently explodes. By the
same token, Deborah Harper was last seen falling into a seemingly-
bottomless pit below a city that was then bombed off the map, but
still: no body.

Carla Radames was last seen as what looked a lot like sixty tons of
modeling clay. A couple of different files indicate that her life
signs stopped, which is why the sea-bed laboratory's been evacuated
and the Haos is defrosting, but her mutation could account for that.

Alex Wesker currently exists as an unpleasant shadow personality

inside Natalia Korda's mind, and Alex has at least begun to influence
Natalia's thinking by mid-2013. The original Alex is very dead.

Q. Why don't any RE games ever take place in daylight?

A. You may as well ask why so few horror movies ever take place
in daylight. Nighttime is scarier. Besides, a few of the later
games have at least started during the day.

Q. Where the hell is Raccoon City?

A. Before the bomb, it was somewhere in "America's Midwest," and

there's nothing in any RE game that would place it anywhere more
specific (i.e. the police cars in RE2 have "Raccoon" license plates).
This has been a popular topic of discussion among RE fans since 1998.
Theories on the subject include Illinois, since Ada mentions the Chicago
branch office of Umbrella during RE2, but which has no mountain ranges,
and Colorado, which has the right climate and topography to host a city
like Raccoon, but which isn't technically in the Midwest. There's a
writeup on Project Umbrella that makes a case that Raccoon City's in
southern Missouri, which would put the "Arklay Mountains" in the Ozarks:
http://projectumbrella.net/forum/Raccoon-City-Geography?page=3#comment-1012575

Q. How close to "reality" is the RE series?

A. The science is, of course, almost universally nonsense. If you

ever want to see somebody go off on a rant, introduce a person who
has a working knowledge of biology to the Resident Evil games and
just watch them go. It's like when a history major reads Dan Brown.

As for the course of history, Umbrella seems to have had a massive

and transformative effect on the RE-verse's Earth. In the wake of the
Raccoon City disaster, the President of the United States resigned,
"bioterrorism" has erupted all over the planet, the general level
of human technology is higher, it has several "extra" cities and
countries, and eastern Europe is wracked by civil war in 2012 for
some as-yet unknown reason. (There's a fan theory that Umbrella was
sufficiently vital to the economies of the former Soviet satellite
states that its dissolution plunged that area into chaos, but it's
not based on any particular in-game information.)

Basically, if you're wondering whether or not a particular real-world

event happened in the RE universe, it's safe to assume that everything's
about the same until 1998 or so, although the missing-persons rate is
likely much higher and Umbrella's standing in for Procter and Gamble,
which means most of the products on store shelves have different brand
names. Post-Raccoon City, though, everything changes.

Q. What is Resident Evil 1.5?

A. I quote Dan Birlew, from the first version of this thesis:

When the original Resident Evil topped the videogame sales

charts, Capcom realized two things: they needed a sequel,
and they should have put more quality into the first game.
Reprogramming it, they re-released it as Resident Evil:
Director's Cut in 1997. The package contained a second disk
this time, a demo version of Resident Evil 2. The demo was
met with extreme confusion, however. Capcom had previously
released to the press screenshots of a prototype for the
sequel. The demo, although definitely not the finished
version, was nothing like what had been previously advertised.

Internet Resident Evil fans have taken to calling this scrapped

prototype game Resident Evil 1.5. Leon appeared in the game,
but the earlier version of Claire was an unrelated college girl
named Elza [Walker]. With blonde hair and red biking gear, she
was similar to Claire only in her love of riding Harleys.

The game was developed with the same map as the game that
was eventually released, but the graphics were steeped in
atmospheric blues and neon lighting. Evidence of widespread
chaos in Raccoon City was far more plentiful and severe in
this game's scenery than in the final version. The Birkins,
Chief Irons, and Ada Wong were all missing from the
ambivalent plotline of this game. Resident Evil 2 in this
version threatened to be too much like the original. The
planners wanted something that would take the storyline
further. What the fans had been shown and told to expect
from the sequel was not what they got.

[Thomas adds: Owners of the PC/Dreamcast version of RE2

can unlock a special image gallery containing development
sketches of RE2 and RE1.5, including a picture of Elza
Walker and a group shot of the cast of RE1.5. Several of
the same pictures appear in the Capcom Design Works artbook.
It's known that several members of the final game's cast,
like Robert Kendo and Marvin Branagh, were originally
planned as major players in RE1.5.]

[There are four movies of RE1.5 in action on the second disc

of the Japanese Dual Shock Edition of RE:DC. The movies show
brief gameplay sequences from various points in the game,
featuring scenes set in the sewers, the RPD, and an underground
complex of some sort. I recognized the RPD morgue and the
elevator hallway in Birkin's lab from RE2. Also, a creature that
looks a bit like the G-Type is present in several scenes;
at one point, it's shown thrashing another monster.]

Q. Where can I get the RE1.5 ROM/ISO?

A. That's a bit more complicated than you'd think. The game

wasn't completed, so no copies of it were thought to exist
outside of Capcom of Japan.

A couple of private collectors acquired a copy of the RE1.5

pre-alpha code via Japanese sources, but the RE fan community
tried to get their hands on it for years without success.

In late 2012, a fan group got what purports to be an 80% complete

build of the game and has been working to finish it. It seems
likely that fans will finally be able to play a version of RE1.5
at some point in the future, but naturally, it wouldn't be canon
and isn't relevant to this document.

Q. How did [character] in [game] get from [place] to [place]?

There's no way for him to leave/get there! How did [character]
in [game] survive in [dangerous area] with only a [weak weapon]?

A. NPCs are a strange and wondrous lot, possessed of powers

beyond mortal ken. These are your "helpers": the other uninfected
humans who assist and/or hinder you over the course of the game.
They often have abilities you do not, like infinite ammunition,
no-clip codes, and forbidden secrets of ninja magic.

(It should be noted for the sake of accuracy that NPC powers
are not unique to the Resident Evil series. They are possessed
by all NPCs in any story-driven game. Some are more blatant
about it than others, and Mayu Amakura is their queen.)

An NPC can move around behind the scenes of reality. Unless

they briefly lose their powers, through being plot-hammered or
the player taking control, an NPC can do whatever the hell
he or she wants. That may include already being in a room that
took you an hour to open, surviving the kind of punishment
that would kill your character twice, leaving an area without
using the only exit, or getting through a difficult part of
the game without a scratch while armed with an empty pistol
and a cocktail straw. Whenever an NPC does something that does
not make any sense, these powers are to blame.

Q. The Mystery of the Phantom MP5: why is it that when

[throwaway NPC] dies in [game], their gun disappears?

A. With the exceptions of Richard Aiken and Robert Kendo,

you will never get to take a weapon from a freshly dead
NPC. You can claim quite a few weapons from old corpses,
but if somebody is carrying a nifty gun and then gets
capped before your eyes, the gun evaporates. This trait
appears to be strongly identified with machine guns, such
as the MP5s or H&K 9mms carried by Hunk and his men.
Many of us have learned to live with this sad state of
affairs, but I used to get a fair amount of e-mail from
people who'd really like to be able to grab an SMG from
those dead guys on Team Delta or take Irons's Magnum or
something. My answer for this is simple: I blame elves.

Q. Have you read the Resident Evil Archives?

A. Unfortunately.

Q. Resident Evil Archives contradicts you.

A. The first volume of the Resident Evil Archives is badly

translated, to the point where it manages to contradict itself,
let alone me. It reads more like a bad novelization with a lot
of concept art thrown in.

I haven't checked out the second volume yet, but my former

colleague Elizabeth Ellis worked on it, so there's no way
it isn't better.

Q. Hey, have you read any of the novels? What do they mean
to the plot? What about Trent?

A. There are seven Resident Evil novels, all written by S.D. (Stephani
Danielle) Perry and published by Pocket Books. _The Umbrella Conspiracy_
is a novelization of Resident Evil (it's a mix of both games, where Chris
explores the dormitories while Jill encounters the Tyrant), _City of the
Dead_ covers the events of RE2 (Leon A/Claire B), _Nemesis_ adapts RE3
(ending #3, where the Nemesis kills Nicholai and Carlos swipes Nicholai's
helicopter), _Code: Veronica_ is a novelization of CV (note: *not* CVX),
and _Zero Hour_ recaps RE0.

Two of the novels, _Caliban Cove_ and _Underworld_, are original stories.
The former features Rebecca Chambers and a bunch of original characters,
while the latter stars Claire, Leon, Rebecca, and the original characters
who survived _Caliban_. All the novels seem to get reprinted any time a
new RE game comes out, and are easy to find online.

As for their canonicity, it's a funny story. The novels are a remnant
of an attempt to create a Resident Evil "expanded universe," which does
not seem to have gone over well with the developers. They went out of
their way to make it clear that the novels aren't canon, with RE3 in
particular contradicting Perry's novels on every point it can. To expound:

Capcom | Perry
----------------------------------+-------------------------------------
Raccoon City is in the "American | Raccoon City is in Pennsylvania, an
Midwest." It had more than a | hour's drive away from New York City.
hundred thousand people in it, | It had a population of eight thousand.
and boasted utilities and public |
services far out of proportion |
to its size. |
----------------------------------+-------------------------------------
On the morning of October 2nd, | Raccoon City was destroyed by a
Raccoon City was bombed off the | massive fire on October 4th. Its
map by the American military. | ruins are being investigated by
Despite the quarantine, rescue | the CDC, with "help" from Umbrella,
personnel were operating in | and the surviving S.T.A.R.S. are
Raccoon right up until the end. | being (ineptly) framed for the crime.
|
A fixed number of survivors has | In addition to Leon, Claire, Ada,
never been established, but | Sherry, Jill, and Carlos, there were
between Degeneration and | about a hundred known survivors of
Outbreak, we've seen a few dozen | the "fire."
overall. They are rare, if |
Greg Green's reaction |
to Claire in Degeneration is any |
indication, but there are quite |
a few more than we used to think |
there were. |
----------------------------------+-------------------------------------
Jill Valentine is ex-Delta Force.| Jill Valentine is an ex-thief and
She is twenty-three years old | the daughter of notorious cat
and a woman. This is somewhat | burglar Dick Valentine, hence
implausible, at least in our | explaining why she's the "master of
universe. | unlocking." She joined the S.T.A.R.S.
| because her father pressured her
| to go into a line of work that
| wasn't illegal.
----------------------------------+-------------------------------------
The S.T.A.R.S. are a unique | There are multiple S.T.A.R.S.
counterterrorism squad that only | units existing within several
exists within the Raccoon City | other towns, such as Exeter. They
police department. | maintain close ties with the RPD
| S.T.A.R.S.
----------------------------------+-------------------------------------
Jill stays in Raccoon until she | Jill leaves town with Barry and
blasts her way out of town on | Chris on September 26th, well
October 1st, a day after Claire | before the T-Virus outbreak, then
and Leon forcibly renovate | reenters town and leaves again on
Umbrella's underground labs. | the thirtieth with Carlos.
Claire and Leon enter Raccoon | Claire and Leon don't get anywhere
on September 29th and leave on | near Raccoon City until the night
the morning of the 30th. | of October 4th.
----------------------------------+-------------------------------------
Claire and Leon don't part on | Claire and Leon are picked up
the best of terms. Claire runs | outside Raccoon by Rebecca Chambers
off, while Leon and Sherry are | and her posse from _Caliban Cove_.
 taken into military custody. | Leon and Claire immediately head off
Leon is gently convinced to sign | to have more anti-Umbrella adventures
up as a government agent, while | together in _Underworld_, and later
Sherry is kept in U.S. custody | join Chris and Barry in Paris. Claire
as a living G-Virus sample. | gets captured at the start of _CV_
Claire continues looking for | as part of a botched operation by
Chris on her own. She and Leon | the STARS. Sherry now lives with
get together at some point | her Aunt Kate, who is apparently a
so she can tell him all about | good enough lawyer that it can stop
the events of CV, and have | mercenary squads.
buried the hatchet by 2005. |
----------------------------------+-------------------------------------
Rebecca Chambers doesn't really | Rebecca is the heroine of _Caliban_
do much, aside from setting the | Cove_, where she saves the world
self-destruct charges, being | and stuff. Perry is fixated on
cute in a jailbait way, and | Rebecca, and displays this unhealthy
occasionally tossing some free | obsession by having EVERY CHARACTER
healing your way. (This is even | conduct lengthy interior monologues
half-true in RE0, the game that | about how smart, funny, clever, cute,
Becky is ostensibly the star of.)| and brave little Becky is. It's
| kind of disturbing.
----------------------------------+-------------------------------------
Chris, Jill, Claire, and Leon | An enigmatic man named Trent, who
survive their adventures by | is secretly a member of the board
being smart, tough, clever, and | of directors for Umbrella, has been
lucky. They're rarely given any | feeding the STARS cryptic information
outside help, outside of the | since just before the Alpha Team
occasional last-minute save from | went into the Spencer mansion. He
a friend or fellow survivor | is also responsible for Carlos's
(i.e. Carlos, Steve, Ada, etc.). | involvement with the UBCS and
| generally pulls all the strings.
| Even though he's well outside canon,
| he continually shows up in fans'
| conspiracy theories. I hate Trent.
----------------------------------+-------------------------------------
The official ending of RE2 is | Claire dispatches the mutated
Claire A/Leon B, as per Ada's | Mr. X at the end of _City of the
scenario in Umbrella Chronicles. | Dead_.
----------------------------------+-------------------------------------
The official ending of RE3 is | The Nemesis guts Nicholai like a
the one where Nicholai survives. | rainbow trout.
----------------------------------+-------------------------------------

Q. Will you be summarizing the novels in this document?

A. Nope. There's no point, as they're not canon. I'm only bringing

them up because it's entertaining to list the contrasts, and because
you still see some fan work that's wholly or partially based on the
"novel universe." Also, I used to get a lot of questions about Trent.
I hate Trent so much.

Q. What about the comic books?

A. Wildstorm published five issues of an official Resident Evil

magazine in 1998. Each issue featured several short comics
featuring the cast of RE, most of which were recaps. The art
was done by an assortment of pencilers who'd go on to do some
high-profile work in American comics, like Lee Bermejo and Carlos
d'Anda. It's often quite good.
The writing, by Ted Adams and Kris Oprisko, usually isn't, although
there are a couple of passable stories. (There are also a couple
that are aggressively terrible, like the werewolf story. That werewolf
story is the RE fan community's answer to "Buster Witwicky and the Car
Wash of Doom.")

The same writers would put out a four-issue limited series a few
years later called Resident Evil: Fire and Ice. This original
story stars the members of the STARS Charlie team as they fight
Umbrella's creations. It's a pretty spectacular train wreck,
with nothing in particular to recommend it.

Both Fire and Ice and many stories from the original magazine have
been reprinted in a recent trade paperback edition, which is a perfect
gift for that RE fan in your life who you do not actually like. Like
Perry's novels, the Wildstorm comics tried to build on the universe,
and like Perry's novels, the games ignored them.

In late 2008, Wildstorm took a third crack at the Resident Evil

franchise with a new six-issue series, by Rick Sanchez and Jheremy
Raapack. Despite Chris being on the cover of the first issue, no
characters from the games appear in the book at any time. Instead,
the series follows two BSAA agents, including the improbably-named
"Holiday Sugarman," as they undertake a series of missions.

The latest comic book was plagued with long shipping delays, and
reads like they slapped the Resident Evil license on a couple of
randomly chosen scripts in order to move a few extra copies of the
book. It's not actively painful to read the way that Adams and
Oprisko's work could be, but it's not great either.

You may want to read the first issue, though. In five or ten years,
the "Lickers in Space" pages are going to show up as part of some
games blogger's article about silly spin-off material, and you can
go ahead and feel smug because you already knew about them.

Q. ...and the manga?

A. There have been a couple of official tie-ins. One, Prelude to

Destruction, is a short and by-the-numbers two-volume story that
exists as a prelude to the "Umbrella's End" scenario in RE:UC. It
was never translated for release outside Japan, but you can find
a fan translation on MangaFox. It's skippable.

Biohazard: Marahawa Desire serves as a prologue to RE6 and is the

first chronological appearance of Piers Nivans. It involves Chris
and the BSAA dealing with an outbreak of the C-Virus at a school
in Asia. It's a side-story at best, although it is canon. It will
receive an official translation and release at some point, although
most of it was "scanlated."

Biohazard: Heavenly Island began in December 2014 and is serialized

in the same magazine as Marahawa Desire. It stars Claire as she
visits a popular tourist destination, right in time for it to be
hit with a biohazardous outbreak. Claire should stay off islands.

A Chinese manga adaptation of Code Veronica by Lee Chung Hing was

translated and released in North America in 2003. It's so over the
top it's hilarious, with awful dialogue provided by Adams and
Oprisko, and the covers recycle RE concept art in the laziest
possible way. If you ever wondered how CV's plot would play out
if every character was capable of punching people until they explode,
pick it up. You won't be disappointed.

Aside from that, there doesn't seem to be any manga worth discussing.
I'll tell you this much for free, though: if somebody offers to show
you an RE h-doujin, run the other way as fast as you can.

Q. Why are the games becoming less bloody?

A. It seems to go in cycles. RE2 and RE3 were moderately gory,

then CV toned it down a great deal. The GameCube RE games ratcheted
it back up again, reaching a decapitation-based crescendo in RE4,
but the Outbreak games were even tamer than CV. RE5 turns the gore
dial back down a bit, and then RE6 has that bit where if you screw
up you get fed head-first into a meat slicer, so...

Q. Who's Shinji Mikami?

A. If any one man can be said to be RE's creator, it's Mikami,

who has a major design credit on every core RE game before 2008.
He was one of the creators who formed Clover Studio, and was
thus part of the group that left Capcom to form Platinum. Mikami
currently works as an independent developer, on projects such as
Vanquish, The Evil Within, and Suda 51's Shadows of the Damned.

Q. Why'd you write/update this?

A. Some people do crosswords. I do this.

Q. How long did this take you to write?

A. My first update, when this first appeared on gameFAQs.com

with my name on it, took me a couple of weeks, most of which
was spent on the RE3 and CV plot summaries.

The considerably more in-depth version you're reading now

is the result of years spent adding to and editing that
original document, with near-constant feedback from readers.

Q. What's with all the disclaimers and their general tone?

A. When people start reading the disclaimers, I'll stop

sprinkling them irritatedly and liberally throughout the
analysis. My feedback for this document is something like
40% theories and 20% questions from people who can't be
bothered to look for their own answers. I don't have a lot
of patience for people with low reading comprehension skills.

Q. I found a magazine article that sounds a lot like this

plot analysis. Have you heard about this?

A. If you mean the December 2004 issue of NGC magazine, then

yeah, I wrote those sidebars, although the editor did British
up the text a bit for print. (That bit quoted on TV Tropes,
about "zombies in the bath," is his, not mine.) If it's
anything else, then tell me about it so I may take vengeance.
Q. You're missing a certain part of the plot analysis. May
I write it up and send it to you?

A. No thanks.

Q. Why don't you want to hear my theory? Don't you have a sense
of humor?

A. In short: Resident Evil fans are *crazy*.

I can understand a degree of speculation about the next game

in a popular series, particularly one that's as rooted in
conspiracies as RE is, but RE fans take it to extremes. The fan
community isn't as bad today as it was in the late nineties and
early aughts, but it still has the occasional moment of insanity.
(A guy in Britain used to keep me updated on his attempts to
replicate the G-Virus. I did not ask him to do this.)

In short, my desire to not hear about your &*$%ing *theory* is

largely born of a desire to not become the sounding board for
every lunatic in the RE fan community, because the online RE
fan community is about 80% lunatics and "shippers." It's nothing
personal. As a general rule, if your letter contains the words
"theory," "speculation," "hypothesis," "idea," "rumor," "Trent,"
"Paul Anderson," or "Alice," I don't want to hear about it.

I'm also not in the business of validating your theory, so

if you write me a letter asking me if something "could" be
possible, I probably won't respond to that, either. (Yes, it
*could* be possible, unless the facts of the story blatantly
contradict it. It also *could* be possible that the sun won't
rise tomorrow. Possibility covers a lot of ground.)

Q. Could you send me a copy/notify me when you update?

A. Nope.

Q. Here's a joke that implies that the green herbs are marijuana!
Aren't I entertaining?

A. No, it's been done. The early versions of the herbs, where they
were crushed onto sheets of paper, is a typical method of using
herbal medicine in Japan.

Q. Where can I read the games' files online?

A. I've gotten into the habit of using the transcripts at

projectumbrella.net. Most of the files there are fan translations
of the original Japanese text, so they don't mesh exactly with the
American versions, but they're well-organized and they've got files
that GameFAQs doesn't.

Q. Why is the series called Biohazard in Japan and China, and

Resident Evil in North America and Europe?

A. The heavy-metal band Biohazard has copyrighted that name

in North America and Europe.
Q. What movies are the games based on?

A. The RE series has always worn its film influences on its sleeve.
The original games are very much an extended homage to George Romero's
"Dead Trilogy," and later entries in the franchise have included any
number of other references or outright shot-for-shot thefts. Most of
these are discussed in the individual games' entries, below.

Q. What's in the future for Resident Evil?

A. Lots, usually. Check your favorite videogame website for the

latest information. This, being a plot summary, isn't really a
good place for all your RE news.

Q. How long will the series continue for, anyway?

A. Degeneration and RE5 helpfully establish a new, extraordinarily

flexible status quo for the RE series. It could theoretically go
on for as long as video games persist as a medium.

===============================
3ii. A Rough Timeline of Events
===============================

This originally started as a rough approximation of the games'

timeline and rapidly spun out of control. It'll probably answer
your question, but keep in mind that even I think this has gotten
out of hand.

1960s: The three divisions within the Travis Trading company

form a conglomerate that they name Tricell. Tricell's
pharmaceutical division does a great deal of work with the
research of the African explorer Henry Travis, whose writings
also convince a young Ozwell Spencer to visit the continent.
(Tricell file, RE5)

1960: Ozwell Spencer, heir to billions and budding megalomaniac,

conducts a series of experiments on dozens of orphaned children
from throughout the world. This is his "Wesker Project," meant to
create a new breed of human. (Wesker's file, RE5)

1962: Spencer commissions George Trevor, a famous architect

from New York, to build a mansion for him outside Raccoon City.

1966: Ozwell Spencer, James Marcus, and Edward Ashford

discover the Progenitor virus in a rare African flower.
(The general timeframe is established in RE:CV, but a
specific year isn't given until RE5's "History of RESIDENT
EVIL" file.)

Spencer installs Brandon Bailey as the overseer of the

African research facility, located in the heart of the
Kijuju Autonomous Zone. At first, the "facility" is a
bunch of tents guarded by mercenaries, but Spencer funds
the construction of a more permanent building. (various
files, RE5)

November 13th, 1967: George Trevor is invited to see the

mansion he built for Spencer. George arrives with his wife
Jessica and daughter Lisa, and finds that the invitation
is a trap. Jessica and Lisa Trevor are kidnapped, and
George is imprisoned beneath the mansion. (Trevor's
Letters, REv.2)

(Wesker's Report II conflicts slightly with the timeline

listed in Trevor's Letters, as it lists Lisa being first
used as a test subject three days before she arrived at
the mansion.)

November 14th, 1967: Jessica and Lisa Trevor are both used
as test subjects for the Progenitor virus. Jessica is killed
during an escape attempt, unaware that she's already been
scheduled for termination. (Family Photos, REv.2)

November 15th, 1967: Lisa Trevor, following an injection

of the Progenitor virus, begins to lose her humanity.
(Family Photos, REv.2)

December 1st, 1967: George Trevor's attempts to find an exit

lead him to an inescapable room, where Spencer has helpfully
left him a tombstone. George starves to death in that room,
unaware that his wife is already dead. (Trevor's Letters, REv.2)

Early 1968: Spencer, Ashford, and Marcus found Umbrella,

funding it by investing their own inherited fortunes.
(cf. CV, RE5) In addition to its secret purpose of bioweapons
research, Umbrella maintains a lucrative cover, hence the
name, as a pharmaceutical corporation. By 1998, most houses
on the planet have at least one Umbrella product in them,
such as painkillers or shampoo.

Due to Umbrella's various advantages--unlimited R&D budget,

staff of sociopath geniuses, human experimentation in secret,
government officials firmly in pocket--they rapidly raise
the level of technology both available to themselves and to
the world in general. Umbrella has access to working cryogenic
storage and functional human cloning by the 1980s.

July, 1968: Alexander Ashford accidentally kills his father

Edward. CV listed Edward as dying in an unspecified accident;
RE5 clarifies that he was infected with the Progenitor. This
is the beginning of the Ashfords' fall from grace within the
company, as Alexander acquires a reputation for incompetence.
Since James Marcus doesn't care about the company (yet), Ozwell
Spencer now has absolute control over Umbrella.

1969: Brandon Bailey reports that the African facility for

the study of the Progenitor virus has been completed. Bailey
will spend the rest of his life there.

November, 1969: The Antarctic shipping facility is completed.

Alexander Ashford includes a hidden laboratory underneath it
to allow him to continue his experimentation in secret. His
particular field of obsession is the genetic basis for
human intelligence.

1970: Alexander Ashford officially succeeds his father as the

head of the Ashford family.
1971: Alexander Ashford's experiments pay off with the births
of Alexia and Alfred, who are partially cloned from Alexander's
ancestor Veronica. Due to Alexander's tampering, Alfred is
simply an intelligent child, but Alexia is a genius. Alfred
quickly becomes dependent upon his sister.

September 19th, 1977: James Marcus first creates the virus

that he codenames "T," by mixing leech DNA with Progenitor.
(Marcus' Diary 1, RE0) His progress is aided by using some
of the students at Umbrella's training facilities as live
human test subjects.

1977: Albert Wesker and William Birkin begin their training

at Marcus's facility.

January, 1978: Marcus considers the T-Virus "complete"

and announces its creation to other Umbrella employees.

July, 1978: Wesker and Birkin are assigned to the Arklay

laboratory. (Wesker's Report 2) Over the next eighteen years,
Wesker and Birkin will assist in the creation of the Tyrant and
the Hunter, among other bioweapons.

1981: Alexia Ashford graduates from university at the age of

ten and is made a head researcher at her father's Antarctic
laboratory. (Newspaper Clip, CV) She and William Birkin
promptly develop a fierce rivalry. (Wesker's Report II)

1982: Alexia and Alfred test the T-Veronica virus on Alexander

Ashford, creating the Nosferatu. They promptly imprison the
monster in a chamber underneath the Antarctic production
facility, turning him into a boogeyman for the local workers.

1983: Alexia infects herself with T-Veronica and enters cryogenic

storage, after faking her own death in a laboratory accident.
Alfred helps her with the cover story, but without her, he
goes insane. Alfred comes to inhabit his own reality where
Alexia is still awake, going so far as to wear her clothes
and manifest an "Alexia" as an alternate personality. (Alfred's
Diary, Virus Research Report, CV)

1987: Michael Warren is elected the mayor of Raccoon City,

and will remain so up until its destruction. During his
administration, Umbrella makes "vast" donations to Raccoon
City, funding the construction of many of its facilities.
In turn, many of these facilities, such as the hospital they
build in 1992, have secret research laboratories or storage
areas built into them. (City Guide, RE3)

1988: Umbrella France creates the Nemesis parasite. William Birkin

discovers the G-Virus in Lisa Trevor's body. (Wesker's Report 2)

Marcus makes plans to take over Umbrella by leveraging the prestige

from his invention of the T-Virus. Spencer reacts by ordering Birkin
and Wesker to take Marcus out; they in turn bring in an unidentified
Umbrella operative to shoot Marcus dead. (Investigator's Report
1, RE0) Marcus's corpse falls into one of the storage tanks where
he kept his leeches, and they devour him.
After Marcus's death, Umbrella discovers his lab under the training
facility. It is sufficiently disturbing to them that they mothball
the entire building and leave it empty for the next ten years.

July 1st, 1988: Wesker and Birkin's research into the Tyrant
hits a snag when they discover just how low a chance a test
subject has of survival. This problem is later fixed when Sergei
Vladimir, Umbrella's head of security, passes the compatibility
tests. All future Tyrants are created with clones of Vladimir
as a base.

1991: Construction begins on the laboratory complex underneath

Raccoon City. (History of RESIDENT EVIL, RE5)

January, 1991: An unidentified man with theorized ties to the

Ashfords provides information to Javier Hidalgo about using the
T-Virus to cure his wife Hilda's cancer. (Javier's Memorandum, RE:DSC)

1991-1992: Albert Wesker has an affair with an Edonian woman named

Muller. She leaves America afterward to return to her country,
where she gives birth to a son she names Jake.

1993: Construction begins on Terragrigia (Italian for "gray

earth"), a solar-powered floating "city of the future."

1995-1999: At some point in the "latter half of the 1990s,"

Ozwell Spencer acquires the abandoned military base on the
Sonido de Tortuga Island. It is retrofitted into a research
facility, which Alex Wesker will use as the site of her
initial immortality experiments.

1995: Wesker gets transferred to Umbrella's secret service.

Ozwell Spencer takes Lisa Trevor from the Arklay lab, under
the pretext that he's going to kill her. He is either lying
or unsuccessful. (Wesker's Report 2)

1996: Wesker forms the STARS in Raccoon City, ostensibly to

combat a recent increase in local domestic terrorism. Most of
its members are former military personnel. (Manual to original
PSX RE)

(In-game, it's been largely implied that the Raccoon City

STARS unit was unique and somewhat famous. In the novels'
universe, there were several other STARS teams in nearby
cities; in the comics', there was a "Charlie" team that
was mostly wiped out; in the films, the team was much
larger and was killed to a man by the Nemesis during
the Raccoon City disaster.)

May 14th, 1996: Yoko Suzuki is one of the participants in

an unspecified T-Virus experiment. The results of the
experiment are "horrible," and Greg Mueller operates on Yoko
to suppress her memories thereof. (Greg's cutscene, RE:O;
Experiment Participants file, RE:O2)

1997: Lieutenant Billy Coen's unit of Marines is sent to

Africa to intervene in a local civil war. Whatever happens
next, at least twenty-three people die and Billy is charged
with their murder. (Court Order For Transportation file;
Billy's flashback, RE0)

May 11th, 1998: James Marcus comes back from the dead to
cause a major T-Virus outbreak at the Arklay laboratory.
He proceeds to kill anyone who gets anywhere near the lab
or the old training facility, whether they're affiliated
with Umbrella or not. (Keeper's Diary, RE v.2; dialogue, RE0)

Morpheus Duvall is fired from Umbrella due to an unnamed

incident in Raccoon City. (Dismissal Notice, RE:DA)

June 22nd, 1998: By this point, all of the researchers

and staff at the Arklay laboratory are infected with the
T-Virus. The last survivors opt to kill themselves rather
than become zombies. (Researcher's Will, Keeper's Diary,
Letter to Ada, RE)

June, 1998: the first cases of the "zombie disease" appear

within Raccoon City. Many of the infected work in or around
the Raccoon sewer system. (cf. M. Watchman's Diary, Sewer
Manager's Diary, RE2)

A series of bizarre murders are committed in the Raccoon

Forest, spurring the involvement of the STARS unit. The
murders are never solved, but they can be attributed to
Marcus or the zombie dogs that have escaped from the Spencer
mansion. At least three were committed by Ed Lester, the
administrator of a country hospital located in the forest
(RE:O2, "Flashback").

July 23rd, 1998: Umbrella sends a cleanup team to the old

training facility in the Raccoon Forest via the Ecliptic
Express passenger train, presumably to join the teams that
are already at work in the facility. James Marcus, restored
to a semblance of life by his leeches, attacks the train
and kills almost everyone aboard. At some point, the train
is stopped.

Marcus also inadvertently (?) frees Billy Coen, whose police

escort stops or is stopped near the train. Billy manages to
escape into the train, while his police escort is killed.

The STARS Bravo team, conducting aerial reconaissance of

the forest, has helicopter trouble and crashes near the
parked train. Rebecca Chambers and Ed Dewey investigate
the train; soon afterward, Ed is killed and Rebecca is
forced to cooperate with Billy for the sake of survival.
Rebecca and Billy spend the next few hours being chased
around the training facility and the subterranean network
underneath the Raccoon Forest.

July 24th, 1998: Rebecca and Billy's final showdown with James
Marcus, in the treatment plant below the training facility, ends
with the deaths of Marcus and his queen leech. Birkin destroys
the training facility.

At dawn, Rebecca leaves Billy in the Raccoon Forest and heads

to the Spencer mansion to rendezvous with Enrico Marini. She
makes it to the dormitories and falls asleep there.

July 25th, 1998: Rebecca meets up with Richard Aiken. As she

and Richard make their way through the mansion to the attic,
Sergei Vladimir is in the mansion's lab wiping the computers.

The Alpha team begins its search for the Bravo team. They're
promptly chased into the Spencer mansion.

July 25th, 1998: at or around daybreak, Wesker's betrayal

is revealed, the Tyrant breaks free, and the remaining
members of the Alpha team escape via helicopter just before
the Spencer mansion explodes. The Tyrant is destroyed on
the helipad of the mansion.

Wesker wakes up after his "death," resurrected and empowered

by Spencer's virus, but without any of the data or BOWs he'd
hoped to sell. He makes a run for safety back through the mansion,
pursued by Lisa Trevor and the surviving mutants within the facility,
and escapes into the woods. Lisa is trapped underneath falling
debris in the Spencer mansion's front hall when it explodes.

late July to mid-August, 1998: with no real evidence, an

admittedly ridiculous story, and Brian Irons working against
them, the surviving STARS are unable to persuade anyone in the
RPD to believe their report. The police and media of Raccoon City
conduct an investigation into Umbrella's affairs, and Umbrella
reacts by briefly suspending their activities. Chris Redfield
continues his investigation into Umbrella on his own. (Mail to
Chief, Mail to Chris, Sewer Manager's Diary, RE2; Chris's Report,
RE2 EX; Jill's Diary, RE3)

Rebecca Chambers submits a report that claims Billy Coen is

dead and his body has disappeared. The report seems to be
taking advantage of the STARS' present bad reputation in
Raccoon City, as it hints at outright incompetence among
the STARS. (Rebecca's Report, RE2 EX) This is Rebecca's
final appearance in the games' timeline.

August 17th, 1998: Strange monsters begin to appear in

Raccoon City. (Chris's Diary, RE2)

August 24th, 1998: Chris and Barry both leave Raccoon City
to go to Europe. Jill elects to stay behind, intending to
investigate William Birkin's underground laboratory. While
she's at it, she quits the RPD and drops out of sight;
according to Marvin Branagh in RE2, Jill "disappeared" at
the same time that Barry and Chris did. (Chris's Diary, RE2;
Jill's Diary, RE3)

Around September 22nd, 1998: A team of mercenaries is sent by

Umbrella's French division to William Birkin's laboratory to
get a sample of the G-Virus. After the subsequent massacre,
the G-Type munches on a number of virus containers, including
the T-Virus. (The date comes from several files, such as the
Chief's Diary in RE2.)

The local population of sewer rats carries a megadose of

the T-Virus up into the streets. When combined with the mild
infection that's been leaking into the city since May, the
virus has an immediate impact. As seen in RE:O, there are
dozens of zombies in the streets of Raccoon City a few minutes
after Birkin kills the strike team.

September 23rd-27th, 1998: the long death of Raccoon City.

The survivors of the outbreak take increasingly draconian
measures in attempting to hold the zombies back, such as
instituting martial law. Between the zombies and the survivors'
attempts to fight them, the city takes heavy damage.

At some point during this period, the outside world places

Raccoon City under a military quarantine, surrounding the
city with troops and barricades. Officially, no one is allowed
in or out. Unofficially, Raccoon City's airspace is 60% nitrogen,
20% oxygen, and 20% escape helicopters.

September 24th, 1998: Brian Irons snaps. He sabotages every method

of escaping the city he can think of, including Umbrella's tunnel
systems, and scatters the police's ammunition supply throughout the
building, crippling their ability to effectively combat the zombies.
(Chief's Diary, RE2)

September 26th, 1998: the police muster their remaining forces

and mount an all-or-nothing counterattack against the zombies.
(RE3's opening movie)

The siege of the RPD building begins. (Operation Report 1, RE2)

Irons hunts down the remaining survivors within the city. (Chief's
Diary, RE2)

Umbrella drops a sizable number of mercenaries into Raccoon City

as members of the Umbrella Biohazard Countermeasures Service.
Many of the mercenaries are told their job is to rescue civilians,
but others are secretly tasked with gathering data, destroying
evidence, or rounding up Umbrella's surviving employees. The UBCS
takes serious losses immediately upon landing. (Mercenary's
Pocketbook file, RE3)

September 27th, 1998: By this point, most of the Raccoon police

have been killed and their final offensive has failed. The survivors
pull back to the RPD's precinct house, which has already withstood
at least one serious zombie attack, and attempt to find other ways
of escaping. Most of the cops and civilians in the RPD die one by
one over the course of the next day, at the hands of zombies,
Lickers, the RPD's zombified K9 unit, or Brian Irons. (Operation
Report 1, Operation Report 2, Chief's Diary, RE2; the opening movie,
the Photos, RE3; "Desperate Times," RE:O2)

Daytime, September 28th, 1998: The siege of the RPD ends when
a small group of survivors escapes the building in a police van.
A wounded Marvin Branagh is left behind, and a second group of
survivors attempts to escape via the sewers. ("Desperate Times,"
RE:O2; Operation Report files, RE2)

Jill Valentine's preparations to infiltrate William Birkin's

laboratory were interrupted by the outbreak. She finally has to
shoot her way out of her apartment. She subsequently witnesses
the death of Brad Vickers at the hands of the Nemesis.

Jill goes on to meet Carlos, Nicholai, and Mikhail, and fixes

the cable car. Mikhail promptly breaks it again in a fight with
the Nemesis, crashing the car and knocking Jill unconscious.

Nighttime, September 28th, 1998: Jill wakes up at the St. Michael

Clock Tower. She signals the UBCS extraction chopper, which is
promptly shot down by the Nemesis. Jill faces off against and
"kills" the Nemesis, but it infects her with the T-Virus. Jill
passes out, and Carlos takes her to the chapel.

At some point between Jill leaving and Leon's arrival, Ada Wong
arrives at the RPD building and begins a room-by-room search,
looking for Ben Bertolucci.

Late at night, September 29th, 1998: At this point, the

quarantine of Raccoon City is apparently getting thin on the
ground. Leon Kennedy and Claire Redfield don't encounter any
resistance as they drive into town. Claire meets Leon outside
Emmy's Diner, and they head to the RPD. Claire is informed of
what's happened by a wounded and delirious Marvin Branagh,
while Leon is pursued by Mr. X.

After murdering Michael Warren's daughter Eliza, Brian Irons

dies at the hands of what was once William Birkin. Birkin
proceeds to infect his daughter Sherry with a G-Virus embryo.

Claire, Leon, Ada, and Sherry escape the RPD via the sewer system,
then take the tram car to William Birkin's laboratory. This trip
may take as long as a few hours, as later games (RE0, RE:O) establish
that Birkin's lab is a fair distance away from Raccoon City.

Early morning, September 29th, 1998: the "death" of Ada Wong, the
death of Annette Birkin, and the final encounters with the G-Type
and Mr. X. With Annette's help, Claire creates a dose of the
"Devil" vaccine, halting but not eliminating the G-Virus infection
in Sherry's system. Leon, Claire, and Sherry make their escape from
Raccoon City via William Birkin's train.

September 29th, daytime: Claire and Leon have their unexplained

argument, and Claire vanishes into the Raccoon Forest. Leon and
Sherry are promptly picked up by the U.S. military. (Leon's epilogue,
RE3; cutscene, RE:DSC; Life Under House Arrest file, RE6)

September 30th, night: HUNK shoots his way out of the RPD building,
thus ensuring Umbrella ends up with a sample of the G-Virus.

October 1st, 1998, the middle of the night: Jill finally wakes
up. Carlos learns that Nicholai is still alive, encounters the
"new" Nemesis, and finds an experimental T-Virus vaccine in
a nearby (secretly Umbrella-operated) hospital.

October 1st, near daybreak: the United States government elects

to destroy Raccoon City at dawn, a decision which is heavily
influenced by a high-ranking military officer named Derek Simmons.
Umbrella attempts to avert or push back the strike through
its friends in the U.S. Congress, but is unsuccessful.
Carlos injects Jill with the vaccine, which appears to cure her
of the T-Virus. They once again split up, independently making
their way through a nearby park to the Dead Factory.

Nicholai assassinates the other surviving members of the UBCS. His

goal is to ensure he's the only person who can report to Umbrella
about what happened in the city. By dawn, Nicholai, Carlos, and
possibly Arnold (RE:O2, "End of the Road") are the only UBCS
operatives left alive.

Ada Wong bandages her wounds and makes her way back into Raccoon
via William Birkin's underground cable car.

Sergei Vladimir, acting alone, steals Umbrella's central computer

core. His helicopter also provides an escape route for Ada, who is
able to hitch a ride on its cargo crate.

George Hamilton leads a small group of survivors into Raccoon

University. They find Peter's body, fight off the Thanatos,
and synthesize the Daylight vaccine. Nicholai assassinates
Greg Mueller, the Thanatos's creator, and blows up Raccoon
University's administration building. The explosion draws the
attention of a rescue helicopter piloted by Raccoon City firemen,
who land nearby to pick up the survivors.

Another group of survivors follows David King into Umbrella's

laboratories, where they meet Linda and Carter. Following
Carter's ill-advised attempt to exploit the Tyrant, the
survivors escape into the city with Linda and eventually
make their way out of town in a stolen UBCS truck. Linda's
survival ensures the existence of a working T-Virus vaccine.

Nicholai returns to the Dead Factory to attack Jill, but

opts to leave her to die instead. Jill destroys the Nemesis,
or at least slows it down enough that the bombing kills it.
She and Carlos are rescued at the last second by Barry Burton.

Hunk's departure from the RPD takes place at night, at some

point after Claire and Leon have vacated the RPD. It could be
set on either September 30th or October 1st.

Dawn, October 1st, 1998: Raccoon City is blown off the map.
RE3 makes it look like a small nuclear bomb was employed, but
in Outbreak, it's shown as an intense conventional bombardment.
While rescue forces are operating in and around the city right
up until the end, the official death toll of the destruction
of Raccoon City is over 100,000, with no more than a handful
of known civilian survivors.

early October, 1998: Leon Kennedy agrees to become an agent

of the American government. (RE3 Epilogue, RE:DSC)

Sherry Birkin is taken into government custody due to her

G-Virus infection. (RE:DSC) She spends the next eleven years
as a ward of the state, with Derek Simmons as her legal guardian.
Claire frequently visits her. (Life Under House Arrest file, RE6)

November 16th, 1998: After thirty-two years, Spencer shuts down

and mothballs the research center in Kijuju. He subsequently
sends assassins after the handful of other people who had a high
enough security clearance to know that the facility existed,
including Brandon Bailey. Of the eleven targets, only one
survives: a "Jenny K." (Spencer's Notebook, RE5)

November, 1998: Ark Thompson's investigation of Sheena Island

ends with an explosion. Ark, Lott, and Lily escape.

December 17th, 1998: while investigating Umbrella to find

leads on her brother's whereabouts, Claire Redfield is captured
in Paris by Rodrigo Juan Raval.

December 27th, 1998: shortly after she's taken to Rockfort

Island, Claire is knocked unconscious. While she's out, Wesker
and a team of mercenaries attack Rockfort in an attempt to find
Alexia. Rodrigo frees Claire, who saves Rodrigo's life, discovers
Alfred's secret, and escapes with Steve.

December 28th, 1998: thanks to Alfred, Claire and Steve's plane

crashes into Alexander Ashford's Antarctic hideaway, where they
face off against and kill both Alfred and Alexander. Alexia wakes
up suddenly and stops Claire and Steve's second escape attempt.

At roughly the same time, Chris Redfield arrives at Rockfort

Island. (Since the Albanoid's grown to adulthood, it's been
at least ten hours since Claire was on the island.) He talks
to Rodrigo, runs into Wesker, and steals one of Alfred's jets.

Jill Valentine finally tracks Chris to one of his hideouts in

Europe, but arrives just after he's left for Rockfort Island.
(Jill's RE3 Epilogue, RE5: History of RESIDENT EVIL)

December 29th, 1998: Chris touches down in the Antarctic, saves

Claire, kills Alexia, and survives his ill-advised fistfight
with Wesker. Chris and Claire escape the Antarctic in Alfred's
jet just as the base explodes.

1998-2002: At some point "soon after" the destruction of

Raccoon City, it becomes public knowledge that Umbrella is
to blame for the outbreak (RE4's introduction). Linda (and
possibly Yoko Suzuki, if she survived) testifies against
the company in court.

Ozwell Spencer marshals a crack legal team and starts a lengthy

court battle. Several survivors come forward to testify against
Umbrella, but a lack of evidence (courtesy of the UBCS supervisors)
hurts the government's case, as does the government's own involvement
in Umbrella's activities.

The political fallout from the Raccoon bombing results in the

U.S. President resigning from office in disgrace. (intro,
RE: Degeneration)

April, 1999: An unknown agency, presumably Umbrella or a

similar corporation, begins secret, unspecified field tests
in the ruins of Raccoon City. The American government remains
unaware of this, despite aerial surveillance. (Outbreak epilogue)

1999: Manuela Hidalgo is diagnosed with the same cancer that

killed her mother. Desperate, her father Javier procures a supply
of the T-Veronica virus from Wesker, and uses it (and murder) as
part of an ongoing treatment regimen.

Ada Wong discovers Derek Simmons's role in the decision to bomb

Raccoon City and breaks off contact with him. She's unaware that
he's become obsessed with her, and Simmons spends much of the
next ten years trying to use the C-Virus to create a replacement
for her.

July 19th, 2000: Alex Wesker arrives on Zabytij Island in the

Baltic Sea. The local population has fallen into severe poverty
since its mine was depleted in 1994. When Alex reopens the mines
and hires the locals to build a new facility out of the lowest
tunnels, they view her as a savior. (The Old Man's Journal file,
RE:R2) This facility is where the T-Phobos virus is created,
with the islanders unwittingly serving as its test subjects.

2000-2003: At some point, Ramon Salazar assists the surviving

Los Illuminados in recovering Las Plagas and administering it
to the villagers who live near his castle. (RE4 never says when
Salazar joins the cult, but since he's only twenty in 2004, it
can't have been long.)

Late 2002: Leon Kennedy and Jack Krauser go into South America
looking for the crimelord Javier Hidalgo. In the ensuing battles,
Krauser is crippled by what used to be Hilda Hidalgo, but Leon's
stories about Wesker give him an idea. Later that year, he fakes
his own death during a mission with Leon and goes in search of
Wesker. (dialogue, RE4)

September 18th, 2002: Morpheus Duvall's followers steal some

of the T-Virus from Umbrella's Paris facility.

September 23rd, 2002: Bruce McGivern and Fong Ling kill

Morpheus, thwarting his scheme to launch the T-Virus into
several American cities.

February, 2003: Responding to a rumor, Chris, Jill, and an

independently funded strike team attack the Umbrella Caucasus
Research Facility in Russia. While the team takes heavy losses,
Chris and Jill reach the test lab and kill the Talos.

While Chris and Jill unwittingly provide a distraction, Wesker

dispatches Sergei Vladimir, "kills" the Red Queen, and escapes
with the last complete archive of Umbrella's research data.
Chris and Jill never realize he was there at all, although their
team quickly discovers that the facility's servers were wiped.

mid-2003: At this point, the lawsuits against Umbrella, both

criminal and private, have dragged on for years, slowed
to a crawl by Spencer's machinations. The prosecution's case
is helped by evidence seized from Umbrella's Russian facility,
which is hinted to be an anonymous leak from Wesker. A guilty
verdict is obtained and Ozwell Spencer becomes a wanted fugitive,
but Umbrella's legal team appeals the decision.

The last straw is the involvement of the Global Pharmaceutical

Consortium (GPC), an international organization comprised of
other pharmaceutical companies. When evidence comes to light
that other corporations were unknowingly complicit in Umbrella's
bioweapons research, these companies willingly offer full
disclosure to help the case against Umbrella in exchange for
immunity from prosecution. The trial against Umbrella ends
with the company being legally dismantled, although Ozwell
Spencer manages to evade arrest. (files, RE5)

The BSAA is formed as an independent organization headquartered

in England, funded by the GPC and intended to serve in an advisory
role to government forces. Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine
are among the "Original Eleven" members of the BSAA.

2003-2004: The United States forms the Federal Bioterrorism

Commission. (The introduction of Degeneration implies the
organization was founded in 2005, but the FBC already exists
by the time of the Terragrigia Panic in 2004.) Its charter
is to protect the United States and its interests from
biological attacks, through "the research, training, and
support of the biological community." It works closely with
agencies having to do with wildlife preservation and is
essentially toothless. (The FBC's Charter file, Revelations)

2004: The newly-opened "city of the future" Terragrigia, located

on an artificial island in the Mediterranean Sea, is the site of
a bio-terror attack by the terrorist organization Veltro. (Episode
2 newscast, RE:R)

Three weeks later, after the FBC has failed to resolve the situation,
the FBC's commissioner Morgan Lansdale weaponizes Terragrigia's solar
collection satellite and uses it to sink the island, destroying both
the city and the BOWs. Veltro subsequently drops out of public view,
which is because Lansdale, who manipulated its members into the
attack in the first place, has double-crossed and killed most of them.

The incident becomes known as the "Terragrigia Panic," and its most
immediate consequence is the rapid expansion of the FBC's charter and
funding. A year later, it's a private army under Lansdale's command.

A young Natalia Korda loses her parents in the Panic, and is rescued
from Terragrigia by Neil Fisher. She is heavily traumatized by the
experience, and is placed in a facility by TerraSave. (Neil's Report,
RE:R2)

In the same year, newspaper articles are published that reveal

the existence of BOWs to the general public. (found on the
beach in Episode 1 of Revelations)

Fall, 2004: Ashley Graham, the daughter of the president of

the United States, is kidnapped. After she's sighted in a rural
village in Spain, Leon Kennedy is dispatched to follow up on
the lead. He encounters resistance.

When the dust settles, Wesker has obtained samples of Las

Plagas, but Ada Wong prevents him from getting a master Plaga.
The Illuminados cult is wiped out.

2005: Incidents of "bioterrorism," while on a steady rise since Raccoon

City's destruction, reach an all-time high this year. Outbreaks of the
T-Virus are reported all over the world, and have killed over one million
people by the time Degeneration takes place.

Chris and Jill recover evidence of Morgan Lansdale's responsibility for

the Terragrigia Panic. Lansdale is arrested and the FBC is subsequently
dissolved, although Lansdale's protege Neil Fisher immediately begins
planning ways to bring it back.

Clive O'Brian steps down as head of the BSAA, which is reorganized

as an international anti-bioterrorism force under the auspices of
the United Nations. Much of the FBC's resources are folded into the
new BSAA.

mid-November, 2005: The Harvardville outbreak. (Angela's Diary,

RE: Degeneration box set) Following the destruction of Wilpharma's
main facility, Frederic Downing tries to escape with both the virus
and the vaccine, but is caught and arrested. Wilpharma's stock takes
a plunge, and the company is bought by Tricell.

2006: A dying Ozwell Spencer leaks word of his location to Wesker,

who has been looking for him for some time. When Wesker arrives,
Spencer tells him all about the "Wesker Project" and Spencer's
dreams of godhood. Wesker reacts by punching Spencer's lungs out.
As you do.

Chris and Jill arrive shortly thereafter to try to arrest Spencer,

and the resulting fight ends with Jill and Wesker being presumed
dead. A grieving Chris throws himself into his work and is soon
a legend in the BSAA.

2006-2008: Both Jill and Wesker survive the fall from Spencer's
castle. Wesker treats Jill's injuries and puts her in cold
storage in the African facility, intending to use her as a
guinea pig. He soon discovers that Jill's effectively immune to
most of his viruses, so instead, he shoots her up with superdrugs
and mind-control serum. Jill spends the next two years as Wesker's
superhuman bodyguard and catspaw, and her viral immunities provide
the keys to the creation of his Uroboros project.

Wesker learns about the African research facility from Spencer's

notes. In conjunction with Excella Gionne and Tricell, he sends a
research team to the facility to clean it up and learn what they
can from it.

At some point in this period, Chris receives intel that Jill may
still be alive.

2008: Jake Muller becomes a mercenary in order to support his mother,

but she dies shortly after the start of his career. Jake goes on to
become a soldier of fortune, training or fighting all over the world.

March 9th, 2008: A BSAA researcher named Ryan is assassinated by

a woman named Suzuki, who's secretly employed by Tricell as a mole
in the BSAA. Ryan's death prevents him from blowing the whistle on
her, and Suzuki will go on to warn Ricardo Irving that the BSAA is
coming for him in Kijuju. (RE5's Japanese marketing campaign)

April 5th, 2008: Tricell offers an "inoculation" to the inhabitants

of the village in the KAZ's oil fields, claiming it's to protect them
against a spreading disease. By the 14th, the women and children
of the village have all died, and the men have been transformed into
the first "Majini." (Village Youth's Diary, RE5)

October, 2008: By this point, Alex Wesker has almost exhausted the
local population of Zabytij Island. Shielded from suspicion by their
high opinion of her, she's begun using them as test subjects. By the
time they're ready to revolt against her, it's almost too late. Those
who don't end up infected are killed in an outbreak of the T-Phobos
virus. (cf. Town Resident's Note, Sluice Operator's Last Words, RE:R2)

November, 2008: Adam Benford is elected President of the United

States. (The extra RE.net material on Leon's biographical file in RE6
is a letter from Benford written in 2011, and Benford is already President.)

December, 2008: The people of the Kijuju Autonomous Zone are

exposed to Wesker's type-2 Plagas.

2009: Jake Muller is betrayed by a commanding officer during an

operation in South America. The incident causes him to become jaded
and cynical. (Soldiers of Fortune file, RE6/residentevil.net)

Sherry Birkin is offered a deal by the U.S. government. In exchange

for becoming a special agent, they'll release her from house arrest.
She accepts. (Sherry Birkin File, RE6)

March 9th, 2009: Chris travels to Africa to track down Ricardo

Irving, partners up with Sheva Alomar, and discovers the KAZ has
been infected. By nightfall, Chris, Sheva and Josh Stone are the
only surviving BSAA agents in the KAZ.

March 10th, 2009: Chris and Sheva kill Ricardo Irving, uncover
Umbrella's African facility, free Jill Valentine from Wesker's
control, foil Wesker's plans to infect the planet with Uroboros,
and kill Wesker himself.

April 30th, 2009: Simmons uses the C-Virus to turn Carla Radames
into a perfect clone of Ada Wong, ending ten years of experiments.

2010: If "Biohazard the Stage" is canon, this is when it took place.

December, 2010: The beginning of the civil war in the Eastern Slav
Republic. A shaky ceasefire is reached, and is subsequently shattered
when the nation's military invades the revolutionaries' territory in
order to seize natural resources.

February 2nd, 2011: Acting on Leon's advice, President Adam Benford

creates the Division of Security Operations (DSO), an anti-bioterror
agency in the United States government under the direct command of
the President. Leon is its first field agent.

February, 2011: In what must be his first mission as a DSO agent,

Leon is sent to the Eastern Slav Republic to investigate the use of
BOWs in its civil war. At the same time, Ada Wong bluffs her way in
by posing as a member of the BSAA. They discover that both sides have
used new-generation Lickers and Tyrants in the war effort, which gets
enough foreign attention to bring down the ESR's president.

At approximately the same time (cf. the Russian radio report in Claire's
Episode 2, RE:R2), Claire and Moira are abducted from a TerraSave dinner
party. They and several other TerraSave employees have been selected by
Neil Fisher as potential hosts for Alex Wesker's "rebirth," and wake up
on Sushestvovanie Island.

In the end, Alex chooses Natalia Korda as her new host, and double-crosses
Neil by injecting him with Uroboros. He goes on to lose a fight with Claire
and Moira.

Alex begins the process of transferring her personality and memories to

Natalia, then commits suicide before Claire and Moira's eyes. Her tower
begins to self-destruct, and while Claire escapes, Moira is trapped inside
as it collapses.

Claire makes it back to civilization and is able to tell Barry what

she knows. Moira is pulled from the wreckage by Evgeny Ribic, the
last survivor of the island's original population, who nurses her
back to health.

August, 2011 (?): The original Alex Wesker is brought back to life,
sort of, by her T-Phobos infection. Out of sheer rage at her situation,
she releases the Uroboros virus from her research facility, hoping to
kill Natalia and scour the island itself clean of life.

After a six-month-long investigation, Barry finally locates the island

and goes there alone. He meets Natalia and tracks down Alex, who
nearly kills Natalia before Moira stops her. Claire arrives shortly
thereafter in a helicopter, and she and Barry kill Alex.

June (?), 2012: Carla Radames provides a student at the Marhawa

Academy, Bindi Bergara, with a sample of the C-Virus. Bindi uses it
on her comatose friend, Nanan Yoshihara, in an attempt to save
Nanan's life. Instead, Nanan becomes a homicidal mutant, preying
on the student body from her lair in the school's steam tunnels.
Due to the school's remote location and the headmistress's attempt
to hush up the attacks, the school is almost depopulated by the
time the BSAA responds. The only survivors of the incident are Chris
Redfield, Piers Nivans, and a college student named Ricky Tozawa.
(Biohazard: Marhawa Desire)

Carla Radames uses data from the Marhawa Academy attack to perfect
the bioweapon code-named Lepotitsa, which is later used in the Tall
Oaks outbreak. (Lepotitsa file, RE6/residentevil.net)

November, 2012: Adam Benford is re-elected President.

December 24th, 2012: The BSAA gets involved in the Edonian civil war
after they receive reports that BOWs are being used in the field.
Chris Redfield leads a squad of troops into the city, where they
first encounter the C-Virus.

Chris is seriously injured in the ensuing fight and Piers, the only
other survivor of their unit, manages to get him to safety. Chris develops
traumatic amnesia, escapes from BSAA custody, and spends the next six
months in a violent, alcoholic stupor.

Sherry, recruited as a government agent under Derek Simmons, successfully

finds Jake and bribes him to go back to the United States with her. The
Ustanak crashes their ride, and the two are captured by Carla Radames.
They're taken to China as lab rats in Carla's custody.

June 26th, 2013: Simmons and a number of subordinates kidnap Helena

and Deborah Harper, and present Helena with an ultimatum; either she
provides an opening in the President's security for his speech in
Tall Oaks, or they'll kill Deborah.

June 27th, 2013: Posing as Simmons, Carla Radames tempts Ada Wong into
investigating one of Simmons's secure meeting sites. Ada discovers that
someone's posing as her, and that that someone is about to pull off two
separate bioterror attacks. She objects to this.

June 29th, 2013: Neo-Umbrella agents acting on Simmons's behalf plant

C-Virus chrysalises throughout the Ivy University campus. When they
mature, they emit enough C-Virus-infused gas to wipe out the university
and most of the people in the surrounding city of Tall Oaks. The ensuing
outbreak kills at least 70,000 people, including President Adam Benford.

Piers Nivans tracks Chris Redfield down in a dive bar in eastern Europe,
scrapes him off the floor, and puts him back into the field.

June 30th, 2013: The infection of Liansheng; the deaths of Derek Simmons,
Carla Radames, and Piers Nivans; and the official "death" of Ada Wong.
The C-Virus is loose on the Asian mainland, a vaccine for it produced
using Jake Muller's blood is only somewhat effective, and millions of
people are dead.

July, 2013: Natalia Korda, now adopted by the Burton family, appears to
be slowly losing her battle against Alex Wesker's consciousness.

2014: The Sonido de Tortuga Island incident. The contestants in "Idol

Survival," a Japanese game show, visit a tropical island that's supposed
to be uninhabited, and instead encounter the infected remnants of Alex
Wesker's initial immortality experiments. (Biohazard: Heavenly Island)

=======================
3iii. RESIDENT EVIL v.2
=======================

Q. Why does it take three shots from Barry's Magnum to kill the
first zombie?

A. Sunspot activity, poor aim, underpacked bullets, a bulletproof

*super* zombie, the planetary alignment at the time, low blood
sugar, psychological trauma, the capricious whims of a mischievous
God, and/or because it's "Barry-style." Pick your favorite!

(This is the kind of thing that people liked to argue about before
RE4 came along. Strap in.)

Q. What's the official ending?

A. There isn't one. RE2 states in the Mail to the Chief file
that all five possible survivors of the "mansion incident" made
it back to Raccoon City alive. At this point in time, it is not
possible to achieve RE's real ending in any version of the game.
Even the "Mansion Incident" scenario in RE:UC, a game that's
specifically intended to close plot holes, omits Barry.
Q. Who captures Chris/Jill at the beginning of the game?

A. Wesker, presumably. There's no one else around to do it.

Q. Why does a Midwestern city have a special anti-terrorism

unit in the first place?

A. Wesker founded the STARS team in 1996, two years before RE and
a year after he transferred from Umbrella R&D to their "secret
service," as per Wesker's Report II. There are vague hints in RE2
that the "domestic terrorism" that the STARS were founded to deal
with is actually fallout from Umbrella's uniquely violent brand of
corporate warfare, which means the STARS team was another method
by which Wesker could clean up after Umbrella.

As for why they're allowed to have military-grade hardware and other

such quirks, it is useful to note here that the chief of the Raccoon
City PD is not merely corrupt, but is William Birkin's personal hand
puppet. Wesker wants the STARS to have anti-tank weapons, so they do.

Q. Where did all the Hunters come from?

A. James Marcus's training facility. Rebecca finds the Hunters'

pen at one point during RE0.

Q. How do I view Kenneth's film?

A. You can use the equipment in the secret area in the laboratory
visual room to watch Kenneth's tape. It depicts, unnervingly, the
last couple of minutes of Kenneth's life.

Q. What's this about Jessica's skull?

A. There are two ways to defeat Lisa Trevor in the crypt. One
is to shoot her until she falls off the edge of the platform;
the other is to shove all four of the locking stones into the
pit. (If you're playing as Jill, it's very difficult to do
this *and* save Barry.) Once the sarcophagus is open, Lisa
will grab her mother's skull and leap into the pit.

Q. What happened to Rebecca Chambers after RE?

A. We know she was there, because of RE0, and we know she

survived RE, because she's mentioned in RE2's Mail to the
Chief file. She is currently slated to appear in the
next animated feature film, Vendetta.

Rebecca is listed as dead in Brady's Resident Evil Archives

book. This is a mistake on their part.

Q. Have you heard about the researcher John?

A. Actually, yes. In brief: in RE2, Ada Wong says that she's

looking for her boyfriend John, who works for Umbrella. In RE,
one of the files is written by a researcher named John, who's
set up the mansion's security computer with his girlfriend
Ada's name as a password. John mentions that he's turning
into a zombie. Therefore, he did exist, he wasn't just Ada's
cover story, and by the time Ada comes looking for him, he's
been dead for four months.

However, when Annette meets Ada in the waste management plant

in RE2 (a meeting that takes place in either scenario), Annette
tells Ada point-blank that her boyfriend's dead and that he
became a zombie. It's not that obscure.

====================
3iv. RESIDENT EVIL 2
====================

Q. Why are Claire and Leon carrying combat knives? Where did
Leon get his uniform if it was his first day on the job? Why
does Claire know how to use a model of grenade launcher that
was obsolete by the end of the Vietnam War? What's a hunting
crossbow doing in a police station? Why does a secret biology
lab have a smelting tank and a freight train? Why why why why?!

A. Look, it's a video game. Calm down, take a deep breath, and
remember: it's not that important.

Q. Why doesn't Leon's uniform look like anyone else's?

A. Leon isn't dressed like an RPD beat cop, but he does look
like Roger and Peter from the 1978 _Dawn of the Dead_. That may
explain it. (Kevin, in Outbreak, is dressed in much the same way.)

Q. What's the official ending of RE2?

A. The official scenario order appears to be Claire A/Leon B,

as Sherry never receives the "Devil" vaccine in Leon A/Claire B,
and that goes on to be a plot point in RE6. Ada's scenario in
RE:UC, "Death's Door," also begins from her Leon B death scene.

Q. Who threw the rocket launcher?

A. Ada, of course. Let it go.

(This is another old debate that's died down over the years.
Some people used to be absolutely convinced that Annette
threw the rocket launcher at the end of the B scenario, and
they would argue about it for *days*.)

Q. If Ada didn't actually die, then how was Leon fooled?

A. It's not like he stopped to check her pulse. Leon's a rookie

and Ada's a good liar.

Q. How do you know when RE2 takes place?

A. Check the chalkboard on the wall in the west office of the

RPD. It'll say that "it's today's date, September 29th." Taking
this into account with RE3's timeline, this would indicate that
RE2 starts late on September 29th, and ends on the morning of
September 30th.

Q. At the beginning of the game, don't Claire and Leon get out
of the wrong sides of the police car?
A. I thought so too, until Ben Plante pointed out that the
burning truck in the first scene is facing to the right, when
I thought it was facing left. In either scenario, Claire and
Leon do in fact get out on the correct sides of the car.

Q. How come that truck driver became a zombie so quickly?

A. The aforementioned dramatic infection pattern of the T-Virus.

(In later games, the T-Virus also works faster if the infectee
is seriously wounded, which fits with previous games' depictions.)

Q. What are the RE2 EX Files?

A. RE2 was rereleased in 1999 for the N64 with a new game mode
and sixteen hidden EX Files. Some are taken straight from RE3,
while others are cheap publicity for RE:CV and the early N64
version of RE0, so you aren't missing much.

The exception is a file found on one of the dead mercenaries

in the sewer, which indicates their orders were given to them by
Umbrella's French division. This goes a long way towards resolving
a couple of major plot holes in RE2, as detailed below.

Q. Why are some of the N64 files different than the PSX's?

A. Some minor mistakes were fixed for the N64 port, mostly
continuity issues.

Q. Are there any other differences between the N64 and PSX versions?

A. The N64 cart has the following plot-relevant changes:

-- the "guest access" password in the Umbrella lab is now "NEMESIS."

-- there's now a dead Hunter lying in the corner of the double-locked
room in the Umbrella lab. When you examine it, you get the same
message that you get if you examine the tank it's lying next to:
"It looks like the remains of a failed experiment."

Q. Where'd that dead Hunter come from?

A. There are quite a few Hunters running around Birkin's lab

during the "Below Freezing Point" scenario in Outbreak, which
is set a few days before RE2.

Q. (from Jim Stevenson) If the T-virus outbreak starts on the 22nd,

then why are there reports of the "cannibal disease" before this?

A. As noted in Wesker's Report II, the Raccoon Forest is one big

transmission vector for the T-Virus. It was slowly working its
way into the city even before the spill at Birkin's lab, and
the fresh outbreak accelerated the process.

As Rob McGregor helpfully notes, various files in RE2, RE3,

and RE:O2 indicate that many people in Raccoon City were
succumbing to T-Virus infection even before the outbreak
on the 22nd, particularly those who lived in the forest or
worked in or around the sewer system.

Q. Who did Ada Wong work for?

A. It's a common misconception that Ada worked for Umbrella.
As noted by reader Justin Kitt, at the end of Leon B, Annette
tells Leon that Ada works for the "Agency" (a term that is often
used in American espionage fiction as shorthand for the CIA).
In "Death's Door," while speaking to Ada, Wesker refers to "our
organization," which implies that he and Ada are working for
the same nameless entity.

Q. Why do you call it "Mr. X"? It's a Tyrant.

A. That's the name on the box that contains its action figure.
Besides, it's easier to say "Mr. X" than to constantly have
to specify which Tyrant I'm talking about. Give me a handle,
and I'll use it.

Q. Where did the Lickers come from?

A. According to the Umbrella Top Secret File in Survivor,

they're what happens when zombies get hit with a second dose
of the T-Virus. As speculated upon in the REv.2 writeup, the
existence of Crimson Heads lends a bit more credence to the
Survivor file than it previously had. Further, in Outbreak,
the boss of the "Hellfire" scenario is a zombie that hasn't
quite finished mutating into a Licker.

Q. How did Chief Irons survive the helicopter crash on the

roof of the RPD building?

A. By not being the guy who caught the helicopter with his
face. That was somebody else.

Q. What the hell is with the RPD building? The ammo's all over
the place, all the equipment is hidden, all the keys are hidden...

A. Chalk it up to Brian Irons. As he says in his diary, he did

his best to make sure no one would survive the siege of the RPD
building. Irons has also rigged up a series of traps inside the
building that are only lethal to humans, and by the end of the
siege, he's actively hunting down the survivors.

Q. So what explains the statue puzzles/sewer entrance/secret doors?

A. We can also blame Irons for the puzzles in the RPD. Apparently,
the maniac was also letting Umbrella do the decoration.

The sewer entrance, on the other hand, is the work of Thomas, the
chess fanboy who hung out with the RPD's night watchman. (Do you
realize that it's easier to access the weapons locker in the RPD
than it is to get into the sewers?)

Q. If Irons was out to kill everyone, how did Ben Bartolucci

manage to survive?

A. Irons couldn't get at Ben, presumably. During RE2, Ben's shut

up in the cellblock with a conveniently wrecked van blocking him
in, and before RE2, Irons's hunt for survivors encompassed the
entire precinct. He wasn't limiting his activities to the RPD.
As an added bonus, Irons might not even know Ben's there. He
was busy, what with cops to hunt, the mayor's daughter to kill,
being stuck inside a monster-infested deathtrap, getting
pinned down by a flaming helicopter...

Q. If Ben was merely hiding in jail and hadn't actually been

arrested, how did Ada know he was there?

A. She didn't. She'd checked everywhere else, and couldn't

check the cellblock without someone to help her push the
wrecked van out of the way. She tells Leon as much.

Q. Why did Irons leave Marvin Branagh alive?

A. Marvin appears to have just gotten lucky. We know nothing about

Irons's movements through the precinct in the period of time between
Marvin's injury and Leon and Claire's arrival in the building. Since
Marvin doesn't warn Claire about Irons, it's possible that they never
saw each other.

Q. What happened to Elliot Edward?

A. That's a pretty good question. According to the Operation

Report files, Elliot was one of the last survivors in the RPD,
and participated in a last-ditch effort to escape via the sewers.
The second Operation Report file contains his final message,
left in the RPD to help anyone who might happen across it.

We know Elliot isn't the "Ed" that Irons claims to have shot in
his diary, because Elliot's final entry in the Operation Report
is set two days after Ed's death in Irons's journal. We also
know that Elliot was trapped on the west side of the building,
because of where his reports are found, and that side of the
building is sealed off in "Desperate Times."

After that, Elliot passes into legend. There's a cop costume that
shares his name in Outbreak, but the actual character dies during
the first scenario, so it's probably not him. There's no telling
what happened to Elliot next, but since the narrator calls Leon
the last survivor of the RPD in the introduction to Leon B, Elliot
probably didn't make it out of town.

Q. {from "NYPlayboy1080") Why did Umbrella attack William Birkin

to begin with?

A. To come up with any sort of answer, we must turn to the Mail

to the Chief file, one of the RE2 EX Files, and Wesker's Report 2.

Birkin says to Irons in the Mail to the Chief file that "I am
certain that I will be appointed to be a member of the executive
board for Umbrella Inc." in return for the completed G-Virus.
He clearly wasn't planning to go outside of the company.

In the Operation Instructions EX File, Hunk is told to get a

sample of the G-Virus "by any means necessary." These orders
come from Christine Henri, the R&D manager of Umbrella's
French division, who is a character from an obscure Japan-only
RE audio drama called "Ada the Spy."
Now, we flip back to Wesker's Report 2, in which we're told that
Wesker had Ozwell Spencer lean on the French division's labs to
get the Arklay facility access to the Nemesis parasite. More
importantly, Wesker says outright in the second Report that
he had every intention of swiping the credit for the Nemesis
from the French division.

With this, everything else falls into place. Birkin and Wesker
steal the French division's big discovery and make a bigger one
with it. Years later, after Wesker's supposed death, a group
of mercenaries come to steal Birkin's big discovery on orders
from the head of Umbrella France. It was revenge, pure and
simple, and it went terribly wrong.

A note for newer fans of the series: the Wolfpack campaign in

ORC claims that Birkin is planning to seek asylum with the
U.S. government, which is why his lab is crawling with Special
Forces troops in the first level. This is unique to ORC's
alternate timeline.

Q. When did Ada reach the RPD?

A. We don't know for certain, but she's had time to conduct a

thorough search of the building. That suggests that she was
around for at least a few hours before Leon and Claire arrived.

Q. How did Ada and Sherry get out of the sewage treatment facility?

A. Ada got out via the ventilation shafts, if her sudden arrival
when Leon reaches the sewers is any indication. If Ada could've
done that, Sherry certainly could've.

Q. Did any of the other police officers survive?

A. Leon is identified at the start of his B scenario as the lone

survivor of the Raccoon City police department. Of all the other
cops we've seen throughout the other games set during the Raccoon
City disaster, the only ones that are unaccounted for are Kevin,
Rita, Andy, and Elliot Edward. The rest die onscreen at some point.

Q. If Leon was the only survivor, what about Chris, Barry, Jill,
Rebecca, Wesker...?

A. Chris and Barry are long gone, Jill quit, Rebecca's AWOL, and
Wesker was supposedly dead and definitely off the RPD roll call.
They were all also STARS agents, which means they technically
weren't police officers. Note, for example, that Wesker's the
only one who had a rank.

Q. Why did William Birkin "impregnate" Ben Bertolucci/Chief Irons?

A. Couldn't tell you on a bet. We know that li'l Willy was out
to perpetuate his species, but we don't know what if any criteria
he was using to pick and choose victims. Reader Logan Rapp notes
that at the time William comes after either man, they're both
uninjured and either alone or distracted. It may be that simple.

Q. How did William get into Ben's cell?

A. It looks like he tore the door open. Even William's early
forms are strong enough to snap a steel railing.

Q. (from "ReBiohazard6587," paraphrased) If William infects

himself with the G-Virus on the 22nd, why hasn't he changed
more in the intervening week?

A. That's a good question, particularly since Wesker's Report

2 tells us that the G-Virus causes constant mutation. William
does munch on a number of other viruses from the briefcase
immediately after becoming the G-Type, which may play a role.
Another point that's frequently made is that William's really
*big* metamorphoses usually take place as a reaction to Leon
or Claire beating the hell out of him. If nobody was shooting
William between the 22nd and the 29th, his mutation may have
slowed to a crawl.

Alternatively, he may be shapeshifting back and forth from one

form to another, as his progression of forms throughout RE2 is
a little inconsistent.

Q. Why is it that William changes instantly upon injection, but

Sherry never changes at all?

A. It's the difference between being exposed to the raw virus

and being injected with an embryo. That much is apparent from
the Vaccine Synthesis file in Claire A. The embryo institutes
a "gradual cellular metamorphosis," as opposed to a sudden and
complete takeover of the body.

Q. What escaped from the holding tank in the double-locked lab?

A. No one's really sure. I tend to agree with Rob MacGregor, in

that the tank in the Umbrella lab is the same one that's shown
in Film B, which would mean that there was a prototype Tyrant
in there.

Q. Where did that Tyrant go?

A. You know. Out. Around.

Seriously, there is an answer, but it's sort of a stretch. In

RE0, as Rebecca's passing through the top floor of Birkin's lab,
one of the monitors in the turntable's control room shows her
a Tyrant in a storage tube. A few minutes later, as she's on
the top floor of Birkin's lab waiting for an elevator, that
Tyrant appears and attempts to kick her hairstyle in. The same
Tyrant later takes a second go at her when Billy's around, and
is finally destroyed when it tries to jump Wesker in RE:UC's
"Beginnings" scenario.

Coincidences are not useful. Tyrants are rare under the best of
circumstances (unless one happens to be on Sheena Island, in which
case one can find the damn things in vending machines), so this
rogue Tyrant in Birkin's lab seems to be our escapee. (Some people
object to this and point to the storage containers on the eighth
floor of the sewage treatment facility in RE0, but that tank held
one of the cockroaches.) In that case, we can attribute its escape
to James Marcus and it's been dead for two months. Case closed.
The biggest problem with this is that if it's true, and it
looks as though it might be, we're also expected to assume that
William Birkin's the worst housekeeper in explored space. The
Tyrant in his lab escaped in late July. While he's done some
minor cleanup by the time the Outbreak crew drops by, the place
is still trashed. Maybe Birkin just put a new, really big door
on the room and called it a day, but it's still an issue.

Q. Who are the people in the S.T.A.R.S. group photo?

A. Back row: Kevin Dooley (?), Forest Speyer, Kenneth Sullivan,

Richard Aiken, Albert Wesker, Barry Burton, Brad Vickers.
Front row: Ed Dewey, Enrico Marini, Chris Redfield, Jill
Valentine, Joseph Frost. Rebecca Chambers is absent.

There used to be some confusion between Kevin and Ed. The

original RE's manual had Ed listed as the Bravo team's helicopter
pilot, which left an unidentified guy in the STARS photo. RE0
clarified this by sticking Ed onto the Bravo team and establishing
that he died well outside the mansion, while the helicopter pilot
was renamed Kevin Dooley in REv.2.

Q. Why isn't Rebecca in the photo?

A. The photograph was apparently taken before Rebecca joined

the STARS. RE0 was her first mission with the Bravo team.

Q. Who's Jill's boyfriend?

A. If you check Jill's desk in the STARS office, your character

will remark that there's a photo of a man on it, "probably her
boyfriend." This mysterious stranger has captured the hearts and
minds of many obsessive RE fans, even though we're probably never
going to find out who he is. If you check Jill's desk as Jill,
in RE3, she doesn't mention the photo.

Q. (from "ChronoDK16") How would you explain the door that

won't open on the second floor of the police station?

A. The door in question, which is in the same room as the

statue puzzle, would lead to the second-floor lounge if it
wasn't boarded up. Check the map.

Q. How do you find the "secret gate" to the RPD building?

A. Check the wall across from the front door to the RPD in
Scenario A. When you find it, you'll see three zombies on
the other side of a gate that won't open. Jill uses this
gate in RE3, and Rita backs a van through it in RE:O2.

Q. What's the point of the P-Epsilon Gas Report file?

A. It hints at something which isn't widely known about

RE2. If you don't activate the anti-BOW gas using the
dorm computer in scenario A, the Ivies aren't poisonous
in scenario B.

Q. At the end of RE2, who sets the Umbrella headquarters

computer to self-destruct--and why?

A. In a way, Mr. X does. In either B scenario, Mr. X wrecks

a console in the power room. That console's destruction
triggers the lab's obligatory self-destruct sequence.

Q. How did Hunk manage to survive in the sewers?

A. Yeah, that's a little irritating. William Birkin's lab

is attacked around the 22nd, but Hunk doesn't escape the
sewers until the morning of the 30th, at some point after
Leon and Claire have left the RPD. This means that Hunk
somehow survived both a beating from Birkin *and* at least
eight days of wandering around in the post-outbreak Raccoon
sewer system, while carrying a vial of the G-Virus. In short,
we must assume that either Hunk was extraordinarily lucky
and is extraordinarily tough, or he doesn't actually spend
that entire period in the sewers.

As a side note, there are five dead Umbrella agents in the

sewer, even though there are only four of them in Annette's
FMV. It's possible that Hunk survived Birkin's rampage by
being conveniently absent ("Hey, guys, I brought the
sandwiches--OH MY GOD!") and is unconscious for some reason
when Leon and Claire are in the sewers.

Q. Why don't any of the assassins come back as zombies?

A. Alert reader Duncan Brown writes in to note that there's an

antibody for the T-Virus, as mentioned in RE3's Mercenary's
Pocketbook file, and that Umbrella gives it to many of their
employees. Birkin also kills the assassins well before he
crushes the vial.

Q. If Hunk and Mr. X both work for Umbrella, why does Mr. X
attack Hunk?

A. Because Mr. X wants, and Hunk has, the G-Virus. Mr. X isn't
all that bright. It's also very likely that they aren't working
for the same people.

Q. (from Pedro Luchini) How did Mr. X manage to get back to the
RPD in time to attack Hunk? He should be dead.

A. There were five other canisters on that helicopter and we

can account for maybe three of them. Hunk may have his very own
Mr. X to play with.

Q. A perennial favorite: was Hunk [Wesker/Billy/Enrico/Richard/

anyone at all in the RE series]?

A. Hunk gets an Epilogue File in RE3. In it, he is shown without

his mask, and is an ordinary-looking blond white man. Hunk,
whatever his true identity might be, is a unique individual,
and is not simply the current pseudonym for someone else.

==============================
15iv. RESIDENT EVIL 3: NEMESIS
==============================
Q. Why is Jill so lightly armed at the start of the game? Why
is she in civilian clothes?

A. The general idea behind RE3's introduction is supposed to be

that the outbreak came out of nowhere and the city went to hell
almost immediately, taking everyone by surprise. When it struck,
Jill ran home to grab her Samurai Edge, then had to shoot her
way out of her apartment, and that's where RE3 begins.

The problem is that later games, specifically RE:O and RE:ORC,

push the start of the outbreak back five days and dramatically
expand Raccoon City. One of the effects of this is to screw up
the introduction to RE3, as Jill suddenly had five days in which
to prepare for her "last escape" and spent none of them acquiring
tactical gear.

You can sort of fanwank this by assuming that Jill's escape at

the very start of the game is set during the beginning of the
outbreak, and she spends the next five or six days trapped in
the warehouse with Dario.

Q. How come Jill can blow away zombies by the dozen, but the
RPD was completely wiped out?

A. The RPD didn't know what they were doing. They simply stood
in one place and attempted to drive off the zombies as if they
were fighting normal people, and by the time they realized
that wasn't going to work, they were overrun. ("Piccolo" writes
in to note that one of the cops yells "Stun 'em!" during the
opening cutscene, which suggests that some of the cops were
using nonlethal riot weaponry. Oops.) The survivors of that
fiasco withdrew to the RPD building, which was already under
siege by the time they got there, and where Brian Irons was
working overtime to stab them in the back.

Jill, on the other hand, knows exactly what she's up against.

If you pay attention to RE3's level design, it's set largely
in back alleys, side streets, and deserted tunnels, suggesting
that Jill is deliberately staying away from the most infested
parts of the city. She also doesn't fight when she doesn't
have to; note that whenever Jill encounters zombies in a
cutscene or movie, she almost always runs away.

Q. (from Angela Gray) How did Nemesis know to go after Jill,

since no one seemed to know she was in town? How did he find
Jill to begin with? How did he keep finding Jill?

A. Umbrella has a very good surveillance network, which is a

plot point in CV. Furthermore, Nemesis was originally after
Brad and Brad leads him right to Jill.

As for tracking Jill later in the game, what people seem to

forget is that Nemesis is obviously intelligent. He springs
ambushes, uses a firearm, opens doors, dodges grenades, shoots
down the helicopter at the clock tower, and, by Jill's own
admission, toys with her throughout most of the game.

Even if he wasn't smart, Jill spends most of RE3 making herself

as easy to track as possible; she's one of the last living people
in the city and she leaves a broad trail of dead monsters, spent
shells, and smoking wreckage everywhere she goes. If something
blows up, she's probably nearby. Nemesis wouldn't have a hard time
following her.

Q. How did Jill know that there wasn't going to be a rescue?

A. Call it an educated guess. There's supposedly a military

blockade surrounding the city and enforcing a quarantine,
which gives one the impression that people aren't going to
be allowed out of Raccoon. (Granted, this isn't a very
effective blockade, but I've ranted about this before.)

Q. What happens to the [construction equipment in the RPD

courtyard/boarded-up doors in the RPD building/movable statues
on the RPD's second floor/the red jewel in the statue/the
inscription on the goddess statue/the window in the west
stairwell] between RE3 and RE2?

A. Storyline-wise? Couldn't tell you. Maybe it was fixed by

the same guy who steals the corpses while you're not looking.

Reality-wise, RE3 was a hurried replacement for RE:CV, which

jumped platforms late in its development cycle. There are a lot
of minor continuity issues in the RE3 version of the RPD as a
result, like the window Nemesis jumps through fixing itself
overnight, but none of them are a big deal.

Q. How do I get Nicholai to show up at the gas station?

A. Escape from Nemesis via either the restaurant basement or the

window in the press office.

Q. Who's Murphy?

A. He's the UBCS merc who turns up infected at the sales office.
Who kills him depends on how you and Carlos dealt with Nemesis
at the restaurant, but either way, Murphy ends up dead before he
can turn into a zombie.

Q. Who's Tyrell?

A. Tyrell's the UBCS merc Carlos meets in the hospital. He only

gets a line if you visit the basement first. Otherwise, he blows
himself up with a grenade in an attempt to take Nicholai with him.

Q. Can I open the wall safe in the hospital basement?

A. Even if you could, you wouldn't want to. If you visit the
hospital's basement first, Tyrell will open that safe for you.
Doing so sets off a bomb. Thanks, Nicholai!

Q. Since Umbrella had already sent Nemesis to do its dirty work,

why did it then send a slower, stupider Tyrant (Mr. X) just to
retrieve the G-Virus?

A. They have different missions, and Nemesis has its hands full
right up until the moment the missiles hit.
(Of course, there is the realistic answer--Nemesis was only
conceived by the developers when they were making RE3, and
as such didn't exist in RE2's time--but realistic answers
are rarely entertaining.)

Q. (from "ReBiohazard6587," paraphrased) How was Brad changed

into a zombie? Did Nemesis's tentacle do it? Is that why his
corpse goes missing after the second encounter with Nemesis?

A. Brad could've gotten the T-Virus in a number of ways, from

Nemmy's tentacle to the zombie gnawing on him in the Bar Jack.
He shows up as a zombie in RE2, thus explaining why his body
vanishes in RE3.

Since Brad died from a major head wound, he really shouldn't

have become a zombie at all. See Mistakes, below.

Q. Why does Umbrella have secret labs in almost every building

in Raccoon City?

A. Because Umbrella donated the money to build almost every

building in Raccoon City, cf. the City Guide file. Raccoon
was apparently not so much a city as it was the world's most
extensive shell corporation.

Q. Why is Marvin Branagh dead, when he's in RE2 a day later?

A. He isn't dead. Next time you play the game, check that
office on your way out of the RPD building. Marvin disappears
when you take the Lockpick.

Q. Why did Umbrella send Nemesis after Jill, when all they
did was keep Chris under surveillance?

A. For all we know, Umbrella *did* send something after Chris.

Jill finds a trashed hideout of Chris's in her Epilogue.

At the same time, Nemesis wasn't specifically after Jill. At

the start of the game, Nemmy's after Brad, but starts pursuing
Jill once he becomes aware of her presence.

Q. Why does Nicholai wait until the end of RE3 to claim the
bounty on Jill's head? He had three previous opportunities
to bump her off when no one else was around. Why didn't he?

A. He's a schemer. Nicholai is very careful not to make an

actual enemy out of Jill until such a time as he's finished
his primary objective. (An interesting side note here is that
Nicholai makes a point of never lying to Jill: "I have no
intention of helping you.")

Q. Why is the rail cannon called "Paracelsus's Sword?"

A. Theophrastus Bombastus "Paracelsus" von Hohenheim was

a German alchemist who lived during the Renaissance. He
was among the first Westerners to experiment with drugs
as a method of curing diseases, and is frequently referred
to as the "father of medicine." Given how the rail cannon
was made for the express purpose of blowing holes in virally
created monsters, calling it Paracelsus's Sword makes
some sense. (For more on Paracelsus, I refer the reader
to virtually any book about alchemy ever written.)

Q. Who made Paracelsus's Sword?

A. According to the Classified Photo file, an unspecified

agency created the Sword specifically to combat Umbrella's
creations. Since the Sword is found surrounded by the bodies
of a U.S. Special Forces team and the file is written by
someone who identifies himself as a colonel, one would assume
that the cannon was made by the American government.

Q. How do you get the cutscene from the summary, where Barry
calls over the radio?

A. Opt to jump off the bridge before you get to the Dead
Factory. After the Live Choice involving Nicholai in the
control tower, don't try to use the hatch. Instead, leave
through the door, then immediately go back inside. This
also changes the dialogue before the ending.

Q. How do you know that Jill was infected with the T-Virus?

A. It was confirmed in RE5. Also, at this point in the series,

the T-Virus is still the only virus in town. The G-Virus has
wholly different effects and isn't available to Umbrella.

Q. So why didn't she turn into a zombie right away?

A. Plot convenience, mostly. It's not hard to come up with a

few possibilities, but in the end, it's because the plot says so.

Q. Who was Nemesis?

A. A snappy dresser, a hit with the ladies, and a good friend.

We mourn his passing.

Q. No, really, who was Nemesis?

A. Around the time of RE3's release, a quote made the rounds from
Shinji Mikami that Nemesis was actually "someone we know from the
past." In 1999, RE was not yet a cottage industry the way it is now,
and we knew next to nothing about Umbrella or the process of Nemesis's
creation. Just the same, the quote got a lot of RE fans talking about
who Nemesis might have been. Since then, the question remains open,
though it may be that Mikami simply meant, as was suggested by reader
Stonewolf, that Nemesis was an unused concept sketch for Mr. X.

A few fans had come to the conclusion that Nemesis must've been
Wesker, since every other major RE character except Rebecca
was accounted for, it's easy to miss Wesker's death in one of
Jill's endings in the original RE, and the idea of Becky Chambers
being turned into a killer bioweapon roughly ten times her size was
kind of silly. Wesker's return in Code Veronica and subsequent
prominence in the plot sunk the theory, although you had some
die-hards arguing the point for years afterward, using an
increasingly tortured line of reasoning (see Say What?!, below).
The big plot twist of the original Resident Evil movie was that
Matt, one of the two survivors, was infected by a Nemesis parasite
in the ending. Then the second movie came out, so... yeah.

Right now, as far as we fans know, the game's Nemesis is just some
random Umbrella test subject who beat the odds. It is possible but
unconfirmed and mostly irrelevant that he, like other Tyrants, is
based on a clone of Sergei Vladimir.

Q. Was Nemesis a G-Virus creature?

A. According to Wesker's Report 2, the Nemesis parasite was created

around 1988, before William Birkin discovered the G-Virus in Lisa
Trevor's body. Furthermore, no one besides Birkin had access to
the completed G-Virus before Hunk's escape on the 29th or 30th,
which is at least one full day after Jill's first encounter with
the Nemesis. (While corporate espionage is a realistic possibility,
there's no record of any such thing in game. Occam's Razor.)

Wesker's Report 2 also notes that a characteristic of creatures

infected with the G-Virus is that they constantly mutate without
any external stimuli. As Nemesis's only real mutation takes
place after he's thrown into the waste dump at the Dead Factory,
which I would count as "external stimuli," it would appear
that he's G-Virus-free.

Q. Was Tentacle Nemesis a mutation, or what?

A. I'm of the opinion that Tentacle Nemesis is just Nemesis

without the trenchcoat, since in your first encounters with Nemmy,
you can see the tentacles writhing around underneath his outfit.
However, fan opinion is markedly split on this issue.

Q. Nemesis, who was designed to kill S.T.A.R.S. members, ends

up hunting Umbrella mercenaries Carlos, Nicholai, and Mikhail.
What's going on here?

A. Nemmy never goes after Nicholai, except in the Mercenaries

game, which doesn't count, and in the Ending #3 trash room ambush,
where Nicholai is biting Nemmy's style. Over the course of the
game, he attacks Mikhail, who was shooting at him at the time,
and Carlos, who's a friend of Jill's and who has a history of
shooting at Nemmy. Even then, Nemmy will usually only go after
Carlos if Carlos gets in his way. (Unless you keep the fight
within a camera angle featuring the exit door, Nemesis will
leave the front hall at the first opportunity and head for the
chapel.) Nemmy doesn't seem to have a problem with eliminating
Jill's allies, because Nemmy is actually intelligent.

Q. How did those zombies in the graveyard reanimate?

A. It's been noted that whenever we see RE zombies actually

crawl out of a graveyard in the best cinematic tradition, it's
always raining. This may be another film reference, to _Return
of the Living Dead_ and its contaminated rainclouds.

Q. Is the girl with the briefcase at the end of the Mercenaries

minigame Rebecca? Is that guy in the hood Chief Irons?
A. Everybody in the Mercenaries minigame is a retextured set of
polygons recycled from either RE2 or RE3. The hooded guy's animation
is taken directly from RE2, when Irons spins around in his chair
and points a gun at Claire, but that doesn't mean the hooded guy
*is* Irons; in the same vein, that doesn't mean that the girl's
Rebecca. Further, the Mercenaries game has no bearing on the plot,
so their identities are meaningless.

===========================
3v. RESIDENT EVIL: SURVIVOR
===========================

Q. Is this game actually canon?

A. It might as well not be, but it is. RE0's introduction mentions

the Sheena Island outbreak.

Survivor's main contributions to the larger plot are establishing

RE3's canon ending (which could very well be a translation error)
and revealing a few really unwholesome details about the production
process of Tyrants.

Q. What's the difference between the various paths?

A. Nothing, really, except for what you fight and what you find.
The exception is the second choice, as explained below.

Q. Who's this little goblin guy, and why does he hate me?

A. The gnome is Andy, the sewer manager. As is not readily

apparent from his diary, he first encountered Ark when Ark
was claiming to be Vincent Goldman. Later, Andy finds out
that Vincent caused the outbreak, and since he thinks Ark
is Vincent, he undertakes a mission of revenge against him.
If you go to the hospital, you'll never see Andy, but he's
laid a trap for you in the library and is waiting in ambush
when you enter the office in the arcade. That's him on
the pay phone at the beginning of the game.

Q. Who sets off the self-destruct mechanism in the factory?

A. There's no explanation on that score. It can probably be

directly attributed to whoever is about to get whacked by
the Tyrant, although it being Andy is a bit of a stretch.

Q. Why are there so many Mr. X units running around?

A. Sheena Island apparently mass-produced them. At one point,

you fight a Mr. X unit on a walkway in the factory, surrounded
by other Mr. Xs in glass containment tubes. If they were released
with a specific purpose in mind other than killing Ark, that purpose
isn't mentioned.

Q. Hey, is Hunk the cleaners' commander?

A. I doubt it. There's no hint whatsoever of who the cleaners'

commander is, which leads me to believe that he's just some
generic guy in a uniform. Survivor also hints that the cleaners'
commander dies at some point, whether you see it happen or not,
and Hunk is still alive as of Code Veronica.

Q. Why does the introduction to the game say that Umbrella

destroyed Raccoon City?

A. Because Umbrella *did* destroy Raccoon City, by honeycombing

it with poorly designed secret bioweapon factories. The bomb
was a formality.

=================================
3vi. RESIDENT EVIL: CODE VERONICA
=================================

Q. Who was Wesker working for?

A. One of the long-standing questions about CV was always the

issue of Wesker's employer. He obviously wasn't working for
Umbrella, since he was attacking an Umbrella facility, and
his uniform was marked with the cryptic acronym "HCF." Fan
speculation at the time of CV's release ran high, putting
Wesker in the employ of everyone from rumor-mill Umbrella
competitor "Bioject" to, and I'm not kidding, Satan.

RE5 belatedly answers the question in one of its unlockable files.

Wesker was freelancing for an unnamed competitor of Umbrella's
when he went after Alexia, and his troops were mercenaries.

Later games also retroactively inserted a rivalry between

William Birkin and Alexia, who were both famous child prodigies
working at Umbrella in the early eighties. Wesker's friendship
with Birkin adds another layer of justification to the attack.

Q. Was Wesker working for Tricell?

A. I need to track it down, but various supplemental resources

indicate that Wesker didn't contact Tricell at all until 2003.
Also, Excella's 15 or so at this point in the timeline.

Q. What *was* Wesker's virus?

A. This was finally answered nine years later in RE5. In

Wesker's biographical file, it's mentioned that the virus
that Birkin gave Wesker was something that Spencer created
as part of the "Wesker Plan." Its strengths and vulnerabilities
are a major part of RE5's endgame.

Q. Why is Wesker collecting a bunch of other viruses if the one

he's using is so much better than all of them?

A. This was one of the big questions that everyone had after CV
and it wasn't answered until RE5. That was a fun eight years.

The virus that allows Wesker to dash around in bullet time was
created by Ozwell Spencer and administered to all of the surviving
subjects of his "Project W," most of whom died afterward. Spencer
proceeded to drop off the map in 1996. Not only does Wesker's virus
have an exceptionally high chance to simply kill anyone who's exposed
to it, but he doesn't have access to Spencer's research until 2006,
so he doesn't know how to make the serum that activates the virus.

Q. Y'know, Steve looks a lot like Leonardo DiCaprio. Here's a

witty comment about it!

A. Stop that.

Q. What's the difference between CVX and CV: Complete?

A. CV: Complete is the Dreamcast version of CVX, and was never

released outside of Japan.

Q. What's the difference between CV and CVX?

A. The following:

-- the Easy and Very Easy difficulty settings from the Japanese
release have been put back in, because not having arms shouldn't
keep you from enjoying Code Veronica.
-- Steve has a new haircut.
-- a new cutscene featuring Wesker and Claire, triggered when
Claire returns to the mansion with the Piano Roll.
-- a couple of lines of dialogue have been changed.
-- the ending's about three times as long, as detailed below.
-- in CVX, Wesker gets a hit in on Alexia. In CV, Alexia slaps him
around like a handball.
-- everyone gets different character portraits in their inventory
screens. (Steve is such a goober.)
-- really fake-looking fire has been Photoshopped over Wesker's
Battle Game victory screen.

Q. How did Leon find Chris so quickly?

A. Claire sent Leon Umbrella's surveillance data, so Leon knew

exactly where Chris was at the time. After that, all he would've
had to do is make a few telephone calls.

The timing on the whole thing is a little convenient, but some

time passes between Claire's departure from the island and Chris's
arrival. Since the Albinoid Claire let out has grown to adulthood,
we know it's been at least ten hours since she was there.

Q. (from Joseph Goodman) What's the "Raccoon City Test?"

A. Couldn't tell you on a bet. It's on the jewel case, but there's
nothing about it in the game. Capcom's translators and marketers
have never been scared to make things up on the fly.

Q. (from Joseph Goodman) How did the T-Virus manage to escape

at Rockfort?

A. As Chris, examine the wrecked ductwork in the chemical storage

locker. Chris will say that "maybe this is where the T-Virus
escaped." This is as close to an explanation as we get over the
course of CV, and all things considered, it's a pretty good one.
It looks like someone chucked a grenade into the wrong room.

Q. Where did the Gulp Worm come from?

A. The same place that the Grave Digger and the giant crocodile
came from: the T-Virus. No more explanation is necessary.

Q. (from Joseph Goodman) Rodrigo tells Claire that Rockfort

Island was attacked by a special forces team, but there's
little evidence of an actual military-type battle. Why would
anyone attack a worthless prison island? Where'd everyone go?

A. Rodrigo's "special forces team" is actually a band of mercenaries

led by Wesker. Wesker tells Claire as much in CVX.

Looking at the island's layout, much of the island is off-limits due

to fires, explosions, and rubble. I'd guess that the fighting is taking
place on parts of the island that the player can't access. Wesker's
forces are only able to take the prison and training facility a day
after Alfred's men have evacuated, judging by the zombies dressed in
black in Chris's game. Most of them explode when they're shot, thus
proving that you should not believe Wesker when he gives you what he
says is a flak jacket.

As for the "worthless island" scenario, Wesker wants Alexia. Alfred's

delusion was effective enough to convince Wesker that Alexia was on
Rockfort, and he only learns otherwise once he's taken over the island.
He says as much to Chris.

Q. The servant's memo at Rockfort implied that Alexia was believed

to be alive and living in seclusion, yet doesn't Alfred's diary (found
in Antarctica) mention Alexia "faking her own death?" Which cover story
was correct?

A. The story in Alfred's diary is the truth. The confusion as

to whether Alexia is dead or alive is the major plot twist of
CV, Wesker's return notwithstanding.

In short: Alexia faked her own death in 1983 and went into coldsleep
so the T-Veronica virus would be allowed to work on her. Alfred
developed an alternate personality to convince himself that Alexia
was still around, and his masquerade was good enough to trick his
servants, Wesker, and himself. The real Alexia was in Antarctica.

Q. Why doesn't Alfred release Alexia from cryogenic freeze the moment
he touches down in Antarctica? What's he waiting for?

A. Alfred's just as surprised as the player when Alexia

defrosts. Look at his face and listen to his voice.

If "Game of Oblivion" winds up being the new canon, then Alfred

has always had a panic button that would bring Alexia out of
cryosleep, but he's hesitant to use it and she's apparently
cranky when she wakes up.

Q. Was Alexia even *supposed* to be released from cryo-freeze at

that point in time?

A. Alexia's sudden emergence from the deep freeze is the

second most contested plot point in CV, right behind Wesker's
survival. While it's feasible for Alexia's time in cryogenic
storage to have run out at some point in 1998 (Wesker's Report
2 has Alexia's "fatal accident" occurring in 1983 when she was
twelve, so her fifteen years were just about up), her defrosting
right in time to wreck Claire and Steve's snowmobile is one of the
single most convenient plot developments in the history of video
games. If it's keeping you up at night, you may wish to assume
Alexia's powers allowed her a degree of extrasensory perception
even while she was inside the tube (as S.D. Perry did in the
novelization), and leave it at that.

Q. How did Wesker find out about the T-Veronica virus?

A. Various files in games that came out after Code Veronica

make note of Alexia's short-lived career at Umbrella. It was
apparently well known that she was working on the T-Veronica
virus, which was the source of her rivalry with William Birkin.

Q. If Wesker had the inside track on the T-Veronica virus, why

did he attack Rockfort to begin with?

A. He was looking for Alexia, and thanks to Alfred, most people

thought Alexia was sitting prettily in a mansion window in South
America. When Wesker fights Chris, he mentions that Alexia's
"already awake," which means that at some point, he does learn
what's really going on.

Q. Since Wesker is a superhuman one-man army, why does he even

*need* a special forces team to attack the island?

A. Supervillains do love their cannon fodder, and Wesker can't

be everywhere at once.

Q. Why doesn't Rodrigo hop aboard one of the cargo planes

fleeing the island? Why does he stay behind?

A. Rodrigo's been gutshot, so he isn't going to move very

fast, and by the time the rest of Rockfort's staff make
their escape, the prison is cut off from the rest of the
island. Since Claire and Steve took the only plane in the
seaport, Rodrigo's got nowhere to go.

Q. Why did Alfred send Claire and Steve to Antarctica?

A. A few people (most recently Gary Tong) have written in to

make note that autopilot systems tend to be preprogrammed
to follow a single course or to fly to GPS coordinates.

Q. Why are there zombies and monsters all over the place in
the Antarctic base?

A. To learn the answer to this question, we must consult the

"Diary of D.I.J." secret file. According to it, the workers
released the T-Virus deliberately, and then escaped via the
cargo planes that Steve notices upon his and Claire's landing.

(The CVX version of the same file changes the story, claiming
that the T-Virus escaped from the planes that landed before
Claire and Steve's did.)

Q. How do I find this secret file?

A. It's one of the random items you can get from the slot
machine in the Battle Game. Once you've found it, it'll be
in your file list whenever you start a new game.

Q. Who's D.I.J.?

A. A mouse. Specifically, he's the mouse that runs under

the closing blast shutter when Alfred traps Claire in the
military training facility. He shows up again in Antarctica,
when Claire lets him out of the locker in Alfred's office.
Reportedly, if you stay alert, you can see him again and
again throughout Claire's game on Rockfort, especially if
you use a GameShark to get the sniper rifle on Disc One.

He is not, repeat *not*, the Ashford family's butler. We don't

know what happened to Scott Harman (although the smart money
says that he was one of the zombies wearing a suit marked
with the Ashford crest), but unless he was in that convenient
crate of explosives, he wasn't in the cargo plane when Claire
fought the Tyrant.

Q. How the hell can a mouse keep a diary?

A. He's a very smart mouse.

Q. Weren't those two mice different colors? How could it be

the same mouse?

A. He's a *very* smart mouse.

Q. (from Jim Stevenson) How does Wesker have access to

Hunters when he no longer works for Umbrella?

A. Well, he did just take over an Umbrella facility. More

importantly, those Hunters are being stored inside the
large cases in the seaport. I don't know why they're there
or why a prison facility had them (to go after escapees?),
but all Wesker had to do was let them out.

Q. What happens with Wesker on the third time through the game?

A. Nothing. "Tips & Tricks" magazine printed that "hint" in

their June 2000 issue, and it's false.

Q. (from Devvrat Shukla) Why is Claire poisoned when I find her?

A. Because you got a little too close to Alexander when you

fought him on the helipad. Alexander's clouds of purple mist
can poison Claire, and if that happens, she'll stay poisoned
until Chris finds her behind the stairs. At that point, you
need to run back to the weapons storage locker on the second
floor and get a container of serum. When you return to the
front hall of the "mansion," Chris will automatically use
the serum on Claire. Alexia walks in thereafter and the game
continues. When you gain control of Claire in the study,
she'll be in Danger condition.

If you manage to kill Alexander on the helipad without getting

poisoned, Claire will be fine when Chris finds her and the game
skips directly to Alexia's grand entrance.

Q. Why do the winged ants attack Alexia?

A. I don't know whether they attack Alexia, land on her, or

just get agitated. That could've been clearer.

Q. Wait. Chris and Wesker are fighting in the same room where
Steve shot Alfred, aren't they? Isn't that room frozen solid?

A. Yeah, I thought so too, right up until I saw the submarine

in the background. Chris and Wesker are fighting in an
underground docking bay, and I'd presume that the submarine
is the one that DIJ mentions in his diary.

==============================
3vii. RESIDENT EVIL: THE MOVIE
==============================

Q. How does this fit into the games' plot?

A. It doesn't. While a couple of elements from the first film made

it into RE:UC, the movies are set in a completely separate continuity.

=========================
3viii. RESIDENT EVIL ZERO
=========================

Q. So this is canon, right?

A. RE0 is one of the least popular games in the core franchise, which has
led a few fans to try to declare it noncanon for various reasons. RE:UC
and RE5 both make it clear that RE0 is canon, though.

Q. Rebecca's a capable heroine who faces down Hunters, Tyrants, and James
Marcus in RE0, but by REv.2, she's a screaming victim. What's up with that?

A. Rebecca pretty clearly hits her limit right around the time she reaches
the Spencer mansion. It's her first mission, she's eighteen years old, and
she's one of two survivors of her team. By the time Chris runs into her,
she's emotionally exhausted; her reaction to the news that Richard Aiken
has died is weary resignation.

Q. Where did all her weapons go?

A. The "Nightmare" scenario in RE:UC follows Rebecca as she reaches the

mansion, meets Richard Aiken, and gets into a fight with the Yawn in the
mansion library. If her relative lack of firepower in REv.2 bothers you,
assume that she expended all her extra ammunition on the Yawn.

Q. How does Billy know that Rebecca's in STARS?

A. She's got a STARS patch on the arm of her T-shirt.

Q. Why didn't Rebecca tell Chris about what'd happened to her?

She doesn't really act like she's been through a lot.

A. Because there's no reason to drop a few dozen RE0 spoilers

into the middle of REv.2. In-character, there are a few reasons
why Rebecca wouldn't tell Chris anything, such as her decision
to fake Billy's death.

Q. If Rebecca sets out for the Spencer mansion on the morning

of the 25th, then what takes the Alpha team so long? Didn't
they set out to find the Bravo team right after the crash?

A. In the original RE, yes, the Alpha team came right after
the Bravo team. In REv.2/RE0 continuity, it would appear that
the Alpha team's search doesn't start until the evening of
the 25th. I couldn't tell you why, but Rebecca's radio reception
sucks for most of RE0 (which is suggestive that all of the Bravo
team's radios were on the fritz, making it difficult for them to
call for help), and Wesker, the commander of the Alpha team,
is out at Birkin's lab for much of the 24th.

Q. Didn't zombie dogs kill the MPs in the truck?

A. No, Rebecca just thinks they did, which isn't a bad guess
given the information she has. In the opening movie, Enrico
looks away from the truck just before slime drips off the
windshield, thus indicating that Marcus's leeches did it.

Q. Why aren't there any Crimson Heads in RE0?

A. Good question, and one that's not answered in the game.

Several readers have written in to mention an interview
with Shinji Mikami that ran on Gamespot. Reportedly, Mikami
said the Crimson Heads were deliberately left out of RE0 due
to the relatively short period of time that Rebecca and Billy
spend in any one location. Since the Crimson Heads require
a lengthy infection time and Marcus didn't depopulate the
training facility all that long ago, that probably makes
enough sense that we can go with it.

Q. Where did the Stinger come from?

A. It's an experimental BOW that the train's passengers

were bringing with them to the training facility, according
to the Passenger's Diary file.

Q. What's the point of the "Verse of Poetry" file?

A. I've kicked this one around with a couple of my editors.

The best thing we can come up with is that it's an oblique
hint that the observatory contains the escape route.

Q. If there was a big explosion in the Raccoon Forest a day

before RE, why didn't anyone report it?

A. Assuming that there was anyone around to see it in the

first place--as the Raccoon Forest was the recent site of
several vicious murders, I doubt there were a lot of people
just casually hanging out in the woods right about then--all
of the people who it would've been reported to are either
responsible for it or being paid not to care. Wesker helped
blow it up, Birkin blew it up, and the chief of the Raccoon
P.D. is so far in Birkin's pocket that he's sorted Birkin's
change. There was already a cover-up in the works for the
"mansion incident"--see the Internal Investigation Report
in RE2--so it easily could've encompassed this.

Q. What's up with James Marcus? Why did Ozwell Spencer have

James Marcus assassinated?

A. At the time RE0 came out, Marcus threw a wrench into

the RE timeline, as he'd never been mentioned before.
CV makes a big deal about how Edward Ashford helped found
Umbrella, and then RE0 made a big deal about how Marcus
helped found Umbrella without mentioning Ashford at all.
The old line of reasoning on the issue was that Alexander
Ashford had been such a tremendous screw-up that Spencer
tried to retroactively write Edward out of company history.

It doesn't help that there's a typo in the American version's

Investigator's Report 1 file. Marcus disappeared ten years
before the events of the game, not twenty as the file says.
Other versions do not contain this error.

RE5 finally clarifies the issue by granting all three men

co-founder status, although by 1970, Spencer is the only
one of the three that cares about the company, and by 1988,
he's the only one that's still alive.

It's like this: James Marcus was one of the scientists who
helped refine the Progenitor virus. When Spencer founds
Umbrella, Marcus doesn't even fake interest, although he
becomes the headmaster at Umbrella's training facility. He
lets his assistant do most of the actual work, but new
trainees William Birkin and Albert Wesker gain Marcus's trust.

In the mid-seventies, Marcus concludes that the only way to

get the Progenitor virus to do what he wants it to do is via
human experimentation. Marcus keeps his "special" research a
secret for a good long while (although he had someone in his
confidence at Arklay, since one of Marcus's prisoners/test
subjects gets sent there), and eventually manages to make a
breakthrough with the creation of the T-Virus. He continues
his private research into the creation of mutant leeches,
because he's $%&*ing gross, and abruptly decides he cares
about his position in Umbrella after all.

Marcus is confident the T-Virus will give him the influence

he needs to oust Spencer as CEO and he's been using Umbrella's
trainees as human test subjects, so Spencer has Wesker take
him out in 1988. Soon thereafter, an Umbrella investigation
team checks out the training facility, and upon discovering
Marcus's torture chambers, they nail the doors shut and close
it up. Years later, owing to a recent rapid period of growth
by Umbrella, a few teams are sent to the training facility
to clean the place up and reopen it. They start the job, but
before they get too far into it, they run into the resurrected
James Marcus. Hilarity ensues.

Q. If Rebecca visits RE2's lab during RE0, then how do all

the labs relate to each other? What about the treatment
plants, the factories, the training facility, the Spencer
mansion...?
A. The training facility had underground transit systems
that linked it up with William Birkin's lab complex and the
shipping lane connected to the Raccoon City sewer system,
both of which were in RE2. The cable cars apparently linked
the sewers to Birkin's lab's cargo entrance, and the cargo
entrance to the training facility; the positioning of the
cable cars' stations would seem to indicate that the tram
Rebecca rides isn't the same tram that Leon and Claire
ride in RE2. (If you check in RE2, there's a big stack of
oil drums in front of the corner where Rebecca's door was.)
The entirety of the tunnel system looks like it makes use of
a preexisting series of underground caverns.

It's important to remember that in RE2, both Leon and Claire

have to ride the cable car from the Raccoon City sewer system
to the tram stop above Birkin's laboratory. That tram ride is
what makes the geography work, even in the hazy, half-finished
way that it does.

From Outbreak, we also know that Birkin's lab has two additional
sublevels, accessible via a freight entrance connected to the
tunnels underneath Raccoon City. In RE2, they're inaccessible
thanks to the giant plant on the facility wall; in RE0, you can't
reach them because Rebecca won't go through the west door on B4.

With this in mind, Rebecca's meeting with Enrico and her

fight with the Tyrant are both set on the top floor of
Birkin's laboratory. We're not sure exactly what caused
the rockfall on this floor (although the Tyrant's a prime
suspect), or what that rockfall is blocking (since the
turntable's got train tracks on it and it doesn't go
all the way down to Birkin's station, one would assume
the rockfall destroyed another train stop). Naturally,
the worst of the damage to Birkin's lab has been cleaned
up by the time Leon and Claire visit.

The sewage treatment plant that Ada and Sherry visit in

RE2 is *not* the one that Rebecca finds Billy in. When
Billy and Rebecca escape the treatment facility at the
end of RE0, they're still in the middle of the Raccoon
Forest, whereas RE2's plant was on the same block as
the police station in midtown Raccoon City.

The biggest problem here is the elevator in the trainyard

of the training facility, which stops there, at a storage
area outside the training facility's cable car stop, at
the top floor of Birkin's laboratory, and at the power
station in the former treatment plant. This would suggest
that all seven floors of Birkin's laboratory, the training
facility, the factory, a dam, at least two train stations,
and a cable car track with at least two cars and four
stops are all encompassed by a single, sprawling complex
that stretches underneath the Raccoon Forest and part of
Raccoon City. This further assumes that the underground
rivers seen in both REv.2 and RE0 are joined to each other.

You could reach this complex via the secret trams in the
Raccoon City sewer system, a personnel elevator in the
training facility's basement, or by walking through a
subway tunnel underneath Raccoon City.

Furthermore, this also means that Birkin's labs were

so well-constructed that after the destruction of the
training facility and presumably all the areas below
and around it, they were not only still standing, but
they were able to function independently.

The Spencer mansion, thankfully, is a bit simpler. By

the time the player reaches the entrance to the labs
beneath the Spencer mansion, there aren't any places
where the mansion *could* have passages connecting it
to Raccoon City or the training facility. There are a
couple of doors in the same area as the fountain that
conceals the labs' entrance, one of which is obviously
a freight entrance, but someone with a welding torch
has sealed them by the time the player gets there. This
could've been Wesker during his clean-up run in the
mansion, or the surviving scientists trying to barricade
the doors.

Q. RE0's geography/map makes no sense. How can she visit

Birkin's lab when it's directly underneath Raccoon City?

A. This is a widespread point of discussion about RE0. As

noted above, though, people who bring this up usually forget
about the tram ride in RE2's sewer system. Birkin's lab is
actually well out in the Raccoon Forest (the top of the
turntable shaft looks out on pine trees), so Rebecca's visit
there isn't that surprising.

Q. (from Alex Rose, among others, paraphrased) When she gets

to the warehouse from RE2, why doesn't Rebecca just go back to
the RPD building?

A. For one thing, the hatch is locked and Rebecca never

finds the key. For another, she's got no way of knowing
about the secret passageway in the RPD basement, as is
suggested by the phrase "secret passageway." Rebecca
has many talents, but clairvoyance isn't on the list.

Q. Is the factory the same place as the Dead Factory in RE3?

A. No. When Billy and Rebecca leave the factory via

the shipping dock on the fifth floor, they're on a
hill overlooking the Spencer mansion. The Dead
Factory was in Raccoon City, behind the park and
within a few blocks of the hospital.

Q. What was that thing that came after Billy in the water?

A. I subscribe to the belief that Billy's attacker was Marcus's

queen leech. It's big, we know from Marcus's expository FMV that
it's aquatic, and it didn't eat Billy.

Q. Where the *hell* did that Tyrant come from?

A. As mentioned above under RE2's FAQs, it might very

well be the mysterious escapee from William Birkin's lab.

===========================
3viii. RESIDENT EVIL GAIDEN
===========================

Q. Does Gaiden contribute *anything* to the plot?

A. Nothing about Gaiden has ever been referred to again

in any other game in the series. Its big twist ending is
either noncanon or reversed offscreen.

============================
3ix. RESIDENT EVIL: DEAD AIM
============================

Q. Hey, is Fong Ling Ada?

A. There's no reason why she would be, aside from them both being
eerily competent Chinese women. They don't look at all alike.

Q. Why was Morpheus blamed for the Arklay outbreak?

A. The Dismissal Notice file is Morpheus's pink slip from Umbrella,

and gives the reason as his responsibility for an unknown, grossly
negligent incident on May 11th, 1998 in Raccoon City. This is close
to if not the exact date on which James Marcus started the outbreak
in the Arklay laboratory.

It's possible this is a coincidence. If it isn't, Duvall is a French

name and we know that the head of Umbrella's French division is
ultimately responsible for the Raccoon City disaster. He may have been
made the scapegoat for the whole thing due to Umbrella's unique brand
of office politics, which spurred him to go on his campaign against
the company.

===========================
3x. RESIDENT EVIL: OUTBREAK
===========================

Q. Are the Outbreak games canon?

A. One or more of the good endings of "Decisions, Decisions"

definitely is, since Daylight is mentioned in the Marhawa Desire
manga. The rest of the scenarios may or may not be.

Q. Okay, so what does *this* do to the timeline?

A. Not a great deal, actually. Outbreak begins on September 22nd,

shortly after the first death of William Birkin (one of twelve;
collect them all!), and despite a mild continuity quirk (see Mistakes,
below), it ends at the same time as RE3.

"Outbreak" clearly starts on the 22nd and ends no more than

a couple of hours thereafter.

"Below Freezing Point" is set on the lower levels of Birkin's

laboratory. Since RE0 establishes that Birkin's lab is way the
hell out in the Raccoon Forest, you've got to figure the hike
under the city took a while. Further, some time clearly elapses
between the attack against Birkin and "BFP." You could set
"BFP" anywhere from the 23rd to the 26th.

"The Hive" takes place inside the Raccoon Hospital, where

Carlos searched for a T-Virus vaccine in RE3. We know from
RE3's Director's Diary file that the hospital was overrun
on the 26th. Thus, "The Hive" could take place at any point
from the 26th to the evening of the 30th.

Since the fire department's still up and running after "Hellfire"

and the street outside the Inn is clear, I'd say that "Hellfire"
is set on the 23rd or 24th, when the situation's dire but not
yet critical.

Finally, "Decisions, Decisions" takes place just before

sunrise on October 1st. The big problem here is Nicholai's
presence, which is complicated by the aforementioned
continuity quirk. That said, for all we know, Nicholai
had a helicopter waiting on the roof.

Q. How do the scenarios relate to each other, anyway?

A. At this point, I consider all the scenarios within the two

Outbreak games to be short stories set against the background
of Raccoon City, rather than a cohesive narrative in five or
ten parts. "Outbreak" is a starting point and "Decisions,
Decisions" and "End of the Road" are endings, but that's about
as far as I think we can go.

Q. Why are there so many zombies, so soon after the outbreak?

A. Many files in RE2 and RE3, such as Chris's Diary, indicate

that the T-Virus had already made it into Raccoon City before
the attack on Birkin, with monsters appearing within the city
limits as early as August 18th. Presumably, those individuals
who immediately succumbed to the T-Virus were already nursing
a mild dose of it before the lab attack.

Q. What's Yoko's deal, anyway?

A. Good question. Nobody in Outbreak gets a lot of plot except

Yoko (there's a lot of inferred characterization, such as each
character's special items, but very little character-driven story),
which makes her the closest thing there is to a protagonist.

If you play "Below Freezing Point" as Yoko, it becomes

obvious that she worked in Birkin's laboratory before the
attack. She gets a number of advantages in this scenario,
like already having the map, and Monica needs Yoko's keycard
to reach B4. (How did Monica get to B4 despite the plant
infestation in the duct? NPC powers.)

Yoko also found out about the attack in time to escape

the laboratory. As noted in the next FAQ, Yoko's not
trying to get out of town before "Outbreak"; she's trying
to change her appearance as fast as possible. The viral
spill is as much of a surprise to her as to anyone else,
if her emotes are anything to go by.
The question then becomes whether Yoko remembers why
she knows this. As you progress through the game as
Yoko, her endings all have the same theme. She knows she's
forgotten something important, and it's driving her mad.

The only resolution we get to this in the first Outbreak

is the comment made by Greg at the end of "Decisions,
Decisions." If Yoko's in your group when you meet him,
Greg says that something happened to her two years ago.
Yoko clearly doesn't remember it, and Greg sympathizes;
it was so horrible that he doesn't blame her for forgetting.

It's only in "End of the Road" in Outbreak File #2 that

we get an answer. If you decrypt a second MO disk and use
it in the computer in the Special Research Room, you'll
find the hidden Experiment Participants file. In it, Yoko
is listed among the people who participated in an unspecified
T-Virus experiment on May 14th, 1996.

Yoko's ad-libs during the same scenario also reveal that her
memory is coming back, as Yoko remembers that she donated cells
to help create the Tyrant. (Since she was eighteen at the time,
one wonders if she was a serotonin donor.) Afterwards, Greg
operated on her to tamper with her memory. It does seem odd
that Umbrella can do that, but they're Umbrella. Specific memory
alteration through invasive brain surgery isn't even the least
possible thing they did that week.

Q. Why was Yoko cutting her hair in the J's Bar bathroom?

A. Yoko has trust issues (one of her ad-libs is "It's okay

to trust you, right?") and she may know what's happened to
Birkin. If you're an Umbrella employee whose boss just got
whacked by other Umbrella employees, changing your appearance
is a solid Plan A.

Cutting off your hair is also a potent image in Japanese

symbolism, representing a breaking of ties with the past.
Other games that play with this include Final Fantasy IX
and Wild ARMs.

Q. What was in Monica's briefcase?

A. The Top-Secret Memo mentions a parasite that needs

to be kept in a special case. If you speak to the dying
researcher on B5 as Yoko, he says that Monica took one
of Birkin's projects.

Odds are good that Monica's carrying that parasite, and

that the parasite has something to do with the G-Virus.
Since it's something that'll "wake up," I'd imagine it's
an embryo.

Q. What happened to Monica?

A. There's some debate on the subject. I always thought

that Birkin showed up to kill her for screwing around with
his pet project, but some have argued otherwise. In the end,
the important thing is that she got killed and infected with
a G-Virus embryo, either by Birkin himself or from the viral
sample in the open case.

Q. If it was him, why didn't William go after the survivors?

A. If you play as Yoko and speak to the scientist on B5, he

mentions that Monica's stealing one of Birkin's projects
("We both know she can't handle that"). That may be enough
to explain it right there, especially early in his mutation
when there might still be something of Birkin left.

Q. Why is the plant in Birkin's lab still alive in RE2?

A. As we know from either version of RE, V-Jolt will

weaken a T-Virus plant, but won't kill it outright. Further,
in RE:O, you don't fry the plant's roots. It has plenty of
time to regenerate between games.

Q. So who cleaned out Birkin's lab in time for RE2?

A. You kill quite a few Hunters in BFP while you're waiting

for the turntable to warm up, and the lab is equipped with
that anti-BOW gas system that you really should not trigger
during RE2. The lab might not have required any additional
cleaning, but if it did, the only character who's alive to
do it is Annette.

Q. Is the leech creature in the hospital James Marcus?

A. The Investigation Report file specifically notes that

these leeches are different than Marcus's.

Q. How does the author of the Investigation Report file

know anything about Marcus's leeches?

A. They were Marcus's private obsession for about a decade,

as seen in RE0, and Umbrella is just crazy about archiving
data. William Birkin was also on the scene for Marcus's
reappearance, and was loyal to the company right up until
he got shot.

Q. Did Ben Bertolucci escape from the Apple Inn?

A. A lot of players have written in to note the presence

of a man who looks a great deal like Ben Bertolucci in
the ending for "Hellfire." That man is running away from
the Inn as fast as his legs can carry him.

Capcom's displayed a knack for reusing character models

in the RE games, especially in the Outbreaks. For example,
Cindy B and Mark B are both standing in the crowd during
File #2's "Run Like the Wind" ending, and Carter from File
#2 makes a cameo appearance in "Below Freezing Point" as the
guy on B5 who gives Yoko the Magnum. Thus, it's hard to say
that the running guy in "Hellfire" is meant to be Ben.

Q. (from Victor Xiao) Are Daylight and the T-Virus vaccine

from RE3 the same thing?
A. Peter and Greg developed Daylight on their own. Greg was
working for Umbrella at the time, but he apparently never
bothered to tell Umbrella about Daylight. The Reagent
Refinement file in RE:O2 indicates that as far as Umbrella
knows, the T-Virus doesn't have a cure.

The components of RE3's misnamed "vaccine," on the other hand,

are just lying around the Raccoon Hospital. Presumably, it and
the AT1521 mentioned in the Reagent Refinement file are the
same thing, since RE5 establishes that the "vaccine" halted the
T-Virus's development in Jill's system.

Q. Who killed Peter Jenkins?

A. Peter wasn't an Umbrella employee and knew nothing about

Thanatos, so Nicholai has no reason to kill him. That would
point the finger at Greg Mura (whose last name is revealed
in a Yoko-specific file in "Flashback," although his name
is apparently meant to be "Mueller").

Q. Why does Greg hate Umbrella?

A. He's a big prima donna, apparently. He resents Umbrella

because they wanted to mass-produce the Thanatos bioweapon.

==========================================
3xi. RESIDENT EVIL 4
(a.k.a. Thomas Uses the Word "Assume"
Fifty Times in Rapid Succession)
==========================================

Q. I'm *really* confused.

A. I don't blame you. Let's take it from the top.

Some time ago, the Salazar family encountered a species

of parasites called Las Plagas and imprisoned them below
their family's castle. When Las Plagas hatch in a victim's
body, they're nearly impossible to remove, although their
development can be slowed with medication. The Salazar
family is able to control them in some unspecified way;
the only explanation given is Ada's theory in Separate Ways
that the original Plaga were very sensitive to vibration.
This may relate to the strange staff that Saddler carries.

Fast-forward to the present day. The last living Salazar

has become a member of a cult called Los Illuminados,
which is led by Osmund Saddler. No one ever says what
the cult's beliefs are, aside from Saddler's "I'm so
awesome I should rule the world" philosophy, but there
are enough bloody altars and freaky iconography lying
around that we can make a few guesses.

Saddler and Salazar hatch a plan. They go find Las Plagas

underneath the castle and find that the parasites have survived,
after a fashion, in the form of spores. They begin research and
experimentation on Las Plagas, aided by biologists like Luis
Sera. We can assume that Salazar funded the project.
The parasite's mutagenic properties allow Salazar and Saddler
to create guardian monsters, such as Los Gigantos or the
Regenerators. Note that many monsters in RE4 are nearly immune
to conventional attacks, and only "die" upon the destruction of
their parasite.

Victims of Las Plagas, the Ganados, are intelligent and appear

self-aware, but are also utterly psychotic. Ganados attack any
non-Ganado they see with intent to kill. Note that even when the
Ganados are ostensibly out to capture Leon, Luis, Ashley, or Ada,
they're using lethal force more often than not; also note that
according to Luis' Memo 2 (sic), the Plagas induced psychosis in
their hosts even before Saddler started experimenting on them. A
Ganado also likes rotten food (every time you run through a kitchen
or storeroom in RE4 or RE5, everything's been left out to spoil),
doesn't care about personal hygiene, tends to prefer melee weapons
over firearms, and becomes extremely sensitive to light. Children
cannot survive being infected with a Plaga.

The leaders of Los Illuminados, such as Salazar, Saddler,

and Mendez, are all hosting master Plagas. Ada theorizes
at one point that the master Plagas can communicate with
and control lesser Plagas via the use of ultrasonic waves.

By the time Leon strolls into town, every surviving villager is

either a Ganado, hosting a parasite, or an Illuminado. (The game
never says what differentiates the two, aside from face paint and
funky helmets. Perhaps Ganados are villagers who resisted infection,
while Illuminados were members of the cult before the rediscovery
of the Plagas.) The destruction surrounding Salazar's castle, the
occasional proof of recent violence (the dead woman in the cabin
by the village in 1-1, the fresh blood on the altar in the cliff
tunnel in 2-3), and the hand-drawn sketches shown during the final
credits suggest that this conversion did not occur without incident.

A modern member of Los Illuminados is hosting a Plaga, and as such,

can be placed under Salazar or Saddler's direct control at any time.
Since there's no free will involved here and Las Plagas are capable
of reproducing on their own (i.e. when the parasite jumps out of
somebody's head), Saddler's plan is to use Las Plagas in a bid for
world domination.

Towards that end, he hires Jack Krauser, a former American soldier,

to kidnap Ashley Graham, the daughter of the President of the United
States. Saddler intends to inject Ashley with a parasite egg, then
ransom her back to her father. Ashley, thus infected, will place the
President under Saddler's control.

(Presumably, an infected Ashley would've been granted some abilities

above and beyond those of a common Illuminado. The sample that Luis
steals from the lab early in the game is important; as Saddler says
in the Closure of the Church file, without that sample, Ashley's
useless to them.)

Krauser has other plans, however. He may be posing as a mercenary at

the moment, but he's actually working for Wesker. Krauser kidnaps
Ashley and delivers her to Saddler as a way of worming his way into
Saddler's confidence, the better to steal a sample of the special
Plagas for his real employer. Krauser has no intention of actually
letting Saddler's plan come to fruition; he tells Leon as much during
their knifefight in 5-2.

(To go by Krauser and Ada's conversation in 5-2, they aren't after

just any Plaga sample. They want the special one that Luis stole.)

Saddler never trusts Krauser, and thus never gives Krauser

the chance to steal the sample. Krauser has no choice but to
call for backup from a woman he despises: Ada Wong.

The Americans subsequently find out where Ashley is, but as

Mendez points out in the Alert Order file, it's not like one
of the Ganados squealed. Someone had to have tipped the Americans
off, and that's probably Ada, who's also the mysterious "third
party" spoken of in several files. Before Leon arrives, there's
no one else on the island who'd help Luis remove his Plaga.

Leon's soon dispatched to the Ganados' territory to ask a few

questions about Ashley. He shows Ashley's photo to the first man
he sees, who responds by trying to kill Leon with an axe. Leon
figures he's on the right track, and the game gets underway.

Q. So why would Ada bring Leon in in the first place?

A. Ada explains her motivations in the reports that frame

the chapters in Separate Ways. Leon's presence is half
a distraction from what Ada's doing, and half an act of
deliberate sabotage against Los Illuminados. Ada wasn't
expecting the Americans to send Leon without any backup,
but she's incorporated that into her plans; Ada's confident
that Leon can survive anything Los Illuminados throw at
him, and while they're focused on him, she can do her job.

The complication is that Wesker wants Leon dead, and Ada

is supposedly working for him. The biggest problem Ada
faces over the course of the game is that she's playing
both sides against the middle, and by the end, she's
betrayed Wesker twice over.

Q. Does Ada actually care about Leon?

A. In the normal game, it's easy to conclude that Ada is playing

Leon like a fiddle, but Separate Ways establishes that she has at
least some genuine feelings for him. She blows her cover in order
to save him from Krauser. (Go ahead and laugh. I used to get this
question a lot.)

Q. Who's Ada really working for?

A. Once you beat Separate Ways, Ada files a final report.

She was a double agent and is working for another organization
that is opposed to Wesker's new Umbrella. That organization
wished to acquire a sample of Las Plagas for research purposes.

Q. The Brady Games pamphlet enclosed with the PS2 version

contradicts you on a few points.

A. The booklet's... well, frankly, it's not that great. Among

other things, it works from the "Leon did it all" version of RE2
found in Wesker's Report and it blames the Raccoon outbreak on
the processing problems at the Dead Factory. Short version:
I'm right, they're wrong.

Q. Why isn't Leon better-equipped when the game starts?

A. He's there to ask a few questions, not invade Spain. If anything,

he's overequipped; Leon's got a handgun with a laser sight, a combat
knife in a quick-release sheath, a flashlight, a grappling hook, two
different radios, a portable tracking device, an attache case, a pair
of binoculars, and some gum. He looks like a Bud K catalogue exploded.

Q. Why don't the Ganados disarm Leon?

A. Why would they? The Ganados don't think guns are dangerous, Mendez
is bulletproof, they expect Leon to become a Ganado at any moment,
Mendez doesn't care if individual Ganados live or die, and they were
planning on killing Leon with an axe.

Q. What happened to Leon's jacket?

A. As you head back through the village in the second chapter

of Separate Ways, one of the Ganados you kill won't dissolve.
If you check, Ada will note that he's wearing Leon's jacket.

Q. What was Saddler doing to Ashley with that machine?

A. I can only presume that Saddler was preparing to inject Ashley with
the special sample that Luis had stolen. What else would that machine be?

Q. Who was Luis Sera?

A. He claims to have once been a cop. As he's dying, Luis confesses that he
was one of Saddler's researchers. That doesn't preclude his being a former cop,
especially in RE, where everyone has six careers before they hit 21, and his
skill with firearms backs it up.

According to Luis's diary entries, which are scattered throughout the game,
Luis's job was to try to find ways that Las Plagas could be safely eliminated
from an infected human's system. Saddler proceeded to use Luis's research to
make Las Plagas harder to safely cure. Luis began looking to anyone and everyone
for help against Saddler, including emailing a friend of his from college.

As Ada mentions in her report on Luis, that friend happened to have died, and
Ada intercepted the email. She contacted Luis and offered her assistance, albeit
without disclosing her identity or her motivations.

There's a little bit of a problem with the story, found within Separate Ways.
Wesker says that they planted Luis in Saddler's employ, but Ada's report on
Luis seems to contradict this. As per a recent re-translation of the Japanese
script at Project Umbrella, I'm prepared to chalk this up to a typo in the
original English localization and consider Ada's report the real story here.

Q. Why is Saddler an idiot?

A. RE4 in general tends to make more sense if you assume that

Saddler is a moron with all-consuming delusions of grandeur.
He was already the leader of a cult of madmen, and then he shot
himself up with a mutagenic parasite that's known for causing
psychosis in its hosts. Even if he didn't have a bad habit of
writing down his plans in explicit detail and leaving the notes
where Leon can find them, Saddler seems utterly convinced that
he's going to win because he's Saddler, dammit, and nothing that
happens over the course of the game is enough to change his
mind on the subject.

An interesting note is that his whole plan would've been

completely unworkable if Wesker hadn't decided to take a
hand in it; without Krauser, Saddler is just a mass murderer
in the middle of nowhere. Krauser also obliquely suggests
that he might've foiled Saddler's plans himself if Leon
hadn't shown up.

Q. Who are the Merchants?

A. Really creepy agents of a game mechanic. I try not to consider them

part of the plot, except as a way of explaining where Leon's getting some
of his equipment. They are Ganados, though; they have the creepy red eyes.

If nothing else, though, their presence does explain how Saddler's getting
ahold of all that military ordinance. For a European cult leader in the middle
of BFN, the man has a lot of firepower.

Q. How does Leon know Ada's been working with Wesker?

A. He clearly knows something we don't.

Q. When does Ada save Leon from Mendez?

A. At the start of Chapter 1-3, head back into the bedroom.

You'll get to see this from the other side during Chapter 2
of Separate Ways.

Q. Why is Wesker planning to bring back Umbrella?

A. We never learn Wesker's motivation for rebuilding Umbrella.

We get Krauser's, odd though it may be, but not his boss's.
That said, there are plenty of possible reasons why someone
might want to reorganize Umbrella, including but not limited
to power, wealth, fame, and megalomania.

Wesker's Report II gives the impression that Wesker didn't

actually hate Umbrella. His objection was largely to Ozwell
Spencer and his crazy plans. If Wesker rebuilt Umbrella,
Spencer would ostensibly no longer be in the picture.

In her final file during Separate Ways, Ada suggests that

Umbrella served as a useful cover for the criminals of the
world. Further, she notes that Wesker used Umbrella to
hide behind while he came up with his own plans. Both are
interesting points, but as neither argument comes directly
from Wesker himself, they must be considered conjecture.
Five years later during RE5, Wesker seems to have abandoned
the idea of resurrecting Umbrella in favor of Uroboros.

Q. Do the Plagas mutations have anything to do with the

T-Virus or G-Virus?
A. There's nothing in any file in the game that would suggest such.
As a matter of fact, the only people who mention Umbrella at all
are Krauser and, at the end of Assignment Ada, Wesker.

The mutations linked to Las Plagas are apparently the result of

Saddler's experiments in the island facility. As far as we know,
they were done on their own, with no influence from Umbrella.

Q. Did Luis's vial contain the T-Virus?

A. Luis says that he's seen a sample of the T-Virus in

his police department's laboratory. Some fans interpret
this as a tacit admission that Luis is a former Umbrella
employee, as it seems unusual that a police station
would have the T-Virus on hand.

However, Luis was a cop in Madrid, the capital of Spain,

and the T-Virus is a going concern worldwide. With all
that in mind, a cop with Luis's background in biology who
works in a major city would be familiar with the T-Virus.
This is backed up by Degeneration, which states that the
virus was used in multiple terrorist incidents over the
course of the six years between RE2 and RE4.

Q. When did Ashley see Ada?

A. She was half-conscious when Leon pulled her out

of Saddler's machine. Note that Ashley is weak, but
walking under her own power as Leon drags her out
of the room. Also, in Separate Ways, Ashley looks up
during the final battle to see Ada zip-lining around
the construction platforms.

Q. Why is Ada dressed like that?

A. Fanservice, and because it looks cool. Before Separate

Ways came out, it was also a subtle way of indicating that
she'd dressed up to appeal to Luis's sensibilities, since
by the time he dies, she's gotten a lot of information out
of him.

Q. How does Assignment: Ada fit into the storyline?

A. Uneasily. It may work best if we assume that Ada's

mission is set after Leon and Krauser's knife fight
and between chapters Four and Five of Separate Ways.
While Leon's battling Krauser, Ada circles back around
the island, changes into tac gear, and mounts her own
assault on what's left of Saddler's processing facility.

At the end of A:A, Ada calls for evac. Assumedly, she

turns the helicopter around, changes back into her
dress, and gets dropped off on the road outside the
battlefield. This also gives her plenty of time to
plant charges throughout the island, and explains
how Ada winds up on the road to the battleground
despite the destruction of the ruins.
In A:A's ending, Ada stores all the Plagas samples
inside the case, including the one she got from
Saddler. Thus, the end of A:A takes place after the
end of RE4's main story mode.

The advantage to this chain of events is that it

gives Krauser a reason to show up at the end of A:A.
The Krauser's Notes file suggests that he didn't
trust Ada and was looking for a reason to kill her.
Ada disarming him during the knifefight would neatly
provide that reason.

This is the best explanation I can come up with,

but it has its own set of difficulties:

-- This explanation assumes that Krauser's mutation

works a bit like it does in Mercenaries. In
other words, his wonder arm's retractable,
though he may need to recover after he uses
it. Thus, he pops it to deal with Ada, changes
back into human form, then brings it back out
(with considerably more drama) to fight Leon.
-- You've also gotta wonder why Krauser gives up
so easily in A:A, compared to what you have to
do to him in Leon's game. Any ideas I'd have
on the subject all involve making guesses about
his motivations, which I don't like to do.
-- It's a nice dress, Ada. Still, why change back
into it?

The alternative is to consider that the in-game

action in Assignment: Ada is canonical the same way
4th Survivor in RE2 is canonical; that is to say,
something very like it happened, but many of the
specific events within the scenario did not, as
they would not necessarily make sense. Thus, Ada
did use Leon's attack on the complex as cover to
steal a bunch of plaga samples, and had both her
radio conversations with Wesker, but perhaps she
did not fight Krauser.

Q. Where did Krauser get his nifty mutated arm?

A. Krauser's sporting any number of enhancements even

before he sprouts the claw: superhuman agility, brief
bursts of unnatural speed, taking a .45 slug to the
face without messy braindeath, sassy beret, etc. The
similarities to Wesker's powers are unmistakable.

Since Krauser's working for Wesker, and thus for the

remnants of Umbrella, it's easy enough to assume
(there's that word again) that he's received several
nifty upgrades as a signing bonus. After all, Umbrella
has Tyrant-in-a-can in 2002, and Sergei is able to
turn into a fully sentient, rational Tyrant in 2003.
It's safe to assume (argh!) that by 2004, with Umbrella's
entire database at his disposal, Wesker's figured out
how to augment humans with Tyrant-ish powers.
Q. Is Krauser infected with a Plaga? Is that where he
gets his powers?

A. Ada's report on Krauser seems to indicate that

Krauser had his mutated arm well before he was sent
to infiltrate Los Illuminados, since she's studied
what he's capable of. She also notes that he's
probably fallen prey to the temptations that the cult
represents, but if Krauser has actually turned on
Umbrella, he dies before he gets the chance to do
anything about it.

Krauser is also motivated to go find Wesker at the

end of RE:DSC, as he's lost the full use of his arm
by the end of Operation Javier.

It's my opinion that Krauser is not hosting a Plaga

at any point during RE4. For one thing, he still has
his free will, which would seem to rule out infection;
if Krauser was hosting a Plaga, Saddler wouldn't need
to distrust him. Further, that distrust would seem to
argue against Krauser hosting a master Plaga.

It is an odd side note, however, that the special

anti-Plaga laser device that you get for beating
Professional Mode in the later ports of RE4 will
instantly kill Krauser. It won't do a thing to
chickens, crows, cows, and uninfected dogs.

Q. Did Krauser survive?

A. To the casual observer, no. Not only did Leon kill

him, but Ada proceeded to kill him again. That said,
if he came back from what looked an awful lot like death
once, there's no reason why he couldn't do it twice.

Krauser wound up as a popular enough character that he came

back in RE:DSC and Mercenaries 3D, so Capcom may not be able
to resist the temptation to resurrect him.

Q. Where the hell did Krauser get spiderbots?

A. He's a big Deus Ex fan. Who knew?

Q. Is Ingrid Hunnigan Ada?

A. This is the first really Out There question that's

arisen in RE4 (the second being the surprisingly
widespread and since debunked idea that Saddler is
Ozwell Spencer), so I'm including it here.

The short version: you lose contact with Hunnigan

shortly before meeting Ada for the first time. Ada's
initially wearing sunglasses, but destroys them as a
handy distraction. The next time you see Hunnigan,
after the credits, she's not wearing her glasses.
Hence, as the popular theory goes, Ingrid's Ada in
disguise, presumably using some kind of gadget to
mask her face and voice.
This theory has apparently become widespread enough
that it was one of the questions that PSM2 asked
Masachika Kawata, the head of the team that ported
RE4 to the PS2. According to him, it's not true.

Q. Was Ingrid Hunnigan the "traitor"?

A. No, that was Krauser. He's an American, and he admits

to being Ashley's kidnapper during the knifefight in 5-2.

Q. What's an ORE?

A. If you check the canned food store in the basement

of the island facility, Leon will remark that it reminds
him of his ORE days. A quick look at acronymfinder.com
indicates that ORE, among other things, can stand for
Operational Readiness Evaluation/Exercise. One would
presume that this is a reference to Leon's training.

===============================
3xii. RESIDENT EVIL: APOCALYPSE
===============================

Q. Are you going to cover the second movie in this document?

A. Hell no. You can't even *begin* to tell me it's relevant.

=======================================
15xiii. RESIDENT EVIL: OUTBREAK FILE #2
=======================================

Q. When do the new scenarios take place?

A. "Wild Things" is set a few days into the outbreak. The

RPD is still an active force in the city and the media is
still operating, which suggests it's before the 27th.

The only thing that determines when "Flashback" is set is

Ed's sidelong comment at the start of the scenario, about
how things are getting bad in the city. There's no real
way of knowing when it occurs, particularly since Ed's
shenanigans don't have much to do with the outbreak. You
could put it at almost any point within the first few days.

"Underbelly" appears to take place at some point after the

27th, since the city's taken serious damage and the streets
are becoming overrun. The first Outbreak's scenarios suggest
that Raccoon didn't get *really* bad until the RPD lost the
battle on the 27th.

The events of "Desperate Times" take place near the end

of the siege of the RPD, just before Jill Valentine visits
the building on the 28th.

Finally, "End of the Road," like "Decisions, Decisions,"

is set on the morning of October 1st, in the last hours
before the bomb.
Q. So what does this do to the timeline? How do all
of these scenarios fit together?

A. As with the first Outbreak, File #2's scenarios aren't

really a cohesive, five-part narrative. Instead, it's five
situations encountered throughout the outbreak, as seen
through the eyes of the survivors. Compared to the first
game, it's a bit more character-driven--all five scenarios
do, however tangentially, involve at least one member of
the cast--but it's still an anthology rather than a plotline.

While some scenarios would seem to be at least coincidentally

linked--for example, the end of "The Hive" could bring a
group of survivors to Birkin's laboratory to participate in
"Below Freezing Point"--no such connections are made in-game.

Q. What order do the scenarios take place in?

A. Every fan who's tried to figure this out winds up with

a different answer. My version of the timeline is as follows:

"Outbreak": this is the start of the Raccoon City disaster.

"Hellfire": since the fire department is still running and the

streets are relatively safe, I'd set this right after "Outbreak."

"Below Freezing Point": I'd set this as early in the outbreak

as possible, to give Annette as much time as possible to clean
the lab back out before Leon and Claire get there. It also
can't be all that long after Birkin's assassination, since
there are still survivors amongst the lab's staff.

"Wild Things": all we know is that this is set before the 27th,
since the RPD is still working on evacuating refugees.

"Flashback": there's no way of knowing when this takes place,

but some characters' Illusion Endings note that the survivors
spend an entire day out in the forest. Thus, it's probably
around the middle of the week.

"The Hive": the horde of zombies outside the hospital, and

the general destruction within it, suggest that this scenario's
set near the end of the outbreak, prior to Carlos's visit to
the hospital on October 1st.

"Underbelly": the destruction in the streets at the start

of the scenario would suggest that this takes place near the
end of the outbreak, anywhere from the 27th to the 30th.

"Desperate Times": This is one of the few scenarios that we

have a date for. It's set on the 28th, a few hours before
Jill arrives in RE3.

"End of the Road"/"Decisions, Decisions": these take place

nearly simultaneously, in the hours just before the destruction
of Raccoon City.

Q. What happened to Kurt at the hospital? Why is Alyssa

having flashbacks?
A. Kurt was an idealistic colleague of Alyssa's, who
came to the hospital to investigate an ongoing scandal.
Patients were dying, the details of their deaths were
going unreported, and Kurt couldn't track down who was
providing the hospital with its drugs. The culprit
turned out to be Umbrella, of course, working through
a shell corporation called Drugs Incorporated.

The Clinical Report file suggests rather strongly that

the drugs being used at the hospital were wholly or
partially derived from the T-Virus. The treatments
worked at first, but the patients would eventually
become zombies. This included Dorothy Lester, who was
given the treatment in 1996. However, patients were
still being admitted to the hospital as late as
mid-September of 1998, no more than a week before the
beginning of the outbreak.

If you hit the emote button a couple of times after

Alyssa's flashbacks, you'll get her commentary on them.
It doesn't seem that she's having sudden bursts of
repressed memory, so much as she's having flashes of
insight about the events that must have occurred at
the hospital. She remembers the hospital, and she
knows she's been there at some point to cover a story,
but it takes her a little while to figure out what
must've happened. It's probably understandable, since
the hospital looks like it's been abandoned for years.

Alyssa knows that Kurt went to the hospital to investigate

the scandal, and then disappeared suddenly. It's only when
she reaches Room 201 that she realizes what must've happened
to him. After talking to Al, the hospital administrator,
Kurt broke into the hospital at night and fell prey to
the zombified patients. Alyssa's flashbacks are a
combination of her memories of the place and a series of
intuitive leaps.

An alternative interpretation is that Alyssa was actually

with Kurt on the night he broke into the hospital, but
something was done to her that made her forget the incident.
The flashbacks are her memories resurfacing as she revisits
the area. I'm not sure I like this version, but given Yoko's
revelation in "End of the Road," it's a distinct possibility.

Q. What the hell happened to the RPD after the siege?

A. Yeah, I'd like to thank Capcom for that one. It's bad
enough that half the RPD is boarded shut during RE3, but
now there's a raging inferno in the back lot, several rooms
are heavily barricaded, and most of the damn building is
flooded with *nerve gas*. (Apparently, Brian Irons doesn't
think something's an effective deterrent unless it's banned
by the Geneva Convention.)

That being said, there are quite a few people who are still
in the RPD or have yet to arrive there, many of whom are
major players in RE2. Just to name a few, Ada Wong, Sherry
Birkin, Marvin, Elliot Edward, Eliza Warren, Ben Bertolucci,
the two convicts in the cellblock, and a few surviving cops
(cf. the Operation Report files in RE2) are all still in the
building when Rita's crew makes their escape. Brian Irons
is also lurking in the background, though he may not actually
be in the building; his diary in RE2 mentions that he's in
the precinct, but not necessarily the precinct house.

Any one of these people could account for one or more of

the changes in the RPD between the end of "Desperate Times"
and Jill's visit on the 28th. Particular suspects here
would include Irons, whose obsession with the arrangement
of his furniture was noted in RE2's Secretary's Diary file;
Elliot Edward, who writes of his attempts to escape via the
sewer system in RE2's Operation Report files; and Ada Wong,
who says in RE2 that she's conducted a room-by-room search
of most of the building.

At the end of the day, however, just like the boarded-up

doors in RE3, none of this really matters. It'd be nice
if Capcom would cut it out, but it's irrelevant for the
purposes of this document.

Q. How does "Desperate Times" fit into the RE2/RE3 timeline?

A. At first glance, the order of events is simple. Following

the battle against the zombies on the 27th (RE3's intro),
the police pull back to the RPD. The siege goes poorly,
and the zombies take over the west wing of the building.
(Presumably, several cops and citizens are trapped in that
wing during "Desperate Times," as there are living officers
in the building right up until Leon and Claire arrive on
the night of the 29th.)

With all of their escape routes blocked off, Marvin Branagh

comes up with a plan. The setup and execution of that plan
is covered in "Desperate Times," which takes place at some
point late on the 27th or early on the 28th.

Rita and the survivors escape the RPD at the end of

"Desperate Times," and Marvin collapses in the west office.

At some point shortly thereafter, Jill stops by to grab

her Lockpick. She thinks Marvin's dead, and thus doesn't
try to help him. While she's slugging it out with Nemesis,
Marvin wakes up and, perhaps motivated by the sound of
anti-tank rockets going off inside the building, finds
somewhere else to be. (As noted above, in RE3, Marvin's
body disappears the moment you find the Lockpick.)

Between Jill's departure from the RPD and Leon and Claire's
arrival, various events take place, presumably accounting
for the dismantled barricades and rearranged rooms.

Finally, on the night of the 29th, Leon and Claire reach

the RPD. Claire finds Marvin barely alive in the RPD's
west office, and is later forced to kill him when he
becomes a zombie.
So far, things are fairly simple. The big complication is
in Kevin's ending in "Desperate Times," where a police car
passes their van on the street. Some people think that's
Leon and Claire's police car from the beginning of RE2.

Personally, I don't see why people think that, as I can't

see through the car's windshield. It's weird that there's
another car on the street, yeah, but if it's Leon and Claire,
it screws up the timeline. Either Kevin and Rita were driving
around the city for a day and a half before he thought to talk
to her (not inconceivable, really, as Kevin's kind of a dick),
Jill's visit to the RPD on the 28th took place at some point
when everyone but Marvin was behind the barricades, or the
Outbreak File #2 developers were so eager to include an Easter
egg that they forgot about RE3.

Q. What's Marvin got against the STARS?

A. There's an interesting note on the desk in the RPD's

west office, where Marvin details the cops' evacuation
plan. He mentions something about how they might be able
to rely on the STARS, but dismisses the idea out of hand.

At this point in the timeline, as far as Marvin knows, the

notoriously unreliable Brad Vickers is the only member of STARS
who's still in town. The other surviving STARS dropped off the
radar around the middle of August, as Marvin says at the start
of RE2. Further, as established in several files in RE2, the
STARS became a laughingstock upon their return to Raccoon City.

Q. Doesn't Marvin know about Jill?

A. He still thinks Jill's "disappeared" when he talks to

Claire at the start of RE2, on the 29th. Clearly, he didn't
actually see Jill on the 28th.

Q. Where's the Experiment Participants file?

A. After you bring Carter the MO Disk, grab a second

disk off the table and decrypt it in the same mainframe.
You can now use the disc in the Special Experiments
room's computer to bring the file onscreen. It's garbled,
but Yoko's name is still legible.

Q. Why did the Tyrant turn on Carter?

A. The Experiment File, found in the mezzanine near

Carter, says that the Mr. X in "End of the Road" is
an experimental life form code-named T-0400TP. The
file then warns that the T-0400TP is mostly used to
cage-match against Hunters in a test of its durability,
and that if it's used outside of the experimentation
chamber, the safety of the user is not guaranteed.

Q. Hey, shouldn't the Apple Inn be on fire?

A. The Raccoon City fire department took care of that in

the closing cinematic for "Hellfire."
Q. How can I get Yoko to talk about the experiment?

A. Yoko seems to be more likely to uncork her ad-libs about

her resurfacing memories if you're either in the lobby of the
Apple Inn with Linda, or if you're on the first floor of the
office building waiting for the clock to run out.

Q. Where did Cindy get the money to buy a house?

A. It's funny, but if you go back and look at the Cindy-specific

SP items in the first game, they include the location of a stash
of money that Jack was embezzling and the deed to J's Bar. She
might've been able to collect on its insurance.

===============================
3xiv. RESIDENT EVIL: EXTINCTION
===============================

Q. Wh--

A. No.

=================================
3xv. RESIDENT EVIL: DEGENERATION
=================================

None yet.

========================================
3xvi. RESIDENT EVIL: UMBRELLA CHRONICLES
========================================

Q. If the front doors of the mansion are locked when Rebecca

and Richard get there, who unlocked them so the Alpha team could
get in?

A. One of the funny things about UC is that it turns the Spencer

mansion from an isolated and largely abandoned deathtrap into
Mardi Gras. There are people going in and out of it like
a Scooby Doo chase scene all damned day and at least two of them
have the run of the place. You could credit either Sergei or Wesker
for unlocking the doors.

Q. How does Sergei have such an obedient Tyrant following him

around a full day before the "mansion incident"?

A. After the GameCube remake of
gradually walking back from the
the Arklay lab was the first of
says that it's a customized Mr.
easily with humans.
the first game, the series has been
notion that the Tyrant in the tank in
its kind. The in-game file on "Ivan"
X prototype, intended to blend in more

======================
3xvii. RESIDENT EVIL 5
======================

Q. Is Wesker really dead?

A. There's an underlying theme of settling old business throughout

RE5. Spencer appears for the first time and gets killed, we see the
definitive origins of the T-Virus and the Progenitor, and Umbrella
has been thoroughly destroyed. Wesker's death would seem to fit neatly
into that thematic background; RE5 is the end of the Umbrella storyline,
and thus the end of Wesker.

2016's UMBRELLA CORPS spin-off contains a vague hint in its single-player

campaign that Wesker may have somehow come back from the dead, complete
with D.C. Douglas's voice, but its canonicity is anyone's guess.

Q. If Spencer killed everyone who knew about the African

research facility, how did Wesker and Tricell know about it?

A. We find out about Spencer's assassinations from the Spencer's

Notebook file, which is found inside Excella's abandoned briefcase
on the bridge of the cruise ship. It states that Spencer's record
wasn't perfect; there's a single person, a "Jenny K," who managed
to slip through his fingers.

Failing that, Spencer's a compulsive diarist like everyone else in

this series, and you can find three entries from his journal during
"Lost in Nightmares." It's possible Wesker read about it the same way
the player does, or that the diaries fell into his or Tricell's hands
after the attack on Spencer's hideout.

Q. Why is Jill a blonde now?

A. I don't know why the designers made that call, but in-game, you can
check one of the monitors in the main storage area in 5-2 to find the
Test Subject Data file. It mentions that the drugs that Wesker used to
put Jill into stasis had the unexpected side effect of leeching out a
lot of her natural pigmentation.

(She also gets a year older and a few inches taller in RE5. Really,
Jill has a rough time of it in this game.)

Q. Where was Umbrella getting all of its Progenitor virus from if

it was so hard to manufacture?

A. The Spencer's Notebook file, found on the ship's radar station

right before the big Uroboros fight, mentions that Umbrella figured
out a way around that problem at some point in the 1980s. Before then,
they had to get Brandon Bailey to harvest and mail out all the samples,
a job that did not do Bailey any good at all.

Q. Didn't Spencer tell Wesker he was the only survivor of the "Wesker
Children"? Who's Alex?

A. You may find this hard to believe, but Spencer was lying. Wesker may
have even known that, since you can find an internal memo written by
Alex in the ship's radar station. She's the last surviving child of the
Wesker Project, and there may be a few more, as Wesker's apparent death
in 2006 is noted to have brought the project's success rate down to 18%.
By 2011, Alex herself thinks she's the last Wesker.

Q. Who was that blonde woman in 2-1?

A. Her name is Allyson. She's part of the viral marketing campaign for
RE5, and appears in a "travel blog" found at http://kijuju.blogspot.com.
Kijuju had a high population of foreigners in the country on work visas,
which would explain the demographics of the village Majini, and Allyson
was one of them. She picked a bad time to come out of hiding.

Q. ...what's in Kijuju that would bring in foreign labor?

A. The guy who wrote the Kijuju travel blog, Adam, worked in the mines.
The KAZ also has oil fields, which goes a long way towards explaining
why it's an "autonomous zone" in the first place.

Q. Who's Ryan? Who's M. Suzuki?

A. Characters from a promotional video on RE5's Japanese website that's

since been taken down. Suzuki was a Special Operations Agent with the
BSAA who was secretly a Tricell double agent, and leaked information to
Ricardo Irving about the BSAA coming for him. Ryan was an intelligence
analyst with the BSAA who was on the verge of figuring out that they
had a mole in the organization.

Suzuki assassinated Ryan at his desk on March 9th, 2008. After erasing
Ryan's files on the Kijuju operation, she subsequently disappeared.

==========================================
3xviii. RESIDENT EVIL: DARKSIDE CHRONICLES
==========================================

Q. Doesn't the good ending contradict RE4?

A. It does, but Krauser's ending doesn't. It seems to me that the

difference between the good ending and Krauser's ending isn't whether
or not we hear Krauser's inner monologue, but whether or not it happens
at all. In Krauser's ending, Manuela overcoming her infection is enough
to make him think that maybe he should look into this "Wesker" fellow.

Q. When did Leon mention Wesker?

A. I gloss over this in the plot summary in the name of brevity. Wesker
has all of two lines in "Game of Oblivion," spends the entire game stalking
Claire from the shadows, and leaves a mocking note for Chris when he steals
Steve Burnside's body.

I'm also operating on the assumption that "Game of Oblivion" is Leon

actually telling Krauser about the Ashfords while they're coughing up
river water in the dam, rather than Leon trying to set a new Olympic
record in the expository inner monologue. Otherwise, Krauser's either
telepathic or he was studying BOWs more than he lets on.

Q. Where did Javier's Umbrella contact get the T-Veronica virus? Doesn't
Wesker have the only sample?

A. One of the problems with the Chronicles games' original levels is that
they still depend on files to deliver a lot of the behind-the-scenes
exposition, and the files are obtained by shooting seemingly random
background objects, so they're easy to miss.

That Umbrella operative that Krauser wants to talk to is the guy who sold
Javier the T-Virus he used to unsuccessfully treat Hilda. Wesker, however,
is responsible for selling Javier the T-Veronica virus, as well as the
Anubises and Hunters he's throwing at you. That's revealed by Wesker's
in-game dossier and the Communications from Wesker file.

Q. Why do you say T-Veronica all the time? The game just says Veronica.

A. Force of habit, mostly. Besides, we all know that's what it is.

Q. Why are the T-Veronica virus's effects so different from what we saw in CV?

A. It's important to note that Hidalgo actually lets T-Veronica out into
the world in DSC, which nobody ever did in CV. There are exactly three
characters in CV who contract it and two of them instantly go homicide
monster without ever trying to spread the infection. Everything else in
CV is explicitly made with the vanilla T-Virus. Hidalgo, conversely, has
done some additional experimentation with it and that is how giant druglord
plant-spiders are made.

==============================
3xix. RESIDENT EVIL: AFTERLIFE
==============================

Q. Bu--

A. Shut it. Shut your whole face. I will turn this car around, mister.

================================
3xx. RESIDENT EVIL: REVELATIONS
================================

Q. I really don't get what happened in this game.

A. It's complicated, and just about everyone in it besides Chris,

Jill, and Keith has at least one hidden agenda (although Quint's
are all kind of silly). See the RE:R entry for a more linear summary.

tl;dr: Morgan Lansdale provided Veltro with the equipment and materials to
cause the Terragrigia Panic, as part of a scheme to terrify the international
community into vastly expanding his organization and its resources. He thus
sacrificed thousands of people in order to, in his eyes, save millions.

Clive O'Brian and Raymond Vester both suspect this of Lansdale, but due to
the FBC's expansion, any attempt either of them make to bring Lansdale down
must be absolutely airtight. Their plan is to manufacture a situation in
which Jill Valentine gets aboard the Queen Zenobia, where Vester is pretty
sure she will find hard evidence against Lansdale, and where Lansdale cannot
use the bulk of his official resources against her, as the Zenobia is also
his private blacksite for bioweapons research. The gamble is that Jill can
sink Lansdale before Lansdale can forcibly dismantle the BSAA.

Q. A lot could've gone wrong with that plan, though.

A. A lot *did* go wrong with that plan. O'Brian is very uncomfortable in

the role of chessmaster, which becomes obvious as the game goes forward,
and the entire scheme flies off the rails early on when Rachael dies.

One of the reasons why Revelations's plot is so confusing is because it

isn't your typical elaborate conspiracy, plotted out to the last detail
by a control-freak genius. It's a desperation move and it blows up on
the runway almost as soon as it starts.
Q. Who the hell is making new T-Virus blends for "study purposes"?

A. The T-Virus may be a zombie plague, but its primary intended use is as a
catalyst for bioengineering. Umbrella used it to create entirely new species
and was researching it as a potential cure for cancer (cf. "Flashback," RE:O2).
It'd be stranger if people *weren't* still trying to study it.

Q. How did Lansdale find Norman?

A. It's suggested that the FBC blockade around the ruins of Terragrigia, as
seen in Episode 2, isn't there to keep the shore safe from contamination.
It's there to keep civilians out while Lansdale has teams sweeping the ocean
floor for the wreck of the Dido, which was Norman's last known location. When
they finally find him and Lansdale dispatches a strike team, that's Raymond's
cue to tell O'Brian to start their own operation.

Q. If Lansdale is a big enough control freak that he has to wrap up every

little loose end, why report Norman dead in the first place?

A. Norman being dead is instrumental in Lansdale having a big enough win on

the books to justify the vastly increased powers and funding granted to the
FBC. He's gambling that he can use that power to find and eliminate Norman
before someone is able to find out the truth behind Terragrigia. Lansdale
has a good poker face, but as he tells Chris and Jill in the Zenobia's
laboratory, he's been working day and night on this for a year.

Q. How does Raymond know Jessica's the mole?

A. She shot him right in time to keep him from outright telling Jill and
Parker that Lansdale's dirty and did so on the flimsiest possible pretext.
Raymond's the only person in that room who knows Lansdale's got a mole in
the BSAA, and Jessica just as much as said it was her.

Q. Why's Jessica flirting with Chris?

A. It doesn't seem to be part of her scheme at all. She simply has a crush
on him and is irritated that he doesn't respond. This is backed up by the
Japan-only supplemental file Jessica's Report.

Q. Why didn't Lansdale use the Regia Solis on the Dido?

A. The Regia Solis is a retasked solar collection satellite, which means

its beam isn't a laser so much as a focused pulse of intense heat. (It's
actually impressive how much thought went into the scene that shows the
destruction of Terragrigia. It's not blowing up; it's being baked to
death.) It's easy to assume that the Regia Solis wouldn't be effective
against a target on the ocean floor.

Q. Why does Lansdale want a vaccine for the T-Abyss?

A. Lansdale goes full-on cat-stroking Bond villain by the end of the game,
so it's easy to forget that he's actually just as interested in saving the
world as O'Brian and the BSAA are, and he's got a few valid points. In the
wake of the Panic, the T-Abyss is loose in the Mediterranean Sea, so having
a vaccine for it on hand is just common sense.

Q. What's the deal with the airport?

A. In Episode 9, as Parker, you can find Raymond's journal in the Zenobia's

opera house by the promenade entrance. In it, he claims that he and O'Brian
are responsible for setting up the Veltro base at the airport in Finland,
and that "Morgan's dogs" have already attacked it by the time Raymond boards
the Zenobia.

By the time Keith and Quint are investigating the area, the base is full of
people who actually do appear to be Veltro agents, but they've been wiped
out to a man by escaped BOWs.

The general idea seems to be that Raymond posed as a Veltro member (maybe
even Norman himself) and recruited the survivors of the group to work with
him at the airport, which gives Lansdale a distraction and Chris a target.
Lansdale then remotely activates the BOWs in storage at the airport, since
they're leftovers from the BOW arsenal he sold Veltro, in order to get rid
of the remaining Veltro members in the area.

Q. Where the hell did Morgan Lansdale get that much money?

A. That's a good question. Lansdale is the anonymous "financier" mentioned

in Bernard Corti's journals, who provided Veltro with everything they needed
including the use of three renovated ocean liners, each of which had a crew
requirement of just over a thousand.

It's probably a plot hole that Lansdale's able to fund a venture like this
out of pocket, although there's room for explanation. The Daily Courier 1
file says that Lansdale's pre-FBC career was in espionage, and in the RE
universe, there's a staggering amount of money floating around the bioweapons
trade (i.e. Wesker having his own stealth bomber and renovated cargo ship in
RE5). Lansdale may simply have had the right connections, particularly if
Capcom wanted to retroactively acquaint him with members of RE6's "Family."

Q. How is it that nobody takes the threat of bioweapons seriously in 2004

when it's only been six years since Raccoon City?

A. You have to take into account what the average guy on the street in the
RE-verse actually knows about Raccoon City. As players, we have more information
about the causes and effects of the Raccoon City outbreak than the characters
do, with the obvious exceptions of Wesker, Ada, and arguably Leon and Claire.
There's a lot of misinformation being passed around about it in-game.

Part of this is because, as we know from RE3 and RE6, there are a lot of
people in high places in the American government who would prefer that
the complete story of Raccoon City and Umbrella never be known, not least
of whom are Derek Simmons and the "Family." With Umbrella dismantled and
people working hard to conceal the truth, it'd be easy for people to think
that bioterrorism isn't a serious threat.

Q. Why was the FBC involved in the Terragrigia Panic at all?

A. As noted above, Terragrigia was a joint U.S.-European venture, and

Lansdale took advantage of certain agreements thereof to take over and
monopolize the official response to the Panic. O'Brian was the only
representative of any other agency in Terragrigia during the Panic, and
he had no power to do anything other than yell at Lansdale (cf. Daily
Courier Report 1).

Q. Who locked the communications officer inside the storeroom?

A. Presumably that guy he mentions in his diary.

Q. How did Jack Norman survive in a sunken ship for a year?

A. He's holed up inside the dining area of a ship with a crew requirement
of 1028, so he's got access to most if not all of the supplies.

Q. Why didn't he leave?

A. The only method we see of exiting the Queen Dido involves a lengthy
underwater swim and playing Frogger with a bunch of man-eating death
sponges. If Norman doesn't have scuba gear with him, he's not going
anywhere, NPC powers be damned.

Q. How long ago was the T-Abyss outbreak aboard the Zenobia?

A. There were actually two of them, or one outbreak and one controlled
release. The first was five days after the Terragrigia Panic, as Lansdale
triggered an outbreak to eliminate Veltro. According to a journal found
in the Zenobia's lab, most of Veltro's membership was aboard at the time.

Shortly thereafter, Lansdale sends a team of researchers to the Zenobia.

With Veltro's lab, their data on the T-Abyss, and the infected members
of Veltro as test subjects in a controlled environment, the researchers
are able to create a vaccine for the T-Abyss. They notify Lansdale of
this, and once he has their research data in hand, he assassinates them
by remotely releasing the BOWs in storage aboard the ship. (This is
probably where the Hunters on the ship's foredeck came from.)

At least two of these researchers are alive right up until Raymond

Vester boards the ship, as per the TGS 2011 trailer, and Raymond uses
their own supply of the T-Abyss to effectively hide their bodies. This
suggests that the completion of the vaccine is a recent development,
which means the fresh corpses that Jill and Parker find upon boarding
the Zenobia were members of the research team.

A complicating factor is that you can find a few different files in the
ship that indicate the Zenobia's crew did not have the faintest idea what
was going on for at least one of the outbreaks. It's implied that Lansdale's
researchers put all the T-Abyss-infected Veltro members in storage, then
hired some guys to run the ship for them, but I could go either way on that.
The only real question is whether the Zenobia's communications officer was
locked up on the promenade deck for a few days or most of a year.

Q. If the T-Abyss requires exposure to a concentrated dosage for infection,

how did Lansdale cause the outbreak?

A. The Researching the Deep-Sea Virus file goes out of its way to mention
that the T-Abyss is still very effective if taken orally, which means
Lansdale could've spiked their food or water. There's at least one place
aboard the Zenobia--the fountain in the casino--that has some T-Abyss
rigged up to a water source.

Q. Why does it take Chris and Jessica so long to find the Zenobia?
Doesn't O'Brian still have the coordinates for it?

A. Raymond seems to have taken care of that. The Zenobia only stands
still until Jill and Parker are on board, but after that, the controls
get sabotaged and it's set adrift.
O'Brian's reaction to the news that the Regia Solis has been reactivated
would suggest this is deliberate. He's expecting Lansdale to try and sink
the ship with a satellite strike, so job one for Raymond is making sure
the ship isn't where Lansdale left it. Since the first thing Rachael did
was find the UAV, it's possible that O'Brian always meant for it to be used
to counter the satellite.

Q. What the hell did Veltro want, exactly?

A. The Veltro Agent's Journal in Episode 6 says they're united by a

mutual belief that modern society is both decadent and corrupt. By
bringing down hell upon that society, hence Norman's thing about
Dante's Inferno, they hope to shock people into rejecting it.

Jessica's Report mentions that Veltro started as a student group

that became radicalized, and the video Jack Norman released to
take credit for the Panic indicated they stood in opposition to
the city's development. It makes sense; if Terragrigia was an
innovation in creating sustainable urban living, it'd perpetuate
and advance the same society that Veltro hated.

Q. How did a whale end up in the Mediterranean to become a Malacoda?

A. Fin whales are native to the Mediterranean, and it's not unheard
of for a whale to accidentally wander into the sea from the Pacific.

Q. How did the FBC strike team get into the Queen Dido when Jill
needed to cut open most of the doors?

A. The recently-dead guy in a scuba suit that you find in the water
in Episode 12 suggests that the FBC strike team entered the Dido through
the same door that you're about to use. I blame their NPC powers for
letting them circumvent the doors, or else they deliberately jammed
them shut behind them. *Something* killed that guy.

Q. Who forced Rachael to go on the Zenobia mission?

A. She's an FBC agent, so I'd imagine it was Raymond. How he did it

isn't mentioned, but her reluctance suggests blackmail.

Q. Who is Jessica working for?

A. The Japan-only supplemental file Jessica's Report involves an interview

between Jessica and Excella Gionne, so Jessica can comfortably be assumed
to be an employee in Excella's branch of Tricell.

===========================================
3xxi. RESIDENT EVIL: OPERATION RACCOON CITY
===========================================

Q. Why isn't there a summary of this game?

A. As noted below, ORC was explicitly designed as an "alternate universe"

game. There are parts of it that would fit surprisingly well into the
main series, but it's not canon.

================================
3xxii. RESIDENT EVIL: DAMNATION
================================
None yet.

===================================
3xxiii. RESIDENT EVIL: RETRIBUTION
===================================

Q. Seriously, I think--

A. I WILL *CUT* YOU.

======================
3xxiv. RESIDENT EVIL 6
======================

Q. Huh buh what?

A. Yeah, me too. Check out the plot summary at the end of RE6's entry.
Basically, Chris's chapters were added relatively late in production
by executive order, which made a complicated plot even worse.

Q. Where is Carla getting the money for all of this?

A. The files say specifically that it's a mystery. The entire underwater
facility was built as an incubator for the Haos, so it's not even a
reclaimed Umbrella building.

That said, Carla is in a long-term, one-sided relationship with the head

of a centuries-old international conspiracy that specifically derives its
political and military power from financial manipulation. She also has
enough rank in the Family on her own that they're willing to cede her
control of part of their Asian forces (cf. the Submarine file). It might
be a testament to the Family's wealth and influence, or to just how much
control she had over Simmons, that Carla could find ways to independently
fund multi-billion-dollar projects without anyone noticing.

Carla's command of the Family's Asian holdings may also neatly explain
where the hell she managed to get enough warm bodies to account for the
highly-trained J'avo army she fields in Liansheng.

Q. How did Leon and Helena survive the C-Virus attack on Tall Oaks?

A. The only people who were killed or infected by the fog cloud were
the ones who were directly exposed. For whatever reason, Leon, Helena,
and the other survivors found throughout Tall Oaks were not in a position
to inhale the gas. In other words, it's pure dumb luck.

Q. Okay, then how do they keep surviving exposure to the fog, like
on the plane?

A. The aerosolized version of the C-Virus seems to lose its potency very
quickly once it's allowed to mix with air. Notice, for example, that even
the relatively high concentration of the gas on the plane just makes Leon
and Helena cough.

In an odd example of the gameplay mirroring the story, getting hit with
a Lepotitsa's gas is one of the single most lethal attacks in the
game, to the point where it's a one-hit kill on any difficulty above
Normal. If you die to it, you'll see an identical death scene to the
one you get if you're caught by the gas cloud in Leon 5. You have to
be right next to the Lepotitsa for its gas to do damage, however, and
at any longer range than that, it's not much more than noxious smoke.

Q. Why won't Helena just tell Leon what's going on?

A. Note that in Helena's flashback, Simmons is making no attempt to

disguise his identity. He's the national security advisor and a
close friend of the President, so as a Secret Service agent, Helena
would know who he is.

Thus, Helena knows that her abduction and blackmail were carried out
by one of the most politically connected men in the world, which means
she can't trust anyone. Therefore, she doesn't tell Leon a thing until
such a time as she can prove at least some of her allegations. It's
still an obnoxious gimmick, all the moreso because of how trusting Leon
is, but it's at least explicable once you find out who Simmons is.

Q. Why doesn't Simmons even try to cover his tracks?

A. He's a multi-billionaire from America. </incisive political commentary>

Simmons has actually done a decent job cleaning up after himself. If

it weren't for Ada, Leon and Helena would end the game as wanted
fugitives, since all their actual evidence went up with Tall Oaks. The
one crack appears to be when he doesn't even try to lie to Sherry in
China, and even then, it has more to do with his being convinced that
it's for a greater cause. He also has exactly zero respect for Sherry,
as per the Deal With the United States file, who he thinks is naive.

Q. How did Leon and Helena manage to get all their weapons on what appears
to be a passenger flight to China?

A. I figure this is Hunnigan at work, since she's already patched into

the plane's systems. It's not exactly impossible for government agents
to skip past customs, especially if Hunnigan did something like gin them
up a couple of air marshal's badges.

(The answer is that they wanted to do an action sequence in the airplane

but didn't want you to be unarmed for it.)

Q. How did the Lepotitsas get on Leon and Helena's plane?

A. The game never offers an explanation. Every other Lepotitsa in the game
was placed deliberately by Simmons and his conspirators as part of the Tall
Oaks attack, however, so you can probably assume that their appearance on
the flight is an assassination attempt by Simmons against Leon and Helena.

Q. Why did Carla send Ada to the submarine?

A. Ada's theory, which is echoed in several files, is that Carla

secretly wanted to be stopped. If you look at her behavior throughout
RE6, Carla takes a lot of risks that she doesn't have to, such as her
attack on the BSAA in Edonia, calling Simmons specifically to taunt
him as he succumbs to his mutation, and indeed, attacking China at all.
If Carla had simply wanted to destroy the world and be done with it,
all she'd have had to do is keep her head down until she finished work
on the Haos.
Q. Why does Jake care that Chris killed his father? Why does Chris
bring it up?

A. Jake's soliloquy to Sherry in the locker room and a couple of the

files provide the answer you want. His mother always told him that
one day, Jake would meet his father, and naturally, Jake developed
a working theory that his father would be a great guy. Surprise! He
was a psychotic supervillain! That's something that would cause
anyone to have a reevaluation of self, and combined with his
near-instant dislike for Chris and the high level of stress they're
all under, that'd be enough to force a confrontation.

(I do wonder, however, if this is another one of those story beats

that works a little better for a Japanese audience.)

As for Chris, I'm a big believer in the theory that he's not in his
right mind throughout the entirety of RE6. The scene where he's
knocked out by the BOWs in 2012 Edonia makes a point of showing
Chris's head hit the floor, and he doubles down on the head trauma
with six months of fighting and drinking. Throughout the rest of the
game, he has mood swings and a distinctly altered personality. By the
time he and Piers reach the seabed laboratory, he's moved into what
looks an awful lot like suicidal depression, to the point where he
does not seem to care if Jake shoots him or not.

Q. Why did Piers think taking an amnesiac Chris into an active urban
warzone was a good idea?

A. You know, I'm starting to think Piers isn't a real doctor.

The stated reasoning is that Piers thinks it'll jog Chris's memory.
No, no part of that makes any sense at all.

==================================
3xxv. RESIDENT EVIL: REVELATIONS 2
==================================

Q. What's Alex's plan, exactly?

A. Alex has developed a device that copies a personality and overlays it

on another human's brain. That person has to be strong enough to endure
the shock, however, and Alex's idea of a test of mental strength is in
seeing how the person is able to cope with fear. Towards that end, she's
built the island into an elaborate death trap, and infected her prospective
new bodies with a virus that only activates if the host panics.

This is the end result of the project Spencer gave her, which involved
life extension. He'd hoped for rejuvenation, but instead, Alex has opted
for a sort of philosophical reincarnation. This plays largely into her
obsession with Franz Kafka, who wrote extensively about the concept.
More importantly, she knows she's dying, so she's acting more recklessly
than she might be otherwise.

Q. Why'd she infect herself with T-Phobos?

A. As she says in Episode 4, it's to prove that she's conquered fear.

It's part of her whole power trip.

She also mentions in passing at the start of Episode 4, while talking

to the sleeping Natalia, that the disease that's killing her is also
one of the viruses she's been working on. She might not actually have
intended to infecrself with T-Phobos.

Q. Why did it take Barry six months to find the island?

A. He says to Moira in the good ending that he spent the entire time
trying to find the place. ("F-----g technology.")

Project Umbrella interviewed RE:R2's director in 2015

(http://projectumbrella.net/articles/Yasuhiro-Anpo-Interview-Project-Umbrella).
According to him, Barry got his recording of Moira's distress call
from a BSAA outpost near the island, but they weren't exactly forthcoming
with the information.

Q. Where do Natalia's powers come from?

A. The general idea, which is backed up by the aforementioned Project

Umbrella interview, is that Alex provided Natalia with several biological
enhancements as part of the transfer process. The only one Natalia knows
about is the augmented vision, which plays into the "Little Miss" DLC.
You could probably assume that Alex's enhancements are also why Natalia
can throw a brick hard enough to kill a man.

Q. Why is the Wossek "where life begins"?

A. It's another Kafka reference. Franz Kafka's father was born in

the Czech village of Osek, which the tavern's named after. It's
probably safe to guess that Alex named the tavern during her stint
as the noble ruler of the island.

Q. What's the Kierling?

A. Kierling is the name of a community in Klosterneuburg, Austria.

Franz Kafka starved to death in the Hoffmann sanatorium in Kierling
in 1924, because his tuberculosis swelled his throat shut.

Q. What's the name of the island?

A. Several files in the English translation identify the island as

"Zabytij," a Russian word that translates to "forgotten." In the
Japanese script, the island's name is "Sushestvovanie," which means
"existence" or "subsistence."

===================================================================
4. RESIDENT EVIL
===================================================================

In 1996, Capcom released Resident Evil for the PlayStation.

RE was, and is, a strangely difficult adventure game which
put the player up against an ancient mansion filled with
secrets, puzzles, and, incidentally, ravenous flesh-eating
zombies. While the game gained a degree of notoriety for some
of the worst dialogue and voice acting in console history, it
also earned a fanbase.

In 2001, Capcom announced that they were remaking the original

Resident Evil for the Nintendo GameCube. The remake, released
in North America on May 1st, 2002, represented a new beginning
for the series.

This synopsis covers the storyline of the 2002 remake of RE. The
original is no longer in canon.

================================================
4i. A Summary of the Basic Plot of RESIDENT EVIL
================================================

In the wake of several grisly murders in the nearby forest, the

Raccoon City Police Department puts the Special Tactics and Rescue
Service (STARS) on the job. The STARS is a unique squad that was
formed two years previously to combat domestic terrorism, and they
send their six-man Bravo team, led by Enrico Marini, into the forest
to investigate.

The Bravo team promptly disappears. On the night of July 25th,

the STARS Alpha team follows the Bravos into the forest by
helicopter, looking for clues as to their disappearance.

They soon find the Bravo team's helicopter, which has broken down,
and its pilot, Kevin Dooley, who's been mauled to death. The creatures
responsible, a pack of wild dogs, soon attack the Alpha team. Joseph
Frost, their vehicular specialist, is dragged down and killed.

The whole situation proves to be too much for Brad Vickers, also
known as "Chickenheart," the helicopter pilot for the Alpha team.
He panics and takes off, leaving the rest of the Alpha team stuck
in the middle of the forest. After a headlong flight through the
woods, the Alpha team takes shelter inside the nearby Spencer
mansion, a supposedly abandoned country estate. They soon discover
that the entire building is infested with the walking dead.

The player's role in the game begins at this point. As either Chris
Redfield or Jill Valentine, two of the five survivors of the Alpha
team, the player must find out just what's happening. Chris eventually
finds and partners up with Rebecca Chambers, the field medic and lone
survivor of the STARS Bravo team, while Jill will be assisted by
Barry Burton, a police veteran and fellow Alpha team member. The
game unfolds differently depending on which character is chosen.

The character's investigation of the mansion begins with Albert

Wesker, the captain of the STARS Alpha team, instructing the character
to check out the source of a nearby gunshot. Upon investigating, the
character finds Kenneth Sullivan, a member of the Bravo team, dead
at the hands of a zombie. When the character tries to report back
to Wesker, he's vanished.

Wesker's disappearance is the beginning of a long stretch of bad

luck. The mansion is inhabited by hordes of flesh-eating zombies,
killer crows, more dogs, and a giant snake. Further, the zombies
must be decapitated or incinerated, or a "dead" zombie will mutate
into the clawed abomination that the mansion's late inhabitants
have nicknamed a "Crimson Head." Fortunately, there are more
powerful weapons and ammunition hidden within the mansion, as
well as stores of kerosene to use against the zombies.

As the character advances through the mansion and the outlying

buildings, discarded papers and uncovered journals begin to hint
at what's really happened here. The people who once lived here were
working on some kind of experiment, which has gone awry. Notes from
the mansion's original architect, George Trevor, reveal how the men
who hired him to build the mansion left him to die in its hidden
labyrinths, and how they may have tortured his wife and daughter.

Eventually, the character manages to unlock a door at the back

of the mansion, opening the way to the graveyard and dormitories.
Here, in an isolated cabin, the character is ambushed by a twisted
parody of a woman. Clad in a tattered dress and shuffling towards
the character on legs that have been chained together, the creature
screams as it attacks. Even the character's most powerful weapons
will do no good, and the character is forced to retreat.

In the scientists' lodgings, the mystery only deepens. Other

experiments have produced a massive, bloodthirsty plant, codenamed
Plant-42, as well as a trio of mutated sharks. The character manages
to dispatch the plant with the help of the scientists' notes, and
the sharks are left helpless when the flooded observatory is drained.
It's in the dormitories that new clues to the nature of this mansion
are discovered; the powerful corporation Umbrella has something to
do with these scientists, and for whatever reason, the scientists
are very interested in the STARS.

After Plant-42 is dispatched, Wesker reappears, claiming to have

been separated from the rest of the team following a monster
attack. He tells the character to return to the mansion and finish
the investigation there.

Upon the character's return to the mansion, a new monster appears.

These "Hunters" are powerful and relentless, and rarely show up
alone. Their presence makes the mansion much more dangerous than it
was before, but the character is able to visit new areas using a key
found in the dormitories. Thus, he's able to find the items needed
to reactivate an elevator in the courtyard behind the mansion.

The elevator lets the character through a secret door, which

leads to an old series of mining tunnels. At one end of the
tunnels, hiding in a dark cavern, the character finds Enrico
Marini, the captain of the Bravo team, who's badly injured. He
tells the character to stay away. STARS, he says, has been
betrayed. Just as he's about to reveal the identity of the
traitor, a single gunshot rings out from behind the character,
killing Enrico. The character gives chase to Enrico's assassin,
but the arrival of a pack of Hunters covers the assassin's escape.

Yet another elevator, at the other end of the tunnels, takes

the character to an underground river and a loading dock.
After another encounter with the twisted creature from the
cabin, the character finds a drainage ditch, which has been
made, over many years, into a candle-lit hideaway.

In this hideaway, which looks like nothing so much as a young

girl's room, the character finds the last thing needed to
open the last door back in the mansion. A ladder in the hideaway
leads back up to the cabin in the graveyard, where the twisted
creature was first encountered. When combined with the information
in Trevor's letters, and recently discovered research notes, it
starts to become clearer what the creature actually is.
The last door in the mansion leads down a long flight of stairs,
to the crypt of Jessica Trevor. It is guarded by the twisted
creature from the cabin. The character, assisted by either Barry
or Wesker, manages to open Jessica Trevor's sarcophagus, and the
creature jumps into a nearby pit after taking Jessica's skull.

A letter in the coffin removes all doubt; the twisted creature

is Lisa Trevor, who was experimented on by Umbrella's scientists
as a child. She has spent the last thirty years in agonizing pain,
locked inside a constantly mutating body that cannot die. The
ordeal drove her insane a long time ago.

The character proceeds on alone. Trevor's crypt leads directly

to an ornate fountain, which conceals the entrance to the real
laboratories, deep underneath the Spencer estate. The character
descends, into the dank corridors of the laboratory, where more
surprises await.

Not only has Wesker betrayed the STARS, but he's been complicit
in this mansion's experiments all along. A slideshow in the lab's
audiovisual room identifies Wesker, wearing his characteristic
sunglasses, as one of the leaders of this group. He has been
instructed by his supervisors at the megacorporation Umbrella
to betray the STARS, in the name of covering up the accident
and generating combat data for Umbrella's monsters. As if that
wasn't enough, the team member that Wesker claimed to be
"separated" from was actually taken prisoner. He or she is
inside a dark cell in the laboratory, awaiting release.

Wesker himself is preparing for his last and greatest betrayal,

deep in the laboratory's storage room. He explains himself to
the character, almost as if he needs someone to tell about what
he has planned. He plans to doublecross Umbrella by blowing up
the mansion, taking all its secrets with it. The betrayal of
STARS was simply to cover his tracks as well as the company's.

As the horrified character watches, Wesker unleashes the most

powerful bioweapon in Umbrella's arsenal: the Tyrant, a featureless,
sexless humanoid monster. Unfortunately for Wesker, its first act is
to gut him like a trout. Its second is to come after the player's
character, who discovers that for all the Tyrant's power, it has a
glass jaw. A few Magnum rounds or acid grenades drop it.

The character must now run for his/her life. The laboratory's
self-destruct sequence has been activated (either by Wesker
or by a well-meaning Rebecca), and very little time remains
before the entire mansion is blown sky-high. After rescuing
the captive STARS member in the back room, the character runs
out to the mansion's helipad and signals Brad "Chickenheart"
Vickers. Brad has been circling above the forest all this
time, awaiting word from one of his teammates. He sees the
character's signal flare, he descends to the helipad.

Of course, it isn't that easy. With two minutes left on the

self-destruct device's timer, the Tyrant bursts from the rooftop.
It has shaken off the sluggishness from its months of storage,
and now moves like a freight train. Even with help from Barry or
Rebecca, the character is barely able to stay alive.
With seconds to go before detonation, Brad Vickers drops a
rocket launcher onto the helipad. An anti-tank rocket proves
to be more than even the Tyrant can handle, and it's blown
to pieces.

The surviving STARS climb onto Brad's helicopter. As Brad

lifts off, the Spencer estate explodes into a pillar of
flame. The STARS are left battered and bloodied, but alive,
with a story to tell that no one will believe.

=====================================================
4ii. Story Differences Between Chris and Jill's Games
=====================================================

1. At various points in Jill's game, you may run into Barry,

who's acting very suspicious. You'll find him in the aquarium
room on the second floor at one point, where he's destroying
evidence (he'll already have torn the first couple of pages
off of the Researcher's Will file). You can also overhear a
conversation between him and Wesker outside Dormitory 002.
To trigger the encounters with Barry, discover Kenneth's
body and return to the dining room without fighting the zombie.

2. If Chris is poisoned by the giant snake, you'll take control

of Rebecca, who'll have to get Chris some serum from the
infirmary. If Jill's poisoned, she passes out in the hall
outside the attic and wakes up in the infirmary at full health.

3. Jill can manufacture V-Jolt by herself, then use it in the

boardroom in the Aqua Ring to weaken Plant-42. When she enters
that room, Plant-42 will grab her, and Barry will come in with
a flamethrower to rescue Jill. Chris has to fight the plant on
his own, unless Richard died in the mansion's attic; if that's
the case, Rebecca will have to save Chris by making V-Jolt.

4. In the final encounter with Lisa Trevor, Jill will find

Barry standing over Jessica's coffin. When Barry tries to
point his gun at her, Jill takes it away from him and points
it at him. Then, when Lisa arrives, the player can choose
whether or not to give Barry his gun back. If you do, Barry
will help out in the ensuing fight with Lisa; if you don't,
Lisa kills Barry by knocking him into the pit. If you keep
Barry's revolver, it can kill the Tyrant with one shot.

In Chris's scenario, you'll run into Wesker in Jessica's tomb,

who'll aid you against Lisa. If Wesker gets knocked off of the
platform, he'll reappear in the lab at the end of the game,
offering no explanations.

5. If your supporting character is still alive, it will change

the final encounter with Wesker:
-- Chris, with Rebecca: inside the lab, Wesker will
explain his motivations and shoot Rebecca in the
chest. While Wesker's standing in front of the
Tyrant's tank, it will wake up and gut him,
stabbing right through the side of its containment
tank. After Chris defeats the Tyrant, he'll find
that Rebecca's still alive, thanks to her bulletproof
 vest, and that Wesker's definitely dead. Upon leaving
the laboratory, Rebecca sets the charges in the
power room, which triggers an emergency evacuation
procedure and unlock all the doors in the lab. You
may then rescue Jill and get to the helipad.
-- Chris, alone: Wesker is slain by the Tyrant, and
drops the Master Key. You can use that key to open
Jill's cell door and to get to the helipad.
-- Jill, with Barry: Barry will hold Jill at gunpoint
when she enters the lab. Wesker will gloat to Jill
about his plan, but in so doing, will let slip that
the threat he's been holding against Barry was a
bluff; his family isn't in any danger. Barry will
unexpectedly overhear that and knock Wesker
unconscious. He doesn't act in time to prevent
Wesker from draining the fluid from the Tyrant's
tank, however, and the Tyrant will escape shortly
thereafter. It knocks Barry unconscious before it
turns on Jill. After the fight, you'll find that
Barry's okay, but Wesker's slipped away in the
confusion. You soon find out that he's set the
charges in the power room, as with Rebecca.
-- Jill, alone: almost identical to Chris's scenario
without Rebecca, as above.

===============================================================
4iii. Differences Between RESIDENT EVIL and RESIDENT EVIL "2.0"
===============================================================

1. If you're an expert player of the original game, the remake

is expressly designed to mess with your head. In the event that
a puzzle or ambush has carried over to the remake from the
first game, there's usually a different solution, another
wrinkle to the puzzle, or monsters come from completely
unexpected directions. (Zombies and Hunters can open doors.)

2. Richard Aiken would die no matter what you did in the

first game, regardless of how quickly you brought him the
serum. In the remake, saving Richard will let him survive
until you fight the giant snake (Jill's game) or enter the
Aqua Ring (Chris's game), at which point he gets eaten. If
you save him, he'll give you his radio, and you'll be able
to take his combat shotgun after his death. Richard's death
also affects your options for dealing with Plant-42.

3. The Chimera that haunt the power room now look a great
deal like RE3's drain deimos.

4. As mentioned above, zombies that are "killed" without

being decapitated must be incinerated. Otherwise, they'll
eventually rise again as the vicious Crimson Heads.

5. It is *much* easier to get your support character killed

in the remake. Getting Barry killed in the original Resident
Evil required a series of bizarre choices and decisions that
might or might not have worked; here, all you have to do is
refuse to give him his revolver.

6. Naturally, the biggest addition to the remake is that of

the unfortunate Lisa Trevor, as mentioned above. More about
Lisa can be found by reading Wesker's Report 2, detailed below.

7. If Wesker "dies" in the encounter with the Tyrant, you

can search his body to find a file written by William
Birkin. In it, he writes about how the G-Virus is almost
finished, and how he wishes he could rub his success in
Alexia Ashford's face (see RE:CV, below).

8. If your support character manages to make it to the end

of the game, s/he'll help you in the final battle with the
Tyrant, on the helipad. During this time, if the Tyrant
manages to knock your character down, it'll leave you
alone in favor of grabbing your support character by the
neck. Unless you shoot the Tyrant at this point, it'll
kill your support character, which will cue the fifth
possible ending.

9. In the original game's best ending for Jill, you could

return to the power room after the self-destruct sequence
to find a Chimera standing over Wesker's dead body. Such is
no longer the case in the remake; the power room is empty.

10. The mansion wardrobe is now hidden in the darkened

closet in the east statue room. Check the large painting
against the back wall. It's actually a door.

11. Chris meets Rebecca when he enters the mansion attic;

she is no longer lurking evilly in the infirmary with a
can of bug spray. In REv.2, this is the first time Chris
and Rebecca meet, period, since as we learn in RE0, the
Raccoon Forest investigation is Rebecca's first case as
a member of STARS.

12. In the helipad encounter, the Tyrant can and will

bat an incoming rocket out of the way with its claw.

======================
4iv. Random Commentary
======================

1. I have to admit that I'm disappointed with the remake.

They kept some of the stupid things, like Chris's low item
capacity, and didn't address the issue of Rebecca's survival.

2. The Lisa Trevor subplot appears, at first glance, to be

almost completely meaningless; it's just there to add another
Tyrant-esque monster. This is largely accurate. However, if
you want to see how she figures into the larger plot, it
helps to hunt down a translation of Wesker's Report 2, which
is discussed further below.

3. The existence of Crimson Heads in RE lends credence to

the statement in Survivor that Lickers, the wall-crawling
monsters first encountered in Resident Evil 2, are mutated
zombies. If a zombie can mutate into a faster form that's
sporting vicious claws, it's entirely feasible for it to
mutate further into the still-vaguely-humanoid Licker.
4. Cinematic references in RE:
-- the deer head in the study is from the 1990 remake of
_Night of the Living Dead_. Deer heads from this point
forward have a weird habit of showing up throughout the
series.
-- I may be on crack, but the end sequence of the game,
with the Tyrant bursting from the rooftop, seems to
be taken almost frame-for-frame from a 1990 Japanese
sf film called _Zeram_.
-- alert reader Jay Yencich writes to say that the
opening title-screen sequence of RE is much akin to
the death and zombification of Roger in _Dawn of
the Dead_.
-- according to Dan's official RE strategy guide, Chris
and Jill's alternate costumes are from _The Mexican_
and _Terminator 2: Judgement Day_, respectively. Chris
is dressing like the Brad Pitt character in the former
film, while Jill is dressing like Linda Hamilton in
the latter.
-- Kenneth's Film is reminiscent of the shoulder cameras
worn by the Marines in _Aliens_.

==================================================================
5. RESIDENT EVIL 2
==================================================================

The original RE is a straightforward horror game that leaves no

real questions unanswered by the time it's over. Resident Evil 2,
on the other hand, introduces the secret agendas and conspiracies
that are now a hallmark of the series. In a very real sense, this
game is the true beginning.

====================================================
5iii. A Summary of the Basic Plot of RESIDENT EVIL 2
by Dan Birlew
====================================================

On the night of September 29th, 1998, Claire Redfield

motorbikes into Raccoon City. She is a college student, and
is searching for clues in the disappearance of her older
brother Chris. On the other side of town, Raccoon Police
Department recruit Leon Kennedy is making his way to the
Precinct for his first day of duty. Stopping to investigate
a mysterious corpse in the middle of the street, he fails to
notice the figures closing in behind him. Claire pulls up to
a diner for a late meal, but finds that she is intended to
be the next course.

Both characters are surrounded by zombies. They collide in

the alley behind the diner, where Leon saves Claire. Finding
an abandoned police cruiser, they make a run for it.

In the car they get acquainted, while Claire finds a gun in

the glove compartment. But they are not alone. In an amazing
sequence, a zombie leaps out of the backseat and struggles with
Leon. The rookie loses control of the vehicle and they crash into
a wall. The zombie flies through the windshield. Before they can
catch a breath, a dying trucker bears down on them in a massive
gas tanker. The two leap out of the wreck as the tanker collides
and flips over, exploding in a huge ball of flame. The characters
are separated by the blaze, and each must make their individual
way through the game.

This is the point at which the player begins, choosing which

character to assume based on which of the two game disks are
loaded. When the player finishes with one character's adventure,
the save file enables the player to approach the same game from
the other character's perspective, in a reverse game. Thus, the
scenarios progress as either Claire A & Leon B, or Leon A &
Claire B. There are differences in each game, and there are
differences in each combination. In addition, whatever the
first character does in their scenario affects the second
character's game.

For the purpose of brevity, this synopsis will follow the

plot as it occurs in the Claire A & Leon B combination, which
is by far the more structurally sound of the two scenario
combinations.

Claire begins on the Raccoon City streets, now overrun by the

zombies who have come out due to the crash. By baiting them
in a certain direction, she figures out that she can create
openings in their ranks and slip past them. She ducks into a
gun shop, hoping to find ammo for her weapon.

Inside, the clerk points a crossbow at her. After she

convinces him that she's not a zombie, he locks his door.
With a slightly sexist attitude, he admits he doesn't know
what is happening in Raccoon City or where the zombies have
come from. Claire finds some ammunition for her gun and
starts to move on just as the undead lay siege to the store.
Crashing through the display window, they tackle the shop's
employee and chew him to pieces on the floor. Unable to save
the man, Claire's only hope is to run through the back door.
(In the N64 RE2 'port, we find out this man's name is Robert
Kendo, and he's the owner of the gun shop.)

Weaving her way through the slow moving ghouls, she makes
her way to the police station. S.T.A.R.S. helicopter pilot Brad
Vickers is encountered near the precinct, recently deceased
and come back by diabolic means. Executing this former hero,
Claire enters the Raccoon Police Department. She finds that
the place has been electronically locked and barricaded
against an apparent siege by the undead.

Leon finds himself directly behind the Police Department. He

has a shorter run than Claire, but must find the key to get
into the maintenance shed at the back of the Precinct. All
the while, flesh eaters converge on him. He gets lucky and
finds a back stairway to the roof of the station, but he
witnesses a rescue attempt fail.

A helicopter appears overhead. There is a lone precinct

survivor on the roof, signaling to it. Zombies attack the
unfortunate wretch. He sprays random machine gun fire
everywhere, accidentally killing the helicopter's pilot.
The helicopter crashes into the station and explodes into
flames. There's a water tank near the wreckage that can be
used to put out the fire, but Leon will need a valve handle.

Claire finds a cop lying on the floor of an office, seriously

wounded and dying. (In RE3, we learn that the cop's name is
Marvin Branagh.) In a brief speech, he tells Claire that her
brother Chris, and the other S.T.A.R.S., tried to get them to
believe that they'd encountered zombies in the woods outside
Raccoon, but no one would listen to them. He gives her the
card key that will open the electronic locks in the Precinct.
He tells her to rescue the other survivors in the police
station and get out. When she starts to protest, the
half-disemboweled officer sticks a gun in her face and
rudely orders her out. He locks the door behind her. Claire
accesses the computer in the main hall, unlocks the doors,
and continues on.

In the zombie-infested office on the first floor, Leon finds

the necessary tool to put out the fire. When he opens the
water tank and douses the blaze, another helicopter appears
overhead. This one is towing a rack of huge cylinders. One
of them detaches and drops. The bomb-like container blows
apart, revealing a huge humanoid creature. The giant crashes
through the roof of the precinct. The trenchcoated menace
heads right for Leon, who empties his weapon into the
stalking monstrosity before it falls. When Leon leaves the
room, the sinister intruder rises... and follows. Little
does Leon know, but anyone who had survived the mansion
incident might recognize this creature as a new and improved
version of the Tyrant.

At the same time on different sides of the station, Claire

and Leon both encounter a new and deadly lifeform.
Amphibious and spider-like, these creatures look like
crawling people turned inside out. They lash out with claws
and an incredibly long and sharp tongue. Police documents
refer to these creatures as "lickers," and no one knows
where they came from.

On the second floor of the west wing of the precinct house,

Claire finds the S.T.A.R.S. office and the log kept by her big
brother Chris. This document explains that he and the other
S.T.A.R.S. members had no luck investigating the involvement
of the Umbrella Corporation in the mansion lab incident. They
departed for Europe to search for Umbrella's main
headquarters. Suddenly a fax comes in, addressed to Chris. A
federal investigation on Umbrella has yielded naught for
clues, but an inquiry posted to the internal affairs
division by Chris regarding Raccoon Police Chief Brian Irons
has been answered. By his record, the Chief would appear to
be a deranged genius and former rapist.

Back outside the office, Claire catches sight of a young

girl being pursued by a zombie. While Claire dispatches this
thing, the fleeing little girl bumps into Leon. Frightened
out of her mind, she ducks into a small opening in a broken
door before he can stop her. Leon and Claire reunite. Leon
admits that this place is dangerous, and Claire suggests
that they split up and look for the girl and a safe exit. The
rookie cop gives her a radio so they can keep in contact.
Leon finds the two parts of a police operation report,
detailing the events of the past few days. The courageous
citizens of Raccoon made a grim standoff in the precinct
house against the flesh-eating undead. But some escaped the
precinct through the exit to the basement in the east wing.
He also finds a note addressed to him from the RPD, and the
party favors for a surprise welcome party they were planning
to throw for him. It seems his party has been cancelled.

He heads for the basement while Claire is startled by a

woman's screaming on the second floor. In order to save
whoever's in trouble, she needs a bomb to clear the helicopter
wreckage. Nearby, she finds the key to unlock the door
downstairs and save the wounded cop. When she returns to
him, he has been fighting off zombies unsuccessfully. Claire
now learns why he rudely forced her to leave him. He
rises, transforms into a zombie, and attacks her. Sadly,
Claire incinerates him. She finds a detonator and a chunk
of plastique, and heads back upstairs.

In the basement, Leon is fired upon by a beautiful woman

named Ada Wong. She's looking for a reporter named Ben
Bertolucci in one of the basement jail cells. After Leon
graciously helps her clear some wreckage out of the way, she
ditches him. He tries to catch up to her, but instead finds
the incarcerated reporter in one of the jail cells. Ada
catches up to them now, but where she went first is a
mystery. Questioning Ben, Ada reveals that she's looking for
her boyfriend John, who works out of an Umbrella branch
office in Chicago. He disappeared in this area some months
ago. Ben refuses to tell her what he knows about what's
happening in Raccoon City. Just then, a monstrous roar fills
the air. Ben has locked himself in his cell for protection
and refuses to leave, but directs the others how to get out
of the Precinct. Ada takes off, and Leon runs after her.

Claire detonates the plastique near the helicopter wreckage

upstairs. She finds an office full of stuffed trophy
animals... and a more gruesome trophy on the desk. The
Mayor's daughter lies sprawled out, a medium-sized wound at
her abdomen. Behind the desk sits Police Chief Brian Irons.
He has completely lost his mind. Although the girl's wound
looks like a bullet hole, he claims that she was attacked by
a zombie, and that she will resurrect within an hour. The
only way to stop the zombification is to decapitate the
victim or put a bullet through the brain. He admits that
taxidermy used to be his hobby (which links him to the
Umbrella mansion, because of all the stuffed trophies found
by the S.T.A.R.S. team there). He asks to be left alone,
and Claire is only too willing to get away from him.

In the room next to the Chief's office, Claire hears the quick
footsteps of someone fleeing from her. She finds the little
girl crouched in the dark. She radios Leon to let him know
that she cleared the helicopter wreckage and found the
little girl. The little girl says her name is Sherry Birkin,
and her parents work at the Umbrella plant. Her mother
called her during the T-virus outbreak and instructed her to
go to the police station for safety. She has heard her
father's voice in the station, but can't find him. Also, a
creature is stalking her. A mighty roar emanates from
nearby. Sherry runs off, and Claire tries to pursue her. In
the office, the Chief and the dead woman's body have
disappeared. However, he has left behind his diary detailing
the extents of his depravity.

Leon has found the sewer system that runs under the city. In
the processing plant, he comes across what appears to be the
exit door but doesn't have all the necessary keys to get
through. Going back, he finds Ada also investigating the
sewage plant. She has found an open vent shaft that she can
get through with a boost. She hits the ground on the other
side, startling the same little girl Leon and Claire
encountered previously. As she runs off, Ada notices that
the little girl dropped her pendant. Amused, she decides to
keep it in case they meet again. After a quick search, she
finds a precinct key and returns to where Leon waits. She
throws the key back through the vent, but she can't get back
herself because the vent is too high. Once again, Ada runs
off on her own against Leon's orders.

Leon returns to the precinct house, searching for the last

few keys he needs to get out. While looking for clues on the
first floor, the horrible Tyrant bursts through the wall, and
only falls after Leon empties his shotgun into it. Leon races
upstairs and finds more items he needs. The Tyrant follows.
Again, Leon is forced to shoot it out with this brute. The
thing is finally subdued, even if only for the moment.

After gathering several keys of her own, Claire finally

catches up to Sherry in the Chief's office. Behind the desk
is a secret elevator, and Claire makes Sherry stay behind
while she goes to investigate. The elevator lowers her into
some kind of custom dungeon beneath the precinct, lit by
flickering torches. As Claire cautiously creeps down the
hall, she hears the Chief scream.

In his private chamber, Chief Irons is backed into a corner

by a hideous mutating creature. Something shoots out of this
thing's hand and down Irons's throat.

In a hideous torture room, Claire finds the Chief, ranting,

raving, and armed. He explains to Claire that his town has
been torn apart by the experimental monsters of the Umbrella
corporation. He tells her that a man named William Birkin is
to blame. Claire recognizes the name. Irons states that
Sherry is Birkin's daughter. Completely paranoid, the Chief
is ready to kill Claire. Before he can execute her, something
bursts through his upper torso from within. A small creature
leaps out of Irons and falls down an open chute nearby. Claire
follows this thing, only to see it quickly grow into some kind
of horrible infant. The thing attacks her, but she destroys it
fairly easily. She runs back to the second floor to get Sherry;
their escape route is now clear.

Leon makes his way to the precinct's clock tower where he

finds the final piece in the Chief's bizarre architectural
puzzle. Now able to exit the police station, he finds an
open dust chute and slides back down to the basement. Upon
landing, he hears Ben screaming in the jail cell nearby.
Leon runs to the reporter's aid, but is too late. The same
thing that impregnated Irons has gutted Ben. The dying
reporter gives Leon a document which entangles Raccoon
City's chief of police in a government conspiracy. In terrible
pain, Ben dies. Ada finally catches up to Leon, and they
read this document together. It is a series of letters from
William Birkin to the police chief, describing in detail how
Umbrella was bribing the chief to keep secret their actions
in the town. Birkin had learned that Umbrella sent spies to
steal his research. Ada then rushes off, explaining only
that she has to find John. She thinks he's in the chemical
plant. Leon is prevented from following by another call from
Claire. She has found a different exit from the precinct and
will join him in the sewers.

Leon runs after Ada, but in the sewage plant, he is

confronted by the mutating Dr. Birkin. The scientist wrenches
a steel pipe off of the wall and attacks Leon with it. Leon
empties a full clip of Magnum bullets into the scientist,
who doesn't fall. Instead, Birkin dives into the muck of
the sewers.

In the sewer beneath the station, Sherry is separated from

Claire when a drainage chute opens and sucks her into a
lower level. Sherry runs for safety, finding herself in a
garbage room. Just when she finds a nice shiny trinket, the
floor springs open and dumps her into the garbage hold.
Knocked unconscious, she fails to see a monster slouch out
of the darkness. Birkin has found his daughter at last.

Ada abruptly rejoins Leon, and he admonishes her for

running off. She agrees to stick with him, for now.

Searching everywhere to find Sherry, Claire runs into her

mother, Annette. The suspicious woman worked with her
husband William on a bioweapon called the G-Virus, a
mutagenic substance that turns whatever it infects into
a giant monster. Birkin injected himself with the virus
when armed Umbrella agents seized the virus from him.
When Birkin was accidentally shot, he used the virus to
keep himself alive. The G-Virus rejuvenates dead cells,
but it also mutates them. He became a monster, a "G-Type,"
and hunted his killers down. The T-Virus leaked from his
laboratory after the attack, and was carried into Raccoon
City by the rats in the sewers.

The G-Virus seeks to spread by finding other host bodies.

When Annette learns that Sherry is in the chemical plant,
she becomes upset. The virus can only be spread through a
complimentary genetic host. Birkin will try to find and
impregnate Sherry with a virus embryo. From somewhere close,
they hear the little girl scream. Claire sends Annette
searching in the opposite direction and continues on.

Leon and Ada search the chemical plant for weapons and
ammunition. They bump into the frantic Annette. Ada chases
the armed scientist. Annette turns and fires on her pursuer,
but Leon jumps in front of Ada and takes the bullet. While
Leon lies unconscious and seriously wounded, Ada chooses to
run after Annette.

Claire finds the garbage dump and spots Sherry, lying

unconscious on a heap of rubble. She calls out to the little
girl, but a gigantic alligator hears her and attacks. Claire
runs back down the corridor and finds a switch to release a
gas canister. When the alligator grabs the canister in its
huge maw, Claire shoots the cylinder. The resulting explosion
flings chunks of the sewer beast's head everywhere. Moving
to Sherry, Claire spots somesort of red worm slithering away;
it is one of William's embryos. Stirring, Sherry complains
of stomach pains. Claire assures her that everything will be
all right. She leads Sherry out of the spider-infested sewers,
past the bodies of several soldiers wearing gas masks...

Ada hounds the scientist through the sewers to the central

control area. Annette blasts Ada's gun out of her hand, an
adept shot for a scientist. She advances on Ada,
interrogating her. Learning that Ada is looking for her
boyfriend John, Annette realizes that she's talking about
one of the researchers at the mansion lab. She knows that
John turned into a zombie, and then died when the lab was
destroyed. She makes it seem that William was working at the
mansion as well, and that he developed the G-Virus there.
Annette starts to explain the new G-Virus to Ada when she
spots her daughter's pendant around the woman's neck. In a
suddenly aggressive manner, she demands to have it. A cat
fight ensues, ending with Ada punching Annette and sending
her flying over the rail. Inside Sherry's pendant, Ada finds
a secret compartment containing a sample of the G-Virus.

Claire and Sherry discover an underground tramcar. After

powering it up, they ride for some distance to an unknown dock.
Apparently they aren't out of danger yet, as the grunts of
the undead are heard nearby. Claire blasts through corridors
full of zombies. They arrive at a train turntable platform.
Inside the engine car, Claire finds the key to the control
panel outside. An alarm sounds upon activation, and the
girls run back inside the car. The entire platform
disengages and drops. It seems they have found some sort of
large secret elevator. Sherry is overcome by her stomach
pains and passes out. Her monstrous father shows up,
threatening to smash the traincar to pieces. Claire runs
outside and ducks a steel rod flung at her by William. The
screaming madman mutates, growing a new head and a
vicious-looking claw. Claire quickly pelts the thing with
enough flame grenades to burn down a forest. When the G-Type
is finally face down in a pool of its own blood, Claire runs
back into the train car. The elevator finishes its descent,
and she carries the unconscious girl into an Umbrella
loading dock. It would seem she has discovered a large
underground laboratory.

A slightly delirious Leon awakens and hunts for Ada. He

finds her in the subterranean garbage dump. After bandaging
his bullet wound, she lets him know that John is dead. She
doesn't seem terribly upset though, and insists they get out
of the sewage plant. At the tram platform, Leon recalls the
car. They board and head for the train elevator. On route,
they are attacked by the G-Type, which isn't dead yet. It
stabs one gigantic claw through the ceiling over and over,
seeking the passengers. Ada fires at the hand, blowing off
one of the fingers. The monster retreats. The two slip out
of the tram and make for the train platform.

Claire sets Sherry on a cot in the security office. She

gives Sherry her vest to keep her warm. The girl stirs, and
lets Claire know that she trusts her and depends on her.
Claire assures her that she will find something to cure her.

Leon has to recall the train elevator platform. Leaving Ada

in the control room, he descends to a secret security room
and there finds the necessary key. When he flips on the
surveillance camera aimed at the door he just entered, he
sees Umbrella's ugliest and most fearsome agent hot on his
trail. After one more battle with this 'Mr. X', Leon returns
to the upper control room to find Ada unharmed. He recalls
the elevator from there and they descend to the lab. But
their moment alone is not to be enjoyed. William is back,
and he exacts a terrible revenge against Ada. His claw
shoots through the wall, stabbing her in the back. She
passes out, and Leon goes out to fight William. The
G-Type has grown two new arms and doubled in size. Leon
pumps the thing full of shotgun blasts before it does any
good. Bleeding heavily, William leaps onto the elevator
shaft wall and leaves Leon alone.

In the lab, Claire figures out that the main power conduit
has been shut down. She finds a fuse for power connection,
and then she is free to explore the lab. Umbrella has
conducted further experiments with plant vegetation, as a
titanic vine grows up from the bottom of one shaft. Its
offspring slide along the ground, spitting acid at her.
Worse, there is an even stronger variety of the "lickers"
here than those encountered before.

The elevator platform's engine overheats, and it stops on an

upper floor of the lab. Leon leaves the wounded Ada in the
train car while he goes searching for something to patch her
wound. He crawls through a vent duct and drops into a
corridor. The elevator platform restarts and continues to
descend. Leon has lost Ada again. He finds an emergency
elevator that will take him down to where Ada has gone, but
it needs power. He finds a door to a "Power Room," but it is
locked. In a room with a huge smelting pit, he fights his
way through the tougher new breed of "lickers." He connects
the emergency elevator's power and goes up to the lab. In
what is obviously William Birkin's former experiment room,
he finds the power room key and goes back to the first level.

Leon runs off the elevator, but not very far. Annette Birkin
somehow sneaks up on him, brandishing a pistol and a vial
of blue liquid. She accuses him of being a spy, just like
the girl he's with. Leon denies that Ada is a spy, and Annette
laughs. She's done a background check on Ada, and has discovered
that Ada works for "the Agency." She's an undercover agent,
using her relationship with John, the researcher, to gather
information on Umbrella. Annette declares that no one will
take her husband's virus from her, and prepares to shoot
Leon. Mr. X suddenly crashes through the ceiling behind Leon.
Annette flees. Evading the powerful giant, Leon gets to the
power room and unlocks it. The monster has followed him, and
now the rookie cop is cornered. Shots ring out. Ada is back,
blasting away at the unholy behemoth. Unfortunately, she runs
out of bullets. As she reloads, the Tyrant seizes her and
lifts her into the air. Ada fires several rounds point blank
into his face. Temporarily blinded, the giant swings Ada into
a control panel, denting the panel and probably breaking every
bone in her body. Blood gushing from his face, Mr. X falls off
the platform into the smelting pit. Leon runs to Ada's side.
In her last moments, she tells him that she's fallen in love
with him. Leon kisses her passionately. Ada goes limp and dies.
Leon screams in grief. Near Ada's body, Leon finds a master key
that fell out of Ada's pocket when Mr. X dropped her.

After Claire finds a keycard in the research room, Annette

pops up again. She's still armed and dangerous, and somehow
knows that Claire tried to kill William. After Claire tells
Annette that Sherry has been infected by the G-Type, the
monster growls nearby. Excited, Annette runs after him.
William crashes out of the ceiling, still alive. More
monster than human now, he cuts his own wife down with one
terrible claw swipe. When Claire rounds the corner he leaps
back up into the ceiling. A dying Annette begs Claire to
save her daughter, giving her detailed instructions on how
to create an antidote to the G-Virus, using materials that
can be found somewhere in the lab.

The damaged central unit in the power room is wracked by

explosions. Lightning bolts course up and down the huge
column. A computer voice comes online to announce that the
self-destruct sequence has been activated, and all personnel
should evacuate to the cargo train platform at the lowest
floor of the lab.

At the edge of the iron smelting pit, a gigantic clawed hand

emerges from the red hot pool. Mr. X isn't down for good
yet, and he may be more dangerous than ever.

Claire runs out to the monitor room. A motion detector

alerts her that someone else is in the lab. Leon is
onscreen, emerging from the power room. Claire tells him to
go back to the security office to rescue Sherry while she
creates the G-virus antidote.

Leon rides the elevator back down into the lab, and retrieves
the barely conscious girl. He uses the master key in the
elevator to take the emergency access tube and reach the
lab's escape route, a high-speed train.

Following the instructions for the G-Virus vaccine, Claire

rushes to the VAM room on the Lab's fourth floor. Killing
several last zombies, she finds a vaccine cartridge. Reading
the instructions for the "Devil" vaccine, she inserts the
cartridge into the machine and starts it up, allowing the
base vaccine to be synthesized. She takes the cartridge and
heads back down to Birkin's lab.

Leon finds the train without power. Laying Sherry on the cot
inside, he finds a platform key at the back of the train and
hurries to power up their escape transport.

Claire inserts the base vaccine into the virus antidote

synthesizer in Birkin's lab, and the machine creates the
"Devil" automatically. On her way back out, she accesses a
corridor to the experimental containment room, where she
finds a huge cargo elevator that will take her down to the
train platform.

An explosion rocks the entire lab. The computer announces

that the self-destruct sequence has begun. There are only
five minutes remaining until total detonation.

Leon races across a bridge over the train to the opposite

platform. There he unlocks the containment chamber for the
power plugs for the train's generator. He takes the plugs
into the next room and inserts them into the power grid. The
computer warns him that the power will be completely shut
down momentarily in order to power up the train. In the
blackout, a huge creature lands behind him. A transformed
Mr. X is ablaze from his dip in the molten vat. With two
huge claws, he charges at Leon, knocking the poor guy from
one end of the room to the other. Suddenly another familiar
shape appears, at the top of the gantry over them. Still
wearing Sherry's pendant, Ada drops Leon a rocket launcher.
The cop recognizes her, but doesn't have a moment to spare.
He dives for the launcher, scoops it up, and fires at his
vicious adversary. The creature explodes into a dozen body
parts. The power comes back on and so do the lights. With
two minutes until detonation, Leon runs back to the train.

Waiting patiently for the elevator to reach her floor,

Claire's thoughts are suddenly interrupted as something
smashes through the ceiling right above her. She backs up
just in time to avoid being squashed as the G-Type drops
into the room. She fires several grenades into the genetic
monstrosity, but all she does is trigger yet another mutation.
The creature's newest form is doglike, pursuing Claire on
four legs and slashing at her with a mouthful of jagged
fangs. Claire runs around the room, playing matador as it
charges at her. Finally, her weapons have an impact on the
thing, and it dissolves into a puddle of genetic jelly.
Claire's elevator arrives, right on cue, and she descends
to the train loading platform.

Leon finds the train platform crawling with naked zombies.

Blowing their heads off left and right, he fights his way
to the switch that opens the gate blocking the train's path,
and throws it. As the gates open, he returns to the train
and starts it up. Slowly, the train comes to life.

Claire gets to the platform just as the train is taking off.

She sees Leon, leaning out an open door, yelling for her to
get on. She misses that opportunity, but luckily there is
another open door.

Once she's inside, the Umbrella lab completes its detonation

sequence in a huge explosion. The train rocks, throwing a
still-unconscious Sherry to the floor. Claire quickly
administers the vaccine to her and they wait. Finally, Sherry
comes to and thanks Claire for saving her. Leon thinks that
the danger is over, but Claire disagrees. She still has to
find her brother. Leon moves up into the cockpit. Still upset,
he says goodbye to Ada.

The train suddenly lurches. Leon moves back into the cabin
with the girls. No one can figure out what the disturbance
was. Leon runs toward the back of the train. The train is
equipped with the same computer system as the lab. The
computer warns them that a bio-hazardous material has been
detected on board. The train will detonate in just two
minutes. The cabin is locked, and Leon is unable to get back
to Sherry and Claire. He runs to the back of the train to
search the cargo compartments.

At the rear, giant tentacles smash through the ceiling. Leon

races back to the front as the G-Type makes an encore
appearance. Birkin is now nothing more than a gigantic black
blob, pulling itself forward with four huge tentacles. Leon
blasts the thing until it loses solidity once more. Then he
heads back toward the cabin.

===================================================
5iv. A Summary of the Conclusion of RESIDENT EVIL 2
===================================================

Leon, standing on the gap between the train's two cars,

tries to get back inside and discovers the door has locked.
Claire can't open it from the other side. The biohazard
is still present, apparently... and still after Sherry.

The G-Type has reformed, and attempts to smash into the

cabin. Claire, not knowing where Leon is, tells Sherry to
hide. Sherry opens a vent to the cockpit and crawls through.
She promises Claire that she can stop the train.

Leon is on top of the engine car, climbing up to the

cockpit. He looks behind him to see the G-Type's tentacles
searching for him.

The main body of the G-Type smashes into the cabin. In order
to hide, Claire climbs down through a hatch and hangs onto
the bottom of the train while it's still moving.

Leon rips open an escape hatch on the roof of the cockpit.

Sherry hasn't had so much luck figuring out which button to
push. Leon spots the emergency stop switch immediately and
points it out to her. Sherry slams her fist on the button.

The train brakes. Sparks shoot out from behind the wheels as
the transport slows, dousing Claire in a shower of yellow
fire. She fights to hold on.
The train stops. The computer warns that the train will
detonate in thirty seconds. Claire crawls out of her hiding
spot and with a sigh of relief, spots daylight at the exit
of the train tunnel. Leon and Sherry are out, looking for
Claire at the front of the train. She joins them just as the
G-Type smashes into the cockpit. The heroes dash for the
mouth of the tunnel, through which they can see the rising
sun. They've lived to see the morning of September 30th.

The monster's tentacles smash through the cockpit

windshield, searching for its enemies. The computer counts
down, 5, 4, 3, 2...

At the last second, the G-Type realizes what's about to happen.

The heroes leap clear of the tunnel.

The transport train detonates quickly car by car, from the

rear to the front. A vicious geyser of fire blasts out of
the tunnel.

Claire and Sherry get up, commenting that they both look
pretty awful. Leon rises, but is already moving off, saying
they don't have time to waste. Claire wonders why. Leon
turns and tells them, "Hey, it's up to us to take out Umbrella."

Blackout. Heavy metal theme music and the credits roll.

===========================================================
5v. Differences Between Claire A/Leon B and Leon A/Claire B
by Dan Birlew
===========================================================

If you play the game in the opposite order, starting with

Leon first, the plot is different in several respects:

1. Sherry keeps her pendant throughout the game. This means

that Ada never obtains the pendant or the G-Virus sample it
contains. Also, Mr. X wants the G-Virus, so he goes after
Sherry and Claire and not Leon and Ada.

2. Annette explains William's mutation and the cause of the

outbreak to Ada, rather than to Claire. Claire finds Annette
after Ada knocks her over the rail, and Annette falls
unconscious soon afterwards.

3. Sherry is never impregnated with a G-Type embryo, so

Claire doesn't have to create a G-Virus antidote. Thus, no
mention of an antidote is heard.

4. Ben Bertolucci is impregnated by Birkin with a G-Type

embryo that later bursts out of him. Why Birkin would
implant him with this is never discussed or explained.

5. Chief Irons is ripped in half by Birkin.

6. Annette is fatally wounded when the G-Type pounds on the

ceiling in the lab and drops a pipe on her head. Leon takes
the G-Virus sample that she is holding.

7. Leon confronts Ada about being a spy. Annette, barely

alive, shoots Ada. Leon's love falls over the rail into a
deep chasm. Enraged, Leon tosses the G-Virus after her.

8. In the game's finales, Leon confronts the G-Type while

Claire battles Mr. X. Likewise, while escaping from the RPD,
Claire fights the G-Type embryo and Leon is attacked by
Dr. Birkin.

9. In Claire's final confrontations with Mr. X, she lures

him into the smelting pool by tossing Sherry's pendant with
the G-Virus over the side. On the trainpower platform, Claire
is aided in her battle against the mutated Mr. X by Ada. This
provides a larger mystery than the previously explored
scenario. How did Ada survive such a fall?

10. At the end of the closing movie, it is Claire instead of

Leon who leads them off, saying, "Chris... I have to find you."

Perhaps the reasons why the previous plot summary focused on

Claire A/ Leon B are now clear. The focus scenario is much
richer in plot and explanations. There is not as great a
leap of faith required to believe that Ada still lives.

Resident Evil 2 is a game much richer in story than its

predecessor, as is evidenced by the number of pages needed
to summarize the plot versus that of the original Resident
Evil. In this chapter of the story, questions are raised.
Some are answered, while others may never be solved.

==============================
5vi. The 4th Survivor Minigame
by Dan Birlew
==============================

A couple of secret games are available to the most capable

of Resident Evil survivors. With the right timing, skill,
and stamina, players will receive an A ranking in Resident
Evil 2. While the secret weapons gained make for a fun
replay, the most interesting aspect of this ranking is a new
playable character named "Hunk." The players are asked to
create a new save file for a minigame called The 4th
Survivor, the special mission suitable only for this
seasoned Umbrella agent. The 4th Survivor is a "battle
game." The player is given a limited amount of ammunition, a
simple goal, and an enormous army of evil monsters to outwit
in order to survive. This side-adventure is a true test of a
player's survival skills.

Whether it is his real name or a codename is uncertain, but

Hunk is certainly a buff character. Dressed in militaristic
biohazard containment gear, Hunk's eyes glow with the power
of his infrared goggles. He runs much faster than the usual
Resident Evil playable character, even when seriously wounded.

Playing as Hunk requires a good amount of quick thinking and

strategy on the part of the player. While some strategies
can be useful every time, the game's enemies sometimes react
differently to Hunk. This means that The 4th Survivor is
always a challenge, even to seasoned Resident Evil veterans.

==========================================
5vii. A Brief Summary of The 4th Survivor
by Dan Birlew
==========================================

The game begins in a total blackout. Someone is thinking,

"G-...G-Virus... I have to deliver it to Umbrella..." The
scene opens at the end of the sewer station, sometime after
Ada and Leon have made their way to the Lab, but before the
end of the regular game. A body floats face down in the
muck, one of the Umbrella infiltrators sent to steal the
G-Virus from renegade scientist William Birkin. The body
stirs, shifts, and shows signs of life. Slowly, Hunk regains
consciousness and rises.

After a quick look around, Hunk pulls out his radio. "Alpha
team here," he says through his gas mask, "Mission
accomplished."

"Roger," confirms another agent on the radio. "We'll meet

at the rendezvous point."

A map cuts in. A blinking beacon light shows Hunk that he

has to get to the second floor roof of the RPD precinct house
in order to be airlifted out. Hunk takes off up the stairs.

Between this stealthy agent and his goal is a small army of

the evil dead. Zombies plague his flight, along with giant
spiders, killer dogs, and slithering botanical experiments.
He has only a limited amount of ammunition, and must balance
his present needs against what he may encounter in the future.
Luckily he has some herbs to heal himself and treat poisons,
but it's not a lot. Leon and Claire have already taken all of
the ammunition from the RPD, so Hunk is stuck with what he has.

The zombies have retaken the Precinct in greater numbers

than ever before, and have laid several traps for the
unfortunate Umbrella agent. With some skill, he just barely
avoids these. But as he nears his goal, the insanity grows.
Each room bears an ever-greater horde of ghouls, quickly
converging on the lone survivalist. Shaking off his
attackers, he clears a pathway out with the barrel of his
gore-splattered gun.

After several close calls, Hunk tops a staircase to the

second floor of the RPD. He's halfway home, but the
nightmare is not yet over. Stomping toward him is a
monstrosity he has only heard rumors about at his agency. At
long last, Umbrella has perfected the Tyrant, and they've
sent it after the G-Virus. Somehow able to sense that Hunk
possesses a sample, the monster attacks him. Reasoning with
the beast would be no use, so Hunk evades the slowly
advancing thing and moves on.

In the final hallway, Hunk meets the Tyrant once again. How
it got over here so quickly is a real mystery, one Hunk
doesn't have time to solve. Evading the hulk yet again, the
agent reaches the roof and lights his last flare to signal
for a rescue.

The pick-up chopper swoops overhead immediately, as if it

has only been a block away this entire time. It hovers over
the precinct for an unbearably long moment, then a bright
spotlight is trained on Hunk. Impatiently, he waves for them
to come down and get him. The helicopter quickly lands and
airlifts the tired and wounded operative. As the Umbrella
chopper soars off into the ominous skies, a brief epilogue
appears on the screen. The agent has delivered the virus to
Umbrella, promising that this is the end of one nightmare,
but only the beginning of another.

=======================================
5viii. Conclusions About the Conclusion
=======================================

1. William Birkin's laboratory and research have been

destroyed, although samples of the G-Virus have made it
back to Umbrella.

2. Somehow Umbrella has almost perfected a Tyrant, and has

more at their disposal. Their research continues elsewhere.

3. Leon, Claire, and Sherry have all survived.

4. Ada has also survived, although it's nine years and six
games later before we find out exactly how.

5. Raccoon City is in ruins.

6. Leon has a new mission in life, while Claire continues hers.

7. The rest of the S.T.A.R.S. team may be somewhere in Europe.

======================
5ix. Random Commentary
======================

1. As pointed out by Dan Birlew in the original version of

this document, Tofu, another hidden character, is also
accessible in RE2. However, he is a block of bean curd with
a knife and a hat.

2. Mr. X isn't really very committed to his mission. He seems

to deliberately put it on hold a couple of times to go after
the player. This is most obvious in either B scenario, where
Mr. X leaves the character carrying the G-sample alone in
order to go down the elevator shaft after the player.

3. The fact that nobody has bothered to clean out the STARS
office is a running gag in the RE fan community.

4. Annette's claim that William Birkin created the T-Virus

was contested by files in Survivor and CV, and is flatly
contradicted by RE0. By now it can be considered to have
been thoroughly retconned, or that Annette only thinks William
invented it.

5. Note that "The 4th Survivor" is the first RE minigame

to actually figure into the plot. We won't see this again
until Assignment: Ada in RE4.

6. In the years since RE2 was released, virtually

every environment in it has been used as the setting for
some part of another game. Much of the RPD was recycled
for RE3 and RE:O2's "Desperate Times" scenario, Rebecca
visits part of the shipping lanes underneath the city in
RE0, RE:O's "Below Freezing Point" scenario is set in
Birkin's laboratory, and Jill fights the Nemesis in the
RPD's west hallway and roof in RE:UC.

7. The original PlayStation version of RE2 is unique in that

any time you die, it often fades to a gory scene where the
monster that kills you finishes you off. Zombies and dogs
rip out your throat, Ivies bite off your head, Lickers impale
you through the chest with their tongues, and so on. Later
versions of RE2 omit this completely.

8. Cinematic references in RE2:

-- the Umbrella lab is sort of a mixed bag of film
influences; I recognized bits taken from _Day of
the Dead_, _Return of the Living Dead Part 2_, and
_Return of the Living Dead Part 3_.
-- Leon is dressed more like Peter and Roger in _Dawn
of the Dead_ than like any other officer in the RPD.
-- the giant alligator may be a reference to the undead
alligators at the beginning of _Day of the Dead_.
-- okay, so I mentioned _Zeram_, right? The big pink
quasi-embryo that crawls out of Irons/Ben, as well
as the little pink embryos that crawl out of *that*,
look a lot like a similar creature, which is spawned
by an alien, in _Zeram_.

=============================================================
6. RESIDENT EVIL 3: NEMESIS
=============================================================

RE3 has had a greater impact than one would expect. It comes
off like it was thrown together in a hurry to cover a gap in
the schedule, and has a lot of recycled content, but it also
introduced one of the most famous monsters in the series: the
unstoppable, unpredictable Nemesis.

Set a day before RE2 begins, and concluding two days after RE2
ends, RE3 stars Jill Valentine. After the mansion incident, she
stayed in Raccoon City, quit the police force, and went underground.
Now, with almost no survivors left in the city, she makes a final
bid for survival: her last escape.

=====================================================
6i. A Summary of the Plot of RESIDENT EVIL 3: NEMESIS
=====================================================

Jill's escape attempt begins with an explosion, as she comes

flying out of an apartment building. Jill takes shelter inside a
nearby warehouse and meets another survivor. She tries to get him
to come with her, but he refuses to leave the warehouse. Jill tells
him that their only hope is to get out of town, but he shuts himself
inside a nearby trailer rather than listen.

Alone, Jill leaves the warehouse. The streets are disturbingly

quiet, with only the occasional zombie wandering around. As she
sneaks through a back alley, a man suddenly bursts out of a
closet, pursued by a mob of zombies. Jill recognizes him as
Brad Vickers, and runs after him.

After chasing him through the streets and back alleys of

Raccoon, Jill finds Brad inside a local bar. They briefly
talk about what's happened to the city. Brad, although he's
wounded, gets up, telling Jill that "he's comin' for us.
We're all gonna die! He's after S.T.A.R.S. members. There's
no escape!" With that, he leaves the bar.

Outside, Brad's nowhere to be found, so Jill sets out on her own.

She emerges onto the street in front of the RPD building, where
both ends are blocked by car crashes, but a nearby alleyway leads
further uptown. The door to it is locked, but Jill left a set of
lockpicks in her desk at the RPD. She heads there.

In front of the RPD building, Brad Vickers finds Jill again.

He looks like someone dropped a truck on him. He starts to
say something, but is cut off by the arrival of a new monster,
a humanoid creature dressed in black leather. Its face is
permanently stuck in a lipless grimace, it has the skin of a
burn victim, and large tentacles writhe underneath its coat.
Jill is frozen in horror as the creature grabs Brad by the face
and lifts him into the air. It kills Brad by stabbing him through
the skull with a tentacle, throws away his body, and advances
on Jill, muttering a single word: "...S.T.A.R.S...."

Jill's weapons seem to have no effect on the creature. She

ducks inside the RPD building and slams the doors behind
her. Although the doors buckle under the creature's attack,
they don't give. Safe for the moment, Jill searches the
building for equipment and ammunition. More than half of the
building has been sealed off by the few surviving police, but
she can still get to her old office.

The S.T.A.R.S. office is wrecked. Someone has deliberately

broken the radio and the desks have been ransacked. As Jill
leaves with her lockpicks, the radio plays an incoming
transmission from someone named Carlos. His unit has been cut
off and no survivors have been found. He asks for anyone who
can hear him to respond, but the broken radio can only receive
transmissions. All Jill can do is wish him luck as she leaves.

The only warning Jill gets before the creature returns is the
sound of shattering glass. It jumps through a window on the
first floor of the RPD, toting a rocket launcher in one hand.
Dodging a barrage of missiles, Jill barely manages to get out
of the RPD building alive. She picks the lock on the alleyway
door and keeps running, but the creature has vanished.
As Jill makes her way uptown, she finds a dead man wearing
the Umbrella logo. She searches the corpse and finds his
diary, which also contains his suicide note. He was a member
of the Umbrella Biohazard Countermeasures Service, a mercenary
team maintained by Umbrella, but the diary doesn't mention
why they were sent into Raccoon City.

More dead UBCS soldiers turn up elsewhere. One is lying in

front of a nearby parking garage, killed by a pack of zombie
dogs. Another has fallen victim to a new creature, a bizarre
breed of giant, mutated insect. These "drain deimos" are
surprisingly dangerous, but shots to their unarmored belly
kill them in seconds.

Jill steps back onto the street outside the construction

site, and sees a man run into a restaurant. Jill follows him
inside. He introduces himself as Carlos Oliviera, a corporal
in the UBCS, and asks if Jill's okay. When she expresses
disbelief--Jill can't believe that anyone from Umbrella
cares whether she's okay or not--Carlos elaborates: his
squad was told to rescue Raccoon's civilians, but the mission
went wrong the moment they landed. Before he can continue,
the creature stalking Jill reappears, coming in through the
restaurant's back door.

As the creature charges, Jill notices a gas leak in the

restaurant's kitchen. She and Carlos hide behind the counter,
and as the creature stops next to the leaking pipes, Jill
throws a lit oil lamp at it. The ensuing explosion nearly
kills both Jill and Carlos, but knocks the creature out.

As they leave the restaurant, Jill asks Carlos why his squad
was sent to Raccoon. Carlos's answer--that they're rescuing
civilians--isn't good enough for Jill, since the destruction
of Raccoon is largely Umbrella's fault. Carlos replies that
he and his fellow mercenaries are just hired hands, and if
Umbrella had some kind of ulterior motive for sending them
in, he doesn't know what it is. If Jill wants answers, she's
asking the wrong guy. The sound of shattering glass inside
the restaurant cuts him off. Carlos invites Jill to join his
squad, and runs off. Jill starts to follow Carlos, but the
creature comes after her again, seemingly unhurt.

After losing the creature in Raccoon's shopping district,

Jill hides inside the offices of the Raccoon Press. Inside,
she finds another gemstone that matches one she found in
the RPD building. They turn out to be the missing parts to a
time lock on the gates to Raccoon's city hall. Jill repairs
the lock and opens the gates.

The city hall is boarded up, and looks as though it's been
undergoing the same kind of siege as the RPD. Past it is a
trainyard, where one of Raccoon City's cable cars is parked.
Inside the cable car, Jill meets a gray-haired man wearing
the same logos as Carlos. Jill greets him, assuming he's one
of Carlos's teammates. The man insultingly asks her how she
managed to survive. Jill replies that she's a S.T.A.R.S.
member, which seems to satisfy him. He walks into the next
car, leaving Jill alone with a badly wounded and delirious
UBCS officer. Jill examines him, concluding that there's
not a lot she can do for him, and follows the grey-haired man.

Carlos is in the next cable car, and renews his invitation

from earlier. The gray-haired man, who is apparently Carlos's
commander, says that they can't trust Jill. Before Jill can
respond, Carlos says that they need her help, as their unit
has been reduced to Carlos, the gray-haired man, and Lieutenant
Mikhail, the injured man in the last cable car. His commander,
Nicholai, grudgingly agrees, and tells them about his plan.

An extraction helicopter is waiting for a signal from their

team. The designated landing zone is by the St. Michael Clock
Tower, a Raccoon City landmark. Nicholai intends to use the
cable car as a mobile shield to get them through Raccoon City,
although the car will require repairs first. Carlos and Jill
agree to this plan, and the three of them split up to look for
parts for the cable car.

First, Jill heads to a nearby gas station to get motor oil.

Carlos enters the station behind her, but a mob of zombies
sniffs them out. As Carlos steps outside to keep the zombies
at bay, Jill opens a locked cabinet to get the oil they need.
Before she can get outside, a live wire falls into a pool of
motor oil in the gas station's garage, starting a fire. Jill
sprints out the front door.

Outside, Jill finds Carlos slumped against the wall, next to

a pile of dead zombies. Jill thinks he's dead for a second,
but Carlos shakily gets to his feet. The fire suddenly spreads
outside, to the pools of gasoline leaking from wrecked cars,
and then to the gas station's pumps. Jill and Carlos barely
escape an explosion that completely destroys both the gas
station and most of the block that it's on. As they pull
themselves to their feet, Carlos tells Jill that he's going
to look for extra equipment, and leaves.

Jill finds some engine parts and returns to the cable car
to fix it. Outside the cable car, Mikhail, despite his wounds,
massacres a horde of zombies before collapsing. Jill runs up
to him and demands to know if he has a death wish. Mikhail
insists that he cannot stop fighting just because he's wounded.
Even though the zombies are innocent victims as well, as Jill
says, Mikhail sees no reason why he should take responsibility
for anything that's happened to Raccoon. After all, none of
the UBCS soldiers are really involved with the company. Jill
agrees, and says that that's the only reason she's trusting
the UBCS at all.

Jill helps Mikhail back into the cable car and tells him to
rest. She also tries to repair the cable car's engine.
She has everything she needs, except a special additive
for the motor oil. She heads back into Raccoon, towards
an Umbrella-owned sales office.

On her way, Jill stops by the warehouse in downtown Raccoon

where she had taken shelter earlier. Inside, she finds a group
of zombies greedily devouring the body of the man who'd refused
to come with her. In the trailer that the man was hiding in,
Jill finds a book where he has written his final words. His
name was Dario Rosso, and he had always meant to be a novelist.

When Jill reaches the office, Nicholai is already there. He

has just killed another UBCS trooper who was infected with
the T-Virus. Jill demands that Nicholai explain why he shot the
man, who was still conscious. Nicholai explains to Jill, as
if it's obvious, that it took fewer bullets to kill the man
before he became a zombie.

Jill lets herself into the office's storage locker, where she
finds the additive she needs. At the same time, another horde
of zombies finds the sales office. Jill hears Nicholai scream.
When she fights her way back into the office, both Nicholai
and the UBCS mercenary's body are gone.

On her way back to the cable car, Jill has another encounter
with her stalker outside City Hall. Once again, Jill runs
for her life. The creature doesn't follow her to the next
street, and before Jill can wonder why, the ground crumbles
under her feet. She's dumped into part of the Raccoon sewer
system, which a large, mutated worm has claimed as its own.
Jill escapes from the sewers via a conveniently located
emergency ladder.

Jill finishes her repair work on the cable car. Carlos walks
in, and Jill tells him that Nicholai won't be joining them.
Carlos grimly accepts the news, and offers to drive the
cable car. The car begins to glide smoothly away from the
station, but it shakes suddenly from a tremendous impact.
Jill investigates, and finds that the creature stalking
her has busted into the cable car. With nowhere to run,
Jill has to fight, and she knocks it down with a fusillade
of nitrogen-laced grenade rounds. The creature gets right
back up again, seemingly unhurt by an attack that would
have killed anything else.

Suddenly, Mikhail opens fire on the creature with his

assault rifle, commanding Jill to get out of the cable car.
The creature advances on Mikhail, whose rifle jams at
exactly the wrong moment. The creature backhands him against
the wall, then throws him across the cable car. A tentacle
emerges from the creature's hand, coiling around its wrist
like a striking snake, and it walks towards Mikhail to
finish him off. Just before it reaches him, Mikhail rolls
over, pulls a grenade from his vest, and pulls the pin. The
resulting explosion knocks the creature out of the back of
the cable car, kills Mikhail, and destroys the cable car's
brakes. Jill pulls the emergency stop, but the car doesn't
slow down until it hits a wall, which knocks her out.

Jill regains consciousness alone in the courtyard of the St.

Michael Clock Tower, next to the twisted ruin of the cable
car. Night has fallen and the sky's cleared. She finds Carlos
inside the tower, who's now convinced that Umbrella has no
intentions of letting them out of town alive. Before he can
get hysterical, Jill slaps him, asking him if he's just
going to give up. Carlos retorts that he just can't handle
what's happening, and runs off.
The clock tower is nearly deserted, except for the occasional
zombie or giant spider. Jill finds several more dead mercenaries
within it, one of whom is carrying a copy of the UBCS's mission
plan. Sure enough, they were here to rescue civilians, but were
specifically after Umbrella's employees. It's a moot point now,
however, as both the mercenaries and the handful of civilians
they successfully saved have been killed.

The UBCS's extraction chopper is in the suburbs of Raccoon,

waiting for someone to signal it by ringing the clock tower's
bell. Jill runs up to the bell tower, and finds that the
mechanical ringer has been dismantled. Solving another of the
puzzles that seem to be everywhere in Raccoon City, she finds
a key to a storeroom.

On the balcony of the clock tower, the creature returns,

seemingly unhurt. Jill rips the wiring out of one of the
clock tower's searchlights and electrocutes the creature. As
it lies twitching, Jill makes her escape, but once again, it
gets up and gives chase. For some reason, though, it doesn't
follow her downstairs.

In the storeroom, Jill finds an ornate gear that'll fit in the

bell's ringer. She runs back upstairs and installs it. The bell
starts to ring, and as Jill rushes outside, the extraction chopper
flies into sight. Jill waves it down, and for a moment, thinks
that she's finally safe. She is, of course, wrong.

A missile strikes the helicopter in midair, sending it crashing

into the tower and showering the courtyard in burning debris.
Jill looks up to see the creature standing on top of the clock
tower, its missile launcher in its hand. It jumps down in front
of her, intent upon finishing her off once and for all. Before
Jill can react, the creature stabs her with one of its tentacles,
and Jill immediately begins to feel shaky and ill. She's infected.

Suddenly, Carlos arrives and attacks the creature. The creature,

more annoyed than hurt, returns fire. Carlos is stunned by a
near-miss, but manages to blow up the missile launcher. As he
passes out, Jill opens fire on the creature, hitting it with
everything she has. The creature, after taking enough damage to
kill an army, finally staggers, then falls into the flames from
the burning helicopter. Jill limps over to Carlos and collapses.

Jill is unconscious for two days, during which Leon Kennedy

and Claire Redfield make their own escape from Raccoon City.
She wakes up in the chapel of the clock tower after midnight
on October 1st. Carlos has been watching over her. She doesn't
feel any pain from her infection, but that in itself worries
her. Jill makes Carlos promise that if she turns into a zombie,
he'll kill her. Carlos says that he'll find something to help
her, and that she'll be safe in the chapel until he returns.

Carlos leaves the clock tower through a door in the storeroom,

and finds that he's down the street from a hospital. He
investigates, hoping to find something to cure Jill.

The hospital lobby is strewn with dead men and partially

locked down with a steel shutter. As Carlos enters, a zombie
slowly shuffles towards him from the back of the room.
Before Carlos can shoot it, something decapitates the zombie
from behind. A new creature screams at Carlos; Jill would
recognize it as a Hunter. After a vicious, albeit brief, fight
Carlos kills the creature and enters the head doctor's office.

Carlos takes the head doctor's private elevator to the fourth

floor. The hospital is crawling with Hunters and the occasional
zombie. There, in the hospital's file room, he finds Nicholai,
who is holding a smoking gun and standing over the body of
another UBCS member. Carlos has a lot of questions for Nicholai,
but the only answer Nicholai has is that he--Nicholai--is
"one of the supervisors." That's all Carlos needs to know.
Nicholai points his gun at Carlos, but before he can fire,
the man on the floor pulls the pin on a grenade. Both Carlos
and Nicholai run for cover, and Nicholai is thrown out the
fourth-floor window.

Carlos is confused about what just happened, but he continues

his search. To his surprise, he finds another of Umbrella's
laboratories in the hospital's basement, where two creatures
are floating in incubation tanks. They look like Hunters,
but where the Hunters Carlos has been fighting are sort of
generically reptilian, these appear to be deliberately
patterned after frogs. (These are probably the MA-121
Hunters mentioned in RE2's EX Files.)

Carlos finds a set of instructions in the lab. Using them

to operate the laboratory's machines, he creates a vaccine
effective against the T-Virus. Running back to the clock
tower, he finds a surprise waiting for him in the hospital
lobby. Someone has set explosives to demolish the hospital.
Carlos leaves the hospital at a dead run, taking cover from
the explosion inside the alley leading to the clock tower.
The hospital collapses in on itself in a burst of flame.

In the clock tower, the ceilings are buckling and groaning,

as if the tower is planning on following the hospital's
lead. As Carlos crosses the clock tower's front hall, the
creaking intensifies into a pounding. With a sudden crash,
the creature that has chased Jill throughout Raccoon City
breaks through the wall. The creature's heavy coat has burned
away, revealing that it's covered in writhing tentacles.
Carlos tries to fight the thing, but it's only interested in
getting to Jill. Fortunately, Carlos beats it to the chapel.

Carlos gives Jill the vaccine. The drug takes effect almost
immediately, and Jill wakes up. She asks Carlos what
happened to him, and Carlos says that he just had another
fight with the monster. Jill wonders aloud whether the
creature can be stopped at all. Carlos says that he's
sure it can, but he doesn't sound convinced. Jill realizes
that the creature is toying with them. Carlos then tells
her about Nicholai's survival, and warns her that although
he doesn't know what Nicholai has planned, he's sure that
Nicholai is their enemy. Claiming that he has to "take
care of some things," Carlos leaves.
Jill runs into the creature as she leaves the chapel. She
leads it a merry chase through the clock tower, losing it
along the way, and ducks into Raccoon's city park.

The park is infested with monsters, but Jill easily takes

care of them. Inside the tool shed in a local graveyard, Jill
breaks through a bricked-up doorway and discovers an abandoned
Umbrella command center. Several documents are scattered
throughout the room. One of them, a report from one of the
supervisors, finally gives her a name for the creature that's
been chasing her; Umbrella calls it the "Nemesis," and they
sent it to kill the surviving S.T.A.R.S. members. The unnamed
supervisor continues to speculate that if the Nemesis is still
loose in the city, then the S.T.A.R.S. must be very hard to
kill... but they can't hope to evade it much longer.

Nicholai is waiting for Jill when she leaves the command

center. He's impressed by her survival, but refuses to help
Jill in any way. When Jill asks him, he admits that the true
mission of the UBCS was to gather data on Umbrella's
bioweapons in a combat situation, but no one ever expected
the UBCS units to be completely wiped out. After a sudden
tremor shakes the ground, Nicholai runs off.

As Jill follows Nicholai, the earth falls out from under

her. The giant worm that Jill fought in the Raccoon sewer
system is back, but not for long. The worm destroys the
graveyard trying to kill Jill, and she responds with a
barrage of bullets and grenades. When Jill climbs out of
the wreckage of the graveyard, she leaves the worm's
cooling corpse on the ground behind her.

The park has been overrun by a fresh wave of zombies while

Jill fought the worm, but they're little more than
annoyances at this point. On one of the park's isolated
footpaths, Jill finds two more dead UBCS soldiers, one of
whom is clutching a set of orders from Umbrella. The orders
confirm what Nicholai said earlier. The supervisors were
also instructed to destroy the hospital and all the data
stored inside it. Umbrella is covering its tracks, and for
some reason, a lot of their supervisors are winding up dead.

The footpath leads to a rickety bridge, which in turn leads

to an abandoned factory. As Jill walks across the bridge
towards it, the Nemesis jumps onto the bridge in front of
her. Jill leaps off the bridge, into the river below. The
Nemesis, after she's gone, turns and walks towards the factory.

Underneath the bridge, Jill finds an entrance to an old

sewer duct, and from there finds her way into the factory. A
quintet of zombies spring a crude ambush on her, but Carlos
arrives and saves Jill a second time. Jill thanks him, and
he tells her that a missile is going to be launched into
the center of the city at dawn, which is coming soon. The
two of them have to split up and find some way to escape,
or they'll be caught in the blast. Carlos puts a hand on
Jill's cheek and tells her to watch out for Nicholai.

The factory is nowhere near as abandoned as it was supposed

to be. Umbrella has been conducting experiments with the
T-Virus here and using the facility to dispose of toxic
waste; as a result, the factory is crawling with Stingers,
Hunters, and powerful, mutated zombies. As Jill explores,
a sudden burst of gunfire sends her running for cover.
Chortling, Nicholai locks himself inside the radio room.

Jill accidentally stumbles into the facility's trash

room. Not only does the door lock behind her, but the room's
automated systems come online; in five minutes, the room
will automatically dump everything in it into the factory's
waste area, which will almost certainly be fatal. Just as
Jill thinks things can't get any worse, the trash room's
lights come on. The Nemesis has been waiting for her.

For the first time in four days, Jill gets lucky. She ducks
underneath one of the Nemesis's wild swings, and it tears
open a pipe on the wall. Whatever is flowing through the
pipe is corrosive enough to burn off half of the Nemesis's
tentacles almost instantly. As the Nemesis recovers, Jill
shoots out another pipe, drenching it in acid a second time,
and then a third. The Nemesis screams, covered in horrible
burns. It falls down, and doesn't get back up. Jill notices
the body of an Umbrella scientist in one of the trash heaps.
She searches his pockets and finds a keycard which unlocks
the trash room doors. As she gets out, the Nemesis's body is
dumped into the waste pool.

The factory's speakers crackle to life, and a woman's voice

reports that a missile attack has been detected. Jill runs
towards the door Nicholai went through and unlocks it with
her new keycard. The door leads to a communications tower. As
Jill picks up a portable radar receiver, the radio suddenly
comes to life. Outside, Nicholai taunts Jill from a helicopter,
and rakes the tower with a burst of machine-gun fire. Apparently,
he's the one who's been killing off the rest of the UBCS, simply
so Nicholai could get more bargaining power when it comes time
to negotiate his bonus with Umbrella. He says that he had also
intended to collect a bounty which Umbrella had placed on Jill's
head, but he decides to fly away instead. Jill, he says, is
doomed anyway.

Carlos runs in. He hasn't had any luck in finding an escape

route, but he refuses to give up. He frantically uses the radio
to scan all frequencies. A familiar voice comes over the
radio. Someone else is coming in a helicopter, specifically
for Jill. All the two of them have to do is meet it at the
factory's helipad. The factory's systems alert Jill and
Carlos that the missile has been launched, and unlock
the door to the helipad. Jill heads there, and Carlos runs
back into the factory to make last-minute preparations.

Apparently, the factory used a scrapyard as their landing

zone. Jill runs through a maze of crushed and stripped cars,
and finds that a small war was fought here recently. Several
dead U.S. Special Forces soldiers are lying outside of the
factory's power room, as well as the burning corpse of a
mutant (actually a Mr. X unit, like the one that attacked
Leon the day before). An official report is on the ground
near one of them, accompanied by a photograph of an
experimental new weapon code-named "Paracelsus's Sword." The
report specifically mentions using it to fight Umbrella's
bioweapons. The Sword is an enormous rail cannon, and looks
like just the thing to take out a Tyrant, but it's far too
big to have been snuck in. There's a mystery here, but Jill
doesn't have time to figure it out.

Jill enters the power room, and an explosion from outside

seals the door shut behind her. Dead bioweapons are lying
everywhere, including several Mr. X units, one mutated,
with several dead soldiers lying among them. On the other
side of the room, Jill finds the Paracelsus's Sword cannon,
still hooked up to the factory's power plant and aimed
directly at the dead Tyrant. Jill tries to turn it on. The
cannon's computer tells her to hook up several oversized
batteries strewn around the room.

As Jill shoves the first battery into place, she hears the
sound of dripping water behind her. Chemicals slowly begin
to leak into the room. Jill turns around, and the Nemesis's
"corpse" falls through a hole in the ceiling. It squirms
towards her, mutating with every move it makes.

Jill frantically hooks up the last two batteries to the rail

cannon, but it doesn't charge quickly enough. She's forced
to use what's left of her ammunition in a final struggle
against the Nemesis, which retaliates by spraying a toxic
stream of the waste chemicals that should have killed it.
Eventually, bleeding heavily, the Nemesis shakily retreats
to the far side of the room, seemingly intent on eating one
of the dead Tyrants' corpses. This puts it directly in line
with the rail cannon, which is now charged.

The rail cannon's blast shakes the room, tears through a

four-foot block of scrap metal, vaporizes the Tyrant's
corpse, and doesn't really look like it hurts the Nemesis
much at all. A second blast finally sends the Nemesis
screaming to the ground. Jill checks the radar receiver,
which tells her that she has less than five minutes before
the missiles hit. Before she can leave, the Nemesis
gets back up for one last attempt to kill her, firing a
blast of venom at her head. Jill rolls out of the way,
grabs a Magnum revolver from a dead soldier, and slowly
pursues the writhing Nemesis across the room. She empties
its cylinder into the Nemesis, and finally, bleeding from
every pore, it stops moving.

Jill leaves the power room and takes an elevator up to the

helipad. Carlos takes the elevator up just after she does
and runs forward, lighting a signal flare. A blue-and-white
helicopter slowly descends to the ground in front of Carlos,
and both he and Jill climb aboard with a few minutes to spare.

=============================================================
6iii. A Summary of the Conclusion of RESIDENT EVIL 3: NEMESIS
=============================================================

Jill thanks the helicopter's pilot, who says that he couldn't

just let her die. Jill seems to recognize him and leans forward.
The pilot, Barry Burton, asks her, "Are you ready to finish this?"

A flash of light outside the window draws Jill's attention.

The missile flies past the helicopter and hits the center
of Raccoon City. The surviving zombies look up in confusion
at the bright light, just before they're consumed in a wave
of fire. All that remains of Raccoon City is a smoking crater.

As the helicopter flies east, Jill, looking out the window

at what used to be Raccoon, vows that Umbrella is going down.

We're shown a news broadcast. The morning's top news story

is, of course, the strike on Raccoon. The President and
Congress planned and executed the destruction of Raccoon
City, which has been "literally wiped off the map." More
than a hundred thousand casualties are expected.

"Our hearts go out to the citizens... of Raccoon City."

====================
6iv. Different Paths
====================

The game's basic plotline can vary each time you play
through it. However, while the details change, the
fundamental events are always the same (Nicholai apparently
dies at some point before you activate the cable car, Jill
always finds Carlos somewhere inside the clock tower, etc.),
so they aren't worth listing in full here. For most of the
choices, I've just kinda picked the one that I liked more
and used it for the summary.

The exception is that I deliberately placed Carlos in the

gas station. Nicholai is a huge badass, but I'm not willing
to believe that he's enough of a badass to survive an
explosion that levels a city block (unless the explosion, as
Vincent Merken and I have theorized, knocked him through a
plot hole). I can accept a lot, but that's just crazy.

=====================
6v. Different Endings
=====================

The ending I've used for the summary is apparently the official
one; one of the files in Survivor is written by Nicholai on October
5th (although some fans claim this is a translation error), and the
brief summary of RE3 given in RE5 indicates that Barry flew Jill
out of the city.

Ending #2:
Instead of negotiating with Nicholai, Jill blows him out of
the sky. Aside from that small yet satisfying detail, this
is the same as Ending #1.

Ending #3:
Instead of jumping off the bridge, Jill shoves the Nemesis
off and walks into the abandoned factory via the front door.
She and Carlos meet up in the second-floor break room, where
a visibly exhausted Carlos tells her about the incoming
missiles. Things proceed as above after that, but when Jill
reaches the trash room, she's ambushed by Nicholai. From
cover in front of the trash room, Nicholai explains that
there's a "modest" bounty offered by Umbrella for whoever
kills Jill, which he intends to collect.

Nicholai fires a couple of shots at Jill before something,

probably the Nemesis, grabs Nicholai from behind. Jill hears
him scream, followed by some wet crunching sounds. When she
rounds the corner, she finds Nicholai's dead body hanging
off of the pipes in the ceiling.

When Jill reaches the communications tower, she hears an

incoming transmission from Carlos. Carlos tells her to take
the nearby radar receiver and meet him elsewhere.

After Jill's showdown with the Nemesis, she rides the

elevator up to find Carlos waiting for her in Nicholai's
helicopter. Jill watches Raccoon explode as they fly off,
saying that this time, "they've gone too far."

=======================
6vi. The Epilogue Files
=======================

Every time the game is beaten on Hard Mode, an Epilogue is

shown after the credits and ranking screen. There are eight
Epilogues, each dealing with a major character from RE; in
order, the files are about Jill, Chris, Barry, Leon, Claire,
Sherry, Ada, and Hunk. Each file is about a paragraph long,
and is accompanied by original character art.

From the Epilogue Files, we know the following:

-- after escaping Raccoon, Jill found one of Chris's hideouts.

It was trashed, but Chris wasn't there. She plans to keep
looking for Chris so the two of them can finally take down
Umbrella. Carlos and Barry may or may not be with her.

-- Barry has left his family. He doesn't intend to return to

them until he's paid his friends back for betraying them.

-- after they escaped the lab at the end of RE2, Leon angrily
told Claire to leave him and Sherry alone. She promised to
return, and disappeared into the woods near Raccoon.

-- Leon has been made some kind of unspecified offer by

either the U.S. government or someone claiming to represent
them. He attempted to get them to leave Sherry out of this
offer, but she "knows too much." We do not know what Leon's
response to the offer was.

-- Sherry is in the custody of the U.S. Army, and is waiting

for Claire to come back.

-- the woman who had called herself Ada Wong survived. She
is leaving that identity behind and preparing for another
mission.
-- Hunk is a little crazy, and has a tendency to be the
only survivor of his missions. He's seen without his
mask in his file.

======================================
6vii. Conclusions About the Conclusion
======================================

1. Raccoon City has been destroyed. As many as a hundred

thousand people could have died during the outbreak.

2. Jill and Carlos have survived, thanks to Barry Burton.

3. A vaccine exists for the T-Virus, and it's been given to

Jill. She's now immune to it and, as per RE5, pretty much
everything else.

4. Ada and Hunk are both still alive. This brings the known
total of Raccoon survivors to eight, out of more than a
hundred thousand.

5. Jill is newly dedicated to the destruction of Umbrella.

She's looking for Chris.

6. Umbrella is actively seeking the deaths of the remaining

S.T.A.R.S. They have a "modest" price on Jill's head.

7. Claire Redfield is somewhere in America, continuing her

search for her brother.

8. Leon Kennedy and Sherry Birkin are in government custody.

9. Leon has gotten an unspecified "offer" from someone claiming

to be a government agent. (It is elaborated upon in RE:DSC.)

10. The U.S. government has attacked at least one Umbrella

facility with very little, if any, success.

11. Umbrella actually tried to *stop* the government from

blowing up Raccoon. Apparently, there's something else going
on here that we don't know about.

12. Hunk survived. Umbrella has a sample of the G-Virus.

13. Someone on the development team hated Brad's guts.

========================
6viii. Random Commentary
========================

1. In the power room, scattered amidst the dead Tyrants, are

shards of red containment capsules, similar to the one that
Umbrella used to transport Mr. X in RE2. If anyone was wondering
where that helicopter might have gone after it visited the
RPD, it isn't a enormous intuitive leap to say it went to
the Dead Factory.

2. The military blockade around Raccoon that's got Jill so

worried is apparently manned by spider monkeys. Neither Leon or
Claire so much as see a blockade, and we've seen no fewer than
eight helicopters, some unmarked, enter and leave Raccoon's
airspace without any problems. (Count 'em. You might even come
up with a few that I missed. Remember, RE:ORC doesn't count.)

3. The Mercenaries minigame, while horrifyingly addictive,

doesn't really apply to the storyline. I would've thought
that this was obvious, but apparently, it isn't.

4. For those who didn't know, RE3 was subtitled Last Escape in
Japan. This is why Jill uses that phrase a lot. (Personally, I
think it should've been the subtitle of the American version,
but that's me.)

5. Although the back of the game's case says that Jill quit
S.T.A.R.S., she never says as much in the game. As a matter of
fact, she claims membership several times ("Hey, I'm no ordinary
civvie!" Shut up, Jill).

6. According to an article in Game Informer, Nemesis's design

was one of the rejected designs for Mr. X. In the sketch they
published, Nemmy's rocket launcher was an elaborate rifle.

7. As established by the epilogue of Outbreak, the bomb that

destroyed Raccoon City wasn't actually a nuclear weapon. Further,
the missile Jill and Carlos see was just the first of many.

8. It's become clear relatively recently that Nicholai's last

name was apparently meant to be "Zinoviev," and became "Ginovaef"
through a translation error. I don't intend to change it in this
document (I can either get three or four emails about the name,
or several dozen asking why I'm saying it wrong), but I did want
to include a note on the subject.

9. Cinematic parallels in RE3:

-- _Return of the Living Dead_ also had an ending which involved
a missile attack. The end scenes of the movie and the end
scenes of RE3, showing the missile arcing towards ground
zero, aren't identical but are thematically similar.
-- furthermore, _Return of the Living Dead_ also has a scene
where a small army of zombies rush a police barricade.
-- the power station sequence is much like a scene in
_Return of the Living Dead, Part 2_, especially if you opt
to electrify the zombies.
-- according to my co-worker Alicia Ashby, the bombing of
Raccoon City reflects a very common plot point in Japanese
pop culture. Man, you drop two nukes on some people and
they just never let you forget about it.

===================================================================
7. RESIDENT EVIL: SURVIVOR
===================================================================

Also known as the first entry in the Gun Survivor series, Survivor is
a light-gun game for the PlayStation, which notoriously was released
in North America without light-gun support. This is not the only reason
it's widely considered the armpit of the series, but it's a big one.
It's a canon game, however, and to a plot enthusiast, Survivor's files
have a lot of useful information. Set two months after the Raccoon
City outbreak, it's the story of a guy on an isolated island who can't
figure out who he is or why there are zombies everywhere.

==========================================================
7i. A Summary of the Basic Plot of RESIDENT EVIL: SURVIVOR
==========================================================

In late November of 1998, an isolated city called Sheena Island

is the site of another T-Virus outbreak. In a short time, Sheena
Island is a ghost town, chiefly inhabited by Umbrella's monsters.

As the undead mill through the streets, a helicopter flies over

the town. A man in white, holding a gun, clings to one of the
helicopter's landing struts and yells, "You won't get away!" He
fires once and the helicopter bursts into flames. As the helicopter
plummets towards the street, the man in white falls off.

Some time later, a man in jeans and a brown parka wakes up

next to a burning helicopter. He doesn't remember anything about
who he is, where he is, or what he's doing there. He has the
clothes on his back and a Glock 17 handgun.

The man, our hero, sets out to explore the city. On the next
street over, he finds the body of the man in white, who looks
like he's dead. Our hero finds a set of dogtags in the man's hand,
identifying him as Ark Thompson. Our hero thinks that the man
looks familiar, but a zombie interrupts his examination. He
executes it and finds a rusted key in its pocket.

The key unlocks the front door of a nearby church. The church is
small and relatively well-maintained; the only discordant note
is the Umbrella logo, carved into the wall above the altar. In
the church manager's office, our hero finds the man's diary, where
he has written about the destruction of the American city of Raccoon
at the hands of the renegade scientist William Birkin.

Our hero leaves through the back door of the church, to an isolated
street where a pay phone is ringing. Whoever it is hangs up as soon
as our hero answers the phone.

After a brief fight with a pair of Lickers, our hero finds his way
to another ringing pay phone. He picks it up, and whoever is on
the other end calls him Vincent. Our hero is confused, but the
man continues talking, calling him a murderer. He denies it, demanding
more information from the man on the phone, but the man hangs up.

Suddenly, helicopters appear overhead. Our hero ducks into a nearby

arcade as men in the black and blue uniforms of SWAT officers
descend from overhead. Their commander, his voice muffled by a
respirator, reminds them of their orders; they are to cleanse the
area of its infection.

Inside the arcade, our hero sees a team of cleaners dispatch two
zombies, but then they attack him. Apparently, "cleansing the area"
is a synonym for "killing all the witnesses." Up close, the "cleaners"
look more like gorillas dressed in body armor than anything else; their
arms reach almost to their feet, and they roll around on their knuckles
like apes. They're remarkably fragile, though, and our hero easily
dispatches them. As they die, they scream like wildcats, and their bodies
dissolve into nothing.

Our hero, as he searches the arcade, is nearly killed by a sniper.

The sniper yells a threat at "Vincent," but doesn't take another
shot. Our hero sneaks out of the arcade's basement, jimmying open
a manhole and entering the sewers.

The sewers are blissfully quiet. In the manager's office, our hero
finds the man's diary. He has written about his meeting with Vincent,
the cruel and vicious man who was promoted to the post of the city's
supreme commander. When the manager took a picture of Vincent for a
souvenir, Vincent got angry. As our hero searches the manager's desk,
he finds the picture of Vincent. It is of himself. Clearly, our hero
concludes, he must be Vincent. He must be this cruel man that he keeps
hearing about.

As he contemplates this, a young boy enters the manager's office

behind him. As Vincent turns around, the boy begs him not to
kill him. Vincent is confused, and tells the boy that he won't
hurt him, but the boy doesn't listen, and runs away. Vincent
gives chase.

The boy's exit route leads straight to the front doors of a place
that claims to be Paradise. It's actually a prison. Inside, Vincent
kills several zombies and finds the diary of the prison's warden.
He refers to the prisoners as "guinea pigs," and has written that
a "mass suicide" that had taken place in mid-October was, in fact,
an escape attempt. Vincent quelled it by shooting down the boys as
they ran, then intimidated the prison's chief into misreporting
the incident back to Umbrella.

As bad as that is, the cell block is worse. Vincent finds the diary
of one of the former prisoners on a bed in one of the cells. The
prisoner was a boy, abducted from the Congo in late August and
brought to Sheena Island. He and his fellow prisoners were all
young, between fourteen and twenty years of age, and were gathered
from all over the world.

According to the boy, everyone in Sheena Island was an Umbrella

employee, even the women and the children. While he and his fellow
prisoners weren't mistreated, the guards took one of them to a
factory, elsewhere on the island, every so often. Whoever was
taken would never come back.

The boy eventually found out why, by eavesdropping on a conversation

between some factory workers in the nightclub. For whatever reason,
the factory workers were ordered by Vincent to take the prisoners,
the "guinea pigs," and extract some kind of material from their
brains. The boy heard this, and immediately resolved to escape.

When word of the disaster at Raccoon City reached Steena Island,

the prisoners used the guards' uneasiness to stage their escape
attempt. One way or another, the boy writes, he's probably dead,
but he'd rather die trying to escape.

Vincent finds a coil of rope nearby, and uses the boy's planned
escape route by climbing down the side of one of the guard towers.
At the bottom of the tower, Vincent finds himself face-to-face
with a massive, trenchcoated figure. Clearly inhuman, it attacks
Vincent, and takes nearly three dozen bullets before it falls.
While Vincent has no idea what he's just killed, Leon would
recognize it as Mr. X.

Two more of the creatures are waiting for Vincent inside a nearby
nightclub. Barely evading them, Vincent bursts out the front door,
and finds himself across the street from a skyscraper bearing
the Umbrella logo. Clearly, he thinks, this is where Umbrella
controlled the island from. Memories flash through his mind as
he looks at the building, but they come and go too quickly.

The office is populated by zombies, Lickers, and the occasional

Hunter. Vincent blasts his way to the thirteenth floor, into
what would appear to have once been the office of the supreme
commander: his office. There's been extensive fire damage recently.
A bank of security monitors is still active, and he can see a
little girl sitting at a console elsewhere in the building.

Vincent finds his own diary on his old desk. In it, he's written
about many things, such as the escape attempt that he thwarted via
gunfire, and a boy named Lott who told him about a spy on the island.
His final entries speak of a plot amongst his subordinates on the
island. Due to his brutal execution of the escapees, his subordinates
planned to gather evidence about the incident and report it to Vincent's
superiors at Umbrella. Vincent, in a fit of insane rage, unleashed
the T-Virus on Sheena Island, making it look like an accident. Now
he intends to dispatch the spy and return to Umbrella for his reward.

Vincent's search is interrupted by a Mr. X unit punching through the

wall. After another intense gunfight, Vincent picks a keycard out of
the rubble. The keycard opens a door further down the hallway, to
the security office.

As Vincent enters the office, he hears an aged voice, claiming to

be his mother. His mother begs him to stop committing his horrible
crimes and just come home. When he rounds the corner, he finds the
little girl, who's listening to one of Vincent's own telephone
conversations on tape. He tries to talk to the girl, who's upset
and crying, but someone nearly caves his skull in from behind with
a baseball bat. It's the boy from earlier, who threatens Vincent,
then grabs his sister, Lily, and runs for it.

On the security desk, Vincent finds yet more allegations against

himself. A document, apparently written by one of the leaders of
the conspiracy against him, says that not only did Vincent kill
one of his colleagues for a promotion before coming to Sheena
Island, but through tapping Vincent's 'phone, the conspirators
had unquestionable proof that Vincent killed the escapees and
hushed it up. If Vincent hadn't destroyed Sheena Island, he'd
probably have wound up in a prison somewhere. Vincent pockets
the document and runs after the children.

While he's waiting for an elevator, Mr. X catches up to Vincent

once again. Another volley of gunfire takes the creature down,
and Vincent takes the elevator back down to the first floor. He
pursues the children through a parking garage, and through an
overflowing rain gutter choked with Hunters.
Finally, Vincent finds his way out of the gutter, to a small,
well-furnished house. He finds Lott's diary, and in the same
room, he finds Lily hiding in a closet. She tells him that Lott
has gone to the nearby factory, hoping to find a way out, but
she's afraid that with all the monsters in the factory, Lott
will be killed. Vincent decides that no matter who he was in
the past, that's not who he is now, and tells Lily that he'll
save Lott. He leaves Lily in her house, and enters the factory.

Lily wasn't kidding. The factory is overrun with lickers, Hunters,

zombies, and dogs. Vincent barely manages to stay alive as he
activates a tram car, taking him to another part of the factory.
He dispatches yet another Mr. X, only to find himself dumped
onto a mountain path where *four* of the creatures are standing
guard. These creatures are smarter than the ones he's fought
before, shielding their faces from Vincent's attack and rushing
forward to try and knock him off of the path. Vincent blasts
through them, fighting his way to the top of the mountain.

The factory's entrance is a once-palatial mansion, now falling in

on itself. As Vincent picks his way through the wreckage, he hears
Lott scream from somewhere below. He makes his way downstairs.

Yet *another* Mr. X is waiting to greet Vincent. He blows it away

and proceeds into a control room, where he finds a Magnum revolver,
the controls to an elevator, and a panicked confession written by
one of the factory workers. The worker is hysterical over his work
in the factory, which involves removing parts of the brains of the
"guinea pigs," the teenage prisoners, and using those parts to
create Tyrants. Vincent has ordered that this operation be carried
out without anesthetic, which is driving the factory worker insane
with guilt and grief. After reading this, Vincent activates the
elevator, which carries him deeper into Umbrella's factory.

More zombies, Lickers, and Hunters, led by yet another Mr. X,

are waiting for Vincent. More of Umbrella's experiments in the
creation of plant life are stored in tanks in this area, and,
of course, they escape at the worst possible time. With luck,
stealth, and sheer firepower, Vincent avoids or dispatches them
all. Finally, he catches up to Lott, just in time to save the
boy's life.

Lott thanks Vincent, who starts to explain his actions. Lott stares
at him blankly, and tells him that he's not Vincent after all. His
name is Ark Thompson. Lott had told the real Vincent about Ark's
arrival; Ark was the spy Vincent mentioned in his diary.

As Ark tries to digest this, a woman's voice comes over the factory's
speakers. Someone has triggered the base's self-destruct mechanisms.
Ark asks Lott how they can get out of the factory, and Lott says that
there's a railway system nearby. Ark says that he'll go there and set
it up. He tells Lott to go back and get his sister. Lott takes off.

As Ark heads through the next door, his memories suddenly return to
him in a rush. His friend Leon Kennedy had asked him to come to
Sheena Island and investigate it, and he'd posed as Vincent to do so.
That's how he had introduced himself to Andy, the sewer manager, and
how Lott had found out about the "spy."
Ark had been ransacking Vincent's office when Vincent himself snuck
up on him. Vincent had been ready to shoot Ark, but Ark overpowered
him and escaped. During the scuffle, Vincent grabbed onto a set of
dogtags Ark was wearing and pulled them off, which is why he had them
in his hand when Ark found his body. As Ark attempted to take off
in a helicopter, Vincent grabbed onto the landing gear and took a
shot at him, which made the helicopter crash.

Ark unlocks the way to the railway station, and finds himself in

a final laboratory. At the lab's end is a vaguely humanoid creature,

floating in a vat. It is roughly the size of a teenage boy, but has
blue skin, no visible gender, and short claws on its left arm. A
nearby document, written by the real Vincent Goldman, tells of how
the prisoners were to be used.

The process that creates Tyrants requires a chemical called Beta

Hetero Nonserotonin. The chemical can only be found in the brains of
human beings between the ages of fourteen and twenty, and is secreted
by the pituitary gland when the human in question is extremely terrified
or tense. Vincent's recommendation is to perform the necessary operation
without anesthesia, which will cause the brain to secrete plenty of the
needed chemical. Ark pockets this last file, takes a key from the lab,
and heads towards the railway station.

Unfortunately, some old friends have invited themselves to the party.

Ark is confronted outside the Tyrant's lab by the leader of the Cleaners,
who is surprised that Ark is still alive. Just before he can shoot Ark,
he is suddenly impaled from behind. The Tyrant, fresh from its storage
vat, pulls its claws out of the man's back and advances on Ark. Luckily,
it's still sluggish from its imprisonment, and Ark overcomes it with
relative ease. He leaves it in a bloody pile on the floor, and is
long gone when it stands back up and roars.

The Cleaners are waiting for Ark on the path to the railway station,
but compared to what he's been fighting, they're barely a threat at
all. He blasts through their ranks and finds Lott and Lily waiting
for him at the railway station. Ark opens the gate on the subway
tunnel, just in time for the Cleaners to spring one last ambush.
Ark foils their plans, and jumps into the train as it takes off.

The train takes them to an isolated helipad, and luckily, there's

still a helicopter on the ground. Lott and Lily climb into the
helicopter, but before Ark can join them, a large shape crashes
down in the middle of the helipad. The Tyrant has returned.

===========================================================
7ii. A Summary of the Conclusion of RESIDENT EVIL: SURVIVOR
===========================================================

As one might expect, the Tyrant has mutated after its earlier defeat.
It is now much faster and stronger, and Ark can barely keep up
with it. He blasts it again and again with acid-laced grenades
and high-caliber bullets, dodging its claw swipes and mad lunges.

For once, the Tyrant's unstable genetics work against it. Ark's
assault eventually triggers another mutation; the Tyrant's
muscles swell, to the point where it can barely move. It's still
dangerous, but it's no longer able to dodge Ark's gunfire. Eventually,
it can't stand up to his attacks any longer and collapses.

Ark hastily scrambles aboard the helicopter and takes off. As he

flies away from Sheena Island, the factory detonates. The explosion
utterly destroys Umbrella's factory and devastates the remainder
of the island.

Suddenly, the helicopter shakes. Ark looks out the window, and finds
that once more, he's acquired a stowaway. The Tyrant slowly pulls
itself on board the helicopter, towards Lott and Lily.

Ark banks the helicopter, putting the Tyrant in line with one of the
helicopter's onboard missiles. He fires, and the missile takes the
Tyrant in the stomach. It screams in rage as it's carried away
from the helicopter by the impact, right up until Ark fires his
second missile at it. The Tyrant disappears in a flash of fire.

In the helicopter, Lott and Lily hold each other. Finally, Lily
asks Ark where they're going. He says that he doesn't know, but
they can fly as long as they have fuel.

======================
7iii. Different Routes
======================

Survivor frequently makes you pick where to go, usually by offering

a choice between three doors or something like that. Most of the
time, the only real difference between routes is what you fight and
what you'll find. Please note that you can never double back and
choose another route once you've picked one, and that it's impossible
to collect all of the guns and files on a single run through the game.

The exception here is the second choice of direction, where you pick
between the Library, the Arcade, and the Hospital. Which of these you
pick determines what cutscene you see, and who shows up to get
slaughtered by the Tyrant at the end of the game.

If you enter the Arcade, you'll see a brief cutscene, as described

above, where the Cleaners descend upon the city. The leader of the
Cleaners is the lucky victim on this route.

Upon going into the Library, you'll meet Andy the sewer manager, who
will beg for his life right up until you hear the sound of an
approaching helicopter. Andy will suddenly turn on you, and try to
catch you in a deathtrap on the second floor. For his efforts, he
gets to be the Tyrant's victim.

Finally, if you choose the Hospital, Vincent will come back from
the dead. He watches Ark enter the hospital through the security
cameras in his office, and unleashes a Mr. X unit to track you
down. Vincent is the only one to hear the Cleaners' arrival, and
he muses aloud that Umbrella must be in a hurry. At the end of the
game, he gets to die again at the claws of the Tyrant.

Much like in my summary of RE3, I chose a route at random and went

with it. To duplicate my summary, go to the Church and the Arcade,
exit the Prison through the guard tower, run through Heaven's Night,
and take the door on the right when you leave the Factory.
=====================================
7iv. Conclusions about the Conclusion
=====================================

1. Ark Thompson, Lott, and Lily have survived.

2. Vincent Goldman is dead. Good riddance.

3. Nicholai Ginovaef survived Raccoon City. His plan to be the

only person able to bring information to Umbrella has paid off.

4. Sheena Island has been destroyed, along with its laboratories

and its research. Umbrella has apparently lost a major facility
for production of its bioweapons.

5. Leon Kennedy is alive and is still working against Umbrella.

6. Umbrella is a lot more depraved than we thought. Each Tyrant

that's created means that a teenager died screaming.

7. Umbrella isn't merely a powerful corporation. In some parts

of the world, it's a nation unto itself, capable of building
entire cities.

==================
7v. Random Musings
==================

1. Say what you will about how lame CV's ending is, but Survivor's
is much, much worse.

2. Separated at birth: Andy, and Chrono Cross's Sprigg?

3. I really don't care for this game. I can see how it'd be
a lot more fun with a light gun, but with a control pad, it
becomes incredibly frustrating.

4. Alert reader Phoenix notes that the endings of Survivor and

George Romero's _Dawn of the Dead_ are remarkably similar.

5. Johannes Lemken writes to point out that Goldman is also the

name of the villain in House of the Dead 2.

=================================================================
8. RESIDENT EVIL: CODE VERONICA
=================================================================

CV's an odd game, and has been reevaluated several times since it came
out. It jumped platforms at least once, from PSOne to Dreamcast, and
often comes off like it was designed by committee. It reintroduces
Wesker to the series as its trademark supervillain, has some of the
creepiest environments in the series, and is the last "classic" game
in the main series.

Code Veronica was originally released on the Dreamcast in 2000, where

it became one of the best-selling releases in the system's lifespan.
It was later rereleased on the PS2 as Code Veronica X, which features
several extra cutscenes and a much longer ending. All CVX-exclusive
scenes will be enclosed in [brackets] during the summary.

===============================================================
8i. A Summary of the Basic Plot of RESIDENT EVIL: CODE VERONICA
===============================================================

In December of 1998, Claire Redfield travels to Paris and

infiltrates an Umbrella facility there, hoping to find clues
to the whereabouts of her brother Chris.

She's discovered, and a chase ensues. As she runs from a

pair of armed guards, she's blinded by a searchlight coming
in through the window. When her eyes clear, she sees an attack
helicopter hovering outside the building. As the helicopter's
chaingun begins to warm up, Claire doubles back and ducks into
the hallway as the helicopter opens fire. It shreds the two
guards who were chasing her, but Claire manages to stay one
step ahead of its arc of fire.

The helicopter chases Claire the rest of the way down the
hall. Just before its gunfire catches up with her, Claire
jumps through an open door and down a flight of stairs. She
rolls to her feet and finds herself eye-to-eye with at least
two dozen of Umbrella's guards, all of whom are pointing guns
at her. As they walk forward, Claire sees that they're standing
in front of a tank full of flammable chemicals. Claire puts
her hands up, drops her gun, hits the floor, catches the gun
before it hits the ground, and puts her last three bullets
into the tank. The resulting explosion sends the guards flying.

Claire gets to her feet as another guard comes down the

stairs. Both she and the guard react at the same time,
shoving their guns in each other's faces, but the guard's
gun has bullets in it. Hers doesn't.

Ten days later, Claire is taken to an isolated prison by

helicopter. She spends most of the ride there with a bag over
her head. A guard tells her what her serial number is, takes
the bag off, and welcomes her to her new home. Another guard
cracks Claire in the face with the butt of his rifle, and
she blacks out.

She wakes up in a dank cell, somewhere underground. As Claire

stands up, the cell shakes with distant explosions. It sounds
as though a war is being fought aboveground. The lights flicker
and die, leaving Claire alone in the darkness.

Slowly, someone clutching his stomach shambles into the room

and stands outside Claire's cell door. Claire uses her lighter
to see who it is, and is surprised to see the face of the man
who took her prisoner in Paris.

The man unlocks her cell and opens the door. As Claire
hesitantly steps out, he slumps into a nearby chair and pulls
a bottle of medicine out of his pocket. It's empty, and he
throws it against the floor in frustration. Without looking up,
he tells Claire that this place is finished. They've been attacked
by what he thinks is a "special forces team." Claire's free to
leave the prison grounds, but he warns her that she has no chance
of getting off the island.

Before leaving the cellblock, Claire picks up a knife and

notes that the man needs hemostatic medicine. A manifest on
the desk tells her that the man's name is Rodrigo Juan Raval,
and that he's a member of Umbrella's medical division.

It's raining gently when Claire gets outside. The cellblock

opens into a small graveyard. A truck has crashed through
the wall, and is burning merrily. Suddenly, it explodes. A
burning man climbs out of the driver's seat, and one look
tells Claire that the man's become a zombie. Somehow, the
T-Virus has been released. As Claire backs away from the
burning zombie, more emerge from open graves all around her.
Claire scrambles to her feet and runs through the nearest door.

Claire gets about two steps out of the door when someone
opens fire on her from a guard tower. Taking cover behind
the crashed truck, she grabs a handgun off of a dead man and
returns fire, shattering the gunman's spotlight and forcing
him to take cover. The man screams. Claire demands that he
tell her who he is. The man--a boy, really--is glad to
see that she's not a zombie like he'd thought, and hops down
from the tower. He introduces himself as Steve, another
prisoner, and says that he's looking for an airport that he'd
heard was on the island. Claire tries to follow him as he
leaves, but Steve claims that she'd only slow him down.

The prison is only lightly populated with zombies, so Claire

doesn't have much trouble as she searches the place. Inside
a nearby mess hall, she finds a map of the facility, as well
as one of the other prisoners' diaries. The prisoner had
managed to figure out that the island is south of the equator.

The prison's file room and computer lab is nearby. Claire

runs into Steve, who's playing with one of the computers.
Steve asks her if she's related to Chris Redfield. When she
says she is, he shows her that Chris is under electronic
surveillance by Umbrella. Claire uses the computer's Internet
connection to forward Chris's location to Leon Kennedy via
e-mail, hoping that Leon can figure out some way to help
her. Steve tells her that the latitude and longitude of the
prison is stored on the computer and, with a snort, suggests
that she have Leon forward that to her brother so he can
come help them out. Claire thinks it's a good idea and does
so, but Steve indignantly claims to have just been kidding;
Chris won't come to help them. Claire denies this. Steve says
angrily that other people will just let you down, and storms
out of the computer lab. Claire is left alone again, wondering
what Steve's problem is.

Using one of the machines in the file room to forge a key,

Claire lets herself out the prison's front gate. A recent
rockfall has blocked the main exit and destroyed the main
bridge, so Claire runs up a nearby staircase instead. To her
surprise, she's now standing in front of a military training
facility on one side, and a mansion on the other. She decides
to investigate the mansion first.
The mansion hasn't escaped damage in the recent assault, but
the interior is more or less intact. Claire finds an ornate
locked door in a study on the second floor, but instead of
keys, the door is molded so as to accept a pair of guns. In
the same room, she finds a diary kept by one of the servants
that lived here. The servant talks about his master, Alfred,
and how Alfred is incredibly secretive about his relationship
with his sister Alexia. No one is allowed near her, or has
even seen her except at a distance, sitting in the window of
Alfred's house.

Someone's private war museum is on the first floor.

Antique handguns and models of battleships line the walls.
Claire presses a button near a sculpture of a giant ant, and
an old movie begins to play on the room's screen. The movie
features two blond-haired, beautiful children, a boy and a
girl, obviously twins. Slowly, the boy plucks the wings off
of a dragonfly, and sets the helpless insect in an ant farm
to be devoured. As the dragonfly writhes, the boy turns to
the girl, and both share an innocent smile.

The end of the movie coincides with a secret door opening in

the corner of the room. Claire finds a pair of gold-inlaid
Luger handguns inside, but taking them from their wall mount
sets off a trap. The door slams shut, and hidden heaters turn
the secret room into a furnace. Claire quickly replaces the
guns and tries to leave the mansion, but as she reaches the
front door, she hears Steve scream for help. She returns to
the museum to find that he's fallen into the same trap, but
refuses to put the Lugers back on the wall. Claire quickly
figures out the room's computer systems and releases the
secret door, freeing Steve. Claire recognizes the Lugers
as what she needs to open the door in the study, but Steve
refuses to give them to her unless she gives him something
fully automatic. Once again, he runs off.

In the front hall of the mansion, Claire notices a laser

sight as it focuses on her head. She dives to the side and
hides behind a pillar. The gunman, a blond man dressed in a
blend of preppy fashion and military gear, demands that she
tell him who her friends are. He's convinced that Claire
deliberately let herself be captured so she could lead her
allies to his base to destroy it. Claire says that she
doesn't know what he's talking about, but he doesn't believe
her. His name is Alfred Ashford, he says, commander of the
base. Claire retorts that he must be one of Umbrella's
low-ranking employees if he's in command of such a small,
isolated facility. Alfred angrily tells her that his family,
the Ashfords, is one of the oldest and greatest in the world.
His grandfather was one of the original founders of Umbrella
Incorporated. He leaves in a huff, telling Claire that she's
just a rat in a cage.

A strange setup outside the palace, when Claire plays with

it, brings a submarine to the surface. She goes inside, and
finds that the sub's a glorified underwater elevator. It takes
her to a hidden seaport, where a fueled-up cargo plane is
waiting. Even better, Claire's already found one of the three
proofs she needs to work its access elevator.
Claire finds a keycard inside an abandoned cargo bay, and heads
back to the military training facility to see what it unlocks.
The training yard is guarded by an enormous worm, which
tunnels under the ground and attempts to devour Claire. She
dodges it and runs into the facility.

Stairs just inside the entrance lead to a lab on the second

floor. The lab's experiment area is locked down due to
environmental pollution. As Claire walks by the lab's
observation window, a man in a biohazard suit desperately
beats against it, trying to get her to open the door. Claire
can't, and helplessly watches as something behind the man
grabs him. The man's skull is crushed against the glass.
As he sinks to the floor, a recording on the overhead
speakers alerts Claire that the area has been contaminated,
and will be locked down for ventilation. Claire barely makes
it out of the lab before it seals itself.

Claire finds extra ammunition in the facility's locker room,

then sets out to explore the rest of the first floor. As she
walks down a hallway, a steel gate silently shuts behind her.
In the next room, Alfred Ashford tries to ambush her, and
fails. Claire dodges his badly aimed gunfire and runs up to
the balcony where he's aiming from, but Alfred is already gone.
She chases him in the only direction he could've run in, but
he seals every door behind her from somewhere else in the
complex. As the final door locks, he jeers at her from a
hidden speaker, telling her that he's prepared a special
surprise for her. He hopes that she won't die too quickly.

The only door that Alfred's left unlocked leads to a

storeroom. A discarded pair of Ingram submachine guns lies
on the balcony with Claire. She picks them up, just in time
to watch a door on the other side of the room open. A new
creature makes it way in; it resembles a zombie, except it
only has one long arm. Its upper body is bulging with
muscle. As Claire watches in horror, the creature's arm
stretches to an impossible length, grabbing a pipe in the
ceiling and using it to swing over to her. Claire barely
manages to kill the creature.

As the rubber man falls dead, Alfred opens a door via remote
control. Claire tries to walk through it, but another rubber
man drops from the ceiling and seizes her head with its arm.
Claire struggles vainly against it as it hoists her into the
air, threatening to either crush her skull or suffocate her.

Suddenly, a window above the creature shatters. Steve

dives through it, blasting the rubber man with the Lugers.
Roaring in pain, the rubber man drops Claire. Steve drives
it backward with a barrage of gunfire, kicks it into the
corner, and finishes it off with a final gunshot to the
head. He walks over and greets Claire, claiming to be her
"knight in shining armor." Claire denies that he's any such
thing, but offers him the Ingrams she found in exchange for
his Lugers. Steve accepts the trade. Suddenly, the floor
they're on begins to descend.
When the floor stops moving, Steve runs ahead of Claire
through the nearest door, anxious for an opportunity to try
out his "new toys." Claire catches back up to him on a
bridge overlooking the facility's sewer system, probably by
following the long trail of spent shells and dead zombies
he's left behind him. Steve claims that this is why Claire
needs him around; he'll watch her back. He then contradicts
himself, saying that the Ingrams he's been using are more
reliable than any person. Claire, who's still confused by
him, asks him why he's on this island, and where his family
is. Steve's response is to yell that he doesn't want to talk
about it and to shoot at the wall. He runs into a nearby
elevator, and Claire follows.

The path Alfred has set for them leads to a balcony overlooking
a motor pool. As Claire runs up to Steve, the balcony collapses
underneath them. Steve falls free, but Claire is pinned underneath
a chunk of rubble. A zombie shambles towards Steve, who raises
his Ingrams, but doesn't fire. Claire yells at him to shoot it,
but Steve freezes. The zombie turns towards Claire. Steve hesitates
for a single long moment, then levels both Ingrams at the zombie
and yells, "FATHER!" He empties both guns into the zombie and
sinks to his knees, sobbing.

Steve explains to Claire that his father used to work for

Umbrella, but had begun stealing information and auctioning
it off to the highest bidder. Umbrella caught him. Steve's
mother was killed, and he and his father were sent to this
prison. He despises his father for being so reckless and
stupid. Claire comforts him, telling him to rest, and leaves
him alone to mourn.

Alfred has apparently given up on his "deathtrap." The only

other problems Claire encounters in the military facility are
zombies and the odd mutated dog. In a storeroom, she finds
a copy of the Ashford family crest, which depicts an eagle
clutching a halberd in its claws. The crest is forged of
some kind of blue metal, while the halberd seems to be inlaid
gold. Elsewhere in the facility, the crest opens a compartment

containing a copy of Alfred's personal keycard. Using that

and the card she found earlier, Claire is able to unlock
most of the doors inside the base. Among other things, she
finds a grenade launcher and the medicine that Rodrigo needs.

Claire unlocks another door to find a monitor room. The

screens are still lit up. Inside, she finds the second key
to the cargo plane's door, as well as data on a creature
called an "Albanoid," the result of injecting the T-Virus
into a salamander. The creature is capable of generating
powerful electric shocks, and reaches adulthood only ten
hours after being "born." One of the monitors displays
the access password to the contaminated lab she was in
earlier, as well as letting her know that the lab's systems
have finished the ventilation process.

Inside the lab, Claire takes a painting she finds on the wall.
As she does so, an infant Albanoid breaks out of one of the
nearby storage vats. Before Claire can do anything, the
insanely quick creature disappears into one of the ventilation
shafts. Claire is forced to escape from the lab a second time,
as the automated systems declare the lab contaminated and
permanently seal the area.

In the storeroom where Claire found the Ashfords' crest, she

uses the painting to solve a puzzle. The wall of the
storeroom slides back, revealing an elaborate diorama of the
facility and a golden key.

Heading back to the mansion, Claire uses the Lugers to

unlock the door in the study. The door leads to what looks
like Alfred's private office. Using his computer, Claire
discovers yet another secret passage, leading through an
abandoned aqueduct to an enormous house, sitting high up the
side of a mountain. Claire heads towards it as lightning and
thunder crash in the distance, and a woman's mocking
laughter echoes over the island.

The house has been hit fairly hard by the assault on the
island. It's guarded by rubber men, but Claire easily avoids
them and gets inside. The interior of the house is a twisted
parody of childhood, with either dolls or books covering
every available surface. A larger-than-life doll dangles
from the chandelier hook in the ceiling, eviscerated. Most
of the furniture is sized for children, or for dolls.

On the house's second floor, Claire walks in on a

conversation between Alfred and his until-now-absent sister,
Alexia. As Claire lurks outside her bedroom window, Alexia
asks an unseen Alfred what's taking so long, when his
opponent is only a little girl. Alfred's success is
necessary, Alexia continues, to restore the honor of the
Ashford family. Alfred insists that he doesn't need to be
reminded. He intends to raise Alexia to the position of
leader of the once-again-glorious Ashford family. Alexia
sees Claire, but chalks it up to her own imagination.
The twins, having finished their conversation, leave.

Cautiously, Claire enters the twins' bedrooms, but no one is

in either of them, and she didn't see either of them in the
hall. A locked secret door above the bed in Alexia's room
tells her why. Both rooms feature an ornate, locked music box,
both of which require yet another unique key. Claire finds a
silver key in Alexia's room and heads back to the mansion.

Claire uses the keys she's found to unlock several doors

inside the palace. One door leads to a boardroom, where,
after a frantic battle with a pair of rubber men, she finds
another copy of the Ashfords' crest. Another room, a private
casino, is apparently where Alfred goes for recreation.

The last and largest room in the palace is a shrine to the

past leaders of the Ashford family. An oil painting of a
twelve-year-old Alfred is in the place of highest honor. An
inscription tells the onlooker to find the family's real
master, with a history of the Ashfords lying underneath it.
When Claire solves the puzzle, the picture of Alfred
rotates, revealing a painting of an adult Alexia. Underneath
her picture, Claire finds an ant-shaped key that will fit
the music box in Alexia's bedroom.

With nowhere to go for now, Claire takes the crest back to

the prison, where it unlocks a door she saw earlier. The door
leads to the prison's medical facility, which is guarded by
a mob of zombies. Claire dispatches them handily. Inside the
medical facility, she finds stacked body bags and the journal
of the facility's doctor. The doctor is apparently just as sick
and crazy as everyone else who works for Umbrella, and Alfred
lets him use the base's prisoners to pursue his "studies." If
the base hadn't been attacked, Claire herself might've been one
of the doctor's guinea pigs.

Claire investigates the prison's crematorium, which has

little of interest besides a small chair in the corner,
sized for a child. When she comes back, one of the body bags
is empty, and a zombie in a lab coat is feeding desperately
on the dissected corpse. The doctor has apparently returned.
Claire shoots him dead, and finds a glass eye on his body.
The eye fits in the doctor's anatomical dummy, which opens
a secret passage to the doctor's private chambers, filled
with antique but well-used torture devices. Blood cakes
the floor. Claire finds a roll of piano music in this
hellish place, and leaves as soon as she can.

Rodrigo is still in the dark cellblock when Claire gets back

there. She gives him the vial of medicine. A surprised Rodrigo
thanks her, but refuses any further help. Claire lets him keep
her lighter, and mentions that it was a gift from her brother.
In gratitude, Rodrigo gives her a set of lockpicks, and urges
her to leave while she still can.

[Claire returns to Alfred's palace. As she puts her hands on

the front door, someone behind her says her name. She asks
who he is, and he claims he is a "ghost from the past, come
back to haunt your brother Chris." Claire recognizes the man
as Wesker. Wesker says that it's good to see her; he attacked
the island, but wasn't expecting Claire to be there. Now
Chris will definitely show up, he says with a smile. Claire
says that she doesn't know what went on between Wesker and
Chris, but Chris isn't the kind of person Wesker seems to
think he is. Wesker's response is to grab Claire by the
throat and toss her away.

[He walks up to Claire, who's struggling to move, and cruelly

puts one foot on her shoulder. It will pain Chris to see
Claire die, Wesker says, but he's interrupted by a radio
message. Whoever it is apparently has new information,
and Wesker winds up walking away. Apparently, Claire may
still be of use to him, Wesker says. He looks back at
Claire, and his eyes glow red through his sunglasses.
Claire gasps, and Wesker, his body blurring with sudden
speed, jumps over the patio railing into darkness.]

The piano roll from the torture chamber fits in the piano in
Alfred's recreation room. As the piano plays the same song
that Alfred's music box did, a secret panel in one of the
slot machines swings open. Inside, Claire finds the key to
Alfred's music box.

The music boxes are the disguised keys to a secret door in

Alfred's bedroom. Claire goes through to find herself
standing on a full-sized merry-go-round with only two
horses. The room is filled with toys and keepsakes of the
twins' childhood. A golden dragonfly sits on a child's
chair, across the room from a painting of an ant. The ant's
mouth is a concealed keyhole. Remembering the movie in
Alfred's museum, Claire plucks the dragonfly's wings off and
puts it in the ant's "mouth." Behind her, the merry-go-round
starts up again and turns, orienting itself so Claire can
climb up to yet another level in the room.

The final tier of Alfred's hideaway is a well-cared-for

study. Thick, well-thumbed books on biology, chemistry,
and genetics fill the bookcases on the walls. A newspaper
clipping on a stool is about a 10-year-old girl, maybe
Alexia, who graduated from a university with top honors.
She was offered a job as a head researcher by Umbrella
Incorporated. On top of one of the bookcases, Claire finds
Alfred's private diary. He has written of his unwholesome

obsession with his sister; he regards Alexia as his queen,

a woman who the entire world must worship. Claire takes the
diary, and finds that it hides the final key to the cargo
plane. She can finally escape.

As she climbs down into Alexia's bedroom, Alexia herself

somehow sneaks up on Claire. Holding Alfred's rifle, Alexia
says that for the glory of the Ashfords, Claire must die.
Claire dodges Alexia's first shot, but she knows the second
won't miss. Alexia moves in for the kill.

Suddenly, Steve kicks in the bedroom door. He sees Alexia at

the same time she sees him, and each point their weapon at
the other. Alexia fires first, grazing Steve. As Steve
falls to the floor, he returns the favor with a wild burst
from one of his Ingrams. Alexia retreats into Alfred's bedroom
through a secret door.

Steve and Claire cautiously follow Alexia. At the end of a

trail of blood, Claire finds a blond wig on Alfred's music
box. As she picks it up, Alfred suddenly jumps from above
his bed, meaning to crush Claire's skull with the butt of
his rifle. Claire dodges, and as Alfred takes a second swing,
Steve kicks him across the room and holds him at gunpoint.

Alfred drags himself shakily to his feet, and accidentally

catches a glimpse of himself in the bedroom window. He's
wearing the same makeup that Alexia was. Screaming insanely,
Alfred runs, and a shocked Steve lets him go.

Steve, confused, asks what just happened. Claire, realizing

that she never did see Alfred during his "conversation" with
Alexia, concludes that there must never have really been
an Alexia. Alfred went to such extremes to hide Alexia from
everyone on the island because he thought he *was* Alexia.
This weirds Steve out, who decides that now they *really*
have to get out of this place (forget about the undead monsters;
it takes a *transvestite* to bother our man Steve). No sooner
does he say that than alarm klaxons start ringing all over the
factory. Alfred has activated the base's self-destruct system
by remote control.

Several cargo planes fly overhead as Claire and Steve leave

the mansion. Steve guesses that the other survivors are on
them. Quickly, Claire and Steve follow their example and run
for the underwater airport. Claire's keys unlock the cargo
plane's door, and Steve sets into the pilot's seat. He begins
to prepare the plane for takeoff, but the airport's maintenance
bridge is in the way. Claire volunteers to raise the bridge
while Steve gets ready to take off.

Claire dashes across the airport and throws a switch, raising

the bridge. This forces her to take the long way around to get
back to the plane. Claire uses the airport's cargo elevator to
return to the training facility's courtyard. A female voice,
almost exactly the same as the one she heard in William Birkin's
lab, tells Claire that the facility will explode in five minutes.

As Claire boards the elevator, Alfred has reached the training

facility's monitor room. Speaking in Alexia's voice, he swears
revenge on Claire. He types a series of passwords into a computer
and punches a red button.

A lab elsewhere in the facility suddenly powers up. Automated

systems defrost a storage tank marked T-078. It swings open, and
a new creature steps out. It looks nearly human, save for its
chalk-white skin and lack of gender. Both arms terminate in
clublike, spiked protrusions. A new Tyrant has been unleashed.

Claire starts running the moment the elevator opens. As she

turns the corner towards Alfred's palace, the Tyrant breaks
down a fence and steps into her way. It wades through a hail
of explosive bolts, only to collapse at Claire's feet. Claire
jumps over its body and takes off towards the airport.

Steve is anxiously waiting for her when Claire gets back to

the plane. He takes off just as the base begins to rock
with scattered explosions. They get into the air without a
hitch, and for a moment, Claire dares to think that their
ordeal is over. Steve tells her that he hopes she finds her
brother, because he now knows what it's like to be alone in
the world. After an uncomfortable silence, he changes the
subject, asking her where she wants to go. Claire suggests
Hawaii, and Steve sets a course.

Back on the island, Alfred runs to the antique tank he keeps

outside the military training facility. He opens a hatch on
its back and moves the tank forward, revealing yet another
secret passage. Using a special key, a minature gold halberd
like the one on his family crest, Alfred opens the door at
the passage's end, which leads to a hangar. Alfred climbs
into a Harrier jet marked with the Ashfords' crest, and
promises Claire to show her what real terror is all about.
A sudden impact shakes the cargo plane. Steve looks at the
plane's instruments, and somehow, the cargo bay's door has
come open. Claire volunteers to check it out.

Claire finds a stowaway in the cargo bay: the Tyrant. It

roars in anger, and one of its spikes grows into a vicious
claw. Claire's weapons only seem to slow the creature down,
but fortunately, the cargo catapult is loaded and ready to
fire. Claire leads the Tyrant near the open cargo bay door,
dodges one of its mad lunges, and hits the switch on the
catapult. A crate full of explosives is fired at the weakened
Tyrant, knocking it out the cargo hatch. Before they can hit
the ocean, the crate explodes.

As she walks into the cockpit, Steve asks Claire what was
wrong. Claire nonchalantly tells him that it was nothing. As
Steve grins, the plane's autopilot suddenly turns on. Steve
tries to turn manual control back on, with no luck. Alfred's
sneering face appears on a screen above the pilot's seat.
With a chuckle, he tells Claire and Steve that he's selected
a new destination for them.

Several hours pass. Steve is slumped against the side of the

cockpit, with Claire asleep on his shoulder. He turns to
look at her, and slowly lowers his face to hers. Just before
he can kiss her, Claire starts to wake up, and Steve jerks
away. Standing up, he looks out the plane's window and
realizes that the plane is descending. Steve looks at the
plane's instruments and sees that they're over Antarctica.

As the plane heads towards the ground, Claire sees a small

facility on the ground. Parked outside it are the cargo
planes that they saw leave the island. Apparently, Umbrella
owns this base as well.

The plane's autopilot apparently doesn't know how to land.

It descends to the base's runway, but goes into a skid. The
plane crashes into the side of the base. Both Claire and
Steve are knocked unconscious.

More time passes. Claire wakes up on the floor of the

plane's cockpit and wakes Steve up, who's surprised that
he's still alive.

Umbrella's base is constructed around a deep chasm of some

sort. Steve kicks the plane's door out and jumps down onto
the base's balcony. As Claire jumps out, he catches her, but
accidentally falls down with her on top of him. After a few
seconds' worth of cheap sexual tension, Claire gets to her
feet and offers Steve her hand. Steve ignores her and gets
up. At his suggestion, they split up to look for a way out.

Alone, Claire explores the base. In a barracks for

Umbrella's employees, she's caught in a crude ambush by a
quartet of zombies. The base may look deserted, but it's
still inhabited by its share of monsters.

The base appears to be both a mine, although Claire never

finds out what it's mining for, and a warehouse for Umbrella's
chemical shipments. One of the miners has left his diary
behind. He has written about both Alfred's tyranny
as a supervisor, and the creature that's rumored to haunt
the base. The miners call him "Nosferatu," and say that
late at night, you can hear him roar.

A richly furnished office on the base's second floor belongs

to Alfred, and inside, Claire finds a note written to Alfred
from his family's butler, offering Alfred condolences on his
sister's death. There *was* an Alexia Ashford, but according
to the letter, she died in an unspecified accident fifteen
years ago, soon after Alfred's father was killed. Alfred was
forced to assume the responsibilities of an adult at a young
age, and lost his beloved sister soon afterward. His insanity
starts to make a little more sense.

A second folder contains a report/confession by Alexander

Ashford, the twins' father and the original architect of
this base. His report concerns the founding of Umbrella, the
creation of the T-Virus, the death of his own father, and
the Ashfords' fall from grace. The most interesting revelation
is the fact that there's a great deal of competition in the
field of T-Virus research. Umbrella isn't the only company
in the world that deals in monsters.

After dealing with the base's meager population of zombies,

dogs, and giant spiders, Claire reactivates the base's
generator. Now that the lights are back on, Claire searches
Alfred's office again and finds a hidden switch. Pushing it
slides a door back, revealing a room with a mesh floor. Far
below this room, a screaming man is blindfolded, gagged, and
shackled to the wall. An ornate battle axe is embedded in the
wall with its haft across his chest. His scream is a completely
inhuman, bonechilling sound. This must be the "Nosferatu" that
the miner was writing about. Claire finds the key to the base's
machine room and leaves Nosferatu's prison.

The base's mining drill can be controlled from the machine

room. Claire meets back up with Steve, who tells her that
there's an Australian outpost seven miles from the base. If
they can use the drill to break out of the base, they might
be able to reach the outpost. Steve takes control of the
drill and starts to guide it towards the wall, but at a
crucial moment, he's staring dreamily at Claire instead of
watching what he's doing. He winds up smashing open a pipe
filled with toxic gas, which fills the mining and machine
rooms. Claire grabs him by the scruff of the neck and yanks
him out of the room.

Steve gets outside and immediately starts beating himself

up over being so stupid. Claire tells him to not blame
himself. (Not right *now*, anyway.) Whatever happens,
they'll escape, and they'll do it together. Steve is cheered
up by this, and runs off to find a way to fix what he's done.
Claire, using a gas mask and a reshaped valve handle,
proceeds to do it for him by shutting off the flow of gas
through the pipes.
The air clears in the mining room. Claire takes off the gas
mask and is immediately ambushed by a freshly arrived Alfred
Ashford. Steve arrives in the nick of time, and, after a short
gunfight, shoots Alfred in the chest. Alfred falls over the
railing of the machine room to the floor of the mining room,
next to one of the yawning pits that the base was built on top
of. He staggers to his feet, but the edge of the pit crumbles
underneath him. Alfred falls out of sight, screaming. After he
disappears, something at the bottom of the pit roars in rage.

Claire picks up Alfred's sniper rifle and gets into the

mining drill with Steve. Steve throws the drill into gear
and drives forward through the wall. The heat produced by
the drill melts the ice on the other side of the wall, which
in turn floods most of the base.

In his prison below Alfred's office, Nosferatu roars. His

chest splits open with a sickening crack, revealing his
oversized first-generation-Tyrant-esque heart. With casual
ease, he pulls himself away from the wall, snapping steel
shackles like spiderwebs. The axe across his chest is
thrown across the room and sticks in the floor.

Steve and Claire get out of the drill. They climb up to the
top of a nearby helipad, and find a staircase on the other
side. Claire is about to go down the stairs when she sees
Nosferatu at their bottom, coming up. Steve steps in front
of her and points his Ingrams at Nosferatu, yelling for it
to back off. Suddenly, an enormous mandible, like that of a
praying mantis, sprouts from the Nosferatu's back and swats
Steve, sending him tumbling off of the edge of the helipad.
Claire runs to where Steve fell, to find him clinging by one
hand to one of the helipad's support struts. Steve begs
Claire to run and save herself. Claire replies that she'll
help him up as soon as she (and I quote) waxes the monster.
Using Alfred's rifle, Claire puts a bullet straight through
the Nosferatu's heart.

Claire helps Steve up. Steve apologizes; despite having

saved her life at least three times in the last day, he
feels that he failed her against Nosferatu. Claire claps him
on the shoulder and tells him to forget it. Steve stands up,
clutching the bullet wound Claire just accidentally hit, and
quietly promises that next time, he will protect her.

At the bottom of the stairs, Claire and Steve find a

snowmobile. Claire gets into the driver's seat and starts it
up. It'll easily reach the Australian outpost.

Somewhere in the base, Alfred Ashford drags himself down a

long hallway. He is mortally wounded. In his own voice, he
promises Claire that things aren't over between them.

Alfred collapses inside a laboratory, on a set of stairs

leading to a raised platform. In a faint voice, he says
Alexia's name. Suddenly, a series of computers and monitors
activate. A cylinder rises in front of Alfred and defrosts.
Fluid drains out of it, revealing the form of a naked,
blonde woman.
"Alexia... you're finally awake. Alexia..." Alfred says,
and dies. The woman's eyes widen in anger.

Claire and Steve talk and joke as they drive towards freedom.

Something enormous, moving so fast that it's unidentifiable,

shatters the roof of Umbrella's Antarctic base and races
towards Claire and Steve's snowmobile. Steve sees it in the
rearview mirror just before it reaches them. Whatever it is,
it hits the snowmobile with stunning force and knocks it onto
its side. The thing that hit it lashes around the snowmobile
like a boa constrictor, slamming it into the ground.

The naked woman sits on the stairs where Alfred died, cradling
her brother's head. She hums to herself quietly as she strokes
his hair. On one of the nearby monitors, she is watching the
snowmobile burn.

Meanwhile, back on Rockfort, a small boat drops off a single

passenger. Slowly, Chris Redfield climbs hand-over-hand up a
sheer cliff, burdened by a heavy bag filled with equipment.
As he hauls himself up, one of his handholds breaks away, and
Chris accidentally drops his bag into the ocean. Grimly, he
continues onward, finding a cave on the side of the cliff.

The cave has been turned into a mausoleum. Chris has been in
it for a few seconds when the ground shakes. Something
nearby roars, and Chris's entrance collapses.

A man is slumped against the wall of the mausoleum. Rodrigo,

whose wounds haven't gotten much better, has made his way
here from the cellblock. He says that he had thought he was
the only man on the island who was still alive. Chris
replies that he's looking for a girl named Claire Redfield.
Rodrigo recognizes the name and tells Chris that he's
wasting his time; Rodrigo helped her escape, and he's sure
that she was on one of the planes that left the island.
Chris thanks him for helping out.

Suddenly, the worm Claire encountered returns. Chris is able

to get out of its way, but Rodrigo cannot. The worm swallows
him whole and disappears into the soft earth of the mausoleum.

Chris catches up to the worm in a large cave nearby. If he

hadn't dropped his bag, he'd have something more appropriate
to the job, but all he has is his Glock handgun. The worm is
soft-bodied, though, and the handgun proves to be enough.
After Chris shoots it a few dozen times, the worm spasms
and dies, spitting Rodrigo out onto the cave floor.

Mortally wounded, Rodrigo tells Chris to leave the island, and

gives him the lighter that Claire gave Rodrigo earlier. Rodrigo
says that it'll be good to see his family again, and dies.

An elevator has been cut into the cave wall. Sadly, Chris
leaves Rodrigo's body behind and takes the elevator down,
winding up in the military training facility's motor pool.
The military training facility has weathered the base's
self-destruct sequence surprisingly well. Chris finds his
way outside, to the courtyard where Alfred kept his tank.
Alfred's escape route is obvious, but he's puzzle-locked
it with an incomplete version of the Ashfords' crest.

Chris hooks up a battery to a lift system in the motor pool,

which takes him up to the balcony. He finds a document and a
key on a shelf, where they've apparently been discarded. The
document is a report on the properties of a new metal alloy
called Duploid. While Duploid is remarkably durable, a
combination of two common chemicals will dissolve it. This
metal is what the Ashford crests were made out of.

A door on the balcony leads to the hall outside the facility

control room. Inside, someone is singing. Chris runs in. The
main screen of the control room shows a woman in an evening
gown, cradling a dead man in her lap. (Alexia is dressed
exactly how Alfred dressed, when he was pretending to be
her.) Chris watches her sing, unsure as to how to react,
until the screen goes dark.

In the airport, near where Claire boarded the cargo plane,

a man in black curses as he watches Alexia sing; she's not
supposed to be fully conscious yet. Another security
monitor comes on, showing Chris. The man in black is
surprised to see Chris, but immediately arranges a surprise
for him. He activates a small hovercraft by remote control
and opens a large white storage device. Slowly, a reptilian
creature climbs out; although it looks different, it is
unmistakably a Hunter. As the hovercraft flies away, the man
in black laughs.

[CVX: the man in black's monologue is slightly different. It

will also make you instantly lose all respect for Wesker.]

In the room where Alfred ambushed Claire, one of the Ashford

crests is lying in plain sight. No sooner has Chris seen it
than it falls through a hole in the floor. Chris realizes
that if he dissolves the crest, he'll be left with a golden
halberd which'll unlock the secret door underneath the tank.
That means he has to figure out how to get into the base's
underground waterway.

He takes the elevator to the basement. Most of the basement

has been flooded with toxic gas after the failure of the
ventilation system, but a staircase that was raised when
Claire was here has now fallen. At its bottom, Chris
appropriates a shotgun and walks through a storage room,
right by the cylinder from which Alfred released the Tyrant.

The key from the balcony unlocks a storage locker, in which

Chris finds one of the chemicals he needs to dissolve the
crest. In a pile of wrecked transport crates on the facility's
cargo elevator, he also finds a doorknob, which he can use to
open a door on the second floor. He kneels to pick it up, and
a beam of red light shines on his back. Chris looks up to see
a small hovercraft, equipped with a spotlight. It sounds an
alarm. In response, a pair of Hunters leap down on Chris from
the top of the elevator shaft. Chris barely evades them.
The hovercrafts are suddenly everywhere in the base. If they
detect Chris, an alarm sounds, and a Hunter arrives almost
immediately. Chris carefully avoids the hovercrafts' motion
detectors, as well as a swarm of fresh zombies. These
zombies are dressed in black military gear and wearing
night-vision goggles. Obviously, the people who invaded the
facility, whoever they are, are having their own problems.
On the second floor, Chris finds a small model of a tank.
Earlier, Chris has seen the diorama of the facility, so he
heads back there.

The tank model fits into an empty space on the diorama. A

secret panel hisses open behind Chris, revealing a lever
guarded by laser beams, a trio of keyholes, a book, and a
key to the cargo elevator. The book is one of Alfred's
diaries, where he has written about his plans to build a new
bridge from the facility to his mansion, using the labor of
his prisoners. The entrance he uses now, which takes him to
his mansion via the facility's underground waterway, is
sealed by what Alfred calls the "diorama trick."

On his way back to the cargo elevator, Chris is walking

through the storage room when he hears chuckling behind him.
He turns to find the man in black... Albert Wesker. Somehow,
Wesker is still alive. Chris realizes that it must've been
Wesker who attacked the facility, which means Wesker attacked
his sister.

[CV Complete note: this dialogue is slightly different.]

Chris raises his gun to shoot Wesker. Suddenly, Wesker is

a blur. He covers the space between him and Chris in a
fraction of a second and knocks Chris across the room. With
superhuman speed and strength, Wesker races over to where
Chris landed and picks him up by the throat. As Chris
struggles to breathe, Wesker tells him that since Chris
spoiled his plans, Wesker has "sold his soul" to a new
employer. Furthermore, Wesker's figured out that Claire
isn't on the island any more; she's with Alexia, in the
Antarctic. Wesker begins to slowly strangle Chris. Chris
punches Wesker in the face, knocking off his sunglasses.
This reveals Wesker's eyes. To Chris's shock, they are
yellow. Their pupils are slitted like a cat's.

A screen by the storage cylinders lights up, showing Alexia

Ashford. She laughs, and the screen goes blank. Wesker,
surprised, throws Chris across the room and into one of the
storage cylinders. A rubber man is released into the room
from the broken cylinder, and by the time Chris has dealt
with it, Wesker has disappeared.

Chris takes the cargo elevator up to the first floor of the

facility. The side of the elevator shaft has been breached,
which leads to the partially collapsed front hall. Scattered
fires are still burning fitfully. Chris navigates through
what's left of the first floor and finds the controls to the
ventilation system. He turns it back on, clearing the toxic
gas from the basement. In the basement, by someone's work
desk, Chris finds the other chemical he needs. Mixing them
together, he creates a compound that'll dissolve Duploid.

The front door of the facility is unlocked and undamaged.

Chris walks outside, and while the door to the palace has
been blocked by rubble, the airport elevator still works.
Chris rides it down.

The airport is just about untouched, although it's now

populated by Hunters and a handful of zombies. Chris fights
his way to the bridge controls and lowers the bridge that
Claire raised. On the airport's control platform, Chris finds
the three keys that Claire used to open the cargo plane;
they'll also fit in the keyholes by Alfred's diorama.

When Chris uses the three keys, the diorama slides back into
the wall to reveal an escape hatch in the floor. The tunnel
to Alfred's mansion has partially collapsed, making access
to the mansion impossible, but the Ashfords' family crest is
lying in a pool of water. It's guarded by an enormous
creature that looks like a cross between a manta ray and
an electric eel. This is the Albanoid that Claire saw earlier,
and it has reached adulthood. Chris jumps into the water,
grabs the crest, and scrambles back out before the creature
can electrocute him.

The crest dissolves when Chris uses the chemical mixture on

it, leaving him with a golden halberd. Finally, Chris can
see what's at the end of Alfred's secret passage. The "key"
lets him into Alfred's private hangar. One of Alfred's
private Harrier jets is brought to Chris by automated
machinery. Chris smiles and climbs in.

Chris flies to Antarctica, and lands in an underground

hangar by Umbrella's base. He takes the elevator up to the
base's balcony. Claire and Steve's plane is still sticking
out of the wall, but to Chris's surprise, a pair of
tentacles are lying across the balcony, almost as if they're
standing guard over something. After he shoots them a few
times, the tentacles withdraw in a spray of green blood.

Most of the base's second floor has frozen into a solid

block of ice. Alfred's office is still untouched. Inside,
Chris uses the halberd key to open a locked bookcase.
Inside, he finds an old diary of Alfred Ashford's and an
oddly labelled paperweight. Alfred has written about, among
other things, the "secret" of his and Alexia's birth, the
experiment that turned his father into a monster, and
Alexia's decision to experiment on herself. Alexia Ashford,
after faking her own death, has been in cryogenic storage
for the last fifteen years. Alfred also writes that there's
a secret passage in the base, and he needs the three jewels
worn by each member of the Ashford family to open it. Chris
makes a note of this before he leaves.

Earlier, when Claire was at this base, part of the walkway

above the sorter had collapsed, keeping her from going through
the doors on the other side of the room. Now, Chris can just
jump off of the walkway and run across the ice to the other
half of the catwalk. A crane hook is stuck in the ice, but
Chris needs a key to work the hook's controls. He leaves
through the nearest door, but as he does, he doesn't see a
massive shape moving beneath him.

In a hallway, Chris finds two more of Wesker's hovercraft

waiting for him. Apparently, Wesker has come to Antarctica
as well. He adroitly dodges the hovercrafts' searchlights
and ducks into a nearby elevator. On the next floor down,
he finds a switchboard and turns the base's power back on,
reactivating a series of elevators.

The fifth floor of the base has a strange room that's

familiar to Chris; it's a near-exact replica of the front
hall of the Spenser mansion. (It is now more accurate to
say that it's a near-exact replica of the PSX RE's mansion;
it bears next to no resemblance to the REv.2 Spencer estate.)
A hall leading out of it, lined with biohazard suits, has
a statue of a tiger at its end that resembles one in that
other mansion's basement.

Chris steps out of the elevator onto the base's sixth floor,
and stops. An enormous anthill has been built here, towering
above the floor and surrounded by thousands of mutated ants.
Chris forges through the ants to the laboratories on either
side of the anthill.

One lab hasn't been used for a while, and Chris finds Alexia's
research notes inside. She somehow fused the remnants of a
virus from the body of a queen ant with the T-Virus, creating a
new virus that she refers to as the "T-Veronica," after her
ancestor. This virus is what she used to turn her father into
a monster, and what she used on herself.

The other lab is cutting-edge and has been carefully maintained.

There's a trail of blood leading to it. The inside of the room is
lined with supercomputers, each one of which is hooked up to a
strange mechanism at the far corner of the room. Chris activates
it by solving another of Alfred's puzzles, and a cryogenic tube
shoots up behind Chris. Alfred's corpse falls out of the tube.
Chris recognizes Alfred's ring as one of the three proofs he
read about, and takes it.

Back on the second floor, Chris finds the key to the crane
in an aquarium, of all places. He starts up the crane, and
it breaks through the ice. Alexander Ashford's dead body is
impaled on the crane's hook. Chris recoils in shock and
disgust. Behind the body, Alexia Ashford is standing on the
other side of the room. She laughs at him, and asks Chris
how he wants to die.

A spider, bigger than any Chris has yet seen, bursts forth
from the hole in the ice. Chris throws himself out of the
crane's control room as the spider crushes it. Alexia has
disappeared. Fortunately, while her spider is huge, it isn't
smart or fast, and Chris can run circles around it. Before
he leaves, Chris takes an earring from Alexander's body.

Back in the replica of the Spencer mansion's front hall,

Chris finds a painting of the last generation of Ashfords,
with hollows at Alexander's ear, Alfred's finger, and Alexia's
throat. The jewels from Alfred's ring and Alexander's earring
fit perfectly.

Behind the mansion's staircase, Chris finally finds Claire,

unconscious inside a coccoon. He cuts her out of it and waits
until she wakes up. She hugs him, and tells him that she can't
leave until they find Steve. She explains who Steve is, and
says that they were separated.

From the balcony, Alexia laughs at Claire and Chris. Holding

Alfred's rifle, she promises to destroy the "genetically
inferior siblings" before disappearing through a nearby door.
Chris and Claire give chase, with Claire in the lead. As
Chris ascends the stairs, a tentacle bursts through the wall
and destroys the balcony beneath him. Chris falls to the floor,
and both he and Claire are knocked unconscious. The tentacle,
which looks like an eyeless snake, descends to the floor and
examines Chris before disappearing back through the hole in
the wall.

Claire is the first to wake up. She leans over the edge of
the destroyed balcony to look at Chris, who is awake and
clutching at his leg. From behind the door Alexia went
through, she hears Steve scream. Chris tells her to save
him, and that he'll be fine. With a final look at Chris,
Claire runs.

Two more tentacles try to ambush Claire as she runs after

Alexia, but she cuts them down with bursts of rifle fire.
She emerges in a cellblock, with Alexia nowhere in sight.
One of the cells has been turned into storage for antique
weapons, and underneath a cannon, Claire finds a blue
binder. A note inside, written by Alexander, tells the
reader how to arm the base's self-destruct system. The
password, of course, is "Veronica." Inside the cannon is a
keycard, suspended in a glass sphere. Claire shatters the
glass and takes the keycard.

The closest place where Alexia could've gone is an empty

room with a lowered gate. Claire opens the gate with the
keycard, but as she does so, the door to the cellblock
audibly locks. Beyond the gate is a hallway lined with suits
of armor. At its end is the room that once imprisoned
Alexander Ashford. It now imprisons Steve Burnside.

Claire hits a switch on the wall, and Steve's shackles open.

The battle axe across his chest refuses to budge, even with
both of them pushing it. Steve tells Claire that the crazy
woman, Alexia, said she was going to perform the same
experiment on him that she did on her father.

Suddenly, Steve's voice distorts. He clutches at his chest,

and screams for Claire to help him. Blood bursts from his
neck, cutting him off. He rumbles, deep and guttural, and
Claire backs away from him in horror. Steve's body begins to
expand and change, growing bone spurs and vicious claws. His
skin turns green and scaly, and he easily triples in size.
His head, grotesquely, is nearly unchanged. With no effort
whatsoever, he wrenches the battle axe from the wall and
stands up. Steve, or the creature that Steve has become,
roars, and swings the axe at Claire. At the same time,
the gate at the end of the hall begins to lower.

Claire's weapons don't do more than slow Steve down. Ducking

Steve's axe, Claire rolls underneath the gate as it closes.
She can already tell that the gate won't hold for long, and
the door to the cellblock is locked. Steve begins to hack at
the gate with the axe.

A tentacle bursts through the wall next to Claire. With

impossible speed, it wraps around her and pulls her into the
air. Claire struggles helplessly.

Steve finally destroys the gate. He steps through the

wreckage and pulls his axe back. He swings it at Claire's
head... and stops. In a deep, guttural voice, he says
Claire's name. With a furious roar, he cuts the tentacle
holding Claire, and she falls to the floor.

The tentacle thrashes, like a thing in pain, and lashes out

with its bloody stump. Steve is hit with bonecrushing force.
As the tentacle withdraws, Steve slowly becomes human once
more. Claire runs over to him, to find that he's been
mortally wounded. Claire begs him to hold on, and tells him
that her brother's come to save them. Steve says that he
can't keep the promise he made, to escape with her. He tells
Claire that he's glad to have met her, and that he loves her.
Steve dies. Claire, cradling his body, bursts into tears.

Back in the ruins of the mansion's front hall, Chris is

hiding amidst the rubble. Alexia stands regally at the top
of the staircase, while Wesker is at the bottom. Wesker, who
still isn't wearing his sunglasses, says that he has been
sent to obtain the T-Veronica virus, the only sample of
which is now inside Alexia's body. He demands that Alexia
come with him.

Alexia says that Wesker isn't worthy of the virus's power.

She descends the stairs towards him, and suddenly bursts
into flames. Her clothing burns away. In the middle of the
fire, Alexia changes. Her skin turns slate-gray, and parts
of her body begin to look like the chitinous exoskeleton of
an insect. At the top of the stairs, she was human; when she
reaches Wesker, she is anything but.

Wesker gawks at her and Alexia casually backhands him. Despite

his own superhuman strength, Wesker tumbles across the room. He
shakily hauls himself to his feet. Alexia gently hops off of the
stairs, across the twenty feet that now separate her from Wesker,
and hits him again. Wesker goes tumbling into the corner of the
room. Alexia turns to smile at Chris, as if she's known where he
was all along.

Seeing that Alexia's distracted, Wesker runs for the mansion's

front door. Alexia gestures, and suddenly, a wall of flame
springs up in front of the door. She's not fast enough to stop
him. Chris makes his own move as Alexia attacks Wesker, dashing
towards and up the main stairs. Alexia makes another gesture,
and Chris is nearly incinerated by another wall of fire. He
tumbles back down the stairs, and Alexia steps in front of him.

[Or, in CVX:

[Wesker recovers in midair from Alexia's uppercut, landing on

his feet. Alexia confidently moves in for the kill, slinging
flaming ichor from her hands. Wesker, trying desperately to
avoid her, runs away from her... and *up the wall*. As fire
crawls up the wall behind him and breaks out on his clothing,
Wesker springs off the wall and delivers a powerful right
cross to Alexia's jaw.

[Alexia spins, dazed, and throws another spray of fire in

Wesker's direction. Wesker is standing in front of Chris,
so both men have to get out of the way. As they stand,
Wesker and Chris notice each other. Wesker grins faintly,
and says, "Chris, as one of my best men, I want you to
handle this." He then breaks for the door. Alexia is too
slow, and her offhand attempt to incinerate Wesker misses.
Chris tries to get away, as with the other version of
this scene, but he's a little too late.]

Chris runs from Alexia, whose every gesture sprays some kind
of ichor or blood across the floor. Where it lands, it burns,
creating a short-lived wall of fire. Alexia herself isn't
bulletproof, though, and after a few rounds to the chest, she
falls over.

In the ashes of her clothing, Chris finds a red jewel in a

choker: the final Ashford family proof. Putting it in the
painting, he opens Alexander's secret passage. As the door
shuts behind Chris, Alexia slowly climbs to her feet.

Alfred has remodeled Alexander's hideaway into a set of

children's bedrooms, identical to those on Rockfort Island.
Chris finds little of interest in them besides another
pair of locked music boxes with parts missing from their
lids. Chris inserts two jewels he has found and a secret
passage opens, just as it did for Claire in the prison's
mansion. Above the bedrooms, Chris finds an old dining
room, lined with portraits of the Ashfords. Alexander
Ashford's picture has been crudely defaced. An ant farm
is on the table, in which sits a golden dragonfly. Chris
pockets it. Although he has no way of knowing it, he's
standing in the room where, long ago, Alfred and Alexia
were filmed as they killed a dragonfly.

Fighting his way through a fresh swarm of zombies, Chris

finds an abandoned lab where Alexander Ashford must once
have pursued his research. A journal on the countertop
contains the secret that made Alfred and Alexia destroy
their father; they were never his real children. They
were the result of Alexander's experiments in genetically
determining intelligence. If the twins are Ashfords at
all, it's because Alexander's experiment used a sample
of Veronica's DNA, which means Alexander is more their
great-nephew than a father.

Alexander's lab connects to the cellblock. Chris hears Claire

sobbing on the other side of a locked door, and tries to open
it. The door is electronically locked, and Chris can't break
it down. Claire tells Chris that Steve is dead, and pushes the
binder under the door with the keycard in it. She's read in
the binder that, once the self-destruct system to the base is
activated, all the locks in the base automatically disengage
to expedite an evacuation. Once she's free, the emergency
elevator to the base's hangar is close by. They can easily
escape before the base explodes.

The control room is locked, but the golden dragonfly serves

as a key. Discordantly, the floor leading up to the control
room is made of steel mesh, and if Chris looks down, he can
see the top of Alexia's anthill. Chris uses the keycard to
gain access to the control room's computers and inputs the
password: the final code Veronica. The base's nuclear
reactors decouple and prepare for detonation, while the
system releases the automatic locks. A countdown begins.

Outside the control room, Claire runs up to Chris and hugs

him. Before they can get to the emergency elevator, a
tentacle bursts through the floor. Its "mouth" opens wide,
and it regurgitates the naked body of Alexia Ashford. The
tentacle itself loses its cohesion, flowing onto Alexia's
body. The resulting substance covers her and hardens
into chitinous plates, like an insect's exoskeleton.

As Alexia transforms, Chris spots a nearby emergency locker.

The labels on the outside say that it contains an anti-BOW
weapon called a "linear launcher." Chris and Claire hurriedly
open the locker. Unfortunately, the launcher isn't charged,
and slowly begins to power up.

Alexia turns and smiles at the Redfields, once again covered

in her gray armor. Chris tells Claire to get to the elevator,
while he keeps Alexia busy. Claire tells Chris not to die on
her, and breaks into a run. Alexia throws a wall of fire in
front of Claire, and advances towards her. Before Alexia can
kill Claire, Chris shoots her in the chest. Alexia crumples to
the floor and her fires die, giving Claire a chance to escape.

Alexia begins to undergo a terrible transformation. Her body

expands like Steve's, changing into something much larger.

[The following sequence is not in CVX:

[Chris looks away from Alexia and smiles at Claire, who is

watching through the glass wall of the elevator shaft. The
car descends, taking Claire out of sight and leaving Chris
alone with Alexia.]

Alexia's latest incarnation is a sickeningly pregnant cross

between an ant and a woman. As she finishes her transformation,
her face, the only part of her that's still recognizably human,
twists into a contemptuous smile. She attacks Chris with small
"soldier ants" and her ubiquitous tentacles, both of which spring
forth from her bloated torso. Chris returns fire with Claire's
grenade launcher, showering Alexia's body with explosive rounds.
After a vicious fight where the two seem to be evenly matched,
Alexia finally screams in pain. Her lower body breaks apart,
dissolving into nothing.

Suddenly, swarms of winged ants burst from the anthill underneath

Chris's feet. They cover their queen, and Alexia seems to absorb
their mass into herself. She rises like a phoenix from the ruins
of her body, taking on the form of an enormous, winged ant.

At the same time, the linear launcher finishes charging.

================================================================
8ii. A Summary of the Conclusion of RESIDENT EVIL: CODE VERONICA
================================================================

Chris pulls the linear launcher free from its housing. Alexia's
newest form buzzes around him, tossing spurts of flaming ichor,
but she's nowhere near as powerful as she was before.

Apparently, "linear launcher" is Umbrella-speak for "plasma rifle."

When Chris pulls the trigger, a burst of energy strikes Alexia in
the chest. It shines inside her for a moment like a star, and for
a moment, Alexia seems like she might survive even this...

...but then she explodes, nearly liquified by the force of the blast.
Chris drops the launcher and takes cover as the platform is showered
with gore. At the same time Alexia dies, the base begins to shake
with small explosions, as the self-destruct sequence enters its
final stage.

[Chris staggers down the staircase from the laboratory to find

Wesker... with Claire. He has Claire in a headlock, and tosses
her ahead of him through a hole in the wall. Chris gives chase,
following Wesker down a long, zombie-infested hallway. Chris
dodges the zombies, shoulder-blocking one out of his way, and
emerges in an underground seaport.

[Wesker is standing by a docked submarine with Claire. He tells

Chris that the T-Veronica virus turned out to be nothing, but
Wesker's revenge will be so much sweeter. Chris tells Wesker
to let Claire go, and Wesker tosses her across the room.

[Wesker tells Chris and Claire that he'd originally come to get
Alexia, but now that it's over with, he can get on to his other
job: revenge. Chris says that Alexia is gone, and Wesker's
response is that it doesn't really matter; now, he has Steve's
body. Steve still has enough of the "T-Alexia" virus in him to
work with. "Maybe he'll come back from the dead one day," Wesker
says, "like I did, to see your sister."

[Claire nearly attacks Wesker, but Chris holds her back and tells
her to go. It's his job to finish this. Claire tells Chris to
remember his promise, and leaves.

[Chris and Wesker face each other as Claire runs off. Chris tells
Wesker to "say hello to my teammates, who you killed!" Wesker
takes off his sunglasses and says, "I don't know where you get
 your confidence, Chris." He drops them to the floor and walks
towards Chris, who hits him with an iron bar. Wesker takes one
shot across the face, blocks the second with his arm--bending
the bar--and hits Chris in the face. Chris goes sprawling, and
Wesker presses his advantage. He may not be human any longer,
Wesker says, but his newfound power more than makes up for it.
A final uppercut sends a dazed Chris sprawling.

[As Wesker prepares to finish Chris off, Chris notices a load

of steel beams, suspended overhead on a pulley. Wesker leaps
into the air for a final, killing blow, but Chris manages to
get out of the way. He hits a lever and drops the steel beams
on Wesker, who looks up just in time to intercept the first
I-beam with his face. Wesker gets buried underneath the pile
of girders. Unfortunately, it isn't enough.

[Wesker gets up, visibly staggering ("Nice try."), and Chris,

likewise, climbs back to his feet. As they prepare to start
the fight again, one of the smaller explosions suddenly takes
out a nearby bit of machinery, and a gout of flame separates
them. They're cut off from each other by falling debris, and
Wesker's struck by the fire. Holding his horribly burned face,
Wesker promises Chris that the next time they meet, he'll kill
him. "Next time," Chris says, and runs out of the room. Wesker
stands amidst the wreckage and laughs.]

Chris runs to the emergency elevator, hoping he's not too late.
Under the platform where Alexia died, her army of mutant ants
burst into flames, which in turn ignites her anthill. Chris
barely manages to get into the elevator before the entire
fifth floor of Alexander Ashford's hideaway is scoured clean
by fire. As Chris's car descends, flames chase him down the
elevator shaft.

Claire is in Alfred's jet, waiting for Chris, when the elevator

opens. Chris gets one step out of it before the firestorm hits,
blowing him off of the balcony and to an undignified landing on
the nosecone of the jet. Claire asks if Chris is all right. His
response is to say, with a smile, that she knows he always keeps
his promises.

The jet rises out of the base's hangar in a cloud of flame.

Claire puts her hand on Chris's shoulder, asking him to
never leave her alone again. Chris replies that he's sorry,
but they have a job to do. They've got to destroy Umbrella
once and for all.

As Chris and Claire fly away, Umbrella's Antarctic base and the
legacy of the Ashford family are consumed in an explosion.

======================================
8iii. Conclusions About The Conclusion
======================================

1. Claire and Chris Redfield have both survived; as usual,

it was through the creative employ of self-destruct mechanisms.
(If Umbrella ever really wanted to kill Chris, all they'd have
to do is lure him someplace without a self-destruct device.)
2. Albert Wesker has also survived. By RE4, he's managed to
patch that unfortunate facial burn right up.

3. Steve Burnside may or may not be dead. While he did die

onscreen, Wesker's statement in CVX leaves the door open for
him to return.

4. Rodrigo Juan Raval did not survive.

5. Alexander, Alexia, and Alfred Ashford are dead. Unless a

distant relative shows up in a future game, the "proud
Ashford family" has died out.

6. Albert Wesker is looking to collect as many bioweapons as he can.

7. Umbrella is not the only company performing research on the

T-Virus and in fact have vicious competition in that particular field.

8. Edward Ashford and "Lord" Ozwell Spencer founded Umbrella.

We don't know exactly how old this makes Umbrella, but it places
its founding within the last hundred years or so, as Edward was
Alexia and Alfred's "grandfather."

9. Ashford and Spencer also discovered the "mother virus."

10. Umbrella is still making Tyrants, and seems to have

ironed most of the kinks out of them.

11. Umbrella is far more powerful than was previously thought.

12. Albert Wesker stole Steve Burnside's body before he escaped,

which means the T-Veronica virus is still in play.

===============================
8iv. The Ashford Family Diaries
===============================

The Ashford family is intricately linked with the history of

Umbrella, and thus with the background story of the Resident
Evil series. CV tells this particular story, but it does so
haphazardly; the relevant information is in files scattered
throughout the game, and at least one of them is very easy
to miss. Therefore, in this section, I've assembled the known
facts about the Ashford family and put them together in a
rough chronological order.

The noble legacy of the Ashford family begins with Veronica

Ashford, about five generations ago. They're constantly referred
to as "glorious" throughout the game, but we're never told why.

A nobleman named Lord Spencer (whose first name is given in

an RE2 EX File as "Ozwell") and Edward Ashford, Alfred and
Alexia's grandfather, discovered the "mother virus." The details
of where it came from are dealt with in RE5, and RE0 establishes
that the "mother virus," a.k.a. the Progenitor, was the precursor
to the T-Virus.

By the time RE begins in 1998, Umbrella's the kind of inescapable

megacorporation that drives most cyberpunk plots. It is noted in
RE0 to have grown particularly rapidly in the time leading up
to the Arklay outbreak. In addition to the bioweapons research
that drives RE's plot, Umbrella makes and sells various
pharmaceutical products.

Edward had a son, Alexander, who got a degree in genetics

and assisted his father with his research. In 1970, Alexander
caused an accident, during which Edward was infected by the
Progenitor virus and killed. As a result, Spencer rapidly
gained more power over Umbrella, and Umbrella lost ground to
its competitors in the field of T-Virus research. The death
of Edward marks the beginning of the Ashfords' fall from grace.

(In RE0 and REv.2, we get a bit of Umbrella's official history

of itself, and there isn't an Ashford to be seen anywhere in
it. Instead, James Marcus--an obsessive researcher who says in
his private diary that he didn't really get involved when
Spencer started Umbrella--is given credit as the co-founder.
Alexander may have managed to anger Spencer enough that he tried
to write the Ashfords out of the company's history.)

In an attempt to gain back some respect, Alexander commissioned

the construction of a research facility in the Antarctic, which
involved the renovation of a transport terminal. Inside the facility,
he had a series of rooms built in the image of the Spencer mansion,
where Alexander could cherish his memories in peace.

Finally, inside this replicated mansion, Alexander constructed

a private lab that only he had access to. He codenamed this
project "Veronica," after the legendary founder of the Ashfords.

Later, Alexander isolated the gene that controlled intelligence

within the human genome, and developed a way to deliberately
manipulate it. To test it, he impregnated a surrogate mother
with an embryo that he made using a sample of the genes of
Veronica Ashford. To his surprise, the woman gave birth to
fraternal twins, who he named Alfred and Alexia and raised
in his Antarctic hideaway. Alfred was smart, but Alexia was
a genius, and Alexander regarded her as the literal reincarnation
of Veronica. After she graduated from college at the age of
ten, Alexia soon had a job as a head researcher for Umbrella
Incorporated.

Early in their lives, the twins became fascinated by ants.

Alexia would later write that an anthill represented her ideal
version of society, with dull worker drones existing only to
serve the needs of their queen. The events depicted in the
movie in Alfred's war museum seem to have permanently left
their mark on him, as the motif of dragonflies and ants is
repeated endlessly inside his private chambers.

(I don't believe for a second that this is intentional on

Capcom's part, but it's interesting to note how the
dragonfly-ant theme plays out over the course of the game.
Early on, to escape from Alfred, Claire must recreate his
torture of the dragonfly, plucking the wings off of the
dragonfly object and placing it in an ant's mouth. Later,
Alexia becomes what's basically a queen ant, complete with
an anthill and her own swarm of mutant soldier ants. To
 kill her, Chris uses a dragonfly object to unlock the door
that leads to her death. When he reassembles the object, the
dragonfly returns to life, and plays a part in the destruction
of the anthill.

(Furthermore, as someone else noted, Alexia writes in her

lab notes that she considers all other humans to be "ants,"
beneath her notice. In her final form, Alexia resembles
nothing so much as a dragonfly, and is killed by Chris,
who would presumably qualify as an "ant." Therefore, not
only has Chris symbolically undone the torture of the
original dragonfly, but Alexia, in her last moments, *is*
the dragonfly, maimed and struggling vainly to survive.

(...I just scared myself half to death. Let's move on.)

Alexia conducted private experiments on ants, assisted by

Alfred, who she refers to in her private diaries as a
"loyal but inept soldier ant." (Alfred, as an adult, seems
to have taken that comment to heart; he dresses like a toy
soldier, is obviously fascinated by war, and the man can't
shoot straight. He has a laser sight and a starlight scope and
he *still* misses everything he shoots at.) Inside the body of
a queen ant, perhaps the same queen ant that Chris finds dead
in the Antarctic base, she found traces of an ancient virus.
Mixing this with the T-Virus her "grandfather" discovered,
she created the virus that she named T-Veronica.

The twins grew to hate their "father." Alfred eventually

figured out how to get into Alexander's private lab, where
he learned the truth about his and Alexia's birth. Soon
afterward, Alexia deliberately infected Alexander with the
T-Veronica virus as an experiment, transforming him into the
homicidal mutant that would become known as "Nosferatu." The
twins somehow managed to imprison Alexander underneath the
base in the Antarctic. As far as anyone else was concerned,
Alexander Ashford simply vanished. It doesn't seem likely
that many people missed him.

Alexia continued her research, and decided to conduct

further experiments on herself. She theorized that cold
storage would slow down the infection, allowing an infected
organism to peacefully coexist with the virus and eventually
adapt to it. The process would take fifteen years. Over Alfred's
objections, she infected herself and went into cold sleep in
a secret lab underneath the Antarctic laboratory. Either
Alfred or Alexia came up with a cover story for this, saying
that Alexia had died in an unspecified lab accident. (Of course,
she would eventually reappear, but she'd be rich, an adult,
and theoretically omnipotent. It didn't have to be a *good*
cover story.)

No one learned the truth until Alexia woke up, although the
Ashfords' family butler at the time, Tom Dorson, came very
close to figuring it out. (Note that by the time of Code
Veronica, Scott Harman has been Alfred's butler for four
years. Tom Dorson may have gotten a little *too* close.)

Alfred was forced to assume Alexander's responsibilities at

a young age, and the problem was compounded by his sister's
"death." Umbrella gave him a meaningless position as the
commander of an isolated prison in the southern hemisphere.
Alfred became obsessed with returning the Ashfords to glory.

Alfred's obsession was the least of his mental problems. The

most obvious is, of course, how he coped with Alexia's "death";
unable to live without her, he simply constructed a delusion
in which Alexia was still around. (I could also add that
Alfred's version of Alexia is apparently far kinder towards
him than Alexia ever was.) The extent to which he went to
maintain that delusion is one of the more disturbing things
in CV. Even if you ignore his obsession and denial, it looks
like he consulted Alexia on the decoration of the Rockfort
mansion. (Would a ten-year-old biochemist prodigy *ever* be
that obsessed with dolls, or is that another facet of Alexia's
megalomania?)

The end of this story, naturally, is the story of Code: Veronica.

=====================
8v. Random Commentary
=====================

1. As was pointed out on the now-defunct Evil-Online message

boards, Claire looks *very* different than she did in RE2.
Moreso than any other character, I'd really like to know
what happened to her between games.

2. It's an interesting touch that Chris still wears gear

with RPD and S.T.A.R.S. insignias on it.

3. People were excited that CV would return to RE's "tradition"

of lousy voice actors, and they weren't disappointed. Claire and
Chris's actors are decent and Rodrigo's voice actor is actually
very good, but the rest...

4. Alfred Ashford could change clothes faster than any man

alive. Somehow, he managed to change from an evening gown
and long gloves into his preppy-soldier outfit in about
twenty seconds with a bullet in his arm.

5. Steve is annoying at first, but he does have his moments.

It's interesting to watch his character develop; at first,
he balances his anger at his father with his need to show
off for Claire, who's the only pretty girl around. After he
kills his father, he attaches himself to Claire, who's the
only friend he's got left. Some real thought was obviously
put into Steve's personality dynamic, and it's a shame that
a lot of it was shot down by a mediocre voice actor. (In his
defense, Steve's voice acting gets better the further you get
into the game, and improves markedly right after Steve is
forced to shoot his father. The actor does a great job with
Steve's death scene.)

6. Note the nods to Silent Hill (the crematorium) and Parasite

Eve (Alexia's shapeshifting).

7. The Resident Evil tradition of characters being far too

young to have the skills they're supposed to possess continues.
Chris is a former fighter pilot (he's had enough flight training
to handle the Harrier jet) *and* an ex-cop at 25; Jill is a
munitions expert, classical pianist, chemist, gunsmith, mechanic,
ex-cop, ex-Delta Force, *and* the god damn Master of Unlocking
at 23; Claire is a demolitions expert, burglar, motorcyclist,
locksmith, and a student of the John Woo school of physically
impossible gunfighting at 19; Rebecca is supposed to be a
trained medic, helicopter mechanic, and a member of an elite
police unit at 18; and Steve is a crack pilot, gunman, and
can operate any kind of heavy machinery at the tender age
of 17. Sherry must have been hiding her *true* power.

8. The back of Claire's vest bears a new design and the words
"Let Me Live," which are only legible near the end of the game.
This is the same design that's on the back of her jacket if she's
wearing her alternate "biker" outfit in RE2.

9. CV is the only Resident Evil game so far that hasn't ended

at sunrise. It's full morning when Chris arrives in the Antarctic,
and it looks like high noon when he flies out with Claire.

10. Watch _Mission: Impossible II_ and then play through CV.
See how many similarities you can spot.

11. Alexander's hideaway is the first time in the series that

someone sets up a deliberate visual parallel with the Spencer
mansion. It happens again in RE5's "Lost in Nightmares" DLC
and Revelations.

12. You can get a slightly alternate cutscene if you trigger

the Alexia/Wesker showdown fight before you use the Crane Key.
It's not a shocking revelation or anything, but it does spare
you one of the stupidest lines in the game.

13. Cinematic parallels in RE:CV:

-- the Bandersnatch is seemingly patterned after a similar
monster in _Return of the Living Dead Part 3_.
-- more _Return of the Living Dead 3_-referencing fun can be
had in the laboratory scene, where the man in the clean
suit meets a messy demise against the observation window.
It's taken almost frame for frame from _RotLD3_.
-- much of Rockfort Island, particularly the mess hall, looks
like the military base in George Romero's _Day of the Dead_.
-- in _Dawn of the Dead_, Peter picks up a sniper rifle like
Alfred's and says, "Ain't it a crime? The only person who
could ever miss with this gun would be the sucker with the
bread to buy it."
-- pseudonymous reader "Clearman" points out that Alfred's
masquerade as Alexia would appear to be patterned after
Alfred Hitchcock's _Psycho_.
-- Steve's necklace looks like the monitoring devices/explosive
charges in Kenji Fukusaku's _Battle Royale_.
-- as many have noted, Steve's slaying of the Bandersnatch
and Wesker's fighting style would both seem to owe heavy
stylistic debts to _The Matrix_ (which, in turn, owes
heavy stylistic debts to wuxia).

===================================================================
 7. RESIDENT EVIL ZERO
===================================================================

RE0 was originally developed as an N64 game, but was moved to the
Nintendo GameCube and completely rebuilt. It's the "behind the scenes"
story of the original RE, set at the start of the STARS Bravo team's
doomed mission in the Raccoon Forest.

The player takes the roles of both Rebecca Chambers, the Bravo team's
rookie medic, and Billy Coen, an escaped prisoner, switching between
them at will using a new "zapping" mechanic.

RE0 was marketed as a game that would answer a lot of the leftover
questions concerning the storyline so far, but mostly confused things
even further by introducing James Marcus to the already-convoluted
history of Umbrella. It also managed to avoid answering the real
question that most fans still have to this day: where's Rebecca?

There are several occasions throughout RE0 where you have to split
Rebecca and Billy up. For the sake of the plot summary, I've gone
with whoever I used at the time, as there's no real difference. The
one exception is when you go back through the train at the start of
the game and encounter the zombie of Edward Dewey. Rebecca gets a
cutscene there, while Billy does not.

=====================================================
7i. A Summary of the Basic Plot of RESIDENT EVIL ZERO
=====================================================

July 23rd, 1998: A passenger train heading through the

Raccoon Forest is attacked by a swarm of hideous, mutated
leeches, as a man in white robes watches from a nearby hill.
A massacre ensues.

Two hours later, the STARS Bravo team--Enrico Marini,

Richard Aiken, Kenneth Sullivan, Ed Dewey, Forest Speyer,
and, on her first mission, new recruit Rebecca Chambers--
flies over the area by helicopter. They're in the middle
of the investigation of the recent murders in the suburbs
of Raccoon City. Rebecca, who's telling us this story
after the fact, muses that they had no idea what was
about to happen, and no chance of survival.

A sudden engine failure forces Kevin, the Bravo team's

pilot, to make an emergency landing. On the ground, the
STARS find they've landed near the wreck of a military
transport vehicle, which is surrounded by dead military
police, their faces twisted into painful grimaces.
Enrico investigates the truck, but Rebecca finds the
MPs' orders before he sees the slime dripping off of
the truck's windshield. The MPs were transporting
former lieutenant Billy Coen, age twenty-six, to a
nearby military base. Following his court-martial the
day before, Coen was to be executed.

Naturally, Enrico and Richard figure that Coen's to

blame for the dead soldiers. Enrico tells his men to
split up and survey the area, but to stay alert for
Coen. Rebecca goes off, alone, and discovers the train,
the Ecliptic Express, which has come to a full stop.

When she gets on board, Rebecca finds that all the

passengers are dead. Several of them are still moving.

The conductor's office and engine room are both locked,

and bloody papers found in a passenger cabin hint that
the passengers were up to something. Apparently, the
train held a cleanup team headed to an undisclosed,
previously abandoned location, with the intention of
reopening it, but bloodstains obscure the finer details.

On a ravaged body near the engine room, Rebecca finds

a key that'll open the dining car, but at the same time,
Billy Coen, splattered with blood and still wearing a
pair of handcuffs on one wrist, finds her. He holds
her at gunpoint, but soon discovers that Rebecca, an
unnerved rookie, isn't much of a threat. He puts his
gun away and walks off, ignoring her claims that she's
arresting him.

Rebecca watches Billy leave, but before she can follow,

Edward Dewey crashes through a window. Edward, who's
been attacked by what looks like a pack of wild dogs,
tells Rebecca that "it's worse than... there are...
zombies and monsters in the woods..." He then succumbs
to his wounds. As Rebecca tries to get him to wake
back up, she's interrupted by a pair of undead dogs,
who crash through the windows after their prey. She
shoots them to death, then, realizing she can't help
Edward, goes after Coen.

Enrico calls Rebecca on her radio as she steps back

into the darkened passenger car. They've found out
more about Billy Coen; his court-martial was for murder,
and he may have killed as many as twenty-three people.
He's also been recently institutionalized. Enrico
tells Rebecca to be on her guard, as Coen wouldn't
think twice about killing her.

In the dining car, Billy manages, once again, to sneak

up on Rebecca. He suggests that they work together, as
there are "some freaked-out things" on the train with
them. Rebecca angrily tells him that she doesn't need
the help of a "wanted felon." Billy condescendingly
retorts that he'll wait right there.

Leaving Billy behind, Rebecca investigates the dining

room. Seated at one of the tables is an old man in a
ragged suit, his eyes open but unmoving. Rebecca touches
the man, and gently shakes him. He turns to look at
her... and his head falls off of his shoulders with a
dry crack. As Rebecca screams, the man's body writhes
for a moment, then dissolves into a mass of glistening
leeches. The leeches suddenly pile back atop each other,
reassembling into a new and twisted body with the old
man's face.

This "leech zombie" attacks Rebecca with its rubbery

limbs. Rebecca empties a full clip into the creature
without much obvious effect, until a lucky shot blows
off part of its head. The creature breaks back down
into a swarm of a thousand leeches, which rush onto
Rebecca's body, covering her in slime and dragging
her to the floor.

Suddenly, one of the leeches on Rebecca's body explodes.

Billy keeps firing, slaying a couple more leeches as
they leap to attack him, and the creatures finally
withdraw. As Billy checks on Rebecca, who's slimy and
out of breath but otherwise fine, they both notice a
strange man watching them from outside the train.

The train abruptly starts moving again. Billy suggests

that they should check out the engine car, and repeats
his earlier point: they need to work together. Rebecca
grudgingly accepts that, but tells Billy that she'll
shoot him if he tries anything funny. Billy not only
says that he's okay with that, but he tosses Rebecca
a box of bullets.

The train's automatic doors are locked, owing to a lack

of power. Rebecca, using a ladder at the back of the
engine car, crawls onto the roof of the train, where she
finds that something's disconnected the power coupling.
She reconnects it, and finds that this "something" is
yet another form of malevolent slime. It knocks her
through a hole in the roof, into the kitchen. Here,
Rebecca finds a key they need, but can't leave the
kitchen car because the door's lock is jammed.

Rebecca sends the key to Billy via a dumbwaiter. He

can now get into the lower floor of the kitchen. The
key opens the conductor's office, where Billy finds a
locked briefcase and a ladder leading up to the bar.
Here, he finds an icepick, which seems like just the
thing to unjam the door in the kitchen, and an old
hunting shotgun on the bed in a private cabin. When he
passes back through the bar to give Rebecca the icepick,
he's attacked by a giant scorpion, which tears through
the roof of the train and destroys the bar. Billy
blasts at it with his new shotgun until the creature
collapses to the floor.

Billy and Rebecca meet back up in the kitchen, and

find one of the keys they need for the briefcase in
the baggage car. They also appropriate a grappling gun
from its housing on the back of the car, which Rebecca
uses to climb back onto the roof.

In a passenger cabin, Rebecca finds the second key they

need to unlock the briefcase. She finds Billy again
outside the conductor's office, where they open the case
to find the keycard for the door to the control room.

As Rebecca unlocks the control room door, she overhears

half of a radio conversation between a gas-masked, armored
soldier and his commander. The soldier reports that "Delta
team" has gained control of the train.

The man's commander, unknown to Rebecca, is Albert Wesker.

He and William Birkin are commanding the Delta team from an
unknown location. Birkin, frustrated, says that he has no
idea how the lab *and* the mansion could've been contaminated.
Wesker covers the microphone and says that it doesn't matter
now. He orders the soldier aboard the train to destroy it.

That soldier never gets the chance. Both he and a nearby

confederate are abruptly killed by a swarm of leeches.
Billy and Rebecca step over the soldiers' bodies and
enter the control room.

Inside, they find that they've only got a few minutes

before the train, bereft of a conductor, is going to
crash. Rebecca takes a keycard off of the desk and
tells Billy to wait while she triggers the brake
at the rear of the train.

Rebecca blasts back through the train, and, in the

process, is forced to kill the zombie that was once
Edward Dewey. She and Billy manage to put the train's
emergency brakes on, but not in time to avoid slamming
into a blocked-off tunnel, well away from the train's
usual route. When Billy and Rebecca come to, they're
in an underground station somewhere, currently
destroyed and set aflame by the train's impact.

A nearby door leads to a sewer tunnel, which in turn

has a ladder leading up to a trapdoor. When Billy
pushes the trapdoor open, he and Rebecca climb up
into the front hall of a mansion. Weakly lit by oil
lamps and low-wattage bulbs, and so long uninhabited
that clouds of dust come up from the floors with
each step, the centerpieces of the decoration are
the Umbrella logo, set into the floor above the
words "Umbrella Research Center," and a cracked and
faded oil portrait of an old man. The plaque below
the portrait reads "James Marcus -- First General
Manager." Rebecca gasps; she's seen this man before.
His was the face the leeches took on when they formed
a human shape.

Wesker and Birkin watch Billy and Rebecca from their

surveillance station. Birkin asks who they are, and
Wesker tells him that Rebecca's a rookie member of
STARS. Neither of them know who Billy is, however.

Suddenly, an ancient public address system broadcasts a

message. It's from James Marcus, who requests that everyone
remain silent while he goes back over the three pillars of
Umbrella's motto: unity, discipline, and obedience. As
Wesker and Birkin try to figure out who played that message,
every screen in their station abruptly displays the man
in white. He laughs at them, and claims responsibility
for the contamination of both the lab and the train. His
motive, he continues, is revenge against Umbrella.
A mass of leeches appears in front of the man, and rises up
to form, once again, the semblance of a human: the old man
from the dining car, James Marcus. The younger man looks
into the camera and tells Wesker and Birkin that ten years
ago, they both helped assassinate James Marcus. Now, the
time has come for revenge.

Billy and Rebecca find out quickly that the training facility
isn't empty. Several cleanup crews have arrived here recently
to reopen the facility, and all of them have fallen victim to
the T-Virus. The front doors are blocked with a strange barricade,
so they're forced to further explore the old house.

As they move throughout the facility, disposing of its undead

population and circumventing a series of obstacles, they
encounter two more leech zombies, and several documents
left lying around by the cleanup teams or the original teaching
staff. In a large open area that might've once been intended
to feed and house animals, Rebecca finds a key, right before
she's attacked and captured by an enormous, mutated centipede.
Billy manages to kill it with a volley of well-aimed pistol fire.

That key opens the doors to the meeting area and the surprisingly
clean office of the head of the training facility. An old entry
in the assistant headmaster's diary speaks of a given class of
trainees, and how the only worthwhile ones in the lot are
"scholar Will" and "practical Al." The headmaster further
notes that James Marcus had told him to constantly pit Will
and Al, who were already naturally competitive, against each
other. This is the first time Marcus has shown any interest
in the facility he's ostensibly in charge of.

A hidden piece of metal in the headmaster's office proves to be

the last part Rebecca and Billy need to fix the time clock on the
facility's third floor. Doing so unlocks the doors to a meeting
room on the second floor and a screening room, the latter of
which provides the security disc that undoes the locks on the
odd "knight barricades" that've sealed several doors. Naturally,
escape won't be as easy as simply walking through the newly
open front door, as the dilapidation that pervades the facility
has claimed the bridge that serves as the facility's front walk.
The training facility is on a cliff overlooking a river, and
it's a long way down.

They do have other options. One of those options is the facility's

observatory, which an old memo implies is an escape route.

A room on the second floor, the office of some strange chess

fetishist, once belonged to James Marcus himself. Billy solves
a puzzle on the floor, which opens a secret compartment in the
desk that hides Marcus's diary. The diary, which is at least
twenty years old, details Marcus's creation of a virus he
calls "Progenitor" and the synthesis of a virus he codenamed
"T," for "tyrant," by mixing the Progenitor virus with the
DNA of a leech. Marcus's personal experiments all involved
leeches, and shortly after he made some kind of breakthrough
owing to the use of experimentation on humans, Spencer began
to quietly investigate Marcus's research. Marcus's final entry
notes that if anyone interferes with his project, they'll be
his next test subjects.

Marcus's portrait in the front hall of the facility turns out

to be concealing a secret door, which leads into the facility's
basement. There, Billy and Rebecca find an isolated cell built
of stone. A nearby prisoner manifest suggests that this is a
detainment center for Umbrella's prisoners and test subjects.

Billy gives Rebecca a boost so she can reach an air vent. When
she crawls through and lands on the other side, she finds she's
landed in a bloody, often-used torture chamber, complete with
an iron maiden.

The facility's circuit box is also in this room. Rebecca turns

the power back on, which cuts off an inconvenient steam jet in
the facility's boiler room, but also alerts the strange young
man. He muses, watching Rebecca on the surveillance system, that
she's trespassing. Somewhere else, a cage opens, and something
snarls as it's unleashed.

Rebecca is warily examining the torture chamber when, suddenly,

something springs onto her back. When she throws it off, it turns
out to be a mutated, hostile baboon, its claws and teeth extended
into vicious hooks. The "Eliminator" pounces again, and Rebecca
dodges to the side. As she rolls to her feet, the floor gives
way underneath her.

On the top floor of William Birkin's private lab, Birkin pores

over a sheaf of paper. He asks Wesker if this is really the
identity of the strange young man. Wesker's response is simple:
whoever it is, if the conspiracy to expose Spencer's assassination
of Marcus is revealed, Wesker, Birkin, *and* Spencer's careers
are over. Wesker's reaction is equally simple: he intends to
leave Umbrella. All Wesker needs is some more combat data on the
T-Virus weapon, and for that, he's got the STARS. Birkin, on
the other hand, needs more time to perfect his G-Virus. He tells
Wesker that he intends to activate the facility's self-destruct
system, blowing the facility and all evidence within it to pieces.

Rebecca, hanging above a long fall into the river, radios Billy
for help. Billy runs back through the facility, blowing away
several Eliminators as he goes, and finally finds Rebecca on
the second subbasement. He grabs her arm just before she falls.

As Billy pulls Rebecca back onto solid ground, she thanks him.
He replies that he was just keeping his word. They agreed to
work together, after all. Rebecca's radio beeps, signaling her
of an incoming call from Enrico Marini. He asks her if she's
found Coen yet; while looking directly at Billy, she tells
Enrico that she hasn't, but she'll keep an eye out for him.

Rebecca smiles at Billy, and says that her great career in law
enforcement's probably over; it's her first mission, and she's
already disobeying orders. At least she probably won't live
long enough to regret it. She switches topics suddenly, asking
Billy if he really did murder twenty-three people. She doesn't
intend to judge him, but she just has to know.

Billy tells her that, around "this time last year," his unit was
sent into the African jungle on a mission to intervene in a local
civil war. Their target was a guerilla force's hideout. By the
time that his unit reached its destination, the heat and the
guerillas had cost them dearly. Only four of them were left.

They discovered that their entire mission had been based on

faulty information. The "guerilla hideout" was, in fact, just
a small village full of innocent people. Billy's commander
refused to cut their losses and head out; instead, he had his
men herd the villagers into a group and prepare to open fire.
In his flashback, Billy remembers trying to talk his leader
out of killing the villagers, but his leader wasn't listening.
He struck Billy with the stock of his rifle, and opened fire.

Billy shuts up. Rebecca asks if he really did kill all those
innocent people, but Billy's done with this topic: "That was
then, this is now." Rebecca tells him that her teammates
think he killed those MPs in the forest, but now she doesn't
think he did. She thinks it was those zombie dogs. Billy,
once again, says that it doesn't matter; he's either got to
turn himself in and serve his sentence, or keep running for
as long as possible. That ends the conversation.

The second subbasement apparently served the facility's trainees

as a barracks and storage area. In a formerly well-furnished
bedroom, Rebecca and Billy find a large heavy plate in the
fireplace, which would fit neatly in a control panel in the
observatory. Further down, in the third and last subbasement,
Billy finds both the last key they need and a pair of Hunters
in a small maze, like the ones zoologists use to test the
intelligence of rats. The key is in a pile of human bones,
and is guarded by a pair of Hunters.

It opens a door on the second floor of the facility, leading

to the recreational area. The leech zombies have returned for
another go, but by now, Rebecca and Billy have discovered the
zombies' vulnerability to fire. Burning the leech zombies to
death with Molotov cocktails, Rebecca finds another plate caught
in a vise in the facility's machine lab, while Billy appropriates
a battery from the wine cellar. That battery fits into a makeshift
elevator, used by the cleanup crew, and provides them with the
stepping stone (or crate, as it were) they need to claim the
last plate from a column outside the facility.

When all three plates are put into the control panel in the
observatory, there's a sudden rumbling. When Rebecca and
Billy look outside, they realize that the observatory itself
has rotated. The door they came in through now leads to the
facility's second-floor balcony, and the locked door on the
other side of the observatory leads to an old chapel.

The chapel's front door is locked, but the lock is, for whatever
reason, connected to a floor plate in a nearby atrium. Billy
steps on the plate while Rebecca investigates the chapel, which
has become the new home of a gigantic, mutated bat. Rebecca
kills the creature with a few napalm-laced grenades and, using
the hookshot that they picked up on the train, reaches the roof.

From the rooftop, Rebecca climbs down into the church's garden,
where she's able to activate an elevator. This elevator takes
her and Billy down into the secret facility beneath the chapel:
James Marcus's laboratory.

The laboratory was also targeted by Umbrella's cleanup team, to

judge by the relatively fresh corpses and zombies that shamble
around its halls. It's also, naturally, haunted by a couple of
leech zombies. Using the hookshot to circumvent a collapsed
stairwell, Rebecca climbs up onto the floor above, where Marcus
did his experimentation. Communicating via radio and sending
items to each other via the laboratory's dumbwaiter, Rebecca
and Billy work in concert to unlock the puzzles of the lab.
Finally, after discovering a pair of jeweled leeches in Marcus's
file room and study, Billy and Rebecca manage to open the door
to a newly-constructed cable car. While looking for the parts
they need to reactivate the car, Billy stumbles upon an old
black-and-white photograph in Marcus's old, yet spotless, study.
The person in it is a dead ringer for the man they've seen
controlling the leeches, but the note on the back of the photo
congratulates "James" for graduating from university in 1939.
Billy concludes that the man they've seen must be Marcus's son
or grandson.

When they find the parts they need, Rebecca hookshots into the
cable car's control room via a hole in the floor, and reactivates
the car. As they prepare to board the train, disaster strikes. A
single Eliminator jumps from the roof of the cable car, onto
Billy, and both of them plummet into the chasm below. Rebecca
rushes to the edge, but is ambushed by another leech zombie.
She incinerates it.

Alone, Rebecca reactivates the cable car once again, which had
been sabotaged by the leech zombie, and heads into the unknown.
The car takes her to an isolated warehouse somewhere, which
is attached to a freight turntable for railroad cars. (Two
months from now, Claire Redfield and Leon Kennedy will use this
turntable to reach William Birkin's lab, and a group of survivors
will escape that lab the same way.) Appropriating a Magnum from
a dead man in the cable car, Rebecca finds a key in a control
room along the turntable's shaft, where the only working monitor
is displaying a picture of a twisted-looking, white-skinned humanoid
creature preserved in a storage tube. Rebecca then brings the
turntable up to meet her.

The turntable takes her to the top floor of an unknown complex.

A rockfall blocks progress from one direction, and Rebecca
decides against a full search of the area. When she approaches
a nearby elevator, she hears it start up. When the doors open,
Enrico Marini steps out.

Marini tells Rebecca that the rest of the Bravo team should've
met him here by now. If they go straight from here, he says,
they should reach an old mansion where Umbrella is carrying
out experiments. He tells Rebecca to come with him, but she
tells him she'll catch up with him later. She has to find
Billy. Enrico tries to persuade her to come with him, since
he's sure Coen won't make it, but Rebecca convinces him she'll
be all right. As Enrico walks away, Rebecca, in voiceover,
tells us that she never saw Enrico again.
A discarded key by Enrico's elevator works on the door of another
elevator, over by the rockfall. Rebecca takes the key and starts
up the elevator, but as she does so, something crawls out of the
rubble behind her.

A day from now, Wesker will tell the other STARS what this thing
is: a Tyrant. Now, all Rebecca knows is that it's enormously
powerful, incredibly ugly, and coming after her. It takes nearly
two full clips from Rebecca's Magnum before it falls.

The newly arrived elevator has several destinations, like the

train station underneath the training facility, but the only
place Rebecca hasn't seen yet is the fourth level. As she
takes the elevator down, the young man and his posse of leeches
watches her over yet another closed-circuit camera. He says
out loud, as though she can hear him, that she and her friends
no longer amuse him. Now, he says, nothing will stop him from
getting his revenge.

The elevator drops Rebecca off on a narrow bridge, over an

aquaduct or river. Below her, she sees Billy, unconscious but
alive, hanging off of a twisted chunk of concrete and rebar in
the middle of the river. Rebecca shouts his name, just before
something enormous slams into Billy from under the surface of
the water and dislodges him from his handhold. Billy yells
in pain as he's thrown downriver.

Rebecca's bridge leads to a power control room. Some computer

work restores electricity to the area, which lets Rebecca take
a nearby lift down. She finds herself in an abandoned sewage
treatment plant, which, like the training facility, is crawling
with zombies and monsters, including the occasional Hunter.
Rebecca fights her way through several levels of the plant,
dispatching yet another leech zombie en route.

When Rebecca finds him, Billy is lying unconscious on a metal

grate, thrown there by the current of the river rushing by
below him. As he wakes up, coughing up water, Billy sees
something. Rebecca asks him what's wrong, then follows his
gaze over to a pile of stripped skeletons, brownish from
decay and age, lying in a puddle of slime so thick that it
has yet to filter down through the grate underneath it.
Billy, looking at the grinning skulls, has a flashback to the
dead villagers in Africa. Rebecca asks what could've done this,
and Billy's answer is that they must be the remnants of Marcus's
test subjects. "Marcus must still have been messing around with
the mother virus!"

Together again, Rebecca and Billy go back into the factory.

Like the facility, the factory is a maze of puzzles, broken
or near-broken machinery, monsters, and locked doors. As
Rebecca and Billy make their way through these obstacles,
the Tyrant reappears on the ninth level of the factory, only
to go down in a hail of shotgun and Magnum fire.

Rebecca separates from Billy for a short time, to unlock a

door and throw a switch. This lowers the floodgate on the
plant's dam, allowing Billy and Rebecca to reach the plant's
incinerator. When they do, they find it hasn't been used for
that purpose for quite awhile; instead, now it's the spawning
grounds for an army of leeches.

From the walkway above them, the young man in white welcomes
them to the "party," since it is, after all, their wake. Billy
demands answers, and to know who the man is.

The man's response is to change his face. He ages several

decades in a second, until the man is clearly James Marcus.
Ten years ago, Marcus tells Rebecca and Billy, Spencer had him
assassinated. He was hard at work on his pet project, the
leeches, when two men in full armor burst in and opened fire
with submachineguns. Through Marcus's mind's eye, we see his
last moments as a human: a young Wesker and Birkin standing
over him, Birkin promising to take over Marcus's research,
and then his last moments, as he sank into a watery grave.

Marcus's queen leech found his dead body, crawled inside his
mouth and began to spawn. Somehow, the T-Virus inside the leech
resurrected Marcus as a monster.

Now, Marcus says, he's returned, and "the world will burn in
an inferno of hate!" Billy shakes his fist at Marcus and tells
him that he'll pay for what he's done. Marcus keeps laughing--

--right up until he vomits a stream of leeches. He gets a look

of horrified surprise on his face, and his body begins to expand
and run like candle wax. Marcus turns into an inhuman creature,
the ultimate expression of the "leech zombies" Rebecca and Billy
have been fighting all night.

Marcus's claims almost come true. He attacks with vomited streams

of acid and the stretching tentacles that now serve him as arms.
After enduring enough small-arms fire to kill a dozen ordinary men,
or a couple of Tyrants, Marcus screams with the slithering voice
of a leech zombie and falls silent.

Two keys fall out of what were once Marcus's pockets. Billy
and Rebecca use those keys to open a final safety door on the
other side of the incinerator, to find a freight elevator that
leads up to the previously-unavailable fifth level. With a
sigh of relief, Rebecca throws the elevator's switch.

=========================================
7ii. The Conclusion of RESIDENT EVIL ZERO
=========================================

The elevator shakes suddenly, as something explodes near the

bottom of the shaft. Billy sees it first: it's Marcus's queen
leech, grown into a grotesque monster the size of a truck,
and it's heading up the elevator shaft after them. For a few
moments, it looks as though they might outrun it, but as the
elevator reaches the end of its track, the queen leech slams
into it. The elevator platform tips over, throwing Billy
and Rebecca into the treatment center's shipping dock; at the
same time, William Birkin makes good on his earlier threat.
A self-destruct countdown is initiated.
The leech slithers onto the floor, attacking Billy and Rebecca
with sprays of an unknown, noxious fluid and its bloated
psuedopods. It's soft-bodied and slow, but it's also enormous;
despite their best efforts, Billy and Rebecca's weapons can't
do more than slow the queen leech down.

Overhead, the ceiling of the shipping dock opens a bit and

lets in the sunlight. The leech shies away from the light,
and Rebecca realizes that the leech's somehow vulnerable to
it. Billy volunteers to distract the queen while Rebecca opens
the shutters the rest of the way.

While Billy continues the fight against the queen, Rebecca

undoes the locks on the dock's ceiling. A couple of minutes
later, Rebecca hits the last lock and the ceiling opens,
bathing the queen leech in full, direct sunlight. Enraged and
in pain, it lashes out, knocking both humans sprawling.

As Rebecca gets back up, she notices a heavy revolver hidden

behind a stack of crates. She seizes it and throws the gun to Billy.

Billy catches the gun, takes aim, and fires, apparently finding
the one explosive round in the cylinder. The queen leech, wounded
and burning, has had enough, and the heavy bullet blows a hole
through its body. It screams and falls apart, the pieces of its
body plummeting back down the elevator shaft, and into the rising
fireball as the facility explodes below them. Billy and Rebecca
make a mad dash for safety.

The Umbrella training facility is engulfed in flames a few minutes

later. Billy and Rebecca watch it explode from the safety of a nearby
hill. Billy, before collapsing onto the grass, pops his handcuffs off
and throws them into the woods.

Rebecca, from her new vantage point, notices the Spencer mansion is
only a couple of miles away. She takes Billy's dogtags, puts them
around her neck, and tells him that "officially... Lieutenant Billy
Coen is dead." She salutes him, and heads down the hill, to meet up
with the rest of her team.

Billy watches her go. She doesn't look back. Billy finally gives her
a thumbs-up that she doesn't see, and says, "Thank you... Rebecca,"
before going on his way.

======================================
7iii. Conclusions About the Conclusion
======================================

1. Rebecca Chambers, obviously, has survived. Her whereabouts

following the "mansion incident" are still unknown.

2. Billy Coen survived, and was last seen in the Raccoon Forest.
Thanks to Rebecca, he's been reported dead (cf. the Rebecca's
Report EX File in RE2). His current whereabouts are unknown.

3. James Marcus, the true creator of the T-Virus, is probably dead.

4. Another virus, the "Progenitor," was created by Umbrella in the

early to mid-seventies. James Marcus and perhaps Ozwell Spencer were
either its creators, or were at least on the team that created it.
It's the same thing as the "mother virus."

5. The T-Virus was derived from a combination of the Progenitor virus

and the DNA of a leech by James Marcus in 1978. After Marcus's
assassination, Birkin took over Marcus's projects, which may be why
everyone in RE2 thinks Birkin created the T-Virus.

======================
7iv. Random Commentary
======================

1. The weirdest thing about RE0's plot is that it isn't about Billy
or Rebecca at all. They've stumbled into the middle of a grudge match
between Marcus and Wesker, and by rights, Wesker should be the protagonist.
Instead, he's barely in it and you're caught in the fallout.

2. Would it have killed Capcom to have included *something*

about where Rebecca's been since the end of RE? A still shot
would've done the trick, or a couple of paragraphs of text.

3. There's a lot more going on with Billy and the incident in

Africa than the game lets on. For one thing, he recognizes the
skeletons in the treatment facility on sight.

4. The murder investigation in the Raccoon Forest was Rebecca's

first case as a member of STARS. She and Leon would have a lot
to talk about, I think. (This also explains why Chris had to
introduce himself to Rebecca in REv.2.)

5. The final battle against the queen leech is like a demented

beerslam of all the final encounters in every RE game up to
this point, plus the movie. The fight takes place with a five-minute
timer, on a helipad, against a giant slithery "queen" that attacks
with gouts of disgusting fluid, and the main character must stay
alive until he's provided with the weapon he needs to win. The
final blow's dealt by someone's carelessly discarded revolver,
accompanied by a cheesy one-liner and gratuitous bullet time.

6. There are more new monsters in RE0 than in any other RE game
to date. The Eliminators, giant cockroaches, the giant centipede,
Lurkers, the giant bat, the leech zombie, the Stinger...

7. Marcus's assassination is carried out by a couple of gas-masked

goons with submachineguns. This means that Umbrella's black-ops
troops are now two for two on indirectly making their targets into
virus-fueled killing machines.

8. Is it just me, or does RE0's music sound a *lot* like

Silent Hill 2's?

9. If you're curious as to how Rebecca chose to deal with her

promise to Billy at the end of the game, her official report on
the Bravo team's investigation can be found in the N64 version
of RE2, in the "Rebecca's Report" EX File. (The EX File in
question is flawed, though, or else it's based upon a version
of the game's plotline that changed between 1999 and 2002.
In it, Rebecca misspells Billy's name as "Koen," and says he
was an Ensign, a rank that doesn't exist in the Marine Corps.
It actually ends up looking like Rebecca's trying to look as
incompetent as possible while she writes it.)

10. Daniel Weissenberger has a note that's sufficiently bizarre

to be worth sharing:

"James Marcus's death scene reminded me more than a little of

the fate of the Swamp Thing when Alan Moore took over writing
the comic. The fact that Marcus was very, very dead when the
Queen Leech entered him, along with the fact that the
less-advanced leech zombies have the habit of creating a
primitive humanoid 'skin,' suggest that the James Marcus Billy
and Becky encounter isn't actually James at all. Rather, it's
possible that, as in the ubiquitous 'planarian worm' experiment,
James' leeches devoured him and absorbed his consciousness,
turning them into a swarm of worms that think that they're
James Marcus."

I suppose if there's a Queen fanboy over at Capcom, a Swamp Thing

fanboy's also a possibility.

11. You've got to wonder if the Lurkers and the Gamma Hunters
are at all related.

12. The Eliminators remind me of an obscure American horror

film, _Shakma_, about a killer baboon, but I kind of doubt that's
more than a coincidence. Five people have seen that movie.

================================================================
8. RESIDENT EVIL GAIDEN
================================================================

RE: Gaiden has more or less been declared non-canon, which removes
the need to discuss it in this document.

If you're curious, Efrem Orizzonte's analysis of Gaiden is available

at www.gamefaqs.com.

=================================================================
9. RESIDENT EVIL: FIRE ZONE
=================================================================

Also known as Resident Evil: Gun Survivor 2, this Namco/Capcom

collaboration is a vague retelling of Code Veronica. It stars Claire,
Steve, and a liberal helping of every monster in the RE series. It's
also a dream that Claire's having as she's lying unconscious in the
crashed plane in Antarctica. As such, it has no bearing on the plot.

==================================================================
10. RESIDENT EVIL: DEAD AIM
==================================================================

Also known as--deep breath--Biohazard Gun Survivor 4: Heroes Never Die,

Dead Aim is a light-gun shooter for the PlayStation 2. For a few years,
it was actually the last game in the series's chronology.

Set in September of 2002, Dead Aim follows Bruce McGivern, a covert

operative with a special anti-Umbrella unit within the United States
Strategic Command, and Fong Ling, an agent in China's Safety Department.
Their current mission is to find and stop Morpheus Duvall, a bitter
ex-Umbrella employee who's taken over an ocean liner the company owns,
and who's threatening both the U.S. and China with the T-Virus.

===========================================================
10i. A Summary of the Basic Plot of RESIDENT EVIL: DEAD AIM
===========================================================

September 23rd, 2002: Bruce McGivern opens his eyes.

The man standing behind him has Bruce's own gun pressed against
Bruce's head, and comments on how Americans seem compelled to
use ugly weapons. They're both standing on the top deck of the
Spencer Rain. Bruce turns around and snarls, "Morpheus."

Morpheus prepares to pull the trigger, but Bruce sees something he

doesn't: the woman standing on the roof of the cabin, and the primed
grenade she tosses onto the deck. Bruce runs for cover, and gets away
without injury. After the explosion, Morpheus has disappeared, as has
the woman. Bruce reclaims his pistol, kicks open a vent cover, and
drops into one of the Spencer Rain's guest cabins.

The Spencer Rain normally carries a full load of rich and powerful
passengers. Now they're a full load of rich and powerful zombies,
slowly waking up as they smell fresh prey. Bruce uses a discarded
key to get into the VIP lounge, where he finds the keycard he needs
to reach the central stairs. As he steps through the latter door,
his radio beeps. It's his boss, telling him of Morpheus's demands:
five billion dollars by tomorrow at midnight.

The conversation is cut short when a woman--the same woman who

saved Bruce's life earlier--kicks the radio out of Bruce's hand.
It goes over the railing and shatters against the floor below,
as the woman slams Bruce into a wall. He manages to gasp out
that she must be the "Chinese security girl," so they're in
the same business. She lets go of him, and notes that the same
business does not necessarily mean the same side. She knows
Bruce's name, but he doesn't know hers. Bruce catches his
breath, then raises his hands, and the woman attacks him again.
Bruce loses his gun, but manages to kick the woman's legs out.
When she falls, Bruce holds her down, and asks for her name.

She introduces herself as Fong Ling, and presses Bruce's own gun
to his chin. He lets her up, and asks if they might not be able
to cooperate. She scoffs at the idea, drops his gun at his feet,
and takes off.

Bruce's new keycard unlocks two doors on the third floor, which
lead to the VIP suites. The VIPs apparently didn't go down without
a fight, as Bruce finds a silenced pistol and semiautomatic handgun
in the wreckage. He also digs up a crewman's ID card, which is
needed to open another set of doors on the second floor.

Heading west, Bruce goes through the hall outside the dining room,
stopping to grab an abandoned shotgun from the kitchen. On the
pool deck, Bruce finds a hatch leading into the hold, and a key
sticking out of the control panel. The valve handle he needs is
back to the east, on the other side of the ship.
Fighting his way back across the passenger deck, Bruce finds the
storeroom he's looking for. The valve handle is inside on a shelf.
As Bruce leaves, an enormous, long-fingered hand bursts through
the window and punches him in the chest. He falls down, the wind
knocked out of him, just as Fong Ling arrives. She takes the
valve handle and runs back towards the pool deck, telling Bruce
that he should just go home.

The zombie population of the lower decks is now fully awake, and
Fong Ling has to fight for every step she takes. When she returns
to the pool deck and attaches the valve handle, Bruce is one step
behind her. As they trade quips, a critically wounded and furious
Morpheus watches via closed-circuit television. He snarls and
presses a switch.

A garage-style door opens at the back of the pool deck, unleashing

two massive, hook-limbed reptilian creatures: a new, larger breed
of Hunters. They work as a team, dodging Bruce's bullets and trying
to catch him between them. As he fights, Fong Ling struggles with
the rusty valve, and gets the hatch open right as the second Hunter
falls dead.

The two agents descend into the hold of the ship. Morpheus, dying
from his wounds, watches them go, and raises a syringe. Triumphantly,
he sticks it into his own body, and begins to crackle with electricity.

The Spencer Rain's hold is populated by the undead remnants of most

of its former crew. They spring a couple of crude ambushes on Bruce
as he heads across the ship, through the boiler room, and up a lift.

A locked door requires another keycard, so Bruce heads in the other

direction. On the other side of the ship's cargo room, Bruce walks
into a richly furnished presentation theater. A crewmember's diary
mentions that the presentation room is off-limits to the crew, and
it's immediately obvious why. Four bioweapon storage tanks are up
on stage, on either side of a podium. One of the tanks is broken,
and the other three are empty.

Bruce picks up a discarded crowbar and an open binder, the latter

of which contains notes on recent Umbrella creations. After entries
on the new "Elite" Hunter and an improved, long-limbed Tyrant, Bruce
reads about the experimental TG-Virus, a blending of the T- and
G-Viruses that results in the carrier developing a powerful
electromagnetic field that renders it bulletproof.

Bruce pockets the file and heads back to the cargo room. Before he
can leave, though, he hears the click of heels on metal; someone's
coming. He slides in next to the presentation room's door and waits
to see who it is.

It turns out to be a "what," not a "who." The creature--a chitinous,

clawed parody of a woman--slides through the door and grabs Bruce
by the throat.

The creature chides Bruce on still using an ugly gun. Bruce realizes
suddenly that this is Morpheus, infected with the TG-Virus.

Just as the file said, Morpheus is now completely immune to small-arms

fire. The virus has also lent him (her?) supernatural speed, strength,
and agility. Left with no other option, Bruce runs for it.

Morpheus has seemingly given up the chase when Bruce reaches the
cargo room. He pries open several crates before finding the keycard
he needs in one of them, then heads back towards the locked door.
Somehow, Morpheus appears again, in front of Bruce, and is hot on
his heels as Bruce sprints towards the engine room.

Fong Ling is already there, trying to open an electronically locked

door. Bruce runs into the hatch behind her and slams the door, which
is barely strong enough to keep Morpheus out. Fong Ling squirms
through the window above the locked door. While Bruce holds Morpheus
back, she restores power and unlocks the door.

As Bruce stumbles into the engine room, Morpheus gives up the chase.
He's suddenly gone. Fong Ling also leaves, cheerfully calling Bruce
a "don-gua." She says it means he's cool.

When Fong Ling unlocked the engine room door, she also unlocked
the door to a monitor room over by the presentation area. Inside,
Bruce finds a key to the recreation room, inside the bar on the
second deck, and a bloodstained, four-year-old reorganization
notice. Morpheus Duvall was blamed for the Spencer mansion
outbreak, and Umbrella fired him. The reasons for his attacking
the Spencer Rain become a bit clearer.

Heading up through the presentation room, Bruce finds himself

back in the main staircase in the ship's VIP area. His new key
lets him into the stairs behind the bar, and into the captain's
quarters. The captain himself has become a particularly tenacious
zombie. Bruce puts him out of his misery and takes his Magnum.

A door at the back of the captain's quarters leads up another

flight of stairs, to the ship's bridge. Fong Ling is, as usual,
one step ahead of Bruce, and is wrestling with the helm when
he arrives. At the same time, alarms go off. The ship is about
to crash into an island and the helm's frozen. They've got
five minutes.

Suddenly, the zombified bridge crew bursts into the room. Bruce
stays behind to deal with them, while Fong Ling sprints for the
exit. Dispatching the zombies, Bruce follows her outside to the
ship's helipad.

Bruce comes through the door as something strikes Fong Ling to

the ground. She cradles her arm and begins to stand, and Bruce
runs up to get in front of her.

Fong Ling's assailant is the same creature that attacked Bruce

outside the storeroom, and was mentioned in the dossier Bruce
read: it is the new, improved Tyrant. Bruce tells Fong Ling to
go after Morpheus as he takes it on.

In the dossier, Bruce read of a design flaw in the Tyrant.

He soon finds it for himself; every time he shoots the creature
in the misshapen hump on its back, it convulses and a spray of
blood douses the deck. Bruce concentrates fire on that hump,
dodging the Tyrant's mad dashes and flying axehandle punches.
After a few minutes of this, the Tyrant falls dead at his feet.
There's no sign of Fong Ling or Morpheus, and the ship is seconds
away from crashing. With no other choice, Bruce jumps over the
side. The Spencer Rain hits the island and explodes.

Bruce swims ashore, to find the island a burned-out, abandoned

husk. Walking through town, Bruce finds a hatch in the ground;
the chain-link fence that once protected it has melted, and is
still throwing off sparks. Morpheus has come this way. Bruce
follows him down, into the island's sewers.

Five years ago, this island was an Umbrella facility, meant

to store and dispose of their failed experiments. Morpheus
was in command here, but he was arrogant and botched the job.
All that remains of the place now are the surviving failed
bioweapons and an occasional zombie. A cave-in has sealed
part of the waterways; a scattering of spent shells and a
discarded grenade launcher hint at what might have caused
the destruction.

Some of those bioweapons include the planarian "Torpedo Kids,"

acid-secreting monsters that fly like missiles through the
sewers. Bruce avoids them and the old zombies that have
taken up residence here, then finds a working radio. He gets
in touch with his superiors, who tell Bruce that if Morpheus's
demands are not met, he intends to fire T-Virus-laden missiles
at several major cities. The Chinese government has already
given in, but the United States, as Bruce's superior says,
does not negotiate with terrorists. Bruce now has the safety
of the entire nation in his hands.

Meanwhile, in the waterways a level below Bruce, Fong Ling

has found her own way inside the facility. She remains
utterly still as an enormous creature, fat and stinking,
shambles by, never looking in her direction. It leaves
the area without incident, and Fong Ling sneaks off in
the other direction.

Traversing the waterways, Fong Ling dispatches several zombies

and finds her way outside onto the facility's heliport. Suddenly,
beams of red light appear from the sky, one of which focuses on
her forehead.

Bruce appears out of nowhere, shouts her name, and tackles

her to the ground. In orbit above the island, a Chinese satellite
focuses a beam of energy on the ground where Fong Ling stood
a moment ago, leaving a smoking crater. Bruce and Fong Ling
run inside the nearest building.

Another blast strikes the roof of the building, and Bruce

pulls out a knife. He advances on Fong Ling, who asks him
what he's doing, right before he cuts into the tattoo on
her left arm.

Bruce pulls a microchip out from under Fong Ling's skin and
crushes it under his boot. Miles overhead, the satellite's
targeting beam flickers and goes out.

Looking out the building's window, Bruce says to Fong Ling

that apparently, the Chinese were willing to sacrifice one
of their best agents. Fong Ling replies that she still intends
to finish her mission. Then, with half a smile, she notes that
since he saved her this time, she supposes she should thank
him. Bruce brushes it off; he's a "don-gua," after all.

Leaving Fong Ling behind, Bruce heads deeper into the facility.
Dusty hallways and wreckage eventually give way to another maze,
this one of concrete and metal; a note Bruce finds in an old
storeroom says that this facility actually had another laboratory,
three hundred feet below the ocean's surface.

The only path Bruce can take seems to lead to that facility.
Older zombies and frog-like mutants that the scientists here
called Glimmers haunt the halls, as do zombies of a more recent
vintage. The facility on the island's surface may be abandoned,
but the one below the water was apparently operational until
very recently.

Bruce reaches the elevator to the underwater lab in one piece,

but as he pushes the button, the fat mutant that Fong Ling had
seen earlier attacks him. Bruce has read an old file on the
creature, codenamed Alpha by the scientists that had accidentally
created it. They blinded it and placed a metal spike into its
brain, as part of their study of its reactions to stimuli. The
result is an enormously powerful creature that navigates entirely
by its keen sense of hearing. Bruce creeps away from the Alpha,
which cannot find him as long as he stays quiet. In a vicious game
of hide and seek, Bruce shoots the Alpha to death with his silenced
pistol, and the creature dies, unable to find what's killing it.

Fong Ling catches up to Bruce as he steps into the elevator.

Unfortunately, so does Morpheus, who drops onto the roof of
the elevator car and severs its cable. Bruce hits the emergency
brake, which stops the car right near the topmost level of
the underwater facility. Morpheus's weight and the elevator's
velocity don't keep it stopped for long, and Fong Ling barely
escapes before the elevator plummets out of sight, taking Bruce
with it.

Alone, Fong Ling continues into the facility. Its staff has
succumbed to yet another T-Virus infestation. The lab is
running on emergency power, which has deactivated the executive
elevator. Fong Ling turns the power back on and proceeds down
to Morpheus's office.

Fong Ling runs into the room to find it empty, save for a live
monitor wall. A soothing female voice announces that the missiles
are being prepared for launch. Fong Ling freezes upon hearing
that news, which is more than enough time for Morpheus to get
the drop on her.

Meanwhile, Bruce wakes up, bruised but alive on the bottom floor
of the laboratory. A door has been padlocked shut, preventing
him from reaching the executive elevator.

Bruce is forced to take the long way around. He uses a digital

recorder and the facility's voice mail to get past a door with
a voice-triggered lock, only to encounter a swarm of mutated
wasps. The scientists called them "Halberds," and they've
infested the facility's incinerator. That's where Bruce finds
the Halberds' queen, which can barely move, and which relies upon
its spawn to defend it. Bruce blasts it to pieces.

The incinerator is the only way into the facility's main lab.
Inside, Bruce discovers an open weapons locker that contains
a futuristic-looking rifle. Its manual is on a nearby desk.
It is a charged particle rifle, designed to penetrate the field
that surrounds a TG-Virus carrier. A dead scientist in the
same room holds the key to the padlock from earlier.

Going back the way he came, Bruce opens the formerly locked door
and finds Morpheus's office, where he's left his diary. Morpheus
had originally intended to use Umbrella's influence and money
to construct his greatest achievement, a kingdom in Africa
where "beauty is the absolute authority."

The chair also hides a switch, which reveals a secret door.

Bruce opens it, just as the monitor bank on the wall reveals
Morpheus, standing over the prone body of Fong Ling. Morpheus
taunts Bruce, just before destroying the camera.

Bruce runs down into the silo, towards a showdown with Morpheus.
Morpheus is still far faster than Bruce, and has mastered his new
powers. He can now generate and throw bolts of lightning.

This does him very little good. The particle rifle performs as
advertised, cutting through Morpheus's electromagnetic field.
After taking a few shots from it, Morpheus crashes to the floor
and lies still, seemingly dead.

Bruce runs to the platform where Fong Ling lies, and finds she
was only unconscious. She chastises him for seeing to her when he
has missiles to defuse, but he chalks it up to his being a "don-gua."

The countdown starts, giving them five minutes to save the world.
They use a nearby console to call up a map of the missile silo,
which turns out to be a virtual maze. Fong Ling volunteers to
stay behind and call out directions using the facility's PA
system while Bruce runs to the silo. Bruce agrees and takes off.

Behind him, as he disappears through the door, Morpheus's body

convulses, and begins to change, before pulling itself upright.

=============================================================
10ii. A Summary of the Conclusion of RESIDENT EVIL: DEAD AIM
=============================================================

Bruce heads towards the missile silo at a full run, but he's
barely reached the first door when Fong Ling shouts a warning.
The G-Virus in Morpheus's bloodstream has done its work,
expanding Morpheus into a kind of quadrapedal blob. It shatters
the door and oozes along the bridge towards Bruce, roaring.
The particle rifle's battery is dead. Bruce runs for his life.

The corridors of the silo are occupied only by a few zombies.

Bruce heads across a narrow catwalk, to a door that winds up
being locked, and Morpheus bursts out of the hallways right
behind him. As Fong Ling frantically tries to remotely unlock
the door, Bruce turns to fight.

While he's lost his electromagnetic field, Morpheus's sheer mass

renders him nearly immune to small-arms fire. It's only when Bruce
manages to put a bullet into Morpheus's head, which slides into
and out of Morpheus's body like a retractable tumor, that he's
able to do any kind of damage.

Finally, Fong Ling unlocks the door, and Bruce runs through it.
She guides Bruce the rest of the way, and then abandons her console
to catch up with him. The door to the missile silo, unfortunately,
is locked, and Morpheus is still right on Bruce's heels.

Grimly, Bruce pulls out his pistol. Morpheus marches across the
bridge and Bruce meets him with a hail of gunfire, directed against
Morpheus's exposed head. Just as the countdown reaches its final
minute and as Bruce is running out of ammunition, Morpheus leaves
himself open for one second too long.

Bruce takes one final shot, putting a bullet squarely into Morpheus's
forehead. Even this does not kill him, as the G-Virus begins another
mutation. As Bruce and Fong Ling look on in shock, Morpheus's body
swells into something enormous, crackling with electricity.

Maybe Morpheus crushes something delicate, or his bioelectric aura

ignites the rockets' fuel. Either way, he winds up doing Bruce and
Fong Ling's job for them. The entire lab facility is destroyed, and
the missiles go up with it.

A trio of helicopters race towards the site of the explosion.

Everything seems quiet for a moment, before a yellow pod breaks
the surface of the water. Its roof falls off, and a flare shoots
into the sky. Bruce and Fong Ling have somehow managed to escape.

Bruce says to Fong Ling that their mission's apparently over.

He says suddenly, like it's just occurred to him, that she should
come back to America with him. Fong Ling hesitates for a second
before declining. She belongs to China.

Bruce shrugs it off, and says that he really is an idiot.

Fong Ling smiles and asks him if he'd known what a "don-gua"
was the entire time. Bruce shrugs, and says he's been to
China before. She smiles and gives him a kiss.

==================================================================
10iii. Conclusions About the Conclusion of RESIDENT EVIL: DEAD AIM
==================================================================

1. Bruce McGivern and Fong Ling have both survived.

2. Morpheus Duvall probably didn't. (After Wesker, I now have to

add "probably" to every statement like this I make ever again.)

3. Four years after the Raccoon City outbreak, Umbrella is still

in business, although there's at least one American law enforcement
agency with a squad specifically tasked to destroy the company.

4. The American government knows that Umbrella makes bioweapons,

and that their virus was responsible for the Raccoon City outbreak.

5. While it hadn't been tested by the time of the seajacking,

Umbrella managed at some point to fuse the T- and G-Viruses
together. The result's basically a bulletproof, intelligent Tyrant
in a can, which would be one of the most dangerous bioweapons in
their arsenal if you couldn't poke it to death with a sharp stick.

6. Umbrella markets its bioweapons. Before Dead Aim, this was an

assumption; now we know for sure.

=======================
10iv. Random Commentary
=======================

1. Looking at RE:DA in light of the post-Raccoon timeline established

by RE4, RE5, and RE:UC, it makes a weird sort of retroactive sense.
In 2002, as per RE:UC, Umbrella is fading fast and spending most of
its remaining money on attempts to keep the various legal actions
against it tied up in court. The Spencer Rain, as a mobile auction
block for Umbrella, could be seen as an attempt by the surviving
executives to generate some quick capital towards their legal defense,
since it's the first time in the series's chronology that Umbrella's
ever been seen selling its bioweapons.

It also means that in a weird way, Duvall is partially responsible

for the fall of Umbrella. An early file on the Spencer Rain indicates
that the ship was full of high rollers, there to bid on Umbrella-brand
bioweaponry, and Duvall killed them all. If he hadn't, Umbrella
might have actually made enough money to defend itself in court.

2. Dead Aim boasts the most sensible environments of any game in

the series so far. There are plenty of bathrooms, and the labs
have everything you'd expect a lab to have. The only sour note
is the oddly mazelike missile silo.

3. So the Spencer Rain sank into the ocean, where fish will no
doubt devour the tender flesh of all the dead T-Virus carriers.
Nice one, Bruce.

4. Fong Ling's kind of complex. I can see why she might've

warmed up towards Bruce, since he saved her from the satellite
and he's got this dogged habit of being nice to her regardless
of whatever else is going on, but Bruce's conversation in the
waterways radio room adds another wrinkle: the Chinese government
had capitulated to Morpheus's demands. That raises the question
of whether their laser strike was an attempt to destroy the
facility, or to assassinate their agent before she could defect
or be captured.

5. Boy, TG-Virus Morpheus looks like Alexia Ashford, doesn't

he? I wonder why. (For that matter, the Alpha and the Insane
Cancers in Silent Hill 3 look remarkably similar.)

6. The enemies in Dead Aim, while they aren't particularly

difficult to defeat, are still a particularly vicious lot.
Umbrella's bioweapons are apparently improving very rapidly.
(It is weird how the most dangerous monsters in the game are
the "mistakes" under the lab facility.)
========================================================================
11. RESIDENT EVIL: OUTBREAK
========================================================================

At the time of its release, Outbreak was a clumsy game with a badly-coded
game-finder UI, which we all raked over the coals for its hilariously long
load times and its lack of voice-chat support. Since then, with the rise of
games like Left 4 Dead and RE5, Outbreak seems like it was ahead of its time.

Set during the Raccoon City disaster, Outbreak is a series of five short
scenarios that take place at various times and areas throughout the city.
It was originally thought to be non-canon, or at least a part of canon that
didn't really intersect with the main franchise at all, but the RE6 manga
may prove otherwise.

=============
11i. Prologue
=============

As the rats watch, William Birkin becomes something more, and

less, than human. He's more than a match for the team of mercenaries
that were sent to steal the G-Virus from him. One of the men is
still alive as William moves on, but the rats are there to finish
the job. All he can do is writhe in agony as he's devoured.

Aboveground, later, an all-night bar is serving its eight customers.

A ninth runs in, and goes straight to the women's room. She's a
skinny Japanese girl who quickly changes into a more casual outfit,
then frantically cuts off most of her hair with a pair of scissors.
Meanwhile, at the bar, two security guards are having a drink, even
though one of them is clearly ill.

A few minutes later, someone punches his way into the diner. He's
not alone. The bartender tries to reason with the newcomers, but
he's quickly dragged down and, to the horror of the customers,
eaten. The eight remaining survivors--Alyssa Ashcroft, a journalist;
Cindy Lennox, the bar's waitress; Yoko Suzuki, the girl in the
bathroom; Kevin Ryman, a police officer; Mark Wilkins, a Vietnam
veteran and security guard, who's worried about his sick co-worker
Bob; George Hamilton, a surgeon; David King, a plumber; and Jim Chapman,
a puzzle fanatic who works on the subway--are suddenly under siege.

============================
11ii. Scenario One: Outbreak
============================

The survivors blockade the bar's door with some furniture and rush
upstairs. The bar's upper floors are under renovation, which allows
the survivors to improvise a barricade using some spare lumber and a
nailgun, but that doesn't hold the zombies back for long.

Pursued the whole way, the survivors fight their way to the roof
and knock down a weak section of the safety fence next to the
roof's edge. The survivors then jump to the next building, an
apartment complex, and take its elevator down.

When they reach the street, the survivors run into a couple of
frantic policemen who're trying to hold the zombies back, one
of whom is killed as they watch. The survivors push a police car
into place and lock the emergency brake, creating an improvised
roadblock. With the surviving cop, Raymond, providing cover fire,
the survivors bust through a gate on the street.

A parked fuel truck gives Raymond an idea, but he dies at the

hands of the zombies before he can carry it out himself. The
survivors act on his plan, opening the valve on the truck and
flooding the street with gasoline. The survivors ignite the
fuel with Raymond's lighter and dive into a nearby canal just
before the tanker goes up.

The survivors swim into a dry part of the drainage canal, then
climb up onto the streets near the Apple Inn. A few injured
civilians have gathered here for transport, via a police van.
However, that transport's slowed down by the barricades that
have been erected throughout the city. Finally, the van stops
outside the Raccoon Mall, unable to go any further. The survivors
tool up from the police's store of weapons and keep moving on foot.

At the Raccoon Mall, the survivors find a trio of policemen.

One, Harry, is struggling frantically with a bomb; two more,
Elliott and Eric, shoot at a horde of zombies who're barely
restrained by a barricade. As the survivors arrive, the policemen's
position is overrun, and Harry panics, leaving the bomb behind.
At his request, the survivors fight off the zombies, reassemble
the bomb's detonator, and set it off, destroying much of the
Raccoon Mall and halting the zombies' advance.

Following the explosion, the survivors report to one of the

RPD's trauma centers. As they muse on what they've been through
and what's to come, a police van carries them away.

Outside Raccoon City, the Army begins to build roadblocks. As

a helicopter flies overhead, we can hear a news report: toxic
waste has been spilled throughout Raccoon City.

=========================================
11iii. Scenario Two: Below Freezing Point
=========================================

A frightened Umbrella employee is shot to death by a woman

with a pistol. The woman wipes his blood off the window of
a storage unit, and says aloud that there's no turning back.

The survivors, with Yoko's help, have found their way to a

secret subway station deep underneath Raccoon City. A large
gate opens, revealing a parked train. Nearby, the woman is
trying to get that train started, but it's not working.

As the survivors enter the facility, a warning shot caroms

off the ground at their feet. The woman brandishes her gun,
but stops when she sees Yoko. Her name's Monica, and she's
holding a briefcase that Yoko recognizes. Monica decides to
let Yoko live in exchange for Yoko's ID card. When Yoko hands
it over, Monica runs off, telling Yoko to "have a nice life...
what's left of it."

With little choice, the survivors explore the complex. The

subway station leads to a wrecked elevator shaft, which
allows them to enter the facility interior via a ventilation
duct. They've stumbled upon the secret labs of William
Birkin, deep underneath the Raccoon forest.

A massive, mutated plant blocks their progress up the lab's

central shaft, but that's easily solved when they find the
lab's chemical locker. A dose of V-Jolt shrivels the plant's
roots, allowing the survivors to go further into the complex.

Two floors up, Monica attempts to escape via the turntable

elevator. She turns the key, but the elevator won't budge.
Monica mutters about how everything seems to be broken, just
before something attacks her from behind.

Meanwhile, the survivors find their way to the facility's

main power room. The topmost floors have been frozen solid,
and are strewn with icy statues of strange creatures: Hunters.
The survivors find one of the facility's researchers dead at
the console for the climate control system, with a note
nearby explaining his motivation. Several of the lab's
test subjects had gotten loose and were killing the staff.
The researcher was mortally wounded, but managed to turn
the lab's temperature down to zero degrees, freezing the
Hunters in their tracks.

A bit of further exploration reveals an escape route: a

parked train on a large turntable, with the discarded
key nearby. Unfortunately, the turntable is frozen in place.
In order to activate it, the survivors are forced to defrost
the climate control system with a blowtorch and turn up the
heat. This wakes the Hunters up.

Bloodied but alive, the survivors return to the turntable

and start its activation sequence. This is accompanied by a
loud safety announcement, delivered via the facility's PA
system, which also attracts the surviving monsters to the
turntable platform.

In the middle of the ensuing chaos, Monica reappears. Her

specimen case is open. She falls down near the turntable.

The survivors use the turntable to escape the lab. Far below,
Monica's body convulses and churns. Something small and pink
bursts out of her chest and crawls up the elevator shaft.

By the time it reaches the turntable's stop, the creature

is strong enough to burst through plate steel. It rapidly
develops into a twelve-foot-tall killing machine: an immature
G-Type. It attacks the battered survivors with a pair of
wickedly curved claws and its wriggling spawn.

One of the survivors reaches the turntable's control panel

and, at the right moment, starts up the train. It lurches
forward, slamming into the G-Type and killing it.

The survivors activate the turntable train for a final trip,

leaving William Birkin's lab facility behind. They're safe for
now, but the outbreak isn't over yet.
==============================
11iv. Scenario Three: The Hive
==============================

A group of the survivors have made it to the Raccoon

Hospital, where they've gathered in an empty room. Outside,
the street is crawling with hungry undead; inside, the
hospital's almost deserted.

A doctor enters and apologizes for startling the survivors.

Despite the quiet, he says, the hospital isn't as safe as it
might look. At the moment, the power's gone out, and he's
trying to find out why.

The survivors search the hospital for weapons and supplies.

They find that the hospital's staff has been killed almost
to a man, either by the few zombies inside the building or
by a new threat.

One of the dead nurses has written a final statement that

neatly describes the creature that killed him, a writhing
mass of leeches that has taken a vaguely humanoid shape.
It's stalking the few humans left in the hospital via the
ventilation system, and inflicts vicious wounds that
stubbornly refuse to close. Its victims rapidly succumb
either to blood loss induced by the leeches' potent
anticoagulant, or to the massive doses of the T-Virus that
the leeches are carrying.

Not long after the survivors find the nurse's message, the
leech creature finds them, emerging from the ductwork to
attack. THe doctor they met upon arrival manages to get
the power back on, but is killed by the leech creature
shortly thereafter.

The survivors' weapons have no effect on the leech creature,

but they soon find that it navigates almost entirely by its
sense of smell. They're able to distract it with the hospital's
remaining stores of transfusion packs while they search for a
more permanent solution.

They find that Raccoon Hospital houses a secret research lab

for the Umbrella Corporation, which is where the leeches came
from. Umbrella's staff has not only studied the leech creature's
weaknesses, but their facility contains a setup meant for studying
subjects' vulnerability to extreme temperatures. The survivors
throw a blood pack into the laboratory's test area, and when the
leech creature rushes to feed, they slam the door and turn up the
heat. The leeches quickly shrivel and die, leaving behind the
doctor's corpse.

The survivors use the doctor's keycard to unlock a door in

the second subbasement. Inside, they find a motorboat
parked on a flooded part of the city sewer. One of the
hospital's employees was also on Umbrella's payroll, and
insisted upon an more elegant mode of transport through
the sewer tunnels than slogging through waist-deep water.
The survivors pile into his motorboat and take off.
Their trip doesn't last long. They've made it about a hundred
feet before they find the leeches' new spawning ground, built
into the flooded tunnels and inhabited by a massive queen leech.
The survivors fight it as best they can, but in the waist-deep
water of the sewers, they're at a serious disadvantage. Finally,
one of them lures the queen leech further down the tunnel, where
a series of utility pipes carry gas and water to and from the
hospital. The survivor fires at the gas pipes, sparking an
explosion. The queen leech goes down in flames.

With little choice, the survivors continue into Raccoon's

flooded sewers on foot. Yet again, they've managed to live
where so many others have died.

============================
11v. Scenario Four: Hellfire
============================

The zombies are closing in. Surrounded by undead on all sides,

the survivors rush into the courtyard of the Apple Inn, a
three-story luxury hotel, and bar the door.

As the survivors catch their breath, a pair of firemen

investigate the Inn's boiler room. They're preparing to search
for survivors when one notices that the boiler is shaking
dangerously. They're too slow to react, however, and both
firemen are killed in the ensuing explosion.

The same explosion rips through several floors of the hotel,

setting it ablaze, and seals the courtyard door. The survivors
are now trapped in the Apple Inn.

The survivors split up. One group heads into the building
through the boiler room, where they find the unfortunate
firemen's bodies, and climb a ladder to the third floor.
The other group starts at the Inn's first floor and works
its way up.

The Apple Inn is on fire, but not yet falling down. The
survivors must contend with not only zombies and the
mutants that the RPD will soon name "Lickers," but
random gusts of superheated air. All of their potential
exit routes are blocked, either by locked doors or the
damage and fire caused by the boiler explosion.

After searching for and finding a pair of keys, the survivors

manage to open a secret door in the hotel's security office
and reactivate the power to the emergency system. They can
now reach the lobby via a safety ladder on its balcony.

The hotel's side door is unobstructed, but not for long. The
survivors' dash for safety is blocked by the appearance of
a more powerful breed of Licker, caught somewhere between
its human and inhuman forms. It hangs from the ceiling and
lashes out with its prehensile tongue, choking the life from
any human who gets within its range.

Fortunately for the survivors, they've found new weapons

as they've searched the hotel. The Licker goes down in a
hail of buckshot and acid-laced grenades.

As it dies, the sound of the fight gets a fireman's attention

from outside the hotel, and he hacks the side door open with
an axe.

Outside the Apple Inn, the survivors watch as the Raccoon

City fire department tends to a handful of living humans. The
fireman who rescued them says that the whole city's starting
to burn. Not only is this not over yet, but it's going to get
much worse.

=========================================
11vi. Scenario Five: Decisions, Decisions
=========================================

Somewhere in Raccoon City, a man with an Umbrella logo on his

shirt works on a project. He muses aloud that an organization is
harmed by excessive growth. Apparently, someone wants him to try
and mass-produce his "masterpiece": a humanoid figure sleeping
inside a stasis tube. It looks slightly like a hairless black man,
but its external heart, yellow irisless eyes, and claws identify
it as a new breed of Tyrant.

Meanwhile, the survivors have made it to one of the refugee

centers within Raccoon City. It's nearly empty, but one of its
walls has been turned into a makeshift bulletin board. George
finds a note there from his friend Peter Jenkins. Peter's waiting
for George at Raccoon University.

Several hours later, in the grey hours before dawn on October

1st, George leads a group of survivors to Raccoon University's
administration building. It's almost deserted, inhabited only
by a handful of zombies.

They explore the building and stumble upon a concealed study

in the lobby of the entrance hall. Inside, they find Peter,
dead and slumped over his desk. He's surrounded by notes on
a cure for the T-Virus that's infected them all, which he
refers to by the code-name of Daylight. As he says, in the
Daylight, you don't need an Umbrella.

Peter developed this cure in collaboration with a biologist

named Greg (you find out in "Flashback" in File #2 that Greg's
last name is "Mura," which is a mistranslation for "Mueller"),
whose input was crucial to the successful completion of the
project. However, Greg is still employed by Umbrella, much to
Peter's horror; Peter has written in his journal about how
Greg has effectively betrayed him. The journal and many of
Peter's private notes have been partially destroyed.

There are three required ingredients for Daylight, according

to Peter's notes. The base is kept in a storage tank in the
basement. The other two are going to be harder to get; one is
a sizable amount of bee poison, while the other is blood from
a creature infected by the T-Virus.

The survivors split up and look for the parts of the cure.
To get the poison, one group ventures into the old subway
tunnels below the university and goes hunting for mutant
bees. The other explores the purification center near the
waterfront, where Umbrella has stored several Gamma Hunters.

Both groups succeed, and head back towards the university.

En route, they see a number of armed men fighting a large
humanoid monster--Greg's "masterpiece," the Thanatos--in
the university's parking lot. While four gunmen keep up an
ineffective attack, a fifth--Nicholai--uses a scoped rifle
to fire a dart into the creature's shoulder. The dart's
an automated syringe, which takes a sample of the creature's
blood. This enrages it, and it makes short work of the gunmen
on the ground. Once they're dead, the Thanatos leaps into the
university. Nicholai watches it go, and muses aloud that it's
probably on its way to "that man."

By the time the survivors reach the lot, the creature's gone
and the soldiers are dead. An inspection of their bodies
reveals the name of their organization--the Umbrella Biohazard
Countermeasures Service--and their orders: to destroy the
creature, remove all traces of its presence, kill any witnesses,
and get a sample of its blood.

The survivors find their way back to the university's entrance

hall, just in time to be the Thanatos's next victims. Their
guns prove to be useless against it. Thinking fast, one of the
survivors lures the creature into a back hallway and zaps it
with some faulty electrical wiring. This stuns the creature,
albeit briefly, and allows the survivors to grab the autosyringe
that's still sticking out of its shoulder.

Quickly, they head to the third floor of the university,

where the Thanatos cannot follow, and place the ingredients
for Daylight into the reagent generator. It begins to work,
but five minutes later, the power shuts down. The survivors
search for a way to turn it back on, and in so doing, find
a pair of nearly empty rooms. One is a makeshift morgue,
containing a sizable arsenal, two dead humans, and two dead
Hunters; the other contains several computers, which are
wired into the building's security systems. The creator
of the Thanatos has been watching their progress.

He greets them cordially as they enter, and says that he

appreciates their help. Daylight is the only hope against
the scourge of the T-Virus. As a backhanded thank you for
gathering Daylight's ingredients, Greg tells the survivors
that they're going to get to play with his ultimate creation.

His speech is cut short by a silenced gunshot from above.

As Greg dies, Nicholai quietly leaves; the survivors never
see him.

Greg's computer proves able to release all the automatic locks

in the administration building. At the same time, the survivors
find that while they were waiting on the reagent generator,
someone planted a series of demolition charges throughout Raccoon
University. They have seven minutes before the building explodes.
The survivors grab several doses of Daylight from the reagent
generator and easily make it outside before the bombs go off.
The Thanatos is still inside when the university collapses,
burying it under tons of rubble.

A pair of firemen in a rescue helicopter see the explosion

and fly down to see what happened. They see the survivors,
and one of them shouts through a megaphone that they'll pick
the survivors up, but they have to hurry. The pilot shines
a spotlight on the gate to the university's back lot.

The survivors make one final run for safety. Unfortunately,

the Thanatos has also survived, though it's seriously injured.
One of its arms is gone, torn from its body, but the trademark
resilience of a Tyrant has allowed it to survive. Its remaining
arm has mutated into an enormous claw.

A frantic battle ensues. The survivors employ every weapon they

have and everything they can find, from the dead mercenaries'
guns to clubs and knives. The Thanatos seems to be able to take
anything they can dish out, but finally, their assault has an
effect. The Thanatos collapses.

The firemen land nearby, in a clearing surrounded by wrecked

tanks. This too is liberally stocked with ammunition and
weapons, including an ampoule shooter. This comes in handy
shortly thereafter, as the survivors are attacked yet again
by the Thanatos. This time, they're ready for it, and load
the ampoule shooter with a dose of Daylight.

A single shot is all it takes. A red light appears from cracks

in its torso, and the Thanatos screams as it falls to pieces.

================================================================
11vii. A Summary of the Conclusion(s) of RESIDENT EVIL: OUTBREAK
================================================================

Six months later, a fighter jet flies high over the crater that
was once Raccoon City. It takes a few photographs, then flies on.

Amidst the ruins, in a small office suspended high above the

ground, a balding man in a lab coat is brought a copy of the jet's
surveillance photos. Raccoon City looks vaguely like a pawprint
on the ground, and the man concludes that nothing human could
have survived there.

Just then, he receives a phone call. Whoever's on the other end

tells him that they're scheduled to begin soon. The balding man
agrees; they intend to drop the experiments in groups of four,
beginning with the T-4 units.

We pan out from the office, past the blasted wreckage of the
buildings and streets, to see that the ruins of Raccoon City
are surrounded by a fence. It's marked with a biohazard symbol.

==================================
11viii. The Remain Hopeful Endings
==================================
Outbreak has quite a few endings, determined by what characters
are still alive following the fight with the Thanatos and what
you've done with the Daylight vaccine. The only scenario that
matters here is "Decisions, Decisions."

After Greg's death, you can use his computers to reactivate

the reagent generator. It'll produce doses of Daylight at
thirty-second intervals; I've gotten as many as five, although
if you stick around too long, you'll be killed when Nicholai's
bombs go off. What you do or don't do with the Daylight determines
what ending you get.

If you cure your active character with Daylight and you've

got at least one other dose of it in your inventory at the
end of the game, you'll get the character-specific "Remain
Hopeful" ending.

Alyssa:
Alyssa leans back in the helicopter's seat. Just thinking
about the column she has to write is giving her a headache.
Noticing Alyssa's discomfort, one of the firemen offers her
painkillers. She notices the Umbrella logo on the box, and
refuses with a wan smile.

Cindy:
With Raccoon City destroyed, Cindy smiles faintly and realizes
she's out of a job. She sees that one of the firemen is wounded,
and bandages his leg with a strip from her skirt. Cindy concludes
that there are any number of things she can do now.

David:
Just as David's about to relax, the fireman in the helicopter
with him opens his eyes, which are covered with a milky film.
He's a zombie, and so's the pilot. They come towards him...
and David wakes up with the pilot's hand on his shoulder.
He's having a nightmare in the helicopter.

George:
George is about to close his eyes and rest, but he realizes
he has one last duty to perform. His friend died to get the
secret of Daylight out to the world, and it's George's job to
make sure that happens.

Jim:
"Does it really work?" Jim wonders, as he flips the sample
of Daylight over in his hand. He accidentally drops it, and
it nearly tumbles out the open door. Jim leaps to grab it,
and is only prevented from falling out of the helicopter
himself by the fireman's quick reflexes. Jim thanks him, and
cradles the sample of Daylight in his shaking hands.

Kevin:
He closes his eyes and lets out a relieved sigh. Kevin
reaches into his vest pocket, produces his last STARS
exam, and rips it into shreds. Tossing the paper out of
the helicopter, Kevin decides that he'll figure out what
he'll do with the rest of his life after he takes a nap.

Mark:
Mark prays aloud that nothing like that ever happens to him
again. "It's us," he says aloud, to himself. "Mankind."

Yoko:
She remembers what Greg said to her,
she's forgotten. If there's a secret
realizes she can't run away from it.
Daylight, she resolves that whatever
see it through to the end.
and wonders what it is
hiding inside her, Yoko
Holding the sample of
happens next, she'll

=========================
11ix. The Special Endings
=========================

If you don't have an extra Daylight but you're virus-free,

or if you're still afflicted but you've got the Daylight
in your inventory, you'll get the Regretful Ending. Your
character has survived, but is tormented by what he or
she has given up in the process.

Alternatively, if you don't have a Daylight in your

inventory at all and you're still infected with the
T-Virus, you'll get the Chopper Zombie ending, where your
character slowly succumbs to the T-Virus in the rescue
helicopter. Although he or she is still vaguely self-aware,
he or she loses control and attacks the pilot from behind.

Finally, four characters have special endings. In single-

player mode, you must be playing as Alyssa, Mark, Jim, or
George. To get the special ending, you must make sure that
Yoko, David, Kevin, or Cindy, respectively, are still alive
after the fight with the Thanatos. You must also still be
infected with the T-Virus, and you must not have a sample
of Daylight in your inventory at the end of the game. You can
still use a dose of Daylight to kill the Thanatos.

Alyssa, with Yoko:

Alyssa decides to remain in Raccoon City. Escaping while
she's still infected would be monstrous, she thinks, even
for someone as self-obsessed as she is.

Inside a building near the university, Yoko helps Alyssa

get online. Alyssa emails her final report to an unnamed
colleague, complete with photos of the zombies. Once the
upload is finished, Alyssa yanks the laptop's wires out
and dashes it against the floor, laughing bitterly.

She and Yoko walk to the window to watch the missiles come
in. Just before the moment of impact, Alyssa says, "We win,
right?" Yoko says, her face blank, "Sure."

Mark, with David:

David fixes the abandoned police tank in the courtyard, and
Mark settles in behind the wheel. David mans the turret, and
they charge into the hordes of zombies that've gathered in the
streets. They're still fighting when the missiles hit.

Jim, with Kevin:

We fade in on Jim whining. He understands why he can't leave
the city, but he would've preferred to get stuck with a woman,
rather than with Kevin. Kevin quietly reloads his gun, and
when he notices Jim's stopped talking, he looks up. Jim is
paralyzed with fear, as he's seen the Thanatos getting back
to its feet. Kevin smiles, and takes aim. As it prepares to
charge, Kevin says, "Let's finish this like men." He fires
at the Thanatos as the first missiles hit.

George, with Cindy:

Cindy admits to feeling "strange," and George says that he
feels the same way. It'll all be over soon, he promises.
They hold hands and watch the missiles come down.

=====================================
11x. Conclusions About the Conclusion
=====================================

1. There are no official survivors, with the possible exception

of the two firemen who were piloting the helicopter. The best
endings in Outbreak aren't about survival; they're about
good deaths. (That being said, if any of the Remain Hopeful
endings were to become official, I'd figure it'd be Yoko's;
she has plot-related reasons to be around for "Decisions,
Decisions," as opposed to "End of the Road" in File #2.)

2. Daylight is mentioned in Biohazard - Marhawa Desire, a manga

starring Chris that serves as a prequel to RE6. At least one of
the survivors must have lived through the destruction of the
university and escaped with a sample.

3. The explosion that destroyed Raccoon City wasn't nuclear.

There's actual wreckage as opposed to dust and glass, and
the ruins don't appear to be radioactive.

4. Despite the military blockade, rescue crews were in operation

in Raccoon City until just before the missile strike. Leon refers
to survivors of Raccoon City as "rare" in Degeneration, but there
are apparently more of them than are indicated by RE2 or RE3.

=====================================
11x. Scenario Branches and Side Notes
=====================================

1. Among all the eight main characters, only Yoko has anything
like a real, character-driven storyline. Several NPCs in "Below
Freezing Point" know her and will reveal some plot information,
and there's a special cutscene if Yoko is in the group when the
survivors meet Greg in "Decisions, Decisions."

2. If George isn't a PC or AIPC during "Decisions, Decisions,"

you'll find him mortally wounded near the manhole that leads
down into the abandoned subway system, surrounded by his pills.

3. If Yoko isn't a PC or AIPC during "Below Freezing Point,"

she'll show up as a zombie either in the chemical locker or in
the B8F office.

=======================
11xi. Random Commentary
=======================

1. Outbreak was something of a failed experiment, but if you

could get the online working, it was also weirdly addictive.
The one real problem with it was its custom interface for finding
games online, which was unique to the game and badly coded. The
lack of voice chat also makes "The Hive" nearly impossible, as
it's very easy to accidentally go to the wrong floor of the
hospital and end up alone with no way to meet up with your crew.

2. Outbreak's also sort of a love letter to the hardcore fans of

the "classic" games, particularly as you move on to the higher
difficulties. It's designed for people who really love to fight
Hunters with knives.

3. The Raccoon Today file ("An Eerie Voice From Underground")

refers obliquely to Brian Irons. I originally thought it was
about Lisa Trevor, but the long blonde hair was a big clue.

4. I've gotta know; is the Valve Handle some kind of running

gag with the developers?

5. I wonder if the sabotaged tram in "Below Freezing Point"

is the work of Brian Irons. He mentions in the Chief's Diary
file in RE2 that he's deliberately making sure no one can
escape via the "lower levels."

===================================================================
12. RESIDENT EVIL 4
===================================================================

Resident Evil 4 went through three separate revisions. The first

became the original Devil May Cry; the second was abandoned. The
third was a complete reinvention of the series as an over-the-top
action-horror game that gave not only the franchise but the entire
action genre a shot in the arm. RE4 is one of the primary influences
on modern third-person shooters.

It differs dramatically from the survival-horror games that came

before it, however, and represents a permanent paradigm shift for
the RE series as a whole. It's the most popular game in the franchise
among mainstream players, and one of the most contentious within the
fan community.

=================================================
i. A Summary of the Basic Plot of RESIDENT EVIL 4
=================================================

Umbrella has been destroyed. Despite their efforts, it came to light

that they were to blame for the destruction of Raccoon City. The
government proceeded to suspend Umbrella's accounts, crashing its
stock and driving it out of business.

It's been six years since Leon Kennedy survived the Raccoon
City outbreak. He's spent those years in training as an agent
of the American government, and is now assigned to the U.S.
Secret Service. Shortly before Leon was to start his new job,
the President's daughter Ashley was kidnapped.
American intelligence soon picks up a lead as to where to find
Ashley, and Leon's sent to investigate. Word arrives that she's
been spotted in a small, rural village in Spain, and Leon gets
a ride into the countryside from a couple of bumbling Spanish
cops, who seem amused by the whole thing. None of them notice
that they're being followed.

The cops decide to wait in the car, near the rickety rope bridge
that separates the village from what passes for its main road.
Leon gets out to start his investigation, and gets an introductory
call on his GRVT visual radio from Ingrid Hunnigan, another agent
who's monitoring his progress.

A nearby signpost simply says "Pueblo," "village," as though

nothing else in the world could be known by that name. The road's
blocked by a parked truck, so Leon checks out a nearby house.
Inside, he finds one man, who curses at him in Spanish. Leon
apologizes and tries to leave quietly, but when he turns his
back, the man nearly brains Leon with an axe. The villager
ignores Leon's warnings, and forces Leon to kill him.

Outside, the truck's engine starts. Leon heads to a window in

time to see it tearing down the path towards the police car. He
hears gunshots, then a crash. At the same time, more villagers
have arrived. Several are holding the front door shut.

Leon searches the rest of the house, and finds a stack of

withered body parts underneath the stairs. These people have
been preying on travelers for some time. He dives out a window,
and gets attacked by more villagers. Like the first, they rush
towards Leon, wielding farm tools with intent to kill; like the
first, they wade through gunfire and show no fear.

Th1e crash Leon heard earlier was from the truck hitting the
parked police car. The crash has broken the rope bridge and
sent both cars into the river below. With no way back, Leon
heads forward, towards the village, through a gauntlet of more
armed villagers and a series of crude booby traps.

When Leon reaches the village, he hangs back and studies it

through binoculars. Calling it a village may be giving it too
much credit; it's a collection of rickety shacks. The villagers
tend farm animals and move hay.

The villagers have impaled one of the policemen and burned him
at the stake in the center of town. When they see Leon, they
attack him en masse. As Leon fights a running battle through
the village, he finds an old shotgun and a cache of grenades,
neither of which the villagers have thought to use against him.
Instead, they wield Molotov cocktails, axes, and pitchforks.

Leon is forced to take shelter in one of the larger houses and

barricade the door. The villagers come through the windows, and
climb up ladders to reach the second floor. Worse luck, one of
them fires up a chainsaw. Leon defends himself as best he can,
but more villagers arrive to replace the ones he shoots. They
only stop when, out of nowhere, a church bell begins to ring from
somewhere nearby. The survivors retreat through a metal door in
the town square. Leon is left alone in an empty village.
A note in one of the cabins, written by "Chief" Bitores Mendez,
is a message to the villagers telling them to stay alert. It warns
the villagers to watch out for an American agent, and has a recent
photo of Leon attached to it. It also says that their captive is
being held in a building past the farm.

His course set, Leon heads down a side trail. The retreating
villagers have taken the time to set up more traps and ambushes
to defend the building, a fire-damaged old house. The villagers'
prisoner is a Spanish man Leon's age, bound and gagged inside
a wardrobe. Leon frees him, and finds that unlike the others,
he's still lucid.

Their conversation is interrupted by the arrival of two

more farmers, accompanied by a large bald man wearing a
heavy overcoat. The prisoner says bitterly that the
latter's the "big cheese": Chief Bitores Mendez. Leon
rushes Mendez and throws a roundhouse kick. Effortlessly,
Mendez catches Leon's foot and throws him backward. Leon
crashes through a table and is knocked unconscious.

While he's out, someone injects something into Leon's neck.

When he wakes up, he's in some other building, chained to
the prisoner. The villagers took Leon's jacket, but not his
guns. Leon wakes the prisoner up, and asks him if he's seen
Ashley. The prisoner's heard about the President's daughter,
who's being kept in the village's church.

The prisoner introduces himself as Luis, a former Madrid police

officer and "ladies' man." Leon says that he used to be a cop
himself, and mentions that he was involved in the Raccoon City
outbreak. Luis recognizes the name, and says he's seen a sample
of the T-Virus in a laboratory.

Suddenly, a villager toting an axe barges into the room. Neither

Luis nor Leon can get free, but when the villager swings, Leon
manages to use the descending axe to break their bonds. On the
villager's next lunge, Leon breaks his neck. Luis runs away.

Leon blasts his way back in the general direction of the village.
He finally comes to the first modern-looking house he's seen yet.
Inside, he finds a modest bedroom. Leon takes a key from the dresser,
and reads a note that's been left on the bed. The Chief of the
village was ordered to leave Leon alive by a "Lord Saddler."

Leon overhears a muted conversation through the bedroom door, and

slowly pushes it open. Mendez grabs him by the throat again and
begins to strangle him. As Leon tries to escape his grip, Mendez
inspects his face. Finally, he drops Leon, saying that Leon shares
their blood. He returns to his bedroom, leaving Leon to wonder
what he was talking about.

Hunnigan calls Leon, and tells him what she's learned. A religious
cult called Los Illuminados is apparently involved with the situation.
Leon tells her what's happened, and she urges him to find the church.

Leon rushes back into Mendez's bedroom to get some answers, but gets
ambushed once again. The only thing that saves him is the sudden
intervention of a woman in a red dress, who fires at Mendez from
outside. Mendez leaps out the window to deal with her as she climbs up
onto the roof. Once again, Leon's left with more questions than answers.

With little else to do, Leon leaves the house and heads back to the
village. His new key fits a door in the town square, allowing him to
reach the village church via a cave tunnel. The front door of the church
is, of course, shut and locked. Leon sets out to find another key.

The path behind the church leads him across a rope bridge, where he finds
another of Mendez's notes in a cabin. The villagers are currently all
occupied trying to track Luis down, as he's stolen something from them
that could somehow render Ashley "useless." Mendez writes that "the agent,"
Leon, will never make it across the lake alive; their "Lord" has awakened
something called Del Lago.

When Leon reaches the lake's shore, he's just

in time to see two villagers dump the other
policeman's body in the lake. As Leon watches,
something enormous comes up out of the water
and devours the corpse. With little choice in
the matter, Leon steals a motorboat and heads
across the lake.

He's nearly knocked out of the boat by the

monster, a hideous mutant the size of a whale.
In the wake of its passing, the boat's anchor
falls out and hooks onto Del Lago's back,
forcing Leon to follow after it. Fortunately,
the boat contains a stock of harpoons. After
Leon sticks a couple of dozen spears into it,
Del Lago retreats to the bottom of the lake.
Leon manages to cut himself free before he's
dragged down with it.

Leon takes the boat to the other side of the lake.

He barely makes it onto land before something in his
chest starts to spasm. He staggers into a cabin and
passes out.

He wakes up later, after a nightmare, to find

that night's fallen. A slightly worried Hunnigan
contacts him and tells him she's been trying to
reach him for six hours. Leon shrugs it off and
says he'll continue with his mission.

There's a note on a bed near where he passed out.

It's unsigned, but tells him that if he wants to
get Ashley, he'll need an item that's hidden in
the waterfall, but he'll also need to watch out
for something called "El Gigante." The anonymous
writer concludes that what's happening with Leon's
body is beyond his/her power to fix.

As Leon heads towards the waterfall, he runs into yet

another pair of villagers on the road. One of them
shudders and twitches. Finally, his head explodes and
is quickly replaced by a shaking mass of razor-sharp
tendrils. This new creature is dangerous, but fragile,
and most of the villagers seem to at least have the
potential to spawn one.

Leon fights through the rest of the waterfall's

guards and uses the villagers' dam to divert the
river's current. In a cavern behind the waterfall,
Leon finds a round insignia that'll fit in the
church's door. Taking it opens a secret passage
that leads to the other side of the lake.

Leon quickly finds out just what El Gigante is. A

group of villagers drag it into a clearing near
the church, where it promptly snaps its bonds and
kills the lot of them. It's a large ogrish thing,
vaguely humanoid and nearly invulnerable. After
it absorbs a few slugs to the face, however, one
of the tendriled creatures emerges from between
its shoulder blades. Leon hits the Gigante with
everything he has, and when it's stunned, he
carves at the growth with his knife. When the
parasite dies, so does El Gigante.

Leon runs back to the church, where he finds

that the round insignia opens the door. Inside,
on the second floor, he finally finds a scared
Ashley Graham. Leon explains who he is, then
radios Hunnigan for extraction.

As they try to leave the church, a robed man steps

in front of the altar and tells Leon that he'll take
Ashley. He introduces himself as Osmund Saddler, the
leader of Los Illuminados. His plan is to show the
United States that it can't police the world, while
simultaneously shaking it down for some much-needed
cash. He also tells Leon that Ashley's been injected
with the same thing he has: their "power," a.k.a.
their "gift." Leon and Ashley are less than enthused
by this. When a pair of crossbow-wielding monks burst
in through the front door, Leon grabs Ashley and dives
through the stained-glass window.

Their designated extraction point is a clearing past

the farm. Leon and Ashley make a run for it. Along
the way, Leon finds a new note by one of the Illuminados,
possibly Saddler himself, about Luis. Somehow, Luis is
not only evading pursuit, but he's managed to remove
the "egg" that the Illuminados injected him with. The
note's author points to this as proof that a third
party is involved.

Leon and Ashley manage to make it past the farm before

Hunnigan calls with some bad news: their evac chopper's
been shot down. Hunnigan tells Leon to proceed to the
extraction point regardless.

As they cross a bridge, Ashley sees a mob of

villagers with torches on the road behind them.
They run away, only to find another mob in their
path. With no other choice, Leon and Ashley run
into a nearby cabin and barricade the door. Luis
is already inside, and introduces himself to Ashley.

The villagers attack soon afterward, laying siege

to the cabin. Leon and Luis fight a losing battle,
slaying dozens, but the villagers keep coming. Just
when it seems as though the cabin will be overrun,
the villagers withdraw.

Luis claims that he "forgot something," and casually

goes off on his own. Leon and Ashley, for their part,
leave the cabin and open a new gate. It leads, via a
roundabout and dangerous route, to a long bridge over
the river, a large door with yet another strange lock,
and an old ski lift. Leon finds a note in a house,
written by Mendez and dropped by a villager, that says
there's an ambush waiting for them at the bottom of
the lift. Mendez is down there, and the gate will
only open "before his gaze."

Leon takes care of a few carloads of villagers as

he and Ashley ride the lift down. The path at the
bottom of the lift terminates in a dilapidated barn:
the perfect place for an ambush. Leon tells Ashley
to hide while he investigates.

Somehow, once Leon's inside, Mendez still manages

to get the drop on him. Mendez throws Leon across
the barn, then turns around and casually twists
the steel doorhandles into origami.

Leon manages to roll away from Mendez's next attack,

and kicks an oil drum at Mendez. Despite Mendez's
contemptuous smile, Leon shoots the drum, setting the
barn on fire and revealing Mendez as inhuman. His spine
elongates, pulling his upper torso free from his legs
with a wet tearing sound; his arms lengthen and sprout
long claws. This new Mendez advances towards Leon.

He promptly catches thirty-seven shotgun blasts

straight to the face. His exposed spine snaps,
forcing Mendez to pull his upper body around
with a strange, monkeylike gait, attacking Leon
without warning from virtually any direction.
Leon continues to pour buckshot into the twisted
thing that was once Bitores Mendez, until Mendez
finally falls over dead. His glass eye falls out,
and Leon pockets it.

The eye proves to be what Mendez meant when he

said his gaze would open the next gate; a scanner
attached to the lock recognizes a code etched onto
the eye's iris. Leon and Ashley walk through, onto
a wide path leading to a well-maintained, ancient
castle. This is their backup extraction point, but
the sudden arrival of a posse of villagers, too many
to fight, forces them to take shelter in the castle.

The castle's crawling with white-skinned men in

black robes: Illuminados. As Leon enters, he receives
another call from Hunnigan, but her signal dies.

One gunfight later, Leon and Ashley are crossing

the castle's battlements when Luis catches up
to them. He claims to have a drug that'll stop
their convulsions, but finds that he's lost it
somewhere. Luis tells Leon and Ashley that he
knows they're infected, and asks if they've
been coughing up blood. They both nod, and
Luis curses; this means their eggs have hatched.

Luis turns around to leave, saying he'll go back

and find the drug. Ashley offers to go with him,
but Luis brushes her off. Leon asks why Luis is
helping them. His answer: "Because it makes me
feel better. Let's just leave it at that."

Leon and Ashley, alone again, progress further

into the castle. In a torchlit antechamber, they
meet the castle's lord, Ramon Salazar, who appears
to be a pasty and withered old man. He offers them
the chance to surrender, as they're his "brethren";
Leon, predictably, refuses the offer. Salazar points
out that they'd rather take the girl alive, but
Leon's marked for death. As he leaves, Leon
reassures a distraught Ashley that they'll find
a cure for their infection.

After Salazar's departure, a large stone plinth

rises into Leon and Ashley's path. It's marked
with a fresco that's conspicuously missing a few
pieces. With no way to get through it, they're
forced to take a detour through the castle's prison.

There, they find another note on the wall, another

dispatch from Saddler or Salazar about Luis Sera.
Apparently, Luis stole several vaccines and an
unnamed sample. The note's author takes this as
further proof of his theory that another agency
is somehow involved, and urges the note's readers
to make the sample's reacquisition a top priority.

Leon investigates the prison, and finds a switch

he needs inside one of the cells. To reach it, he
must defeat a blind, armored prisoner who wields
a pair of wickedly sharp claws. Fortunately, Leon's
able to exploit its blindness by shooting at a
pair of bells in the prison; while it swings wildly
at the ringing sound, Leon blasts at the parasite
on its back. It dies when the parasite does.

After dispatching a sizable number of Illuminados,

Leon and Ashley reach an enormous ballroom. Suddenly,
Ashley begins to cough helplessly, drenching her hands
with her own blood. When Leon tries to help her, she
pushes him aside and runs, straight into one of
Salazar's traps. Ashley winds up strapped to a secret
door, which promptly revolves out of sight, while
Leon is prevented from reaching her by several sets
of spring-loaded spears. As she disappears, Leon
yells that he's coming for her.

He receives a call on his radio from, of all people,

Salazar. They've jacked into his transmissions. Salazar
tells Leon that he's unleashed some of his "pets" into
the castle's sewer, just to keep him company.

These "pets" turn out to be large mutated insects,

capable of camouflaging themselves and of sticking
to walls. Leon will later find out they're called
"Novistadors." For right now, he's hard-pressed
to stay alive as he passes through the castle's
dungeon, which has been repurposed into an archaic
sewer system.

In the old cellblock, Leon finds a set of notes

signed by Luis, who's written the beginning of a
biological treatise on parasites called "Las Plagas"
and their victims, the "Ganados" - the Spanish word
for "cattle." The Plagas are a species of parasite
with the ability to control their hosts.

When Leon finds his way out of the sewer, he's above
an Illuminado prayer meeting. Leon disrupts that
with violence, then heads deeper into the castle.
In a lushly furnished gallery, he has a shootout
with one of Salazar's red-robed lieutenants, who
attacks Leon with a mounted machine gun. This is
an unwise decision, as Leon can run faster than the
turret can rotate.

Leon also finds documents in the gallery written by

Ramon Salazar. Salazar writes about the Illuminados,
who were once a powerful local religious group.
Salazar's ancestors had oppressed the Illuminados,
but Salazar, as a member of the cult, felt the need
to make it up to them. To do so, he and Saddler have
released Las Plagas, which were once sealed away
underneath the castle, and somehow "rejuvenated"
them. Salazar sees the Plagas' powers as a way to
save people's souls, as a man without free will
cannot sin.

Leon promptly catches up to Salazar on the other

side of the gallery. Salazar reveals two interesting
things: one is that despite his appearance, he's only
twenty years old. The other is that unlike the Ganados
and Illuminados, Salazar isn't a "puppet of the
parasites." He's in complete control of them. He
demonstrates this by siccing a small army of
Illuminados on Leon, including several that are armed
with anti-tank weapons. When the smoke clears, Leon's
found an ornamental goat, one part of the fresco puzzle.

His next encounter with Salazar comes in the castle's

gardens, a hedge maze inhabited by infected hunting
dogs. Again, Salazar calls to tell Leon his death is
imminent; at the end of the call, Salazar mentions he
has another "rat" to chase down.

Leon blasts his way through the hedge maze and finds
the keys he needs to escape. His exit door leads to
a luxurious guest bedroom, and an ambush. A woman
pokes a gun into his back from behind. Leon whirls
on her, disarming her and putting his knife to her
neck. Leon tosses her pistol away, as she takes off
and drops her sunglasses. Leon instantly recognizes
her as Ada Wong.

She smiles and says, "Long time no see." Leon's not

as glad to see her, as he's heard that she's been
working with Wesker. Ada, still smiling, doesn't
deny it, and compliments him on having done his
homework. Leon tries to ask another question, but
just then, Ada's sunglasses explode in a flash of
white light. When Leon's eyes clear, Ada's rearmed
herself and jumped out the bedroom window. Leon,
still half-blind, has no choice but to let her go.

The bedroom apparently belongs to Salazar, or perhaps

even Saddler himself. A note on a table speaks of the
female intruder, and has several pictures of Ada
attached. Since they've discovered her, the note's
author concludes that she's responsible for removing
Luis's egg, she's after the sample, and she's probably
working for someone else. The focus of the Illuminados'
operation has switched to Ada, and Luis is now expendable.

Leon receives a gory demonstration of this shortly

thereafter. Luis catches up to Leon in a large ballroom.
He has the Plagas sample, but doesn't get the chance to
say much before something slams into his back. A tendril
rips through his chest and throws him into the air. Luis
drops the sample, and Saddler is there to catch it.

Saddler leaves, promising Leon that Salazar will

deal with him. Luis, still clinging to life somehow,
makes a confession: he was one of Saddler's researchers.
With his last bit of strength, he gives Leon a drug
that'll slow down the development of the Plagas inside
him, and begs Leon to get the sample back from Saddler.
Then, Luis dies.

With the drug in hand, Leon hears a familiar voice.

He's standing directly above Ashley, who's still
strapped down. Leon carefully destroys her bonds, and
continues to defend her from above as the Illuminados
storm the room. Ashley grabs a key off one of the
dead Illuminados and escapes through a nearby door.

Ashley finds herself in a dusty, little-used part

of the castle, used mostly for storage. She evades
a couple of unarmed monks and finds her way into
several unlit storerooms; fortunately, someone has
left a flashlight near their entrance.
In the oldest and dustiest of these rooms, Ashley
finds a crest marked with the Salazar family's emblem,
and a serpent ornament that serves as another piece
of the plinth fresco. At the same time, she also finds
that Las Plagas are not limited to infecting human or
even living hosts; some of them have taken up residence
within ancient suits of plate armor. Ashley manages
to dodge the Plagas and make her way back to an
earlier room, where the Salazar family's crest opens
a secret door. Within is a ladder, leading upstairs.

Ashley rejoins Leon, and the two of them renew their

attempts to escape, despite Salazar's acidic commentary
via radio. Leon backtracks briefly so he and Ashley
can work together to access a locked treasure room,
inside which is a large-caliber revolver.

In another room, where clockwork gears and chaindriven

flamethrowers guard a narrow path over a constant flow
of lava, Leon finds the final piece of the plinth fresco.
Nearby, a small tram carries Leon and Ashley back across
the castle grounds, to the ballroom with the plinth.

Another tram is waiting for them. This one carries

them to a slightly newer part of the castle, where
Leon finds another note on a table. It tells of
Luis's death at Saddler's hands, the recaptured
sample, and a renewal of purpose for the Illuminados;
with the sample back in their hands, they can focus
their efforts on capturing Ada and Ashley.

Salazar springs yet another pair of traps on Leon

and Ashley, neither of which prevent Leon from getting
a golden cup: the Queen's Grail. The King's Grail is
guarded by several of the armored Plagas Ashley
encountered earlier. Both items are needed to open
the next door. It leads, unexpectedly, to an enormous
antechamber dominated by an equally enormous, pulsing
green egg sac: the spawning grounds of the Novistados.

Suddenly, one of them swoops down and grabs Ashley,

flying off with her through the tower's open ceiling.
Leon's left to contend with several flying Novistados,
and once again, to rescue Ashley. Leon manages to get
outside onto the battlements just in time to see Ashley
being escorted into one of the towers by a retinue of
Illuminados.

Leon fights his way across the battlements and through

the castle's clock tower. Salazar is holding Ashley in
a sort of throne room, where he's got yet another trap
waiting for Leon: an old-fashioned pitfall. Fortunately,
Leon has a grappling hook with him, which he uses to
arrest his fall. Salazar, growing increasingly frustrated,
sends one of his robed companions, his "right hand,"
after Leon.

The depths of the castle are apparently where Salazar's

ancestors had sealed the Plagas away; ancient stonework
eventually gives way to the trappings of a modern
industrial project. Leon finds an elevator that's been
powered down, and goes to reactivate it.

When he does, the "right hand" attacks him. It strikes

without warning, swinging at him from random directions
with a barbed tendril. Leon retreats into the power room.
It follows him, and when Leon flips the elevator's circuit
breaker, it's trapped inside with him. Leon uses a nearby
tank of liquid nitrogen to freeze it solid and shatter it.

At the same time, somewhere else, Saddler tells a man dressed

in military fatigues to get "the girl" and dispose of Leon.

Leon's elevator takes him down into some mining tunnels, where
a squad of Ganados are hard at work. They've found some gold,
but the focus of their exploration is Las Plagas. They've even
found some Plaga fossils, suggesting that the parasites are
much older than they thought.

The mining tunnels eventually yield to a series of natural caves,

used as a breeding ground for the Novistadors and storage area.
A bizarre elevator at the caverns' end takes Leon up to a set of
ruins. Ada's left a note for Leon pinned to the door of a small
cabin. She's learned that drugs can neutralize a Plaga before it
hatches; otherwise, it can be removed from its host via risky
surgery. She cautions Leon that Ashley was injected well before
he was, and her time is running out.

As Leon ascends to ground level, it becomes obvious that the ruins

used to be a large village or town. What hasn't been burned down
looks like it was blown up. One of the destroyed buildings has a
gate in its floor, leading down into an ancient set of catacombs.
These, too, are being excavated by Ganados, leading to Leon fighting
off most of the mining crew over the course of a hell-for-leather
cart ride. At its end, he claims the key he needs to get back into
the castle.

Inside, Leon finds himself at the feet of a giant clockwork statue

of Salazar, operated by a squad of Illuminados. As he tries to leave,
the statue comes after him, smashing the castle as it goes. Leon stays
one step ahead of it, and leaps to safety as the statue destroys the
bridge outside.

Inside the tower, Salazar sardonically applauds, and

congratulates Leon on being alive to join them. Salazar
reaches for another lever, to catch Leon in yet another
trap, but Leon pins Salazar's hand to the wall with his
knife. Salazar screams like a girl and runs for safety,
with Leon close behind.

Their final showdown comes at the top of the tower.

Here is apparently where Las Plagas are bred; a
massive broodqueen drops the parasites by the dozen,
while Salazar looks on. When Leon runs into the room,
Ashley's nowhere to be found; as Salazar tells him,
sneering, they've just taken her to a nearby island.
He just missed her.
Meanwhile, Salazar has one last trick up his sleeve. The
broodqueen's tendrils envelop and draw him into it,
mutating them into a new form before Leon's eyes. This
new creature is built around a core that's still
recognizably Salazar, and lashes out at Leon with
its head and tendrils.

Leon dodges its attacks and blasts at its head. When a

lucky shot strikes home, the creature roars, and Salazar
is left vulnerable. Leon takes the opportunity to put half
a dozen .45 slugs into Salazar's chest. With its guiding
intelligence dead, the rest of the creature quickly follows.

Leon quickly climbs back down to the base of the

tower, where he finds one last motorboat parked at
the docks. Ada Wong is behind the wheel, and offers
him a ride. Leon hesitantly agrees.

Ada and Leon drive to the island in silence, Leon

pensive, Ada smiling enigmatically. As they reach
the coastline, Ada stands up and fires a grappling
hook up to the cliff face. She claims she has some
business to take care of, and bails out of the boat.
Leon's left to bring it back under control and dock
it; as he does, Saddler calls him on the radio. He
and Leon exchange barbs before Saddler signs off.

The island facility is heavily guarded by a new

breed of Ganados, dressed in fatigues and armor,
and wielding a generally higher quality of weapons.
One even attacks Leon with a Gatling gun.
Fortunately, despite their fortifications and
weaponry, Ganados don't really work well as a
group. That and some fast thinking are all that
keeps Leon alive as he mounts his assault on the
facility. He manages to stay a few steps behind
Ashley's captors, but the heavy resistance slows
him down.

Leon blasts his way into the island's lab complex

via its kitchens. In the facility's security room,
a closed-circuit camera feed shows a cell elsewhere
in the building. Ashley is being held prisoner
inside by a pair of Ganados. They turn off the
camera, but they're too late: now Leon knows
where Ashley is.

As he gets closer to that area, the opposition

begins to thin out. Leon enters a much quieter,
dimly lit part of the facility, where very few
Ganados remain to oppose him. He's forced to
search the area for a keycard before he can get
any further.

One room is a crude operating theater. Leon finds

the keycard he needs on the body of a dead doctor,
apparently killed in the middle of implanting a
Plaga into an unwilling host, and another of Luis's
notes. This one is about a creature called a
"Regenerator," one of Saddler's experimental
bioweapons. As Leon tries to leave the room, he
gets to see one up close. It's a slow, grey-skinned
humanoid, and when it's shot, it heals almost
instantly. Leon is forced to run.

His new keycard opens the walk-in freezer, which

the Ganados have been using for storage purposes.
Inside, he finds several frozen corpses, both
human and Plagas; a keycard rewriter; and an
infrared rifle scope. Using the latter, he's
able to target the leechlike Plagas that live
inside Regenerators and destroy them, thus
killing the Regenerator. After rewriting the
keycard, Leon sets out for the waste disposal
facility, and Ashley's cell.

It is, of course, locked when Leon gets there.

He goes a bit further into the facility, alone,
to find its key. Neglected corridors give way
to a clean, well-used state-of-the-art research
laboratory, complete with a watchdog: a mutated
Regenerator bristling with spikes. It's also got
the keycard to Ashley's cell, forcing Leon to
destroy it. Thus equipped, he returns to the
storeroom and sets her free.

A paper airplane marked with a lipstick kiss

sails in through the storeroom window. It's a
note from Ada, suggesting that they escape via
the waste disposal ducts. Leon takes her advice,
and with an unwilling Ashley in tow, leaps down
the disposal shaft.

The Ganados catch up to them quickly, starting

a running fight that ends when Leon and Ashley
commandeer a bulldozer. The Ganados' attempt to
destroy the 'dozer with a truck is foiled when
Leon puts a .45 slug into the truck's engine
block, which forces both the truck and the
bulldozer into a fiery crash. Leon and Ashley,
luckily, are separated from their pursuers by
a wall of rubble.

They've crashed into the heart of Saddler's

research complex, a blend of the castle's Old
World architecture with high-tech defenses.
Saddler himself is waiting for them, and with
contemptuous ease, demonstrates the control of
which the late Ramon Salazar spoke; he halts
Leon's attack with a word, and compels Ashley
to follow him deeper into the complex. Leon
barely has enough presence of mind to attach
a bug to Ashley before he passes out. When he
comes to, he's alone.

Elsewhere in the complex, Krauser toys with a

knife and asks Ada how Leon's doing. Ada's
response: "He's not making it easy." Krauser
continues the conversation by noting that
Saddler's wise to their little game, and has
the sample. Further, he says, neither he nor
Wesker trust Ada. If she tries anything "fancy,"
he'll kill her. Ada, unimpressed, leaves.

Leon continues to brutalize Ganados as he pursues

Saddler. As he enters the boiler room, some gut
instinct makes him stop and draw his knife.
Suddenly, Krauser leaps at him from the ceiling,
blade extended, and Leon barely parries in time.

Krauser greets Leon, who recognizes him from two

years ago, when Krauser supposedly died in a crash.
Leon makes an intuitive leap: Krauser must have been
the "insider" who kidnapped Ashley. Krauser congratulates
him for catching on so fast.

As they fight, Krauser lays out his plan. He kidnapped

Ashley to buy Saddler's trust, which would let Krauser
get close enough to steal the unique Plagas sample.
Further, he's done all of this for the sake of Umbrella.
Krauser feels very comfortable telling Leon this, as he's
winning; Leon's only saved by Ada's intervention. She
shoots Krauser's knife out of his hand just as he's about
to drive it into Leon's chest.

Krauser makes a tactical withdrawal by leaping about

thirty feet straight up from a standing start. Shortly
thereafter, without admitting to much, Ada leaves as well.
Leon picks up Krauser's knife and receives a call from
Saddler, who promises to introduce him to... "it."

Krauser was guarding Saddler's throne room. Leon evades a

series of laser barriers, and uses a lift behind the throne
to descend deeper, into another set of caverns that the
Illuminados are using for storage. Here, atop a stack of
crates, he finds another of Luis's notes on Las Plagas.

Luis's studies showed him that Las Plagas were

a sort of collective intelligence, regardless of
the species of a given Plaga's host. Therefore,
they could quickly form communities upon infection.
Luis concluded that he let his fascination with
Las Plagas blind him to what Saddler had planned,
and thus he felt that he shared the responsibility
for Saddler's crimes. He knew he had to do something,
but he didn't think he could do it alone.

Leon pockets the file and keeps going, to a vast

chasm bridged by a trio of shipping containers.
In a puddle near the shipping crane's control
booth, he finds the bug he attached to Ashley.
Shortly thereafter, something enormous and
vaguely serpentine crashes through the wall
behind him; Leon rolls with the impact, and
falls into one of the shipping containers. This
is "it": a bizarre and resilient cross between
a human and a snake.
A frantic game of cat-and-mouse ensues. Leon stays out
of "its" grasp long enough to hit the emergency release
switches on each shipping container. Each time, it falls;
each time, "it" leaps to safety at the last moment. Leon
hits the last switch and runs for safety, grabbing into
the crane's hook as the last container plummets into the
chasm, taking "it" with it.

"It" can also cling to walls, and comes storming

up after Leon. Without having to worry about the
emergency system, Leon's free to unload into its
face. After a dozen Magnum slugs, "it" falls to
the ground and crumbles into nothing.

A nearby ladder leads back up and outside, to where

the mercenary Ganados have set up camp. Leon uses a
mineshaft as a shortcut, and winds up at another
ruined city street. This one is mostly built out of
sandstone, and provides a handy spot for Krauser
to ambush him.

Ashley's been taken beyond a gate at the end of

the street, which is currently locked with three
insignia. Krauser's carrying one of them, and has
placed the other two throughout the area. If Leon
wants to go further, it'll be over his dead body.
The problem is that Krauser is now clearly more
than human, moving so fast that he blurs and
appearing from nowhere to attack with his knife.

When Leon reaches the roof and claims the second

insignia, Krauser returns for a final showdown.
Triumphantly, he throws his gun away and holds up
his left arm, which elongates into a glowing claw.
He knocks Leon off the roof. While Leon's hanging
off the edge, he sees that Krauser's placed charges
around the tower they're standing on top of. Leon
has three minutes to beat Krauser before the whole
street explodes.

Krauser's new claw is bulletproof, and he takes

full advantage of that. It does not, however,
protect his knees. Leon blasts Krauser's legs out
from under him repeatedly, punishing Krauser when
he falls. Finally, Leon's assault wears down
Krauser's resistance; Krauser's heart explodes
out of his chest, and he falls lifelessly to the
rooftop. Leon grabs the insignia and escapes.

What Krauser failed to mention is that the gate

also leads to the Ganados' last lines of defense,
a fortified encampment protected by dozens of
armed guards. Leon thinks he's in trouble for a
second, until a searchlight washes across the area;
Hunnigan's second chopper has finally arrived.
Leon produces an earpiece from his belt and gets
in touch with its pilot, Mike, who's happy to even
the odds. He begins by knocking over a nearby water
tower, and follows up by raking the assembled Ganados
with a hail of bullets.

Leon heads through the fortifications on foot,

shooting anyone who gets in his way while Mike takes
on the Ganados' mounted guns. As they reach the other
side of the ruins, Mike takes out the remainder of the
Ganados' forces in the area, shredding them with
chaingun fire. Leon thanks Mike, just before a
surviving Ganado blows Mike out of the sky with a
rocket launcher. Leon sees Saddler disappearing into
the ruins with the Ganado, and swears that Saddler
will pay for Mike's death.

Ada catches up to Leon shortly thereafter, just as

Luis's drugs start to wear off. For a moment, Saddler's
control exerts itself, and Leon grabs Ada by the throat.
Leon smiles coldly as he chokes her. Ada draws a slim
switchblade from a sheath on her leg and slams it into
Leon's thigh, breaking Saddler's control. Leon swallows
another of Luis's pills and apologizes. Ada says that
they have to get the parasite out of his body, but Leon's
not willing to do it until he finds Ashley. Ada, slightly
frustrated, agrees to his terms, and suggests that they
split up. Without waiting for Leon's answer, she leaves
the room.

Saddler's main laboratory is built within an old prison

that's fallen into disrepair. Leon dispatches the Iron
Maidens that prowl its cellblock, then takes on the last
few guards. Finally, in the center of the building, Leon
finally finds Ashley, sealed within a womblike device of
unknown purpose. As he runs into the room, Saddler steps
behind Leon and comments on his audacity. Leon prepares
for a fight, but before he can react, Saddler moves
forward with amazing speed and punches Leon squarely
in the chest. Leon's thrown backward, stunned.

Saddler prepares for the final blow, but is interrupted

by a stream of bullets. Ada, standing on a catwalk above
the laboratory, empties a submachinegun into Saddler, who
staggers back. This gives Leon the chance he needs to free
Ashley, but doesn't actually hurt Saddler; before their
eyes, his body rejects the 9mm slugs. They slide through
his veins and bloodlessly fall from his fingertips.

Leon grabs Ashley and makes a break for the nearest door.
Ada covers them by blowing up a nearby stack of fuel drums,
preventing Saddler from following Leon and Ashley, but
trapping her in the room with Saddler.

Their newest escape route leads Leon and Ashley down into
a newer laboratory, where Luis's last memo is lying by the
side of the path. It turns out that part of his research
was to find a way to safely remove Las Plagas, but Saddler
was using his work to make Las Plagas nearly incurable.

Luis's lab is nearby, complete with a machine he designed

to destroy Las Plagas. Without hesitation, Leon straps himself
into the device and has Ashley operate on him.

The device probes Leon's sternum with powerful, visible beams

of radiation. As Leon writhes in pain, the radiation vaporizes
the Plaga attached to his spine, without doing any immediately
apparent, lasting harm to Leon. Encouraged, Ashley also submits
to the operation.

Leon says it's time that they went home. They head
upstairs, out of Luis's lab, and wind up at the base
of a construction platform. Suddenly, the entire island's
gone ominously silent. Leon, suspecting a trap, has Ashley
stay behind while he boards a personnel elevator.

====================================================
12ii. A Summary of the Conclusion of RESIDENT EVIL 4
====================================================

The lift leads to a construction site. The first thing

Leon sees is Ada, unconscious and dangling from a rope.
Saddler laughs and chides Leon for being too American
to believe he'll lose.

Leon throws Krauser's knife, cutting Ada's rope and

dropping her to the ground. As she runs for cover,
Saddler promises to thrash the cliches out of Leon,
and begins to mutate into a new and terrifying form:
half spider, half scorpion, all giant multiclawed
killing machine.

Its only weak points are its eyes, which bulge out
from its limbs and from Saddler's grotesquely mutated
face. Leon opens up on it with every weapon in his
arsenal, stabbing at Saddler's eyes whenever he
has the chance, and uses some of the abandoned
construction equipment to his advantage.

Finally, Ada tosses a rocket launcher to Leon; some

things never change. Leon grabs it and fires, wiping
Osmund Saddler from the face of the planet. Luis Sera's
sample of Las Plagas falls from Saddler's dead hand.

Leon picks up the sample, and immediately, he feels

the barrel of Ada's pistol against his head. She
smiles, and demands the sample. Leon gives it to her.
Ada takes it, then dives off the edge of the platform.

Naturally, she comes right back up, seated comfortably

inside an escape helicopter. She tosses Leon a keychain,
then presses a button on a pocket computer. A three-minute
countdown starts.

Leon runs back to the elevator. At its bottom, he

grabs Ashley and runs for the nearest tunnel, which
links up to a sea cove with a parked jetski.

With ninety seconds to go, Leon revs the motor and

heads for daylight. Halfway down the river, a
series of explosions levels the island, and the
cavern begins to collapse. As rubble rains from
the ceiling and a tidal wave chases them down the
river, Leon and Ashley barely escape the tunnel
before it collapses.

As they move away from the crumbling ruin of Saddler's

island, Ashley, smiling, offers Leon some "overtime."
Leon quietly refuses, and guides his jetski back towards
the mainland. All he wants to do, he says, is get her
back home.

=====================
12iii. ASSIGNMENT ADA
=====================

Known as "Ada the Spy" in the Japanese version, A:A is a

short unlockable scenario that's made available when the
player completes the main game. It is what happens when
Ada Wong stops being subtle.

In the coves of the island, Ada Wong receives a radio

transmission. The voice on the other end of the line,
Wesker, asks if there's a problem; Ada tells him that
Saddler "knows." Wesker orders her to complete the mission
as planned, and lets her know that an extraction helicopter
is on its way.

Her mission is to find five samples of Las Plagas, which

are scattered throughout the island's research facility.

Ada mounts a one-woman assault on the Ganados' island

complex, shooting it out with the survivors of Leon's
attack. He's left all the doors open and dealt with the
more powerful mutations, such as the Regenerators, so
all Ada has to do is dispatch the stragglers. A couple
of Ganados with chainguns make that difficult, but Ada
wins through.

Four of the five Plagas samples are exactly where Ada's

intel said they were. The fifth is missing.

As Ada runs across the walkway towards the facility's

radio tower, Jack Krauser suddenly appears behind her,
already mutated into his powerful combat form. Ada
manages to stay one step ahead of him.

Finally, Krauser's had enough punishment, and drops a

flash grenade. When Ada's eyes clear, Krauser's gone,
but he's dropped the final Plagas sample. She takes it,
rides the lift up to the radio tower, and calls for evac.

Seated safely in her helicopter, Ada seals the Plagas

samples in a suitcase. A screen unfolds from the ceiling
and displays Wesker, who congratulates Ada on her punctuality.
He asks about Krauser; Ada says that he's dead. Wesker
doesn't seem surprised, as Krauser was "an expendable grunt."
Ada, on the other hand, is praised for her service, and for
bringing Wesker's plans a bit closer to fruition. She smiles.
Wesker says that Umbrella will soon return, and it will
change their world. He breaks into maniacal laughter.

===================
12iv. SEPARATE WAYS
===================

First introduced in the PlayStation 2 port of RE4, Separate

Ways is a second, shorter campaign. Like A:A, it's unlocked by
clearing the main game on Normal difficulty.

In RE4's plot, there are no coincidences. Most of the plot all

comes back down to one person: Ada. From the moment Leon gets
out of the police car outside the village, Ada is working to
make sure that his mission succeeds and, despite Krauser and
Wesker's plots, that he survives.

Each of Separate Ways's five chapters is set during a particular

point in RE4's main plot, shown from Ada's point of view. With
her grappling hook, the player can access new areas and see the
same events from a new perspective.

=====================================================
12v. SEPARATE WAYS, Chapter One: Ring the Church Bell
=====================================================

The only reason Ada's taken on this mission is to get closer

to her main objective. It's not her style to hide in the shadows,
though; she notes that she'll have to reveal herself to Leon
and offer advice every once in a while.

Just before Leon enters the Ganados' village, Ada infiltrates

it herself. She knocks out a couple of Ganados who notice her
arrival, then accepts a call from Wesker.

Wesker is watching the village via satellite. He reminds Ada of

the specifics of her mission; she's to rendezvous with the scientist
they planted among Los Illuminados and acquire a master Plaga sample.
He further advises her that if the natives are getting restless,
ringing the church bell should quiet them down.

Ada hangs up on Wesker just before Leon enters the village and
starts a fight with the Ganados. Ada joins the battle on Leon's
side, although she never lets him see her. Ada dispatches a few
of the Ganados on her own before finding the key to the large
metal door.

The Ganados continue to hinder Ada as she moves through the

underground passage to the churchyard. When she reaches the
church itself, Ada must solve the sundial puzzle behind it to
claim the strangely-shaped key to the front door, then use
a catseye gem to defuse a pressure plate within the sundial.

Inside the church, Ada takes out a few extra villagers and uses
a console to ring its automated bell. At the same time, she
inadvertently closes the portcullises around the room where
Ashley is being kept.

After she escapes the church, Ada records a report on what

little she knows of Las Plagas and Los Illuminados. The cult's
somehow resurrected the Plagas, parasitic organisms which seem
to communicate via a unique frequency of sound waves, much in
the same way that dog whistles work. These hypotheses have been
developed after study of a tissue sample Ada's organization
retrieved at some point; Ada notes that she's seen several
cultists carrying ceremonial rods, and wonders if the rods
emit the sounds that control Las Plagas. Ada also notes that
the Salazar family is able to control Las Plagas, although
she doesn't say how.

Ada's organization needs samples of Las Plagas to prove or

disprove their theories, and Saddler's "occult activities"
were considered worthy of investigation. Ada's also here to
prove her loyalty to them.

"The opening moves in this chess game have been played. There's
no turning back now."

=============================================
12vi. SEPARATE WAYS, Chapter Two: Rescue Luis
=============================================

As Ada's reading a book in Mendez's bedroom, Wesker contacts

her via her PDA. He informs her that their double agent, Luis,
is being held captive nearby. Ada must stop what she's doing
and rescue him.

Ada rushes to the burned-out house where Luis is imprisoned,

but arrives just in time to watch the Ganados carrying Leon
and Luis, both unconscious, out the door. Ada watches them go,
and resolves to follow them.

She pursues the Ganados back through the village to Mendez's

house, where she arrives just in time to prevent Mendez from
killing Leon. That comes at a price, though; Ada winds up in
a confrontation with a squad of armed Ganados. One of them
gets the drop on her with a tranquilizer rifle, and Ada is
knocked out.

Ada wakes up some time later lying on the bloody altar in

the tunnels just outside Salazar's castle. She barely avoids
being the Ganados' next sacrifice.

After activating the ski lift, Ada rides it up to the castle's

gate. Using her grapple gun, she enters the pen where one of
the Gigantes is lurking in ambush. Defeating it, Ada reaches
the clearing outside the cabin, just as Leon and Luis repulse
the Ganados' siege. As Luis leaves, Ada is waiting for him.

She rebuffs his attempts to flirt with her and asks Luis
where the sample is. He says he's just about to go and get it,
then asks where she stands on "all of this." Ada tells Luis
that there are some things he's better off not knowing, and
who she works for is one of them. Luis shrugs and leaves,
saying that he doesn't care who she is, as long as she gets
rid of Saddler and his "religious friends."

Shortly thereafter, Ada records a report on Luis. She muses

that Luis has the least entanglements of any player in the
current scenario; he's a "brilliant scientist," and he has an
enthusiasm she once shared. Ada likes him.

She first became aware of Luis's importance when she intercepted

an e-mail that he sent to a friend from college pleading for
help; that friend had since died. Luis didn't think he could
trust the police, but when Ada revealed herself to him, he
begged her to take him into custody. Instead, Ada ordered
him to secure a master Plaga sample for her, as evidence.
Fortunately, Saddler trusted Luis once... but now Luis's
"snooping" has made Saddler suspicious.

========================================================
12vii. SEPARATE WAYS, Chapter Three: Retrieve the Sample
========================================================

Ada detonates her sunglasses and uses the distraction to escape

from Leon. She easily loses him in the hedge maze, but then she
gets another call from Wesker.

Wesker informs her that Luis has successfully recovered the

Plagas sample. In addition, if Ada encounters Leon, she's to
take him out; Wesker reasons that they don't need the distraction.
Ada notes that Leon doesn't really know what's going on, and as
such, is harmless. Wesker retorts that Leon's a survivor of
Raccoon City, and repeats himself: "Take him out." Ada appears
genuinely distressed by the order.

Despite the sudden arrival of a squad of Illuminados, Ada finds

her way back out of the hedge maze and through an ambush in the
castle's dining hall. She catches up to Leon at one point as he's
dispatching a squad of Illuminados, but to her obvious regret, Ada
realizes she can't be seen with him.

Ada enters the hall where Ashley's being held, a few steps ahead
of Leon. She's hiding nearby when Saddler kills Luis, but her
cover's nearly blown when Wesker contacts her. As Leon grieves
over Luis's dead body, Ada tells Wesker that Luis has just been
killed, she hasn't been able to claim the sample, and she hasn't
yet had the chance to eliminate Leon. Wesker receives the news
without visibly reacting, aside from tapping his fingers on his
armrest, and says that they might be able to capitalize on the
distraction that Leon represents. Ada, who's been doing that all
along, makes a mild sound of agreement.

Her next report concerns Jack Krauser, who Ada has to admit is
one of the best soldiers she's ever met. He is just a soldier,
though, and if he presents any serious problems, Ada's confident
she can deal with him; she's studied his combat style and knows
she can handle "that arm of his."

Krauser takes his orders directly from Wesker, but Wesker also
sent Ada along; she wonders if it wasn't so she could keep an eye
on Krauser. She wouldn't be surprised if he's already fallen prey
to the temptations of Las Plagas, but it doesn't matter. Krauser's
role in the play is that of a patsy, the one who takes the blame
when everything comes crashing down. Ada notes that everything
must continue exactly as it has been up until now.
==============================================================
12viii. SEPARATE WAYS, Chapter Four: Stop Leon's Assassination
==============================================================

Krauser and Ada have their meeting atop the radio tower on
the island. As Ada leaves the room, she receives another call
from Wesker. Wesker informs her that Leon's made "quite a
jolly mess," and the Ganados have fallen into a panic. Ada
notes that once Leon's found Ashley, his job is over and he'll
just leave without a fight; Wesker says calmly that he's already
told Krauser to kill Leon, then breaks the transmission. Ada
says out loud, even though Wesker can't hear her, that he's
forgotten she doesn't always play by Wesker's rules. She
breaks into a run.

A short time later, Ada's found her way into the shipping
lane Leon and Ashley used to escape from the waste disposal
facility. It's half-wrecked and burning, but it's still
mostly clear, and it's an easy trail to follow.

Ada blasts her way through the Ganados in the area, and takes
a side passage into a previously-undiscovered underground
harbor. Saddler's ambitions apparently extended even further
than anyone thought; he's not only acquired a battleship
somehow, but he's recommissioned it. Ada finds this out the
hard way, when Ganados use the battleship's turrets to open
fire on her.

She returns fire with the harbor's own mounted defense guns,
fighting a running battle throughout the dock and onto the
deck of the battleship itself. Her final salvo, delivered
with the help of an anti-aircraft gun, hits the battleship's
magazine. Ada barely makes it to safety before the ship sinks.

Ada continues battling through the processing center, past

the wrecked trucks that tried to stop Leon and Ashley's
bulldozer run, and eventually kicks her way into the area
where the bulldozer crashed. She enters the warehouse just
in time to shoot Krauser's knife out of his hand.

The next report Ada files is about Leon, and his "formidable
survival skills." She speaks at length about his good qualities:
she says he's "practically a genius," and that he "has smarts
and knows how to use them." He's the most important part of Ada's
plan, but he wasn't a part of it at all until a couple of months
ago. Ashley's kidnapping forced Ada to rapidly adapt to Leon's
presence, but she has faith in him. His consistent luck and his
ability to survive despite overwhelming odds both have Ada
convinced that everything will go exactly as she's planned.

====================================================
12ix. SEPARATE WAYS, Chapter Five: Obtain the Sample
====================================================

Ada, occupied with other matters, reaches the dirt road past
Krauser's ambush site just as Mike the helicopter pilot arrives.
She fields another call from Wesker, who orders her to take on
whoever proves to be the victor in the final battle between Leon
and Saddler. Ada, almost wistfully, notes that it's not as easy
as it sounds, but Wesker is strangely insistent that neither
Saddler nor Leon live to see tomorrow.

Leon and Mike have nearly obliterated the Ganados' defenses, but
Ada still encounters resistance as she follows Leon. She takes out
the last few mercenary Ganados in the area and catches up to Leon
just in time to nearly die at his hands. After their brief
conversation, Ada runs ahead.

She disposes of the token Ganado resistance in the old cellblock,

but as Ada reaches the prison yard, a thrown girder nearly takes
her head off. She looks up to the watchtower's roof to see a
bloodied and burned Jack Krauser, half-dead and still wearing his
monstrous form. With a small smile, Ada pulls out her grapple gun
and hurls herself onto the tower's roof. As she's just reported
Krauser's death, Ada tells him, his suddenly turning up alive
would mean she'd have to fill out far too much paperwork.

While Ada fights Krauser on the rooftops of the prison yard, Leon
can be heard dispatching the guards below. Krauser's lost little
of his sheer power, and he's chosen the battlefield very well; the
narrow confines of the towers' rooftops work in his favor. Ada's
come too far to lose now, though, and Krauser's wounds have weakened
him. She leaves him in a bloody heap.

Ada rappels onto the side of Saddler's laboratory and crawls

inside via a ventilation shaft. She winds up on the catwalk
above Saddler's lab just as Saddler punches Leon across the
room. Ada takes Saddler on with her TMP, giving Leon the crucial
moment he needs to escape the laboratory with Ashley. At the
same time, though, Ada winds up trapped inside the laboratory
with Saddler.

If anything, Saddler's far more dangerous as a simple human.

He attacks Ada with the tentacles that killed Luis Sera, as well
as a devastating chokeslam that takes advantage of his unbelievable
speed. He's able to absorb any bullets she fires at him, then eject
them from his outstretched hand fast enough to cause injuries. Ada
bombards him with grenades and explosive crossbow bolts, occasionally
getting close enough to stab Saddler in the eye that emerges from
his mouth.

At the end of the fight, Saddler falls face-first to the floor,

seemingly dead, and Ada finally claims the sample. She doesn't
notice Saddler's tentacle moving of its own volition, though,
and it knocks her unconscious.

When she comes to, Saddler's strung her up on the construction

site, and Leon's caught up with them both. Once he frees her,
Leon moves to engage Saddler while Ada rappels up onto the catwalks
above the construction site. Ada notices a rocket launcher lying
on the other side of the building, but she also notices a series of
demolition charges that a squad of angry Ganados have planted
throughout the construction site. A two-minute timer starts.

Ada frantically races for the rocket launcher, reaching it with

a few seconds left to go, and tosses it to Leon at the crucial
moment. He fires, wiping Osmund Saddler off the planet, and Ada
is finally able to accomplish her mission.

As Ada flies away in her escape helicopter, she writes her final
report. As requested by her organization, she's acquired the
sample, but she's given Wesker something else entirely. She
was only pretending to work for him all along.

To Wesker, Ada notes, Umbrella represented sanctuary; he could

hide behind it while he made his own plans. There are those in
power who need something like Umbrella to hide their own deceit.
Wesker will stop at nothing to recreate Umbrella, for himself as
well as these unnamed others.

Wesker's been in contact with another pharmaceutical corporation,

which "maintains medical and drug facilities the world over." Ada
doesn't doubt that he'll next turn up in conjunction with them.
The organization, she thinks, must remain vigilant.

=====================================
12x. Conclusions about the Conclusion
=====================================

1. Leon S. Kennedy, Ashley Graham, and Ada Wong have survived.

2. Leon is no longer carrying a Plaga inside his body. Ashley,

however, may be. (See Random Commentary, below.)

3. Luis Sera, Ramon Salazar, Osmund Saddler, Bitores Mendez,

Mike the helicopter pilot, and most if not all of the Ganados
and Illuminados are all dead.

4. Jack Krauser may or may not be dead. He was killed twice,

but the first one looked pretty final and it didn't take.

5. Ada has delivered several samples of Las Plagas to Wesker,

but did not give him the special parasite meant for Ashley Graham.

6. Wesker is planning to bring back the Umbrella corporation,

and to use it to change the world. Umbrella and those who work
for it are involved in some kind of deeply covert war.

7. Wesker does *not* have a sample of a master Plaga. He

may think he does, but Ada's given him something else in
its place. (This plays into the Plaga mk. 2 and 3 in RE5.)

8. Ada Wong is still human. (In other words, it would appear

that she did not, as occasionally theorized, use any viral
methods of survival at the end of RE2. Ada exhibits no
superhuman abilities at any time during RE4.)

9. Ada Wong is a double agent, working for an undisclosed

organization that appears to be opposed to Wesker and his
unnamed backers. She was only pretending to work with Wesker,
but she may have blown her cover by helping Leon.

10. Leon is currently employed as a member of the U.S.

Secret Service.

=======================
12xi. Random Commentary
=======================

1. When Leon shows the photo of Ashley to the Ganado in

the first cabin, he snarls something in Spanish. A rough
translation is, "What the f--k are you doing here? Get
out of here, a-----e!"

2. Other translations:
"Cojelo!" = "Get him!"
"Muerete..." = "Die..."
"Morir es vivir..." = "To die is to live..."
"Ganados" = cattle, livestock
"M�telo!" = "Kill him!"
"Cabron!" = a general-purpose vulgar insult

3. Unless Saddler's death finished off the remaining Ganados

somehow, you have to figure there are a few survivors of Los
Illuminados. Leon couldn't've gotten them all.

4. While RE4's introduction makes Umbrella's demise sound

like a quiet, civilized process, RE5 and RE:UC make it clear
that it was anything but. To the average man on the street in
the RE universe, though, Umbrella was dismantled after a
five-year-long court battle.

5. I wonder if Las Plagas infection weakens the human

skull. Ganados' heads seem to pop or deflate given the
slightest provocation.

6. Many readers have written in to note that in 5-4, Luis's

device gives a different readout for Ashley than it does for
Leon. Ashley may very well still be hosting a Plaga. However,
this may have been an error in the GameCube version; in the
PS2 version, Ashley's readout is simply not shown.

7. Cinematic references in RE4:

-- that damn laser corridor is all Paul Anderson's fault.
-- there's a deer head mounted on a wall in the art gallery,
complete with a gem hidden in its eye. This dates back
to the original Resident Evil, where it was a shout-out
to the creepy deer head mounted on the wall in the 1990
remake of _Night of the Living Dead_.
-- the initial village area reminds me of, as I've said
before, Lucio Fulci films, with the random grossouts,
rural environment, and occasionally shocking gore.
-- the Illuminados' design is similar to characters in an
old German movie called _Mephisto_.
-- Duncan Brown notes that the unlockable Mathilda
handgun is not only Leon's old custom handgun from
RE2, but it's named after Natalie Portman's character
in _The Professional_ (who was, of course, a young
girl being protected by a man named Leon).
-- Another note from Duncan Brown: the Plagas are
vaguely reminiscent of the parasites from the X-Files
episode "Darkness Falls."
-- Franck Grasset writes in to note Salazar may be named
after Miguel Salazar from _Day of the Dead_. (Either
that, or after that guy on "24.")
 -- Ada's pose on the title screen of Separate Ways is,
as observed on Wikipedia, a homage to the film poster
for _La Femme Nikita_.

8. Differences between the GameCube and PS2 versions:

-- When Leon and Krauser are speaking during your final
fight with him, Krauser's answer to Leon's second response
has changed. Before, it was "I see you've honed your
skills." Now, it's "Hmph! Umbrella."
-- The cage ambush in the dining room has a short intro scene
now, featuring the prisoner leaping down into the cage from
above you.
-- All cutscenes are now cinematics, as opposed to being
rendered with the game's engine. Thus, any changes you've
made to an area or to Leon won't carry over to the movies;
Leon will always be unarmored and in his default costume,
and parts of a room that you've just smashed will be whole
and intact during a movie.
-- As above, the scene where Ashley's Plaga is removed is no
longer shown.

===================================================================
13. RESIDENT EVIL: OUTBREAK - FILE #2
===================================================================

The original Outbreak sold quite well on the strength of the RE name,
but by the time File #2 came out, word of mouth had caught up to it.

File #2 was a substantial improvement to the original game, featuring

a number of mechanical improvements like new character bonuses, the
ability to walk with a weapon readied, and auto-aim, but its sales
were so poor that it killed off plans to release a #3 and #4.

Like the original game, RE:O2 is five unconnected short scenarios set
in and around Raccoon City in the week of the outbreak, starring eight
ordinary people caught in the middle.

==============================
13i. Scenario One: Wild Things
==============================

The Raccoon Zoo is the site of a massacre, with many of its animals
lying dead outside their cages. Zombies feast on the corpses, but some
of the animals have caught the virus themselves. One of them, an elephant,
strikes out at the zombies in a rage.

Near the zoo's back entrance, Cindy Lennox finds a note posted on a
bulletin board, left by the Raccoon City police. They've set up an
extraction point in the trainyard near the Raccoon Zoo's front gate.
If the survivors cut through the zoo, they should make it to the
trainyard with time to spare. Cindy says aloud that she has a bad
feeling about this, but they really should check it out.

The zoo's Elephant Restaurant is nearby, although inhabited by several

zombies. The survivors find a chain cutter in the restaurant's back room,
and use it to take the padlock off the zoo's back gate.

For a moment, the zoo looks almost peaceful, but then the elephant comes
out of nowhere and attacks. Its charge destroys the zoo's back gate, and
the survivors are forced to escape into the zoo. The elephant continues
to pursue them through the concourse, along with infected hyenas, tropical
birds, insects, and even some of the plant life.

Inside the administration building, the survivors find a key. It opens the
door to the elephant's old performance stage, where one of the zookeepers
has left his diary. The elephant's infection has clearly been progressing
for some time, and he's developed a violent reaction to the parade music
that accompanied his show. More importantly, however, the survivors also
find documentation about the zoo's new security measures. To open the
zoo's front gates and escape, they need to find two lion emblems.

The survivors turn the zoo's power back on, then lure the elephant onto
its stage by playing its hated parade music. When it charges inside,
they shut the gate behind it, trapping it.

After arming themselves from the zookeepers' stash of firearms, the

survivors then proceed through the zoo's attractions, dealing with undead
female lions, crocodiles, and a swarm of giant bees as they ransack the
area. They find the emblems they need and install them, which unlocks
the zoo's front gate just as the zombie elephant escapes its pen.

There's a train parked right outside the zoo, and it even works, which
should provide a quick run to the extraction point. Before they can get
aboard it, however, the zombie elephant crashes through the fence of the
Front Gate Plaza. They're forced to deal with it before it can tip over
the train, shooting it dead with a couple of rounds from the zookeepers'
high-caliber hunting rifle.

Exhausted, the survivors climb onto the train and start it up. Just as
they start to relax, however, the train crashes into something and stops.
Outside its window, they see a burning helicopter, surrounded by the
bodies of policemen and National Guardsmen. The evacuation point has been
wiped out, and their entire ordeal in the Raccoon Zoo was for nothing.

==============================
13ii. Scenario Two: Underbelly
==============================

The streets have been overrun. With no other options, the survivors
dodge a mob of zombies and run into the only shelter they can find:
a subway station, where Jim Chapman used to work.

The station has a few zombie inhabitants, but it's otherwise calm.
A parked train offers an avenue of escape, but there are several
complications. The street above the subway has collapsed, which
blocks the westbound tunnel and crushed all the cars in the train
except for one. It's also dropped enough debris on the tracks to
trigger the automatic shutdown system. The last intact car would
work as an escape route, but to get it going, the survivors must
decouple it and reactivate the subway system.

They venture into the employees' section of the station,

dispatching the undead remnants of its staff, and reactivate
the emergency power supply. Using a valve handle found near the
generator, the survivors drain the pump room and reactivate the
breakers, which also opens the storage closet. Inside that, they
find a roll of vinyl tape, which they use to repair the subway's
fire suppression system.
The survivors return to the subway platform, just in time
to see another train crash into the station. The sprinklers
immediately go off, drenching the survivors and dousing
the resulting flames. As a happy side effect, the survivors
are able to find the last piece they need in the wreckage
of the new train. They install it, which decouples the last
intact subway car from the rest of its train.

They get into the car and hit the switch, but a new enemy has
entered the picture: T-Virus-infected fleas, which swell into
immensity if supplied with enough fresh blood. A larger specimen
suddenly smashes through the window of the subway car, abducting
one of the survivors.

The others go to rescue him. The largest of the fleas is guarded

by a swarm of smaller insects, and it's capable of crushing a
human underneath its bulk. They bring it down with a combination
of conventional weapons and bug spray, salvaged from various
areas around the station. With it dead, the tracks are no longer
blocked, and they're able to use the train car to escape.

Thanks to the fleas, some of the survivors miss their ride.

Using a key found where the subway car used to be, they
return to the generator room and open a passageway into
the subway's ventilation tower. The ladders on its sides
lead the survivors, weary but alive, onto the empty
streets of Raccoon City.

================================
13iii. Scenario Three: Flashback
================================

Several of the survivors, including Alyssa Ashcroft, have

made it out into the Raccoon Forest, using some of the
forest's hiking trails.

They gather in a cabin that belongs to Ed, an old man who

lives in the woods by himself. His cabin is covered with
notes in his illegible handwriting, and decorated with
several photos of him and a woman. The photos are labeled
"Ed & Dorothy."

Ed volunteers to lead the survivors out of the woods to

safety, using an old path that he says leads to the next
town over. He sets off at a brisk pace, but cautions them
to be careful. "It's not like there's a good hospital
around here," he says, and laughs disturbingly.

While it's not as monster-infested as the city, there are

still a few zombies on the back paths through the forest.
These zombies are a bit older than the ones in the city,
and many have bizarre, plantlike roots sticking out of
their bodies. When injured, they emit a cloud of green,
poisonous gas.

Just before the survivors reach an old suspension bridge,

Ed disappears. Alyssa has a sudden flash of memory; near
the suspension bridge, she remembers seeing a wounded man
lying on the ground.

Crossing over, the survivors find the ruins of an old

hospital. If the local plant life is any indication,
it's been abandoned for decades, if not longer. At the
same time, there's an old newspaper in the corner of
the courtyard from September 8th, 1998: earlier this
month. The article speaks of a strange masked figure
that's been mutilating dogs and crows in the Raccoon
Forest, thus causing hysteria among the locals. Alyssa
can remember seeing two cops standing in the hospital's
open gate at some point.

The survivors warily enter the hospital. The inside is

as dilapidated as the outside, but it isn't abandoned.
They're barely more than a few steps inside the building
when a door opens, and a man wearing a black hood comes
after them with an axe. He's shirtless, wearing dress
slacks, and the side of his chest is disfigured by what
looks like some kind of fungal infection. Gunfire seems
to injure him, but it doesn't stop him.

The Axeman continues to pursue the survivors throughout

the building, as do the poisonous zombies. The hospital
is falling apart, only held up by the huge, unnatural
vines that've grown throughout the building. Several
people have come to investigate this growth, including
an ill-fated botanist who's left his notes, and his last
words, in the hospital's locker room. In the hospital's
examination room, an equally unlucky journalist has
written of his intention to "defy the power of money" by
investigating the hospital.

In the hospital's basement, the survivors find a large

tank of a noxious, yellow solvent. The survivors fill
syringes and bottles with it, using it as a weapon against
the plants. This allows them to clear the vines off several
doors, and thus further explore the complex.

During the survivors' investigation, they hear a massive

crash from outside. The rope bridge that let them reach
the hospital has collapsed.

(Those survivors who're caught on the opposite side of

the bridge when it falls are stuck in the forest. The
zombies disappear, replaced by gigantic mutant insects
that leap upon their prey. After reuniting a wounded
survivor with her young daughter, the survivors manage
to find a bridge that will, unfortunately, take them
back to Raccoon City. They've spent a day in the forest,
and accomplished almost nothing.)

It doesn't take long for them to find another way out of

the hospital; a side door in the first-floor storage
room leads back into the forest. When they try to open
it, a large tendril ensnares the doorknob, as though
guided by some malevolent intelligence.

Finally, with the Axeman hot on their heels, the survivors

duck into the administrator's office. A patient record
in the administrator's files tells two disturbing stories.
One is that patients were being admitted to this hospital
as recently as this month, September of 1998. This isn't
the overgrown ruins of a hospital; the hospital's been
ruined by the mutant overgrowth.

The other is the list of the symptoms of a sick woman,

Dorothy Lester. Her disease, while unidentified, is clearly
a slow-acting case of the T-Virus.

Ed has left part of his diary in the administration

office, and another hospital executive who's tormented
by his conscience has hidden a letter of confession
inside a secret room. Reading them, the survivors begin
to understand what's going on in the hospital.

Through a shell corporation, Drugs Incorporated, Umbrella

provided the hospital with untested drugs as a way of
avoiding costly and potentially unsuccessful clinical
trials. Some if not all of these drugs were based on the
T-Virus, to judge by the patient records; at least one
patient was given a fast-acting cancer "cure" that killed
him shortly thereafter.

The data the hospital generated was then used to

construct bioweapons. A colleague of Alyssa's, Kurt, had
come to this hospital to investigate and expose this
practice, but he's since disappeared.

Ed Lester, the hospital's administrator, knew all of this,

but he was motivated to work with Umbrella by his wife's
terminal illness. Having been told that medicine could not
help her, Ed was willing to turn to anyone or anything that
could, including Umbrella. His grief became twisted, and
he allowed Dorothy to be transformed into a blood-drinking,
plant-based bioweapon. He treats this creature as if it
were a reincarnation of his wife, and happily feeds it
whatever prey he manages to catch. Judging by the sheer
number of zombies in the hospital, this likely includes
quite a few refugees.

The survivors realize that if they're to escape the hospital

alive, "Dorothy" has to go. They've seen her roots already,
in the hospital's intensive-care ward, but her body's
protected by a near-impenetrable core. Fortunately, the
survivors' destruction of several of Dorothy's larger
nodules throughout the building has had an effect on her.
When they inject solvent into a third nodule, it further
injures Dorothy and cracks the core. She's now vulnerable.

"Dorothy" is immobile, but she's grown several plants to

defend herself with, such as vines that whip out from the
floor and blood-drinking tendrils in the ceiling. The
survivors fight back with bottles of solvent, an old axe,
and a grenade launcher loaded with flame rounds.

Finally, the plant dies. As it falls to pieces, its core

pops like a cyst, and the withered body of a dead woman
slithers out.

The hospital lets out an ominous rumble. The mutant vines

spread throughout the building were all that was keeping it
standing. With "Dorothy" dead, the heavily damaged hospital
is ready to collapse.

In the ashes of her corpse, one of the survivors finds

another fragment of Ed's diary. He's fed whatever he can
catch to Dorothy, like dogs and cats, and has "graduated"
to hunting humans recently. He's written about luring in
a group of three young hikers the same way he tricked the
survivors, feeding them one at a time to Dorothy. One of
the hikers figured out Ed's plans and attempted to fight
him off with a shotgun, but to Ed's surprise, it didn't
hurt him at all. Living with Dorothy in the virus-rich ruins
of the hospital, Ed's become some kind of mutant himself.

As the survivors race back to the storage room, they

encounter the axeman again. This time, when they try
to drive him off, their attacks actually have a distinct
impact; either the axeman's resilence was somehow linked
with the plant, or his repeated clashes with the survivors
are taking their toll. The axeman drops his weapon and
retreats into the intensive care ward. The survivors let
him go, and escape via the storage room exit.

The axeman peels off his hood; he's Ed, of course. He

cradles Dorothy's withered body in his arms, and promises
her that he'll never leave her side again, right before
the hospital collapses. Both are crushed under debris.

With the hospital destroyed, an ominous and total peace

once again descends upon the Raccoon Forest. There are
no paths that lead further into the woods, and no one's
left to be a guide. The survivors are forced to return
to Raccoon City, and the horror that awaits them there.

====================================
13iv. Scenario Four: Desperate Times
====================================

The RPD has fallen. Their fortifications and traps have

failed, the west wing of the RPD has been overtaken by the
undead, and only a handful of policemen are still alive.

In the RPD's east office, Marvin Branagh goes over an old map
of the building. He points out a ventilation shaft to one of
the surviving officers, a blonde woman named Rita. If they can
figure out how to reopen the shaft, Marvin says, Rita's small
enough that she could use it to escape the building and bring
them help. Rita agrees to the plan.

Some of the survivors are already in the RPD, while others

have just arrived. One of them talks with Marvin and Rita
in the lobby, who're trying to open their planned escape
route. Marvin tells the survivors to help each other out.

One of Brian Irons's less brilliant ideas during the siege

has been the implementation of an automatic defense system
throughout the building, with the exception of the cellblock
and the main hall. At regular intervals, the halls will flood
with a toxic nerve gas.

The gas doesn't disturb the zombies at all, but it aggravates

the survivors' T-Virus infection. They can briefly neutralize
the gas with a counteragent, stored in canisters that are found
throughout the building, but it never lasts long.

One of the survivors happens across a note, which suggests

that the goddess statue in the RPD lobby is a potential
escape route. As they search the building, they find a series
of five plates, each decorated with a gemstone, which fit into
the goddess statue's base in a fleur-de-lis pattern.

When the final plate is placed in the statue, it rises slightly,

revealing a narrow crawlspace. Rita crawls inside, swearing to
Marvin that she'll return with help.

Some time later, Rita radios Marvin to tell him that she's back.
She'll pull a van up outside the RPD's front entrance. All he has
to do is gather the survivors and wait for her.

The survivors follow Marvin out into the courtyard, where he's
attacked by a zombie. Critically injured, Marvin tells the survivors
to gather outside. He goes inside to use the RPD's intercom, while
the survivors ransack the RPD for ammunition and supplies. They find
that all of the police officers besides Marvin have been killed,
either by zombies or by the infected K9 dogs kept in the RPD's kennel.
The survivors and Marvin are now the only living people left inside
the accessible part of the RPD.

With a few minutes to go before Rita returns, the survivors head to

the RPD's courtyard. It's at this time that the RPD's front gate,
weakened by the zombies' constant assault, gives way, and a small
army of the undead spills into the courtyard. The survivors hold off
the siege with every weapon at their disposal, slaying dozens of zombies.

An RPD van backs through the front gate, flattening the last couple of
zombies. Rita opens its back door and helps the survivors climb inside,
but Marvin's not with them. Instead, he's clutching at his wounds and
battling the zombies that made it into the RPD lobby. He tells Rita to
go on without him.

Rita isn't listening, and is prepared to leap out of the van to get
Marvin. Unfortunately, Harry's driving the van, and he has other ideas.
When a zombie gets close to his window, Harry panics and drives away,
leaving Marvin behind.

In the lobby of the RPD, Marvin Branagh, not dead yet, has
managed to dispatch the last of the zombies. Clutching at
his wounds, he staggers into the west office.

The survivors are left with a sobbing Rita in the back of

the van, as it speeds off to some unknown part of the city.
They've managed to live for another day, but they're all
aware of the horrible price that's been paid.
===================================
13v. Scenario Five: End of the Road
===================================

In the wreckage of Raccoon City, a woman in an Umbrella

uniform argues with a man wearing dark gray body armor.
Both stand near a parked heavy-lift helicopter, which has
a large cargo crate chained to it. The woman needs the pilot
to wait for her, while she goes back and gets something "very
important." The pilot reluctantly agrees, and she runs off.
As she leaves, he says aloud that if the choice is between
his life or hers, he's going to be "the first one out the door."

Several blocks away, Umbrella's corporate headquarters in

Raccoon City has weathered the outbreak mostly intact. Blood
sprays across the walls of the lobby as David King beats a
zombie to death with an iron pipe. A scared man in an Umbrella
uniform watches in horror from the floor nearby.

Once he's done, David offers the other man a hand up. The
man thanks David, but the front doors suddenly open. David
almost brains the woman before the man points out that she's
human. She's shocked, but shakes David's hand.

Five minutes later, David, his surviving allies, and the

Umbrella employees are in a waiting room. The man, Carter,
asks the woman, Linda, if she's after "the sample"; apparently,
this refers to the small plastic case he's holding in his
hand. Linda says she is, and suggests to David that he might
want to get moving. She offers to give him and his friends
a lift, since she's got a chopper waiting for her.

Suddenly, alarms go off, and a steel shutter slides down over

one-half of the room. Linda locks herself inside the nearby
examination room, while Carter heads into the hallway beyond.
The survivors follow him and run right into an active Hunter.
Umbrella's BOWs are loose in the building, and have already
killed several of the remaining scientists.

The survivors dispatch the Hunter and search the building.

Most of it's locked down tight, and several areas have
caught on fire. They find a key to the examination room
and return there to find Linda working on a computer
terminal. Her plan is to leave the building via the east
exit using her key, but Carter had some other plan. She's
waiting to see what it was.

Near Linda, the survivors find a file that mentions an

inhibitor agent for the T-Virus, codenamed AT1521, or
simply "AT." An unlocked door leads further into the complex.
After fighting several Hunters, the survivors catch up to
Carter, who's busy at another terminal.

His idea is to fight fire with fire. He'll defrost and

activate a Tyrant bioweapon and set it against the Hunters.
To do that, he's going to need the survivors to decrypt a
MO disk and bring it to him.

When they return with it, Carter unleashes a Mr. X on the

Hunters, and it easily dispatches several of them. Linda
arrives in the room and notes that while she wouldn't've
chosen the Tyrant for this, it'll get the job done. Carter
boasts that the Tyrant will do what he tells it, but in case
it doesn't, he's arranged a special surprise. He holds up a
detonator, and claims that if the Tyrant does anything he
doesn't like, it'll be "ground zombie meat."

Watching the Tyrant kill the Hunters, Carter's boasts take

on a strangely psychotic quality; where the survivors see
a monster, he seems to see an artistic statement. Linda
picks up on Carter's instability, and suggests that they
escape while they can.

Linda uses her keycard to unlock the doors in the east

passage, while the Tyrant dispatches the Hunters that
get in their way. It fights like a pro wrestler, favoring
powerful if clumsy punches and kicks.

When the survivors and Linda reach the east elevator,

Carter's right behind them with the sample. The building's
east exit connects directly to Raccoon's extensive sewer
system, providing a handy escape route.

The arguably inevitable happens immediately. The Tyrant

turns on Carter and Linda, crushing his skull, destroying
the sample, and sending both Linda and the detonator flying
into the darkness below. The survivors grab Carter's keycard
from his corpse and make a run for it.

One of the survivors steals a crowbar from the facility's

"nursery" and uses it to pry off a chunk of the wall.
The hole leads into the lab's sealed special research room,
where Carter's keycard opens a second elevator.

This elevator takes the survivors down into an underground

waterway underneath the city. It's dry, but choked with
garbage and refuse. As they walk along the balcony above
the drainage area, they catch sight of Linda lying on a
pile of garbage down in the waterway. She's unconscious,
but alive.

Due to the garbage that chokes the waterway, the survivors are
forced to take the long way around to get to Linda. En route,
the Tyrant punches through the ceiling and continues its attack.

The survivors barely manage to stay ahead of the Tyrant as they

progress through the waterway, but one of them makes a lucky
find. Somehow, Carter's detonator survived the fall. When used,
it sets off an explosive charge in the Tyrant's neck, and it
crashes lifelessly to the ground.

Shortly thereafter, the survivors reach Linda. When she wakes up,
she explains that the capsule the Tyrant smashed was a possible
cure for the virus that Umbrella's spread throughout the city. She
thinks she can reproduce the sample on her own, but first, they've
got to get out of town.

The waterway floods once again, and Linda is unwittingly swept away
by the current. The survivors find a valve handle in the nearby
debris, and use it to lower an escape ladder. When they climb it,
they emerge onto the blasted streets that used to be the Raccoon Mall.

The Tyrant follows them up. It survived Carter's bomb, but in so doing,
it's mutated. Its torso swells with new muscle, and its hands lengthen
into vicious claws. It's lethal, but it's also now much slower, and
they're able to put it down.

At roughly the same time, several blocks away, Linda limps painfully
towards the side entrance of the Apple Inn. A distant UBCS sniper takes
aim at her and fires, putting a bullet through her leg. Linda screams
in pain, and the sniper realizes that she isn't a zombie. He opts not
to finish her off.

He's promptly accosted by a thin man wearing a business suit. The sniper
is shooting at zombies when he should be trying to find "that capsule."
The sniper ignores him, then receives a radio call. A minefield's been
set down around their position, which'll block off any ground-based
methods of escape. The thin man continues to whine, right up until the
sniper fires a shot over the thin man's shoulder. A zombie drops dead,
the thin man cowers, and the sniper, satisfied with his hundredth kill of
the operation, walks away.

Meanwhile, the survivors have found Rodriguez, who waits impatiently

inside his helicopter. He tells the survivors that if they've run into
Linda, they should bring her to the helicopter. He's not sure how much
longer he can wait.

A pile of papers inside the helicopter sheds some light on Linda and
Rodriguez's situation. The cargo crate next to Rodriguez's helicopter
is an unnamed experiment that's supposed to be transported to an
undisclosed location.

The survivors grab a mine detector off the body of a dead mercenary,
and use it to navigate the UBCS's minefield. They cut through a
burned-out office building to reach the next street over, and as they
do, they overhear a conversation between the sniper and the thin man.
The sniper is furious; someone has declared the situation a "code
double-x" and no one told him. There's a missile strike inbound on
Raccoon City. The thin man protests that he'd told the sniper to hurry.
Disgusted, the sniper drops the thin man and leaves the office. Even
if his mission hasn't been accomplished, the sniper doesn't intend to die
in the explosion.

The survivors find Linda in the Apple Inn's lobby, but she can barely
walk. The survivors help her up and head back to Rodriguez.

They're too late. Rodriguez has already left. As he lifts off, the
thin man emerges onto the roof of the office building, toting a Stinger
missile. Rodriguez sees the thin man just as he fires, and is able to
steer out of the missile's way. Doing so snaps the restraints on
Rodriguez's cargo, and Rodriguez curses as it lands on the overpass.

A squad of UBCS troops goes to investigate the crate. They seem to

recognize it, and treat it with the utmost caution. Suddenly, something
smashes into the crate from the inside, puncturing its metal walls
and breaking it open. The mercenaries open fire, but it doesn't do
them much good. One by one, in a few seconds, they're impaled or
crushed by a writhing mass of pink tentacles, which draws their corpses
back into the crate.

Down on the street, the survivors try one last bid for escape. Thanks
to Raccoon City's typically crowded city design, the office building
they passed through earlier is surprisingly close to the highway overpass.
If they can reach the office's roof, they may be able to get to the road
and simply walk out of town.

With Linda in tow, the survivors return to the office and find that the
UBCS had the same idea. The office's stairwell has seen a bloody struggle
in the last few days, but with the UBCS's withdrawal, the zombies have
taken the building. The survivors arm themselves with the UBCS's discarded
equipment and fight their way up the stairs.

Finally, they emerge onto the roof. The thin man has made his escape, but
he's dropped a copy of his orders. His name is Tommy Neilson, and he was
in Raccoon City to track down Rodriguez, and reclaim the experiment that
was in the crate Rodriguez stole.

A hole in the overpass's concrete divider will let the survivors reach the
street, but they'll have to jump for it. That means they'll have to leave
Linda behind for now.

============================================================
13vi. A Summary of the Conclusion of RESIDENT EVIL: OUTBREAK
- FILE #2
============================================================

For a moment, the overpass looks deserted. No mercenaries

are visible, but Rodriguez's shipping crate is lying empty
near two large trucks, one of which has the keys in its ignition.

Suddenly, the Tyrant returns, seemingly none the worse for

wear after its most recent "death." It leaps from the street
to the overpass, intent on another bout with the survivors,
and is set upon and devoured by Rodriguez's stolen lab experiment.

The Nyx is comprised largely of the corpses of the unfortunate

UBCS mercenaries, and now, of the Tyrant. Its newfound mass is
slowing it down, but it's still very strong and resistant to damage.

It attempts to kill the survivors by generating and hurling

massive chunks of decaying protoplasm or by absorbing victims
into its body. The survivors soon realize that the Nyx's only
real weak point--the only part of its body that's legitimately
a part of *it*, rather than an absorbed corpse--is the enormous
staring eye on its torso. They scavenge weapons and ammunition
from the UBCS's stash and attack the Nyx, forcing it to its knees.
In its moment of vulnerability, one of the survivors grabs an
abandoned rocket launcher and fires it directly into the Nyx's eye.

That proves to be the last straw. The Nyx liquifies, letting the
inert corpses of its victims fall lifelessly onto the overpass.
Even the Tyrant seems to have finally been killed.

One of the survivors uses a fallen road sign to create a

makeshift bridge for Linda. She limps carefully across the gap
and, with the rest of the survivors, piles into the truck.
The survivors put the pedal to the floor and take off down
the highway as fast as the truck will go. They make it into
the tunnel that separates Raccoon City from the outside
world with seconds to spare, just as the first missile hits.

In a command center somewhere, a severe-faced general watches

the status of the missile strikes. No sooner has the first
missile hit than a second, more intense barrage starts,
delivered from a distance by fighter planes. At least a dozen
explosions register on the general's computer model of the
bombardment, with more on the way.

The survivors have pulled over sixteen miles outside of

Raccoon City, where a number of other refugees have gathered.
They all rush to the side of the road to watch Raccoon burst
into flames.

=======================
13vii. Multiple Endings
=======================

There are four possible endings for "End of the Road,"

depending on how you escape the city and whether you
rescue Linda.

If you escape via the helicopter with Linda, which is

difficult to do, you get the "Up and Away with Linda"
ending. Rodriguez gets out of Raccoon City seconds
ahead of the missiles and Neilson never attacks him,
so the Nyx is never released from its crate.

If you simply return to Rodriguez's helicopter after

the countdown starts, you'll get the "Up and Away"
ending. The Nyx is never released and you escape the
city, but you've left Linda to die in the explosion.

If you destroy the Nyx and escape Raccoon City via the
UCBS's truck with Linda in tow, you get the Engrishy
"Run Like the Linda" ending. In order to get Linda to
the truck, you must use a chunk of wreckage near the
broken concrete divider to create a makeshift bridge.

If you leave Linda to die in Raccoon City and escape

in the truck, you get the "Run Like the Wind" ending.

In the event that Linda survives, there's an extra scene

during the ending. Rodriguez, if present, leans against
his helicopter as Linda throws her Umbrella ID badge
into the foliage by the side of the road. The only gift
that humans really have, she says, is that they can rebuild.

Regardless of how you escape Raccoon City, you'll see

the missile bombardment, and your character will offer
a short soliloquy as Raccoon City explodes. After the
game's closing credits, you'll be shown an extra movie
as determined by your ending. Getting out with Linda
in tow earns you the good ending, whereas if you leave
her to die, you'll get the bad. Since Linda mentions
being able to reproduce the T-Virus antidote, leaving
her to die presumably means your character succumbs to
the virus shortly after escaping, much like the Chopper
Zombie endings in the original Outbreak.

Alyssa:
She muses that life isn't worth living without risk. The
smart thing to do, Alyssa figures, would be to try to play
it safe... but she's never been that kind of person.
Shortly thereafter, as she's working out, Alyssa watches
a news report about Umbrella. She takes a break and opens
a newspaper, which has her photo on the front page. She
smiles, and continues her workout.

Cindy:
She tries to take solace in the fact that surviving the
disaster has made her a stronger person, although the
events of Raccoon City will haunt her dreams for a long
time to come. When she gets back to civilization, she
decides to "start something new" by buying a house.

David:
David reacts to the disaster with his trademark stoicism,
saying "...the shit hit the fan and the fan finally broke."
We next see him talking on a payphone, then getting aboard
a large boat named the Silver Star. He looks over the
railing with a faint smile on his face.

George:
This can't be called just retribution for humanity
attempting to play God, George thinks, because he can't
think of an action so foul that what happened in Raccoon
City would've been the appropriate consequence. Still, he
figures, this has taught him that mankind must learn from
its mistakes, himself included. We next see him working
on a laptop while chatting on a cell phone; he says that
he's intending to drop by "the university's research lab."
George figures he'll be quite busy.

Jim:
The Raccoon City disaster seems to Jim to be more than
a little like a movie, complete with a nail-biter of an
ending. He's half-expecting a narrator to say that their
fight is just beginning, but Jim isn't interested in that.
He intends to spend the rest of his life having fun, and
we next see him doing just that, shopping for a new pair
of sneakers while talking to somebody on his cell phone.

Kevin:
As he watches the explosion, Kevin notes--apparently
narrating this at some later point--that he can't quite
remember what he felt as he watched Raccoon City vanish
in flames. He hasn't forgotten what he went through,
but he chooses to focus on the now, rather than what
he describes as "ancient history." Kevin goes on to
accept a new job in Miami.

Mark:
Mark muses that Raccoon City taught him things he didn't
even learn in Vietnam. His duty, he thinks, is clear: he
survived to tell the story of the last days of Raccoon
City. The next time we see him, he's at home with his
family, kicking back on the porch of an enormous suburban
home. His wife and son are setting the table for dinner.
Mark's talking on the phone, and tells whoever it is that
things are as dull as ever. He leans back with a smile.

Yoko:
As Raccoon City burns, Yoko's memory suddenly comes back.
She realizes she has no time for or right to self-pity;
there are things that only she can do.

At some later point, Yoko and Linda walk into a courthouse.

Yoko takes the witness stand, and says in narration that
she finally feels like she's making some progress.

The Bad Ending:

A narrator notes that in time, people stopped talking about
the Raccoon City disaster. As he speaks, we see a scene of
night in some other city, as two men unload newspapers from
the back of a van; the newspaper's headline is "Worldwide
Bloodshed." It may be, as the narrator says, that history
will repeat itself, and humanity is helpless to prevent the
events of Raccoon City from happening again.

====================================
13viii. Plot Branches and Side Notes
====================================

Much like Resident Evil 3, many scenarios in Outbreak have

branch points or multiple endings.

1. In "Wild Things," the zombie elephant (a.k.a. the Titan)

will only break out of the gate on the elephant stage if you
linger for too long in that area. If the elephant is still
trapped when you open the zoo's front gate, or you somehow
manage to kill the Titan on the Concourse, you'll fight the
Stalker, a mutant lion, instead. On higher difficulties, it's
accompanied by a couple of female lions.

2. After you kill the Gigabite in "Underbelly," you've got

a surprisingly short window in which you can catch the subway
car. If you make it there in time, the scenario's over, and
you've gotten the "Railway to Tomorrow" ending.

Otherwise, you'll need to grab the Ventilation Tower Key

off the subway tracks and use it to unlock the door in
the facility's generator room. Climbing the ventilation
tower to reach the street earns the "Cold Comfort" ending.

3. There are four endings, all told, for "Flashback."

3i. If you simply kill Dorothy and escape without
fighting the Axeman, you'll receive the
"Leaving the Mystery Behind" ending. Your
character has survived, but feels as though
the mystery of the hospital now cannot be solved.
(*What* mystery? Al's practically wearing a T-shirt
that says "I'm the Axeman. Ask me how!")
3ii. Kill the Axeman and read three files throughout
 the hospital. One, Kurt's Notebook, is in the
crate in the reception area. The two Administrator's
Diary files are in the secret passage behind the
administrator's office and the crack in the wall
in the hall outside the intensive care unit,
respectively. The latter file only appears after
you've destroyed Dorothy. You'll receive the
"A Glimpse of the Truth" ending.
3iii. When playing as Alyssa, you'll have sudden
flashbacks in the administrator's office,
the hospital courtyard, the far end of the
suspension bridge, and Room 202. After having
all four flashbacks, kill Dorothy, read all
the files listed above, and finally, kill
the Axeman on your way out. You'll get the
"A Glimpse of the Past" ending, where Alyssa
swears that Kurt's death will not have been
in vain.
3iv. Stay on the far side of the suspension bridge
until it collapses; in an online game, someone
must trigger this event by using a syringe to
kill the plant node in the basement. This'll
repopulate the forest with Scissor Tails
and open a couple of new paths in the forest.
Take one of them to end the scenario and see
the brief "Illusion Ending," which is mostly
notable for the (lousy) secret character,
Regan, that you can unlock along the way. The
"Illusion Ending" is unique to each character,
but is not in the game's gallery.

4. Kevin has a special ending for "Desperate Times,"

where he consoles a despondent Rita. A police car
drives by outside during this scenario; ostensibly,
it's driven by Leon and Claire. See FAQs.

You'll also get a different reaction if you, as Kevin,

speak to Marvin or Rita in the RPD lobby. Tony, the
K-9 cop who's initially in the reception area, will
appear dying in the kennel after Rita leaves the
building, and will only talk to Kevin.

5. "End of the Road" unfolds slightly differently

depending on whether or not you've killed the Tyrant
by the time you reach Linda. If you've killed it,
events unfold as listed in the summary above. If you
haven't, the waterway will flood, washing all the
characters in it into the canals near the Apple Inn.
(I opted to use the former scenario for the summary
because it seems to have the more logical progression
of the two. In it, you can find the Mine Detector
*before* you have to deal with the mines.) If you
dodge the Tyrant in the waterway and never visit
Raccoon City's main street, you never have to fight
the Tyrant at all.

6. On Normal difficulty or higher, if Cindy isn't a

PC or AIPC during "Wild Things," she'll be killed when
the Titan demolishes the zoo's entrance.
7. If Alyssa isn't a PC or AIPC in "Flashback" on Easy
or Normal modes, she'll simply stop in a clearing near
the suspension bridge and claim to be too tired to continue.
On Hard or Very Hard modes, you'll find her dead along the
path to the hospital. She'll subsequently animate and come
after you as a zombie.

8. If David isn't a PC or AIPC in "End of the Road," he'll

leave the waiting room and disappear. If you then use the
emergency ladder to escape the waterway, you'll find David,
as a zombie, lurking nearby.

9. The guy with the cap in the Raccoon Zoo inner office
will carry on a short conversation with Mark if you emote
a few times.

10. The cop on the roof of the RPD will talk to Cindy if
you emote a few times.

11. Tony, the K9 cop standing in the RPD's waiting room,

will have a brief conversation with Kevin if you emote a
few times.

12. On Hard and Very Hard difficulties, quest items are often
placed in different locations, which usually don't make a lot
of narrative sense. For example, the hunting rifle on "Wild
Things" is found in the zookeepers' office in a gun cabinet,
but on Very Hard, it's often in the alley behind the restaurant.

======================================
13ix. Conclusions About The Conclusion
======================================

1. At least one of the original eight survivors made it out of

Raccoon City alive, with Linda in tow. The bad ending for Outbreak
makes it clear that if they hadn't, the world would've gradually
become infected with the T-Virus, and the world's in pretty good
shape during Dead Aim and RE4.

2. Rodriguez has survived.

======================
13x. Random Commentary
======================

1. In RE2, Raccoon was a small city. In RE3, it got a little

bigger, but not unrealistically so, although the cable car
system was a bit much. In the Outbreak games, we find out it
had a large zoo, its own university, eight miles' worth of
subway, and a trainyard.

2. Not only was the explosion that destroyed Raccoon City

distinctly non-nuclear--you don't outrun a nuclear explosion
in a truck--but the American government pounded Raccoon with
at least a dozen missiles.

3. There's a brand-new cast of voice actors in File #2, and

they're almost all pretty good. Of particular note are Wendee
Lee, who voices Alyssa, and whoever plays David. (He makes
David sound almost psychotic, which is kind of cool.)

4. It took nine years and thirteen games, but Capcom finally

thought to include an Umbrella employee who *isn't* a
completely one-dimensional evil sociopath. Good job, guys.
Granted, she's almost certainly a conspirator intending to
steal from and/or betray the corporation, but whatever.

5. Between the two Outbreak games, it's now possible for

all eight of the original survivors to have escaped Raccoon
City. George leads the group to Raccoon University, and
David, for whatever reason, is prominently involved in
"End of the Road."

6. I'd like to see a few of the characters from Outbreak

return in more character-driven, singleplayer REs, either
as supporting characters or as protagonists. Alyssa or Yoko
would seem to be the most likely candidates, although Mark,
Kevin, or David could probably work as well.

7. Unlike the first Outbreak, there are a lot of incidental

survivors in File #2. Rita, Harry, Lloyd, Austin, Patrick,
Regan, her daughter Lucy, Rodriguez, Arnold, and Linda all
live through the scenario they're introduced in.

8. *Two* valve handles this time! What the hell?

9. It's possible to access a brand-new set of characters

in File #2, by using a GameShark code on the first game and
importing the save data. These characters are ostensibly
from File #3; one of them is Hunk, shown both with and
without his mask.

10. "Wild Things" bears a superficial resemblance to one

of the stupider stories in the old Wildstorm _Resident Evil_
comic book.

11. All of the male characters are shown talking on a phone

in their good endings.

12. There's a broken briefcase in the west concourse during

"Underbelly" that has the initials "BB" on it. When looked
at in conjunction with the Commuter Pass SP Item, it would
appear that Ben Bertolucci was in the subway at the start
of the outbreak.

13. At this point, Kevin, Mark, and Jim are the only characters
who haven't died onscreen in some way. All of the others will be
killed or zombified at some point in one stage or another if no
player has chosen them. Since Kevin and Jim share a bad ending
in the first Outbreak, fan theory has it that Mark will wind up
as the "official" survivor of the games.

14. Alyssa's good endings in RE:O2 have been rendered noncanon

by Revelations, which states that BOWs were not revealed to the
public until 2004. This doesn't necessarily mean that she's dead,
although she might not be doing as much writing as she'd like.
15. Rodriguez is the luckiest helicopter pilot in the entire series.
He always lives.

==================================================================
14. RESIDENT EVIL: UMBRELLA CHRONICLES
==================================================================

Released for the Wii in 2007, Umbrella Chronicles is a multi-chapter

rail shooter. The game's stated goal was to fill several plot holes
and bring the plots of the original RE games closer to the post-RE4
status quo.

The titular Chronicles are a series of audio diaries stored on Wesker's

computers. He has recorded his version of the events that led up to the
final fall of the Umbrella corporation, from the outbreak that destroyed
the Arklay laboratories to the destruction of Umbrella's final working
facility in 2003.

Three of the Chronicles are abbreviated retellings of three of the

core games in the series, which differ in both large and small ways from
the games themselves. It's my position that since Wesker is telling the
story, it can be counted as the work of an unreliable narrator, which
means I'm not treating RE:UC as any kind of retcon. This is particularly
important for the RE3 scenario, "Raccoon's Destruction," which is
dramatically different from the game it's based upon.

=====================
14i. Train Derailment
=====================

On the evening of July 23rd, Wesker tells us, the Ecliptic

Express was attacked by James Marcus. Umbrella sent a team
to investigate, but their communications were abruptly cut
off. Unwittingly, Rebecca Chambers and Billy Coen are swept
up in the resulting fight.

This chapter abbreviates RE0.

================
14ii. Beginnings
================

Marcus's "outburst" has convinced Wesker that Umbrella is

a sinking ship. On the night of July 23rd, as he and William
Birkin watch the STARS Bravo team on a series of security
monitors, Wesker makes his choice: it's time to walk away.
To Birkin's chagrin, Wesker says aloud that the T-Virus just
needs a little extra combat data before it can be considered
complete, and that's what STARS is there for. He doesn't need
Umbrella anymore. As Wesker lets himself out of the security
station above Birkin's laboratory, a hapless Birkin begins
the process of "getting rid of" the training facility.

Wesker intends to take the tram back to Raccoon City's sewer

system, but it's lost power. Instead, Wesker uses the turntable
to descend into Birkin's lab complex and reactivates the tram.
This process is complicated by zombies, Eliminators, and some
of Marcus's leech zombies, but they just slow Wesker down.
Wesker retraces his steps and heads back to the turntable, but
on the way up, the mutated Tyrant that Rebecca and Billy fought
leaps down the elevator shaft and attacks. Wesker, surprised to
see that the Tyrant is still alive, uses the empty turntable's
dock for cover and knocks it down.

As the turntable arrives back at the station, the Tyrant gets

back up and leaps once more to the attack, but its recent battles
are taking their toll; Wesker can see that it's become "brittle."
He subsequently destroys it.

Wesker returns to the training facility and emerges on the second

floor, outside the observatory. He takes an unhurried route back
through the building, dispatching the bioweapons that have
arrived in the time since Rebecca and Billy passed through, and
eventually reaches the lobby. From there, he drops through the
secret hatch into the underground train station.

As Wesker rushes into the room, Sergei Vladimir, one of his superiors
in Umbrella's security division, greets him from atop the wrecked train.
He wants to know where Wesker's going, as Wesker is supposed to be
reclaiming the management training facility. If Wesker's leaving, that
says to Sergei that Wesker's not taking responsibility for his failure.

Wesker says, as calmly as ever, that he intends to detonate the facility

to dispose of the escaped T-Virus, but that's not good enough for Sergei.
He sends down his bodyguard "Ivan" as a reminder of Sergei's authority.

Ivan quite resembles a Mr. X; it wears a pair of red wraparound

sunglasses and a large white overcoat, and fights in the same
way. It's capable of occasional brief bursts of speed, but it
isn't a thinker.

The fight ends unexpectedly, as the tunnel shakes and debris

rains down from above. Birkin has detonated the training facility,
wiping it off the map. As Ivan and Sergei are distracted, Wesker
makes a quick escape, and Sergei decides to let him go. They
have a mission of their own.

Wesker leaves what's left of the facility via the train tracks,
and heads back to Raccoon City to meet the STARS Alpha team.
The real struggle is about to begin.

=======================
14iii. Mansion Incident
=======================

"Mansion Incident" is an accelerated retelling of Chris's

scenario in the original RE. The major difference therein
is that Wesker never captures Jill, and thus she and Chris
are side-by-side throughout the game. Barry Burton never
appears at all.

===============
14iv. Nightmare
===============

After leaving Billy in the forest, Rebecca has managed to

reach the Arklay mansion in one piece. When she arrives,
the mansion is unsettlingly quiet and none of her teammates
are anywhere nearby. Exhausted from the previous day's
events, she falls asleep on a bed in one of the dorms.

Rebecca's having a nightmare about being pursued by a

giant snake when Richard Aiken wakes her up. They compare
notes; Rebecca saw Edward Dewey die, and Richard got split
up from the rest of the team. They decide that they
have to catch up with Enrico. He'll know what to do.

The dorms are no longer quiet as Rebecca and Richard start

heading back to the mansion. Crimson Heads have begun
waking up throughout the area, and the dorms are infested
with giant spiders. Cornered and without options, Rebecca
pushes Richard through a hole in the floor, landing in the
spiders' underground nest.

Rebecca and Richard return to the mansion via the gardens.

A few mutants and bioweapons are prowling its halls, but
it's otherwise quiet; in Richard's terms, something just
doesn't "feel right." Rebecca, still unsettled by her
nightmare, can only agree. Richard, trying to make her
feel better, reminds her that they're both members of an
elite unit; they shouldn't have any trouble as long as
they stay calm.

They make it to the mansion's front hall, but there they

find that the front doors are securely locked. Without much
of a choice, they turn around and investigate the mansion's
second floor instead.

As Rebecca walks by a window, she sees someone moving

outside. Sergei and Ivan are walking away from the mansion,
and Ivan has a heavy blue object slung over one shoulder.
Rebecca is curious about who they might be, but is in no
position to stop them.

As Sergei and Ivan head into the forest, they're confronted

by a small pack of Cerberii, which Ivan easily dispatches.
The sound of his fist crushing a Cerberus's skull is audible
all the way inside the mansion, which startles Rebecca,
but Richard prods her to get moving.

Shortly thereafter, as Rebecca and Richard are walking

along a balcony above the library, a flock of undead crows
suddenly bursts through a nearby window. Both of them try
to fend them off, but Rebecca loses her balance and falls
down a short flight of stairs.

Richard fends them off by firing his pistol into the air
and helps Rebecca get back on her feet. With a vacant
expression on her face, Rebecca says quietly that it's
probably "just us now." Richard replies that "help will
come," and as long as they can find the captain, everything
will turn out okay. In the meantime, he's there to back
Rebecca up.

Richard Aiken then proceeds to seal his fate by saying

out loud, "And with me around, what could go wrong?" The
Yawn is happy to provide an example.

Rebecca sees the giant snake's shadow a second before it

hits, and pushes Richard out of the way just before he
would have been crushed. They make a run for it through
the mansion's second floor, pursued the whole way by
the Yawn, but finally run out of luck in the mansion's
research library. Just when they think they've lost it,
the Yawn quietly creeps up behind Rebecca and resumes
its attack.

With no other option, Richard and Rebecca go on the

offensive. The Yawn slithers into the shelves on the
library's second floor, swinging down suddenly to bite
or smash them, but concentrated gunfire manages to keep
it at bay.

At a crucial moment, Rebecca remembers the nightmare

she had in the dormitory, and freezes up. The Yawn
strikes at her, but Richard tackles Rebecca out of the
way and is bitten instead. The Yawn lifts into the air
with its fangs sunk deeply into Richard's chest.

The sight of Richard in the Yawn's mouth is enough to

shake Rebecca out of her paralysis. She fires at the
Yawn's exposed belly, drawing blood and causing pain.
It loosens its grip on Richard, whose gun hand is
currently wedged inside the Yawn's mouth. He pulls
the trigger, and the bullet explodes out the back of
the Yawn's head. That's enough to get it to drop him,
and it slithers away to lick its wounds. As Richard
slides to the floor, a gout of his blood splatters
against Rebecca's face and chest.

Even as wounded as he is, Richard refuses to give up

hope. He assures Rebecca that help is coming for them,
and tells her to get the look of despair off of her face.
Rebecca decides that if Richard can be that optimistic
even with two big holes in his chest, so can she.

"I'll prove I have what it takes to survive."

============
14v. Rebirth
============

"I died once," Wesker says.

Being impaled by the Tyrant was just part of his plan,

although he'll always remember what it felt like. Birkin's
virus has done its job, though, and Wesker wakes up minutes
after his "death" in the Tyrant's lab.

Wesker discards his Umbrella-brand sunglasses and sets to

work at a nearby terminal. He intends to grab the facility's
research data before escaping, but it's all been automatically
transferred onto a remote server, U.M.F.-013, courtesy of
Sergei Vladimir.
Further, as of midnight, Umbrella's computer system has opted
to revoke Wesker's access to its mainframe. The AI governing
Umbrella's systems, the Red Queen, introduces itself to a
furious Wesker. He puts his fist through the computer's monitor
and swears to make the Red Queen regret its decision.

With no other choice, Wesker arms himself and sets out to

escape. The surviving monsters have been driven into a frenzy,
but with the power of his new virus, Wesker has no trouble
with them. In fact, he's enjoying himself.

As he gets out of the lab, Wesker rounds a corner and runs

straight into Lisa Trevor. She advances on him and he knocks
her down with a fusillade of shotgun blasts. "Nobody's
perfect, Lisa," Wesker sneers, and steps over her body.
Predictably, she gets right back up.

Wesker reaches the mansion's front hall with time to spare,

but Lisa intercepts him before he can open the front door.
Rather than slug it out with her, Wesker retreats and heads
upstairs, with Lisa in slow, dogged pursuit.

Dispatching a few remaining Hunters, Wesker runs into the

armor room on the second floor. Lisa follows him in, and
while he's able to knock her off her feet again, she just
won't stay down. Caught between the surviving monsters and
Lisa, Wesker heads back downstairs and through the mansion's
east hallway. The mansion begins to shake under his feet as
the self-destruct sequence counts down to zero.

Lisa doubles back and intercepts him at the other end of

the hall, smashing through the door to the art room. At
this point, Lisa simply absorbs everything Wesker can do to
her, but eventually is forced to retreat.

When Wesker returns to the lobby, she's waiting for him

in the shadows, like she's trying and failing to set up
an ambush. Wesker sees her coming and attacks, but Lisa
isn't at all phased by his gunfire; she's either evolved
past it or is simply refusing to react. She only stops
coming after him when the lobby's heavy brass chandelier
falls on top of her, pinning Lisa to the floor.

With Lisa indisposed, Wesker runs for the front door. He

manages to make it into the forest just before the mansion
explodes. Even though he wasn't able to claim any of the
data that he died to get, Wesker is jubilant; he has risen
above the rest of humanity, and cheated death itself.

===========================
14vi. Raccoon's Destruction
===========================

This scenario retells RE3, but
any other adaptation in UC. It
the streets of Raccoon City to
fight the Nemesis to the death
UBCS chopper.
changes its details more than
follows Jill and Carlos from
the roof of the RPD, where they
and subsequently escape in a
===================
14vii. Death's Door
===================

It's been two days since the destruction of William Birkin's

laboratory complex. In that time, Ada Wong has managed to
bind her wounds, arm herself, and find her way back into
Raccoon City's sewer system. She muses to herself that,
thanks to Leon, she'd forgotten one of her first rules:
always stay calm, no matter the situation.

Ada's covered in bandages and is barely able to stand, but

she fights her way back up to the street outside the Apple
Inn. Ada's barely in time to keep an appointment with one
of her contacts.

She finds her contact's corpse slumped against a wall in

the Apple Inn's back office. Wesker, whose image appears
on a nearby computer screen, tells Ada without preamble
that her contact chose to kill himself, and that Ada has
failed their organizations.

Ada places a glass case on the table in front of the screen.

It contains a tissue sample from the G-Type. Wesker is
suddenly much less annoyed.

Wesker explains the current situation to Ada. Firstly, the

American government is minutes away from destroying Raccoon
City. Second, an Umbrella officer is nearby, and escaping the
city at the last minute via helicopter. Wesker remotely unseals
a locked case by Ada's contact's feet, which reveals a
gun that fires a grappling hook, and ends the transmission.

Ada picks up the glass case, and a thought strikes her:

the city around her is what happens when the T-Virus gets
loose. What happens, she thinks, if the G-Virus were to
get out? She has no illusions about trusting Wesker, but at
least for the moment, she's valuable to him.

Ada heads back out into the streets, en route to intercept

the Umbrella officer's helicopter. The grappling gun allows
Ada to get over a flaming car wreck that's blocked off the
street near the Apple Inn. That, in turn, allows her to
quickly get into the lobby of an office building, the roof
of which allows her access to the freeway.

The freeway is littered with military-style vehicles and discarded

equipment. Ada begins searching for the helicopter, but a roar from
the city below her gets her attention first. A mutated Tyrant, one
she hasn't seen before, leaps up and climbs onto the freeway. It's
out for blood, but Ada's more than a match for it.

Shortly after the Tyrant goes down, Ada notices the helicopter
she's looking for, which is carrying a large cargo container.
Ada evades a last few zombies, climbs onto the roof of a wrecked
truck, and hits the cargo crate with her grappling hook. She
takes a running start and leaps after the helicopter, inches
ahead of a Hunter. Ada retracts the line, pulling herself up,
and climbs unsteadily onto the top of the cargo crate. The
Hunter makes a leap for her, but only manages to get one of
her shoes. It crashes into a wrecked car as Ada soars away.

Inside the helicopter, Sergei Vladimir is toying with his

knife, and asks the pilot if he thinks Sergei's being reckless.
The pilot admits that yes, he does think that, since Sergei
just stole Umbrella's computer core.

Sergei accidentally cuts himself with the knife and grimaces

at the wound, but laughs. Anyone that history comes to regard
as a hero, Sergei says, is never really "stable." With the
computer core, though, he now has all of Umbrella's research
data. The company will rise from the ashes.

=======================
14viii. Fourth Survivor
=======================

HUNK escapes the sewers via the RPD kennel and radios for
evac. Listening in on a variety of random transmissions
via his headset, HUNK heads to the RPD's roof, despite the
dozens of monsters in his way.

One of his fellow squad members radios in, claiming to

be wounded and trapped, but HUNK ignores her. Survival,
he says, is her own responsibility.

He boards the evac helicopter alone, as he always does,

with a G-Virus sample in hand. The pilot, morbidly
entertained by HUNK's survival, takes off and flies out
of Raccoon City.

====================
14ix. Umbrella's End
====================

According to Wesker, in the days following the destruction

of Raccoon City, Umbrella's stock prices plummeted. Even
then, they had the money and connections necessary to start
shifting the blame for Raccoon onto others, such as the
American government itself. The UBCS's supervisors had
done their job well, and most of the evidence of Umbrella's
responsibility in the Raccoon City disaster had been
destroyed in the missile strike.

By 2003, Umbrella had reestablished a base in Russia and

begun work on a new project, with plans to offer their
bioweapons on the arms market. Chris Redfield and Jill
Valentine, currently employed as members of a private
anti-bioweapon containment unit, hear rumors of the
facility and move in to shut it down.

On approach to Umbrella's facility, the unit's helicopter

pilots spot a trio of Hunters prowling across the tundra,
and shoot them down from the air. Chris takes command and
starts issuing orders. The helicopters drop two strike teams.

Zombies, Cerberii, and Hunters infest the facility's surface

level. As Chris and Jill enter the facility, the force's
commander radios in that they've taken losses and need to fall
back. The only other member of the strike teams to make it into
the facility, Bronson, is killed by zombies shortly thereafter.
Chris and Jill are once again on their own.

The research facility contains an encyclopedic list of

Umbrella's bioweapons projects, both past and present. Even
failed experiments like the Eliminators and accidents like the
Lickers are stored in this base, and as Chris and Jill
work their way further inside, they're forced to fight
them all. At the same time, someone is setting traps for
them throughout the complex. At one point, Chris accidentally
sets off a tripwire, and both he and Jill barely avoid being
crushed by a shipment of heavy fuel canisters. The trap does
destroy a catwalk, though, preventing Chris and Jill from
reaching the facility's armory and computer core.

As they approach the base's final elevator platform, their

team radios in. Despite heavy casualties, the base's surface
level is secure.

At the base of the elevator shaft, Chris and Jill find the
facility's nerve center. Someone has hastily abandoned the
security console, and set up a series of explosive charges
as he retreated. Between those, the escaped bioweapons, and
the base's security measures, Chris and Jill barely stay alive.

Finally, they're forced down a long series of hallways into a

large circular room, which Jill identifies as a testing area
for BOWs. She thinks they've been herded this way since they
reached this level of the base, and has just finished proposing
the idea when Sergei Vladimir's voice comes over an intercom
system, greeting them as fellow soldiers.

He happily introduces them to the latest product in Umbrella's

catalogue, codenamed TALOS: a half-mechanical bioweapon directly
controlled by the Red Queen. It scampers around the room like a
gorilla, wielding its massive fists and an oversized rocket
launcher. Chris and Jill are able to evade the first few rockets
by taking shelter behind a series of palisades throughout the
room, then return fire.

The Talos crashes lifelessly to the ground, but seconds later,

it begins to mutate. Tentacles sprout from its flesh, and it
rapidly expands, bursting out of its armored suit. Sergei,
sounding somewhere between proud and apologetic, explains that
the Talos has evolved beyond the Red Queen's ability to
control it.

In its new form, the Talos has a weak spot in its armor, at
the point where its main tentacle burst out from its back. It
uses that tentacle to suspend itself from the test lab's
ceiling, and when that tentacle is damaged, it crashes to the
floor. While it's relatively weak, Chris and Jill finish it off.

The Talos was the last vestige of armed resistance within the
Russian facility. Chris and Jill return to the surface, aware
that Umbrella has been struck a final, fatal blow, but also
aware that Wesker is still out there somewhere.
Wesker, watching their victory from a distance, observes that
they probably shouldn't be patting themselves on the back just
yet. They wouldn't have pulled this off without his help, and
they don't even know it.

As the biohazard strike team cleans up the facility, burning

BOWs' corpses with flamethrowers, one of the crew examines a
terminal set into a wall. All that's on it is two lines of
white text against a blue background:

U.M.F.-013
NO DATA

================
14x. Dark Legacy
================

Wesker arrives at Umbrella's Russian facility on foot. He uses

a transceiver on his wrist to eavesdrop on Jill and Chris's
radio traffic, just in time to hear Jill claim that they can't
afford to wait for permission from the Russian government to
attack. Wesker smirks. He plans to use one pawn to capture another.

Sergei Vladimir watches via closed-circuit camera as Wesker kicks

down a door, comparing Wesker to a "little black cockroach." He's
then distracted by his security system identifying a level 4
biohazardous contamination in the facility. Over 90% of the research
staff has been killed. Sergei instructs the Red Queen to begin
activating the Talos, in preparation for destroying the facility.
It's a waste, he admits, but as long as he has the Red Queen
and the Talos, he can start over. The Red Queen complies, but
also alerts him to the presence of Chris and Jill's strike teams.

Wesker has gained access to a corpse-strewn tram stop near the

facility, which is infested with escaped bioweapons. Wesker
activates the tram and rides it deeper into the facility, even
while Hunters and Chimera are ripping it apart from the outside.
The tram's elevated track is currently stopped on a floor well
below him, and Wesker barely manages to stop his car before it would
have plunged several stories. He disembarks and leaps across the
elevator shaft to the opposite landing, using his superhuman
strength and agility to descend floor by floor.

As he reaches the ground floor, a bullet caroms off the ground

by his feet. Wesker points his silenced handgun at Sergei, who
greets him as "Comrade Wesker" and brandishes an old WWII pistol.
Wesker asks him if he's still intending to "go down with the ship,"
but Sergei denies that Umbrella's going anywhere. He introduces
Wesker to "a few of my old friends": two black-skinned, advanced
Mr. X units wearing bullet-resistant overcoats. Sergei makes his
escape while Wesker engages them, but the fight doesn't last long.

Wesker emerges into the laboratory complex's elevator shaft, only

a few steps behind Chris and Jill, and jumps down the shaft under
his own power. He fights through a fresh wave of zombies in the
base's security office, then jumps across the gap in the catwalk.
On his way to the computer room, Wesker's able to loot the facility's
armory, which gives him more than enough additional firepower to
deal with everything in his way.

As Sergei sics the Talos on Chris and Jill, he notices Wesker

approaching the Red Queen's computer core on a security monitor,
and walks over to talk to him.

The Red Queen first became active the night of Wesker's death,
Sergei tells Wesker, and Sergei stole her from Umbrella's
facilities just before Raccoon City was destroyed. He feels a
great deal of empathy for the computer, Sergei says. Both of
them always want to know the truth, regardless of how painful
it might be.

Wesker condescendingly points out that the computer is a tool;

what it wants is determined for it by the user.

Sergei, amused, says that he's glad Wesker feels he can be honest
with him, but now is when their relationship has to end.

Sergei screams in agony and begins to mutate. Skin tears, muscle

deforms, and bones crack, as Sergei rapidly takes on many of the
characteristics of the Talos. Wesker, unimpressed, evades Sergei's
attacks and returns fire.

As they battle, Sergei reveals the reason for his absolute loyalty
to Umbrella. After the fall of the Soviet Union, he was a man
without a country, but Ozwell Spencer took Sergei in and gave him
a cause. Sergei was so dedicated to this purpose that he took the
test to determine whether or not he was suitable for transformation
into a Tyrant, and was the first to ever pass it. He allowed Umbrella
to produce clones of him and transform them into bioweapons. The
Tyrants, he says, are his brothers, and they and he will usher in
a new era for mankind.

Wesker, exasperated, demands to know where Ozwell Spencer is, but

it's too late. Sergei's already taken too much damage from Wesker's
attacks, and he falls in a bloody heap before answering the question.

Without looking back, Wesker walks to the computer core and transfers
its data--the entirety of Umbrella's bioweapons research--onto a
disc. He pockets it, and notices on a nearby monitor that Chris and
Jill have successfully defeated the Talos. Wesker, pleased that
everything has unfolded as he predicted, inputs a lengthy password
into the Red Queen's terminal.

He looks into the Red Queen's camera "eye" and mockingly says,
"Goodbye, fair lady." Wesker presses return, and the Red Queen
announces that a full system reformat is about to take place.

All over the base, the power shuts down, replaced by the red glow of
emergency lights. Chris, Jill, and the surviving members of their
strike team look around in shock, with no idea what's going on or
how to stop it.

The computer system announces that all data has been erased.

Wesker triumphantly walks out of the base and shoots a cargo hook
down from its moorings. As it swings down at breakneck speed, Wesker
grabs it and uses it to swing up onto the facility's perimeter fence.
Facing the sunrise, Wesker muses that Umbrella had power, but it
"lacked the proper vision." It now falls to him to usher in a
new future for the planet.

As the credits roll, a newscaster issues a special report. The

Umbrella Corporation has been found guilty of all charges concerning
the Raccoon City incident, owing to new proof found and entered into
the case by the prosecution. The defense plans to file an appeal on
the grounds that the evidence could be deemed inadmissible in court.

Further, due to an anonymous tip, Ozwell Spencer is sought for

culpability in the biohazard that contaminated Raccoon City, and is
now the subject of an international manhunt.

After the credits, Wesker walks into his command center and inserts
the Umbrella archive disc into his system. Browsing through the
accumulated data, Wesker monologues about Spencer, who has gone from
the would-be ruler of the planet to a fugitive. Wesker promises
Spencer that "before the conclusion of this drama," Wesker will find
Spencer, and tell him all about the world Wesker intends to create.

For the first time, Wesker smiles.

======================================
14xi. Conclusions About the Conclusion
======================================

1. Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, and Albert Wesker have survived.

Rebecca Chambers is presumably alive, but still missing.

2. Sergei Vladimir, the last die-hard Umbrella employee and the

man on whom all Tyrants were based (the Jango Fett of bioweapons,
if you will) has died.

3. The Umbrella Corporation has been found legally responsible for

the Raccoon City incident, presumably due to information retrieved
from the Russian facility. While its legal team has sufficient
basis to appeal the decision, Umbrella is effectively finished as
a corporate entity.

4. The Red Queen has been erased.

5. Albert Wesker has the only complete archive of Umbrella's data.

Other surviving researchers have virus samples or partial files,
but Wesker has the entire thing.

6. Not even Wesker knows where Billy Coen is.

7. Wesker's involvement with Raccoon City has been belatedly

explained. While he was arguably responsible for Ada's survival,
it was indirect at best. There's no proof he was ever actually
within the city limits.

========================
14xii. Random Commentary
========================

1. "Raccoon's Destruction" and "Death's Door" both make use of

environments from the Outbreak games. In fact, "Death's Door" is
a shooter version of the last third of RE:O2's "End of the Road,"
right down to fighting the same kind of Tyrant. This is reportedly
due to the lack of existing HD assets for RE2 and RE3.

2. While the revelation that Sergei Vladimir got cloned is more

than a little cheesy, it does actually close a plot hole. It's
been established for years that humans that can survive being
transformed into Tyrants are few and far between, so how was
Umbrella able to produce as many as it did? Simple; they used
the same guy over and over again. It also explains why they all
have the same face.

==================================================================
15. RESIDENT EVIL: DEGENERATION
==================================================================

Set in 2005, one year after the events of Resident Evil 4,

Degeneration is an original 90-minute animated feature film
created and written by the staff at Capcom. It's effectively
Resident Evil 4.5, and bridges the gap between the two games.
Specifically, it introduces the new corporation Tricell, and
establishes the new post-Umbrella status quo.

Degeneration is a bit controversial within the fan community,

as it marks the first time Claire had been seen in the series in
years, so naturally, she ends up stuck in a control room for the
second half of the movie while new character Angela Miller swipes
the spotlight.

Since Degeneration is a film and not a game, I don't intend to

summarize it here. It's easy to find for sale or rental.

=====================================
15i. Conclusions About the Conclusion
=====================================

1. Leon Kennedy, Claire Redfield, Angela Miller, Rani Chawla,

Frederic Downing, and Rani's unnamed aunt have survived.

2. Curtis Miller, Greg Glenn, Ron Davis, and a whole lot of

innocent people are dead.

3. Frederic Downing has been arrested.

4. Just about all of Umbrella's old projects are now available

on the black market, up to and including the G-Virus.

5. The fallout from Raccoon City and the dissolution of Umbrella

took the President of the United States down with it. (In fact,
in RE5, Spencer writes in his journals that the U.S. government
had more to do with the destruction of Raccoon City than Spencer
himself did. Spencer is well-known for being a nutbar, of course,
but it's still an interesting point.)

6. While they were unknowingly using Umbrella's own data, Wilpharma

successfully produced an effective vaccine for the T-Virus.

7. Wilpharma has been bought out by Tricell.

=======================
15ii. Random Commentary
=======================

1. I can't really recommend Degeneration, and mostly it's because

of Leon. For whatever reason, he has the personality of a cardboard
box in Degeneration, and also commands the most screen time of any
of the characters. Angela's not much more interesting.

2. It's funny how easily the T-Virus outbreak in Harvardville is

contained, compared to the others we've seen in the series so far.
Granted, the established background indicates that people have had
a lot of practice. This may be enough to explain why the T-Virus
hasn't spread across the face of the planet, along with the existence
of a vaccine.

3. While the movie itself isn't great, I'm honestly impressed with
the direction they chose to take the series. It would have been
easy, as evidenced by a few thousand fanfics and one major motion
picture, to send the world of RE sliding towards apocalypse. They
could still go that way, granted, but now the series is a strange
blend between international military-themed adventure and survival
horror. It really blows the lid off of the setting.

4. As far as I can tell from the movie, Wilpharma is the first

example in the series of a major corporation that isn't secretly
seething with evil; TerraSave is only protesting against them due
to misinterpreted pictures from an Indian terrorist attack. Their
only mistake is hiring Downing, who proceeds to backstab them
in the classic Umbrella style.

==================================================================
16. RESIDENT EVIL 5
==================================================================

The first Resident Evil game to appear on the Xbox 360 is also
the first RE game to ship after Shinji Mikami left Capcom. The
result is a game that, independently of its design as a co-op
shooter, has a very different feel from everything that's come
before it.

Set in 2009, RE5 is intended as the final chapter of the Umbrella

series, and closes the book on a lot of ongoing plots.

===================================================
16i. A Summary of the Basic Plot of RESIDENT EVIL 5
===================================================

In a basement somewhere, a man is writhing on the floor, while a

woman in a robe and mask, dressed like a medieval plague doctor,
looks on. The man's eyeballs slowly turn a reflective black, while
tentacles writhe across his body from just underneath his skin.
His skin turns grey and he slumps over, lost beneath the mass of
tentacles. The woman exits the room, leaving him there.

At the same time, Chris Redfield drives a jeep across the savannah.
He's now an agent of the Bio-Security Assessment Alliance, or BSAA, a
privately-funded internationally-recognized organization that
infiltrates terrorist hotspots throughout the world. He's in Africa
with a job to do, and despite his current misgivings about whether or
not "it's all worth fighting for," he intends to see it through.

Chris parks in a ramshackle village in the Kijuju Autonomous Zone

and is greeted by his new partner, Sheva Alomar, of the BSAA's
West African branch. Chris introduces himself, but her use of the
word "partner" gives him pause for a moment. He has a brief flashback,
of a tombstone with "Jill Valentine" written on it, but shakes it off.

Many of the locals are sitting around doing nothing, giving Chris
dirty looks. Several more are busying themselves by beating
something wrapped in a burlap sack, which is about the right size
to be human. In a side alley, one terrified man is trying and
failing to escape two others, who drag him into the shadows.

Chris makes radio contact with his advisor at the BSAA, Kirk Mathison,
who tells him to head to the butcher shop to meet his local contact.
Their mission is to back up BSAA's "Alpha team," as they both work to
find and arrest their target, Ricardo Irving, who's in town for a
black market arms deal.

As Chris and Sheva head through town to meet their contact, the
village suddenly goes still and silent behind them. Everyone in
the village has disappeared.

Their contact is waiting for them. He provides them with pistols,

knives, and information. A new bioweapon project called Uroboros,
which Chris had only heard rumors of, is real. Their only lead on
the subject is Irving. The BSAA's field teams typically consist of
several combat units backed up by a pair of agents working in an
intelligence capacity, and the latter role belongs to Chris and
Sheva. The contact, his job done, steps out.

Chris and Sheva, now armed, head deeper into the settlement. They
find only the bodies of recently slain animals and a shelf lined
with candles and old human skulls. A note on a dusty desk, in
erratic handwriting, calls for the deaths of outsiders.

A scream from a nearby building draws Sheva's attention, and she

runs to investigate. Inside, two men force an object down the
throat of a third. When they notice Chris and Sheva, the first
two run away, while the third rolls over and tries without
success to cough up the object. In surprisingly short order, the
man's coughs stop, and he takes on a pallid, deathlike complexion.
He attacks Chris and Sheva, who have no choice but to shoot him dead.

The only way out of the building is to jump out a second-floor

window, and shortly afterward, a lynch mob finds Chris and Sheva.
Lightly armed and dramatically outnumbered, their only option is
to run into a shack nearby and bar the door. Chris radios Kirk
and gives him a status update, but Kirk is unmoved; their mission
objectives have not changed. Sheva is unnerved by Kirk's lack of
a reaction, but Chris cynically accepts it as the standard.

Chris and Sheva escape via a tunnel into a nearby building, just
in time to watch an angry mob drag their contact up onto a gallows.
A massive hooded man swings a homemade axe down on their contact's
head, to the delight of a watching mob. One of them sees Chris and
Sheva, who are forced to fight for their lives.

Chris radios Kirk, who promises that he's on his way, but that
leaves Chris and Sheva to play a desperate game of hide-and-seek
amongst the various shacks, houses, and broken-down vehicles
throughout the village. The villagers are only armed with axes,
pitchforks, and the occasional crossbow, but there are a lot of
them, and the executioner is much tougher than all the rest.

When Kirk arrives in his helicopter, he knocks down a barred door

with a missile strike, which has the happy side effect of routing
what's left of the mob. Kirk gives Chris a status update via the
radio; the BSAA's Alpha Team is about to deploy into the area, so
Chris and Sheva need to head to the rendezvous point. Chris agrees,
and Kirk's helicopter flies away.

As Chris and Sheva make their way towards their destination, Captain
DeChant from the Alpha Team radios in; his team's path is blocked.
Kirk does not reply. As Chris and Sheva fight towards the rendezvous
point, dispatching more infected villagers, DeChant reports over
the radio that he and his team are under attack. His next broadcast
is cut off abruptly, as DeChant cries out in pain.

A woman's scream from a nearby building gets Chris's attention.

He and Sheva rush towards it just in time to see a white woman
in a red dress get pulled inside a nearby building by an infected
villager. By the time Chris manages to reach her, she's been
infested with a parasite of her own, which explodes out of her
head into a giant fanged maw: a Plaga. Chris and Sheva barely
manage to kill her before she kills them.

Shortly thereafter, in an underground waste disposal plant, Chris and

Sheva find what's left of Alpha team. The only survivor is Captain
DuChant, who's barely alive. He tells Chris that it was a setup;
Irving got away and his team's been wiped out. He was able to
download details on the arms deal into a portable hard drive,
which he gives to Chris before expiring. Chris decides to head
towards the BSAA's vehicle depot, where he can find something to
transmit the data to headquarters. Sheva notices someone watching
them from nearby, but whoever it is escapes.

Moving further into the disposal plant, Chris and Sheva run across
the creature that killed Alpha team: a gigantic tentacular mass
surrounding a vaguely humanoid core. It attacks them by swinging
its arms in powerful hammer blows, shedding short-lived wormlike
creatures with every step it takes. Their firearms don't do much
to it, but when Chris thinks to shoot a large propane tank nearby,
the explosion knocks the creature down. They realize that it's
vulnerable to intense heat, so Chris lures it into the plant's
incinerator and stuns it with an incendiary grenade. Sheva throws
the switch on the incinerator, and the gas jets do the rest.

A short distance outside the waste disposal plant, Chris finds the
warehouse where Alpha team stowed their vehicles and equipment. As
Chris uses a laptop to upload DuChant's data to the BSAA's servers,
a man in a bad suit--Irving--is driven away by the masked woman.

Chris radios in to BSAA headquarters. With the Alpha team wiped

out, Irving in the wind, and the villagers all turned into what
Chris recognizes from the "Kennedy Report" as Ganados, they
request a mission update.

Nothing has changed, however; they're still tasked with finding

and arresting Irving. The BSAA Delta team has been dispatched to
their location for backup, but until then, Chris and Sheva are
ordered to pursue Irving by themselves. Chris bitterly says to
Sheva that they're apparently expendable.

The Alpha team's vehicles have been sabotaged. With no other

choice, Chris and Sheva head out of the city on foot via the
waterfront, fighting off infected villagers and dogs in a maze
of shipping containers. A new breed of infected Plaga makes an
appearance, birthing out of human corpses and taking to the
air on insectoid wings. Kirk Mathison shows up in his helicopter
as they approach the next station, providing air support.

The flying BOWs soon bring Kirk's helicopter down, with Chris and
Sheva helpless to do anything but watch. New orders from BSAA HQ
send them towards the crash site, with the villagers putting up
increasingly heavy resistance. At one point, they're forced to
contend with a chainsaw-wielding man with a bag over his head,
who soaks up bullets and nearly kills them both.

The helicopter is a flaming wreck by the time Chris and Sheva

reach it, with no survivors. Before they can do anything else,
a revving motor announces the arrival of a villager driving a
motorcycle, dragging a heavy length of chain behind him. He goes
for Sheva, but Chris shoves her out of the way and gets entangled
in the chain. As he's dragged away, Sheva draws a careful bead and
fires, severing the chain and dumping Chris into the dust.

More bikers appear, and Chris and Sheva go back to back. Thankfully,
the BSAA's Delta team arrives, and make short work of the bikers.

Their captain is Sheva's former trainer, and introduces himself

to Chris as Josh Stone. Josh hands Chris a data chip and says
their orders are to pursue Irving; the data from the hard drive
Chris recovered seems to indicate that Irving is going into
the nearby mines. Chris plugs the data chip into his handheld and
calls up its contents on the screen. One of them is a photograph
of a blonde woman who looks much like Jill Valentine, taking Chris
aback. When Sheva asks what's wrong, he shrugs it off.

The Delta team moves on, leaving Chris and Sheva alone in a meeting
room. Josh has left behind some captured intelligence about the
"Type 2" Plagas that have infected the villagers. After laboratory
improvements on the original model, Type 2 Plagas now only take ten
seconds to take over a host's brain. They have been deployed in Kijuju
half as a research project, and half as a deliberate attack against
the BSAA.

Chris and Sheva get back on Irving's trail. After fighting past
a truckyard full of infected dogs and through a series of mine
tunnels, they emerge outside the mine's offices, where they
corner Irving.

Just before they arrest him, a tear gas grenade is thrown into
the room. The masked woman suddenly swings through a nearby
window, grabs Irving, and pulls him outside. Irving laughs at
Chris and Sheva as he's pulled to safety.

As the gas clears, Chris decides that there must have been
something in the room that Irving didn't want them to see.
He digs through the papers, and soon finds a map of Kijuju
with a large area circled and labeled "Test Zone 01." Sheva
identifies it as the oil fields, located in the marshlands.

Chris radios the Delta team to tell them that Irving's escaped.
Josh says he'll put a team on Irving's trail, but for now,
he needs Chris and Sheva back with him. Chris agrees.

Unfortunately, the road outside the mines has been heavily

reinforced by Plaga-infested villagers, and they remember how
to operate an old mounted machine gun. Chris finds a Dragunov
sniper rifle inside a locker in the office, and uses it to take
out the villagers from a safe distance.

As they break through the last barricade, a villager drives

down the road in a large cargo truck. As he crashes to a stop,
a massive insectoid bioweapon, similar to the U3 Leon Kennedy
fought four years ago, explodes out of the back of the truck.

Its exoskeleton proves to be quite bulletproof, but its soft

underbelly isn't. Using explosives and teamwork, Chris and Sheva
manage to inflict enough damage to the creature that it takes off
into the air. As it dives headlong towards Chris, he fires off a
couple of well-aimed shots, forcing the creature to crash into
the wrecked truck. Both go over the edge of a nearby cliff, and
the BOW is unable to pull out of the dive. The truck explodes,
and the creature splatters against the ground.

As Chris and Sheva catch their breath, one of the Delta team
members approaches in a jeep. Their ride has arrived.

Sheva radios in to headquarters to give them a status update.

Josh replies soon afterward, as Chris and Sheva are fighting off
another biker gang with the jeep's mounted guns, to inform them
that just about all of the villagers have become infected with
type 2 Plagas. In the data from the hard drive, they're referred
to as "Majini."

The trip gets rougher, as Majini in trucks and motorcycles find

and pursue Chris and Sheva's jeep. They return fire with the
jeep's mounted guns, waging a running battle across the savannah.

As Chris and Sheva approach Delta team's current location, Josh

radios them that his team has come under attack, and cannot hold
out for long. By the time Chris and Sheva manage to shake their
pursuers, night has fallen.

They arrive at the site of a massacre. The Delta team has been
wiped out. As they survey the destruction, their driver is suddenly
crushed under the foot of a Gigante.

Chris and Sheva barely manage to make it back to the jeep they
arrived in, and use its heavy machine guns to fight off the
Gigante. Like the ones Leon fought, the Gigante itself is only
inconvenienced by machine gun fire.

When enraged or in sufficient pain, though, the massive parasites

in its body emerge. Chris and Sheva concentrate fire to drive the
Gigante back, then obliterate the parasites as they appear. When
they're destroyed, the Gigante dies, its body crushing their jeep
as it falls.

Sheva searches the bodies, and discovers that Josh isn't among the
dead. As she wonders out loud where he's gone, Chris tells her that
she can still back out from this, even though they're the only two
BSAA agents left. Sheva reacts incredulously; if anything, she says,
they should *both* be talking about running away. Chris denies this,
and says he now has a personal stake in this mission.

A while ago, Chris says, he received intel that his old partner,
Jill Valentine, might still be alive. The data that DeChant
recovered from Irving seems to confirm this. If Jill is alive,
Irving knows where she is, and Chris intends to find her.

Sheva makes a half-hearted attempt to talk him out of it, but

Chris can't be swayed. He goes to find a boat he can use to
cross the marshland, and by the time he's done so, Sheva has
decided to come with him. "Partners," she says, "until the end."

By daybreak, they're piloting a fanboat across the marsh. Sheva

finally asks what happened to Chris's partner.

Two years ago, Chris says, he and Jill had gotten a tip concerning
the whereabouts of Umbrella's last living founder, Ozwell Spencer,
and were going to investigate. He was reportedly holed up inside
a castle somewhere in Europe.

When Chris and Jill found Spencer, he was dead on the floor and
Albert Wesker was standing over his corpse. They immediately attacked,
but if anything, Wesker had gotten faster and stronger since Chris's
previous encounter with him.

Finally, Wesker sent Chris flying across the room, and he rolled
to a stop at the base of a window. Before Wesker could finish him,
Jill tackled Wesker, sending both Wesker and herself out the window
and into a darkened canyon. Neither of their bodies were never found.

Chris tells Sheva that, one way or another, he has to know if

Jill is still alive. Then he changes the subject, and asks Sheva
why she's a member of the BSAA. She says that both of her parents
died in an outbreak caused by Umbrella, created to cover up the
manufacture and shipment of biological weapons. She joined the
BSAA because "somebody has to pay for that."

Chris and Sheva pursue Irving to a village in the marshland. At

the first dock they stop at, a dead BSAA agent is lying in a
small clearing. His PDA has an open mission log; his squad was
sent to reinforce the fallen Delta team, but they were too late.
One of the members of Delta team was still broadcasting a distress
signal, though, so the dead agent's team came out into the marsh
to investigate. His PDA indicates a massive locked gate nearby,
next to which is a labeled map.
Chris and Sheva search the various small settlements within the
marsh. While the area is wired for electricity, the local population
were subsistence farmers, raising chickens and catching fish. Their
village has several outposts in the deep water, raised on sticks to
defend against crocodiles.

The swamp's Majini wear grass skirts and little else. Some use vicious
homemade spears or crossbows, but most are content to leap at Sheva
or Chris with their bare hands. Some have relearned the usage of
explosives, and have mined the swamp and juryrigged their arrows.
Just the same, Chris and Sheva manage to recover the four pieces of
the emblem that they need to unlock the village's gate.

Most of the remaining locals wait in ambush for them in the village
square, including a pair of massive, masked natives armed with huge
barbed clubs. They've set up a series of traps around the village's
huts, and have killed several BSAA agents with them. Chris and Sheva
salvage new weapons from those agents, and use them and the villagers'
own traps to win through.

Deeper into the village, across a nearby bridge, Chris is scrounging

for supplies when he finds the diary of one of the younger villagers.
A generation ago, the owners of the nearby oil refinery had swindled
the villagers out of the land that the refinery now sits on. In the
modern day, the owners of the refinery have frequently assisted the
villagers out of what the writer assumes is guilt, giving them exotic
alcohol and building them a gondola to help them across the swamp.

On April 5th, one of the refinery's supervisors came to the village

in order to offer the locals some inoculations against an unspecified
disease. The writer didn't initially accept the offer, due to his
immediate distaste for the supervisor. Two days later, despite the
villagers' best efforts, the village's children had died.

When the village leader went to the refinery to demand answers, the
supervisor claimed it was because of the illness he'd initially hoped
to prevent. This time, the writer of the diary went with the others
to get the injection.

A few days later, the women of the village had grown listless and
vacant, while the men were adorning themselves with traditional war
paint and garb and fighting one another. By the time the author of
the diary succumbed to the same violent impulses as the other men
in his village, most of the women were dead.

Chris and Sheva take the villagers' gondola across the swamp to another
part of the village, where several of the Majini have strung up another
dead BSAA agent for the crocodiles. After dispatching them, Chris
and Sheva raise a bridge and exit the area.

A pair of abandoned tents just past the village bear the logo of
the Tricell corporation, which Chris identifies as one of the
companies that funds the BSAA. A clipboard in one of the tents
discusses a clinical trial of "Type 3" Plagas, which are a hybrid
of Type 2 and the baseline Plaga. While Type 3 Plagas dramatically
increase a host's physical capabilities, and occasionally cause a
dramatic mutation where a host may grow to nine feet tall, they have
a zero percent adherence rate in women and children. A woman or child
hosting a Type 3 Plaga simply dies.
The tents are set up outside the entrance to the oil field. Inside,
Sheva spots Irving as he enters the building, which is guarded by
a squad of armed type-2 Majini. Chris and Sheva dispatch the Majini
and disable a series of gas valves, allowing them to pursue Irving.

As they enter the building, a gunman approaches them from behind.

Fortunately, it's Josh Stone, who's now the lone survivor of his
team. He demands to know why they didn't simply retreat in the
face of such a widespread infestation, and Sheva tells him an
abbreviated version of events thus far.

At that point, a horde of Majini burst into the room. Sheva and
Chris cover Josh as he unlocks the refinery's elevator, and the
three of them make an escape into an easily-barricaded room on
the second floor. Josh tells Chris and Sheva to pursue Irving,
who's decided to blow up the oil refinery to cover his escape,
while he secures a way out. As he runs off, Sheva tells Josh to
be careful. He nods.

Chris and Sheva burst out of the refinery and onto the docks,
but they're too late to prevent Irving's escape. The masked woman
drives away in a small motorboat, while Irving rides off in a
heavily-armed riverboat.

A small army of Majini, backed up by infested dogs, arrives at

the docks. Josh radios in to tell Chris and Sheva to hurry to
his location, where he's gotten a boat started, but the Majini
make that as difficult as possible. The three of them get aboard
their boat and away just before the refinery explodes. Several
squads of Majini attempt to slow them down, both in boats and by
springing ambushes along the tributary, but they're unsuccessful.

Josh is piloting the boat along a quiet stretch of the river when
Irving's boat suddenly sideswipes them. One of the Majini immediately
opens up from Irving's boat with a machine gun turret, forcing Chris
and Sheva to take cover behind their own boat's engine block. Chris
takes out the Majini with two precise gunshots, and they board
Irving's vessel.

Irving holds a large autosyringe filled with red liquid. The masked
woman gave it to him, claiming that Irving had to clean up his own mess.

Despite Chris and Sheva's threats, Irving jams the syringe into
his neck, and immediately begins to convulse and scream. Tentacles
sprout from his back, which he uses to fend off Chris and Sheva as
he drops into the water.

A massive sea monster surfaces shortly thereafter, with part of

Irving's body serving as a sort of nerve center. He laughs crazily,
calling his transformation an "extreme makeover," and tries to crush
Chris and Sheva against the deck with his new tentacles.

If Irving hadn't been using such a well-armed ship, he might have won
the fight. Chris and Sheva use his own turrets against him, severing
his tentacles and blasting holes in what's left of Irving's old body,
which dangles like a tongue in the monster's gaping maw. The fight
ends when a burst of machine-gun fire cuts the tissue that connects
what's left of Irving's body to the rest of the monster. His torso
and head land heavily on the ship's deck.

He curses, although he's in surprisingly good humor for a dying man.

Apparently, he says, Excella didn't think he rated the "good stuff."
Chris tries to get answers out of him, about both the picture of
Jill and the rumored Uroboros Project, but Irving is only willing
to give him any answers at all once Sheva refers to Chris by name.
Once he knows who he's talking to, Irving is delighted to tell Chris
that any answers he's looking for can be found inside the nearby
system of caves... if he's able to stay alive for long enough to
get them. Irving dies, still laughing, in a spreading pool of blood.

The caves that Irving spoke of aren't hard to find. As they pull
alongside a nearby dock, they find a boat already tied to it. Sheva
recognizes it as what the masked woman used to make her escape.

When Josh realizes he can't talk Chris or Sheva out of this, he

says he'll radio into headquarters. With luck, he'll be able to
get the withdrawal order rescinded, and get Chris some backup. Josh
salutes and drives away.

The caverns are infested with a bizarre breed of spider which

seems at least partially derived from Plagas. They share Plagas'
photosensitivity, and Chris soon finds that a flash grenade will
take them out. A few Majini also prowl the caverns, and as
Chris and Sheva pass through an ornately carved doorway, they
discover why.

They suddenly find themselves exploring a series of majestic

ruins of unknown origin, patrolled by hostile Majini and strewn
with both new and old traps. Sheva had had no idea that anything
like this was in Kijuju.

Using an ancient system of pulleys, Chris and Sheva manipulate

a series of sliding staircases to allow them access to the deeper
parts of the ruin. As the last piece slides into place, another
variation on the U3 bioweapon appears from above. This time,
though, Chris and Sheva have found better weapons, and they
leave it in a bleeding heap.

Elsewhere, a woman wearing half a dress gives a man an injection.

She'd had her doubts about him when he first arrived, she says,
but now the Uroboros is complete.

"Your position at Tricell is secure," Wesker tells her, but she

shrugs it off and caresses him. She has her eyes on something
much bigger (...ahem), like a place in his "new world." She's
proven she's worthy, or at least so she thinks.

Wesker forcibly removes her hand. "Perhaps you have," he says in

a neutral tone. The masked woman enters the room and tells them
that the BSAA has arrived. Apparently, Wesker's old friend Chris
has come to pay them a visit.

Wesker tells them that he won't tolerate delays, and both women
leave. He looks out the window into a missile storage facility,
several of which have UROBOROS written on the sides.

"I should thank you, Spencer," Wesker says idly. He thinks of

the encounter in the castle three years ago, shortly before Chris
and Jill arrived. Wesker remembers Spencer's conversation in
fragments: the Progenitor virus, Spencer's dreams of godhood.
Wesker had finally driven his hand through the old man's chest,
to Spencer's surprise, and whispered a denial into the old man's
ear. If anyone was to become a god, Wesker says, in the present
to himself and in the past to Spencer, it would be him.

Meanwhile, Chris and Sheva are still negotiating traps within the
ruins. After dealing with a series of obstacles involving focused
beams of sunlight, they descend three floors into a large ritual
chamber, with a small field of flowers at the center of the room.
The flowers are somehow surviving in the absence of direct sunlight.

The area is littered with abandoned equipment, some of which is much

older than the rest. Chris wipes the grime off of one of the crates
to find a faded Umbrella logo. Some of the other, newer equipment
bears Tricell's name.

A nearby journal, written in 1966 by a man named Brandon Bailey,

is lying open on top of one of the tarp-covered crates, as though
someone found it, opened it, and forgot about it. Bailey's journal
talks about his research, conducted alongside Marcus and Spencer.
The flowers in the ritual chamber were prized by a tribe called
the Ndipaya, which called them the Stairway to the Sun. In their
natural habitat, the flowers were the host to a virus that they
code-named "Progenitor." If their research team tried to grow the
flowers anywhere else on Earth, the virus was gone.

Brandon was sent to Africa by himself in 1968 to acquire more

samples of the virus. Spencer quietly acquired the land where the
flower had been originally discovered, in an attempt to keep the
researchers from being constantly attacked by the Ndipaya. The
conditions remained harsh, with the constant risk of raids
compounded by the sounds of construction and the facilities
housed inside a bunch of tents, but it all paid off in 1969.
Umbrella's African research facility was complete, although
it wasn't anywhere near big enough to support Bailey's work.

Further into the lab, Chris finds that Tricell has set up shop
in Umbrella's old lab building. He turns on a computer and
finds the research journal of a Tricell scientist named Miguel.
The center had been completely cleaned out when Tricell arrived,
but they needed samples of the Progenitor virus and there was
nowhere else to get it. While they were here, they also began
experiments on the BOWs known as "Lickers." Administering the
Progenitor virus to them didn't change much, aside from giving
them the ability to reproduce, and Miguel doubts they'll ever
be financially viable bioweapons.

Just outside the computer room, Chris and Sheva find a hallway
that's splattered with blood, with large claw marks scored into
the wall. The hallway has been blockaded with crates and containers.

The Lickers attack Chris and Sheva shortly thereafter. They

fight much like the Raccoon City version did. They're also
completely blind, and easy to sneak past. When Chris is forced
to break down a door to reach the facility's elevator, it's
noisy enough that the rest of the Licker population breaks free
of their cages and comes after them, forcing Chris and Sheva to
fight them all while they wait for the elevator to arrive. Using
the exit corridor as a choke point, they bombard the oncoming
horde with grenades and bullets.

They barely escape, and the elevator takes them to a truly massive
room lined with cryogenic storage capsules. This is where Umbrella
once kept human test subjects from all over the world. There's space
for hundreds of people along the walls, and as Sheva watches, one
opens and drops a withered corpse into the darkness below.

Chris uses the storage facility's computer to search for Jill's name.
Sure enough, a photo of a sleeping Jill is on file; she was kept here
at one point. A note appended to her records indicates that for some
reason, while she was in cryogenic storage, her pigmentation changed.
She's now blonde.

The computer automatically engages its lift system, taking Chris and
Sheva towards the area where Jill's capsule is, but it's forced to
stop by the arrival of a bioweapon sentry: some kind of massive spider.
It lashes out at Chris and Sheva with its legs, but a couple of shotgun
blasts to its arms force it to collapse onto the lift platform. While
it's stunned, Chris shoves a couple of grenades into its open mouth,
bypassing its bulletproof exoskeleton. The creature screams and loses
its grip on the walls of the storage facility, plummeting into darkness.

As Chris and Sheva watch it fall, a video chat window appears on the
computer screen. It shows a woman, who wonders aloud why Chris and Sheva
didn't retreat when they were told to. Sheva recognizes her as Excella
Gionne, a Tricell executive and a member of the Global Pharmeceutical
Consortium. Excella contemptously says Sheva has done her homework,
then denies knowing anything about Jill. She implores Chris and
Sheva, when they're done with their "vigilante mission," to leave;
there's nothing here worth dying over.

Convinced that Excella knows more than she's telling, Chris and Sheva
set out to find her. Taking an elevator down to the lower levels of the
facility, they discover the Majini have upgraded. Before, they were
attacking with shovels, axes, and glass bottles. Now, they wear body
armor, and wield assault rifles, stun batons, and flash grenades.

The lower levels of the facility are dedicated to both shipping

and waste disposal. Chris and Sheva use the conveyor belts to
navigate it, and sneak past the infestations of Lickers that have
gathered in the quieter areas. A sheaf of abandoned memos indicates
that the Uroboros virus was shipped out of this facility at some
point, but a fire broke out. Soon thereafter, a new breed of mutant
took up residence within the darkened parts of the facility, killing
anyone sent after it. The unnamed author of the memo decides to name
them "Reapers" for the time being.

While reactivating power to a conveyor belt, Chris and Sheva

meet a Reaper firsthand. Its powerful limbs allow it to tear
a human apart in seconds, and it reacts to attack by ejecting
clouds of corrosive gas. Like the Uroboros-infected humans,
though, the Reaper has enormous tumorlike growths that protrude
from beneath its exoskeleton, and destroying them kills it.

Eventually, Chris and Sheva find their way to a laboratory

deep within the facility, where a bald man sits motionless
in a chair. Excella greets them from an observation room, with
the masked woman by her side, and Chris demands to know where
Jill is. Excella mocks him for being just as single-minded as
"he" - Wesker - said Chris was.

Excella tells them more about Uroboros. It's the unification of

Wesker's ideas and her own. Rather than being intended for the
international black market, Uroboros was made for the purpose
of evolution. Only the worthy will be able to control its
power, and as the bald man lurches up out of his chair, it
becomes obvious that he can't.

Tentacles writhe beneath the man's skin for a few seconds

before he slumps to the ground. Soon, he's covered in the
same mass of black eel-like fronds as the man Chris and Sheva
fought back in the village.

Tricell's laboratory has an automated anti-biohazard protocol

that activates whenever an outbreak is detected within the
lab. As part of their standard operating procedure, this
requires a clean-up crew to incinerate anything within the
lab with a flamethrower, which is helpfully stored in a unit
on the wall. They use it against the Uroboros, inflicting enough
damage to expose the pulsating white nacelles on its body. The
creature absorbs a huge amount of punishment, but they eventually
kill it, reducing the Uroboros to a slurry on the floor.

By the time Chris and Sheva find their way up to the lab's
observation room, Excella has cleared out. She's left behind
a short manual on the usage and behavior of the Uroboros
virus, which attempts to adapt itself to a host's DNA. If
it's unsuccessful, as it's been in every case that Chris and
Sheva have seen so far, the virus completely overcomes its
host and turns it into the mass of black pustules they've
seen twice now. At this point, it begins looking for more
organic matter that it can use to fuel its growth.

Chris and Sheva pursue Excella deeper into the facility, and
along the way, their radio headsets pick up a weak signal
from elsewhere in the base. Excella's transmission cuts in
and out, but they hear her speaking of a man named "Albert."
Chris realizes that Wesker must still be alive, although he'd
hoped otherwise. A memorandum in an employee lounge just ahead
indicates that Wesker is dealing with his research staff in
his accustomed manner; all of the surviving Tricell researchers
were put on a bus, knocked out with gas, killed, and incinerated
in the furnaces on the facility's lowest floor.

They pursue Excella back up several floors in the facility,

using the storage area's lift to return to the ancient ruins.
Here, Tricell and/or Umbrella have constructed a drawbridge
that links back up to the local cavern system. The Lickers
have also made this area into one of their local habitats.

Crossing the drawbridge, Chris and Sheva finally catch up to

Excella, who's waiting for them inside the atrium of an ancient
tomb. She seems amused by their continued pursuit, especially
when the masked woman suddenly attacks. With unearthly speed,
she quickly humiliates both Chris and Sheva, dodging bullets
and retaliating with devastating, superhuman kicks. Chris knocks
off her mask with a lucky gunshot.

Wesker enters the room and, smug as ever, calls the situation
a "family reunion." Chris demands to know what he did with
Jill, and Wesker's reaction is to pull off the masked woman's
cowl. Her face is twisted with either hatred or rage, but it's
unmistakably Jill Valentine.

Excella makes herself scarce as a remarkably one-sided fight

breaks out. Neither Chris or Sheva can match Wesker's raw speed
and power or Jill's agility. After realizing that, Chris changes
their tactics. Chris manages to get Wesker to kick him through
the sealed door to the catacombs surrounding them, and he leads
Wesker on a wild goose chase through the tombs of the Ndipaya.
At the same time, Sheva engages Jill in the atrium, in what's
not so much a fight as a game of tag.

Seven minutes later, both Chris and Sheva have managed to stay
alive, if only barely, and Wesker can no longer spare the time to
deal with them. He leaps up to the elevator he entered through
and takes a phone call on his PDA, leaving Jill to finish Chris
and Sheva off.

Jill gets Chris in an armlock and starts to twist. With no other

option, Chris pleads with her to remember who he is, and suddenly
Jill breaks the hold. She staggers backward, and an impressed
Wesker notes that she's still resisting "even at such an advanced
stage." He points his PDA at Jill and pushes a button, and she
convulses, screaming. Jill rips open the collar of her jumpsuit
to reveal a bizarre red object attached to her chest, just below
her collarbone. Wesker leaves via the elevator.

Even alone, Jill is more than capable of killing both Chris and
Sheva, but they quickly identify the object on her chest as the
problem. It's bulletproof, but Chris has enough of a weight
advantage on her that he can restrain her for brief periods.
While he does that, Sheva tries to yank the object off of Jill's
chest. This isn't easy; when the object starts to give way, it's
obvious that it's surgically attached. Finally, Sheva claps both
legs around Jill's neck and slams her headfirst into the floor.
While she's stunned, Chris rips the object out, and Jill screams.

Jill loses consciousness briefly, but when she wakes up, she
recognizes Chris. She was aware of who he was and what she was
doing, but helpless to keep herself from doing any of it. Chris
tells her it's okay, and Jill implores him to pursue and stop
Wesker. Jill is barely able to stand, which forces Chris to
leave her behind.

Sheva and a distracted Chris take Wesker's elevator up to find

a large harbor, with an enormous cargo ship docked there. From
where they're standing, they can see Wesker and Excella walking
on board the ship, and Excella has a suitcase with her.

A few hours later, night has fallen, and Chris and Sheva have
managed to sneak aboard the ship. Chris figures it's too big for
Wesker to want to use it to spread Uroboros; it'd be too easy
to find and destroy the ship.

Chris and Sheva dispatch dozens of well-armed Majini on their

way across the ship's deck, down into the hold, where they find
Excella frantically typing away on a computer in a small lab.
Excella runs away, and both Chris and Sheva open fire. They don't
hit her, but a bullet breaks open one of the two attache cases
she's carrying, and Excella abandons it. She seals the bulkhead
door behind herself, and Sheva inspects the broken case. It turns
out to hold several vials of an unidentified serum, and Sheva
pockets one for later study.

Another entry in the researcher Miguel's journal is available on

one of the computers. Miguel's project involves development on a
new virus, one to surpass the potential of both the G-Virus and
T-Veronica. The big problems are eliminating the virus's ability
to cause extreme mutations and mental atrophy while improving
its stability. Miguel believes he's got the first two handled,
and is working on methods to enhance the third.

Unable to follow Excella, Chris and Sheva take a detour through

the ship's cargo hold, where Majini confront them with rocket
launchers, assault rifles, and even a hand-held gatling gun. It
isn't easy, but they get through them and reach the ship's bridge.

Wesker watches their progress via security camera, but he's not
really paying attention. His mind's on his last encounter with
Spencer three years ago, just before Jill and Chris found him.

When Wesker found Spencer, the latter was an old man in failing
health, and Spencer was bitterly amused to be facing his own
mortality. After all, he told Wesker, he had the right to be a god.
According to Spencer, Wesker is the last survivor of a "new
superior breed of humanity," created by Spencer with the
Progenitor virus. Spencer's goal was to become a god, creating
a new world with a new, better breed of humans. With the
destruction of Raccoon City, Spencer was forced into hiding,
and his plans never reached fruition.

Wesker, suddenly enraged, drove his hand through Spencer's chest.

Spencer, with a look of shock on his face, collapsed against Wesker
and died.

Spencer was arrogant to the end, Wesker muses. Only someone who's
actually capable of becoming a god deserves the right to do so.
In the present day, Wesker says to himself that Uroboros gives him
that right.

The elevator takes Chris and Sheva back up to the deck, where a
horrifying sight awaits them. A massive pile of fresh corpses,
most of which appear to have been the villagers from Kijuju, has
been heaped upon the ship's deck. Excella Gionne, in agony,
staggers towards them, unable to believe that she's been
betrayed; Wesker has administered the Uroboros virus to her,
but like everyone else, she can't handle it. Chris isn't surprised
at all. As he tells Sheva, Wesker doesn't give a damn about anyone
other than himself.

Crying Wesker's name, Excella explodes into a flurry of tendrils,

engulfing the nearby corpses and growing faster than any Uroboros
host before her. The new Uroboros reaches out to try to crush
and ensnare Chris and Sheva, who stay one step ahead of it and
take shelter back inside the ship. They're back in the hallways
outside the bridge, and the Uroboros instantly pours in after them.
It lashes out through windows and ventilation ducts, feeling around
blindly inside the ship for anything else it can consume.

Wesker has engaged automatic systems and locked the ship's controls.
At the ship's radar station, Chris finds an old memo from Spencer
himself inside an open briefcase, presumably Excella's. Written
around the time of Raccoon City's destruction, the memo details
Spencer's plans for ensuring Umbrella would survive the political
fallout from the disaster. Oddly, Spencer himself believed that
Umbrella wasn't directly responsible.

One of his first steps is to ensure that the African facility, which
is already a closely guarded secret, remains off the books. To do so,
he killed everyone in Umbrella who had the security clearance required
to know that the African facility ever existed, including the luckless
Brandon Bailey. Even if Umbrella itself is forced to close down, it was
always just a tool in Spencer's eyes. It's all about the research, and
that will survive.

A second nearby memo labels Wesker himself as No. 13 in the "W

Project," and dates back to directly after the Arklay mansion
incident. The author of the memo is an "Alex W." from Umbrella's
security department. He labels "Albert" as the reason why the
Arklay mansion was destroyed, and notes that his death brings the
success rate of the "W Project" down to 18 percent.

On the bridge, Chris finds a memo attached to a bulletin board that

instructs the reader how to use "Shango," a satellite-mounted laser
that can strike within centimeters of the designated target. Shango
is in geosynchronous orbit above the ship, and the targeting device
is locked down outside. Chris has already found the keycard to open
its storage locker.

Chris and Sheva run outside to battle the Uroboros. Like the smaller
versions of it that they've fought before, Excella's Uroboros is still
highly vulnerable to flame, but by now, it's easily several stories
tall. Chris unlocks the targeting device for Shango, while Sheva targets
the softer parts of the Uroboros's body. Landing a solid hit on any of
the large red nacelles all over the Uroboros gets an immediate and
dramatic reaction, and while it's stunned, Chris targets it with Shango
and fires.

It takes multiple hits from the Shango to kill the Uroboros, but it
does eventually do the job. After an intense fight, the orbital laser
reduces the Uroboros to a smoking heap.

Chris and Sheva go back into the ship's bridge and take a look around
using the security monitors. They show a bomber docked below decks,
which must be what Wesker plans to use to spread the Uroboros. A nearby
document confirms this; Wesker will fire the missiles loaded with Uroboros
into the planet's troposphere, spreading the virus worldwide.

Chris starts to head downstairs to intercept Wesker, but gets a call

on his PDA. It's Jill, who's calling to tell him about something she
noticed while working for Wesker. The virus he used to gain his powers
is unstable, and he requires an injection of a specialized serum every
day. While he's already gotten his dose today, the amount he requires
is very precise. If he were to get more than he needed, it would actually
poison him, which might give Chris a chance at beating him. Excella
always carried the serum with her in an attache case, and Jill reels
off the serum's serial number before Chris loses her signal.

Sheva looks down at the vial she took from Excella. Conveniently, it's
a dose of Wesker's serum. Chris says that it's at least worth a try.

They take the elevator to the ship's hold. The last of the Majini are
defending the hangar with their lives, the ship's Uroboros payload has
mutated some of the local insect population into Reapers, the ship
has both sprung several leaks and caught on fire after the fight on
the top deck, and there are two separate Majini with gatling guns
guarding the way.

All the same, they manage to catch up to Wesker before he gets into
the plane. Contemptuously, Wesker asks them if they ever get tired of
failure, just before he takes off his sunglasses and flicks them at Chris.

By the time Chris catches the sunglasses, Wesker is already punching

him in the face. He avoids their gunfire like it's not there and
retaliates at will, culminating with a throw that sends both of them
at once over a railing to the hangar floor. The vial of serum falls
out of Sheva's pocket, and they realize it's their only chance.

Chris shuts off the lights in the hangar, which gives them a slight
edge. Wesker can only dodge their attacks if he can see them coming.
They play a game of cat and mouse with Wesker, who takes the opportunity
to explain his motivations. The world is overpopulated, he tells Chris,
and most of the people in it are worthless. With Uroboros, only the
worthy will survive, and Wesker will rule over them as a god.

Wesker is so busy with his villainous monologue that Chris actually

gets the drop on him, pummeling Wesker with his fists. While Chris has
Wesker's attention, Sheva grabs a rocket launcher from a weapons locker,
and as soon as Chris is clear, she fires.

Wesker catches the rocket in mid-air, although it takes all his

strength to keep it away from his face. Chris forces the issue
by shooting the rocket, blowing it up and sending Wesker flying.

This is their chance. Chris grabs Wesker in a headlock, holding him

long enough for Sheva to jam Excella's needle into Wesker's chest.

It has an immediate effect. Wesker staggers to his feet, visibly

off-balance. Realizing he no longer has the advantage, Wesker covers
the entirety of the hangar in two jumps and runs into the bomber.

As Wesker takes off, Chris and Sheva barely manage to make it on board
via the cargo hatch. Inside, Wesker is catching his breath, and their
fight resumes in closer quarters.

Wesker's not as formidable as he used to be. He's still strong,

and fast enough to dodge bullets, but he's moving like he's drunk
and taking hits he never would have before, including a vicious knife
strike from Sheva that drives deep into Wesker's left forearm. Finally,
Chris wrestles Wesker to the ground and stabs him in the neck with
Excella's needle.

An automated voice aboard the bomber reminds Wesker that he's got
seven minutes until he's at the ideal deployment altitude for the
virus. Sheva covers Chris as he heads for the plane's override switch,
firing at Wesker as Wesker leaps across the bay. Chris pulls the
switch seconds before Wesker reaches him, and the bay doors open.

Chris has a good handhold, but neither Sheva or Wesker are as lucky.
Sheva grabs onto a support strut for dear life, and Wesker only
manages to survive by holding onto one of her legs. She makes eye
contact with Chris, and her expression changes from fear to acceptance
to determination; she's ready to sacrifice herself if it means Wesker
dies too.

Watching her, Chris has a flashback to when he thought Jill died in

Spencer's mansion. With a scream of "No!" he leaps forward, grabbing
Sheva's arm just as she loses her grip on the support strut. Wesker
swears that he's going to take Chris and Sheva with him, and Sheva
draws her pistol and fires one shot into Wesker's face. That breaks
his hold, and Wesker goes flying out of the cargo door.

====================================================
16ii. A Summary of the Conclusion of RESIDENT EVIL 5
====================================================

Wesker's bomber crash-lands inside the caldera of an active volcano.

Chris and Sheva both survive the landing, although the bomber's viral
payload and half the plane are spread across the rocks.

Suddenly, Wesker reappears. He's lost his shirt and coat in the crash,
and tells Chris that Wesker should've killed him years ago. As a final
act of revenge, Wesker drives his fist into one of the missiles,
which explodes into the trademark tendrils of the Uroboros.

It immediately bonds with him, and unlike everyone else who's been
infected so far, Wesker can handle it. The virus causes enormous
tentacular masses to emerge from both of Wesker's arms, serving as
both additional limbs and body armor. He uses the writhing bulk that
used to be his right arm to grab a large, sharp chunk of the wreckage
from the plane.

Chris and Sheva backpedal, trying to get some space before Wesker knocks
them into the lava, and a chunk of rock crumbles under Chris's feet.
He falls to a lower rock formation, and Wesker opts to pursue him rather
than Sheva. Chris runs to higher ground with Wesker in pursuit.

Wesker has abandoned whatever faint pretense of sanity he started out

with. He lashes out at Chris with his Uroboros-spawned tentacles,
ranting that humanity is a disease, spreading war and pestilence
wherever it goes. Chris is barely able to stay ahead of him, but while
he's dodging Wesker's attacks, he sees a possible weakness: like all
the other Uroboros-spawned monsters they've fought today, Wesker has
acquired a glowing red nacelle on his chest.

Chris shoots the nacelle, and Wesker roars in pain. His other arm,
previously almost untouched by the virus, is engulfed by pustules.
He uses it to propel himself across the volcano, towards Sheva.
With their roles reversed, Sheva runs away from Wesker while Chris
covers her from below. His gunfire does little more than annoy Wesker,
but it slows him down long enough for Sheva to escape. As she pulls
herself up onto the next cliff, Chris looks to the side and sees a
boulder he can knock over. He does so, which creates a short-lived
bridge for Sheva.

Wesker pursues the two of them and corners them atop a large, stable
chunk of rock in the middle of the volcano's caldera. There's barely
enough room for all three of them, and Chris and Sheva are forced to
go on the defensive. It takes all they've got just to keep Wesker from
throwing them into the lava below.

Finally, Chris sees an opening and puts a high-caliber round into

the nacelle on Wesker's chest. Wesker staggers, and Chris leaps on
Wesker's back, grabbing the Uroboros-spawned pustules and physically
ripping them away from the nacelle. He screams for Sheva to shoot it,
even if that means shooting Chris as well.

Instead, Sheva draws her knife and comes in swinging. Both she and
Chris are drenched in yellowish blood as Sheva stabs Wesker repeatedly,
with Wesker struggling against Chris's grip. Wesker finally manages to
knock her away, but Chris drives his own knife into the nacelle.

Wesker staggers backward. The rock crumbles underneath his feet, and
Wesker is suddenly up to his waist in lava. He screams in agony.

Suddenly, a helicopter arrives, piloted by Josh Stone. Jill is in

the back, and pushes a rope ladder down for Sheva and Chris. Sheva
grabs it immediately, but Chris, watching Wesker sink into the lava,
almost doesn't get to it in time. He leaps and grabs the last rung
on the ladder just as the rock he was standing on disappears into
the lava flow.

Sheva and Chris haul themselves into the helicopter. No one says
anything... except Wesker. With his one surviving arm, he lashes
out; the tentacles extend to an enormous extent and latch onto one
of the helicopter's landing struts.

Jill quickly points to a pair of RPGs stored in the helicopter's

passenger cabin, and hands them to Sheva and Chris. They sight in
on Wesker's face, and simultaneously fire.

The rockets hit Wesker squarely, exploding and sending a geyser of

lava flying into the air. His grip on the helicopter is severed,
and Wesker disappears underneath the surface of the molten rock.

Josh gets some altitude and heads for home base. Chris slumps over
in the back of the helicopter, and looks from Sheva to Jill. When he
started this trip, Chris thinks, he was wondering if it was all worth
fighting for anymore. Now, as Josh flies the helicopter into the rising
sun, Chris decides that it is.

=========================
16iii. LOST IN NIGHTMARES
=========================

Three years ago, Jill picks the lock on the entrance to one
of Ozwell Spencer's palatial estates in continental Europe.
A tip has come through from an informant that Spencer is
holed up here, and it's Chris's hope that Spencer can lead
them to Wesker. The BSAA has scanned the region by satellite,
but there's no sign of unusual activity.

The lobby of the mansion is disturbingly similar to the one

in the Raccoon forest, and there's drying blood smeared
across the floor. As Chris climbs the stairs, a recently dead
man in a gray suit falls from the balcony above him. There are
several more dead men strewn across the second floor, as if
they'd fallen guarding a certain door; they all died from broken
necks or blunt trauma. The door in question is tightly shut,
and its electronic lock has shorted out.

Throwing a lever on the back of the main stairs unlocks

security gates on the second floor. One leads to the
balcony above the estate's dining room, where Chris finds
the first volume of a memoir written by Spencer's butler.
The butler's family has been in service to Spencer's family
for generations, and he's in awe of Spencer's influence and
family fortune, but Spencer is now an old man in rapidly
failing health with no heirs. Chris takes a slip of paper
out of the book, on which a password is written.

Upstairs from the dining room, Jill plays a classical piece

on a grand piano, which opens one of Spencer's trademark secret
doors. Behind it, Chris finds an emblem with an engraving of a
centaur. Another volume of the butler's memoirs is on a shelf
near the piano, where the butler talks about experiments
that he's helped Spencer perform in recent days. While he
has serious moral misgivings, the butler has administered an
unspecified virus to several prisoners kept in the basement.

On the east side of the first floor, the centaur emblem opens
a previously locked door. This again leads to an oddly familiar
hallway. It's eerily quiet as Chris and Jill walk towards the
east wing.

Here, they find Spencer's study, which Spencer himself abandoned

a long time ago. His own memoirs are among the countless books
kept on the shelves. Spencer writes bitterly that his long-held
plan, of being the new god-emperor of mankind, is being foiled
by simple old age. He's kept alive only by the machines that are
hooked up to his body, and his legs no longer work. His only hope
of ever achieving his dreams now rests with "Alex," a brilliant
child that Spencer has set up with a research facility on an
island in the South Seas. It's Spencer's hope that Alex can somehow
derive a chemical means of immortality from the T-Virus, and he's
given Alex absolutely everything he could have asked for in order
to achieve that goal.

Unfortunately, Spencer learned nothing from his patronage of

Albert Wesker. After submitting a single progress report over the
course of a month, followed by a request for more test subjects,
Alex vanished off the face of the planet along with his data and
his research staff. Spencer is dying, and there's not a damned
thing he can do about it anymore. He's forced to act through his
butler Patrick, carrying on his own limited experiments.
Down the hall from the study, Chris and Jill find an old storage
room. When they singe a piece of heat-sensitive paper in the dining
room's fireplace, it turns out to reveal the last part of a password.
That password, when used on the computer in Spencer's study, opens
a secret door. It also reveals the final volume of Patrick's memoir.

Spencer had initially retreated to this estate, using Patrick to

cover up any and all evidence that he was there, for reasons that
he never shared with Patrick. Unexpectedly, he employed Patrick
to leak news of Spencer's location to Wesker, which Patrick did by
paying off a man who sounds a lot like Ricardo Irving. Spencer then
dismissed Patrick from his service, and with a heavy heart, Patrick
left the estate behind forever.

Additionally, Chris finds an odd list of thirteen names on the

computer. The twelfth is Alex; the thirteenth is Albert.

Entering the secret room triggers a typically Spencer-esque trap,

and Jill is stuck inside a locked room with a spiked ceiling. As it
slowly descends, Chris searches the mansion for a way to shut the
trap off. Jill manages to shoot through a window and knock the lock
off a previously-barred door, and Chris finds the trap's controls
just behind it. All of this was apparently to prevent them from
opening a safe, which contains a crank, suitable for opening a
gated door on the first floor of the mansion.

Using it, Chris and Jill are able to reach the mansion's basement.
The mansion was well-maintained and modern, but the basement is like
a medieval dungeon, littered with decomposing corpses.

It's not long before Chris and Jill start running across Spencer's
test subjects. Some are barely distinguishable from simple zombies,
and are able to do little more than lie on the floor and twitch.
Others have become monstrous, wielding an enormous maul and leaking
toxins from massive tumorlike growths on their backs.

After scrounging up two halves of a crest to open a gate in the

basement, Chris and Jill jog through it and promptly fall through
a splintered wooden bridge.

They come to in separate parts of a watery catacomb, haunted by

more of Spencer's monsters, and both of them have lost their
weapons in the fall. They're forced to improvise. Several ancient
deadfall traps are strewn throughout the area, but the necessary
parts to activate them are kept in chests nearby. Jill primes
each trap in turn while Chris lures Spencer's monsters into them,
crushing them underneath tons of concrete. Each is carrying an
object which they need to open the way out.

When they escape, Chris and Jill are on a narrow staircase that
leads up onto the second floor of the mansion. Several members
of Spencer's staff lie dead on the floor at the top of the stairs,
and two of them are carrying handguns that they never had the
chance to fire. Chris and Jill arm themselves, then silently
approach the double doors at the end of the hall.

Inside, they find Wesker, who's standing over Spencer's dead body.
A short-lived, one-sided fight ensues, which ends when Jill tackles
Wesker out the window.

======================
16iv. DESPERATE ESCAPE
======================

Jill sends Chris and Sheva after Wesker, then takes two steps
away from the elevator and passes out. The next thing she knows,
she's being shaken awake by a man that she doesn't recognize.

He introduces himself as Captain Josh Stone from the BSAA, and

belatedly recognizes her. He offers Jill the chance to escape with
him, aboard the helicopter that's coming to pick him up, and she
gratefully accepts.

The nearest helipad is on the other side of Tricell's manufacturing

facility, which is well-fortified by Majini. Jill and Josh scrounge
up a few extra weapons and blast through the opposition. Without
her implant, Jill has lost much of her superhuman strength and
agility, but retains her training.

Along the way, Josh contacts Doug, the man piloting his helicopter,
to inform him of the change of plans. Doug starts heading their
way, pausing occasionally to flirt with Jill over the radio.

Jill changes her mind about halfway through the facility. She
realizes she has to get to the communications tower and get in
touch with Chris. Fortunately, the helipad is just beyond the
comms tower, so she and Josh are still heading the same way.

With Josh's help, Jill reaches the comms tower and contacts
Chris via his PDA, telling him about Wesker's serum. The signal
is weak, but she manages to get the important information to him
before getting disconnected.

Shortly thereafter, Jill and Josh reach the helipad. As they

come out of the elevator, it locks behind them and a small army
of Majini surrounds them. Jill and Josh fight a desperate holding
action, killing dozens of Majini, but more are never far behind.

Doug finally arrives, a bit later than he'd intended, and lands
his helicopter. As she's heading towards it, a near-miss from an
anti-tank weapon knocks Jill sprawling. Josh picks her up and
drags her towards the helicopter. Doug jumps out of the pilot's
seat, grabs a rifle, and covers their retreat, mowing down the
Majini with precise headshots.

Unseen by any of them, a distant Majini sights in on Doug with

a laser-guided anti-tank missile. As Josh drops Jill off in the
helicopter, he shouts out for Doug to break off contact, but it's
too late. Josh turns around just in time to see the rocket fire,
which hits Doug and explodes. Doug's empty helmet rolls to a stop
by the helicopter.

Josh punches the side of the helicopter and curses bitterly,

then jumps into the pilot's seat himself. Jill has gotten back
on her feet in the meantime, and at his suggestion, grabs a
spare rifle from the arsenal in the back. As the distant Majini
sights in on the helicopter, Jill carefully aims and puts a
bullet directly into his forehead. The Stinger still fires,
but Josh is able to dodge the rocket.

As they fly towards their meeting with Chris and Sheva, Jill
compliments Josh on his flying. Josh says sadly that Doug
could have done it better, and that he was his friend. That
said, if Josh and Jill don't meet up with Chris and Sheva,
Doug's sacrifice--and the sacrifice of all the fallen members
of the BSAA--will have been for nothing.

======================================
16v. Conclusions About the Conclusion
======================================

1. Chris Redfield, Sheva Alomar, Jill Valentine, and Josh

Stone have survived.

2. Ricardo Irving, Excella Gionne, Don DeChant, Ozwell Spencer,

Kirk Morrison, almost two full squads of BSAA operatives, Doug
the pilot, and most of the inhabitants of the Kijuju Autonomous
Zone have died.

(The only civilian survivor we know of is Adam, a miner in Kijuju

on a work visa, and even he's part of the game's viral marketing
campaign. As far as the game's concerned, the KAZ may have been
wiped out.)

3. Helicopter pilots remain the unluckiest people in the world.

4. Albert Wesker appears to be dead. He is, however, Wesker.

Current word from the top is that Wesker is in fact really
dead, but I have some lingering doubts.

5. While most of the survivors of Spencer's "Wesker Project"

have died, several are still unaccounted for, and they would
have been forced to make contact with Spencer at some point
in their lives. At least one, Alex, was being funded directly
by Spencer at one point, and there are at least eleven others
whose current statuses are unknown.

6. The Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance remains intact,

although it's lost quite a number of personnel from its
West African branch.

7. Umbrella is still gone. Tricell, on the other hand, is

still kicking, and it has access to a great deal of Umbrella's
research on the T-Virus. On the other hand, it's taken heavy
losses and now has the BSAA's attention.

8. Jill Valentine is flat-out immune to the T-Virus, and

the resulting antibodies give her a substantial resistance
against other related bioweapons. She's also heavily resistant
to the Uroboros.

=======================
16vi. Random Commentary
=======================

1. If RE5 had come out before RE4, it'd look better. RE5's
biggest problem as a game is that it doesn't have Mikami's
utter lunacy behind it, so it eventually devolves into a bunch
of shootouts. The inventory system's also a step backward. It's
entertaining enough on its own merits, but it really suffers
in comparison to its predecessor.

2. Ricardo Irving is noteworthy for being the single largest

mutated human in the series up to this point, although Javier
Hidalgo trumps him in DSC, and for achieving that enormous size
in less time than anyone else. There must have been a pod of
crocodiles or a mass grave or something in the river.

3. The butler's memoirs in "Lost in Nightmares" mention an

"Asian spy" that he got in touch with in order to leak Spencer's
location to Wesker. Chris then says in the main game that a
"confidential informant" told the BSAA where they could find
Spencer. Presumably Ada, playing both sides against the middle
again, is that informant.

4. We're told in the main-menu files that "most" of the hundreds

of Wesker children died after being administered the virus. In
"Lost in Nightmares," we find a list of thirteen names, presumably
those of the surviving Weskers. Spencer's record as a complete
monster remains unblemished.

5. There are two conspicuous survivors of Spencer's purge of the

high-level Umbrella employees. One, Henning P., is listed as
"imprisoned." The other, Jenny K., could not be located. Since
the list Chris finds in the ship's bridge lists Spencer himself
as deceased, the list is clearly maintained by Excella or Wesker,
which means at least two high-ranked Umbrella employees are still
in play.

6. If you wait around in the village at the start of the game for
a couple of minutes, there's an interesting conversation between
Chris and Sheva that highlights his newfound cynicism.

7. The primary cinematic influence of RE5 is _Black Hawk Down_,

as the directors have mentioned in interviews.
-- Wesker throwing his sunglasses at Chris is taken almost
directly from the 1998 Mark Dacascos film _Drive_.
-- The unlockable Hydra triple-barreled shotgun is very similar
to Reggie's homemade sawed-off from the _Phantasm_ movies.

==================================================================
17. RESIDENT EVIL: DARKSIDE CHRONICLES
==================================================================

Darkside Chronicles, like Umbrella Chronicles, is a light-gun

shooter for the Nintendo Wii. Released in 2009, it consists of three
separate scenarios. Two are adaptations of past RE games, while
the third is an original story featuring Leon Kennedy and Jack
Krauser, undertaking a mission in 2002 South America.

The adaptations of RE2 and RE:CV take the form of a story told
to Krauser by Leon. Because of that, and because they differ
markedly from the past games, it can be safely assumed that if
a given event differs markedly from the way it's told in a past
game, it's because Leon's an unreliable narrator.
Unlike RE:UC, DSC focuses as much on horror and atmosphere as action.
It often does so through shifting perspectives, and over the course
of the game, characters are often knocked over, dazed, or running
around in a panic.

===============================
17i. Operation Javier, Part One
===============================

In 2002, Leon Kennedy and Jack Krauser are new acquaintances

on their first mission together. Krauser has distinguished himself
as a SOCOM operative, while Leon's a 24-year-old rookie. Leon has
the edge on fighting BOWs, however, which Krauser has never
encountered and doesn't really believe in.

Together, they hike through the jungle towards the village of

Mixcoatl. Their mission is to find a local crimelord named
Javier Hidalgo, the head of a crime cartel called the Sacred
Snakes. Hidalgo has recently disappeared, but beforehand, they
have learned that he'd attempted to approach Umbrella.

Leon and Krauser have a guide waiting for them in Mixcoatl who
can show them to Hidalgo's hideout in Amparo, but the moment they
set foot in the village, they know something's wrong. It appears
to be deserted. The nearest fence is covered in missing-persons
posters, and Krauser says aloud that the village smells like death.

He's right, as zombies soon come out of the alleyways at them. Most
are villagers, but a few are wearing fatigues. Krauser spots tattoos
on the latter which identify them as members of the Sacred Snakes.
He and Leon scramble through the village in a search for their guide,
fighting when they have to and avoiding what they can. Along the
way, they fight off a pair of giant spiders, which represent Krauser's
first encounter with a BOW.

The village is built on the water, and as they get out into a narrow
lane through a selection of huts, they notice the water level's
rising. Someone, probably Javier, has opened the gates on the dam
located upstream, which has taken out the bridge. Worse, they notice
a couple of bodies in the water being devoured by a school of infected
piranha, which jump out of the water at them. Leon and Krauser take a
detour through one of the nearest huts.

By the time they reach their guide, it's already too late. He's
heavily injured, and tells them about a girl who "brought devils
to this village." She escaped from Javier's mansion with the guide's
help, but he dies before he can tell Leon and Krauser what happened
next. Krauser theorizes that this may have something to do with the
Sacred Snakes' involvement in black-market organ trafficking. They
decide that they're going to have to find the girl.

With no better options, Leon suggests that they head to the nearby
church, where they ought to be able to find a boat. They walk a few
steps away, and the guide's body is suddenly sucked into the water
by something with tentacles. Worse, as they're staring at where the
body used to be, a Gamma Hunter drops to the floor and attacks.

More Hunters, zombies, and undead piranha attack as Leon and Krauser
head towards the church, but worse, something massive jumps out over
the dock and nearly takes them both into the water with it. It
looks like it may be the creature that took the guide's body, but
for now, it only makes one attempt at them.

As Leon and Krauser enter the church, they hear singing. It's coming
from a young woman, who's clearly local. She's wearing a torn and
bloodstained white dress, its skirt burned off to well above her knees,
and her right arm is wrapped in bandages almost to the shoulder. When
she notices they're there, she turns her head and passes out without
another word.

A second later, the creature from the water emerges inside the church
for another attempt. Seen in full, it's bigger than either of them,
waving a mass of thin tentacles and standing on two massive legs, like
a cross between a frog, a cricket, and a small truck. Its body is soft
enough that their gunfire both hurts and enrages it, but its sheer size
forces them to retreat outside. This works to its advantage, since it
can swim through the water around the church a lot faster than it can
walk or run, but Leon's able to drive it off by shooting at the weakened
roof on the church. Its spire breaks off and falls on the monster, which
retreats into the water.

With it gone, Krauser and Leon take shelter in the church, near the
unconscious girl, and Krauser demands answers. Leon has fought BOWs
before, Krauser says, so it's time Leon tells him everything.

=============================
17ii. Memories of a Lost City
=============================

At Krauser's request, Leon tells him about his one and only day as
a police officer. He drove into Raccoon City only to find it was
overrun by zombies, and met Claire Redfield shortly thereafter.

Like "Mansion Incident" in RE:UC, "Memories of a Lost City" is an

accelerated retelling of RE2. Leon and Claire remain side by side,

meeting the same characters, and take a path that blends the A and
B scenarios together. They chase Sherry, meet Ada and Annette,
watch Chief Irons die, and fight both Mr. X and William Birkin.
Leon goes on to tell Krauser that Claire set out on her own to find
Chris, and that he and Sherry were "rescued" by government agents.

The scene shifts to Leon, held inside a cell in a detention camp

somewhere. An interrogator has a camera pointed at him, and tells
Leon over a PA system that they have the authority to do whatever
they want to him and Sherry. Leon says that she's innocent, but the
agent retorts that she's an innocent who carries antibodies to the
G-Virus. They're taking very good care of her.

The bottom line, the interrogator says, is that Leon's gained the
experience they're looking for. If he wants this to end peacefully
for him, Leon has one choice: come to work for the US government.
He accepts their offer.

=================================
17iii. Operation Javier, Part Two
=================================
Krauser takes in Leon's story without comment. Leon says he knows there
are significant differences between Raccoon City and the current outbreak.
Some of the BOWs that they've fought so far are the kind of that are
deliberately controlled, like the Hunters, which means this wasn't any
kind of accident.

They take the boat from the church and head upstream. As they travel,
the girl wakes up suddenly. Leon assures her that she doesn't have to
worry, but she remains quiet and skittish. In accented English, she asks
what happened to the people in the village. Without turning around,
Krauser says, "They're all dead."

The girl is disturbed by the news, but Leon keeps talking. He tells
her they're Americans on a mission, looking for another American who'd
contacted Javier, and asks if the girl can take them to Amparo, where
Javier is. She nods.

She leads them to a massive aqueduct built across the river, where she
claims to have escaped from, and a water channel that should lead them
straight to where they want to go. They get out of the boat and Leon
asks for her name. She says it's Manuela.

The channel's discharge tunnel is infested with piranha and a few stray
zombies. A new, skeletal BOW attacks simultaneously, which can climb
and jump with surprising speed. Its codename, they'll learn later, is
the Anubis, a new model meant to replace the Hunter, and it's created
through surgically modifying a large breed of bat.

They escape from a fresh wave of zombies through a side tunnel, and
Manuela claims that when she passed through the area earlier, she didn't
see any of the monsters. She also asks why they want to find Javier.
Krauser replies that after seeing the traps he set, she should know
that someone like that shouldn't be allowed to walk free.

Manuela leads them through the hallways and up a staircase, with Leon
and Krauser dealing with fresh waves of zombies, Anubises, Gamma
Hunters, and giant spiders as they go. Manuela continues to express
mild interest in why they want to find Javier, but is evasive about
why, and leads them to an elevator. It takes them back to the drainage
tunnels, where an attack by piranha knocks Manuela into the water.
The current sweeps her downstream, and Leon and Krauser give chase.
They're able to catch her, but a sudden zombie attack separates them
as they reach one of the dam's machine rooms.

As they polish off the zombies, Manuela comes staggering out from
behind a running turbine, singing and clutching her bandaged arm.
Krauser asks what she's thinking, and she says it's something her
mother used to do when Manuela was scared.

Javier's voice comes from over the dam facility's PA system, calling
Manuela's name. He asks her to come home. Manuela says "Father!" and
runs away from Leon and Krauser, who give chase. They find her a
short distance away, standing in another drainage tunnel and staring
at Javier Hidalgo.

He's there in person, standing on the other side of the flow, and claims
that he's done "all of this" for Manuela. She needs only to follow his
directions for the next fifteen years, and that will "prevent the
transformation." The man who gave them the Veronica virus said that
this would work.

His mention of the virus distracts Leon for a few crucial seconds, and
Manuela is seized by one of Javier's men. He brandishes a pistol at Leon
and Krauser, and Javier continues his speech. The Americans, he says to
Manuela, cannot save her. Only he can.

A nearby water gate opens, and both Leon and Krauser are swept away by
the deluge. Manuela suddenly breaks free from the man holding her and
dives into the current after them. Javier cries her name in shock.

=======================
17iii. Game of Oblivion
=======================

The game then shifts into a retelling of Code Veronica, beginning

with the moment where Claire meets Steve. In Leon's version of events,
Claire is much more sarcastic and aggressive, at least at first, and
Steve is nervous, constantly cracking lame jokes, and gradually becomes
suicidally overconfident as they make progress. Alfred also receives
an upgrade, becoming genuinely threatening as opposed to incompetent;
Wesker's presence in the game is much more subtle; and Alexia goes
full-tilt lunatic.

==================================
17iv. Operation Javier, Part Three
==================================

If Manuela's infected with the T-Veronica virus, Leon thinks, it could

spread throughout the region. The question is then how she's managed to
control it without transforming into a monster like Steve Burnside did.

While he's been telling this story, he and Krauser have been catching their
breath in one of the dam's drainage cisterns. About forty seconds later,
they're jumped by piranha, zombies, and Hunters, and the running gunfight
starts all over again.

In a darkened side tunnel, Krauser and Leon discuss Manuela. Their briefing
had no indication that Javier had children, and Krauser reminds Leon that
they're there for him, not Manuela. Leon agrees, and they continue shooting
their way through the dam. After wandering through the interior for a while,
they realize that the water level's rising, and bringing more piranha with
it. Javier's trying to either flush them out or kill them. They end up back
at the machine room they passed through before, but the room beyond it is
flooded. They're going to have to drain it somehow.

Manuela suddenly catches back up to them, ecstatic that Leon's still alive.
Leon's surprised that she's not still with her father, and she says that
she ran away. Leon tries to tactfully ask what it is that Javier's done to
her, but right then, the door to the next room begins to give way under the
water pressure. Manuela ducks underneath a nearby set of pipes to reach the
drainage system while Leon and Krauser cover her.

She's turning the last valve when Javier's voice comes back over the PA
system. He's spotted her, and orders his men to bring her back; "otherwise,
it will be too late." The door to the drainage ditch gets pounded in a
few seconds later, right as the water's drained from the next room. Leon,
Krauser, and Manuela escape into the aqueduct next door just in time.
They climb a ladder and get to an elevator, spotting a new monster on
their way up. This one is vaguely bipedal and insectoid, with four arms
that all end in a mantis-like claw; it's an experimental BOW produced
by one of Umbrella's competitors, codenamed the Jabberwock. It isn't
able to catch up to them before they make it into the elevator.

It takes them up to an exterior staircase on the dam, where several Ivies

try and fail to block their passage. The stairs bring them up to the top
of the dam, where the Jabberwock they saw before suddenly jumps them.

It's smart enough to guard its face from their gunfire, and marches towards
them with slow, deliberate steps. They mow it down with focused fire, but
as it turns out, it's just the forerunner, and two more jump in immediately.

Once the coast is clear, Leon turns to Manuela and asks her why she's
running away from Javier. She hesitates, and he presses onward; why did
Javier infect her with T-Veronica, and what does he mean by "too late"?

Manuela looks out over the river and says she shouldn't even be standing
there, "given the circumstances." She unwraps the bandages around her
right arm and reveals that it's badly infected and looks gangrenous.
As part of her "treatment," she was injected with the T-Veronica virus.

When she was fifteen, Manuela was diagnosed with a fatal disease, which
had also killed her mother. (In-game, Manuela just calls this an "illness."
The Javier's Memorandum file indicates that her mother had cancer.) Her
doctor claimed it was incurable, and that it only appeared in the region
in which they lived. Hidalgo contacted Umbrella and used the T-Veronica
virus as a form of treatment. It allowed Manuela to recover, but as Leon
notes, the T-Veronica virus has a number of side effects that even the
Ashfords hadn't been able to eliminate. Whatever Javier's doctors were
doing to Manuela, it's allowed her to keep her basic humanity.

They move deeper into the jungle, and as Leon's scouting out the area
ahead of them, Krauser approaches him. He's of the opinion that they
should kill Manuela now before she becomes a larger threat. Leon disagrees;
he'd like to know what Javier's done to keep Manuela from transforming,
and that's going to require Manuela's presence.

Leon produces a PDA from his pocket and hands it to Krauser. It

displays a document, and Krauser recognizes the attached protocol.
Leon's on a special assignment under Presidential authority, and as
he explains to Krauser, his mission is to eradicate the T-Veronica
virus once and for all. For that, he'll need Krauser's help. Krauser
decides that he's on Leon's side, and they shake hands.

Together, they enter an isolated compound. Javier's voice blares from

its PA system, expressing his gratitude that the two "g�eros" (Spanish;
a person with fair complexion) have returned his daughter to him. He
then gives the order for his men to attack.

Javier's first wave consists of the zombified corpses of his Sacred

Snakes, many of which are wearing helmets or strapped with grenades.
He releases them against Leon and Krauser from inside large shipping
containers scattered around the camp, along with a few Gamma Hunters.
Badly outnumbered, Leon and Krauser have to flee into an underground area.

It turns out to be a cellblock, where every cell is occupied by zombies.

After killing them all, they search for a way out, and Manuela finds a
secret passage in the wall. The dark area beyond it is lined floor to
ceiling with bones, an ossuary for Javier's victims.

The exit leads them into a second cellblock, with similar inhabitants.
Javier tries to shut the gates and trap them inside, but they're able
to duck underneath the closest one before it closes.

After climbing a ladder, they come up in the atrium of a luxurious

Spanish estate. It's currently littered with corpses, who Manuela
recognizes instantly as her doctors. She made them tell her how they
were treating her illness, which drove Javier into a rage.

The estate's now only occupied by BOWs and zombies. Krauser wonders
out loud where Javier could be, and Manuela hesitantly suggests the
one room in the house where she was never allowed to go. Leon asks her
to take them there.

She opens the door into the estate's botanical garden, where the plants
have been heavily mutated by exposure to the T-Veronica virus. After a
fight with another Jabberwock, Krauser glances down to see a dead man
on the floor. It's the Umbrella researcher that he'd wanted to question.

The centerpiece of the garden is a massive mutated bulb plant. After

a tense trip along an observation catwalk that takes them straight past
the bulb, they get to the other side of the garden and its elevator.

They disembark and end up in a maintenance corridor, which leads to a

large storeroom where Javier kept the Sacred Snakes' stock of BOWs,
many of which have been released. After an intense fight, they notice
they're standing next to a section of the storeroom that's been walled
off with hung sheets of plastic, and Leon decides to investigate.

The interior is a makeshift operating theater. The walls are lined with
shelves, which hold large jars full of what Krauser recognizes as
human organs. Leon finds a large packing freezer nearby, which is used
to store the corpses of dozens of women, hung like sides of meat. He
recognizes the one closest to the door from one of the posters back in
Mixcoatl, and realizes they've found all those missing persons.

Manuela hits the floor, retching and clutching at her arm. Leon rushes
to her side, and from nearby, Javier says calmly that her organs
must be transplanted regularly.

He steps through the plastic sheeting and, as if it's not that big of
a deal, explains that the frequent transplants help her cope with the
pain from her infection. He was told by the late Umbrella employee,
however, that it's "only" for the first fifteen years.

"If you had just let me die," Manuela tells him, "none of this would
have ever happened." Javier is dismayed; he couldn't do that. This has
made her a predator, and as he sees it, a successful predator can only
grow stronger and thrive. This infuriates Leon.

As a favor, Javier says, he'll let Leon and Krauser's death have some
meaning. He takes a few big steps back, and above them, they can hear
a metal gate open. The creature from the village crashes down into the
middle of the storeroom, and as it attacks, Javier slips away.
After exchanging a few blows, the creature retreats to the higher floors
of the storeroom and fires jets of acid and needle-like spikes at Leon
and Krauser. Since their previous encounter, the creature's mutated
further, and large parts of its outer shell are now nearly impenetrable.
Grenades and explosives are useless. They're forced to stick to small
arms, firing when the creature opens its mouth or exposes the large
opening on the back of its head.

The fight continues, neither side able to get the upper hand, when
the creature suddenly turns away from them. Manuela has emerged from
the operating theater and is singing, just as she did in the village.
The creature stops in its tracks and stares at her, right up until
Manuela clutches her arm and drops to her knees. She explains that
she learned in the village that, as long as she's singing, the creature
won't attack her. That was why she was singing when Leon and Krauser
found her in the church.

She's barely finished the explanation when the creature realizes she
isn't singing any longer, and instantly goes back on the offensive. Leon
and Krauser duck for cover, climbing awkwardly up into the storeroom's
rafters. The creature can still hit them with its gouts of acid, but
this gives them a clear shot at the opening on its back, and they
bring it down.

They drop back down to the floor and look for Javier, who's taken the
opportunity to escape. As they run for the door after him, a flying
spike hits the floor by Krauser's feet. The creature isn't as dead as
it looked, and as Krauser turns to fire, it launches a second spike
that hits his left arm, above the elbow. Leon shouts his name, and
together, he and Krauser empty their clips into the softer parts of
the monster's body.

The creature isn't quite dead yet, but instead of attacking, one of
its tentacles gently brushes against Manuela's outstretched hand.
She meets its eyes and says, "Mother?" The light in its eyes goes
out, and it sheds a single tear. The creature was once her mother
Hilda, mutated into a monster by the same T-Veronica "therapy"
that Javier used on Manuela, and like Steve Burnside, she's able to
regain some of her humanity as she dies.

Upstairs, Javier's destination is the botanical garden. He looks at

a nearby statue of a woman holding a baby and says aloud that he
should've done this sooner. He drops his gun and steps in front of
the mutated bulb, his arms spread wide. It opens slowly and leans
down to swallow him whole.

Back in the storeroom, the wound on Krauser's arm has already turned
an angry black, with the infection visibly moving along his veins.
They've lost track of Hidalgo, and Leon concludes they need some
air support. As they head for the door, the ground shakes suddenly,
and with a quake and a shower of pulverized concrete, a massive
mutated plant punches through the ceiling, dropping to the floor
behind them.

It showers them with corrosive ichor and tries to crush them into
the ground with its sheer bulk, but before long the plant withdraws,
leaving a chunk of itself dead on the floor. Krauser suggests that
they fall back and regroup, and Leon agrees. Manuela notices the
creature's entrance has torn open a steel shutter near where it
entered the basement.

Whatever's going on upstairs, it feels like it's causing a major

earthquake. The shutter leads them into an old mine tunnel, which
connects to one of the cellblocks they passed through before. A
massive tendril chases them back outside, to the fortified area
outside Javier's estate.

The creature that rises up out of the ruins of the botanical garden
looks like a particularly plantlike breed of spider, and is one of
the single largest BOWs Leon has ever seen. It roars in Javier's
voice, and Leon realizes that's where he went: to voluntarily give
himself to the mutated plant he's been cultivating in his garden.
The resulting creature, the V-Complex, invites Manuela to join with
it, so it can take away all her pain.

The fight begins simply, with the V-Complex swatting at Leon and
Krauser with its limbs. One ends in a massive pulsating organ, which
the V-Complex uses as a mace. It's slow and predictable, but their
combined gunfire can't do much against the V-Complex's sheer bulk.
It can't kill them; they can't kill it.

Nearby, Manuela comes to a realization. The pain from her infected

arm is how she knows she's still human. If she were to join with the
V-Complex, the pain would go away. Manuela decides that she'd rather
die as a human than live as a monster, and breaks into a run towards
the V-Complex.

Leon, caught while he's reloading, realizes what Manuela's trying to

do and runs after her. As its limb comes down to crush her, Leon grabs
Manuela's hand and pulls her away in the nick of time. They go rolling
to a stop, Leon on top of Manuela, and the V-Complex readies one of its
sharper limbs to impale them both.

Manuela sits up suddenly and yanks the bandage off her arm. It flares
with sudden light as her blood catches fire, and she holds it up, using
the power of the T-Veronica virus to manifest a sustained, white-hot
blast of flame. The V-Complex's limb is instantly incinerated, leaving
her and Leon covered in ashes, but alive.

She stands up and shakes her arm, putting out the fire. Manuela turns
to Leon and says wonderingly, "I'm still here." She was able to use
the virus's power without losing herself in the process.

The fight begins again. Manuela uses her blood to throw massive gouts
of fire at the V-Complex, incinerating its joints and limiting its
movement. The V-Complex reacts by stepping up its game, sending shoots
into the ground to emerge from behind Leon and Krauser and generating
shells from its underbelly that are filled with an explosive gas.

After they manage to break both its legs, Javier calls them fools.
The creature's skull ruptures, revealing a central core that still
slightly resembles Javier's face, and he breaks into insane laughter.
Everything the V-Complex devours increases its power, and when it's
injured, it'll just regenerate and be all the stronger for it.

In making that boast, however, Javier has officially stopped trying to

fight the T-Veronica virus's influence, and like every other infectee,
he goes berserk. The V-Complex begins to lash out wildly with its
surviving limbs, and spews gouts of toxic slime from its mouth.

Manuela continues to attack the V-Complex with blasts of flame, while

Leon and Krauser dodge its tentacles and keep up their own assault.
In the end, Javier's last act is to beg them to kill him, and Leon
obliges with a long burst of gunfire to the V-Complex's core. It
finally goes down, its body shuddering and red blood spurting from
Javier's corpse. A moment after it stops moving, it quietly bursts
into flames, burning until its entire mass is consumed.

=======================================
17v. A Summary of the Conclusion of
RESIDENT EVIL: DARKSIDE CHRONICLES
=======================================

As they're evacuated from South America by helicopter, Manuela sits

in the open door next to Leon. She thinks she should've died right
alongside her father, but Leon talks her out of it. She's got a
responsibility to all those girls who died so she could live.

Leon wonders to himself why Manuela never lost her conscience. It

could've been genetic, he thinks, or maybe something to do with the
environment she was in.

Krauser is quiet, clutching his injury. He's thinking about this

"Wesker" that Leon's mentioned, and wondering if he could help
Krauser regain the use of his arm. He doesn't know that Wesker's
not that far away, and has been watching them through binoculars.

To Krauser, Leon's inspirational speech to Manuela just seems cruel.

Instead of encouraging her to look towards the future, and the whole
new life she's got ahead of her, he's telling Manuela about her duties
and obligations. He and Leon make eye contact, and Krauser thinks that
he and Leon are simply different sides of the same coin.

When they return to the United States, Manuela is put in government

custody for observation, but she does not mutate any further.

=======================
17vi. Different Endings
=======================

If you take more than ten minutes to defeat the V-Complex, Manuela
loses too much blood during the fight and dies in the helicopter.
She thanks Leon, her body begins to glow brightly, and she turns
into a cloud of glowing ash.

If you manage to kill the V-Complex within ten minutes, Manuela doesn't
have to expend a lethal amount of blood on fighting it and she survives.
Leon narrates that after they got back from their mission, Krauser's arm
never healed and he was discharged from the service. He disappeared
shortly thereafter, and no one knows where he went.

Getting the "good ending" also unlocks the Krauser Side Missions,
which are technically chapters 6 and 7 of "Operation Javier." These
are much harder versions of levels 4 and 5 with additional dialogue
from Krauser.

If you can clear chapters 6 and 7, you also unlock a different

version of the good ending, where you get a soliloquy from Krauser
instead of Leon's musing on viruses and the human soul. This is
what's listed in the plot summary, as Leon is embarrassing when he
tries to be profound.

=======================================
17vii. Conclusions About the Conclusion
=======================================

1. Leon Kennedy and Jack Krauser have survived.

2. Manuela Hidalgo may have survived, depending on which

ending is canon. It's probably safe to assume that the
"Wesker Ending" is the right one, but it's hard to say
for sure. If she's alive, then as Leon tells it, she's in
the custody of the U.S. government and is in good health.

3. Hilda Hidalgo, the population of Mixcoatl Village, and

most if not all the members of the Sacred Snakes cartel are
dead. Javier Hidalgo is extremely dead.

4. Leon's recruitment to government service took the

form of an offer he couldn't refuse, although he seems
to have made his peace with it.

5. Sherry Birkin was taken into government custody

following RE2, due to her containing antibodies to
the G-Virus. This invalidates the last remaining bit of
the original Wesker's Report.

6. There's been a major T-Veronica outbreak in the South

American jungle. Combined with the sinking of the Spencer
Rain and the Raccoon City outbreak, the T-Virus has been
introduced into most of the planetary biosphere.

7. The T-Veronica still requires a substantial period of

adjustment after infection, or it drives its hosts crazy
and turns them into monsters. Alexia's plan was to stay in
cryogenic storage for fifteen years, but Javier has come up
with an alternate plan that actually does seem to work. Just
kidnap several dozen people of roughly the same age, gender,
and body type as the carrier, harvest their organs, then
install them in the virus host as needed.

...it's possible that the "cryogenic storage" plan may remain

the more popular of the two.

=========================
17viii. Random Commentary
=========================

1. Like RE:UC, RE:DSC's narration is that of somebody telling

a story. In this case, it's Leon telling Krauser about the
events of RE2 and RE:CV. As noted above, and as with the
RE0, RE, and RE3 scenarios in RE:UC, the many differences
therein can be chalked up to Leon being an unreliable narrator.
At this point, I'm not considering either of the Chronicles
games as any kind of retcon.
2. The circumstances of Leon's recruitment add a weird
dimension to his character that wasn't there before. His
RE3 epilogue made it look like he was cajoled into it; in
DSC, he's recruited with an implicit threat.

3. I can't really recommend DSC and it's mostly because of the

near-constant $&%@ing shakycam. Good lord, it's annoying.

It's kind of a shame, because "Game of Oblivion" is the only

retelling in the Chronicles series that's actually better than
its source material. It manages to retell CV in a way that's both
more straightforward and considerably creepier without jettisoning
a major plot element to do it. About all it's lacking is Rodrigo,
and I like the character, but he's a footnote.

4. I think my favorite thing about this game is emptying the

bowgun into bosses. Stage 1 Alexia's particularly awesome, because
then she's sitting there trying to act all smug when she has about
sixty arrows sticking out of her face.

5. Leon's hidden superpower is the ability to make female

supporting characters instantly fall in love with him.
By the time you get past "Game of Oblivion," Manuela is doing
the best she can to pretend Krauser doesn't exist. Helena
Harper might be in trouble.

6. It may be a coincidence, but the abduction of the women of Mixcoatl

is reminiscent of the "feminicidio," an infamous series of hundreds of
murders in and around the Mexican city of Ciudad Juarez. Look it up if
you want, but I'll warn you now that the feminicidio is scarier than
anything in these games, and all the moreso because it's real. If it's
a deliberate parallel, RE:DSC would be one of several works of fiction
in the 2000s that dealt with it.

==============================
18. RESIDENT EVIL: REVELATIONS
==============================

Revelations is one of two RE games to appear on Nintendo's 3DS

handheld system, alongside the plotless Mercenaries 3D. It represents
a shift back to survival horror after RE4 and RE5, using the same MT
Framework engine but focusing once again on atmosphere and difficulty.

In 2005, the BSAA is two years old and is strictly intended as an

advisory organization. Revelations is the story of how and why it
became an international paramilitary force. It features one of the
most convoluted plots in the entire series, as well as some of the
tougher bosses.

The Tokyo Game Show 2011 trailer for Revelations is a three-minute

cutscene that sets the stage for the start of the game. I've included
a summary of its events.

=============
18i. Prologue
=============

Two dead men lie on the floor of a ship's bridge. One is still twitching,
and both are surrounded by dropped glass tubes of the sort used to hold
virus samples. A third man stands nearby, holding a pistol and wearing a
gas mask, and it seems likely that he's just killed at least one of them.
He picks up one of the vials, twists off its end, and injects its contents
into the dead men. They soon start to get back up.

Below decks, a blonde woman wearing a wetsuit unzipped to the waist is

undertaking her part of an unnamed mission. She's anxious to get off "this
godforsaken ship," but notices something strange nearby: an open ventilation
shaft drips with blue-green slime.

The woman is suddenly jumped by a new brand of bioweapon: humanoid creatures

the same color as the slime, which shrug off bullets and can move quickly
through small spaces. They seem like they're mostly liquid, except for the
spikes growing from their forearms or the lamprey-like tentacle that emerges
from their heads. Once she's out of ammunition, the woman panics and runs
for her life, but the monsters are everywhere.

6:08 PM: It's been ninety-four minutes since Chris Redfield dropped
off the BSAA's radar. His last known coordinates place him in the
middle of the Mediterranean Sea.

Jill Valentine and her new partner, Parker Luciani, take a tugboat out
to investigate. They're both surprised to find a massive ocean liner named
the Queen Zenobia. At Jill's suggestion, Parker circles the Zenobia until
they find a boarding point, then get onto the Zenobia's deck with ziplines.

The only door into the ship has been chained shut. Jill shoots off the
padlock and opens it to find an old storeroom, full of rust and mold.
The ship's interior looks like it's been abandoned for some time, but
there's a relatively fresh corpse in the storeroom, dead by evisceration.

Something moves just out of sight as Jill opens the next door, disappearing
into an open ventilation shaft. It leaves behind a trail of slime on the edges
of the vent, and Jill realizes that she and Parker aren't alone.

As they descend belowdecks, the duct overhead shakes and dents, as if

something is scrambling through it ahead of them. At the base of the stairs,
Jill finds an elevator without power and, shortly thereafter, a fresh human
corpse hanging out of the overhead ducts. The dead man wears a bright orange
safety vest. One arm has been gnawed to the bone, and the other has begun to
swell grotesquely.

The creature in the ducts continues to run away from them. As they give
chase, Jill and Parker find fresh blood on the floor and hastily erected
barricades across several of the doors along the hall. The Zenobia may
be abandoned, but something happened here very recently.

The only usable door in the hall leads to an employee break room. The
power's still on, but the only light comes from the display on a
vending machine. Most of the furniture's been piled up against the
doors, and when Jill approaches the nearby fusebox, a few rats jump
out at her. They've been nibbling on the wiring, and it's shorted out.

A door on the far wall leads to a kitchen, where another corpse is sprawled
across the closest table with its face smashed in. Jill notices something
gleaming underneath a drain in the floor, and as Parker lifts the grate
for her, she scans the object with a handheld device. Carefully, she lifts
the object out of the muck, bringing a foul stench up with it. It's a pistol,
with its former owner's hand still clinging to it, but it's not Chris's.
As Jill stands up, the creature in the ductwork drops to the floor behind
her. It's another of the blue-green monsters that attacked the blonde woman.
It attacks her and Parker, and they shoot it dead. As it falls to the floor,
Parker notes that this explains where the Zenobia's crew has gone.

==================================
18ii. Episode 1: Into the Depths
==================================

A newscaster, standing on a sunny beach on the shores of the Mediterreanean

Sea, introduces a segment about Terragrigia, a sustainable "aquapolis" built
on a man-made island. The city was entirely solar-powered with the help of
an orbiting satellite, and was built with the latest green technologies.

A terrorist organization called Veltro opposed the development of Terragrigia,

and in 2004, they released both a virus and a number of bioweapons into the
city. (The newscaster says "several." What she means is "hundreds.") Footage
is shown of people on the streets of Terragrigia fleeing from Hunters.

The American-based Federal Bioterror Commission, or FBC, stepped in at this

point. Its commissioner, Morgan Lansdale, organized the effort to contain the
attack. The BSAA also sent its commander, Clive O'Brian, in an advisory role.
In the end, the outbreak was contained by Terragrigia's destruction, as
Lansdale used its solar collectors to fry the city with concentrated sunlight.

The event has, in the year since it occurred, come to be known as the
"Terragrigia Panic," and is one of the most destructive terrorist attacks
in human history. In the days after the Panic, the FBC announced that they
had successfully disbanded Veltro. Terragrigia itself is still off-limits
to the public, sealed away behind fences put up by the FBC.

3:50 PM: Clive O'Brian stands on the same shore as the newscaster. The
ruins of Terragrigia are visible on the horizon, as is a brewing storm.

As he and Jill arrive on the beach, Parker calls out a greeting to O'Brian,
surprised that he's "[joining] the fray." O'Brian laughs it off, claiming
that he was told he needed more exercise, and tells Parker and Jill that
the FBC has cordoned off the entire area. A number of strange carcasses
have washed up on the shore, and O'Brian wants the BSAA to investigate.

The carcasses in question are massive pink chunks of biomass, like sponges.
Both Jill and Parker have come equipped with a new kind of scanner,
called the Genesis, and use it to collect data on the corpses for O'Brian.
The Genesis also reveals that one of the sponges has a metallic object
stuck underneath it, which turns out to be a small red vial of the sort
used to store viral samples. Jill digs it out and hands it to O'Brian
for further analysis.

A couple of the corpses aren't as dead as they look. They shuffle along the
beach at her and Parker, rearing up to attack with the giant fanged maws on
their stomachs, and Jill reacts by firing her pistol into their mouths until
they drop over dead. This amuses Parker, who says this kind of thing must be
easy for her after Raccoon City. Jill brushes it off and asks him why he's
left the FBC for the BSAA. Parker claims it's because he wanted to fight.

Jill collects data from the corpses and brings it back to O'Brian. It's obvious
by then that the creatures were mutated through exposure to some virus or
another, and that they somehow managed to wash up on the shore despite the
FBC's blockade around Terragrigia.

O'Brian gets a phone call, and claims it's the BSAA's emergency line. He
takes it, hears something that surprises him, and tells the caller that
they'll "have to speed things up." After hanging up, he tells Jill and Parker
that the BSAA has lost contact with Chris and Jessica.

Jill pulls out her PDA. Chris and Jessica's last known location is labeled
on a satellite map, and she's surprised to see where; the last she knew,
Chris and Jessica were in Finland looking for leads on Veltro, but the data
puts them out at sea. O'Brian says he'll return to the BSAA's headquarters
to handle the search and rescue, and orders Jill and Parker to head out
after Chris.

6:20 PM: As they examine the dead "Ooze" in the Zenobia's kitchen, Parker
wonders aloud if it's already gotten to Chris and Jessica. He then hurriedly
points out that he's not saying that Chris is dead. Jill, exasperated, says
that they'd better just find him.

Nearby, they hear a heavy clang, like that of a deadbolt being thrown, and
Jill volunteers to check it out. The nearest door leads down another set of
stairs, and at the first landing, she finds a heavy steel door with an
observation slot. Inside, she sees a shirtless, muscular man handcuffed to
a chair with his back to the door, and it looks a lot like Chris. Jill calls
his name, but he doesn't respond and the door is locked. Worse, it's a tough
enough lock that she'll need the actual key to open it.

The closest door leads to one of the Zenobia's stairwells. Part of the
lower landing has collapsed, preventing her from descending deeper into
the ship, but she can go up a floor to the hallway outside the ship's
barracks. The area's barricaded, just as it is below, and the only things
around are more Oozes, which can hide almost anywhere.

She finds two more doors, both locked, before going deeper into the ship.
As Jill goes downstairs, she hears a woman's scream from somewhere ahead
of her and rushes to investigate. On the other side of a pane of safety
glass, two of the Oozes have cornered the blonde woman. One of them holds
her up by her neck and throws her into the window. Blood sprays, and she
crumples to the floor.

Jill bursts into the room a few seconds later and kills both the Oozes
as they feed on the woman's corpse. She reports in to Parker and searches
the woman's body. There's nothing to tell Jill who the dead woman was,
but she's holding a key.

Jill takes it and goes back upstairs to meet with Parker. The dead woman's
key unlocks the door to the room where she spotted Chris, but when they enter,
it turns out that "Chris" is a mannequin. Parker looks to the side and sees
the far wall is covered with a flag bearing the logo of Veltro. A moment
later, the door locks and gas floods the room. The last thing Jill sees
before she passes out is a man in black fatigues and a gas mask, who tells
her that it's "time [she] learned the truth."

================================
18iii. Episode 2: Double Mystery
================================

6:42 PM: Chris Redfield and Jessica Sherawat hike through the mountains
of Finland, Jessica complaining as she goes: her feet hurt, Chris is going
too fast, and they're so deep in the mountains that she can't report to HQ.
Chris brushes it off; they've got a source that says there's a Veltro camp
in these mountains, and it's close by.

A cargo plane flies overhead a few minutes later, its engines on fire,
and crashes on the other side of the next hill. There aren't any aerial
shipping lanes in the area, which Chris takes as proof that their source
was accurate.

They run to investigate the crash site. At first glance, there are no
survivors, and the entire plane is strewn across the face of the mountain.
The wreckage contains a number of heavy-duty cages, which have burst open
from the impact, and two small lockers labeled with biohazard symbols,
both of which contain large tissue samples similar to what Jill and Parker
found on the Mediterranean shore. The only corpse Chris finds in the crash
is a man in combat gear, who falls out of the cockpit when Chris opens the
door. There's a flight plan on his body that indicates the plane's eventual
destination, Valkoinen M�kki Airport (Finnish for "white cabin"), which
Chris figures they can reach by going through a nearby mine tunnel.

The mine has some scattered furniture and supplies set up, suggesting
it's been used as shelter recently. It's also now home to a large pack
of bioweaponized timber wolves, escapees from the plane crash. Chris
and Jessica take them out and keep going, Jessica asking Chris pointed
questions about Jill Valentine as they go. Chris, confused why she'd
bring Jill up now, tells her to stay focused; he takes her questions
as insecurity, with Jessica comparing herself to his previous partner.
He claims that he trusts Jessica just as much as he trusts Jill, but
doesn't notice the edge of jealousy that's crept into Jessica's voice.

The mine tunnel eventually leads them to a high cliff that overlooks
Valkoinen M�kki Airport. As Jessica views the area through binoculars,
BSAA HQ contacts Chris via radio. The interference has suddenly cleared up.

Chris reports his location, and Clive O'Brian, back at BSAA headquarters,
curses, saying "It's all a setup." O'Brian's intel was faulty, and he's
sent Jill and Parker to the wrong place entirely.

Before he can explain to Chris, Jessica speaks up. She's spotted a Veltro
flag on one of the towers at the airport, which means the rumors are true:
Veltro is on its way back. Chris doesn't care about that, though. He tells
O'Brian that he and Jessica will go after Jill and Parker.

8:32 PM: Jill wakes up. Her weapons are gone and she's locked inside one
of the Zenobia's guest cabins, which would be luxurious if they weren't
trashed. She still has her radio, and Parker contacts her; he's in a similar
state, and neither of them are able to reach BSAA HQ. Jill scrounges up a
screwdriver from her suite's bathroom and uses it to break out.

When she gets outside, Jill heads towards the Zenobia's main dining
room. The halls are crawling with Oozes, but without weapons, all she
can do is dodge and run. Fortunately, when she finds Parker, he's found
the storeroom where their captor locked up their gear, and together,
they're able to break down the door.

Now that they're armed, Jill decides their next move should be reporting
in to headquarters. Parker suggests they head to the bridge and give it
a try from there, so they set out in that direction. Almost all of the
doors that would get them off this deck of the ship are locked, but one
near Jill's cabin is simply chained shut. They return there and shoot off
the lock. Beyond it, they find an elevator that takes them straight where
they want to go.

The hallway outside the bridge is messy and abandoned, like it was
evacuated in a hurry, and the bridge itself has been sabotaged very
recently. The wiring is still smoldering. They can't contact HQ with
the ship's radio and they can't steer the ship. The Zenobia's adrift.

An explosion from outside catches their attention. They get to the

window right in time to watch their boat explode and sink. They start
to rush out of the room, but someone comes in from behind Jill and tries
to catch her in a chokehold. Jill kicks him in the face and gets away,
while Parker holds the man at gunpoint. Instead of surrendering, the man
pulls out a pistol of his own, and Parker fires.

=================================
18iv. Episode 3: Ghosts of Veltro
=================================

The game flashes back to 2004, near the end of the Terragrigia Panic.

Parker and Jessica are agents of the FBC, waiting in the FBC's
Terragrigia command center for orders from Morgan Lansdale. The
only other operative in the room is a red-haired cadet, the same
person from the Queen Zenobia's bridge, with a painful wound on his
left thigh that he's trying to pretend doesn't bother him. Parker
does his best to stay optimistic, but Jessica's just about had it.
As far as she can tell, she says, this is over and the city's finished.

Lansdale's on the phone, and tells whoever's on the other end that
"this is a wake-up call that was long overdue. Good work." He hangs
up and turns to Parker and Jessica. Their facility has been breached,
Lansdale says, and it's time to evacuate. Parker and Jessica are
ordered to hold the line, keeping the BOWs back until everyone
else can reach the building's helipad. O'Brian, as the last member
of the BSAA who's still in the city, enters the room to register his
objections to Lansdale's plan, on the basis that what he wants to do
will both destroy evidence and create maybe as many as a dozen other
organizations just like Veltro. The objection seems to amuse Lansdale,
who retorts that people like the members of Veltro are what keep people
like him and O'Brian in business.

The cadet, Raymond, goes with Lansdale to ensure that he and O'Brian
reach the building's helipad. With that settled, Parker and Jessica
enter the building's lobby. They fight a desperate holding action
against an obscene number of Hunters, which pile into the building in
packs of two or three. They aren't quite as vicious or durable as the
original Umbrella model, but they're still Hunters and there are a lot
of them. Parker and Jessica hold the line against them, and eventually,
it's their turn to evacuate.

The Hunters give chase, climbing up the exterior of the building.

Parker and Jessica make small talk as the elevator goes up; Jessica
seems to be in better spirits now that they're fighting instead of
waiting, and tells Parker that he now owes her dinner. She's interrupted
when something above them explodes and the elevator stops, forcing them
to find another route up.
They're now on the third floor of the building, in what was once
an office space, and which bears signs of an unsuccessful attempt to
hold the Hunters back. There's a lot of blood, but no bodies.

During a lull in the fighting, they discuss Clive O'Brian. They agree
that O'Brian's probably on the right side of things, and shouldn't be
deferring to Lansdale as much as he is. "...being in the FBC," Parker
says, "distorts your moral compass."

They manage to reach the building's stairwell and take them up to

the sixth floor, emerging in a cubicle farm. Parker pries open an
emergency shutter, and they duck underneath it right as a fresh
wave of Hunters surges through the hall. When they reach the last
elevator, they have to turn and fight once again as they wait for
the car to come back down from the roof.

Parker and Jessica make it through and ride the elevator up to

the helipad. As they catch their breath, they discuss Morgan's
decision; by the next morning, Terragrigia will be wiped off the
face of the earth just as Raccoon City was, nothing more than a
name in a history book. Jessica's bravado gives out, and she asks
Parker, "We did do everything we could, right?" His answer is that
he hopes so.

In the end, Parker and Jessica make it onto the second-to-last

helicopter to leave Terragrigia. They watch from the air as the
retasked satellite focuses an intense beam of light on the city.
Banks of solar panels begin to crack and explode; the sudden heat
shatters windows and buckles the highways; Hunters in the street
are vaporized, like paper in fire. The skyscrapers collapse, falling
against each other, and Terragrigia sinks into the sea.

Parker and Jessica watch it go. Both of them had come to the city
to help, and in the end, Jessica says, they did nothing.

The game returns to the present day. Parker's gunshot has missed
by a couple of inches, and Parker lowers his gun. He recognizes the
man who tried to grab Jill as Raymond Vester, the cadet he met during
the Panic, who's now a full agent in the FBC. They point their guns
at each other and Parker demands answers, but Raymond dismisses
him; the BSAA has no authority, he says, and Parker doesn't know
why he's on the ship or who he's fighting. Contemptuously, Raymond
lowers his gun and walks away.

When he's gone, Jill and Parker decide that the only way they're
going to get any answers at this point is to keep searching the
ship. Their first stop is the captain's quarters and briefing
room underneath the bridge, where they find another unpowered
elevator, a key with an insignia that matches several locked doors
they've seen elsewhere in the ship, a map of the ship's interior,
and the captain himself, who seems to have been killed by or
during the process of mutating into an Ooze.

Jill also finds a dossier on the history of the Queen Zenobia, which
was repurposed as a luxury liner in the late '80s. Unsurprisingly,
given the layout of the guest cabins and the system of labeled keys the
ship uses for security, she discovers the Zenobia was constructed based
upon a set of blueprints that George Trevor left behind before his
disappearance in the 1960s. The ship's interior's faint resemblance to
the Spencer mansion is not a coincidence.

The map indicates that, with their new key, Jill and Parker can backtrack
through the cabins to reach the ship's emergency communications room.
Parker also says he wants to find Raymond. Jill asks how they know each
other, and Parker says that they used to work together.

As they move back through the ship, notes and documents left behind
by the crew begin to paint a picture of what happened. The exterior
and top decks of the ship make it look like it's been abandoned for
a while, but the deeper into it they go, the better maintained it is.
The Zenobia appears to have been fully crewed within very recent memory.

By the time Jill and Parker return to the dining room on the cabin
level, the Oozes have begun to change things up. In addition to the
standard model, some have mutated a sort of organic crossbow, letting
them fire bone quills from a distance. Others attack with a pair of
massive spiked claws.

Jill's new key allows them to raise a security shutter in the dining
room, which lets them open an elaborate airlock. It leads to a massive
ballroom, which is almost untouched.

When they reach the emergency communications room, it's locked down
with another security shutter. There's a handwritten note on the
wall next to it, from the Zenobia's communications officer to any
surviving crew members to happen across it. He says that he's got
the key, and he's going to go hole up on the promenade deck.

The entrance to that deck is on the lowest level of the ballroom.

The moment Jill and Parker set foot through it, though, they can hear
the communications officer's voice. In a phlegmatic wheeze, he
continually repeats the beginning of the same distress call, as if
he remembers he's supposed to do it but not exactly how.

Jill and Parker lift up a partially-ajar emergency shutter and go

to find the room where the voice is coming from: a padlocked closet
at the back of a storeroom, with something inside struggling to
break out. They've searched everywhere else and haven't found the
key, so without any other choice, Jill shoots the lock off the door.

The communications officer is inside, and he's caught a much stronger

dose of whatever's mutated the rest of the crew. He's both slower and
stronger than the Oozes, and where they have clubs or claws, one
of his arms has evolved into something like a four-foot-wide rotary
bandsaw. Worse, his appearance is a wakeup call for the Oozes in the
area, and they come running out of the open vents.

The officer has left extensive barricades in place from his own fight
against the Oozes, complete with ammunition caches and a couple of
strategically placed gas canisters. It takes most of the ammunition
that Jill and Parker have found on their way through the ship, but
they finally manage to kill the officer. With a final "Mayday," he
collapses into a bloody pool on the floor, and Jill is able to fish
the key they need out of the muck.

That key also opens a locked door on the west side of the promenade,
behind which is another elevator. Jill bypasses its security lock,
and they're able to take it back up to the bridge. Once again, they
go back through the luxury cabins, and open the shutter with the
communications officer's key.

When they open the door, Raymond Vester is already there. He turns
to face them, and says that they're both too late. The emergency
radio has been sabotaged, just as the one on the bridge was.

One of the monitors lights up shortly thereafter, showing the man

in the gas mask that Jill saw earlier. He faces the camera and,
for no obvious reason, recites from Canto XXXIII of Dante's "Inferno."

At BSAA headquarters, Clive O'Brian and his team are watching the
same video. The poetry recital abruptly ceases, and the masked man
pulls out a vial. It is the T-Abyss virus, he says, and Veltro is
poised to use it to infect one-fifth of the world's oceans.

He empties the vial into a large aquarium full of docile fish. The
moment the red tint from the virus hits them, the fish shake and
begin to dash around the aquarium. Seconds later, they may as well
be another species.

The man peels off his mask to reveal his face: a square-jawed white
guy with glasses. "We are Veltro," he claims, "vengeful messengers
from the depths of the Inferno."

Chris and Jessica are also watching his broadcast, on a laptop from
their helicopter in the Mediterranean. Chris radios O'Brian and tells
him to send a team to the Valkoinen M�kki Airport, in hopes that there's
information about the ship there. O'Brian agrees and turns to two
of the BSAA agents in the command center with him: Keith Lumley and
Quint Cetcham. Despite their complaints, he orders them to suit up
and depart for Finland. Meanwhile, Chris and Jessica search the
Mediterranean for the Zenobia.

=====================================
18v. Episode 4: A Nightmare Revisited
=====================================

9:28 PM: Parker and Raymond watch the Veltro broadcast, which angers
them both. Raymond mutters to himself that they "killed these bastards
already." Dryly, Jill retorts that it looks like they missed a few,
"and they're on this ship."

Raymond says cryptically that Veltro are after the "truth about
Terragrigia... and vengeance," right before he leaves the room.
After he's gone, Parker looks over the communication console and
points out that the ship's systems are currently running on
emergency power. If they can get the main power system working
again, it may let them get the ship's communications back online.

When they walk out into the ballroom, Raymond is waiting for them.
He gives Jill a key to the casino, which should let them reach the
ship's engine room through the bilges. Raymond also asks if they've
seen anyone else from the FBC, as he doesn't seem to be able to
reach his partner Rachael. The last time he saw her, she was heading
to the bilges herself.

The casino's dark when they get there, but it's easy enough to
find the circuit breaker. The VIP lounge is locked down by means
of an elaborate game, but a staffer has left a note nearby that
mentions the game has a "cheat code"; if a certain amount of
weight is placed on the game's scale, the door always opens.
Jill scrounges up some coins and does so.

An open hatch in the floor of the VIP lounge leads them down
through the bowels of the ship, where they find a freight
elevator that should take them to the engine room. Once they're
there, they find that the elevator requires a key, and it's missing.
Parker stays behind to search the area, while Jill goes off on
her own.

Another security bypass lets Jill reactivate an elevator, which

carries her back up to the crew level. As she leaves the elevator,
she radios Parker: she hopes she's wrong, but she figures Rachael
is the dead woman she saw earlier.

As she passes by the room where the fake "Chris" was being kept,
Jill checks it out again. After dispatching a particularly dramatic
Ooze, she finds an unsigned set of instructions. It's a plan of attack
for capturing and ultimately misleading "our two targets," without
engaging or firing upon them. It also mentions "spy props," meant
to be used to "sow confusion."

Jill passes back through the crew quarters, dealing with a few
more Oozes. Suddenly, a woman's voice whispers from somewhere
close by: "Found you."

The woman's body is gone when Jill returns. All that's left is
a leather-bound notebook in a pool of dried blood. It's unsigned,
but it's been used to leave a final journal entry. The author
claims she was forced to go on a mission aboard the Zenobia,
which was used as the base of operations for Veltro a year ago
during the Terragrigia Panic. She's even found the Unmanned
Aerial Vehicle that Veltro used to drop the virus into the city.

After completing the first step of her mission, however, the

agent was attacked by a monster and lost an eye. Worse, she was
infected; she feels terrible and her arms are changing before
her eyes. Her last legible entry is simple: "need doctor bad".
The rest of the book is ruined by bloodstains.

When Jill looks up from the notebook, Rachael is standing on

the other side of the window. Her right arm and leg are both
heavily infected, her right hand's little more than a bone
claw, and she's covered in her own blood. "Found you," she says
again, and limps back toward the stairs.

After giving Parker a status update, Jill chases after Rachael.

She immediately finds out that Rachael's actually the one
chasing her, as she pours herself out of one of the open ducts
and staggers towards Jill. She seems to be almost immune to gunfire,
but after she's shot a couple of dozen times, Rachael whimpers and
limps away, diving back into the relative safety of the ducts.

Jill plays cat and mouse with Rachael throughout the crew level.
Like the other Oozes, Rachael can come out of nowhere, slithering
through the ship's ventilation system, and she's fond of ambushes.
Jill finally knocks Rachael down and takes the lift key off her body.
Unfortunately, Rachael's body doesn't dissolve the way the other
Oozes do, and as Jill takes the lift back down to the freight
elevator, she can hear Rachael's voice hissing at her from overhead.

==================================
18vi. Episode 5: Secrets Uncovered
==================================

Quint and Keith arrive at Valkoinen M�kki Airport, both complaining

about the cold. They report in to O'Brian, and then to one of the
BSAA agents guarding the area. The latter tells Keith that they
haven't found a thing yet, but they're getting ready to bust into
an underground chamber inside the airport. Quint immediately
volunteers for the job, ignoring the guard's protests that they
haven't gotten authorization yet, and Keith follows him inside.

The underground chamber's almost as cold, and utterly vacant.

There are large sprays of fresh blood across the walls and floor,
and the last two doors on the level are locked down. Keith borrows
Quint's screwdriver and uses it to bypass one of the doors' locks,
which turns out to lead to the airport's security station.

While he's releasing the lock on the next door, Keith and Quint
also gain access to the station's security feeds. They quickly
find a recording of a plane taking off from the airport, which
Quint recognizes from the timestamp as the plane that Chris and
Jessica saw crash in the nearby mountains. As it's taxing down
the runway, several Hunters suddenly appear, attacking nearby
armed guards and leaping onto the plane. One jumps on the wing
and damages the nearest engine to the point where it catches
fire. Quint says soberly that the people aboard the plane never
had a chance.

Another piece of footage is taken from the base they're in

at the moment, as something the camera can't see knocks over
several objects in the exterior hallway. A few minutes later,
in a large meeting room they haven't seen yet, a single Veltro
operative comes out of an elevator and visibly catches his breath.
He hears something and brings his rifle up, but the same invisible
creature from the hallway grabs him by the leg. To Quint and Keith,
it's as if the man's throat tears itself out, and his corpse throws
itself at the security camera. As the body falls to the ground,
something falls out of its pocket.

The door they just unlocked leads to the same meeting room from
the security feed. The dead man lies on the floor, his corpse
covered in terrible wounds. Keith pulls out his Genesis scanner
and uses it to sort through the wreckage until he finds what the
dead man dropped: a USB security token. Keith hands it to Quint,
who says he can use it to get some data out of the downed plane's
onboard systems.

10:25 PM: Jill and Parker ride the freight elevator all the way
down into the Zenobia's engine room. They immediately discover
a new problem: the ship is leaking, and most of the engine room
is waist-deep in water. Jill finds a local control room, where
the automatic systems inform her that the bilge is leaking;
however, the bulkheads cannot be lowered to stop the leak until
the ship's main power system is restored.
Just to cap it all off, they also find that the engine room is
inhabited by a new species of aquatic mutant, which likes to
hide just below the water level before leaping out at them.
They're joined by the occasional Ooze as well as a few of the
T-Abyss-mutated fish, which makes going anywhere in the water
a hazardous proposition. One bit of luck comes when Jill finds
a few stashes of specialized grenades, which emit a powerful
electric shock upon detonation.

Turning the power back on gets complicated, mostly due to some

inconvenient steam jets and the late members of the ship's crew
finding a cute hiding place for the restart key, but Jill figures
it out. Once she and Parker reactivate the main power, however,
both the exit doors to the engine room bolt themselves shut.
An alarm klaxon goes off, and overhead pipes open, filling the
room with a deluge of seawater.

Back at BSAA headquarters, Clive O'Brian is on the phone with

Quint and Keith, who are reporting in from the crash site. After
telling them that neither Jill or Parker have contacted HQ yet,
he orders them to find a computer terminal at the crash site so
they can use the security token.

Quint runs on ahead of Keith, leaving him to deal with another

pack of Veltro's brand of undead dogs. As Keith catches up, he's
right in time to see Quint go sprawling into the snow, knocked
over by what he claims is the "invisible man." It is actually the
first of a pack of a new breed of Hunters, capable of nearly perfect
camouflage. Keith uses the Genesis to penetrate their invisibility.

When it seems like it's safe, Keith guards Quint as they move
forward to investigate the crash site. They pry a chunk of
wreckage away from the fuselage, and find a surviving computer
terminal in what looks like the passenger section of the plane.
Quint sets to work. He finds a set of coordinates immediately,
which he thinks may be those of the Zenobia, and calls them in.

As Quint explains to Keith, it's as if Veltro was searching for

their own ship; he didn't have to do much of anything, because
there's a routine running on the terminal that's specifically
looking for the Zenobia. They have no idea who they're actually
up against, Quint says, but he now knows that it's not Veltro.

===============================
18vii. Episode 6: Cat and Mouse
===============================

After receiving the coordinates from Quint, Chris and Jessica's

helicopter drops them off on the ship's helipad. This puts
them on the top deck, and Chris begins his search by taking the
elevator down to the promenade level.

It's completely infested with a nearly endless number of Oozes,

and in the end, he and Jessica just have to make a run for it,
smashing through the Oozes' line and heading to the ship's ballroom.
As they enter, Quint checks in with them via radio; while he's
temporarily flustered when he realizes he's talking to Jessica,
he suggests that they check the ship's engine room. Chris agrees,
and he and Jessica head towards the casino.

When they get inside, the door to the VIP lounge is jammed, and
there's a dangerous rattling coming from the office. Jessica
points it out, right before the door comes off its hinges. The
communications officer on the Zenobia was not unique, and two
more of his breed of Ooze, Scagdeads, come into the casino.

One of them is holding the last of the four keys needed to navigate
the ship. Chris takes it off the Scagdead's corpse and uses it to
open a door in the casino's office, which leads them along an alternate
route towards the freight elevator. This takes them through a couple
of heavily infested storerooms, where they encounter a new kind of
T-Abyss mutant, one that's not much more than a big pocket of explosive
gas on awkward legs. Low on ammunition, Chris and Jessica manage to
punch through them and get to the freight elevator.

As they ride it down, the water level in the bilges is close to the
ceiling. Parker is yelling for help, to anyone who could possibly
hear him. Jill clings to a nearby rail, telling him not to give up.

The bilges are full of multiple kinds of Oozes from the moment
Chris and Jessica burst in. They mow them down and finally reach
the engine room, Quint yelling at them to hurry.

Chris pushes open the door... and it's empty. No Jill, no Parker,
no water. As he and Jessica wander around the room, Chris wonders
aloud where Jill went.

He doesn't see an illuminated map on the wall above him, indicating

he's in the engine room of the Queen Samiramis. They're on the
wrong ship.

11:43 PM: At this point, the bilges of the Queen Zenobia have
flooded completely. There's an air pocket near the ceiling, which
is enough to keep Parker and Jill alive, but that's all.

Jill dives below the surface, looking for
pipes have detached from the walls, lying
engine room, and she grabs them. Near the
a grate that leads to a ventilation shaft
ceiling, and Jill's able to use the pipes
Parker swim up through it to safety.
a way out. A couple of
on the floor of the
top of the bilge, there's
along the engine room's
to pry it open. She and

They take a minute to catch their breath, then drop down through
the vent. They land in the passageway outside the engine room,
right near the control center. The power's back, and they're able
to use it to close the bulkheads and keep the ship from taking
on any more water. When Jill looks, though, the real problem
with the ship's communications seems to be that the antenna on
the observation deck is out. All they can do is head up to it
and see if it can be repaired.

As Jill and Parker ride the freight elevator back up, Chris
is on the Semiramis's helipad. His chopper's landed nearby and
he's reported in to HQ; he and Jessica have just figured out
what went wrong. O'Brian relays word from Quint that Chris is
currently on the Zenobia's sister ship, and that it's likely
the two ships were traveling together up until a few hours ago.
From the freight elevator, Jill and Parker go back through the
casino. Reactivating the power has also turned the glass-walled
elevators in the ballroom back on, and they get into one. Very
shortly thereafter, the car jolts, the glass shatters, and they
realize something's landed on the roof.

They can only see part of it at any given time. It reaches down
from the roof of the elevator car to swat at them with something
like a turtle shell at the end of a limb, or occasionally peeks at
them with what might be its face. There's a shock of black hair on
it that suggests that it might have once been human, but mostly, it
looks like it was assembled by committee from mollusks. While it's
perched on the roof, the elevator refuses to move. Jill blasts the
monster with her shotgun until it withdraws.

The elevator takes them the rest of the way to the observation deck,
where several old popcorn stands sit in a semicircle in the center
of the room. The creature drops through the ceiling almost immediately.

Seen in full, it has a lot in common with a turtle, and is half-covered

in dense, bulletproof shells. Its favored method of attack is a full-on
charge, dragging its limbs behind it. It's not quite strong enough to
burst through the windows, and after a charge, it takes time to recover.
When it stops, Jill and Parker bombard its softer parts with gunfire,
whittling it down, and let it run headlong into the old gas canisters
that the popcorn stands used as fuel. It eventually collapses, and when
it hits the ground, does so with such an earth-shaking thud that the
access hatch to the roof breaks open.

Jill and Parker climb up to the observation deck, where they find a
keycard marked with the Veltro symbol and an open journal. It's written
by Bernard Corti, a member of Veltro, with the last entry dated twelve
hours before the start of the Terragrigia Panic. Corti's a true believer
in Veltro's aims, to "bring hell to the people" and force them to reject
the decadent society they've built. He speaks highly of their leader,
Jack Norman, and of the "grizzled financier" who arranged it so they
could use the Queen Zenobia as a floating base of operations. What's
more interesting, though, is his casual mention of a secret lab in the
Zenobia's bilge.

The keycard opens a door that leads out onto the observation deck's
exterior walkway. Jill follows it around to the comms antenna, and
uses her screwdriver to pry off its access panel. After some rewiring,
she manages to get the antenna working again, and they're finally
able to raise O'Brian on the radio.

O'Brian tells them that the whole thing was a setup, and he fell for
it. This leads Jill to the natural follow-up question: "How do you know?"
He doesn't answer.

In O'Brian's office at BSAA headquarters, as Parker demands that O'Brian

answer the question, a call comes in from a BSAA staffer via O'Brian's
terminal. The European Security Force is calling to inform him that the
satellite that sank Terragrigia has been reactivated. Apparently, O'Brian
says out loud, somebody's found the Zenobia. He looks down at his desk,
to a hardcover copy of Dante's Divine Comedy and a framed photograph of
himself with Morgan Lansdale. "You haven't changed a bit," O'Brian says.
He gets back in touch with Parker and Jill to tell them that all hell's
about to break loose. The Queen Zenobia is about to be destroyed via
satellite. Jill wonders aloud how they can just ignore the ultimatum
that Veltro gave them, but Parker's more direct and demands an evac.

"Sorry," O'Brian says, "but I can't authorize that."

==================================
18viii. Episode 7: The Regia Solis
==================================

O'Brian expounds: there isn't enough time for a successful rescue

operation, even though Chris is on his way. He'll do what he can
to stop the attack, O'Brian says, and signs off. Parker curses, as
this may have become the worst day of his life.

They get a call from Quint shortly thereafter, who suggests that
they may be able to confuse the satellite's targeting system. He
sets to work on a way to do that while Jill and Parker get back
inside the ship.

Jill calls the elevator from the observation deck and they ride
it back down to the ballroom. By the time they get out, Quint has
a plan. As Rachael's diary said, Veltro's old UAV from the Panic
is still aboard the Zenobia, parked on the foredeck. If they launch
the UAV and deploy its chaff, it may force the satellite strike to
miss the ship.

The keycard they found on the observation deck can open a number
of doors they've seen throughout the ship, including a couple on
the deck above the bridge. Jill and Parker go back through the
luxury cabins one more time towards the elevator, fighting off
another wave of Oozes and, more disturbingly, a second appearance
from Rachael. She jumps them in the ship's library, pursuing them
right up until the elevator doors close.

Once they reach the foredeck, it's being patrolled by a large pack
of Hunters. Jill and Parker eliminate them and find the UAV in a
metal shipping container on the Zenobia's helipad.

1:07 AM: Morgan Lansdale's at FBC headquarters when Clive O'Brian

calls him on his private line. O'Brian tries to be chatty, saying
that they haven't spoken in at least a year, but Lansdale cuts him
off: "...you're too late."

1:08 AM: Jill finishes setting up the UAV. Quint calls again to tell
them that the drone's controls are in the ship's hold.

Back at FBC headquarters, O'Brian asks Lansdale why he's deploying

the Regia Solis. "What's got you spooked?" Lansdale doesn't answer.
He uses a handprint scanner, which grants him access to the targeting
system for the Terragrigia satellite. "The time has come, O'Brian,"
Lansdale says, and quotes the inscription above the door to Hell in
the Divine Comedy: "Abandon hope, all ye who enter here." He pushes
a button, and a countdown begins.

Quint radios Jill and Parker; they've got a few minutes, if that,
before the Solis finishes charging. As they fight their way across
the exterior of the ship, they can already feel a distinct increase
in the ambient temperature.

The ship's hold is a killing floor. A bunch of mismatched shipping

crates have turned it into a maze, riddled with traps planted by a
Scagdead and guarded by a number of missile-firing Oozes. Worse,
Rachael makes a return appearance. Jill ducks and weaves through
them, and reaches the control room for the UAV with seconds left
on Quint's estimate.

The UAV launches away from the Zenobia, leaving a glittering trail
of chaff as it goes. Jill, Parker, and Morgan Lansdale all watch
their respective terminals as the Solis fires, and the trail of
chaff ignites briefly before the UAV itself is destroyed by the
Solis's beam. The satellite strike ends up missing the Zenobia
itself by maybe as little as half a mile.

In so doing, it instantly flash-boils a massive amount of water.

The effect is to create a massive tidal wave, taller than the Queen
Zenobia itself, which rolls over the ship.

================================
18ix. Episode 8: All on the Line
================================

1:17 AM: Lansdale is still on the phone with O'Brian, who's taken
his call using his computer terminal in his office. Lansdale stresses
that "immediate containment is imperative," accusing O'Brian of being
blinded, "a humanist with no cause." All loose ends can do is make
the situation worse. O'Brian invites Lansdale to cut the bullshit,
and their conversation ends.

In the hold of the Zenobia, the ship tilts dangerously and an alarm
klaxon goes off. Jill realizes what's happened seconds before water
surges through the door and floods the room to the ceiling.

The cargo hold isn't much better, but it's not completely submerged.
Jill goes underwater again, moving underneath some of the floating
cargo containers, and swims to a ladder to the catwalk. The elevator
that brought them down here in the first place has gone offline, but
the flooding lets them drop back down to the floor of the hold to a
door they couldn't reach before.

It leads to a flooded stairwell that takes them all the way back
down to the engine room, all of which is now underwater. Chris contacts
them, telling them that the ship is sinking, but he and Jessica know
where they are and are on the way.

The same grate that let them escape the engine room before now lets
them get back to the overhead duct. The bulkhead they spent so much
time trying to close is now keeping them out of the control room,
but luckily, the sudden flooding's knocked off a nearby vent cover
and blown out the control room's observation window. From there,
they can reach the freight elevator shaft, which is rapidly filling
with water but not yet full.

Jill and Parker use the ventilation shafts to get back up through
the ship, and reemerge into the VIP lounge. As they reenter the
casino, the man in the gas mask finally reappears, giving them a
round of applause from a balcony above the floor.
A few minutes earlier, Chris and Jessica are on approach to the
Queen Zenobia. They were close enough to the satellite's pulse
that their helicopter's electronics were all fried, so now they're
heading in on a hovercraft. Chris spots something moving in the
water nearby, and he and Jessica jump onto the hovercraft's
gun turrets. They defend their boat against a few large eel-like
creatures in the water, which bite at the ship with massive jaws,
or hang back and throw spiny missiles. Sustained gunfire drives
them off, and Chris circles the Zenobia to find a boarding point.
He tells Jessica that they have a promise to keep.

Back in the casino, the masked man calls Jill and Parker "friendly
BSAA patrons," congratulating them on stopping the Regia Solis from
destroying the ship. Now, he says, he'll reveal the secrets he's
been keeping, like how it took the authorities this long to find
the Queen Zenobia in the first place, why Veltro completely faded
out of existence immediately after the Terragrigia Panic, or why
the Regia Solis was deployed at all.

The masked man is really having fun with his monologue, but his
exposition is interrupted by a sudden gunshot. He's hit in the
chest and falls over the railing of the balcony.

The shooter is Jessica, standing at the top of the casino escalator.

Chris runs in behind her, pushing her gun down and demanding to know
why she fired; Jessica claims it was to "protect our people."

Parker gets to the masked man's side and finds that it's Raymond.
When Parker asks him why he's playing the part of a Veltro agent,
Raymond whispers something inaudible into his ear. More loudly, he
says to "find the truth about Terragrigia," then goes limp.

2:14 AM: The ship suddenly takes another hit, and parts of the ceiling
visibly buckle. Jessica overreacts to the impact and throws herself into
Chris's arms.

Chris pries her off of him and says that, after he and Jessica's
search of the Semiramis, he has an idea where the Zenobia's lab is.
They can't let its supply of the T-Abyss go down with the ship, or
else it'll contaminate the ocean. He takes Jill with him as they set
out towards the lab, while Parker and Jessica are left to find a way
to keep the Zenobia from sinking for a little while longer. They split
up, and as they go, Jessica frets aloud that Chris "never got the hint."
Parker, clearly amused, suggests that maybe Chris is already taken.

Chris hands Jill a few pulse grenades, which they use to fend off the
sea life in the flooded parts of the ship. They turn around and head
right back through the VIP lounge to the freight elevator shaft, where
Jill's Veltro keycard lets them through a previously-locked door. From
there, they head back through the flooded cargo hold to a locked door.
The key Chris found on the Semiramis unlocks it.

It opens up into a lab complex that's wildly unlike the rest of the
ship, all polished steel and state-of-the-art equipment. It's been
locked down tightly, with further entrance barred by a fingerprint
scanner, but the recent damage to the ship has shattered the window
to a nearby server room. Jill goes in through the window to find a
working computer and a sheaf of notes on the desk nearby that concern
the creation of the T-Abyss.

A recent exploration of the Kermadec Trench, a deep-sea fissure on the

ocean floor near New Zealand, had resulted in the discovery of a new
breed of predatory fish, living at 9,000 meters below the surface. To
the surprise of the biologists studying the fish, its uncommon ferocity
and mobility weren't natural to it, but were instead the result of an
virus it had. The virus, which its discoverers named the "Abyss,"
converted the fish's fat and water reserves into high-density bone
and muscle, completely out of sync with the usual demands of its habitat.
The Abyss was also almost 100% infectious via blood-to-blood contact,
and slightly less so if taken orally. The author of the note's excited
about the possibility of using the Abyss to develop a new bio-organic
weapon, which could advance studies in the field.

Jill uses the computer to register her own fingerprint on the lab's
database so she can unlock the door. Further entry also requires that
they both submit to a sterilization procedure, which is almost immediately
aborted when a new BOW cuts its way in through the chamber wall. It's
covered in natural armor, much like a crab, and defends its softer parts
with a thick plate on its arm that it uses like a shield. Chris breaks out
of his half of the room to back Jill up, and together, they manage to kill
the creature.

The Zenobia's lab is full of signs of recent violence. Jill and Chris
descend to a lower deck, go through a long airlock, and open an enormous
door that looks like it should be on a bank vault, revealing a massive
laboratory with an equally massive tank of the T-Abyss.

=======================
18x. Episode 9: No Exit
=======================

2:50 AM: Quint continues to pull information off of the terminal in the
downed Veltro plane in Finland, while Keith shivers in a seat behind him.
Quint's in the middle of a download when the screen goes black, and after
a few minutes, they conclude that the battery's finally gone dead. Quint
pours himself a cup of coffee from a thermos, and suddenly realizes
something. They need to get back to Valkoinen M�kki Airport, and quickly.
He thinks he's figured out something important about Veltro and the
conspiracy thereof, but doesn't want to jump to any conclusions.

By this point, even the BSAA has packed it up and headed home, but Quint
left himself a back door in their security. They let themselves back into
the underground chamber, with Quint excitedly babbling pieces of his theory.
Not even a sudden attack by a pair of Hunters is enough to get him to stop.

They haven't yet investigated what's on the other side of the elevator
in the meeting room, and do so now. It leads to an area full of metal
shipping crates, weapons, and ammunition. The first thing Quint spots is
an MB-28 supercomputer, which is powered by means of two large diesel
generators on opposite sides of the room. Quint stays behind to play with
the computer while Keith gathers ammo and reactivates the generators.

The MB-28 is a powerful machine, but even it's going to take time to
crack the encryption Quint's working on. Keith, who isn't much of a computer
guy, takes him at his word and watches Quint's back. Unfortunately, an alarm
goes off in the facility, and Quint casually mentions that he thinks he's
just annoyed the FBC. The encryption he mentioned is because he's using
the MB-28 to hack into the FBC's secret servers. He attributes the appearance
of a wave of angry BOWs--infected wolves and both kinds of Hunters they've
seen so far--to FBC countermeasures.

When the fighting's over, Quint sits down to have a look at the data
he's dug up. It seems to answer some questions, but as he tells Keith,
the only way to be sure is to go ahead and ask. Quint gets O'Brian on
the radio, and Keith flips out; O'Brian's behind Veltro?

Quint tells O'Brian what he's learned. Veltro was never back in action.
The entire production was smoke and mirrors on O'Brian's part, designed
so he could "get into the head" of Morgan Lansdale, the head of the FBC.
O'Brian doesn't deny it, and says that Quint's worth his paycheck.

While he's connected to the FBC's servers, Quint tells O'Brian that he's
found something in Lansdale's personal logs that O'Brian's going to want
to see. Before he can send it, he gets a connection error; Quint's been
detected and they're locking him out of the system.

Keith notices the roof is shaking. He grabs Quint by the arm and tries
to pull him away from the computer, but Quint won't go until he reconnects
to the FBC's system. A progress bar on the screen hits 100%, data is sent
elsewhere, and something abruptly explodes nearby. Outside, a pair of planes
go on a bombing run, turning the airport into a crater.

In O'Brian's office, he has a remote download that's stuck at 20%, and

he can't raise either Quint or Keith on the radio.

Aboard the Queen Zenobia, Jill and Chris conclude that they have to figure
out a way to neutralize its supply of T-Abyss. There's enough of it in the
lab's central storage tank to contaminate a big part of the world.

Jill uses the fingerprint scanner to get into another part of the lab.
Another scientist has left notes on a table about the T-Abyss, which was
originally created as part of study and research on "weaponized marine
viruses." By itself, it's not particularly dangerous, but the scientist
has concluded that in a concentrated form, the T-Abyss would be capable
of radically altering the entire world's oceanic ecosystem, starting
with bacteria. The work the scientist is doing on the Zenobia is
ostensibly to help prevent bioterrorism, but he's starting to wonder if
his research will end up causing it.

Another nearby document mentions the development of a new BOW

codenamed "Malacoda," after the leader of the Malebranche demons
in Dante's Inferno. As the researchers exposed several kinds of fish
to T-Abyss, one of the fish happened to be infected with salmon fluke.
To their surprise, the T-Abyss mutated both the fish and the parasite,
creating two separate new species. The Malacoda is thus a sort of
delivery system for the T-Abyss, infecting a host and maturing rapidly.
Its maximum growth only seems limited by the size of its host.

Finally, a nearby open book contains the last journal entry of Bernard
Corti. Two days after the start of the Terragrigia Panic, he's jubilant;
the FBC was powerless and the city's become a hell on earth.

Three days after that, however, a viral spill aboard both the Zenobia
and Semiramis infected the surviving members of Veltro. Corti feels
betrayed, as the hell they've unleashed has come back around to them.
The only person who could've done this, he thinks, is their mysterious
financier, who conveniently isn't aboard the ship.

The lab leads them right to the control system for the T-Abyss's storage
tank. Chris asks for some time to figure out the controls, but can already
tell there's a failsafe in place. They can release a neutralizing agent
into the tank that'll render the T-Abyss harmless, but doing so requires
a passcode. Jill volunteers to sweep the lab and see what she can find.

Chris cracks the code and opens a nearby elevator. Jill takes it down a
floor to find a bizarre maze, where the "walls" are a kind of laser array.
There's a dead scientist on the floor, but through the Genesis, she
can tell that he manipulated the lasers so he can't be touched. She uses her
scanner to pick her way through the maze and into the next room.

At this point, Jill can see outside the lab to an underwater storage tank,
tinted red with the T-Abyss. As she leaves the maze, something slams into
the nearest window hard enough to crack the glass, then swims away. It
looks like the tentacles Chris fought outside, and may be the aforementioned
Malacoda. After disposing of a couple more Oozes with shields, Jill uses
another fingerprint scanner to reach a secure experiment station.

Inside, she finds a map of the laboratory, a device that administers

inoculations, and a console that lets her turn off part of the laser array
outside. The Malacoda takes another swing at her as she leaves, but she's
able to reach the dead researcher.

He's holding a sample of an experimental vaccine, still secure inside a

glass container, and an open paperback journal. His name was Ryan, and
he's left two relevant entries.

The first is from 2004, in the days after the Terragrigia Panic. He and
his team seized the ship after the Veltro members aboard it had all
succumbed to the T-Abyss virus. This made it a dangerous but very useful
place to study the virus's effects.

By 2005, their research had reached its goal with the development of a
proper vaccine for the T-Abyss virus. Since they didn't need the Zenobia
any longer, they elected to abandon it. When they reported their success
to Lansdale, it made him uncharacteristically happy. However, the moment
they sent Lansdale their research data, the facility was shut tight and
all the cryogenically stored BOWs woke up at once. Ryan almost admires
the skill with which Lansdale pulled off the double-cross.

Jill radios the information back to Chris. It's only circumstantial

evidence of Lansdale's involvement, but it's still huge, and it goes a
long way towards explaining what Raymond meant back in the casino. Jill
picks up the vaccine sample and returns to the lab.

Ryan's employee number gets Jill into the system, and she downloads
the passcode she needs onto an authentication dongle. While she's at it,
on a hunch, she injects herself with Ryan's vaccine. This turns out to
be a good call, because moments later, the Malacoda manages to break
the windows. Red-tinted water, seething with the T-Abyss, floods into
the room, punching the doors to the lab off their hinges.

Jill swims out through the airlock. Most of the windows are covered by
automatic shutters, but one isn't. She uses it to get back up to the top
level, surfacing in the tainted pool below Chris's platform. She uses
a ladder to get back up to him.
The passcode works, and the lab's systems automatically begin the
neutralization program. As they do, a set of flatscreen monitors
above the T-Abyss tank flip on, revealing Morgan Lansdale, sitting
at his desk. He congratulates the BSAA on their activities; while
he knew that O'Brian and "his dog" Raymond Vester were looking into
his business, Lansdale didn't account for Jill's presence aboard
the ship. As punishment for being stowaways, Lansdale remotely
releases a small army of powerful Oozes onto the platform with Jill
and Chris, hoping to watch them die.

It doesn't quite work out that way, of course. By the time the virus
neutralization process is complete, Chris and Jill have mowed down the
Oozes. Lansdale sighs; he should've expected as much from the "duo who
brought down Umbrella."

Lansdale goes on to explain that he has a character flaw: he's a

perfectionist. He's got to clean up every last detail before he
considers a job done, and right now, that includes the BSAA, Clive
O'Brian, Chris, Jill, and the Zenobia. The only reason he's even
talking to them right now is because, as he displays on the monitor,
he has the Zenobia targeted from overhead.

==============================
18xi. Episode 10: Tangled Webs
==============================

2:14 AM: As Chris and Jill leave the casino via the VIP lounge,
Parker and Jessica head back into the ballroom. They've been
through hell once before, Parker says with a look at Raymond,
so this should be nothing new.

In the ballroom, Parker mentions his plan. The power's back on,
so he should be able to remotely close off the bulkheads with the
maintenance system, delaying the ship's flooding for at least a
while. Jessica agrees, but says she has to "check on something,"
and goes off on her own. They decide to meet back up on the bridge.

Parker heads back through the promenade, where he receives a radio

call from O'Brian. When O'Brian asks, Parker says that Raymond
told him everything. That means, O'Brian says, that Parker knows
what he has to do. This does not make Parker happy.

The promenade has filled back up with a new type of Hunter, slightly
tougher than the ones from the helipad. Parker kills a few and evades
the rest, taking the elevator on the west end of the promenade up to
the bridge. On his way up, Jessica radios him, saying she's already
there and is working to lower the bulkheads. This means, she continues,
that he owes her dinner again.

When Parker reaches the bridge, however, he points his gun at Jessica
from behind. What Raymond whispered to him in the casino was that
Morgan Lansdale has a mole in the BSAA, and it may be Jessica. She
tries to talk him out of it, slowly reaching for a large red emergency
switch on the nearest console, but a sudden gunshot makes her snatch
her hand back.

Raymond steps up next to Parker, leveling a pistol at Jessica. He was

wearing body armor before, so his "death" in the casino was an act.
Raymond accuses Jessica of wanting to set off the Zenobia's self-destruct
mechanism, which will destroy both the ship and all the evidence they've
collected.

Jessica, laughing awkwardly, asks if they're kidding her. She appeals

to Parker, and slowly, Parker lowers his gun. She's right; he can't
trust Raymond completely. He asks Raymond to lower his gun, and when
he doesn't, Parker puts his hand on Raymond's arm. Raymond accuses
Parker of being too soft.

In that moment of distraction, Jessica grabs her own gun from the
console, levels it at Raymond, and fires. Parker throws himself in
front of Raymond and takes the bullet, collapsing heavily on top of
Raymond. Jessica, muttering about "stupid men," reaches out and pushes
the self-destruct button. An emergency klaxon goes off, red lights begin
to flash, and Jessica, laughing at Raymond and Parker, lets herself out
of the bridge. She'd figured that O'Brian had a "lapdog," she says, and
she'll tell "Morgan" that it was Raymond.

Parker angrily shoves Raymond away, telling him to get after Jessica.
He's in pain, and pulls himself into a sitting position, slumped against
the bridge controls. Outside, the nearby Queen Semiramis is rocked by
several explosions on its upper deck.

3:50 AM: In the Zenobia's lab, Lansdale watches the Semiramis sink via
satellite, broadcasting the image so Chris and Jill can see it too. An
automated voice announces that the Zenobia's self-destruct sequence has
been armed, and Lansdale says with relish that his "bright young assistant"
has made the last move. This is checkmate.

Chris tells him to "start counting." All Morgan's done is given him and
Jill a target. This amuses Lansdale, who wishes them luck and breaks
the connection.

Their first job is to escape the ship. As they backtrack to the lab's
exit, Kirk Mathison calls via the radio. He's en route to the Zenobia
and will be waiting on the foredeck to evacuate them.

Chris leads Jill deeper into the ship, to its boiler room. The Zenobia
has begun a process of multiple small detonations, and is shaking apart
around them.

An explosion brings down a wall between Chris and Jill, forcing her
to find another route around. That's where she finds Parker, staggering
in short bursts down a maintenance hallway. As Jill puts him up on her
shoulder, he explains that Jessica shot him, and she's working for Morgan.
Together, and with Chris once he catches up to them, they fight through
the boiler room's rapidly flooding corridors.

They aren't making good time with Parker in tow. They may not make it
and they all know it, but Chris refuses to leave a man behind. In the end,
Parker makes that decision for them. When a catwalk suddenly gives way,
Parker deliberately loses his grip, falling into the flames below with
a smile on his face.

Chris and Jill pull themselves together for their last run through the
Zenobia. As they bust out onto the exterior deck, the ship's begun to
sink, and the last leg of the trip is done "uphill," dodging falling
lifeboats and other debris. Chris and Jill emerge onto the foredeck
just as one of the helicopters leaves.

A second helicopter waits on the helipad for them, but one of the
smaller explosions goes off and knocks both Chris and Jill sprawling.
As they get to their feet, a tentacle suddenly lashes up out of the
water and directly onto the helicopter, smashing it to the surface of
the helipad. As it explodes, the tentacle's owner emerges out of the
water: a whale infected with the Malacoda parasite.

==============================
18xii. Episode 11: Revelations
==============================

4:28 AM: Kirk pilots his helicopter well above the wreckage of the
Queen Zenobia. Somewhat unnecessarily, he reports that extraction
is not possible, as the Malacoda is sitting on the end of the ship.

The infected whale doesn't move that much on its own, but up to four
massive parasites at a time emerge from its sides, stabbing the deck
with enormous pincers or thrown spikes.

Kirk takes a hand shortly thereafter, dropping four crates onto the
deck near Chris and Jill. Each contains a single anti-tank rocket,
which Jill uses to sever the parasites from the Malacoda's shell.
They drop lifelessly into the water, leaving the Malacoda's body
leaning motionless above the Zenobia, and Kirk takes the chance to
drop them a rope ladder.

Suddenly, a fresh batch of parasites spawn from the Malacoda. It

lashes at the ship again, catching the end of the rope ladder and
nearly whipping Chris off and into the water. He barely manages to
hold on, and Jill pulls him aboard. Chris shoots off the latch that
keeps the rope ladder attached to the helicopter, and they're able
to lift into the air.

Kirk nearly takes off, but Chris stops him; they can't let the Malacoda
just roam free. Using the helicopter's mounted guns, they systematically
blow every parasite apart, shooting the Malacoda's projectiles out of
the air and letting Kirk handle the evasion.

After the destruction of a few dozen of the parasites from the sides
of the Malacoda, it slowly opens its mouth. Jill spots a major organ
in its throat, nearly hidden behind a couple of last parasites. Kirk
leans back long enough to give her a "present": a powerful laser-guided
missile launcher. Jill locks onto the Malacoda's throat and fires,
causing a detonation that blows out the back of its head, straight
through its protective shell.

5:02 AM: Dawn finds Chris and Jill aboard the helicopter, watching
the Zenobia sink below the surface. The Malacoda's body has buckled
forward onto its deck, and is slowly going down along with it.

O'Brian calls them over the radio and requests an update. Jill reports
Parker's death; Chris tells O'Brian of Jessica's betrayal and Lansdale's
confession. This doesn't surprise O'Brian as much as it should, and Chris
tells him it's time to come clean.

Terragrigia, 2004: Parker and Jessica barely escape into the basement
of the FBC's headquarters. Both are low on ammunition and out of breath,
and Parker asks without irony if they're both in hell.

Parker uses the last of his ammo to bring down a Hunter that's found its
way into the basement with them, and they jump into a nearby elevator.
On their way up, Jessica says that Lansdale was right; he's been pushing
for an expansion of the FBC's purview, and it looks like thanks to the
Terragrigia Panic, he's about to get one. Hopefully, Parker says, the
Panic will at least get Lansdale's message across to the international
community: bioterrorism is a serious threat.

They hear gunfire as they come out of the elevator. Raymond Vester is
on the ground in the next hallway, fending off Hunters with a handgun.
The floor and wall near him are covered with blood, and he can't stand.
After they dispose of the Hunters, Parker lends Raymond a shoulder and
helps him up.

Raymond had been ordered to leave, but he stayed behind anyway. There
are still civilians in Terragrigia who need help, he says; even though
he's too badly injured to stand, he's still trying to figure out ways
he can contribute. When the Hunters reappear shortly thereafter, Raymond
instantly offers to stay behind and buy Parker and Jessica some time,
which Parker immediately rejects. As he tells Jessica a little later,
he's of the opinion that cadets need a little "towel-snapping" in order
to grow up, which in his case means brutal honesty. Raymond's "too young
to play hero."

They drop Raymond off in what looks like a safe area on the third floor.
Parker and Jessica go back to the stairwell in hopes they can find a
tourniquet for Raymond on the fourth floor, scrounging up more ammunition
as they go. The medical station is trashed and occupied by yet more Hunters,
but they're able to find what they need.

By the time they get back to Raymond, the Hunters have found him again.
Parker and Jessica fight off what he's left alive, then bandage him up.
Parker makes fun of Raymond's desire for "heroics" as he works to patch
up Raymond's leg, telling him that in the real world, such a thing is
only going to get his entire unit killed.

With the bandages in place, Raymond's leg can support his weight again.
He's able to limp after them as they proceed to the command station, but
as they ride the elevator there, Raymond speaks again. There's something
off, he says; the whole attack seems to him to have been too professional,
and he has no idea how they managed to hit Terragrigia without the FBC's
intelligence network picking up word of it. Parker cuts him off abruptly,
saying that their job isn't to investigate the Panic, but to resolve it.
Raymond protests that his logic is sound, but Parker isn't listening.

Parker and Jessica cover Raymond long enough for him to get into the
relative safety of the command room, then follow him inside.

Morgan Lansdale is in the middle of a phone call with Jack Norman, the
head of Veltro. He tells Norman to "enjoy the celebration" aboard the
Queen Dido, where the T-Abyss virus has just broken out. Norman says
with grim humor that Veltro's "certainly been had"; they were Lansdale's
pawns, and now he's eliminating them. That means Norman and his men can
serve one more purpose for Lansdale, as test subjects for the T-Abyss
virus in a controlled environment.

Raymond Vester abruptly comes through the door behind Lansdale. Lansdale
sees Raymond, but continues the conversation.

Norman reveals that he always figured Lansdale would stab him in the back,
so he's kept video records of all their interactions. Lansdale retorts that
the use of the satellite has been approved, which infuriates Norman. Lansdale
follows up by quoting the "Divine Comedy" yet again: "Full soon shalt thou be
where Thine eye shall answer make to thee of this, seeing the cause which
raineth down the blast."

Back on the Zenobia, Parker has survived his fall from the catwalk,
but now he's got an injured leg on top of his bullet wound. He's limping
slowly along when Raymond finds him, and for a second, Parker thinks
Raymond's about to finish him off. Instead, Raymond says that Jessica's
escaped, holsters his pistol, and picks Parker up.

Parker apologizes to him, saying that Raymond was right all along.
Raymond dismisses it, saying Parker's being too hard on himself. Now it's
his turn to save Parker.

Back aboard Chris and Jill's helicopter, O'Brian concludes his story.
Raymond had heard more back in Terragrigia than Lansdale thought, and
approached O'Brian with the information. Together, they set up an
elaborate plan, involving the seeming resurgence of Veltro, in order
to put heat on Morgan Lansdale. They knew that Lansdale had at least
one mole inside the BSAA, so there was no way to tell any of the agents
involved without the risk of blowing the entire operation.

O'Brian has one last card to play, courtesy of Quint and the data he
was able to dig out of Veltro's terminal. They'd known about Veltro's
two sister ships, but as it turns out, there was a third: Norman's ship,
the Queen Dido.

=====================================
18xiii. Episode 12: The Queen is Dead
=====================================

5:35 AM: O'Brian explains to Chris and Jill that the Dido sank
during the Terragrigia Panic. Its wreckage can be found on the
ocean floor near the ruins of the city. Kirk flies them in that
direction, and O'Brian signs off.

O'Brian opens his desk drawer and finds the vial from the beach,
wrapped in an evidence bag. Suddenly, an alarm goes off, and armed
FBC soldiers storm the building. O'Brian watches it happen through
his office window, right as Lansdale himself comes inside.

As of right now, Lansdale says, the BSAA is under the direct

supervision of the FBC. He orders O'Brian arrested as a terrorist
collaborator, and two FBC soldiers put handcuffs on O'Brian. He
submits peacefully, knowing that Chris and Jill are now the
BSAA's only hope.

Equipped with scuba gear, Chris and Jill drop off the side of
Kirk's helicopter and into the water. It's easy to find the wreckage
of the Dido, and Jill's able to open one of the hatches to get below
decks. Some of the inner bulkheads are jammed, requiring the use of
a plasma torch to open.

The interior of the ship is rusted and overgrown, inhabited only

by an occasional corpse and a few of the carnivorous blobs that
have been washing up on shore. That, Chris says, explains why Morgan
cordoned off the area. He didn't want anyone finding the blobs and
wondering where they came from.

As unthreatening as the blobs were on land, they're very dangerous

underwater. The pulse grenades that were so effective on the
Zenobia only stun the blobs for a few seconds, and all Jill can
do is avoid them. As Chris does his best to rewire an ancient
control panel, she goes off on her own to try to reactivate the
ship's emergency power. That lets them through an old rusted
security gate, and from there, up a ladder.

The hatch at the top of the ladder leads them onto a higher deck
of the ship, which still has air. As they come up out of the
water, they notice a dead man slumped against a nearby wall,
wearing an armband and vest that identify him as an agent of
the FBC. He hasn't been dead for long, and he's holding a voice
recorder. It contains his name, Dario Barioni, and his last
request, which is to turn the recorder over to "General" Lansdale.

Barioni was part of an FBC combat team sent to the Dido to claim
a video log; the fresh corpses in the flooded compartment were
unlucky members of his team. The members of Veltro that still
lived inside the wreck weren't willing to give up without a fight,
and Jack Norman in particular fought like a demon. By 7:48 PM the
previous night, Barioni was the last survivor of his team. They
were unable to fulfill their objective.

It turns out they're inside the Dido's guest cabins, although a

year of being underwater and inhabited by lunatics hasn't done the
decoration any good. The area is littered with corpses, several
of which have been carefully wrapped and placed on the dining room
table. Each also bears a sort of epitaph, identifying them as
deceased members of Veltro. Barioni's strike team may have died,
but they took almost all of Veltro down with them.

The next room contains the video equipment and backdrop that Jack
Norman used to record his ultimatum. As Jill walks into the room, a
projector flips on, playing a recent video of Norman. He's visibly
lost his mind, and holds a vial of the T-Abyss. Norman twists off its
end and jams it into his arm, as he's come to see the T-Abyss's mutation
as a nearly religious transformation. As he waits for the virus to take
effect, Norman pulls a PDA out of his pocket and waves it at the camera,
threatening Morgan Lansdale with it. He recorded every meeting they had
and has every file on the PDA.

A nearby double door leads to the Dido's equivalent of its sister ship's
grand ballroom, down a long staircase littered with dead FBC agents. Jack
Norman's voice can be heard through the door, still quoting Dante.

Norman's set himself up with a throne, a king of a kingdom of one, with

a Veltro flag behind him. When he sees Jill and Chris, he sees them as
Lansdale, there to steal the video log from him. As Norman threatens them
with it, a spasm strikes him and he writhes in pain, dropping his PDA to
the floor at the foot of his throne. Jill picks it up quickly, and she
and Chris both run to the other door.

Norman tells them to wait. Whether it's from living in the wreck of the
Dido for a year or some natural resistance, the T-Abyss he took has yet
to mutate him appreciably. He decides to seal the deal, and as Chris and
Jill watch, he bites off the end of another vial. That's enough to kickstart
his personal evolution, and Norman instantly begins to grow. His first attack
is a vicious claw strike that Jill barely ducks, and she drops Norman's PDA.
It skids into a corner.

6:40 AM: Jack Norman, no longer human, makes his last stand. The double
dose of the T-Abyss has let him mutate further and faster than any of the
other infectees they've seen, even Rachael. He's acquired a new organ
mounted inside his skull that disorients Jill with flashes of light,
creating the illusion that he's teleporting around the room or conjuring
false images of himself.

She notices that the real Norman, wherever he is, often emits a purple
gas from his mouth. Jill plays a guessing game, doing her best to see
through Norman's illusions and counterattack, knocking him off-balance
with shotgun blasts at close range.

He's one of the most durable mutants either of them has ever faced,
to the point where Chris wonders aloud if Norman's immortal. Norman's
weak spot turns out to be a pulsating yellow organ on Norman's back,
protected by an armored carapace. As the fight wears on, Norman
becomes more reckless, and he finally leaves himself open to attack
from behind. Jill shoots the organ, which explodes into a disgusting
shower of fluid, and Norman finally drops.

Norman says aloud how glad he is that he can finally die, and reaches
out for the Veltro flag with the last of his strength. As he goes limp,
his hand knocks over some lit candles, which set the flag alight.

Jill picks up Norman's PDA from where it fell. The first video she
pulls up on it is shot with a hidden camera from behind Jack Norman,
sitting at a table somewhere as Morgan Lansdale explains his plan:
dispersion of the virus via a UAV on the cruise ship. Lansdale even
picks up a briefcase and opens it so Norman can have a look inside,
showing off eight vials of "bonafide T-Abyss." The meeting comes off
like Lansdale hiring mercenaries rather than conspiring with known
terrorists, which amuses Norman. It's like Lansdale's slumming.

Jill beams the video straight to BSAA headquarters, where it plays

in O'Brian's office on the big monitor screen. The FBC soldiers
look at each other, confused, as O'Brian turns to Lansdale with just
a hint of smugness. Lansdale admits he's underestimated the BSAA,
and maybe O'Brian as well.

O'Brian offers Lansdale the vial Jill found, saying he can have it
back now that the BSAA's done with it, but Lansdale doesn't rise to
the bait. He's picked up O'Brian's copy of the "Divine Comedy," and
asks O'Brian if he can see Lansdale's dilemma. If he hadn't caused
the Terragrigia Panic, Lansdale claims, the world would still be
completely ignorant of the threat they face from bio-terrorism. He
goes so far as to say that no one has the right to detain him, as
he's done what he's done in the name of the greater good. O'Brian,
not buying his argument for a second, places him under arrest for
the same charges Lansdale had just leveled against him. Lansdale's
own soldiers escort Lansdale out of the room, but not before he
accuses the BSAA of making a huge mistake.
================================================================
18xiv. A Summary of the Conclusion of RESIDENT EVIL: REVELATIONS
================================================================

In the wake of Morgan Lansdale's arrest, the FBC is dissolved.

Most of its agents and resources are transferred to the BSAA.
The BSAA is subsequently overhauled, made into an international
organization under the auspices of the United Nations.

Quint and Keith are shown walking away from the crater that was
once Valkonien Mokki Airport, seemingly unhurt. Keith goes on to
become a leading figure at the BSAA's East African branch, while
Quint refuses promotion and continues to work in the main BSAA
office's R&D department.

Parker is found adrift off the shore of Malta and rescued. He's
shown reading a BSAA manual and recovering from his broken leg.
A month later, he returns to work as a Special Operations Agent
at the main BSAA office.

Clive O'Brian stepped down from his position as the head of the
BSAA, although he retained the respect of his subordinates. He
went on to serve as an advisor while writing a detective novel.

Chris and Jill are shown as they approach the front door
of Ozwell Spencer's mansion, just as in "Lost In Nightmares."
"...they have no idea what horrific fate awaits them."

Finally, in an upscale coffee house somewhere, Jessica Sherawat

is reading a copy of the "Divine Comedy." A man sets a vial of
the T-Abyss down on the table across from her, and without looking,
she says, "Almost too easy, wasn't it?" The company just let them
"take Morgan out with the trash."

The man, wearing a pair of sunglasses, is glimpsed briefly in

reflection. "It's a tough world," he says, and starts to leave.

Jessica has one question, though; why did he save Parker?

Raymond Vester turns around and takes off his sunglasses. He had
his reasons, he says. Jessica notes that the BSAA isn't as useless
as she'd thought it was, and he agrees.

"The fun's just getting started," Raymond says, and walks away.

========================================
18xvii. Conclusions About The Conclusion
========================================

1. Every major character except Jack Norman has survived.

2. I'm not even willing to count Rachael out at this point.

3. Morgan Lansdale has been arrested, and does not appear to have any
allies left. With Jack Norman's video files as evidence, Lansdale is
likely to be convicted for what could be thousands of charges.

4. The United States's Federal Bioterror Commission has been closed

and its resources have been reassigned to the reorganized BSAA. This
is the United States's last attempt at an official, in-house bioterror
agency until Adam Benford starts the Division of Security Operations
in 2011.

5. Jessica Sherawat and Raymond Vester are working for an unknown

third party, and escaped the sinking of the Queen Zenobia with a
sample of the T-Abyss virus.

6. Veltro has been thoroughly wiped out. If there are any members left,
they're hiding really well.

========================
18xvi. Random Commentary
========================

1) The episodic structure of Revelations doesn't make a lot of sense

for a stand-alone game, but according to its assistant producer, it's
deliberately designed as if it were a Japanese TV drama.

2) Heh. "Double Mystery." It sounds like something Encyclopedia Brown

would handle.

3) An awful lot of the game's later plot wouldn't happen or would happen
differently if Chris had asked Jessica out on a date at some point.

(I don't know if it's just to provide ironic foreshadowing for Jill's

"death," but Chris is so devoted to Jill in Revelations that it's
bordering on romantic obsession.)

4) You can find the FBC's 2004 charter on a chair in a storeroom while
you're playing as Parker during Episode 3. Looking at it, it's easy
to see why Lansdale thought he needed more authority, as the charter
makes the FBC sound like forest rangers in lab coats.

5) Jack Norman's recital at the end of Episode III is from Canto XXXIII
of Dante's Inferno, which deals with Ugolino:
http://www.classicreader.com/book/142/33/

There's a pretty good writeup on Ugolino on Wikipedia if you're curious.

He's got one of the creepier stories in the whole poem, and this canto
shows up more than once in Revelations.

6) So I guess Hunters eat human bodies whole now. Good to know.

7) It's difficult to appreciate just how transcendent a dick move

Episode 6 is until your second time through the game. They've gone
out of their way to make you think it's the Zenobia, to the point
where there are unreadable files in the same locations, and the
fighting's so intense after you reach the casino that it glosses
over a lot of the other issues.

8) The theme of Episode 7 is "Parker says something that would make

Jill roll her eyes." It's the worst day of his life! Hunters?! It's
like all his old enemies have come back to haunt him!

9) Looking at how similar big projects have worked in the real world,
you could probably assume that Terragrigia would not be repeated.
The game makes it sound like they'd barely gotten in through the
door when Veltro obliterated the place.
10) The Japanese version of Revelations shipped with a bonus DVD. One
of the features on it is Jessica's Report, a translation of which is
available on Project Umbrella. It provides a little background material
and is generally an entertaining read.

11) Cinematic references in Revelations include:

-- The whole game has a lot of the 1989 James Cameron movie _The Abyss_
in it, right down to the enemies that look like they're made of water.
-- There's a deer head on the wall of the cabin that Jill wakes up in.
That deer head has shown up in multiple RE games, as noted under
RE4's summary above.
-- The Pale Rider revolver from Raid Mode is reminiscent of the comically
large gun the Joker uses in the 1988 _Batman_ movie.

================================
18xvii. The Conspiracy Explained
================================

Since RE:R is told out of order and is largely a story of dueling

conspiracies, this section explains its story in a manner that's
slightly easier to follow.

In 2004, Morgan Lansdale is the commissioner of the FBC, which is

a joke. You can read its charter during the first Terragrigia
flashback level, and it depicts the FBC as a nearly powerless
adjunct of wildlife protection agencies. Lansdale knows he needs
more authority and funding to do what the FBC's job ought to be.
The only way he thinks he can get it is to force the governments
of the world to take the threat of bioterrorism more seriously.

Lansdale has the contacts and access to quietly acquire BOWs,

including Hunters (available on the black market as per Dead Aim)
and the T-Abyss virus (a recent creation, meant for study purposes).
With those, Lansdale goes to small-time terrorist Jack Norman, the
leader of an anti-urban development student group gone radical, and
hands Norman everything he needs to launch a major bioterrorist
attack. Norman hits Terragrigia, because it's a brand-new city based
upon sustainable, ecological urban living, and as such is a living
symbol of everything Norman hates about modern society. The result
is the Terragrigia Panic.

Since Terragrigia was co-developed by American interests, Lansdale

has the legal right to get the FBC involved, and he makes sure that
the FBC is in sole charge of the response to the Panic, forbidding
European participation. The only concession he makes is to allow
Clive O'Brian to come aboard as an advisor, but alone, O'Brian can't
do much except argue with Lansdale about the use of the Regia Solis.
The FBC gets slaughtered, and Lansdale gets the expanded authority
he wants even before the Panic is over. (Note that Lansdale's powers
as the head of the American FBC include the authority to launch a
bombing run on short notice against a target in Finland. Whatever
his specific sphere of influence is, it's clear that he doesn't
have any effective oversight.)

Norman's forces are celebrating their victory when--surprise!--the

other shoe drops. Lansdale uses the Regia Solis satellite to sink
Terragrigia, and has arranged for the T-Abyss to break out on all
three of Veltro's ships. The Dido is too close to Terragrigia and
is sunk by the satellite strike, taking Jack Norman with it, while
the other two end up as ghost ships in the Mediterranean Sea. Almost
every member of Veltro is killed in the outbreak and the survivors
go into hiding, which allows Lansdale to run with a cover story that
the FBC was able to shut Veltro down. His plan is a huge success,
and all it took was the largest terrorist attack of all time.

Lansdale has three problems left, however. The first is the rookie
FBC agent Raymond Vester, one of the few survivors of Terragrigia,
who figures out there's something strange going on during the Panic,
and who becomes suspicious of Lansdale due to how Lansdale was acting
immediately prior to their evacuation. The second is Clive O'Brian, an
old friend of Lansdale's who was on the ground during the Panic as an
advisor. O'Brian knows that Lansdale's hands are dirty, because Lansdale
all but admits it to him while the two are arguing during the Panic,
but O'Brian can't prove it. Finally, Jack Norman's body is never found,
and while Lansdale reports that he's dead (cf. Jessica's Report), he
can't prove it. Worse, wherever Norman is, he has a PDA on him that he
used to record video of all his meetings with Lansdale, which Norman
tells Lansdale about during their final conversation.

Of the three, Norman is the only problem Lansdale is worried about. He

goes so far as to place a loyal agent into the BSAA, Jessica, as an
observer and mole, but the FBC has the BSAA so far outgunned that if
O'Brian does anything openly, Lansdale can crush the BSAA out of hand.
He knows he's got somebody in the FBC leaking information to O'Brian in
return, but doesn't know it's Raymond.

In order to find Norman's body, Lansdale puts up and enforces a naval

blockade around the ruins of Terragrigia (as Chris notes during Episode 12,
it's not doing a great job keeping things in, but it's great at making
sure nobody knows where the mutant blobs are coming from), while keeping
the Queens Zenobia and Semiramis adrift as "ghost ships." This is so he
can send a research team to the Zenobia, where they develop a vaccine for
the T-Abyss. All the while, he has his own squads of fanatically loyal
troops searching for Norman.

Raymond gets in touch with O'Brian at some point and they compare notes.
Of the two, O'Brian's got the most ability to act, but he can't do so
directly because Lansdale has made himself politically untouchable. Towards
that end, they come up with an elaborate plan to make it look like Veltro
has suddenly begun to rebuild. Raymond disguises himself as Jack Norman,
using the getup Norman used on camera when he claimed credit for the Panic,
and contacts the surviving members of Veltro to set up a secondary base
for them in Finland. He's also in Morgan Lansdale's confidence at some
point, which allows him access to the FBC's systems, where he finds the
coordinates of the Zenobia.

Raymond's also in it to steal a sample of the T-Abyss, as well as its

new vaccine, and is willing to assassinate the last of Lansdale's
researchers to get it. His motivations are the largest unexplained factor
in Revelations's plot, but he's got "disillusioned idealist" written all
over him and has decided he can do more good as a free agent.

On the day Revelations begins, O'Brian has Parker and Jill with him
researching the blobs that have washed up on the shore of the Mediterranean.
He's also managed to send Chris up into the mountains with Jessica, chasing
an "anonymous tip," in order to find the isolated Veltro facility that
Raymond helped to establish. At the same time, Lansdale's finally figured
out where Jack Norman is, and he prepares to deploy a strike team.

The "emergency call" that O'Brian takes on the beach is clearly about
what the FBC and Lansdale are doing (and is probably from Raymond), which
forces him to accelerate his timetable. Chris and Jessica are out of
radio contact due to being up in the mountains, so he acts like they've
suddenly disappeared, knowing that Jill and Parker will rush off to
rescue their old partners without a second thought. (It also suggests
that a big part of Clive's plan is using Chris and Jill's partnership
to his advantage. He needs people who are going to act without thinking,
and even then, Jill almost realizes it's a setup the moment it starts.)
He gives them the Zenobia's coordinates, which starts the ball rolling.

At around the same time Jill and Parker arrive at the Zenobia, the FBC's
strike team arrives at the Dido. They take losses on their way in, as shown
by the dead men in scuba gear that Jill and Chris find in the underwater
section of the ship, but are able to get into the wreck and find where
Norman's hiding. The entire strike team and all the surviving members of
Veltro are killed in the ensuing gunfight, except for Norman himself.

Raymond and Rachael Foley arrive at the Zenobia well before Jill and Parker
do. Their game plan is to investigate the ship and turn it into a kind
of guided tour for Jill and Parker, but to do so without killing them;
the only player in the game's events who would include that proviso
is O'Brian, so he's the guy who wrote the Mysterious Instructions file.
Rachael isn't a trained combat operative and, to go by her notebook, may
only be there because Raymond is blackmailing her.

Raymond's general approach seems to be to leave Rachael to figure out

what's actually aboard the ship, then move in behind her and set things
up so Jill and Parker gradually learn what Rachael's already discovered.
The gas trap is a big part of that, which puts Jill and Parker out of
action for a while and gives Raymond the run of the place. That also
allows him to pursue his own agenda aboard the ship without the risk
that Rachael will notice; as seen in the TGS trailer, Raymond killed
the last of the ship's scientists himself to secure a T-Abyss sample.

Lansdale has put a lot of effort into making sure nobody knows where
the Zenobia is or what happened aboard it, which means he can't use
any of his official resources to counteract the BSAA's investigators
once they're already on board the ship. Doing so would put suspicion
on Lansdale, because sending FBC troops after the Zenobia would raise
questions about his involvement that he'd rather not answer. O'Brian's
gamble is that his agents will find something he can use to take Lansdale
out and will do so before Lansdale notices they're there.

The major complication, however, is that the Zenobia's upper decks have
a lot more BOWs on it than O'Brian bargained for, and they infect Rachael.
When she dies, she's just found the key to the freight elevator, which
suggests she was about to go deeper into the ship and find the lab.

Without her, Raymond has to abandon much of his original plan and shifts
over into the role of FBC flunky, refusing to answer any questions about
why he's on the ship and simply getting out of Jill and Parker's way. At
that point, he knows Jill and Parker are now his best shot at getting off
the ship alive, and he's counting on Parker speaking up in his defense.

All the BSAA agents involved in the situation are sure that they're
dealing with the sudden reappearance of Veltro right up until Quint
gets his hands on the terminal in the crashed plane in Finland. He
knows the moment he sees it that Veltro was as clueless about what's
happening aboard the Zenobia as the BSAA is. At that point, Quint
goes rogue and hacks directly into the FBC's servers, which Lansdale
is also using for remote access to the Veltro bioweapons and the Zenobia,
and before they lock him out and blow up the airport, he sees some of
Lansdale's private files and figures out exactly what's going on.

Lansdale's strike against Norman fails at around 7:30 PM on the first

night, and he doesn't try again, presumably due to Norman's angry ultimatum
about the T-Abyss (which may or may not have been a bluff, unless there's
another giant T-Abyss tank aboard the Dido). When Lansdale figures out
what's going on with the Zenobia, his first move is to seal Jill and
Parker inside the engine room and flood it (no other character has both
the motive and means to pull that off and no other cause is ever established).
When that fails, he tries to sink the ship.

Even after that, Lansdale stays calm until he catches Quint hacking into
the FBC's systems. At that point, all bets are off; he orders an airstrike
against the airport, Jessica shows her hand, he tries to kill Chris and Jill
directly, and once the Zenobia's been sunk, Lansdale arrests O'Brian. Lansdale
is under the impression that the BSAA is useless and powerless, and if Chris
and Jill hadn't found Jack Norman in the Dido, he'd have been right.

=========================================
19. RESIDENT EVIL: OPERATION RACCOON CITY
=========================================

RE:ORC is an online third-person shooter developed by Slant Six,

the studio behind the PlayStation 3's SOCOM series. The game's main
story campaign is from the point of view of the Wolfpack, a group
of six Umbrella mercenaries who see action during the destruction
of Raccoon City, and who inadvertently wander into and out of the
events of both RE2 and RE3.

A second campaign is available as a paid download, starring Echo

Six, a U.S. Special Forces team that undertakes various missions
at the same time as the Wolfpack.

RE:ORC was made and marketed as an "alternate universe" game, giving

the player the opportunity to effect and change the events of both
RE2 and RE3. Since it's explicitly non-canon, summarizing it in this
document is largely pointless.

===================
20. RESIDENT EVIL 6
===================

RE6 is four games in one, starring four sets of characters. Leon's game
is closest to the classic survival-horror mold; Chris's is very nearly
a modern third-person cover-based shooter; Jake's is an adventure game
in the mold of something like Uncharted; and Ada's moves between the
other three, working behind the scenes.

====================
20i. Leon and Helena
====================

June 29th, 2013: Leon Kennedy bursts into a room in Ivy University's
lecture hall alongside a female Secret Service agent, but they're too
late. The man they're there to find, Adam Benford, the President of
the United States, has already become a zombie. They hold him at gunpoint,
and Leon begs Adam to snap out of it, to not make him shoot, but Adam's
already succumbed. Just before Adam takes a bite out of the agent,
Leon kills him.

They stare at the body of the President, and suddenly, the agent claims
it's all her fault; she did this. Leon asks her to elaborate, and the
agent says that the only place he'll get any answers is at the Tall Oaks
Cathedral, on the other side of town.

The agent's phone rings, and it's Ingrid Hunnigan, who makes a quick
introduction; the woman's name is Helena Harper. Leon tells Hunnigan
that he's just shot the President, who was already infected.

Hunnigan greets the news with shock, but quickly gets back to business.
The biological attack that infected the President has spread to affect
the entirety of the Ivy University campus and is rapidly moving into
the surrounding city of Tall Oaks. Hunnigan recommends they leave, but
Helena says they can't, as "Agent Kennedy" has a lead they need to
investigate. Leon hesitates, but goes along with it.

After they hang up with Hunnigan, Helena maintains that Leon won't
believe her story unless they can reach the cathedral. Leon agrees,
but lets Helena know that if she is as responsible as she says, her
days are numbered. Helena agrees to that, and they move out.

The university's halls are virtually abandoned, aside from the occasional
corpse, all of which look as if they dropped in their tracks. As Leon
and Helena move through the lecture hall, decorated for a reception that's
now never going to happen, they catch sight of a survivor, who ducks into
the kitchen.

The survivor turns out to be a middle-aged man who works for the university.
They corner him in the kitchen's office, and he mentions that "the fog
came out of nowhere"; to go by his harsh coughing, he's infected but has
yet to succumb.

Before he says much more, a clatter nearby is accompanied by a shrill

scream. He moves to the door, calling out for his daughter Liz. Leon
agrees to help the man find her, over Helena's objections.

As they move back into the lecture hall, the building's power suddenly
dies, and a number of rats scurry across their path, as if they're all
running from something. Liz finally turns up on the other side of the
building, dizzy, weak, and covered in blood. Her father helps her back
through the hall to a nearby elevator, and tells Leon they can escape
through the underground parking garage.

Liz doesn't survive the elevator ride; she succumbs to a coughing fit
and slumps over, seemingly dead. Her father lets out a wail of despair
that turns into a fit of his own, right before the elevator's overhead
light goes out. When Leon turns his flashlight on, it illuminates Liz's
father's corpse and Liz herself, who lunges at him with her teeth bared.
Helena finishes her with a shot to the head, then stands up in shock,
not quite able to process what's just happened. Leon bluntly reminds
her that it's "them or us, and they don't hesitate."
When they reach the parking garage, the door opens to reveal a pack of
hungry zombies, with more standing right behind them. There would be even
more if not for a security shutter on the exit ramp. While Leon's experience
fighting the T-Virus does apply, these are a newer, faster breed; some of
these zombies wield weapons, while others can manage a stumbling run or even
a headlong, screaming leap. When they're killed, their bodies dissolve
into black slime.

Leon and Helena escape the garage through its security office, which
also connects to a dilapidated stairwell on the first floor of one of
the university's teaching buildings. Some of the hallways are blocked
by improvised barricades, as if someone had tried to defend themselves,
but all they find are corpses and zombies as they cross the building.

They emerge into a courtyard at ground level that's decorated for the
reception. Hunnigan gets back in touch to point out a gate that'll lead
them out onto the street, but it's locked down, and for some reason,
Ivy University has very tight computer security. Leon and Helena
end up having to search a nearby office for a keycard to raise the gate.

The gate leads to a security checkpoint, complete with a pair of

metal detectors. Leon has no choice but to go through the first one,
which sets off an alarm klaxon and attracts freshly-risen zombies
from throughout the campus. Leon and Helena break through the horde
and use a nearby police car to escape from the university, but Leon
crashes it shortly thereafter due to zombies clinging to the roof.
Hunnigan suggests they use an alternative route that goes underneath
the city, and with some distaste, Leon and Helena drop down through a
nearby manhole.

Helena reiterates to Leon that once they get to the cathedral, she'll
tell him "everything." Her use of the word triggers a flashback for Leon,
to a conversation he'd had with Adam Benford in the Oval Office. Benford
had planned to use his speech in Tall Oaks to disclose everything he had
on the American government's involvement in the Raccoon City disaster, on
the pretext that it was the only way forward, and had asked for Leon's
support. Leon had agreed.

Leon shakes off the memory and they move into Tall Oaks's subway system.
By the time they get back up to the street, the town has become a war zone.
Zombies are everywhere, and the few living people they see are soon killed.
All Leon and Helena can do is run, using alleyways and construction gangplanks
to navigate past the zombies. Hunnigan provides guidance along the way, using
GPS and satellite feeds to track their location.

They cut through several buildings, appropriating a shotgun along the way
from a dead SWAT officer, and encounter a new kind of mutant. The "Shrieker"
has an oversized torso and voicebox compared to the other zombies they're
running into, and when it screams, it's loud enough to shatter windows. A
few gunshots to that new organ put it down quickly enough, but each of its
screams draws more zombies towards their location.

After escaping the bulk of the zombie horde, Leon and Helena find a group
of three survivors--a police officer on his first day on the job, a man
named Peter, and Peter's unnamed girlfriend--making a last stand outside
a gas station. They team up with them to repel a wave of zombies, led by
another Shrieker, and finish the job by detonating the gas station's
underground tanks. In the wake of the explosion, they follow the police
officer to the next block, where a gun shop briefly provides them with a
defensible position. The shop's owner is holed up on the second floor,
and offers them safety if they can clear the zombies out of the shop.

In the ensuing battle, Peter's rifle jams. He drops it and wrestles his
girlfriend's pistol away from her, then flees out a window. Peter makes it
about half a block, but then runs into a new mutation; a zombie he shoots
does not die, but instead bursts, shedding its skin and growing a new set
of massive fangs where its face used to be. This mutant, a "Bloodshot,"
makes short work of Peter, and is killed when it tries to force its way
into the shop.

When the battle's over, the gun shop owner drops a set of heavy shutters
over the store's windows. The owner's holed up with another survivor, a
Japanese tourist, and explains that he's got someone coming to get him in
a bus. Once they're on board, they'll be heading straight to Tall Oaks
Cathedral, one of the emergency evacuation points for the area. All they
have to do is hold out until the bus arrives.

The zombies catch up with them shortly thereafter, climbing through the
windows. Leon, Helena, and the other survivors hold them off as the tourist
repairs the wiring on the security shutters, closing them just before they're
overrun. They retreat to the next room just as another new enemy smashes
through the door: a massively obese, nearly-indestructible mutant, which
charges at the survivors like a bull. The "Whopper" suffers from weak knees,
however, and multiple shotgun blasts are enough to take it down.

The zombies continue to pursue the survivors onto the roof, and then onto
the street, right up until the bus arrives. They pile onto it, but another
Whopper appears, and proves to be strong enough to stop the bus from moving
forward. As Leon and Helena take it on, the gun shop's owner is dragged from
the bus by the assembled zombies, and the Japanese tourist is grabbed as he
tries to help. As the two of them are torn apart by the horde, the gun shop
owner sets off a grenade as a last act of defiance.

The Whopper holding the bus finally staggers, stunned briefly by Leon and
Helena's gunfire, and the bus roars forward. The driver guns the engine,
grinding the Whopper underneath his wheels, and the bus takes off down the
road towards the cathedral.

En route, Leon takes another video call from Hunnigan, who reports an estimate
that roughly 90% of the population of Tall Oaks can be confirmed as infected,
for a total of 70,000 possible hostiles. She asks them for any information they
can spare, as the "suits" are breathing down her neck; specifically, Derek C.
Simmons, a close friend of President Benford's and the national security advisor
for the United States, is standing right behind her, idly toying with the large
gold ring he's wearing. Leon and Helena don't have anything to tell her.

The bus driver sees a zombie in the road and tells Leon and Helena to hold
on. He drives straight over the zombie, but the impact is more than the bus's
shocks can handle. The bus spins out and comes to a rest with its back end
hanging precariously over a cliff, its headlights illuminating an oncoming
mob of zombies.

Leon and Helena are briefly knocked unconscious as the bus comes to a stop,
and they come to as the last two survivors in the bus are dragged out to
their deaths. Leon and Helena defend themselves, firing at the zombies that
have already forced their way through the bus's back door, when a truck, its
driver dealing with zombie problems of his own, crashes into the bus from
behind. The bus flies over the cliff, and both Leon and Helena are thrown
clear of the crash. The bus driver isn't as lucky; he's killed when the
wreckage ignites. Leon and Helena are once again the only survivors.

Leon calls Hunnigan back to confirm that they're still alive. The crash has
left them at the far end of the cemetery that surrounds Tall Oaks Cathedral,
which is now infested with bizarrely desiccated zombies, both human and canine.
Several of the graves have been dug up, and they encounter several zombies
that are wearing pieces of metal as improvised armor.

After a tense encounter at the cathedral's main gate, where they have to kill
several waves of undead before the survivors will let them in, Leon and Helena
gain access to Tall Oaks Cathedral. It's occupied by a handful of traumatized
civilian survivors.

Helena points out the cathedral's altar, claiming there's a secret passageway
underneath it. Leon asks once again for answers, and Helena says "It's better
if I show you."

Searching the cathedral reveals an ornate puzzle that involves a series of

Madonna statues. Finding the first two opens a door on the cathedral's first
floor, which leads Leon and Helena through a gauntlet of locked doors and
traps. They finally emerge on the balcony overlooking the cathedral's first
floor with everything they need to open the passage under the altar.

When they do, however, a hideous mutant emerges from underground. It was once
human, but most of its upper body is covered with a tumor-like protrusion
that looks like a beehive. As Leon and Helena watch, it emits a cloud of blue
gas that almost instantly transforms the nearest survivors into zombies.

Leon and Helena are forced to engage the Lepotitsa at long range to avoid
being infected themselves, bombarding it with gunfire and incendiary grenades.
They are unable to bring it down before it's killed most of the survivors
that remain in Tall Oaks Cathedral.

The secret passage under the altar leads to an old concrete bunker, which
has been converted into a cellblock. Several of the cells are occupied by
recent infectees, although a dead Lepotitsa on the floor suggests what may
have happened.

On the other side of the cellblock, they find a room that's empty aside
from a single chair. Helena says she remembers it; "Deborah must be close."
Leon asks who that is, but Helena's silent. She takes the lead, moving
through the next hallway into a laboratory, where several computers line
each wall.

The hallways past this room are lined with storage crates, furniture, and
the occasional dead man in a lab coat. Someone has moved in modern equipment,
turning these centuries-old catacombs into an improvised medical theater.
Helena goes through the area ahead of Leon, ignoring the few corpses that
reanimate along the way and still searching for "Deborah." When Leon finally
gets a reaction out of her, Helena claims they "don't have much time."

Leon and Helena smash open a door in the next room, which is full of
humanoid shapes suspended in tanks full of liquid. One of the tanks has
shattered, and the humanoid within it has solidified, like a statue made
of amber. Helena says aloud that none of the tanks or equipment were in
this room three days ago, just as Leon spots a VCR and an old video tape
on the far side of the room. "Happy Birthday Ada Wong" is written on the
tape in flowery cursive, and Leon puts it in to play.
The footage is identified as part of "Project Ada." A humanoid shape, like
those on either side of Leon and Helena, pulsates in the center of a room,
observed by several men in lab coats. It finally explodes from within,
disgorging a woman. She is identifiably Ada Wong.

The tape ends, and Leon asks if this is what Helena had wanted him to see.
It isn't.

A nearby door leads them further into the laboratory, which is lined with
more of the glass storage tanks. Most are occupied, and several more of
the amber statues are found throughout the area, as if the lab's staff were
suddenly transformed. Their passage through the lab is complicated by the
arrival of a pack of zombies, made up of the reanimated corpses of the lab's
staff and what appear to be some fresh arrivals from Tall Oaks. Leon and
Helena make an escape through a nearby disposal chute.

It drops them in an old mining tunnel, in a dead-end covered in old trash.

The passage opens onto a large vertical mineshaft, where a young woman in
a nightgown lies on a plank in the center of the room. This is Deborah,
to go by Helena's reaction; she's lucid, but groggy and in pain. Leon
tries to use this as an excuse to finally get some answers out of Helena,
but Helena picks Deborah up, calling her "sis." She says she'll tell Leon
everything once Deborah's safe.

Leon takes point as Helena carries Deborah. The mineshaft has its own
population of zombies, which are even more decayed than those they fought
in the cemetery, but they retain enough human knowledge to wield mining
tools and lit dynamite as weapons. Between the zombies' explosives and
whatever's going on in Tall Oaks, the ceiling begins to rumble ominously.

As they reach a new landing, Deborah screams, crumples to the ground and
finally bursts into flames. Her clothing burns away, her skin melts, and
in seconds, she's covered in one of the amber-colored chrysalises they
saw back in the laboratory.

----
[split scene 1: Ada]
Deborah's back splits and erupts, just as they saw on the videotape of Ada's
"birth." Slowly, a new Deborah emerges from the shell, naked but weirdly
sexless. Helena reaches out for Deborah...

...and an arrow strikes Deborah in the forehead. She flies backwards and
lies still.

Leon whirls to find Ada Wong, holding an oversized crossbow. "You look like
you've seen a ghost," she says calmly, and brushes off Leon's demands for
information with "It's complicated." Helena holds her at gunpoint for a
moment, but Leon gently pushes Helena's gun towards the ground. Helena
breaks down sobbing.

Helena kneels before Deborah, trying to apologize, but Deborah is not yet
dead. She suddenly sprouts a set of massive, spider-like limbs from her
back, and with no sign of her former humanity, begins to attack Helena,
Leon, and Ada.

The fight doesn't last long. Deborah lashes out, shattering the floor.
Helena ends up on one side of the mineshaft, with Leon and Ada on the other,
as Deborah disappears into the darkness. As they move down the gangplanks,
Ada tosses Leon a ring. "It'll make sense later," she says.

Leon and Ada's progress down the mineshaft is interrupted by Deborah,

who tackles them both to the ground. She adopts hit-and-run tactics,
leaping back and forth with surprising agility and sweeping her targets
off of their feet with her spider limbs. At one point, a lucky shot
seems to knock her unconscious, but she recovers quickly, once again
shattering the floor.

Deborah's attacks are further destabilizing the area, and the entire
mineshaft shakes. Ada and Helena activate an old mine cart and use it
to escape the area with Leon in tow, which is complicated shortly
thereafter by Deborah's reappearance. She clings to the side of the
cart, trying to kill them all with her spider limbs, and their gunfire
doesn't seem to do much more than annoy her.

Their cart runs out of track shortly thereafter, and it sails over
a dark pit. Leon and Ada bail out and end up on a platform above
Helena, who finds herself facing off against Deborah alone with her
back to the pit. Deborah sprouts a new limb, this one emerging from
her mouth, and inches forward to impale Helena.

All three of them concentrate fire, trying to stop Deborah, and it

finally has an impact. Deborah's limbs retract into her body and she
falls forward, rolling over Helena and off the edge of the platform.
Helena reacts quickly and grabs Deborah's hand, but seeing her eye
to eye, Helena can finally tell there's nothing left of Deborah; her
sister is dead. She swears that she's done crying until such time as
she avenges Deborah, and lets go. Deborah falls into the darkness.

When they meet back up, Leon finally gets his explanation. Helena
and Deborah were both abducted, and Deborah's life was used as
leverage against Helena. She was forced to submit a report over the
radio that an armed group of assassins had entered Ivy University
with plans to attack the President, which split the Secret Service's
focus. When the gas attack hit the university, they were distracted
and weren't able to evacuate the President in time. One of the people
responsible for the abduction was Derek Simmons himself.

Hearing that doesn't surprise Ada, who says it sounds like Simmons's
style. Her phone rings, and Ada walks away, saying they're "up against
the people who really run this country." She uses her grapple gun to
make a quick exit.
----

Leon's own phone rings shortly thereafter. It's Hunnigan. When Leon
tries to explain what's going on, Simmons cuts into the conversation,
claiming he just heard his name.

Simmons, clearly enjoying himself, tells Leon and Helena that since
they were the only two people present when the President was killed,
the two of them are obvious suspects in the President's death. He
encourages them to turn themselves in, ignoring Helena's furious
accusations, and breaks off the call.

Leon and Helena begin to search for a way out. The mineshaft leads
them to ancient catacombs, which are in surprisingly good repair and
feature a number of deadly traps. The first passageway ends in a door
that's locked with an elaborate seal, but Leon soon realizes it can
be opened with the ring that Ada gave him. The seal on the door
also matches the sigil on Simmons's ring.

Like the mines, the catacombs are riddled with desiccated zombies, as
if they've been getting dumped down here for years. Several are armed
with old axes or improvised bludgeons. The tunnels the catacombs are
built on are slowly flooding, which provides another mutant with a
habitat: a massive, mutated shark, with rusty harpoons sticking out
of its flank.

Leon and Helena break through the catacombs to a massive underground

cavern, where several rope bridges and unsteady walkways provide them
with a path over yet another chasm. Unfortunately, several of the
zombies from the mineshaft catch up to them, many of which are armed
with old dynamite. A stray explosion is powerful enough to trigger a
partial collapse of the cavern, and just as Leon and Helena reach
safety, they're swept further into the caverns by a sudden flood.

The lowest levels of Simmons's catacombs are now half-collapsed

and flooded. Leon and Helena swim through them, surviving by finding
air pockets within the destruction, and manage to reach a cistern.
It's blocked due to a cave-in, but they don't have time to search
for another option; Helena is suddenly dragged underwater by the
shark. Leon grabs onto the shark's tail fin, and they drive it off
by employing the harpoons stuck into its hide.

When they both get free, they find themselves in an underground lake.
Helena lands on dry land, and holds off the shark with her gun while
Leon swims for safety. The shark, much like Deborah, has a bizarre
proboscis extending from inside its mouth, and striking the proboscis
causes it to roar and break off its pursuit.

Leon and Helena think they've won for a second, right before the
shark makes one final try at them. They end up sliding down another
tunnel, pursued by the shark all the while, barely evading its jaws
by shooting it in the proboscis. Finally, they catch a break; some
of the debris that's been washed down the tunnel with them includes
a barrel of explosives from the mines. They detonate it in midair,
blowing the shark to pieces.

The tunnel drops the two of them out into open air, above a lake
outside the Tall Oaks city limits. Leon and Helena surface just
in time to see a pair of fighter jets on approach towards Tall Oaks.
As they drag themselves ashore, the horizon lights up with fire and
smoke; the city has been destroyed, along with Simmons's laboratory
and all the evidence against him.

Hunnigan calls them from the ops center. Soon after they'd spoken
to him, Hunnigan says, Simmons lit out for the airport. He has a
private jet waiting to take him to China, where there's been another
similar attack in the city of Liansheng. In both places, the BSAA
has confirmed the weapon used is called the "C-Virus," which they
encountered during the Edonian civil war six months ago. She also
reports that an organization calling itself "Neo-Umbrella" has
taken public responsibility for the Tall Oaks outbreak.

Leon hesitates, then comes up with a plan. He tells Hunnigan to fake

both his and Helena's deaths. While it won't be long before people
see through the ruse, it'll be enough time to let Leon and Helena
get to China. They're going after Simmons directly.

A day later, they're aboard a passenger jet. Helena asks Leon why
he didn't turn her in to clear his own name; Leon replies that it
might've worked, but it wouldn't have been enough to stop whatever
Simmons is planning.

As their plane enters Chinese airspace, it shakes suddenly and

an alarm goes off. Leon and Helena get up and enter the cockpit,
where they find one pilot dead on the floor and the other inside
one of the C-Virus's chrysalises. It breaks open, revealing another
Lepotitsa. Somehow, the virus that's loose in Liansheng has already
gotten aboard their plane.

Leon seizes a high-caliber handgun from the pilots' storage locker

and uses it to dispatch the Lepotitsa. The plane's auto-pilot is
keeping them in the sky, but Hunnigan radios in that the alarm is
due to something going wrong with the plane's pressure bulkhead.
Leon and Helena head down to the cargo hold and seal it up, only
to end up in a confrontation with a second Lepotitsa. Thinking
quickly, they knock it out the plane's cargo door.

They head back towards the cockpit, but the second Lepotitsa has
already done its damage. The passenger cabin of the plane is filled
with the same gas that infected the survivors in Tall Oaks Cathedral,
and all the other passengers have succumbed. Leon and Helena shoot
their way through these new zombies, but when they reach the cockpit,
discover the plane's at 1,000 feet and descending fast; opening the
cargo hold door also destabilized the plane. Leon gets into the pilot's
chair and, with Hunnigan's help, tries to land. Instead of crashing
it outright, he brings it to a destructive halt in the middle of
Liansheng's shipping district.

----
[split scene 2: Jake & Sherry]
When Leon and Helena extricate themselves from the plane, the first
people they see are Sherry Birkin and Jake Muller. Sherry and Leon
have a quick reunion, although it's the first time Leon's seen Sherry
in a while, and Sherry explains she's on a protective detail for Jake.
When Leon says he and Helena are after Simmons, she's confused; she
reports directly to Simmons, and is on her way to rendezvous with him
right now near a building called the Quad Towers. Leon and Jake
almost come to blows over it, but Sherry calms Jake down.

Suddenly, one of the engines from the wrecked plane comes flying at
them, thrown by a massive, humanoid mutant that's standing on top of
the plane. They dodge it and fight off the mutant, which Jake calls
an "ex-girlfriend"; it doesn't know when to quit. It weathers a hail
of gunfire from all four of them, retaliating with a metal claw it
has in place of one arm.

The fight finally ends when a nearby radio tower, weakened by the plane
crash, gives way. The mutant is underneath it when it falls over, which
separates Leon and Helena from Sherry and Jake. Sherry tells Leon to meet
her at her rendezvous point with Simmons just before an explosion cuts
them off. Leon and Helena set off by themselves.
----

In an open-air meat market, they discover their progress blocked by

a series of sturdy steel doors. Several merchants have sacrificed their
own lives to keep the market isolated from the rest of the city. Leon
and Helena soon find out why, as new, bizarre creatures begin to pursue
them. They're called Rasklapanjes, which is derived from the Serbian
word for "dismantle"; each is a loose collection of independently
animated parts, which break apart to pursue them. Gunfire only serves
to forcibly disassemble them, unless the individual parts are absolutely
destroyed. Leon and Helena are forced to contend with the Rasklapanjes
while searching the market for the merchants' keys, slaying several
via means such as microwave ovens, meat slicers, and thermite grenades.

Once they escape, Leon and Helena start to head for Sherry's rendezvous
point, but they notice a woman disappear into a nearby building. It appears
to be Ada, and Helena suggests they follow her.

Just as they catch up to Ada, someone shoots at her from nearby, and she
uses her grapple gun to escape. The door locks behind her, so Leon tries
another route. They end up in another laboratory like the one Simmons had
underneath the cathedral in Tall Oaks, complete with storage tanks for
unknown organisms on either wall.

Leon dashes down a long hallway towards an elevator, but is slowed down
when Ada, observing him from above, activates a security measure,
filling the hallway with a laser field. That buys time for someone else
to take the elevator, forcing Leon and Helena to use the stairs.

They're racing against two armed men to get to Ada first, and Ada's
complicating matters by employing armed drones and gas grenades. She
reaches the other side of the warehouse, but is cornered by the two
gunmen. Leon catches up to one and knocks his gun to the side just
before he fires, spraying bullets to Ada's right; a brief scuffle
ends with Leon and the man pointing guns at each other.

----
[split scene 3: Chris & Piers]
It's an angry Chris Redfield, who tells Leon that Ada is responsible for
the deaths of all his men. Leon retorts that Ada's a key witness against
Simmons, who's responsible for 70,000 dead Americans and the murder
of the President.

Ada uses their standoff as a distraction and drops a flashbang grenade.

Chris's companion Piers recovers first, firing at her as she drops to
the warehouse floor, and gives chase. Before he pursues Ada, Chris offers
Leon a deal; the BSAA will track down Ada if Leon will go after Simmons.
Leon agrees, and tells Chris that he knows he'll do the right thing.
----

Leon and Helena leave the warehouse to keep their appointment with
Sherry. The rendezvous point where she's to meet Simmons is a construction
site, right next to an elevated track for a commuter train.

When Leon and Helena get to the construction site, Simmons is waiting
on a floor above them, escorted by several men in black suits holding
SMGs. A tense standoff ensues, which isn't helped when Sherry and Jake
arrive a few seconds later. Sherry asks Simmons if he had anything to
do with the Tall Oaks outbreak, and Simmons doesn't deny it; he asks
rhetorically if Leon's just running down the street, telling anyone
who'll listen about it. Simmons claims the entire thing is for the
good of the country and tells his men to open fire.
From behind cover, Leon and Sherry discuss a plan. Sherry gives Leon
a data chip that she says may contain a cure for the C-Virus; Leon
volunteers to cover Jake and Sherry as they make a break for the
nearest door. Leon and Helena dive out of cover, spraying Simmons's
guards with suppressive fire, as Sherry and Jake escape.

Above them, Simmons is annoyed that the standoff is taking this long.
His guards' gunfire blocks out the sound of a man creeping up on him,
who fires a dart gun into the side of Simmons's neck.

His guards blow the man away, who bursts into smoke and ashes as he
falls, and Simmons yanks the dart out. It's an injector, and whatever
was in it is already causing the veins on the side of his face to turn
an ugly black. "She got me," Simmons says aloud. "Well played."

Simmons lurches drunkenly off his platform, dropping onto the roof of
a passing commuter train. Leon and Helena give chase, jumping onto an
empty car on the back of the same train.

They catch up to Simmons at the head of the train. He's on the phone
with a woman who sounds like Ada, who assures him that he's just
becoming the monster he always was. Simmons crushes his cell phone
in anger, then turns on Leon and Helena.

The death of the President was for a greater good, he maintains. If

the truth about the government's involvement in Raccoon City had come
out, the United States would have lost all of its political authority
and the world order would have promptly collapsed. The real threat,
Simmons says, is from "that traitor," Ada Wong.

His villainous monologue is cut short as he suddenly loses his battle

with whatever he was injected with. Simmons's body swells, breaking
his family ring and shredding his clothes, before something bursts
forth from inside his skin. His body reassembles itself in seconds,
going from human to something quadripedal and much larger, and he
leaps to the attack.

While he isn't in control of his mutation and he doesn't enjoy the

same insane durability as Deborah did, Simmons just keeps mutating
and coming back for more. Leon and Helena fight a desperate battle
with him in and around the moving subway train, filling him with
bullets, and every time Simmons seems to be down, he simply gets back
up. His next form is capable of keeping pace with the train by running
on the parallel track, firing shards of bone from an extended tendril
that rip into the subway train like machine-gun fire.

The final straw comes when Simmons notices their fight has an observer.
One of the black-suited men that accompanied him at the construction
site is watching them from inside a helicopter, and as soon as he realizes
Simmons has seen him, he flies away. Simmons's allies have abandoned him.

Simmons goes berserk and leaps off the train car, intending to kill
Leon and Helena by derailing it. They interrupt him with some well-placed
gunfire and he stumbles, falling underneath the car's wheels. The train is
still knocked off its tracks, but Leon and Helena have just enough time
to leap into the harbor.

Slowly, they pull themselves onto a nearby pier. Several BSAA operatives
are nearby, guarding a handful of refugees. For some reason, they've been
ordered to evacuate these people even though the C-Virus hasn't spread
this far out.

Hunnigan calls Leon and tells him that a situation's come up. Sherry and
Jake have been abducted, and satellite images indicate they were taken
to the rigs for an underwater oil field nearby. Leon's confused, but
Helena reminds him of the data card Sherry gave him. He plugs it into
his phone, and a brief scan of the files says it all; Jake himself is
the potential C-Virus cure that Sherry mentioned. Leon asks Hunnigan
to check and see if the BSAA has any agents nearby, and she patches him
in to Chris.

As they speak, Helena notices something overhead. As it gets closer,

it becomes obvious that it's a missile. Chris gets on the radio with Leon
and frantically tells him to get out of the area.

It's too late, and the missile detonates in the middle of downtown
Liansheng, pushing a massive, opaque cloud of C-Virus-infused gas
into the city.

A few seconds of silence pass. People who were indoors as the cloud
passed by are unaffected, but as they slowly begin to emerge onto the
street, they're attacked by a horde of freshly created zombies. The
city devolves into chaos.

Leon tells Chris that he and Helena have survived, and tells Chris to
rescue Sherry and Jake. Jake's blood could be used to create a cure for
the C-Virus, Leon says, and he's Albert Wesker's son. Chris is shocked,
but says he'll take care of it.

Before they break radio contact, Chris tells Leon one more thing: Ada
Wong is dead. Leon says "Copy," and is otherwise silent. Helena asks if
he's okay, and Leon says he is, although he appears to be in shock.

A squad of BSAA soldiers comes by below them, escorting civilian evacuees,

and Leon and Helena volunteer to help. As they move out, the gas cloud from
the center of the city arrives, and anyone caught by it dies almost instantly.
Leon, Helena, and the surviving BSAA soldiers use alleyways and buildings
to avoid direct exposure, cutting through a department store to reach one
of the BSAA's humvees. The civilian evacuees and several of the BSAA's
soldiers succumb to the gas, and the resulting mob of zombies is hot on
their heels. Only two of the BSAA soldiers make it to the humvee, and one
sacrifices himself in a holding action to keep the zombies at bay.

The last BSAA soldier takes the wheel and drives Leon and Helena
through the streets of Liansheng, protected from the gas by the
airtight seals on the humvee. His radio crackles to life; Liansheng's
Taichi district is officially a no-go zone for the BSAA, and all
operatives are told to pull out. One squad, Echo, remains within
the perimeter, but they're being written off, as the BSAA can't
afford to risk any more soldiers.

As they drive through the city, the corpses strewn through the
streets rapidly reanimate, clawing at the windows of the humvee.
The agent takes them up to a road that's been blocked by a multi-
car pile-up and apologizes; this is as far as he goes. He's
going back for Echo.
Leon and Helena move forward into Liansheng, but both are nearly
flattened by an out-of-control tanker truck which overturns
nearby. They have just enough time to see that it's leaking fuel
before it ignites. The ensuing explosion sends them both flying,
and they both black out for a few seconds.

Leon is the first to wake, and he hoists Helena up onto his shoulder.
Suddenly, they're both lit up by a spotlight from a helicopter. It
gets close enough that both of them can see through the windshield
to its pilot: Ada Wong.

Ada covers them with the machine gun on her chopper as Leon and
Helena get off the street, cutting through a nearby building. They
end up overlooking a busy overpass, full of commuters and travelers
who were helpless when the C-Virus rolled through. The road is now
choked with zombies, devouring the few people who survived the gas.

Hunnigan confirms via radio that this road will lead Leon and Helena
to the BSAA's fallback point for evac. They jump a rail and drop down
to the street, fighting their way through the zombies, until Helena
notices a problem. A fighter jet has crashed into the building
overhead, and as they watch, it begins to teeter. Leon and Helena
run for it as the jet falls onto the road's surface, causing a chain
reaction; the overpass buckles, the jet smashes open another tanker
truck full of fuel, and soon they're just one step ahead of a rolling
wave of flames.

Rescue arrives in the form of a pair of BSAA agents in a helicopter,

one of whom leaps to the top of a truck to cover them. Helena gets
there first, and Leon manages to grab onto a landing strut, but the
BSAA agent is lost in a wave of flames as the explosions send the
helicopter reeling. The pilot is unconscious, and soon succumbs to
the C-Virus, so Leon takes the stick. It's too late to land, but he's
able to crash near to where they want to go.

The BSAA's set up their fallback position at the base of the Quad
Towers, where a tall, thin plinth marks the center of the area between
the four buildings. This area is well-stocked and readily defensible,
but it didn't do the BSAA any good. None have survived.

Leon looks up from one of the bodies to see a bloody, wounded Simmons
stagger into the area. Leon and Helena ready their weapons for another
confrontation, but before a fight can start, Ada arrives in her helicopter.

----
[split scene 4: Ada]
Simmons seethes upon seeing her. He knows what she did, he says; she
stole Wesker's son, and used "that bastard's blood" to make the C-Virus
even stronger. With a roar of rage, Simmons's body warps yet again, this
time into a bizarre and gargantuan form that resembles a tyrannosaurus
rex, with a single bulging eye located within its mouth.

With Ada providing air support, Leon and Helena fight Simmons, using
their small arms and the BSAA's stash of fuel and ammunition. His hide
seems virtually impenetrable, but the eye in his mouth is a weak spot,
and damage to it makes him roar in agony. The lone BSAA survivor reappears
in his jeep, and Leon and Helena employ the jeep's mounted guns to great
effect against Simmons, but Simmons wrecks the jeep, killing the soldier.
Finally, Simmons crashes to the floor and doesn't get back up.
----

Ada shines her helicopter's spotlight on Leon and Helena, then goes
straight up. Leon figures she means for them to follow her.

They take an exterior elevator to the Quad Towers' roof, watching the city
burn through its glass housing. The topmost floors have caught fire, and
small explosions rock each building. Leon watches as a skybridge breaks
apart and drops down towards the street.

Helena asks Leon about Ada, but she's interrupted when one of those
small explosions hits their elevator. The first jolt shatters the
exterior glass wall; the second knocks the car away from the building.
Leon and Helena share a look, then jump for and catch the elevator's cable.

As they climb, they notice a fight has broken out atop a nearby skybridge
between Ada and Simmons, the latter of whom has resumed the doglike form
he used in their battle on the train.

----
[split scene 5: Ada]
Leon and Helena reach the closer end of the collapsed skybridge and jump
to it, taking the opportunity to back Ada up from long range. They knock
Simmons back into human form for a second, but the skybridge is too unstable,
forcing them to get back on the cable as it collapses.

Simmons ditches Ada to pursue Leon, using his claws to cling to the side
of the building and chase Leon up the cable. This time, it's Ada's turn
to back Leon up, and she knocks Simmons off the wall just before he cuts
Leon in half. That gets Simmons's attention right back on her, and a sweep
of his tail knocks Ada flying. She rolls to a stop, unconscious, atop one
of the intact skybridges.

Helena makes it to safe ground, but when Leon sees Ada isn't moving, he
leaps from the cable to Ada's position. His gunfire has no real effect
on Simmons, who stalks towards them in human form, telling Leon that Ada
will just betray him; Leon refuses to abandon Ada, going so far as to
shield her with his body from Simmons's attacks. Fortunately, Ada was
simply stunned, and she's able to return to the fight.

With Helena providing cover fire, Leon and Ada engage Simmons. In these
close confines, it's nearly impossible to dodge his attacks, and he
knocks Leon off the edge of the skybridge. Leon catches onto the roof
with one hand, dangling hundreds of feet in the air.

Simmons resumes his human form to gloat and step on Leon's fingers, but
Ada interrupts him. She stabs Simmons in the side with an arrow, where
an ordinary man's liver would be. As Simmons screams in pain, his wound
venting both blood and a red gas, Ada switches her grip on the arrow and
takes them both over the side. As Simmons plummets, Ada uses her grapple
gun to swing to safety.
----

Leon yells for Ada to wait for him, but she sends him a text message;
she's "left a present" for him on the roof of the building. She disappears
into the shadows inside one of the buildings.

Helena contacts Leon by radio and tells him to go after Ada. Leon shakes
his head. They're sticking together.
Leon and Helena reunite and head to the building's roof, where Ada's left
her helicopter for them. Between it and them, however, are a surprisingly
large number of zombies... which are suddenly impaled, one by one, by a
tendril from behind. Each zombie convulses and bursts into flames, as
Deborah had, before their mass is absorbed by the creature that stabbed
them: Simmons. What passes for his rationality is entirely gone.

Leon and Helena's attacks catch Simmons off guard, stunning him. The nearby
zombies latch onto him, seeing a free meal, and Leon and Helena escape while
they're trying to feed.

They've reached the part of the towers that's still under construction.
One of the gangplanks is still blocked by a crane, and as they hoist
themselves up and over it, they catch sight of what Simmons is now. He's
absorbed the biomass from all those zombies that tried to kill him, and
now resembles a massive, red-eyed black fly, which is the size of the
skyscraper's roof and growing fast.

He throws a projectile at them, which appears to be a knot of dead zombies

fused together, and hits the back of the crane. Leon falls off, landing
on a nearby window-washer's lift, and is forced to defend himself from
Simmons as Helena gets him out of harm's way. Simmons's massive compound
eyes provide an obvious target, and Leon's gunfire knocks him off the
building; Simmons's tiny wings don't generate enough lift to save him
from another fall, and the damaged crane falls on top of him.

When Leon and Helena reach the helipad, Simmons catches right back up
to them. He's mutated even further in the few minutes since, and is
now mostly covered in a jet-black, bulletproof exoskeleton. Yellow nodules
have formed where his six legs meet the rest of his body, and they're
quite vulnerable to gunfire, but he shields those nodules with armored
limbs and heals his wounds by absorbing zombies whole.

The closest Quad Tower's spire broke in half at some point, and the broken
end has fallen to the rooftop, spearing a zombie like a museum moth. Simmons
seems to be indestructible until he tries to absorb that zombie, at which point
a bizarre weakness shows itself. He's now the biggest creature in the city,
perched on top of the tallest building, and there's a thunderstorm coming.
Simmons's absorption of the zombie means he brings the spire up with it,
which attracts a lightning bolt to him.

That forms the basis of a new plan. Simmons is forced to absorb zombies
to heal the damage they're inflicting on him, but when he grabs a zombie
that's been impaled on the piece of the broken spire, it turns him into
an improvised lightning rod. Even a direct lightning strike isn't enough
to kill Simmons outright, but it stuns him, and when his head lands on
the rooftop, it gives them an opening in which to fire at his exposed eyes.
Soon, as his legs begin to crack and fall away from his carapace, the spire
ends up sticking out of his forehead. The next bolt of lightning goes straight
into his brain, and Simmons loses his grip on the side of the building.

As Leon and Helena finally reach the helicopter, Simmons struggles back
up for one last attempt. He raises a single claw up to crush them, but
Leon notices an anti-tank rocket stored inside the helicopter. Before\
Simmons can strike, they use it against him.

Simmons is knocked off the side of the building and plummets to

the ground, surrounded by flaming pieces of what used to be his
exoskeleton. He ricochets off one of the last remaining skybridges,
returning to his human shape in mid-air, and hits the ornamental
plinth in the central plaza at terminal velocity.

His face splits open, and for a moment, it looks as if he's going to
begin yet another life-saving mutation, but it stops halfway through.
Whatever's been fueling his metamorphosis has run out. Simmons lies
still, impaled on the plinth. Helena looks down at him and says
quietly, "That's for my sister."

When she and Leon open the doors to the helicopter, they find a
makeup compact on the seat, etched with a butterfly logo. When opened,
it contains a secret compartment with an SD card inside. Plugging
it into his phone, Leon finds photo after photo of Simmons and his
experiments. It's all the information he needs to prove Simmons's
guilt and their innocence, although Helena immediately claims she
doesn't need it. She's willing to face the consequences of her actions.

Leon receives a call from Hunnigan, who tells him they've figured
out a way to defeat the C-Virus. Just then, a nearby explosion
reminds him that they're still in the middle of a dying city, and
Leon hangs up. With Helena behind the stick, they lift off in Ada's
helicopter and fly out of Liansheng.

Upon their return to the United States, Helena's role in the Tall
Oaks disaster is reviewed by a judicial commission, and they find
that she can't be held liable for Simmons's actions. Leon and
Hunnigan tell her this as Helena's visiting Deborah's grave, to
Helena's surprise.

As Helena and Hunnigan leave the cemetery, Helena throws Ada's

compact to Leon. "For the next time you see her," she says.

======================
20iii. Chris and Piers
======================

June 29th, 2013: an American drinks and smokes at a dive bar in eastern
Europe. Another American sits down next to him with a plate of food.

The bartender refuses to serve the first American any more alcohol,
which almost results in a fight with some of the locals. The American
picks up a liquor bottle to use as a weapon, but the second American
catches him by the arm. He didn't expect to find Chris Redfield in a
place like this, he says.

He introduces himself as Piers, as if Chris should know him. Chris

clutches his head and claims he doesn't remember a thing, even when
confronted with four photos on Piers's phone: four dead BSAA soldiers,
who Piers claims Chris should know. The sight of the BSAA emblem seems
to spur Chris's memory, and Piers brings in several soldiers as backup.
They're taking him back, Piers says, one way or the other.

A day later, Piers has brought Chris to the city of Waiyip in China.
A bioterrorist attack has endangered the lives of several UN workers,
and it's their job to rescue them. They're part of Alpha Squad, one of
five teams operating in the city. Step one is to get to a hotel,
codenamed the "Ace of Spades," where the UN workers are being held.
Their helicopter drops them off on the roof of a fire-damaged, condemned
building near the incident zone. When they emerge onto the street, they're
greeted with a reporter who tries to interview them about the BSAA's role,
both here and in the "incident in America." The BSAA ignores him.

The far end of the street is held by hostiles, and as Chris and Piers
draw near, one hits the BSAA's position with an anti-tank rocket, killing
several men and blocking off the street. This forces them to take a detour
through a nearby building. As the other squads report coming under fire
via the radio, Chris and Piers witness several civilians being cut down
indiscriminately by the terrorists.

As they emerge onto the street, they make contact with one of the
terrorists for the first time. At first, it looks like an ordinary man
wearing a mask, but then it catches a round that takes off most of its
head. It quickly regenerates into something inhuman, and opens fire
as if nothing had happened.

The terrorists all seem fearless to the point of suicide. One uses a rocket
launcher to take out a helicopter that's almost directly above him, which
topples directly on top of him and his companions. Others attack a full
compliment of riflemen while wielding nothing more than a machete.

Chris seems to remember his training, if nothing else, and deals with
the terrorists appropriately. When Piers asks if being in the field is
jogging his memory, Chris tells him to "can the chatter."

They reach a back-alley kitchen, where several BSAA soldiers have

fallen at the hands of the terrorists. Piers saves one of his men
with a careful rifle shot to a terrorist's arm, and as the wounded
man hits the ground, his shoulder begins to swell. With a disgusting
ripping sound, the man gets back up, his face covered in extraneous
eyes and his wounded arm replaced with a powerful, twisted claw.
He uses it to strike down a groggy BSAA agent, and the sight of the
soldier lying wounded on the floor triggers a sudden flash of memory
in Chris, of reaching out to take the hand of a scared young man.

After they dispose of the terrorists, Chris orders two of his remaining
troops to stay behind and care for the wounded. They continue to progress
through the back alleys, running into more of the masked terrorists,
which get more vicious and better-armed as the BSAA gets closer to its
destination. The terrorists mostly appear human, but if one takes a
crippling injury to a limb, it mutates to compensate; arms become
enormous twisted claws, and a man who's lost both legs may suddenly
take to the sky on a bizarre set of insectoid wings. Whether they
mutate or not, the terrorists burn to ashes upon death.

As the BSAA makes further progress, the last two men in their squad stay
back to wait for reinforcements; those reinforcements are subsequently
delayed when they come under heavy fire. By the time they reach the
"Ace of Spades," Chris and Piers are on their own, and are forced to
withstand a siege until the Bravo squad can reach their position.

Now with backup, Chris and Piers enter the "Ace of Spades" through
the roof and fight their way down, floor by floor, through more
mutants, terrorists, and mutated terrorists. Several of the mutants
have become horrific crossbreeds between spiders and men, clinging
to walls and ceilings as they fire on the BSAA.
They soon discover the hostages are being held by two of the, well,
spider-men, who seem content to run around the building with the
hostages stuck to their backs, leading the BSAA into ambushes. One
by one, they track down the hostages, kill the terrorists holding
them, and send the hostages to safety with BSAA agents as bodyguards.

That leaves Chris and Piers to finish clearing the building. Once
they're done, they're told via the radio, the BSAA will send in
a bomber to finish the operation and ensure no trace of the virus
remains. They advance through the building, dealing with two separate
ambushes in the elevator shaft, and rescue the hostage on the first floor.
Unfortunately, their evacuation is delayed by part of the building
falling apart, and they're forced to hustle to the third floor and
leap to safety just as the bombs drop.

In the wreckage of the hotel, below ground level, they see something
strange: humanoid figures that look as if they were trapped in amber,
frozen in place. The sight of the figures causes Chris to fall over,
holding his head, as memories come rushing back.

Six months prior, on Christmas Eve, Chris and Piers had been in the
eastern European country of Edonia, where one side in a local civil
war employed a new brand of bioweapon the BSAA codenamed a "J'avo,"
taken from the Serbian word for "devil." The J'avo were much like
the mutated humans they've been fighting in China.

One of Chris's men was wounded while doing recon alone. Chris gave
his men a pep talk, reminding them that none of them are expendable.
The speech was particularly important to one man, a rookie named
Finn McCauley.

They moved out towards the fighting, where enemy fire overturned
Chris and Piers's humvee. The J'avo opened fire on their position,
and they had to fight their way up the street. Just the same, they
weren't having a lot of trouble until the J'avo suddenly received
backup, coming in the form of a two-story-tall giant BOW, codenamed
the Ogriman. It was powerful enough to shove buildings out of its way
to try and get at them, but shots to a soft red spot on the back of
its neck caused it to drop to its knees in pain. The arrival of a
BSAA armored vehicle drove it away, and it collapsed half a street
behind it to cover its escape.

With the armored vehicle backing them up, Chris's squad cleared
through several blocks of occupied territory, only stopping when
they reached a bridge. The J'avo had both a tank and a mounted
cannon backing them up, but Piers was able to take the first out
by blowing up a fuel truck, and the second was knocked into the
river by Finn McCauley and his demolition charges. The BSAA had
taken a few casualties up to this point, but no fatalities.

----
[split scene 6: Jake & Sherry]
On the other side of the bridge, Chris's squad was approached by a
blonde woman holding a U.S. government badge, who identified herself
as Sherry Birkin. She was transporting a known insurgent, Jake Muller.
This was the first time Chris had ever met her, although he'd heard
all about her from Claire.

The conversation was interrupted by a heavy-lift helicopter flying

overhead, which dropped off an Ogriman BOW on their position. Chris
was also informed of a nearby anti-aircraft battery, which needed to
be disabled before the BSAA could bring in reinforcements.

The rest of the squad, assisted by Sherry and Jake, distracted the
Ogriman while Finn set charges on the anti-aircraft turrets. In the
end, the Ogriman was killed; the massive red organ on its back proved
to be a vulnerability. It dissolved into gallons of foul-smelling muck.
When the first Ogriman showed up looking for a rematch, the same
tactics proved equally effective.

Once the AA guns were taken care of, Chris called in a pair of helicopters
to provide Sherry and Jake with further transport. Jake was a wanted
insurgent and looked familiar to Chris for some reason, but over
Piers's objections, Chris let him go. It wasn't their mission.
---

Instead, he took the rest of his squad to the Edonian city hall, which
resembled a scene out of a baroque painting. Humanoid statues, frozen
in mid-scream, decorated the area, coated in something like amber.
According to Finn's instruments, each had a living human inside.

As they progressed up to the second floor, Chris and Piers caught sight
of a woman in a blue dress as she disappeared around a corner. They
pursue her into an office on the first floor, where three of the cocoons
hatched. Each swelled rapidly upon its "birth," into an armored, bulky
creature that attacked with a pair of clublike fists, called a Napad.
It was protected from gunfire by a chitinous carapace, but once that
was shattered, a few bullets to a pulsating weak spot on its back brought
the creature down.

After another encounter with the J'avo, Chris and Piers caught up to
the woman in an infirmary, where the floor was littered with large, empty
syringes. The woman claimed she'd been a hostage of the J'avo guerillas,
and that they'd called the substance in the syringes the "C-Virus." She
introduced herself as Ada Wong. According to her, the J'avo were backed
by an organization calling itself "Neo-Umbrella." Chris thanked her for
her cooperation, and set Finn to be her bodyguard.

Ada offered to show Chris and Piers a "quick way back to the entrance."
With Finn in tow, they went back to the atrium, where all hell had broken
loose; their rear guard was engaged with three more of the bulky BOWs
they'd fought before, and more of the cocoons were hatching. On Ada's
advice, they made a tactical withdrawal to the second floor, where she
sealed off the door behind them, only to come face-to-face with yet
another new BOW: a lizard-like, wall-crawling creature that attacked
them by firing quills or vomiting noxious fluid.

On Ada's advice, Finn used breaching charges to access the warehouse next
door, which was also infested with hatching cocoons. They fought through
the new BOWs and tried to escape via the basement.

As they moved into the area, Piers noticed that Ada had quietly
disappeared. A second later, two wrought-iron portcullises dropped
into place on either side of the room, trapping Finn and the other
three members of their squad inside; Piers and Chris only escaped by
virtue of having been on point.

Ada stepped out of the shadows, thanked them for "the escort," and
gently tossed a silver sphere into the room with Finn and the others.
It exploded into dozens of tiny autosyringes, firing like shrapnel
through the room, and each of the BSAA agents was hit. Shortly
thereafter, all four were encased in their own amber cocoons, and
Ada made her escape.

As Chris hammered on the gate, unable to accept what had happened,

Finn's cocoon split open. He'd already turned into one of the monsters
they fought before. Before Chris could react, Finn seized him and beat
him against the walls and floor, striking his head directly against the
pavement. Piers grabbed onto him and dragged Chris to safety, firing his
rifle at the oncoming monsters, but Chris quietly blacked out.

Back in the present day, Chris watches as BSAA troops incinerate the
cocoons found underneath the hotel. He quietly asks Piers what had
happened to Ada Wong. Piers says she's probably in the city with them,
as she's been sighted several times and is known to be the leader of
this "Neo-Umbrella." Chris stands up and tells Piers to gather the
squad; they're moving out.

Before they can leave the ruins of the hotel, one of the BSAA soldiers
is suddenly attacked. An enormous snake slithers out of the wreckage
without a sound and latches onto his arm, then takes off with him. Its
scales shimmer into a camouflage pattern as it goes, becoming virtually
invisible. Chris and Piers gather their men with them and take off after
it, further into the evacuated area of the city.

A trail of blood leads them into a tenement building, which proves to

be a fallback position for the J'avo. Their C-Virus infections have
worsened, speeding up the rate at which they mutate in response to trauma.

----
[split scene 7: Jake & Sherry]
As they reach the other side of the building, an explosion gets Chris's
attention. He sees Sherry Birkin and Jake Muller pull themselves to their
feet on the street several stories below. Piers tells him that Sherry and
Jake had vanished six months ago, right after Chris's injury, and no one
was sure if they were alive. The BSAA tries to contact them, but neither
has a radio.

An attack helicopter flies into view, and Sherry and Jake are soon cornered
by a small army of J'avo gunmen. Neo-Umbrella is after them. Chris hesitates,
but orders his men to spread out and eliminate the threat.

The J'avo are largely coming pre-mutated now, and many have developed an
oversized set of insectoid legs, allowing them to leap large distances and
kick like a mule. Two spring directly to stand on the tail of the helicopter,
using its stabilizers as shooting positions.

One by one, the BSAA eliminates them, until all that's left is the helicopter.
It launches one last attack--a missile that almost hits Jake--before flying away.
----

Piers suggests that they escort Sherry and Jake to safety, but Chris doesn't
bother. Instead, they return to the pursuit of the giant snake. The helicopter
reappears as they reach a nearby rooftop, but this time, they're armed with a
40mm grenade launcher, found on the corpse of an unlucky J'avo. It's enough
to breach the helicopter's armor and bring it down.
With a glance at Sherry and Jake, who make eye contact to him from the street
below, Chris turns away. Piers tries to argue with him, on the basis that
Neo-Umbrella is clearly after Sherry and Jake, but Chris won't be dissuaded.
Their mission's the BOWs, he says.

They find their missing soldier shortly thereafter, dead and slumped against
a wall. The snake promptly grabs another man, Keaton, picking him off while
the rest of the squad's back is turned. Chris charges recklessly after it,
but he's too late. Piers objects, and Chris reacts angrily; these are his
men, he says, and Piers needs to fall in line. Piers quiets down.

The snake strikes twice more, taking a man each time, before one of its
attacks splits the team up. They converge on the second floor, where one
of the soldiers, Marco, radios in that he thinks he's found it. He's
right; they catch up to him in a barbershop as Marco makes an escape from
the snake.

The only time the snake notices their gunfire is if they hit it directly
in the mouth. It toys with them through half the building's basement,
then flees outside, taking cover inside a set of exposed storm drains.
Fortunately, the building's tenants have also jury-rigged a system to
draw power from the city's grid, and with Marco's help, Chris and Piers
are able to use that system to fry the snake with electricity. Upon its
death, it quickly dissolves.

Chris, Piers, and Marco head back into the building, Chris still intent
on finding Ada Wong. Piers argues that it's time to pull out, as they've
lost most of their squad, but he's interrupted by a cry of pain
from Marco. He falls over with a syringe sticking out of his neck.

Ada, holding a dart gun, greets them before she escapes out the window.
Marco succumbs to the C-Virus within seconds, and emerges from a chrysalis
as a new breed of BOW: a cloud of stinging insects, controlled by a single
queen the size of a housecat. A lucky shot kills the queen, and the rest
of the swarm disperses or dies.

Chris punches a wall in rage, and Piers tries one more time to talk him
down. The "legendary Chris Redfield," he says, is clearly more interested
in his vendetta against Ada than he is in their mission. For a second,
it looks as if Chris is about to punch Piers's lights out, but then Piers
says it's a good thing Finn didn't survive to see this. That seems to get
to Chris, who turns away and radios their headquarters; he needs a location
for Ada Wong. He's still going after her. Piers decides to go with Chris
anyway, as "someone needs to watch [his] back."

HQ gets back to Chris almost immediately with a report: Ada Wong has
been spotted heading for the harbor. All BSAA operatives in the city
are told to pursue her, with instructions to take her alive.

Chris and Piers emerge onto the waterfront and cross it by moving from
boat to boat, fighting off the increasingly-mutated J'avo as they go. Ada's
not far ahead of them, and escapes on a jetski.

Unfortunately, she has air support, in the form of two J'avo flying a
second attack helicopter. Chris and Piers run across the harbor, dodging
J'avo and the helicopter's suppressive fire, until they can take cover
inside a floating restaurant. They return fire with the grenade launcher,
knocking the helicopter into the water.
Ada hasn't gotten far, and they spot her as she ducks into a building,
which is identified by a nearby plaque as a medical research center. Piers
wonders aloud if it could be where the C-Virus was created, but Chris
doesn't notice. As Ada steps onto a balcony above them, Chris takes a
shot at her and misses; she escapes once again using her grapple gun.

Ada uses the building's bizarrely futuristic security systems to slow them
down, including a laser fence and a series of rolling mines. After hotwiring
an electronic lock, Chris and Piers move up to the street side of the
building and finally corner Ada.

----
[split scene 3: Leon & Helena]
----

Chris and Piers pursue Ada once again, just in time to see her leave the
research center in a red convertible. Piers takes the wheel of a nearby
jeep and they head after her, through the nearly-deserted streets of
downtown Liansheng. Chris tries to radio for backup, but all the BSAA's
squads are occupied with the J'avo. They do receive one piece of news;
there's an unidentified aircraft carrier in the harbor that, to go by
its radio traffic, may be the property of Neo-Umbrella.

Ada has a retinue of J'avo running interference for her, and it's only
through some reckless driving that Chris and Piers are able to stay on
her. Finally, Chris switches to the driver's seat and ramps the jeep
off an unfinished portion of the highway, rolling it into an open port
on the side of the aircraft carrier. As he blacks out from the impact,
he sees Ada walk away.

Both he and Piers wake up shortly thereafter, just before a humanoid

creature in a high-tech version of a plague mask can disembowel Chris.
It's not alone; the carrier is occupied by a heavily-armed cadre of
similarly-dressed J'avo, all of which mutate at the drop of a hat. They
run interference for Ada, using the carrier's automated walkways and
military hardware to slow Chris and Piers down.

When they reach the other end of the carrier's storage bay, they're in
time to overhear a phone conversation between Ada and Simmons, where she
tells him she's just given him what he'd given her; "...you're becoming
the monster you always were." He and his "family" may have shaped the
world, Ada says, but starting tomorrow, everything is going to change.

Chris and Piers take an elevator up to the next level of the carrier,
and once again end up face-to-face with Ada--dressed differently than
she was before, in a red shirt and black leather pants--as she slams a
bulkhead door behind her. Chris breaks the door down, but it's too late;
Ada disappears behind a heavy blast shield. They're forced to detour
through the carrier's barracks and bridge, and Ada always seems to be
one step ahead of them.

They finally catch up to Ada--once again wearing the blue dress and scarf,
as she was in the warehouse--on the ship's upper deck. She turns to face
them, holding her dart gun, and seems coldly amused. She'd hate to be a
member of Chris's team, Ada says, since they all keep dying, but at
least they made good test subjects.

Chris screams in rage and fires his rifle, but his shot only knocks Ada's
dart gun out of her hand. This isn't about vengeance, Chris says, but justice.
They're going to arrest her. It's over.

Ada agrees; it is over. The carrier is preparing for launch, and when it
does, it'll be "Raccoon revisited" all over the world.

An unmarked helicopter suddenly appears, shining a spotlight on Ada. A

man in a black suit aims a scoped rifle at her from the helicopter's
passenger compartment, and before anyone can react, he fires, striking
Ada in the chest. She hisses, "You got me. Well played," and falls
backward off the upper deck. Chris and Piers rush to the edge in time
to see Ada hit the ship's lower deck with a sickening thud.

Ada's briefcase is still on the platform with them. Piers opens it to

find three molded spaces inside for large, modified syringes. Only one
remains, and to judge by its color, it's a different strain than the
darts they saw used in Edonia and on Marco. He pockets it on Chris's
orders, intending to bring it back to HQ for analysis.

Chris realizes the entire terrorist attack on Liansheng was a diversion

for whatever the carrier's about to launch. He radios in to HQ, and is
told that the BSAA has lost contact with all assets on the ground in
Liansheng; he and Piers are on their own. With no better ideas, they go
back into the carrier, hoping there'll be a usable plane in its rear
hangar that they can use to stop the launch.

The BSAA's HQ tells Chris on their way down into the guts of the ship
that there's a second carrier not far from their current location, and
satellite images indicate that second carrier's preparing to launch
a brace of missiles into the city.

They cut through the ship's mess hall, where they find the corpses of
several men in navy uniforms, along with several unlucky J'avo. All
are the recent victims of several Rasklapanje, who wriggle piece by
piece through the ship's drainage system. At the same time, the ship
begins to rock dangerously, as if it's taken heavy damage from an
unknown source.

They reach the hangar and discover a VTOL fighter jet that's already
prepped for launch. Chris scrambles into the pilot's seat while Piers
takes control of the jet's weapon systems. By the time they get into
the air, the second carrier--crewed by J'avo--is almost ready to put
missiles in the air. They have very little time left.

Piers disables the carrier's anti-aircraft batteries with the jet's

missiles, then jumps out of the jet to the deck of the second carrier.
With Chris covering him from the air, Piers fights across the deck,
dispatching J'avo and avoiding the attacks of an Ogriman, and reaches
the carrier's control systems.

Piers manages to stop the missiles' launch sequence just before the
Ogriman stomps the control shed flat, then uses the carrier's cargo
crane to get back to the jet. Chris keeps the Ogriman at bay with the
jet's guns, but unexpectedly, the missiles begin their launch sequence
again. There's some kind of failsafe in play.

The Ogriman holds them off, but Piers is able to destroy one of the
missiles on its launcher. The second is fired directly into Liansheng.

From their vantage point aboard the jet, Chris and Piers can see the
cloud of C-Virus-infused gas that overtakes the city. It's taller than
some of the buildings.

Abruptly, Ingrid Hunnigan is patched into their radio channel, and she
in turn puts Chris in touch with Leon Kennedy, who's on the ground in
Liansheng. Leon and Helena have survived the explosion, for now.

Leon asks Chris to rescue two people from a nearby underground oil
field: Sherry Birkin and Jake Muller. Jake, Leon says, has antibodies
for the C-Virus in his bloodstream. Chris agrees, then tells Leon that
Ada Wong is dead. Leon acknowledges it, then breaks their connection.

It's almost sunrise by the time Chris and Piers reach the oil field. The
rig is abandoned, and there's an unlocked elevator near its helipad. They
land the jet and use the elevator to go down.

The sides of the elevator shaft turn to glass as they descend, revealing
a massive underwater facility, its sides shrouded in a quasi-organic muck.
Piers thinks aloud about the ironies of the situation; Wesker's son might
be the world's only chance, and his father's killer has come to save him.

Chris, who's become oddly somber since they cornered Ada, says that it's
been three years since Wesker's death, and he can't let the war follow him
forever. This is his last mission, he says, and once he retires, he'd be
honored if Piers would take his place. Piers is shocked, but then the
elevator doors open. It's back to business.

The underwater facility is massive, and it seems incredible that anyone

had the kind of money required to build it. It's exactly the kind of
undertaking that Umbrella was known for, and Chris says as much.

Right now, however, it's virtually abandoned. They encounter no resistance

as they enter, and it only takes Chris a few seconds with its computers to
find Jake and Sherry on its security feed. He's able to unlock their cell
remotely, but in so doing, triggers an alarm. The base's J'avo personnel
now know exactly where he and Piers are, and arrive to engage them.

Jake and Sherry are somewhere below them in a wing of the facility devoted
to research. Chris and Piers move through the area, dealing with more
of Carla's plague-masked J'avo, and activate an umbilical system: an
air-filled, flexible pipe for personnel transport that connects their
location with the research wing.

In so doing, they also set off another failsafe. Ada's recorded voice
greets them over the facility's public address system. If they've gotten
this far, she says, she assumes they're BSAA agents. It's time for them
to meet her greatest creation, one designed to thrive in the ruined world
to come.

----
[split scene 8: Jake & Sherry]
Once the umbilical system's ready, Chris and Piers escape through it to
the research wing, where they find Sherry and Jake. Sherry greets Chris,
guessing that Chris and Piers are why their bonds suddenly unlocked.
Jake is dejected; somebody else has managed to save the day.

Unexpectedly, Chris tells Jake "I can see your father in you." Jake is
shocked, and asks if Chris knew him. Chris admits that he killed Wesker.
Jake pulls his pistol and points it at Chris's face. Sherry tries to
talk him out of it and Piers levels his rifle, but Chris tells Piers
to ease off; this is between him and Jake. He was just following orders
when he killed Wesker, Chris tells Jake, but it was also personal. He
tells Jake to go ahead and kill him if he wants, but also wants Jake
to promise him that Jake will survive. The world needs him.

Enraged, Jake pulls the trigger, but the bullet strikes the wall behind
Chris. Chris doesn't react. There are more important things right now
than the two of them, Jake says, and holsters his gun.

The facility's walls rumble dangerously, and all four of them look up.
The room they're standing in is an enormous vertical shaft that links
multiple levels of the facility. Above them, hanging dangerously in the
center of the shaft, is a giant C-Virus chrysalis.

A nearby computer system is running a simulation, depicting the rate at

which this creature could infect the entire planet with the C-Virus. If
this creature isn't stopped, Chris says, it means the end of the world.

All four of them use nearby elevator platforms to travel up the sides
of the shaft. Piers, on a lift with Chris, tells him he didn't have to
risk himself like that. Chris, still eerily calm, says Jake had the right
to know what had happened. Wesker was his father.

They encounter significant resistance from the remaining J'avo as they

travel up the sides of the shaft. At its top, all four realize at once
that they're too late. The side of the chrysalis splits open, and the
creature inside roars as it's birthed. It's vaguely humanoid, dozens of
feet tall, and looks like a deformed human underneath slimy, transparent
skin. This is the last creation of Neo-Umbrella, made to destroy the
world: the Haos.

Its first attack, with a massive tendril that terminates in a vaguely

human hand, nearly crushes them all. The entire facility shakes, and
the cargo crane that's holding the Haos's chrysalis up snaps. The Haos
plummets down the shaft, catching itself with both hands several
stories below.

Jake and Sherry disappear behind a closing blast door, Jake reminding
Sherry that her job isn't finished yet, while Piers and Chris remain
behind with the Haos.
----

All their weapons can do is cause it pain, and they run for their lives
up the sides of the shaft. The Haos tears apart everything it can reach,
but they manage to stay ahead of it long enough to find a cargo elevator.

It takes them to the top of the shaft, where the Haos bursts through the
floor to pursue them. This is their first glimpse of its whole body, which
is bizarrely incomplete and terminates at the waist. It can only chase them
slowly, by hoisting its bulk across the floor on its hands, and tries to
kill them with broad sweeps of its limbs. The Haos's sheer size is its most
dangerous asset, as it causes more damage to the facility around them every
time it moves.

A fusillade of grenades to its exposed skull makes it roar in pain

and collapse, which is followed shortly by the entire base shaking
dangerously. Ocean water begins to pour in from above them, flooding
the area. Chris pulls himself onto a catwalk near the top of the room,
with Piers following shortly thereafter.

They've made it into another of the umbilicals that separate parts

of the base, suspended over a geothermal tap in the ocean floor.
They take a couple of steps forward and the Haos latches onto the
roof of the umbilical, punching through its ceiling to grab at them.
They hit its hand with enough gunfire to make it pull back, then
slide underneath a security shutter as it drops.

The Haos pursues them down the umbilical, breaking it to pieces as it

goes, punching through the shutter like it isn't there. Their
weapons inflict no obvious damage on the Haos, but it still feels
pain, and they're able to keep it at bay as they escape into a
storage room.

Chris turns to face the Haos as it bursts through the door, and
Piers pushes him to safety. The Haos grabs Piers instead and throws
him across the room, into the wall and impaling his left arm on a
sharp piece of debris. Piers screams in pain, stuck fast, and is
unable to avoid the Haos's follow-up attack. It throws a steel storage
crate across the room at him, severing his arm at the shoulder.

Chris engages the Haos, but is quickly grabbed himself and struggles
to break free. As Piers pushes himself up on one arm, the needle they
took from Carla falls out of his pocket and clatters across the floor.
With a second's hesitation, Piers jams it into his chest.

The effect is sudden and dramatic. Piers's missing arm is replaced by

a misshapen stalk of flesh, which ends in a jagged claw and crackles
with bioelectricity. With a scream, he gestures at the Haos, striking
it full in the chest with a bolt of blue lightning. Chris drops to the
ground, freed, and the Haos retreats into the relative safety of a
C-Virus chrysalis.

Chris tries to open the door, but automatic systems are holding it shut
while they work to regulate the air pressure in the next room. Forced to
wait it out, he tells Piers to fight the mutation, to stay in control,
even as the Haos emerges from its cocoon. It looks little different from
its previous form, but has acquired the ability to launch corrosive blasts
of muck from its throat, and now jumps between the shipping containers in
the room, firing from above.

Between Chris's rifle fire and Piers's bio-electricity, the Haos is driven
back into its coccoon, but it re-emerges just as quickly. Whatever they do
just forces it to regenerate and evolve.

The further it mutates in response to trauma, however, the more fiercely

a cluster of pulsing organs glows from inside its chest. As the Haos
enters its regenerative coccoon, Chris and Piers step up their fire,
blasting the chrysalis to pieces and knocking the Haos onto its back.
In its moments of vulnerability, they shoot and hack at the Haos's
exposed organ. Finally, Piers plunges his claw into it and electrocutes
it from the inside, which buys Chris enough time to sink his knife into
the Haos's heart. It finally lays still.

The effort has cost Piers. His skin has turned a pallid gray, and it takes
him a visible effort to speak. "I did it for the BSAA," he tells Chris.
Chris swears that they're both going to escape.
The pressure bulkhead's finally released, but the damage the Haos has
already done is enough to doom the facility. Its automated systems can
no longer maintain its air pressure, so the facility is being crushed
by the thousands of tons of water above it.

Piers collapses just before they find the facility's escape pods, and
tries to get Chris to go on without him. Chris picks him up and drags
him into the next room, where he preps one of the pods for launch. Piers
suddenly stands up, presses something into Chris's hand, and throws him
into the pod, closing its hatch behind him.

Wordlessly, Piers watches Chris through the hatch's window, then activates
it, sending Chris up to the surface. Chris screams Piers's name and hammers
on the glass, ordering Piers to open the hatch, but to no avail. Piers stands
stock-still as Chris's pod departs, the facility collapsing around him.

Chris looks down at his hand and finds a BSAA emblem, torn from the arm of
Piers's uniform. He stares at it in shock, just before his pod shakes;
the Haos is back. It begins to crush Chris's pod in both its hands.

Underneath them, the facility pulses blue, and an enormous bolt of blue
lightning emerges from the empty tunnel where Chris's escape pod had
launched from. It strikes the Haos in the back, and it lets go of Chris's
pod, spasming and screaming. It falls backward into the facility, lost
in its destruction.

Chris's pod breaks the surface of the water. He gets out, the lone survivor,
and spots rescue helicopters on the horizon.

Some time later, Chris is eating a steak in a tavern. He doesn't get to

finish, as a young man in BSAA field gear comes to his table. They have new
orders. Chris abandons his meal and follows the young man outside, into
the light, towards his next mission.

=====================
20iv. Jake and Sherry
=====================

Edonia, Christmas Eve, 2012: Jake Muller settles down in a quiet corner of
a ruined building with an apple in one hand and a syringe in the other.
After a moment's deliberation, he pushes the syringe into the side of his neck.

Nearby, Sherry Birkin watches as several other men inject themselves with
similar syringes, which are ostensibly "energy boosters." Unlike Jake, they
have an immediate and painful reaction, shaking as the virus in the syringe
takes effect. Within moments, they've become psychotic J'avo.

Jake, unaware of this, greets one as it walks into the room. It attacks him
with a knife, and he beats it to death in retaliation.

Sherry enters the room and looks at her watch. Since Jake's still unaffected,
she tells him, he's got the antibodies. He assumes she's there to get one
of the "shots," and tells her to talk to the "lady downstairs," but Sherry
ignores it. Addressing him by his full name, Sherry tells him the fate of
the world rests with him. They're interrupted by the rest of the J'avo, and
Jake makes a hasty exit via a nearby disposal chute. Sherry follows him.
Neither of them see Ada Wong, watching them from the shadows.
When they reach the basement, Sherry introduces herself as a special agent
of the U.S. government. She tells Jake that the men they've just fought are
a new breed of bioweapon called J'avo, which explains to Jake why the BSAA
has gotten involved. They need to get out of the country without being
noticed by either the BSAA or the Edonian military.

By the time they get back up to street level, the city has become the site
of open conflict between the freshly-turned J'avo, some of which have
already mutated, and a division of the BSAA. The BSAA is getting the
worst of it on the ground, which is making their air support trigger-happy,
and both Jake and Sherry are nearly killed by stray fire.

When they have a moment to talk in relative peace, Jake talks terms; he
wants cash up front for her services. Sherry corrects him, as she's not
here to hire him as a mercenary. The "energy booster" his merc buddies
took was a new bioweapon called the C-Virus that's an imminent global
problem. Jake's somehow immune to it, and Sherry is here to get him so
they can make a vaccine. Jake takes this in, then says the going rate
for one pint of his blood is $50 million, in cash, non-negotiable.

They continue onward through what's left of Edonia, which is mostly

a bombed-out slum guarded by J'avo. In the distance, the BSAA are
fighting across one of the major bridges, which amuses Jake; his
former employers have an old tank waiting for them, which means the
BSAA are probably doomed.

The J'avo catch up to them in an old drainage system, and in such

numbers that fighting's pointless. They run like hell to escape
them, but instead, end up in a T-intersection. Behind them, there
are heavily-armed J'avo, and to their right, out of nowhere, a
monstrous, humanoid creature is busy executing a guerrilla.

That creature has a massive metal construct instead of a right arm,

equipped with a claw and several long needles. It may have been
human once, and still has wisps of hair clinging to the top of its
scalp, but it's taller and stronger than any human has ever been,
with a leather mask covering the lower half of its face.

Upon sighting Jake, it heads straight for him, bulldozing straight

through the unwary J'avo. It doesn't seem to notice gunfire, and
when Jake detonates an old propane tank in its face, it's only a
brief distraction.

Jake and Sherry take off running in the other direction, and only
escape the creature by taking a blind leap of faith at the end of
the path. They get lucky and smash through a window, into the upper
floor of a ruined factory. The creature pursues them, but is too
large to fit through the same window. Instead, it climbs up the
side of the building and disappears.

The factory is heavily damaged and is now a forward camp for J'avo.
As Jake and Sherry try to leave via its front door, the creature
smashes through the ceiling after them. It's as resilient as it
was before, but the building isn't. The creature finally smashes
through one too many walls and the floor caves in, dumping Jake
and Sherry underground.

They end up in an old storeroom, hosting a creepy collection of

disused mannequins. At Jake's insistence, Sherry explains that
the creature chasing them is the Ustanak, a bio-organic weapon
created with the C-Virus. It's been sent to capture him by a
terrorist organization called Neo-Umbrella, and for much the
same reason as Sherry. They just want his blood, Jake says, and
that's fine, as long as someone's willing to pay him for it.

----
[split scene 6: Chris & Piers]
----

Aboard the BSAA's helicopter, Sherry calls in to her superiors, who

accept Jake's terms. Jake greets this news with enthusiasm, and
tears his mercenary squad's logo off the arm of his jacket. He
starts to ask Sherry about Chris, but doesn't get very far before
the helicopter shakes.

The Ustanak punches its way in through the side of the helicopter.
It doesn't get ahold of Jake, but does start an electrical fire in
the cockpit. Sherry and Jake carefully leap to the escort helicopter,
though not in time to save either pilot.

The second helicopter is equipped with a pair of gun turrets.

Jake and Sherry grab them and use them against the Ustanak, as
it soon becomes clear how it caught up with them in the first
place; it has an entourage of smaller helicopters, which it
rides by holding onto their landing struts. Its arm also proves
to be detachable, as it replaces its claw with a Gatling gun.

Jake and Sherry destroy each of the helicopters in turn, slowly

whittling away at their armor. The last helicopter, just before
it's blown out of the sky, crashes into theirs, leaving the
Ustanak clinging to its loading bay. What little cargo is aboard
the BSAA's helicopter includes several fuel tanks, which Jake and
Sherry use as improvised explosives to dislodge the Ustanak.

The helicopter's had it, though. Jake grabs a parachute just before
it falls out of the helicopter, straps it on in freefall, and pulls
the cord. The chute deploys, but seconds later, the BSAA helicopter
explodes. Its rotor goes flying through the parachute's silk, and Jake
and Sherry's controlled descent turns into a headlong dive.

Jake comes to some time later. They've landed near a deserted logging
camp, somewhere in the mountains outside Edonia. Sherry is on top of
him, and Jake notices his hands are covered in her blood. A chunk of
shrapnel from the helicopter is lodged high in her back.

Sherry begs Jake to pull it out, and he does, warning her that she'll
bleed out. She doesn't; within seconds, the ugly wound in her back
closes up and vanishes, not even leaving a scar. Jake is dumbfounded,
and wonders aloud why they aren't testing her blood, rather than his.
Sherry says that they did, at length, "more than [she] could stand."

They find supplies from what's left of the BSAA's helicopter

and the abandoned logging camp, salvaging some data chips that
Sherry lost in the crash. A blizzard starts, hampering their
search, and they encounter several J'avo along the way.

Finally, Jake and Sherry take shelter inside an old log cabin
and build a fire. The blizzard gets worse as they wait. They're
stuck for the time being.

Jake breaks the silence by asking about Sherry's "superpowers."

Sherry explains that her father was a scientist, and she was
exposed to one of his bioweapons in the Raccoon City disaster.
She was treated before it was too late, but the virus in her
system survived and adapted, which is what let her survive the
shrapnel wound. Her father wasn't as lucky; he was a victim of
the same virus.

The people who saved her, Leon and Claire, are now the closest
friends she's ever had. She's just trying to live up to that
example, Sherry says; she never gives up, no matter the odds.

A sound from outside gets Jake's attention, and he throws himself

and Sherry to the floor. Gunfire rips through the cabin's wall,
and outside, a cadre of J'avo on snowmobiles advance. They take
cover and defend the cabin.

The sound of a pitched gunfight and several explosions soon

makes the mountain rumble dangerously. Jake and Sherry steal
a pair of snowmobiles and drive down the side of the mountain
at top speed, staying just ahead of an avalanche. At the end
of the path, they duck to safety in an old mine tunnel.

At first, the mine appears to only be populated by bats, but

the tunnel ends in a solid steel door. It opens onto a large
central chamber, where the Ustanak stands in the center. It's
traded out its claw attachment for a multi-headed drill, and is
accompanied by a swarm of mutated insects, each of which is
the size of a man's torso and emits a weak beam of light.
As Jake and Sherry watch, an unlucky man walks into the room
and directly into the insect's light. It lets out a high scream,
and the Ustanak instantly dashes to and kills the man. A keycard
is visible in his hand as his corpse hits the ground.

Jake and Sherry are forced to sneak through the cavern, avoiding
or smashing the Ustanak's alarm bugs. Making the slightest sound
instantly alerts the Ustanak, and it's now out for blood; their
only chance for survival is to stay hidden.

Their way out is sealed with another vault door, and opening it
is enough to get the Ustanak's attention. They evade the Ustanak
by sliding through a crawlspace, but then end up back on the far
side of the central chamber. Jake uses a bomb to distract the
Ustanak while Sherry takes the dead man's keycard.

It opens the door the man came through, which is one of a series
of short tunnels separated by more of the heavy vault doors. Jake
and Sherry open each one and shut it behind them, but they don't
do much more than slow the Ustanak down. Finally, they reach the
end of the tunnel, where an earth-mover is parked. Jake jumps
behind its wheel and guns the engine, impaling the Ustanak on
its drill bits. The Ustanak fights back, and its power is very
nearly equal to that of the earth-mover's engine. After an epic
struggle, the Ustanak is pinned against the cavern wall by the
earth-mover's drill bit. It goes limp, unconscious or dead, and
Jake and Sherry figure they've won.
The tunnel leads outside, where the sun's risen and the skies
have cleared. They're overlooking a city, and Sherry recognizes
it as her rendezvous point. She and Jake jog towards it, but are
interrupted by a spray of gunfire.

More J'avo appear from either side of them, shooting wildly. Jake
and Sherry draw their pistols and return fire, but the fight is
enough of a distraction that the Ustanak is able to get the drop
on them. It lost its mask in the battle with the earth-mover, which
reveals its mouth is a twisted grimace, distorted by scar tissue.

The Ustanak knocks Sherry unconscious with a single swing of its

arm. Jake doesn't fare much better, and is left flat on his face.

Ada Wong, accompanied by several J'avo bodyguards, walks up to

Jake and greets him, calling him "Wesker Junior." Jake doesn't
follow, so she expounds; Albert Wesker was a "colossal imbecile"
who tried to destroy the world, but he was also Jake's father.
This means Jake is heir to a "very special blood type." She nods
to the Ustanak, who knocks Jake out.

Six months later, Jake is ushered from a featureless white cell

by a trio of J'avo guards. One pokes him with his gun when Jake
stops moving; Jake says, in Chinese, that it's time for him to
go. He's finally managed to learn enough Chinese to figure out
what's going on. He kills all three guards with his bare hands,
then fights through the lab and shuts down its main power grid.

Nearby, Sherry is in an observation room when she notices the

area's become uncommonly quiet. When the power dies, a guard
rushes into the room. Sherry ambushes him and takes his stun rod,
then sneaks past the armed J'avo in the hallway outside. Several
catch her as she enters what looks like a reception area, but Jake
uses the building's security measures to eliminate them.

Sherry and Jake meet back up in a locker room, seeing each other
for the first time in six months. As they dress in stolen clothes,
they compare notes. Both have worked out that they're in China--
Sherry's had access to Chinese television--but other than that,
they have no real clues as to who's captured them. Both have been
the subject of invasive experiments into their unique genetics,
and in Sherry's case, it's been unpleasantly reminiscent of the
time she spent in the custody of the U.S. government.

What Jake's learned is that he's the illegitimate son of Albert

Wesker, who was a "nutjob" who nearly destroyed the world. All
his life, Jake says, his father's been an anonymous deadbeat, but
now he's found out he's the son of a supervillain, which explains
a lot about himself. Sherry cuts him off. At some point, she says,
Jake has to take responsibility for his own actions.

Reunited and rearmed, Jake and Sherry head out in search of a

method by which Sherry can report in to her superiors. The locker
room connects to a part of the complex neither have seen before,
which is an opulent mansion filled with antiques. Well-dressed
J'avo are on patrol everywhere they go.

After solving a bizarre puzzle in the mansion's atrium, they

find a room filled with computers, one of which is already
logged into the laboratory's server. Sherry takes an SD card
off the counter and fills it with all of the data that the
lab's accumulated on Jake.

Jake finds a cell phone in a nearby cabinet and hands it to

Sherry, who calls her handler. To her surprise, he's already
in China. All she and Jake have to do is escape the mansion
and meet up with her team.

When they return to the atrium, the J'avo have pulled out all
the stops. Many of the survivors of their attack have mutated,
and they've gone so far as to drive an old tank directly
through the mansion's front doors. Jake vaults up onto the
second-floor balcony and grabs Sherry, but that escape route
is spoiled when the tank takes the floor out from under them.
Jake and Sherry barely outrun the tank to the mansion's back
lot, where Jake finds and hotwires a motorcycle. The tank
continues to try and take them out right up until they use
the bike to hop the mansion's fence.

Jake and Sherry end up on an oddly deserted stretch of road

outside Liansheng. Sherry gets a call from her handler, who
gives her coordinates for a rendezvous point, and they head
in that direction.

An armored helicopter appears overhead and rakes them with

machine-gun fire. A chase ensues along the highway and well
into the city, which is almost completely evacuated. It takes
some quick thinking and a number of nearly suicidal stunts,
but they manage to stay alive until Jake crashes the bike.

They end up cornered by J'avo guerrillas, with the helicopter

hovering overhead. Luckily, Sherry looks up and sees a BSAA
fire team has emerged from a nearby building, led by Chris
Redfield. Jake doesn't like the idea of being saved by Chris,
but between them, they're able to route the J'avo.

Jake and Sherry escape the courtyard via an emergency ladder,

and notice from the fireworks above them that Chris's team
has engaged the helicopter on the rooftops. They take a few
shots of their own from the ground, and soon, the helicopter
hits the ground and explodes. They share a glance with Chris,
but Sherry gets them moving again; her orders are to avoid
all contact with other people before their rendezvous. Jake
wonders aloud if Chris knew he was Wesker's son on meeting
him, or if he just rubbed the guy the wrong way.

Sherry and Jake head towards the rendezvous point via a

trash-strewn back alley, Jake marvelling at Neo-Umbrella's
sheer financial power; the kind of helicopter they just
destroyed is easily worth fifteen million dollars.

Liansheng, at this point, belongs to the J'avo. The only

humans they see in its shopping district are dead.

At the end of one street, the elevated train rolls by and

disgorges a new kind of mutant: a red, twisted creature
with an arm that functions as a sort of organic chainsaw.
Its impact punctures, then ignites a drum of fuel, which
sets half the street alight. It gets right back up after
falling several stories and goes after them; they leave it
lying motionless in the fire it started.

A passenger jet passes overhead, close enough that Sherry

can tell it's American, and crashes into the city somewhere
nearby.

----
[split scene 2: Leon & Helena]
----

Sherry calls out to Leon to meet her at her rendezvous point, but
an explosion cuts them off. Jake tells her not to worry; if Leon's
half the man that Sherry said he is, he's fine. Sherry nods, and
they set off, using a maintenance tunnel to bypass the wreckage.

Jake and Sherry cut through the harbor, where the mutant with
the chainsaw reappears without warning. Just as quickly as it
shows up, it goes down, its skull punctured by a bullet from
an unseen sniper. Jake attributes it to one of Sherry's "buddies
from the BSAA," and they commandeer a barge to cross the water.

The harbor has been the site of a recent and destructive battle;
the largest ship is a floating restaurant that's now wrecked, and
many of the other boats on the water are on fire. The mutant is,
of course, not quite dead yet, and returns for a showdown on the
roof of the restaurant. After withstanding a barrage of rifle and
Magnum fire, it pitches forward into the water.

Sherry and Jake leave the harbor and head towards the tower,
but Sherry stops for a moment. She tells Jake that if Leon
was right, and Simmons is to blame for this, she wants Jake
to run. He scorns the idea, but agrees.

They reach the tower in time to interrupt an argument between

Leon, Helena, and Simmons. When Sherry asks Simmons if it's true,
point-blank, he doesn't deny it; "it's for the greater good," he
says. This is the first Sherry's heard of the President's death.

With Leon and Helena providing cover fire, Sherry and Jake try
to escape. They're quickly intercepted by a squad of J'avo
guerillas, and are overcome via sheer weight of numbers.

They both come to later, cuffed to a metal apparatus of some

kind. Sherry tries to apologize to Jake, for not thinking to
question Simmons. Jake says she was just following orders.

A warning klaxon goes off overhead, and their cuffs unlock.

Sherry spots their weapons, kept on a desk outside their cell,
and an open ventilation shaft above them. She gets a boost
from Jake to get through the shaft, reclaims their guns, and
opens the cell.

They set about trying to escape, but soon hit a snag; the
facility has redirected power from this area to an "incubation
chamber," which has shut down the elevator they need to leave.
Wherever they are, it's located directly above a oceanic lava
vent, which the facility is using to generate power via a
geothermal tap. Sherry and Jake climb some of the machinery
to reach the levels above them, where they're able to charge
a backup battery system.

Along the way, they're forced to deal with several Rasklapanje

BOWs, and at a crucial moment, a piece of one of them falls into
some exposed wiring. This causes an overload, and as Jake and
Sherry use the elevator to escape, it's as the facility is
beginning to shake itself apart.

----
[split scene 8: Chris & Piers]
----

Jake and Sherry's escape from the incubation chamber has taken them
almost back the way they came, to a rickety series of walkways set up
above the lava vent that powers the facility. Between the earlier overload
and the damage wrought by Chris and Piers's fight with the Haos, the
facility is on its last legs, and parts of it are falling into the lava.

As they navigate the walkways, the Ustanak steps into the room with them,
currently wielding a spiked ball-and-chain in place of its right arm. It
attacks, and whatever relative restraint it previously had is now gone.
It's fighting to kill, and doesn't seem to care how much damage it causes
or incurs; it goes so far as to use the lava to superheat its ball-and-chain.
The Ustanak smashes the walkway, dropping all three of them onto the cooled
surface of the lava, and tries to kill Jake and Sherry by smashing that
surface out from under them.

Its resilience isn't infinite, however, and a lucky shot stuns it. Sherry
climbs onto the Ustanak's back, throttling and electrocuting it with her
stun rod, while Jake wrestles with its ball-and-chain. With a yank, the
chain snaps.

It throws them both off, back up onto the surviving walkways. Sherry loses
her weapons into the lava, while the Ustanak disarms Jake. Jake puts up his
fists, prepared to deal with the Ustanak hand-to-hand.

Sherry climbs up to a higher level of the catwalk and discovers the controls
for a cargo transport system, the rails for which pass over the area where
Jake and the Ustanak are fighting. She uses it to hit the Ustanak in the face
with a fast-moving crate, and Jake capitalizes with a brutal flurry of punches.
His last blow is a flying haymaker that knocks the Ustanak off the walkway.
It lands in the lava up to its waist and roars in agony, right before a
falling chunk of the ceiling lands on its head.

The facility's just about had it. Jake scales a ladder to reach Sherry's
position, and the two of them discover a warehouse in the adjacent area.
Jake says aloud that it must have a way to ship goods out, and he's right;
they find a cargo platform nearby.

It was not meant to hold humans, however. The platform takes off at high
speed, and neither of them can stay on their feet. They hold on by their
fingertips as it heads for the surface, as the shaft turns and the platform
goes almost vertical. Behind them, the seabed laboratory consumes itself,
and flames chase them up the tunnel.

A second platform rises out of the fireball, and to their chagrin, the
Ustanak is on board. It's still covered in a glowing layer of volcanic rock,
but has replaced its ball-and-chain with a grappling hook.

Jake and Sherry climb the platform for their lives, staying
ahead of the Ustanak, and hit the release lever on one of the
few pieces of cargo that was secured there. A crate of fuel
tanks hits the Ustanak in the face, buying them some time,
and they try to repeat the process with a stack of steel pipes.
Finally, the Ustanak leaps above them and lands on the last
crate before they can launch it at them. It turns out to have
been full of loaded handguns, one of which lodges in a gap
in the platform between them and the Ustanak.

Sherry gets to it first, but can't steady her grip one-handed.

Jake reaches out and takes hold of the gun's base. The Ustanak
is vulnerable, the lava having burned away its flesh, and they
can see its pulsing heart within its chest. Jake and Sherry
fire two shots into it, and slowly, the Ustanak topples forward
and plummets into the oncoming fireball.

Jake and Sherry soon see daylight, and Jake says quietly to
Sherry, "You know you saved me, right? Thank you." She nods.

Some time later, Sherry is aboard a passenger jet typing up

a report on a laptop. She was able to deliver both Jake's blood
sample and Neo-Umbrella's research data to the United Nations,
offering some hope of a reprieve from the C-Virus. The BSAA has
also classified Jake's relationship with Albert Wesker, in the
hopes that no one else will try to use Jake as Neo-Umbrella did.

Sherry receives a text message as she closes her laptop. It's

from Jake, who's lowered his asking price to 50 dollars. She
smiles, and on the ground, Jake watches her plane disappear
into the distance. He takes off on a motorcycle.

Some time later, somewhere in the Middle East, a young boy

peers out of a boarded-up house. There are BOWs in the street
outside. As he turns around, he backs into a man wearing a
cloak, who asks if they have a deal. The boy hands over an apple.

Jake Muller steps into the street, takes off the cloak, and moves
to engage the BOWs, pistol in one hand and the apple in the other.

========
20v. Ada
========

June 27th, 2013: Someone in a bulky diving suit approaches a

motionless submarine, somewhere deep below the surface of the
northern Atlantic Ocean. The diver opens a hatch on the submarine
and enters its airlock. The top of the suit opens, revealing
Ada Wong.

A short time ago, while being pursued by an unknown enemy,

Ada had taken shelter in an office. A ringing from the desk
got her attention, which turned out to be a cube-shaped handheld
computer. The call was from Derek Simmons, who Ada hadn't spoken
to in years.

He'd engineered the entire situation just to get the handheld

into Ada's possession, because "phone calls can be so impersonal."
He offered to show Ada some intel he'd gotten on her, but Ada
broke off the call, claiming to be disinterested. The handheld
did allow her to track down the source of the call, however,
which turned out to be this old submarine.

As Ada gets out of the diving suit, the handheld rings again. It's
Simmons, who gloats that he knew she couldn't resist the bait. He's
arranged it so her handprint should get her through the security
systems; he's got a lot more on Ada than just her fingerprints. Ada
decides to find out what he's playing at.

The submarine is locked down and guarded by elite J'avo, a "new

breed" of BOW that Ada's heard about before. She tries to avoid
contact as she makes her way through the submarine. Many J'avo
have succumbed to advanced mutations, and she encounters several
that have entered their chrysalis stage.

Her handprint gets her into a briefing room that's set up

with a running projector. When Ada presses play, it shows
a film strip about Jake Muller, who's been located in Edonia.
As he's the son of Albert Wesker, the theory is that his blood
could be used to create a vaccine for the C-Virus, which they
cannot allow to happen. Simmons says he's going to dispatch
"Agent Birkin" to collect Muller, but Ada's job is to ensure
both Jake and Sherry get out of Edonia alive.

The briefing's dated six months ago, which confuses Ada, as

it mentioned her by name but this is the first she's heard of
it. A squad of J'avo guards interrupts her thoughts, and she's
forced to fight for her life. The handheld has a useful map of
the submarine, including where to find its escape pods, and
she heads that way.

An exchange of gunfire in the sub's engine room results in a hull

breach. The sub begins to sink and goes down tail first, which
foils Ada's attempt to reach the escape pods. She's forced to try
for her "plan B," and heads for the torpedo tubes.

To fire a torpedo, she's forced to provide authorization, which

is taken over by a remote user. A woman asks her how she plans
to atone for her sins, since she experimented on humans in
Edonia six months ago at Simmons's request; Ada retorts that
she doesn't work for Simmons, so she has nothing to atone for.
The woman then asks what Ada fights for, and if she wants a
"world of chaos." Ada replies that it isn't her style, but it
would truly annoy Simmons, which has some appeal. Finally, the
woman asks Ada who she's fighting, and Ada simply says it's
whoever gets in her way. This seems to satisfy the woman, and
just before the sub reaches critical depth, the torpedo tubes
open. Ada grapples up into the launch chamber and begins the
firing process.

As she does, Simmons calls her on the handheld to ask what she's
found. With a bizarrely gleeful tone in his voice, he tells her
that in a few days, first America and then China will suffer
biohazardous outbreaks, followed by the rest of the world. It
will all be blamed on Neo-Umbrella's own Ada Wong.
Ada opens a torpedo's side and climbs inside, telling Simmons
that if he thinks she's just going to stand back and be their
scapegoat, he's "got another thing coming." She escapes the
submarine by using the torpedo as a makeshift escape pod.

Two days later, Ada has made it to Tall Oaks, and arrives in the
middle of its outbreak. She observes the cathedral from her perch
atop a nearby roof, and notices Leon and Helena kicking a gate
open below. As they make their way to the cathedral's front door,
Ada ziplines down to the rear of the building and enters a secret
passage that someone helpfully left open, hidden underneath a
tombstone in the cathedral's back garden. Her goal is to find
Simmons's laboratory.

Ada's path takes her through an ancient set of crypts, back

through the above-ground mausoleum, and underground into an
old dungeon block. There are generations of withered corpses
stored here, many of which have been subjected to elaborate
cruelties. Ada searches the area, looking for items she needs
to open the path to the lab, and turns up both a sniper rifle
and a ring marked with Simmons's family crest. She finally
ends up in an old mineshaft, just in time to see Deborah Harper
succumb to the C-Virus.

----
[split scene 1: Leon & Helena]
----

Ada tells Leon and Helena that they're playing a "very dangerous
game" before leaving to answer her handheld. It's Simmons again,
who tells Ada there's something he wants her to see in the laboratory.

Ada returns to Simmons's lab via an alternate route, entering

through an old cellblock occupied by Whoppers. The lab has been
depopulated by Leon and Helena's trip through it, but the few
zombie survivors have had time to mutate and evolve. Ada
has to deal with a host of monsters on her way back through.

She reaches the lab Simmons spoke of and finds what he apparently
wanted her to see: a videotape labeled "Happy Birthday Ada Wong."
She watches it on the nearby player, and as her doppelganger is
"born," she notes that an observer who's barely visible in the
frame is wearing Simmons's signature thumb ring.

Simmons calls her back, asking if she'd enjoyed "the show." Ada
cuts him off; she's figured out that she hasn't been talking to
the real Simmons. He and his Family have a lot invested in the
security and stability of the world they created, Ada says, and
whoever she's talking to wants to destroy it. "Simmons"--a woman
in a blue dress and red scarf, somewhere else, using a similar
handheld computer to Ada's own--doesn't deny it, and points out
that the world will then blame Ada.

Ada sets a bomb on the desk with the video player, and as she walks
away, calls Simmons directly on the handheld. She tells him that
the "doppelganger [he's] cooked up" is trying to destroy the world,
then breaks the connection. The race is on: Ada vs. Ada.

A day later, Ada's made it to Liansheng. She watches as a BSAA

squad is informed of "her" last location, at the harbor, and then
goes her own way through the streets. Ada has to deal with zombies
and several J'avo guerrillas, who are occupying themselves by
killing survivors.

Ada leaps a barricade just in time to witness the birth of a new breed
of J'avo, called an Ubistvo. It cuts its way out of its chrysalis with
a claw shaped like a chainsaw and immediately goes after her.

Ada plays cat-and-mouse with the Ubistvo, using her grapple gun to
stay ahead of its attacks, but it's relentless. Whatever she does to
it only delays it temporarily, until finally, she forces a confrontation
with it on the roof of a commuter train. Her final attack knocks the
Ubistvo flying back into the city, where it ricochets off a neon sign
and lands in a heap.

During that fight, Ada listens in on the BSAA's radio traffic and hears
the report that her doppelganger's heading for the harbor. She decides
it's time to head that way herself.

Ada uses her grapple gun to leave the train, and climbs the stairs in an
abandoned apartment building to reach a rooftop that overlooks the harbor.
She uses her scope to look closer at the docks below, and sees Sherry
Birkin and Jake Muller make their way onto the scene, pursued by the
Ubitsvo. Ada muses aloud that it's time to repay the kindness their parents
showed to her, and sights in on the Ubitsvo's head. Her first shot knocks
it out for a few seconds, giving Jake and Sherry time to commandeer a boat.

She continues to play guardian angel as Jake and Sherry fight their way
across the docks, taking out a few J'avo and harrassing the Ubitsvo with
sniper fire. Finally, Ada uses her grapple gun to swing in and rescue Sherry
from the Ubitsvo, dropping her off in Jake's arms. The Ubitsvo is knocked
into the water, where it's helplessly drawn into the running rotor blades
of a wrecked helicopter.

Ada receives another radio intercept as she returns to her previous position,
this one from Piers Nivans. He and Chris are in hot pursuit of "Ada," who's
heading for the military dock. Ada glances over the side of her building,
and from her vantage point, can see the only two moving vehicles on the
highway: "Ada" drives a red convertible, chased by Chris and Piers in a jeep.

As Sherry and Jake leave the harbor, Ada steals a jetski. She uses it to
ramp off some of the wreckage and get into open water, heading straight for
her evil twin's last reported position: the unidentified carrier.

When Ada gets aboard, the ship's corridors are patrolled by

plague-masked J'avo, much like the ones she saw aboard the
submarine. Several have successfully taken the ship's mess
hall and quarters, wiping out a handful of surviving Chinese
sailors, but Ada takes them out in turn to steal their keycards.

Ada approaches the exterior of the ship in time to overhear

the tail end of her twin's phone call with Simmons, where she
promises him he's "just becoming the monster you always were";
for some reason, it's being picked up by the ship's PA system.
Ada wonders aloud what Simmons did to her twin.

She continues through the ship, and has a close encounter with
Chris and Piers, who order her to stop. Ada doesn't, and uses
a closing bulkhead to escape from them. As they fight through the
J'avo, Ada avoids conflict altogether by sneaking across the
ship's exterior deck or using the ventilation shafts. She still
has to deal with search parties of J'avo, but Chris and Piers
unwittingly handle the worst of the opposition for her.

Finally, she reaches a small, tasteful office near the ship's

top deck. A locked briefcase on its desk has an attached fingerprint
reader, but strangely, Ada's prints unlock it. Inside, she finds
a data recorder, several files attached to a clipboard, and a small
souvenir replica of the Quad Towers in Liansheng.

As she reads the files, Ada finally understands what's happened.

Simmons was far more obsessed with her than she'd thought. When
she'd left his service years ago, Simmons successfully set out
to make a replacement for her. The woman she's been chasing, her
"evil twin," is--was?--a scientist named Carla Radames, warped
into her duplicate by the C-Virus.

A gunshot from nearby gets Ada's attention. She rushes to the office
balcony just in time to see Carla's body fall past her, landing on
the deck below.

Ada takes a nearby lift down to where Carla's corpse landed.

Along the way, she overhears more BSAA radio chatter: an
aircraft carrier in the waters off of Liansheng is preparing
to launch missiles into the city.

She walks out onto the deck to Carla's corpse. Speaking out
loud, Ada wonders if Carla's conscience is what got her in the
end; maybe some remaining shred of decency is what convinced
Carla to bring Ada into the situation. If Carla had approached
Ada, she says, and said she wanted revenge on Simmons, Ada would've
helped her. Instead, Carla's dead, and her plans have failed.

Carla's eyes shoot open, and an empty syringe rolls out of her
hand. Ribbons of gray liquid roll out of her skin to cover her
body, like she's devolving into wet modeling clay. The moment
she can once again speak, Carla snarls that she hasn't failed
at all. Nothing will be left of the world, and she will rule
that nothing as its queen.

Carla attacks Ada with a spray of wet protoplasm, but Ada dodges
and heads back into the ship, putting a heavy steel door between
them. Carla's body is rapidly dissolving into gray muck, which
slithers out to cover the deck.

Ada moves deeper into the ship, figuring Carla's overdosed on the
C-Virus. She's about to fight a pair of J'avo when the entire
corridor floods with the same kind of gray protoplasm that Carla
turned into, killing them both. Ada turns and runs as the hallways
and windows acquire a slimy putrescence, which hardens into tumors
and wiggling red eyes. Soon, mindless gray clones of herself,
disfigured by tumorlike growths in their chests, are chasing her
down, and a grumbling voice that seems to be coming from all
around her is calling Simmons's name and claiming to be the
"real Ada Wong."

The ship around Ada becomes a bizarre extension of Carla's mutated

anatomy, with replicas of her face grinning at Ada from every
direction, and grabbing forests of hands sprouting from the walls.
She finds her way to an exit near the ship's cooling system, but
Carla closes it off with a screaming wall of flesh.

The protoplasm is easy to damage, but rapidly regenerates. Ada

blasts a hole through it, and in the seconds before it closes again,
fires a shot that ruptures the cooling system's stock of freon. In
the spray of supercooled chemicals, Carla ends up frozen solid. Ada
runs to safety, saying aloud that she hopes Carla got what she wanted.

Ada uses a lift to ascend to the top deck, where she finds and steals
a helicopter. Behind her, Chris and Piers take off from the carrier
on a jet. Ada holds up the replica of the Quad Towers she found in
the office, and says aloud that she'll let the BSAA deal with
Carla's mess. She's going after Simmons.

When Ada arrives in Liansheng, the streets are already in flames.

A new explosion gets Ada's attention, and when she investigates,
she finds Leon and Helena standing in an intersection, surrounded
by zombies. She provides cover fire with the helicopter's machine
guns, giving them a chance to escape.

Ada flies across town towards the Quad Tower, dealing with the
last of Carla's J'avo air force along the way. She reaches the
base of the Quad Tower in time to witness Simmons's return, and
his newest mutation.

----
[split scene 4: Leon & Helena]
----

Ada flies to the rooftops of the Quad Towers, where she pauses to bail
out two groups of survivors, eliminating the zombies that are threatening
them. At one point, her stray fire cuts one of the Towers' spires in
half, and the sharp end impales a zombie below.

She clears herself a landing zone, mowing down several undead BSAA troops
from the sky, and disembarks. The last item on her list is to find Carla's
lab and eliminate the signs of her stolen identity. Ada grapples to the
next tower.

Another explosion from below gets her attention. Leon and Helena's
elevator ride has come to a sudden stop, and she watches them grab
the cable. Ada descends to give them a hand, but is distracted by
the sudden reappearance of Simmons, who tries to shoot both Leon
and Helena down with bone spikes from his new form's tail.

Ada goes after Simmons with every weapon she has. He seems amused,
and is still prone to mistaking her for Carla. "The only thing she
and I had in common," Ada retorts, "is hatred for you."

Their fight lasts longer than a couple of the skybridges they're

fighting on. Each time one crumbles, Ada grapples to the next one
and Simmons follows shortly thereafter. Finally, he gets sick of
being harrassed with gunfire by Leon and Helena and goes after
them directly, forcing Ada to knock him off the building before
he can reach them. He retaliates against her by knocking her out.
----
[split scene 5: Leon & Helena]
----

Ada watches Leon from a distance, thinking he looks so cute when

he's confused, and waves goodbye to him as she walks away. A short
time later, her search of what's left of the Quad Towers bears
fruit when she finds a well-hidden laboratory. Carla's miniature,
when placed in a console, activates its systems.

The screens throughout the room display footage of Carla at work,

breeding some new variety of C-Virus BOW. She placed a lab here, she
tells an assistant, because new test subjects are easy to come by. Just
walk outside and grab one. Her next test subject, however, is one of the
men responsible for the experiment that turned Carla into Ada. He claims
it was Simmons's idea, that he was forced to do it, but Carla's unmoved;
she could say the same thing.

The next room is built to test and monitor one of the glass
containment units Ada saw in Simmons's laboratory in Tall Oaks.
Whatever's inside it, as Ada watches, begins to hatch. A pair of
what could be human hands emerges from the crack in the chrysalis.

With uncharacteristic anger, Ada brings up her Uzi and opens fire,
unloading an entire magazine into the chrysalis. She reloads and
riddles the rest of the room with bullets, starting an electrical
fire, then does it again. She doesn't stop until the entirety of
Carla's laboratory is on fire and the chrysalis is no longer moving.

She spots a computer, the screen of which displays an old photo of

Simmons and Carla before her metamorphosis. With a snarl, Ada throws
Carla's handheld onto the desk with the computer, leaving them both
to burn.

As she turns to leave, Ada's own phone rings. She's back to her normal,
neutral self as she answers it. It's a job offer, and as it turns out,
she's suddenly available.

======================================
20vi. Conclusions About The Conclusion
======================================

1. Leon Kennedy, Chris Redfield, Jake Muller, Helena Harper, Sherry

Birkin, Ada Wong, and Ingrid Hunnigan have survived.

2. Derek Simmons, Adam Benford, and at least five full squads of the
BSAA are all dead.

3. Carla Radames was last seen with a vicious case of C-Virus infection,
having devolved into six tons of Silly Putty. It's possible Ada killed
her by freezing her brain, but given what it took to kill Derek Simmons,
it's difficult to say that Carla is truly dead.

4. Carla's personal project, a massive BOW that was capable of destroying

the world, has been wiped out, along with a Neo-Umbrella outpost located
on the ocean floor near the Chinese mainland.

5. Tall Oaks, a college town in the United States, has been destroyed, with
a final death toll of over 70,000 people, including President Adam Benford.
6. The Chinese city of Liansheng, which is apparently Hong Kong with its
serial numbers filed off, has been extensively contaminated with the
C-Virus. There are no confirmed survivors.

7. A semi-effective vaccine for the C-Virus has been successfully created

from Jake Muller's blood, providing a measure of hope against it.

8. Jake Muller has begun a career of wandering the globe as a freelance

mercenary, although his fees are now largely symbolic.

9. Ada and Leon's relationship continues to be mostly theoretical.

10. Both Piers Nivans and Deborah Harper are missing and presumed dead.
Both were extensively mutated and did not die on-screen, but it would
take quite a lot to justify their continued survival.

(Piers's lightning runs off of his health meter; if you play as him in
the last battle, you can reduce him to nearly zero health by spamming
bolts. Given the size of the lightning bolt that killed the Haos, it's
entirely possible that he killed himself to fire it.)

11. Helena Harper has been found innocent of all charges relating to
the Tall Oaks disaster and has been reinstated in government service.

12. Ozwell Spencer's tampering in the "Wesker Project" altered its

subjects on a genetic level, and several of those alterations are
inheritable. Despite never coming into contact with his father, Jake
Muller is immune to a later-generation bioweapon, is almost superhumanly
strong, and is a borderline genius linguist.

13. Officially, the woman known as Ada Wong died in Liansheng's harbor,
shot down by an unnamed assassin, unless Leon or Helena reported otherwise.

========================
20vii. Random Commentary
========================

1. RE6 is a notorious patchwork quilt of a game and its various shortcomings

will likely be a subject of discussion for years to come. This was an attempt
by Capcom to create a surefire blockbuster and it largely didn't work.

2. Simmons's "Family" isn't wildly dissimilar to a number of similar

organizations that routinely pop up in conspiracy theories, as noted below.
Something about American history seems to lend itself to ancient conspiracies.

3. Since the catacombs under Tall Oaks Cathedral have apparently been in
Simmons's family for over 400 years, this suggests Tall Oaks is on the
eastern coast of the United States.

4. Ada Wong strays over the line from "badass" to "explicitly superhuman"
in this game. Not only has she not visibly aged, but her progress through
Liansheng involves grapple-gun stunts that would impress Spider-Man, and
I'm pretty sure firing herself to the surface in a torpedo should have
killed her.

5. For that matter, Jake's somewhere on the superhuman spectrum as well.

Dude lands a tombstone piledriver on the Ustanak at one point.
====================
20viii. Plot Summary
====================

One of the most obnoxious things about RE6 is that its files, unlike past
games, are locked behind the Serpent Emblem collectibles, some of which are
ridiculously well-hidden. Worse, some of the files are explicitly there to
close plot holes and reveal details that wouldn't have fit into the main
game's storyline, much as with the main-menu dossiers in RE5. As such, the
story is made much more complex by much of it being deliberately hidden.
An organized summary follows, to the best of my ability.

In 1998, Derek Simmons is a high-ranking military officer and an advisor

to the President. He's also inherited his ancestors' position within the
Family, a clandestine organization that works to influence and control the
United States and the world.

(The existence of such an organization has been a staple of American pop

culture and conspiracy theory for decades. If you like, you can mentally
cross out "the Family" and substitute Freemasons, the Illuminati, the
Bildenbergers, or whatever secret evil overlords you prefer.)

Simmons is one of the parties consulted on the decision to bomb Raccoon

City in 1998 and is one of the loudest voices in favor of it. The incident
convinces Simmons that bioweapons are the future of war, and both he
and the Family move to take advantage of the political fallout.

Ada Wong frequently accepted mercenary work from Simmons during this period,
unaware that he'd become dangerously obsessed with her. When Ada finds out
that Simmons had a hand in the bombing of Raccoon City, she breaks off
contact with him.

This doesn't stop Simmons, who decides that if he can't have her, he'll build
himself a replacement. For ten years, Simmons undertakes a series of experiments
in his private labs underneath Tall Oaks Cathedral, dumping the failures into
the old tunnels beneath it. He calls this "Project Ada."

Along the way, Simmons becomes the patron of an up-and-coming scientific

prodigy (yes, another one) named Carla Radames. Carla, who is infatuated with
Simmons, has a breakthrough in 2001 when she first creates the C-Virus, which
is synthesized from elements of the T-, Progenitor, and T-Veronica viruses.

Eventually, Simmons discovers that in order to succeed at Project Ada,

he requires a test subject that's a close genetic match with the original
Ada Wong, and Carla fits the bill. Carla emerges from a chrysalis on April
30th, 2009, as a perfect genetic clone of Ada Wong. Simmons proceeds to
brainwash Carla until she's wholly convinced that she's the "real" Ada Wong,
and only then do the two of them enter into a relationship.

On the surface, Carla Radames no longer exists; she's simply Ada Wong
now, a brilliant scientist and Simmons's lover. Some subconscious core
of Carla remains, however, and the longer her relationship with Simmons
goes on, the more she begins to hate Simmons for what he's done to her.

Since Simmons and the Family have played such a large role in making the
world the way it is, Carla decides to take her revenge against the world
itself. She quietly founds Neo-Umbrella to pursue ways in which to
strengthen the C-Virus while continuing to work with Simmons.
Towards that end, she raises her own status within the Family and has a
facility built on the ocean floor near China, powered by a geothermal tap.
There, she works on a final doomsday weapon, the Haos: a gigantic mutant
that naturally produces toxic, airborne clouds of the C-Virus, in amounts
capable of quickly covering the planet. Carla also implements a dead man's
switch into the systems that keep the Haos in storage; if her life signs
ever stop, the Haos will automatically be released.

Somewhere along the line, Simmons comes into possession of intelligence

concerning Jake Muller and his parentage. On the theory that Muller's
inherited a genetic resistance that would work against the C-Virus, Simmons
dispatches agents to search for him. He also recruits Sherry Birkin, now
an adult, as a federal agent under his direct supervision. When Jake is
found, Simmons sends Sherry, to find Jake and get him out of the country,
and Carla, to quietly ensure that Sherry and Jake escape Edonia alive.

Carla has other plans. She's turned a former employee into the Ustanak,
and sics it on Jake with orders to capture him. When Sherry makes contact
with the BSAA, the Ustanak crashes their ride and Carla does her best to
kill off Chris's squad on the ground. In the end, she captures Jake and
Sherry herself and sends them to her laboratory in China. She tells
Simmons that Jake and Sherry are dead, but instead uses their unique
biologies to further refine the C-Virus, making it more effective and
harder to cure.

Meanwhile, Simmons's friend Adam Benford was elected President in 2008.

(As noted above, one of the expanded files on RE.net indicates Benford
was president in 2011.) Benford is an old hand at fighting bioterrorism,
and he tells both Simmons and Leon that he plans to give a speech in which
he discloses the U.S. government's ties to the Umbrella corporation, and
thus to the creation of the T-Virus. By placing all of the United States's
cards on the table, Benford thinks the world will better be able to unite
and move forward in the fight against BOWs.

Leon's in favor of it, but Simmons isn't. Simmons's argument is that the
revelation will strip the United States of its moral authority in the
war on bioterror, thus lowering its global status and causing what could
be a catastrophic power struggle on the world stage. Privately, Simmons
also fears the disruption to the status quo. Benford, who either doesn't
know how powerful the Family really is or doesn't care, goes ahead with
the plan despite Simmons's counsel.

When Benford plans an appearance in Tall Oaks, Simmons uses his own
extensive holdings in the city to set up an assassination attempt. First,
he has his agents in the Family plant multiple Lepotitsa BOWs throughout
Tall Oaks. Once they mature, they emit clouds of virus-laden gas that kill
and reanimate any humans caught within. Survivors describe it as a "fog"
that swept over the city.

Second, he kidnaps Deborah Harper and uses her life as leverage against
her sister Helena, who's a rookie agent in the Secret Service. Helena
is forced to call in a fake alert to Benford's bodyguards, so when the
virus attack hits, half of them are busy chasing ghosts.

Helena tries to save Benford at the last second, but the only agent on the
scene who's willing to listen to her is Leon Kennedy. They're too late.

With Simmons distracted in the United States, Carla begins her own attack.
She dispatches several squads of J'avo into Liansheng to cause problems and
kidnap some local VIPs, which gets the BSAA's attention. This includes
Chris Redfield, who's been forced back into the field by a well-meaning
Piers Nivans.

As the BSAA and local forces evacuate midtown, Carla sends in more J'avo
to neutralize the Chinese naval presence in the harbor, which allows her
to move a ship of her own into position. This ship is equipped with missiles
that will spread the C-Virus as a gas, infecting the entire city, killing
millions including the BSAA, and plunging the world even further into chaos.

Carla dooms herself before she even started, however, by being unable
to resist getting in touch with the original Ada Wong, who's already
dealing with some of the fallout of Carla's plans. Carla also fails to
keep Jake Muller under sufficient observation, allowing him to escape
just before the attack; she has Simmons infected with the C-Virus,
rather than killed outright; she deliberately antagonizes Chris Redfield
into chasing her onto her captured naval carrier, which puts him in a
position to nearly stop the missiles' launch; and when she has Jake
and Sherry recaptured, she has them taken to her underwater laboratory,
which would otherwise have gone unnoticed. Ada voices a theory at one
point that Carla secretly wanted someone to stop her, and given the
number of ways in which Carla sabotages herself, Ada may be right.

While Carla's J'avo army successfully launch her attack on Liansheng,

Carla herself is assassinated by an unnamed operative working for the
Family, and while she's able to briefly save herself with a dose of her
own C-Virus, she comes out second best against Ada. The Haos is killed
by Piers Nivans before it can infect the rest of the planet, Jake
Muller is successfully delivered to agents within the American government,
and a vengeful Ada destroys Carla's research lab in downtown Liansheng.

================================
21. RESIDENT EVIL: REVELATIONS 2
================================

The result of Capcom finding unexpected success in the digital market,

RE:R2 was initially released in four episodes over the course of a
month, with two additional scenarios becoming available at the end.
It also features the long-overdue return of Claire Redfield and Barry
Burton to the series.

Set in 2011 and taking place more or less at the same time as Resident Evil:
Damnation, it draws heavily upon the series's continuity. As with the
original RE:R, it also has a heavy literary influence; in R2's case, it's
the works of Franz Kafka.

==============================
21i. Episode One: Penal Colony
==============================

The non-governmental organization TerraSave is enjoying a period of growth

and exposure, following its assistance with the aftermath of the Kijuju
incident. They've even begun to advertise on television (poorly), emphasizing
their independence from both politics and corporations. Claire Redfield has
worked at TerraSave for several years.

One evening in mid-2011, Claire attends a party at TerraSave's headquarters,

which also serves as a welcome-aboard event for their newest hire, Moira
Burton. Claire greets Moira, and they engage in small talk until Claire's
immediate superior, Neil Fisher, flags her down. Claire excuses herself
to talk to him.

Neil asks Claire if she knows what's going on in Washington, where

talks have broken out surrounding the Uroboros virus, and does his
best to keep her from seeing a clipboard he's carrying. Claire
warns him to avoid mentioning Moira's father to her, but Neil already
knows. Moira is Barry Burton's older daughter, and their relationship
is an "emotional minefield."

When Claire returns, Moira is scowling at her phone. She's having an

argument with her father again, who had resisted the idea of her joining
TerraSave at all.

She's interrupted when the room's lights go out. Three small helicopters
appear outside, shining spotlights through the windows, and multiple
armed and armored operatives storm the ballroom.

A soldier approaches Claire, while another holds Moira back, and tells
her she's coming with them. Her protestations are cut short when one
injects her with a sedative.

Claire wakes up some time later, in a dingy, abandoned cell block. She's
wearing the same clothes, but a black metal bracelet with a glowing green
LED is fastened around her wrist, with no obvious way to remove it. As she
stands up, the door to her cell unlocks and slides open.

A brand-new closed-circuit camera on an automated swivel is watching her

every step, but aside from it, the prison looks like it's been abandoned
for years. She can hear a Russian radio broadcast from somewhere nearby.

The only other inmate in the prison is Moira, who's frantically beating
on the door of her cell. She wears a similar bracelet, and as Claire
speaks with her, Moira's cell door unlocks and opens, accompanied by
the sound of an electronic buzzer.

Together, they advance to the door at the end of the hall, which opens
onto a ventilation tower. Long chains dangle from its ceiling, many of
which terminate in rusted hooks; many of those hooks, in turn, support
body bags. A platform along the wall looks as if it was built to hold
a tracked vehicle, but has fallen through in several places, and they're
forced to improvise to get out.

As they reach a higher level, a woman screams from somewhere nearby.

They round the table to find fresh blood on the floor and wall next
to a door. Nearby, they find an old combat knife and a flashlight on
a desk; Claire takes the former, while a nervous Moira takes the latter.

The door leads them to what might have once been an operating theater,
where a mutilated corpse lies covered on a gurney. Claire breaks the
observation window and they climb through it, where they find a slip
of paper on a bookcase. It lists the rules for monitoring "test
subjects": they must be on a 24-hour watch, their status must be
recorded every ten minutes, and any subject that displays abnormalities
must be immediately disposed of.

The concrete floors are replaced by tile and drywall in the next
area, and they pass several more fresh bloodstains. Someone has
passed through here recently, and thrown up multiple barricades
across the path. They're forced to circumvent or move those barricades
to progress. As they push a bookcase out of their way, Claire
is suddenly attacked by a heavily-mutated man, whose skin is
adorned with metal spikes. She stabs him repeatedly until he lets
go of her.

The woman screams again from somewhere in front of them, and this
time, it's accompanied by grunts and inhuman roars. They find her
in a dark storeroom, pursued by two more mutants. By the time they
catch up to her, it's too late. She staggers towards Claire, covered
in her own blood, and expires; her last words are about "the animal
eyes." Claire recognizes her as Gina Foley, another employee at
TerraSave. There is no sign of her killer.

The nearest door is locked. The hallway where Gina died leads to
a stairwell leading down, where a door on its nearest landing is
electronically shut. A dead man, dressed in the same armor and
fatigues as those who attacked the TerraSave party, dangles by his
feet from a hook and chain by the stairs, with a keyring on his
belt. When Claire attempts to take the key, she accidentally knocks
him off the chain, and he plummets almost two stories down. As they
watch him drop, the door on the landing is remotely unlocked.

It leads to the prison's infirmary. Its halls are littered with

gurneys and more relatively fresh bloodstains, and it's in
somewhat better repair than the cellblock. Claire descends to
the floor and arms herself from the dead man's corpse, taking
his pistol, holster, gun belt, and key ring. The presence of
the gun visibly unnerves Moira.

When she does so, another electronic buzzer sounds, and two
locked doors on either side of the room suddenly open, disgorging
a group of more mutants. They're dressed in rags, their exposed
skin is swollen and tumorous, and many have decorated themselves
by driving spikes or wire through their flesh. Some have improvised
weapons, but most come after Claire with their bare hands.

There are too many to fight with just a pistol, and Claire tells
Moira to run for it. As they pass back through the infirmary, more
formerly-shut doors suddenly burst open, revealing more mutants in
ambush positions. Moira soon discovers that they're surprisingly
sensitive to light, to the point where smoke visibly rises from
their bodies when she shines her flashlight's beam directly on them.
She begins to use her flashlight offensively, stunning the mutants
and setting them up for Claire's attacks.

When they escape the infirmary, the key opens the door near Gina's
body. Another relatively fresh corpse, this one a man in a stained
lab coat, lies in the hallway beyond, still clutching an old
double-barrelled shotgun. Claire takes it.

They emerge into an old storage area, and Claire tells Moira that she
should be carrying a gun herself. Moira immediately declines, saying
that she doesn't do guns, "not after what happened." Claire apologizes,
saying she should've known better, and Moira decides instead to arm
herself with a nearby crowbar. It proves useful for prying open a
nearby door, which has been nailed shut.

They emerge into another debris-strewn hallway, where a little girl

in a dressing gown takes one look at them and flees. Neither Claire
nor Moira try to follow her, as neither are sure they saw her at all.

Shortly afterward, Claire and Moira climb a set of stairs into a

dilapidated cellblock at ground level. Many of the cells around
them are inhabited by more enraged mutants, some of whom have
almost managed to break free from their cells, and all the doors
are held shut by more electronic locks.

Both of their bracelets make an electronic whine, and a woman speaks

over a speaker within: "Fear what you become, and become what you
fear." She asks them whether or not they're afraid, seeming to relish
the question, then abandons it; neither of them, she says, even have
any idea what they should be scared of. Moira asks aloud if the woman
is speaking to them or at them.

The prison's front door is blocked off by a large wrought-iron gate,

which remains shut due to someone removing part of its locking mechanism.
Claire and Moira are forced to explore the prison's upper level to
find the missing gear.

It soon turns up, wedged into a corpse, which in turn has been pinned
inside a bizarre torture device. The prison's power is down, which
keeps them from opening the device to retrieve the gear, and they
set out to find the power room. That leads them to the second floor
of the prison, where several more mutants are waiting in ambush.

A side room contains several shelves of binders and notes, including

another set of instructions regarding the bracelets they're wearing.
The bracelets are designed to monitor and display the wearer's
emotional state by tracking epinephrine and adrenaline levels.
The light glows green under normal circumstances, turns orange if the
wearer becomes anxious, and starts blinking red if the user should
experience fear. If the light turns a steady, solid red, a mutation
has begun, and the user should be disposed of immediately.

Once they reach and reactivate the power, it also turns on a series
of traps set up throughout the prison. Each one is a series of blades
set into a rotating steel cage, which blocks several corridors. The
mutants don't recognize the traps as a threat, which Claire uses to
her advantage.

They return to the front hall with the gear in hand and reassemble
the lock. As they attempt to pry the front door open with Moira's
crowbar, all of the cellblock doors open at once, and Claire is
forced to hold off an advancing mob of mutants while Moira works
on unbarring the door.

The exterior gate to the prison is wide open, leading out onto
a grassy field in a canyon, with a radio tower visible in the
distance. Their bracelets' radios stir to life again, and the woman
introduces herself as the Overseer. She tells them that they must
go to the Wossek, "where life begins," before breaking the connection.

Moira spots the radio tower, and suggests they head for it, in the
hopes that they can send an SOS. It's only a short distance away,
although the bridge that leads to it is falling apart, and is
surrounded by long-abandoned parts for construction. Wherever they
are, it was apparently under development when it was abandoned.
They find the radio without a problem, but its console is dead.
Claire climbs the tower and throws its breaker switch, while Moira
remains behind to try to get a broadcast out. As Moira transmits a
message asking for rescue, with no idea if she's being heard, she
breaks down sobbing. Atop the tower, Claire looks out across the
island, and sees nothing but empty ocean in every direction.

Six months later, a small boat speeds towards the island. It's
piloted by Barry Burton, and as he steers, he listens to Moira's
radio broadcast on a small digital recorder. His face is blank.

He disembarks from his boat onto an old pier, and is surprised by

the appearance of a young girl in a dirty, blood-stained dressing
gown, wearing a bracelet with a glowing red light on it. Barry puts
her on the boat and tells her to stay put until he comes back, as
he has "some grown-up stuff" to attend to. The girl refuses, on the
basis that it's not any safer on the boat than it is on the island,
and a frustrated Barry gives in.

He spots the radio tower in the distance, and asks the girl where
her parents are. She says she doesn't have any parents, or any idea
why she's on the island. She just is. Barry assumes that "she" got
the girl, just like she got Moira. They make introductions; the
girl's name is Natalia.

The path from the dock has crumbled, and one exit looks as if it's
been deliberately blocked off from this side, with a cart of heavy
debris set on the stairs. Barry and Natalia climb up across the bluffs
to a warehouse, letting themselves in through its freight entrance.

Inside, Natalia warns Barry about monsters a moment before several

come after them. Each is a fast-moving, desiccated corpse, more dead
than alive, and they fall easily to Barry's weapons. He assumes aloud
that they're the "infected" he was briefed about.

As they reach the building's offices, Natalia points out more

monsters ahead. She mentions that she can just sort of see them;
through her eyes, the monsters have a sickly aura that's even visible
through walls. Barry cautions her to stay back, but she calmly says
she isn't scared.

The warehouse eventually connects to the administration wing of the

prison. Several of the rotating blades that Claire and Moira had to
evade on their way out are still in operation, and Barry is forced
to go back to the facility's power room and turn them off at the
source. The area is filled with more infected, many of which have
decayed to the point where their legs no longer work, and several
smears of organic material, left behind by Claire and Moira's fights.
These "blisters" have mutated into a sort of organic land mine, and
are nearly invisible to Barry. Natalia leads him past them.

After disabling the traps, Barry and Natalia leave the prison via
its front door. The bridge to the radio tower has continued to fall
apart, and is now impassable, forcing them to go around. Natalia
crawls through a hole in a nearby wall and opens a door for Barry,
letting them cut through the woods.

They have a close encounter in a nearby cabin, where they find a

new creature as it's savaging an old corpse. It still has improvised
metal weapons clinging to its limbs as the infected do, but it instead
creeps around on rubbery, black tendrils. It stalks Barry as he tries to
open a barricaded door, and his gunfire simply knocks pieces of it off.
Natalia alerts him to the location on its body of a single vital organ,
and its destruction kills the creature.

As they emerge from the woods, Barry says aloud that these creatures'
symptoms resemble those of Uroboros, a virus that some "bad people"
used in Africa a couple of years ago. The creatures share Uroboros's
vulnerability to heat, and Barry is able to make a couple of Molotov
cocktails to take advantage of that.

A note in a second nearby hunting cabin contains the last words of a

nearby dead man, who writes about his escape from the prison. He knows
who imprisoned him, an unnamed woman who's the "one who saved us all,"
and as such, knows no one on the island will believe his story.

The path ends in a lumber yard, with the radio tower visible just
ahead. Barry heads straight towards it, to discover that the lumber
yard's gate is not simply locked, but is elaborately chained shut.
Pursued by more of the Uroboros creatures, he uses an overhead crane
as an improvised battering ram, breaking down the gate with several
cut trees. The crane's load begins to slip, and with Natalia under
one arm, Barry runs for the exit, as his pursuers are crushed under
tons of wood. He finishes the job by blowing up a nearby fuel tank,
setting the trees alight.

After carefully sliding down a nearby hill, Barry and Natalia

finally reach the far side of the bridge, and enter the radio tower.
Inside, Barry finds the console and is able to replay Moira's
last message, as well as a few lines he hadn't heard before. Six
months ago, after concluding the radio was broken, Claire and Moira
elected to head to the Wossek, as instructed.

When Natalia learns Moira's name, she doubles over, clutching her
head in both hands. Moira, she says, is dead.

================================
21ii. Episode Two: Contemplation
================================

Three men run from the infected in the forest; one is Neil Fisher,
who volunteers to stay behind and cover the others' escape. He stands
and fires at the oncoming infected as the other two make a break for it.

The other men, Pedro and Gabe, find the ruins of a village, with a tavern
called the Wossek: "where life begins," Gabe says, sardonically shaking
his bracelet. They open the doors to a tavern, finding it empty.

Movement outside gets Gabe's attention, and he draws a knife, ready to

ambush whoever arrives. Claire enters shortly thereafter, clearing the
way for Moira. As they exchange greetings with Gabe and Pedro, the village
suddenly regains power.

Gabe and Pedro are both TerraSave employees, and tell Claire that they,
Neil, and a man named Eddie Thompson all woke up in the middle of the woods.
Thompson was killed shortly thereafter, and Pedro chopped off his hand in
order to get his bracelet for further study. Moira objects, but Claire
says he had to "make the hard choice."

As they search the tavern, the Overseer calls again, saying she plans to
"throw [them] at the wall, and see who sticks." She informs them that as
part of her tests, they've all been infected with a virus.

Gabe brushes it off, and tells Claire to come with him. Leaving Pedro
behind to inspect Eddie's bracelet, Gabe shows her to a clearing on the far
side of the village, where someone has left an old helicopter. Gabe says he
can get it flying, but will need some parts and fuel to do it, and asks Claire
if she can look around for them.

With Moira in tow, she sets out to search the village. They also manage to
startle Pedro, who's found a gas-powered drill and a shotgun, and who uses
the former to break down several bricked-over walls throughout the village.

The first one he opens leads them to a desiccated corpse. A nearby journal
contains his story; he was an adventurer from the mainland who thought it'd
be fun to explore an uncharted island, only to discover it was inhabited by
paranoid villagers. They confiscated his helicopter, locked him up, and
as far as he could tell, forgot about him. He died of thirst two months
later, without ever finding out what had happened on the island. It's his
helicopter that Gabe's trying to fix.

As run down as the village is, it has a fuel dump and a machine shop, and
with Pedro's help, Claire and Moira manage to find the battery and fuel that
Gabe needs. Along the way, Pedro mentions that he's been able to trace the
signal from their bracelets to somewhere north of their current location.
He also assumes that given the strength of the signal, the transmission must
be coming from somewhere high up.

When they return to the helicopter, Gabe sets to work, but is interrupted
by an alarm blaring from the tavern's roof, which attracts every infected in
the area straight to them. Gabe locks himself behind a sturdy gate to
continue work on the helicopter, while Claire, Moira, and Pedro set out
to repel the attack.

Shutting down the alarm is as easy as throwing a switch on the tavern's

second floor, but that also traps them inside. Pedro bars the door and
they withstand a siege, blasting infected as they pound on every window.

As the siege wears on, Pedro begins to panic, which is only worsened when
he notices the light on his bracelet has gone from green to orange. As the
Overseer gloats, Pedro tries and fails to get ahold of himself. The virus
mutates him before Claire and Moira's eyes; his muscles expand, new eyes
open along his chest and arms, and he flies into a homicidal rage, lashing
out with his drill.

Claire's weapons do little to Pedro, and new infected are still filtering
into the village. Claire and Moira are only saved when Neil Fisher appears
and kicks down a safety ladder, giving them access to the tavern's roof.
Neil leads them along a narrow cliffside path and opens a gate for them.
Claire and Moira run through it, and they barely manage to shut and lock it
in the face of a pursuing mob of infected.

Claire protests that they're leaving Gabe behind; Neil reassures her that
Gabe, who's ex-military, will be fine. They descend into an old drainage
tunnel, barring its entrance behind them. Claire tells Neil what happened
to Pedro, and belatedly introduces Moira to Neil.
They climb out of the sewers into an isolated stretch of road, blocked
on one side by a tunnel with a gate across it. In the distance, they
can see an enormous tower, the largest thing on the island, and Claire
says it's probably where the bracelets' signal is coming from. She suggests
they head that way now, and Neil tells her they should wait until dawn.
Claire rejects that, as "the clock's ticking"; by dawn, there's a chance
they could all end up like Pedro did.

The town around them is bizarre, with signs of how it once must have been
half-buried by newer construction and old rot. Many doors are boarded up
or barricaded, and half the street is blocked off by a tall fence made out
of razor wire. The tunnel ahead of them, leading further into town, is
barred by a metal gate topped with spikes.

The infected reappear as Claire, Moira, and Neil pass an abandoned

restaurant, trying to break down a wrought-iron gate in its alleyway.
Claire boosts Moira up to the restaurant's balcony, and Neil lifts Claire
up after her. Instead of following them, he opts to get the incoming
infected's attention, then runs further into the town.

Claire and Moira go inside the restaurant to look for another way out. A radio
has been left on in its kitchen, tuned to a news channel; a Russian broadcaster
reads a story about the civil war in the Eastern Slav Republic. They leave via
the front door.

After a fight with a handful of infected in a decaying playground, they

spot a seemingly normal little girl as she disappears into a building.
She's the same girl that they thought they saw back in the prison,
and they follow her inside.

The girl's avoided them by ducking through a small hole in the wall,
next to a hall that's blocked by a security shutter. Claire and Moira
try to go around it, and discover that they're in what used to be the
town's hospital. Its morgue is covered in blood, decorated with hanging
corpses, and inhabited by another new kind of mutant. Its entire body is
covered by a single explosive blister. When the blister ruptures, it
goes off like a grenade, covering everything nearby in disgusting ooze.

They leave the hospital via its back stairs and enter an old apartment
building. On its fourth floor, they spot the girl, who's just leapt
from a balcony to a hallway next door, and follow her.

Moira talks to the girl in an attempt to calm her down. The girl doesn't
give her name, but she's Natalia Korda. Her bracelet is glowing red,
and she clutches a teddy bear dressed in a blue uniform. Moira introduces
herself, and asks for the bear's name; it's Lottie. Claire assures Natalia
that once they find and deal with the lady in the tower, they can go home.

The building they're in turns out to be the top floor of an abandoned

storefront, and its first floor is crawling with infected. As Claire
deals with the first few she finds, another new kind of mutant bursts
through the ceiling. It's massive, holds a lit torch in one hand, and
launches balls of explosive ichor at them from a distance. By the time
it falls, it's reduced most of the surviving shelves and goods in
the store to splinters.

Claire and Moira double back to retrieve Natalia, and the three of them
leave the store via its front doors. They're on another isolated stretch
of the street, blocked on both ends. Moira, making conversation, asks
about Lottie; Natalia says Lottie's a girl, and was a gift from the
"Terra Saver" guy who saved her when she was little.

They start heading south once again, towards the base of the Overseer's
tower, when they hear the sound of a helicopter from above. Gabe flies
into view, laughing.

Before he can land, the helicopter's console sparks and warning

lights flash. The Overseer chides him over the radio in his bracelet,
accusing him of "cheating." As he loses control of the helicopter,
Gabe's bracelet begins to flash red, and in a desperate attempt to keep
himself from mutating, he hacks at his own arm with his knife. As Claire
and Moira watch from the ground, the helicopter plows into one of the top
floors of the apartment building.

While they're distracted, neither Claire nor Moira notice when someone
grabs Natalia from behind, covering her mouth and running off with her.
They only notice Natalia's gone after a taunting message from the
Overseer, about how they're clearly stronger than their dead friends.

Six months later, Natalia tells Barry that when they met, Moira was
trying to get to the tower in the distance. It's barely visible from
behind the radio tower, and it has seen better days. Most of the
elaborate construction at its top is simply gone, and much of what's
left is a tangled mass of rebar and broken concrete.

Barry decides not to believe that Moira is dead, and asks Natalia
to show him to the tower. She agrees.

Natalia mentions in passing that Moira was nice to her, and that her
bracelet was what she thinks she remembers a woman was using to talk
to them, but her memories of what happened six months ago are fuzzy.
Barry wonders aloud if the woman was the Overseer, who was mentioned
in his briefing.

They pass through the woods, which are starting to reclaim the ruins
of several destroyed cabins. One of them has a handwritten note on
a shelf inside, left by the late Gabe Chavez, detailing what had
happened to him and his fellow TerraSave employees. Nearby, Barry
finds the decayed corpse of another TerraSave employee. He's wearing
his ID card around his neck, which identifies him as Edward Thompson,
and is missing his left hand.

The cabins are built on a bluff overlooking the old fishing village.
The intervening six months have left it covered in tall grass, and
it's now infested with a new kind of flying BOW. Getting close to it
causes nausea and blurred vision, and it's invisible to the naked eye.
To Natalia's eyes, it's more of a floating blur, but it's enough that
she can tell Barry where to shoot. Upon death, the BOWs become visible;
they look like a hideous blend of a human and an insect, with a massive
tumorlike growth for a torso.

With Natalia playing spotter, they retrace her steps from six months
ago, back through the drainage tunnel into the streets of the island's
town. As rain begins to fall, Barry asks Natalia where her parents are.
She says that they died in Terragrigia, and afterward, TerraSave put
her in a facility.
When they reach the street outside the restaurant, someone is waiting
for them from above. Natalia seems to sense her presence, but doesn't
see her. She's still tracking them after they cut through the city's
warehouse and the hospital, and enter the apartment building where,
as Natalia says, she first met Moira.

The elevator is trashed, so Barry and Natalia climb the stairwell to

the fourth floor, dispatching several Glasps along the way. Gabe's
helicopter is still there, crashed halfway inside the building, and
Barry just has to give it one good shove to send it back down to
the street.

On the east side of the building, overlooking the street, Barry runs
headlong into the mutant that was once Pedro Fernandez. Crying Gabe's
name, he attacks Barry with his handheld drill. Barry is better armed
than Claire was, and soon finds that the open eyes on Pedro's mutated
body are a weak spot. After several well-placed shots, he's able to
lay Pedro to rest.

Barry takes Pedro's drill and uses it to break open the apartment
building's front door. Outside, slumped against a car, he and Natalia
find the partially-mutated, charred corpse of Gabe Chavez. His knife
is still buried in his arm next to his bracelet.

They've reached the street where Natalia was abducted six months
prior, when the "nice man," the same person who rescued her years
ago, came and got her.

The base of the tower is guarded by a partially-ajar shutter, which

Barry forces open. The base of the tower is covered in rubble, but
the first thing they see is a propaganda poster in Russian, of a blonde
woman in white depicted as a savior of the people. Smaller versions of the
poster were all over town, most of which were too weathered to read, but
this is the first one Barry's seen where he can make out the woman's face.

The interior of the tower has survived, if only barely, and is littered
with debris. A note on a desk refers to the trials of an experiment back
in January of 2010; the "T-Phobos" virus has been improved to the point
where it only has a 2% resistance rate, and the innate lethality of the
T-Virus has been reduced. It will now only trigger upon the host being
exposed to strong emotional trauma.

The lobby has been extensively defaced, with barely legible words
scratched into the walls. One of those words is Natalia's name, at
the head of a list that includes "kill" and "crush." Several baby
dolls have been mutilated and hung across the walls, in splatters
of what looks like blood.

These decorations only become more elaborate as they move up the

stairs, past makeshift humanoid sculptures topped with the severed
heads of dolls and a row of empty coffins. In the atrium, which is
lit by a pair of burning torches, they discover what almost looks
like an altar, where burning candles surround a dusty portrait of
a man in black and a woman in white. The latter is the same woman
from the propaganda posters.

Barry recognizes the man as the late Albert Wesker, and the sight
of the woman is the only thing they've yet encountered that has
made Natalia afraid. Her name, Natalia says, is Alex Wesker.
A low, crazed laugh from the shadows gets their attention. Barry
whirls, pistol raised, to try to get a bead on it, with Natalia
hiding behind him. She's on the verge of panic, and when a creature
emerges from the shadows atop the altar, Natalia freezes up. The
creature, its twisted face covered by an oxygen mask and most of
the rest of her body hidden underneath a black cloak, points a single
finger at her. She knew Natalia would come.

==============================
21iii. Episode Three: Judgment
==============================

Claire and Moira search the street for the little girl, Moira regretting
that she'd never asked for the girl's name. There's no sign of her, but
Claire finds a note in Neil's handwriting, taped to the steel shutter at
the base of the Overseer's tower. He wants to meet them at the nearby factory.

Moira questions why Neil would want to go there at all, but Claire explains
that sometimes, he "just does things." This isn't that unusual for him.
Moira goes along with it.

As they enter the factory's yard, a portcullis slides shut behind them,
trapping them inside. The Overseer welcomes them to "the Kierling, where
all things come to an end."

There are three doors in the factory's courtyard. One is locked by a

brand-new terminal, which requires a retinal scan to open; another is
blocked by a statue of who the Overseer identifies as Prometheus, who
was punished for stealing fire from the gods. Neil's TerraSave ID card
dangles from the statue by its lanyard. The third door, when Claire
sees the card, audibly unlocks.

The first building was once an office and laboratory, with joints of
raw beef on display in a lab near its entrance. Several of its rooms
have been dramatically renovated and turned into bizarre puzzles; one
requires Moira's flashlight to illuminate the only correct path past
a series of automated turrets, while the other forces them to set off
a trap in order to collect a key they need. In the end, they get ahold
of an artificial eye, which they use to defeat another retinal scanner.
In the supervisor's office, they find a long-dead man seated in a desk
chair, with part of a disgustingly realistic model of a human liver
placed inside a gaping wound in his chest. Claire takes it.

The artificial eye opens the second door in the courtyard, which leads
them to a slaughterhouse. Since the locals have become infected, they
seem to be taking a great deal more pride in their work, as the walls
and floors are liberally smeared with blood and tissue. A key they need
is held behind a series of rotating blades, which leads them to find
the second half of Prometheus's model liver. Taking the latter triggers
another alarm klaxon, bringing a squad of infected inside. Claire and
Moira run for their lives, and shut the slaughterhouse door behind them.

The statue, as a final insult, explodes in their faces when the liver
is inserted. As per a map in the factory supervisor's office, it leads
them to the underground waterways, which will provide them with an
access point to the Overseer's tower.

First, they pass through several rooms where old barrels are stored,
and another portcullis slams down behind them as they pass through.
The third building is a gas refinery, and as they enter, it begins to
shake dangerously as its safeties are remotely disabled. The Overseer
informs them via radio that they're being removed from the experiment.

Working together, Claire and Moira use the last few functioning release
valves to smooth their progress across the refinery. Its exit is blocked
by another of the Overseer's traps, but Moira is able to get behind it
and defuse it.

Claire and Moira leap into one of the flooded waterways just in time, as
the refinery explodes behind them. They're saved from the worst of the
blast by the water, and come up drenched but alive.

They move further into the waterway, Claire trying to keep Moira's
spirits up. Hopefully, she says, the Overseer will think they died
in that explosion. She further admits that Moira was right to be
cautious, since neither Neil or the girl were in the factory.

There's an electronically locked door blocking the waterway, and

Claire prepares to turn back. As she does, an old man sticks the barrel
of a rifle through the door of the control room and pokes Moira in
the side of the head. He doesn't wear one of the test subjects'
bracelets, and after a short, tense conversation, hits the switch
to unlock the door. As far as he's concerned, he tells them, they're
just more foreigners who've come to ruin a once-beautiful island. This
is the room he's chosen to die in, so they'll have to find their own.

The waterway is flooded waist-deep, which doesn't seem to bother the

infected. They spring several ambushes as Claire and Moira pass.

Claire and Moira finally emerge into a bizarre subterranean crypt, which
Claire theorizes puts them directly below the tower. The centerpiece of the
crypt is a memorial carved into a stone plinth, honoring the fellow
servants of "Master Alex," who gave their lives to provide her with
valuable data.

A nearby stairwell leads them up into the base of the Overseer's tower,
which is built around a large, central elevator shaft. It's strewn with
packed shipments of fuel tanks and covered crates, and what Claire
initially thinks are support columns turn out to be pipes. The tower
is sending the flow from the waterways up to its topmost floors.

One of the few rooms off the main shaft is a richly decorated parlor,
where a dead man hangs from one of the rafters. A nearby note, written
to his "Master Alex," explains that this is the way he's chosen to atone
for the many sins he's had to commit in her service. Stuart, her faithful
servant, made sure all of the other servants and her research team were
dead, then hung himself.

Moira remarks, as they search the main room, that Neil isn't here.
Claire's still determined to find him, so Moira points out something
she noticed back in the village. At no time did Neil's bracelet ever
change color, despite their pursuit by the mutants. He was never even
anxious. Claire shuts her down immediately.

Unfortunately for Claire, they soon find the tower's security office.
Neil's clipboard from the party sits on its desk, and contains a list
of all of the people they've seen on the island so far, all but one of
whom--Natalia--are TerraSave employees. Claire closes it; Moira was
right. Neil sold TerraSave out.

Moira consoles Claire, but then spots Neil on one of the security monitors.
He's working on a computer, and as a woman in white approaches him from
behind, he tells her that he's "isolated the best candidate."

She thanks him for his work, then shoots him in the chest with a dart gun.
He wanted an Uroboros sample, she says, and now he's got one.

As Neil falls to his knees, struggling with the infection, the woman
expounds on her reasoning. Morgan Lansdale went down for causing the
Terragrigia Panic, but before he did, he picked Neil as his successor.
Neil thought he could use a sample of the Uroboros virus to create a
big new terrorist threat, thus justifying the return of the FBC. This,
she says, is because Neil is an idiot.

Claire turns off the monitor. Moira thinks she's crying, but Claire denies
it. She's just "learning to see a little more clearly."

Neil's left more scattered paperwork in the security office. One is a note
to Stuart, expounding on the reasoning behind his list. All of the candidates
on it have faced bioterror threats before and survived, indicating a high
resistance to psychological trauma. The exception is "No. 6," Moira, who
was included due to "promising test results."

As they leave the security office, an elevator car descends along the main
shaft. Claire investigates and is knocked over when Neil, clutching the
side of his neck, falls out.

Neil succumbs to the Uroboros virus as Claire and Moira watch. He's failed
Lansdale, Neil says; the FBC is never coming back. He expects to die.

He doesn't. Neil emerges from the transformation as a massive, muscle-bound

hulk, with Uroboros tentacles slithering into and out of his left eye socket.
Unlike virtually all other Uroboros infectees, he's remained in control.

Claire is furious, and raises her gun, screaming at Neil. He's betrayed
TerraSave, she says, which was supposed to save people. Now he had better
hope someone comes along to save him from her.

Like other Uroboros carriers, Neil is vulnerable to even small amounts of

heat, such as the beam from Moira's flashlight. Claire uses that, tricking
Neil into smashing open the fuel shipments and setting himself alight. The
flames burn away some of his skin, revealing the same weak spot that all
Uroboros carriers seem to have: a distended, glowing orange organ in the
center of his chest.

Neil rips open the coolant pipes to douse the flames, which allows him to
partially regenerate. As the fight continues, his powers continue to evolve;
his right arm bursts into a writhing mass of tentacles, which he uses to grab
at Claire or Moira from halfway across the room, and he learns how to throw
globs of Uroboros-derived tissue at them like biological land mines.

A final attack to his "heart" drops Neil to the floor. Claire and Moira
leave him there and use his elevator to go up, planning to confront the
Overseer. Neil stops their car from the outside, holding it in place, and
when Claire pries the doors open, he leans in and pins Moira to the wall.
Claire hacks at Neil's arm with little effect, then goes after Neil himself,
burying her knife in his chest. He roars in pain and falls backward out of
the elevator, bringing both Claire and Moira with him back to the ground
floor. Claire manages to land on top of Neil, who's stunned by the impact;
Moira isn't so lucky.

Claire gets up first, staggering as she moves to check on Moira. Neil

recovers suddenly and backhands Claire with his mutated arm, knocking
her pistol out of her hand. Claire struggles with him, reaching for the
fallen gun.

Slowly, Moira crawls towards the pistol, bombarded by flashbacks: her sister
Polly's face, an angry Barry, her hands covered in blood. With a moment's
hesitation, she picks up the pistol and empties the rest of its clip into
Neil's face. Neil collapses.

Above them, the Overseer watches the end of the fight on a flatscreen
monitor. She's in a surgically clean laboratory next to Natalia, who's
asleep inside a glass-walled metal tube. The Overseer puts a hand on
the glass, and says that she and Natalia will be "good friends."

Six months later, at the base of what was once the Overseer's tower,
Barry and Natalia face the creature. She pulls off her oxygen mask
and discards it, darkly amused. Natalia recognizes her immediately;
while half of her face is disfigured, with one lidless eye, the intact
half is still that of Alex Wesker.

Barry demands to know where Moira is, and Alex claims to have "buried
her beneath a mountain of fear and despair." Barry interprets that as
an admission that Alex killed Moira, and for a moment, seems as if he'll
break down.

"There's one more to kill," Alex says, and her eyes focus on Natalia.
At the same time, Revenants swarm into the room around them.

Natalia points at the door to the waterway as a possible escape route,

and Barry's eyes focus. Promising that he'll come back to kill Alex, he
fires several shots into the unstable wreckage above them, collapsing
part of the tower onto Alex and the Revenants' heads. He and Natalia
make their escape into the waterway, pursued by Alex's laughter.

The waterway has dried out in the last six months, and the part of it
that connects to the Overseer's tower is virtually abandoned. Natalia's
leg was hurt in their escape, and Barry carries her on his back for a
while. As they get some distance from the tower, he talks with her about
his family, and the incident that caused his distance with Moira.

When his children were much younger, Barry had forgotten to lock up his
gun collection. While playing, Moira found a loaded .45 pistol and
accidentally shot her sister Polly with it. Polly survived, but Barry
never quite got around to accepting the blame for the incident. It drove
a wedge between him and Moira, and it's now too late to fix it.

The far end of the waterway is inhabited by a handful of rotted zombies

and waves of mutated insects, which don't pose a real threat. When they
reach the control room, they find an old man lying dead on the bed, his
arms folded on his chest. Nearby, Barry finds Moira's cell phone, and
swaps its SIM card into his own. Moira has used it to record a tearful
goodbye to her family, which includes an apology to him. It takes Barry
a moment to recover after hearing that, but then he pockets both phones,
swearing that he's going to destroy the island.

The old man's diary lies open next to the bed. He used it to practice
his written English, and to chronicle his relationship with his daughter
Irina. She was born in 1988, his only child, and as she grew older, they
would fight bitterly. At the age of 20, despite his objections, she went
to work in the island's mines on the island alongside many of the other
locals. That was the last time he saw her.

When they finally escape from the waterway, Barry resolves to pick up
Alex's trail. He offers Natalia the chance to back out, but she refuses.
At this point, she wants to know the truth about what's happened as
much as Barry does.

With the factory destroyed, there's only one place they can go: the
island's mines, built into a large canyon. Its elevator system runs
off of oversized batteries, which have been removed. While searching
for a new one, Barry and Natalia discover an old set of notes in an
abandoned office. They're the last written words of Irina. Alex had
had the mine workers injected with an unknown bioweapon, and as they
succumbed, the mine turned into a bloodbath. Irina was one of the
last survivors, and she eventually succumbed to the same infection.

Barry finds a new battery for the elevator, but encounters a bizarre
new creature along the way. It's a sort of super-Revenant, intent on
absorbing as much biomass as it can, with a massive, pulsing heart in
the center of its body. It attempts to shield the heart from injury
with its limbs, but after absorbing a few gunshots, it flees. When
Barry and Natalia reach the other side of the canyon, the monster
returns for a second attempt, but this time, Barry finishes it off.

They find some scattered paperwork by the mine's exit, dated February
of 2010. After the miners' deaths, the tunnel system has been repurposed
for the storage and disposal of human corpses, sometimes processing
as many as thirty in a single day as part of trials in the development
of the T-Phobos virus.

Once they're clear of the mine, Barry and Natalia set back out after
Alex. She abruptly appears behind them, quiet as a ghost, and punches
Barry over the nearest cliff.

Alex grabs Natalia by the throat, one twisted finger stroking her
cheek. She asks Natalia why she hasn't changed, then begins to throttle
her. Unable to fight back, Natalia's eyes close...

...then open again. Her gaze meets Alex's. Alex drops her, recoils,
and screams in horror.

=================================
21iv. Episode Four: Metamorphosis
=================================

Alex Wesker, the Overseer, strokes the side of the machine she's strapped
Natalia into. Six months from now, she says, Natalia will awaken as her,
"and the world is going to be very afraid." She wishes Natalia good night,
and the machine descends into the floor, taking a sleeping Natalia with it.
Natalia's platform descends the tower's central shaft at the same time
Claire and Moira's elevator ascends.
Leaving the elevator is like stepping into a giant brain. The entire tower
is set up to support a massive number of servers, set into the walls around
them and joined by a series of catwalks. The waterway below the tower was
there to feed a single, massive liquid cooling system.

They've arrived just outside a dedicated office, where a series of flatscreen

monitors display camera feeds from all over the island, as well as profile
pictures of Claire, Moira, and the other "test subjects." Despite Claire's
hopes, Alex has been watching them every step of the way, even after the
factory exploded.

Alex Wesker's bedroom is just upstairs, where she keeps several aquariums
and a collection of rare hardcover books. She's written a short essay in a
personal journal about her love/hate relationship with the protagonist of
Kafka's "Metamorphosis," Gregor Samsa. Like Gregor, Alex was created for a
specific purpose, and she suspects that, also like Gregor, she would have
been abandoned once she'd achieved that purpose. She wonders if Albert
Wesker felt the same.

Another note to herself sits near a message from the late Neil Fisher,
to the late Stuart. Alex is sure her transfer procedure will work, but
the prospective candidate must be mentally strong enough to handle it,
and able to overcome his or her fears. The process takes six months,
during which time the candidate must be protected at all costs.

Neil's note discusses why he selected Natalia Korda as one of the test
subjects. Due to her experiences in Terragrigia as a child, which included
her parents being killed in front of her, Natalia has been traumatized. She
is simply incapable of feeling fear.

They lower a catwalk and ascend to the topmost level, where Alex Wesker
is waiting for them in her laboratory. Protected by a thick sheet of
bulletproof glass, she faces them for a final monologue. Death was her
brother's escape, Alex says, and it will be hers as well. She produces
a pistol, places it to her head, and fires.

The room goes red with overhead alarms, and a prerecorded voice announces
that "confidentiality protocols" have been initiated. The entire top half
of the tower is preparing to self-destruct. As Claire and Moira run back
to the elevator, the tower starts to shake, and all of the blue lights on
the server racks have turned an angry red.

The tremors in the building dislodge one of the coolant tubes, which lands
on the roof of their elevator car and knocks it out of commission. Claire
hops the railing on the catwalk and uses the fallen coolant tube to reach
a lower floor.

They spot a door that appears to be an emergency exit, on the other side
of a maintenance area that's infested with what Barry will later come to
know as Glasps. Claire is forced to flush them out with improvised smoke
bombs and explosives as they head for the exit.

Once they leave, they discover that whatever plans Alex had for the
exterior of the building were unfinished, or it's simply fallen into
disrepair. They're suspended hundreds of feet above the island, on
increasingly narrow ledges and walkways. Worse, the same computerized
voice announces that the final countdown to the building's destruction
has begun, sardonically telling the tower's employees that they are
"now authorized to panic."

Claire and Moira make it back inside the tower as it begins to fall
apart, with pieces of the upper levels collapsing on top of them. They
duck and run, using whatever they can to descend, but soon, their
luck runs out. Moira sees an incoming cave-in and pushes Claire out
of the way, shoving her to safety.

Claire staggers to her feet and looks back, where Moira lies under
a pile of rubble in a pool of her own blood. She begs Claire to save
herself, and with no other choice, Claire escapes the tower through
a hole in its wall. Begging God for forgiveness, she throws herself
into the ocean below.

When Claire makes it off the island, she's taken to a hospital. The
first person to reach her side is Barry, who begs her to tell him what
happened to Moira. Claire says, with tears in her eyes, that she tried
to save her, just before she's rushed into the emergency room. Barry
is left alone in an empty hallway, with no answers.

Six months later, Barry comes to. Alex's punch sent him sliding down
a cliff, through some underbrush, and knocked him for a loop. The
first thing he sees when his vision clears is Natalia, who appears
to be in mild shock. All she can say is that Alex "went somewhere else."
Barry collects himself, and with her in tow, heads out to continue their
pursuit of Alex. He doesn't realize he dropped his BSAA ID in the fall,
which he keeps in a leather wallet with a picture of his family.

They've reached a landfill and shipping yard that once serviced Alex's
construction projects, which has since fallen into general disrepair.
It's only inhabited by a handful of infected, many of which are too
badly decayed to stand up.

Barry and Natalia are forced to ascend the old, teetering freight
crane and use it to ferry themselves, one stop at a time, across
the shipping yard. On an isolated stretch of the crane's walkway,
they find the corpse of the crane's former operator, who's written
down his last words in a notebook. At some point, a virus escaped
from "the facility"; men who were infected were driven mad, while
women suffered terribly before dying. The operator was a workaholic,
and ended up making his final stand here, alongside the crane he'd
worked with for 30 years.

The crane's control room leads them to another entrance to the old
mine tunnels. Natalia tells Barry that while she doesn't remember
this place, she feels like she's been here before. After six months
of "chasing scraps," Barry's willing to consider that a valid lead,
and they use an elevator to descend into the tunnels.

On their way down, the speaker on Natalia's bracelet crackles to life.

Alex promises Natalia, the "false one," that she will die. Barry shrugs
it off, promising Natalia that the two of them together are stronger
than Alex.

Parts of the mine tunnels have accidentally breached pockets of toxic

gas. The tunnel is littered with corpses, some of which are still
active enough to make feeble grabs at Barry and Natalia as they pass,
but nothing more.
As they emerge into the main mine shaft, they can see it goes down
several hundred feet, most of which is flooded with gas. Natalia says,
as if sure, that Alex is somewhere down there.

They're forced to explore several side tunnels in search of a key for

the main lift and to get to the ventilation control system. As they
do, Barry finds two journal entries from one of the late mine workers.
When he was initially hired, he was excited about the chance to make
some real money, and was surprised to find out that the lower levels
of the mine were dedicated to some kind of pharmaceutical research.
He'd noticed that the research, for whatever reason, seemed to require
a huge number of people to conduct, and their hiring standards were
for little more than just warm bodies. He never saw any of them leave,
and assumed there was a second exit to the mine on the lowest levels
until the day he thought to look inside some crates he was moving.
On the discovery he was hauling dismembered human corpses, the unnamed
worker was revolted, and resolved to confront Alex Wesker directly.
This was presumably his last mistake.

As they ride the lift down to the lowest level of the mine, Barry asks
Natalia why Alex has it in for her. Natalia says she doesn't know; after
talking to Alex for a little while, she "got really sleepy." Barry decides
that any further answers will have to come from Alex herself.

The lowest level of the mine is a cistern, with a wrought-iron grate

covering a reeking "soup" of wastewater. A nearby palm scanner blocks
entrance to the pharmaceutical research facility. To both Barry and
Natalia's surprise, her palm print is registered in the system, which
grants them access.

The door opens onto a security checkpoint, where two massive holes
in the floor are clogged with ash, dust, and a few mutated human corpses,
looking like late-stage T-Virus infectees. Paperwork on the security
desk deals with the logistics of the affair; Alex was systematically
depopulating the island, block by block, to use the villagers as test
subjects. Alex herself contacts them again, threatening Natalia and
promising to "not let [her] wake."

The checkpoint leads them, discordantly, to a short, ornate bridge

and a pair of double doors. As they enter, a series of automatic lights
reveal a long, richly decorated front hall, occupied now only by dead
men and Revenants. Bloodstains and claw marks seem to tell the story
of what happened here.

The first floor of the facility contains bathrooms, lounges, and a

well-furnished library. Barry reads some discarded paperwork, and
learns that a researcher here had perfected a viral strain he'd
codenamed "T-Phobos." It had been thought useless, as it only triggered
if the host had sufficient levels of epinephrine in his system, but it
caught Alex Wesker's eye. The researcher was rewarded with a promotion.

The floor below is much less ornate, and is dedicated to biological

research. Its entry hall is full of Revenants, suspended in glass tanks
filled with an unknown fluid. One of the tanks has shattered.

A nearby control room has a sheaf of lab results left out on a console.
Alex and her team had been studying and working with the Uroboros virus,
building the bottom floor of this facility for that specific purpose,
and had created the Revenant by injecting the virus into a human corpse.
Given its infectiousness, if a single sample escaped the scientists'
control, they conclude it would rapidly turn the island into a graveyard.

The chief researcher himself--the unlucky creator of T-Phobos--died in

a recent "cultivation experiment" with Uroboros, and as a result, the
lab has been set to security level 2. Barry pockets a level 1 keycard
from one of the dead researchers, and uses it to access the morgue
where the chief researcher's body was being disposed of. Instead, he
finds a key decorated with an elaborate emblem, which corresponds to
several doors he's seen on the upper floor of the facility. That lets
him into the late chief's office, where Barry acquires his keycard.

That keycard lets them into a dingy warehouse where several crates
are prepared for transport, including multiple Revenants and related
BOWs in glass tubes. The majority of the shipments, however, are more
massive crates of ash and human corpses. As they attempt to leave,
they're ambushed by the Uroboros-spawned monsters that have taken
the place over, which forces an automatic security lockdown. Barry
is forced to kill them all before the lockdown is lifted, allowing
he and Natalia to take the elevator out.

It drops them at one end of a dark tunnel. Alex has set up several of
her morbid decorations along the sides of the tunnel, where mobiles
of burning and dismembered baby dolls sit in arrangements of lit
candles. Natalia's bracelet begins to play a slow, off-key song on
the piano, which she doesn't recognize but knows she doesn't like.

Barry's flashlight dies halfway down the tunnel, as Alex whispers

a bizarre mantra into her microphone, broadcast via Natalia's bracelet:
she is "true," while the "false" one must die.

Alex has left a particularly cruel surprise for them near the tunnel's
end. Lottie, Natalia's teddy bear, has been torn limb from limb and
nailed to an up-ended table. Natalia screams in anger when she sees
her "friend," demanding that Alex tell her why she did it.

There's a pile of scrawled letters near Lottie, addressed to Natalia,

though it doesn't explain much to either her or Barry. Alex explains
that in the moment before she killed herself, she felt a moment's fear,
when she thought she'd conquered it entirely. Ironically, the viruses
that were killing her then saved her life, bringing her back from the
verge of death as a twisted, ugly mutant.

Driven insane by the sight of herself, Alex became preoccupied with

Natalia, who would soon awaken with a copy of Alex's personality and
memories. She concluded that meant Natalia was a "false" version
of herself. Alex proceeded to unleash the Uroboros virus onto the
island in an attempt to kill Natalia, thus proving herself to be the
real, true Alex Wesker.

The tunnel's end is decorated with implements of torture, much like

the ones Claire and Moira encountered in the prison and the factory.
Alex continues to hiss at Natalia over her bracelet, telling Natalia
that the gaps in her memory are because she's "not the one."

Alex awaits them at a cavern at the end of the tunnel, which is a

sort of field laboratory. An old wooden grand piano is set up in
its center, surrounded by steel shelving and server banks. As they
enter, Alex removes a final red vial of Uroboros and jams it into
her chest. It's not enough to simply live, she says; like Albert
before her, she wants to transcend.

The Uroboros does its work rapidly, but affects her differently than
others. Her spine, already disfigured by a series of metal implants,
expands and stretches, tearing her apart at the waist. She develops
the typical Uroboros glowing organ in her chest, but gains an insane,
inhuman degree of flexibility. When cornered, she flees into a series
of ventilation ducts in the cavern's ceiling, which are too small to
fit her and should be too weak to hold her.

Her downfall is that she virtually ignores Barry in favor of lashing

out at Natalia. Barry's gunfire knocks her flat on her back, giving
him a clear shot at the glowing Uroboros nodule, and it ruptures,
spilling glowing plasma across the floor. She collapses.

Barry advances on her to make sure she's dead, but Alex suddenly springs
back to her feet and backhands him across the room. Barry lands in a
stunned, helpless heap on the floor. Alex grabs a vulnerable Natalia in
one hand, and as Natalia struggles in her grip, begins to squeeze.

A gunshot rings out, and Alex convulses. Several more follow, ripping
into Alex's body, and she drops Natalia, reeling back. Natalia looks
up to see Moira Burton, dressed in rags and holding a now-empty pistol,
who has arrived on the scene.

She holds up Barry's BSAA ID, and asks him if he'd done "all this"
just for her. Barry apologizes to her for taking half a year to do it.

Their reunion is cut short by Alex, who rises up on her feet, her
body suddenly seething with Uroboros's trademark black worms. While she's
occupied with her own mutation, they make a break for it, back the way
Moira came.

Due to a wrong turn, they end up outside on the edge of a cliff, with
Alex right behind them. They turn to face her, just as Claire arrives.
She's in the passenger bay of a helicopter, armed with a sniper rifle,
and puts a bullet into Alex's Uroboros nodule.

As Alex reels, Barry throws Moira and Natalia aboard the helicopter.
Claire gets a few words into an apology to Moira before Moira cuts her
off; coming back with a sniper rifle and a helicopter, Moira says, is
more than enough.

With Moira safe, Barry stays on the ground to face Alex alone. He
jumps down to a nearby mining trail, which is still littered with
debris from the island's industry, and Alex is right behind him.
She's gone utterly feral; her body largely consists of a group of
swirling tentacles, with her face left as the only part of her that
looks even vaguely human. Claire covers Barry from the air, harrassing
Alex with sniper fire.

At Barry's request, Claire finally breaks out the "big gun": an RPG-7,
kept on the wall of the helicopter's passenger bay. Alex looks up in
time to see the anti-tank rocket coming towards her, and an expression
of pure shock crosses her face as the rocket buries itself in her
chest. The explosion that kills Alex Wesker can be seen for miles.

As they leave the island aboard the helicopter, Barry and Moira have
a long-overdue talk. Barry admits he should've let Moira have her
space, and Moira apologizes, as she gave him more than enough reasons
to worry.

They're passed by a pod of helicopters heading towards the island,

which Barry identifies as a BSAA clean-up crew. He sits down and hugs
Natalia with one arm, who smiles at him.

Two years later, Claire drives down an American highway, having a

conversation on a hands-free headset. Her brother Chris is in China
now, she learns, and she tells the person on the other end of the
line to tell Piers Nivans to look after him. As she removes her headset,
a newscast on her car radio mentions "the tragedy in Tall Oaks" from
earlier in the week.

At the Burtons' house, the family is getting ready to go out, as their

TV plays a newcast about the chaos in China. The channel's ticker
mentions a new president being sworn in.

Natalia is upstairs in her bedroom, ignoring the calls for her to get
ready. She's intent upon the book she's reading, which is a volume
of Franz Kafka's work, and she reads a line aloud:

"A cage went in search of a bird, but now the bird is gone. The bird
has changed." She breaks into a smile.

=================
21v. The Struggle
=================

Crushed by rubble in Alex Wesker's collapsing tower, Moira blacks out.

To her surprise, she wakes up some time later, on the old man's bed in
the sewer system. He dug her out of the wreckage, along with her phone.
He's afflicted with a wracking cough, and cheerfully tells her that
she should've died when she had the chance.

It takes Moira eight weeks before she's on her feet again, during
which time she notices that her bracelet has never turned any color
other than green. With no idea how to get off the island or call for
help, she and the old man end up working together to survive. He
insists on her pulling her own weight, and begins by teaching her how
to hunt small game. He never offers his name, nor asks for hers,
settling for always calling her "kroshka."

The island is never less than dangerous, but it's more manageable in
daylight, and they stick to the area surrounding the old logging camp.
They live off of rabbits, rats, and even the mutated spiders, which
the old man insists are edible as long as they're cooked through.

Moira never gives up hope about finding a way off the island, despite
the old man's insistence that she needs to face reality. He seems
uninterested in escape, claiming there's no point. Moira, haunted by
dreams of her father, continues her search.

Then, Moira says, comes "the day I really fucked up." One of the old
man's rules is that they never go out at night, and by the day, all
they do is scavenge the island for supplies. She pushes her luck, and
in so doing, draws a massive mob of infected down into the waterway,
endangering their hideout in the control room. Between her and the
old man, they wipe out all of the infected, ensuring their safety
for the time being.

The old man, however, is enraged. He demands that she face reality
and focus on survival. A chastised Moira listens to him, and decides
that as long as the island's stronger than she is, she's got no hope
of escape.

Six months go by, and the Revenants emerge onto the island. Unlike
the infected, the Revenants have a habit of killing everything they
see, and they're beginning to wipe out the local game. The old man
decides they ought to start stockpiling resources, rather than watch
the monsters take it all. At the same time, though he denies it, his
persistent cough is getting decidedly worse.

After a supply run to the fishing village, they discover an old document,
which is a list of names of local islanders who were used as test
subjects. The old man recognizes one of the names on the list, Irina,
who Moira later learns is his daughter. She's been missing for years.

The old man is rejuvenated by the idea of figuring out what happened
to Irina. He and Moira investigate the old mining complex to try to
find out more, only finding out upon arrival that it's overrun with
infected and Revenants.

When they clear the place out, they break into the one sealed
building on the premises, which looks as if someone reinforced it
to withstand a siege. Upon entry, they find a letter from Irina,
written as she began to mutate.

Watching the old man read his daughter's last words redoubles Moira's
resolve. She refuses to die on this island and put her father through
what the old man's going through.

Conversely, the old man loses hope. He locks Moira out of the control
room one night. With her sobbing on the other side of the door, tells
her that he was born on the island, and like his daughter, will die here.
She's young, and shouldn't feel the same obligation.

Only now do they exchange names; his turns out to be Evgeny. He sits
down in an old armchair, and sees to his shock that his old cough is
starting to bring up blood. He dies shortly thereafter, and Moira
lays him to rest on his old cot in the control room.

Now alone on the island, Moira searches for a way to escape, and
stumbles across Barry's BSAA ID. It leads her to follow his trail to
the mines, just as Alex Wesker is about to kill Natalia.

=================
21vi. Little Miss
=================

Natalia Korda is asleep in Alex Wesker's transference machine. In the

moments before she wakes up, she dreams of standing in a featureless
void, surrounded by the laughter of unseen children. The only other
thing in it is her teddy bear.

Suddenly, the bear springs to her feet, and with an elaborate salute,
introduces herself as Lottie. Natalia laughs, but her view of Lottie
is slowly obscured by clouds of smoke.

She wakes up as the transference machine removes the helmet from her
head, and takes a few halting steps out of the device. Lottie is
nowhere to be found.

A second girl steps out from behind Natalia. She's spotless, and wears
a black velvet dress and a lace choker, with a red ribbon in her hair.
When Natalia says aloud that they look alike, the second girl says she's
also Natalia. She produces a postcard with Natalia's name on it.

It's from Lottie, who asks Natalia why she left Lottie behind. The
other, "dark" Natalia suggests, with mockery in her voice, that
they should try to pick up Lottie's trail.

Suddenly, they're in the island's waterway, which is inhabited

by Revenants. Dark Natalia says matter-of-factly that if they see
Natalia, they'll kill her, so Natalia opts to sneak past unseen.
They can't seem to see Dark Natalia, however, who runs ahead to
scout. To Dark Natalia's eyes, the monsters are glowing.

As they approach the exit, Dark Natalia asks if Natalia remembers

what happened on the island. Natalia doesn't, aside from that it
was bad. Dark Natalia brushes off Natalia's questions about how
it's possible for them both to be her, encouraging Natalia to
focus on finding Lottie. After all, Lottie's all Natalia has left.

They find Lottie's next postcard soon afterward. Lottie claims

to be trapped in a tunnel underneath the village, unable to feel
her legs and probably dying.

Suddenly, they're in the street outside the village's department

store, standing outside the entrance to the Overseer's tower.
As they evade the patrolling Revenants, Dark Natalia continues
to berate Natalia, asking her why she thinks she needs Lottie.
It's because, Natalia says, "Mr. Fisher" gave her the bear after
he saved her in Terragrigia. Lottie's her oldest possession, and
the only thing left in her life that's good.

The next postcard from Lottie was sent from the ocean, and comes
with a photo of Lottie standing next to the broken bridge by the
radio tower. She's written that she's surrounded by dead bodies,
which Dark Natalia says were the victims of "someone's" experiments.

In the ruined cabins on the outskirts of the fishing village, Dark

Natalia's demeanor changes. She begins to emphasize how much Natalia
needs her, encouraging Natalia to give up, to rest, and to turn over
control. Natalia stubbornly resists, refusing to give up her search
for Lottie, until they find a third postcard on the bridge.

Lottie claims to be dying. The postcard says to look for what's left
of her on the beach, and the two Natalias walk that way hand in hand.

When they find Lottie, she suddenly springs to life, just as she
had in Natalia's dream, but this time, she snarls at Natalia.
She was "supposed to win this little tug-of-war."

The life drains out of Lottie and she falls to the ground, just an
ordinary stuffed animal. Dark Natalia picks Lottie up, and admits
defeat. Natalia's in control for now, she says, but next time, she'll
"never see [her] coming." She speaks the last few words in the voice
of Alex Wesker.

Natalia snaps awake. She's somehow ended up down by the docks, and
to her surprise, she sees a boat approaching the island.

=======================================
21vii. Conclusions About the Conclusion
=======================================

1. Claire Redfield, Natalia Korda, and Barry and Moira Burton have
survived.

2. Gina Foley, Pedro Fernandez, Gabriel Chavez, Edward Thompson, and

the civilian population of the island have all died.

3. The original Alex Wesker died twice, and the second time looked
about as final as you can get out of this series.

4. Neil Fisher is the only person besides Albert Wesker to manage to

retain control of himself after infection with Uroboros, apparently
through sheer stubborn fanaticism. He's likely dead, although given
what it took to kill other Uroboros infectees, his survival wouldn't
be a huge surprise.

5. Natalia Korda has been adopted by the Burton family.

6. Natalia has a copy of Alex Wesker's personality and memories

overlaid on her own. It's already beginning to have an influence
in 2011, and by 2013, may be in control.

7. Polly Burton was the victim of an accident with her father's guns
as a child, but made a full recovery.

8. According to the game's director, Claire is still infected with

the T-Phobos virus. She survived the events of the game by never
quite managing to panic.

9. Moira is also still infected, as the events of "The Struggle"

represent her own ability to overcome her fear.

10. Morgan Lansdale had the book thrown at him after the events of
the first Revelations. Whatever his fate was, he's been reduced to
working through surrogates, and Neil might have represented his last,
best shot at relevance.

11. Sushestvovanie/Zabytij Island, in the Baltic Sea, has been completely

depopulated, and is the site of an Uroboros outbreak. Fortunately, Uroboros
doesn't seem to spread to the local ecosystem the way T-Virus derivatives do
and a BSAA cleanup crew was on the scene. That island has likely been burned
right down, though.

=======================
21viii. Alternate Paths
=======================

RE:R2 has two endings and one minor plot branch. The latter is in Episode
2, and revolves around what happens to Pedro. It's possible, if difficult,
and virtually impossible on an initial run, for Claire and Moira to kill
Pedro in the fishing village. Should they do so, his drill appears in the
Wossek tavern in Barry's chapter 2, and Barry doesn't fight Pedro at all.

The trigger for the second ending comes at the end of Claire's chapter in
Episode 3, right before you finish Neil off. If you don't switch control
to Moira and crawl for Claire's discarded pistol, Claire will eventually
take it herself and kill Neil with it.

The game continues as normal until the end of Claire's chapter in Episode
4. After Claire escapes, a short new scene plays, showing Moira as she dies
under a pile of rubble. As her hand goes limp, her bracelet flashes red.

At the end of Episode 4, when Alex gets ahold of Natalia, Natalia struggles
briefly before seeming to pass out. When she opens her eyes again, they're
glowing red.

Natalia frees herself from Alex's grip by severing Alex's hand at the wrist.
As Alex reels in shock, Natalia rips the Uroboros nodule out of Alex's chest
with one hand. It rapidly burns to nothing and disappears.

Barry pulls himself to his feet, and a smiling Natalia reintroduces herself
to him. Now, she says, you can call her Alex. Barry points his pistol at her,
but can't bring himself to pull the trigger, and a laughing Natalia walks away.

======================
21ix. Random Musings
======================

1. Alex and her servant Stuart both write separate files that mention
Alex is the last survivor of Ozwell Spencer's "Wesker Project," but
both are written from their perspective. There could be as many as eleven
more "Weskers" somewhere, and all Capcom would have to say is that Alex
didn't know about them.

2. Reports from those who imported the Japanese version indicate that the
Japanese script and direction are significantly different from the English
version of the game. Moira isn't as profane, and Claire is less stoic and
closer to her original characterization. Most notably, the Japanese version
does not contain the same hints of Claire's attraction to Neil.

3. The game broadly hints that Barry was not one of the Original Eleven
members of the BSAA, instead opting to serve as a consultant. Besides
Chris and Jill, the identities of the other eleven founders are unknown.

4. It's interesting to replay Barry's chapters after completing the "Little

Miss" DLC. Compared to her appearances in Claire's game and "Little Miss,"
the Natalia of Barry's game seems almost eerily calm and is decidedly less
childlike, although flashes of her original personality persist.

=======================================================================
21. NON-GAME SOURCES AND UNANSWERED QUESTIONS
=======================================================================

This section contains information on the two Wesker's Report documents,

both of which were produced to provide fans with answers to some of the
lingering questions from the earlier RE games, as well as a list of the
few plot holes and dangling threads remaining in the series.
====================
21i. Wesker's Report
====================

A special-issue DVD was packed in with the Japanese release

of Code Veronica: Complete. Meant to celebrate the fifth
anniversary of the release of the original Biohazard, this
disc contained bonuses like an interview with the games'
directors and Shinji Mikami. One of those extras is Wesker's
Report, a video diary of Wesker's involvement in the series up
to that point. It's stitched together out of scenes from RE and
RE2, and narrated by Wesker's CV voice actor.

At the time it was released, Wesker's Report was an attempt to

fix some of the series's plot holes, such as Ada's survival, and
it brought up more questions than it answered. In the eleven years
since its release, however, all of the allegations in Wesker's
Report have been contradicted or outright ignored by later games
in the series. As of RE:DSC, Wesker's Report is an artifact that
can safely be ignored, and is only of interest to die-hard fans.
If you want to know where Wesker's reputation as a manipulative
bastard came from, it starts with this.

========================
21ii. Wesker's Report II
========================

Wesker's second report was first made available on Capcom's

Japanese website, as part of the promotional push for the
GameCube remake of the first RE. Each of its five parts represents
a report written by Wesker, supposedly to Ada Wong, as a summary
of the twenty years that he spent as a researcher for Umbrella.
It's an interesting read for plotline enthusiasts, and does a lot
to solidify the series's chronology and storyline. Naturally, it
was never officially translated in English. (I'm using the
translation from rehorror.com. Thanks, Chris Bound, for sending
me the link.)

Wesker was first assigned to the Arklay mansion laboratory

at the age of eighteen, on July 29th, 1978. He and William
Birkin, who was sixteen, were assigned to the facility by
Ozwell Spencer himself, and appointed the chief researchers.

At that time, the Arklay laboratories were performing

research on the Ebola virus. Ostensibly, the research
was meant to provide countermeasures for Ebola in the
event that someone used it as a weapon, but Umbrella
was really studying it for use as a bioweapon. At this
time, William Birkin also intended to combine the
T-Virus with Ebola, to create a new, enhanced virus.

On their first visit to the Spencer mansion, Wesker and

Birkin had their first encounter with an unidentified woman,
who was then twenty-five. For the last eleven years, the
woman had been a test subject for the research on the T-Virus.
No one knew her name, or how she had come to be there.

Three years later, Alexia Ashford was appointed the chief

researcher at Umbrella's Antarctic facility, which caused
Wesker a lot of grief. A lot of the older researchers at
Arklay still respected Edward Ashford and wouldn't shut up
about his granddaughter's accomplishments. Wesker decided, out of
irritation with the "old fools" who worked for him, to use
them as test subjects.

Wesker had two bigger problems, though. One was that Birkin's
ego was wounded by Alexia's appointment, and his work suffered
for it. Another was a snag they'd hit in their research.

At this point, Wesker and Birkin were working at Spencer's

behest on making the T-Virus into a fully effective bioweapon.
They had managed to get it to the point where 90% of the
subjects infected with the T-Virus became zombies (the remaining
10% simply died), but Spencer would settle for nothing less than
100%. That bothered Wesker, as Spencer was apparently throwing
good money after bad; he had suddenly stopped caring about the
project's profitability. Wesker began to wonder what Spencer was
planning, even as he and Birkin started work on the bioweapon
that would eventually be known as the Hunter.

Wesker's final report for 1981 deals with the aforementioned

mysterious woman. The Arklay lab went through human "test subjects"
at an incredible rate, but they were quickly replaced. The only
test subject who had managed to survive was the woman, who clung
to life despite being ravaged by the Ebola virus. Wesker couldn't
figure that out, either, as the data he gathered from her wasn't
any different from that of any other test subject.

Wesker's next report came two years later, in the winter of the
sixth year he spent at Arklay. Since his last report, the research
at Arklay had come to a virtual halt, but the dry spell was broken
by news of Alexia Ashford's death. She had apparently made a
mistake while working on the T-Veronica virus, one of her personal
projects. It was rumored that Alexia had injected herself with it,
but Wesker disregarded those stories. With Alexia dead, William
Birkin changed back to the driven scientist he'd been when he first
arrived at Arklay.

(There's a slight discrepancy here, as CV implies that the

T-Veronica virus was a secret project, while Wesker's Report
2 implies that most people knew about it. On the other hand,
Wesker says that he'd meant to find out more about Alexia's
research all along, but had to put that project aside for
later. Wesker may have independently learned Alexia's secret.)

Wesker began to have suspicions about Ozwell Spencer's motivations.

Wesker's private studies of the T-Virus had revealed that it could
infect most forms of life, from plants to insects and larger animals.
If that was the case, then why was the Arklay mansion situated in
the middle of such a large forest? In the event of a breakout, the
mansion's solitude wouldn't prevent the spreading of the virus. If
anything, the plant and animal life in the Raccoon Forest would
spread it further and faster. It seemed to Wesker as though Spencer
had set up this laboratory because he *wanted* the virus to spread.

Wesker resolved to gather more information, and he couldn't

do that as a simple researcher. Quietly, he continued his
work with Birkin, to conceal his true motivations from Spencer.
Birkin married another researcher at the facility, and they had
a daughter in 1986. Two years later, Wesker and Birkin's research
ran into a new set of problems. They had begun planning the
creation of a powerful bioweapon, the Tyrant, but Birkin's
method of creating the Tyrant, which utilized the T-Virus,
had almost no chance of success. In their simulations, only
one subject in a hundred million would actually become a Tyrant
after being subjected to the process. The rest would simply
become zombies.

An Umbrella facility in Europe had come up with a plan to

circumvent this problem, known as the "Nemesis Project," and
with their help, Wesker managed to get a sample of their work
from the French facility.

(1988: Wesker wrings a virus sample out of a French laboratory.

1998: an assault team is sent after the Raccoon City labs on
orders from the head of Umbrella's French division. 2002: a
crazy bastard who might be French takes the fall for the
Arklay outbreak. Coincidences are not useful. See the RE2 FAQs
for more.)

The Nemesis itself was a parasitical life form. It would take

over a host and create a bioweapon with enhanced intelligence
and incredible power. The problem that the European branch had
encountered was that the Nemesis parasite invariably killed
its hosts. Wesker theorized that if they could prolong the
survival time of a host, he and Birkin could get the credit
for the Nemesis Project.

It happened that Wesker had access to a perfect test subject.

The mysterious woman was still alive, despite the tortures
inflicted upon her, so she seemed like a natural candidate
for the Nemesis parasite.

When Wesker tested the parasite on her, it entered her brain and
disappeared. After further testing, Wesker discovered that the
woman had somehow consumed the parasite. This occasioned a new
series of tests on the woman, which would in time give rise
to a new bioweapon: the G-Virus project.

The next report was written seven years later. Wesker had been
transferred to Umbrella's secret service, while Birkin's work
on the G-Virus was authorized in 1991. Neither of them spent
much time at Arklay anymore, as Wesker wasn't a researcher
anymore and Birkin did most of his work in the labs underneath
Raccoon City.

Apparently, Birkin first discovered the G-Virus inside the body

of the woman who wouldn't die in 1988. The G-Virus, like the
T-Virus, mutated its hosts, but unlike the T-Virus, would keep
mutating the host on its own. While those infected with the
T-Virus might change if they were exposed to another stimulant,
like radiation, the G-Virus caused constant changes inside its
subjects. That was why the woman had been able to survive anything
the Arklay researchers had thrown at her, from the Nemesis parasite
to Ebola; the G-Virus simply mutated her to accomodate the new
virus in her system. Birkin's stated intention with the study of
the G-Virus was to take this mutation to its furthest extent,
to see what would happen.

(A frequent question that's come up in my e-mail is exactly how

the G-Virus came to be inside Lisa's body in the first place.
The series never really gets more specific than this: after they
stuck every disease and virus they had into Lisa Trevor, they
eventually noticed she had the G-Virus. It is the result of
Lisa being a cauldron of disease for thirty years. That's all
you get for an explanation. Go home.)

Wesker was dumbfounded that Spencer had actually allowed Birkin to

pursue the research. He cynically noted that Spencer hadn't shown
up at Arklay for years, almost as if he was expecting something
bad to happen there. Even with Wesker's move to the secret service,
he hadn't been able to get any more insight into Spencer's plans.

Wesker came to the mansion in 1995 to try and kill the unkillable
woman. The consumption of the Nemesis had made her slightly more
lucid, although her behavior was erratic. When she had first been
injected with the "mother virus," all those years ago, she had
been known to rip the faces off of other women and wear them
herself. She had recently resumed that behavior, and had killed
three researchers. Since she wasn't needed anymore for the G-Virus
research, the order came down to get rid of her. While it took
three days, she was finally declared dead, and the president of
Umbrella disposed of her body. (At least, he said he did. The
images that accompany the last page of the Report confirm that
the "woman who wouldn't die" was Lisa Trevor.)

Wesker left the Arklay labs in 1995, still wondering what Ozwell
Spencer had in mind.

===========================
21iii. Unanswered Questions
===========================

RESIDENT EVIL:
1) As per Wesker's Report II, what did Spencer actually do with
Lisa Trevor's body?

RESIDENT EVIL 2:
1) If Raccoon City was being overrun by zombies, how did both Leon and
Claire manage to avoid hearing about it? How did they get into the city
without noticing the destruction or the quarantine, or being stopped by
the military blockade?

(To some extent, this question is the result of the Raccoon City outbreak
being gradually increased in intensity and scope in subsequent games.
Starting with RE3, the city went from the suburb shown in RE2's exterior
segments to a small but thriving metropolis, with its own zoo, university,
subway, trainyard, and waterfront. Later games also extended the outbreak
itself, placing its start date on September 22nd, a full week before the
events of RE2.)

2) How was Mr. X able to track the G-Virus? (Was it just smarter than it
looked? Could it smell the vial?)

RESIDENT EVIL 3:
1) Why did the U.S. government attack the Dead Factory? (Keep in mind
that RE:ORC's Echo Six campaign is non-canon.)

2) Why does Carlos wait for two days before going to find an antidote for
Jill? What does he "have to take care of" after he leaves Jill in the chapel?

RESIDENT EVIL: SURVIVOR:

1) What were the Cleaners? (Andrew Fernando writes in to say that Brady's
official guide for Survivor lists the Cleaners as "robotic special forces
troops," set to disintegrate upon death.)

2) Who is Ark? Lott calls him a detective and Ark knows Leon somehow, but
one of the side effects of Ark not knowing who he is for most of the game
is that we know next to nothing about Ark himself.

3) Why did Ark think it was a good idea to pose as Vincent? (It's supposedly
to collect information, but it sounds like a really stupid plan.)

4) Who set fire to Vincent's office? It's the only place in the whole city
that's sustained any fire damage.

5) Who the hell names a kid "Lott"?

RESIDENT EVIL: CODE VERONICA:

1) What happened in the three months between RE2/RE3 and RE:CV? At this
point, it's one of the least-explored points on the entire timeline, with
the exception of the events of Survivor.

2) What did Claire do or see inside Umbrella's Paris office that had them
going after her in the middle of the city with an attack helicopter?

3) How did she get inside the base in the first place?

4) Exactly what were Alexia's powers? She's got a number of different

abilities that don't share a common theme, which may suggest that the
final-stage T-Veronica mutation was only limited by her imagination.

5) What was it about Alexia's sudden appearance that made Wesker drop
Chris and run away?

6) What does D.I.J. stand for?

RESIDENT EVIL ZERO:

1) Where'd Rebecca go after escaping from the Spencer mansion?

2) Where's Billy?

3) What happened to Billy Coen in Africa, and did it have something to

do with the mother virus?

(For some reason, Billy can identify the corpses of Progenitor victims
on sight, and never says how or why he knows that. With the later
revelations about the virus's origin in RE5, it's worth asking if
Billy's mission in Africa was anywhere near Kijuju. Of course, I
doubt that this is more than a coincidence.)

4) Why did the Bravo team's helicopter crash? (In the original RE,
Rebecca mentions at one point in Chris's game that she was the last
one to service the helicopter, which was the source of a fan theory
at the time that Rebecca was quietly in league with Wesker. No such
claim is made in the remake.)

5) From Steven Collins: when the Alpha team finds the Bravo team's
helicopter, it should be relatively close to both train tracks and
the wreckage of the MP vehicle that was transporting Billy, but it
isn't. Who moved the helicopter?

RESIDENT EVIL 4:
1) Why does Wesker want Leon's body (cf. Krauser's Notes)?

RESIDENT EVIL: OUTBREAK - FILE #2:

1) How does Alyssa know what happened to Kurt in the hospital?

RESIDENT EVIL: UMBRELLA CHRONICLES:

1) Who or what caused the outbreak at the Caucasus Facility? It
appears to happen entirely at random, and neither Sergei nor Wesker
seem to have anything to do with it.

RESIDENT EVIL: REVELATIONS:

1) Who are Jessica and Raymond working for? (Jessica's Report indicates
that Jessica at least knows Excella Gionne, which a lot of fans point to
as proof that she's working for Tricell.)

RESIDENT EVIL 6:
1) How did the C-Virus get aboard Leon and Helena's flight?

2) Why did Piers think it would be a good idea to take Chris directly to
an active war zone, rather than a hospital?

==========================================================================
22. MISTAKES
==========================================================================

In addition to the cheerful ignorance of pretty much the entire science of

biology, there are a few other errors scattered throughout the series. This
section lists them just for fun.

Contributors to this section include myself, Cal Adams, "CVXFREAK," Joseph

Brooks, Michael Soo, Mark Chang, Andrew Leonard, Frank Kool, James Middleton,
Rob MacGregor, and "TwistingGears."

RE0:
If you examine the Dining Car Key, what the tag says and what
the text field says it says are two entirely different things.

REv.2:
Presumably, the gunshot heard at the start of the game is fired
by Kenneth Sullivan. However, when you watch Kenneth's film in
the media room at the end of the game, he fires three times.

George Trevor's last diary entry is dated November 31st. There

are only thirty days in November. (I'm including this for the
sake of having it, so I don't hear about it again. All in all,
though, give Trevor a break, huh? He was starving to death.)

The Observation Note file, ostensibly written by William Birkin,

has a comment in it about how Birkin wants to rub his success
in Alexia Ashford's face. The problem there is that the success
he's talking about is the G-Virus, which was first discovered
in 1988, five years after Alexia's "death." Therefore, either
Birkin's unhinged, Birkin and Wesker knew that Alexia faked her
death, or this is a genuine mistake. Until I hear something else,
I'm considering it to be the latter.

(Dan Kirk makes an interesting observation in that we have no

idea when Alfred's delusion started; he could've been
masquerading as Alexia for quite some time. As such, Birkin
might've thought that Alexia was still alive, thanks to Alfred.)

RE2:
Very few of the guns in the game are correctly labeled or firing
the right ammunition.

When you fight the G-Type in Leon B, it wrenches off a chunk of

the railing to beat you with. If you look in that room before
the fight, that chunk of the railing isn't there.

In Claire A, when Claire sees Leon on the monitor room in the

Umbrella lab, Leon isn't bandaged.

In Leon A, the gun that Leon concludes is Ada's is actually

Annette's; Ada's gun clearly fell off the walkway with her.

In the N64 port, when Ada catches up to Annette in Leon A,

you'll hear Claire's voice instead of Ada's during Annette's
expository FMV.

The Night Watchman's Diary file has a couple of continuity

errors, especially in light of the timeline established by
later games.

The upside-down flag in the RPD briefing room is indicative of

a state of emergency, and isn't actually a mistake.

RE3:
The RE3 manual claims that Jill, at the age of twenty-three,
is a former member of the United States Delta Force. Delta
is comprised of either Green Berets or Army Rangers, neither
of which admit women at the time of this writing. Further,
even if we assume the setting allows otherwise or if Jill was
a member of Delta's "Funny Platoon," it would be extremely
unlikely for Jill to reach Delta by 23, let alone to have left.
RE:ORC does feature a mixed-gender U.S. Special Forces team,
which suggests that women have less difficulty gaining admission
to combat squads in the RE universe, but it's also non-canon.

(Subsequent games have glossed over Jill's military career as

fast as possible; for example, her RE5 file lists what she
can do but doesn't say how she came by those skills.
Comparatively, Chris has been ex-Air Force since his
introduction.)

Brad Vickers is killed by a tentacle through the head. This

would make his becoming a zombie, as seen in RE2, impossible.

(As we know from both gameplay and Brian Irons's paranoid rant
in RE2, an injury that damages the brain prevents a human from
 becoming a zombie. The injury that kills Brad punches a big
hole through his head; if you check his body after the fight
with Nemesis, Jill notes that his face has been "decimated.")

No one ever actually tells Jill Nicholai's name. She sort

of figures it out on her own.

As mentioned above, the area code on the Grady's Inn sign in

the introduction is for Manhattan Island. For those of you
who aren't Americans, that would place Raccoon City, with its
mountain range, big forest, handy lake, and Midwestern locale,
somewhere in New York City.

The Mercenary's Diary file is written in a book with the words

"Diary of Chris Redfield" on the cover. Chris apparently has his
own line of hardcover journals.

RE:S:
In real life, the Nanbu pistol, also known as Handgun 4, was
chambered to fire 8mm rounds. Survivor's 9mm parabellum rounds
wouldn't fit in the gun.

CV:
It doesn't actually snow in most of Antarctica. It's too cold.

Steve manages to run out of ammo in both guns simultaneously

after shooting his father, after he's just blown the hell out
of the wall in the last room with the gun in his right hand.
(I would further note that Claire somehow makes one clip fit
two guns.)

If Alexander Ashford had genetically engineered a single

embryo to produce intelligent offspring, it shouldn't have
resulted in fraternal twins. Twins are the result when a
single zygote either develops into two embryos or when two
separate egg cells are fertilized by two separate sperm.
(It makes you wonder what that surrogate mother he hired was
doing in her spare time.)

CVX:
The five-minute countdown to a nuclear explosion conveniently
stops right before Chris's showdown with Wesker, as if the bomb
doesn't want to go off until it sees how the fight turns out.

RE:O:
In the longer, character-specific endings, we see the missiles
hit Raccoon City while it's still dark. This contradicts both
the beginning of "Decisions, Decisions" (it's twilight when
the characters arrive at the university) and RE3 (where the
missiles hit right after dawn).

RE4:
The game is apparently set in an alternate universe where people
on Spain's western coast still use the peseta and speak badly
conjugated Mexican Spanish, yet by Capcom's insistence, are not
actually in Spain.

RE:O2:
Once again, the missiles hit at the wrong time.
RE5:
As with RE4, the location of Kijuju is sort of deliberately confused.
The KAZ is apparently an oil-producing country in West Africa, but
their currency is the Nigerian naira and the natives all yell at the
player in Swahili, the official language of a handful of nations in
East Africa.

The entire final fight with Wesker, as noted on TV Tropes, is spent

in such close proximity to pools of lava that all three characters
should be having serious health issues. Being that close to molten
rock is usually enough to kill a person.

RE:R:
Italy and Finland are about two thousand miles apart, which confuses
the hell out of the game's timeline. In parts of both Chris and Keith's
chapters, they make it from one point to the other in about an hour.

RE6:
The inhabitants of the country of "Etonia" are speaking in Serbian.

Ada keeps activating fingerprint scanners while she's wearing thick

leather gloves. I don't get it either.

==================================================================
23. Say What?!
==================================================================

You people are crazy.

In the years before RE4 came out, the RE series had a certain
cult appeal, and every new game added six or seven unsolved
plot threads to the mix. The fanbase rapidly turned into a
nonstop carnival of pure weirdness concerning the game's
various unsolved mysteries, and most of the theorists wrote
to me at some point.

Say What?! is meant strictly for fun. This is not an invitation

to send me even *weirder* theories, or indeed, to send theories
at all.

All theories regarding Wesker's survival predate Wesker's Report,

save #19. All theories regarding Nemesis's origins predate the
RE film and Wesker's Report 2.

1. Wesker survived RE because there is more than one Wesker. There

is actually a *series* of Weskers, created by forces unknown, which
are sent out to perform various tasks. These Weskers are:
1a. ...clones.
1b. ...robots.
1c. ...robot clones.
1d. ...robot killer death clones. Yeah, bitch.
1e. ...Rebecca. Yes, that's right, *all* of them are *Rebecca*.
She's *very clever*.
1f. ...Nemesis. Turnabout is fair play.
1g. ...created by Dr. Mephisto for his own evil purposes. Some
of them have as many as *five* asses! Quake in terror,
mortals! The five-assed Wesker thirsts for your blood!
2. Nemesis was actually:
2a. Wesker. The radiation from the nuke turned him human again.
(This, and the other radiation-based theories, all stem
back from before Outbreak, when we all thought the missile
at the end of RE3 was a nuke. Capcom's walked that back a
bit since those days.)
2b. The original Wesker. The one in CV was a clone (with/without
"Hunter genes," depending on who's talking).
2c. Jill's anonymous "boyfriend," mentioned in RE2.
2d. Ada. She survived the end of RE2 by using the G-Virus, and
then turned right around and became Nemesis. (The G-Virus
also enables limited time travel.)
2e. Rebecca.
2f. The (previously) unidentified guy in the STARS group photo.
2g. Regina White. No, I don't know why he'd be Regina, particularly
since if Regina exists in the RE universe, she'd have been
eleven in 1998.
2h. Hey, Billy Coen could've been Nemesis! (HATING YOU SO MUCH)
2i. Hey, D.I.J. could be Nemesis, who was turned into a mouse
by the nuke's radiation! (...am I the only one who didn't
learn about radiation from Silver Age Marvel comics?)
2j. American "prop comic" Carrot Top, in his video game debut.
2k. He was sculpted out of delicious tapioca pudding, and
left in the microwave too long.
2l. No one actually *made* him. They found him clogging up
the floor drain in the Dead Factory.
2m. Nemesis is 1952 Democratic presidential candidate Adlai
Stevenson. "STAAARRRSSSS" is really code for "Eisenhower
beat me, so I will extract revenge on you, Jill!
Rrraaarrggghhh!" (I always thought Adlai looked a little
shifty.)

3. Wesker is "obviously" a vampire as of CV. He's fast, he's

strong, he's arrogant... he's a vampire! Come on! Work with me!

4. Jill quit S.T.A.R.S. and the RPD because of--ahem--unwanted

attentions from Chief Irons. (According, that is, to "anonymous
sources" inside the development staff. Why is it that everyone
and their mom, EXCEPT ME, has "anonymous sources" inside Capcom?)

5. You can play as [Rebecca/Wesker/Akuma] in RE2. (No, you can't.

Rebecca and Wesker are purely Internet rumors, but the
Akuma rumor was printed in one of Electronic Gaming Monthly's
April Fool's issues, and like everything else that showed up in
their April Fool's issues, the rumor spread like influenza and
has far outlived its funniness. According to EGM, if you beat
the game in under an hour and a half, using *only* the handgun
and knife, Akuma would become playable. Vincent Merken did it,
probably just to prove he could, and it didn't work.)

6. Wesker works for the American government (yet another fact

from those "anonymous sources").

7. Brad was an Umbrella spy before his death. (And not a very good
one, either.)

8. Annette Birkin threw the rocket launcher in RE2. (It's Ada's voice
actress (a guy on Evil-Online actually ran a spectrograph and proved
it), it's Ada's polygon model, Leon thinks it's Ada, and Ada's
 still alive.)

9. D.I.J. is the Ashfords' butler. The T-Virus turned him into

a mouse. Now, he uses his powers to fight evil!

10. Lara Croft threw the rocket launcher in RE2. Yeah. I know. The
girl gets around.

11. Nemesis was a G-Virus creature, because the Resident Evil 3

two-page magazine ad shows a broken vial of the G-Virus. (It's
not the conclusion that I have trouble with, so much as it is
the process by which that conclusion was reached.)

12. Ada was Rebecca in disguise, who was in turn Nemesis (who lived
in the house that Jack built!).

13. In CV, Wesker is, and I quote, a "super stealth Tyrant."

14. Nemesis was a G-Virus creature! He was he was he was! Here's

an incredibly unlikely series of events that would explain his
being a G-Virus creature, none of which are so much as hinted
at in the game! (Remember what I said about taking this too
seriously?)

15. Resident Evil 1.5 was a better game than RE2; it had hand grenades,
better scenery, and Elza Walker was a better protagonist than Claire.
The only reason it was canceled was because Square lured away most
of Capcom's design team so they could work on Parasite Eve. (...yeah.
It's worth mentioning that I asked the guy who sent me this to produce
a source for it, and he never replied.)

16. Nemesis escaped from the ruptured tank in RE2's double-locked room.

17. The reason Rebecca disappears after RE is because Wesker used her
brain to make the RE Tyrant. (There's that time travel thing again.)

18. Wesker's body was rebuilt, using the genetic material of a Hunter,
by an Unspecified Third Party, Probably His Employer In CV (TM).
That Unspecified Third Party (TM) has been mentioned to me so often
that it's earned its WWWF Grudge Match (TM)-style (TM).

19. Wesker survived RE because the Tyrant threw him off of the Spencer
mansion's balcony. (This was sent in *after* the Wesker's Report
updates, by a charming individual who claimed he'd e-mailed
Capcom and that was what they'd told him.)

20. This one comes from the RE0
Device Virus was a special,
(The problem is that Birkin
another two months, so it's
version on tap.)
gamefaqs.com boards: Wesker's Plot
mutation-free strain of the G-Virus.
doesn't perfect the G-Virus at all for
unlikely that he'd have a better

21. Osmund Saddler is Ozwell Spencer. Their names are so similar,

after all; they've just *got* to be the same guy.

==================================================================
24. About the Authors
==================================================================
I work as a freelance writer.

Dan Birlew's author's information can be found in his strategy

guides, available from Brady. Also consult www.danbirlew.net.

==================================================================
25. Conclusion
==================================================================

Thanks to Dan Birlew, for starting this document and letting

me update it. Thanks also go out to Ben Plante, who's apparently
my editor; to Toby Normoyle, who sent me Wesker's Report dubbed
onto videotape back in the early 2000s (you younger people have no
idea how difficult some things could be before YouTube came along),
as well as the uncensored introduction to RE, the new ending for
CV, and some RE1.5 movies; and to everyone else who's contributed
to and helped shape this document. I appreciate most of the letters,
and I've probably let you know if I didn't appreciate yours.

At the 2003 Digital Arts Conference in Melbourne, a paper

was presented entitled "Reading Resident Evil-Code Veronica
X." This document was used as one of the source references.
If you're interested, it can be found at:

http://hypertext.rmit.edu.au/dac/papers/Tosca.pdf

If you're interested in placing this document on your own website,

please e-mail me for permission. Naturally, using this document
for anything other than non-profit purposes, or altering the
content of the document in any way, are both strictly forbidden.
It's also your responsibility to make sure that the copy of the
analysis that you're hosting is the most recent one.

Questions, comments, corrections, and feedback are welcomed.

Please e-mail me at multimedia.superstar at gmail dot com.

Note that sending me any of the following will at best get

you a rude response:

-- theories (this applies to *everyone*)

-- requests or questions about an update
-- unsolicited attached files
-- questions that have already been specifically answered in
this document
-- viruses. Please do me a favor and run some scanners. I
get *lots* of viruses, and it's all because of this FAQ.

Thomas Wilde
a.k.a. Wanderer
multimedia dot superstar at gmail dot com