Capcom, bless its heart, does not make it easy to follow the stories of its big franchises. Granted, that’s to the company’s benefit: it allows them to take wilder swings with a sequel without being too beholden to silly shit like rules, narrative cohesion and whatnot. But it still makes for some absolute bewilderment when Capcom pulls something like what it’s doing with Resident Evil Requiem, baking the story of a less-beloved online co-op title like Resident Evil Outbreak into the linchpin lore of a mainline sequel.
That kind of move does beg the question: exactly what the hell *is* the canon story of the Resident Evil series at this point? And I can tell you this for free, friends: I’ve done this type of explainer for both Call of Duty: Black Ops and for Death Stranding. This one required research on 30 years’ worth of ongoing storytelling. The good news is that as far as lore goes, internally, Capcom is seemingly way more interested in the broad strokes of Resident Evil than in maintaining consistency with every little detail. That might ruffle the feathers of the Cinema Sins genus of pedant, but it does make coming to grips with the series’ storyline for most normal folks a lot easier. There is a straight, bold line to be drawn through RE‘s narrative of hard and fast facts, even if Capcom may fudge the finer points later, and before we see where that line takes Leon Kennedy and Grace Ashcroft, it’s worth getting our story straight.
Henry Travis and the Stairway to the Sun
While our story technically begins with the illustrious Spencer family of rich assholes, I’d actually argue our tale kicks off in the 1800s, with a different, undermentioned rich asshole named Henry Travis. Ol’ Hank was a scientist and explorer who wrote a book called the Natural History Prospectus, a detailed, multi-volume journal of the man’s 34-year journey through the continent of Africa, detailing plants, animals, and tribes. As one could probably guess by the fact that a rich white guy wrote the thing in the 1800s, a lot of it turned out to be fabricated nonsense. However, you don’t spend 35 years in a place and learn absolutely nothing. Matter of fact, the prevailing rumor is that some of Travis’ relatives started the train rolling on discrediting his book only so they could keep the knowledge of the legitimate, highly valuable and exploitable resources Travis wrote about under wraps. Cue the sound byte.
©CapcomThe most relevant of those resources to our story is a specific plant: the Sonnentreppe flower, or “The Stairway to the Sun.” According to Henry, while the cave-dwelling plant is highly toxic, a tribe called the Ndipaya in the western part of the continent had been using the flower since prehistory for a ritual. The scant few people who ate the plant and actually survived came away from the ritual with superhuman power, and thus were immediately made the tribe’s new leader. Think the Heart-Shaped Herb from Black Panther, except unfortunately, the colonizers actually find out about it and the Ndipaya don’t have any cool Vibranium weaponry. And that leads us to the actual subject of our sordid tale.
The Adventures of Ozzy and Miranda
Ozwell Spencer is born in 1923, the heir to one of the wealthiest families in Britain. He’s highly educated, and deeply interested in art and literature. He’s also a hardcore eugenicist, and as you might be aware, Europe in the first half of the 20th century was a damn fine time to get real interested in eugenics.
When Spencer’s in college striving for a PhD, he makes a few friends of a similar upbringing and interests: Edward Ashford and James Marcus. The three of them grow up and thrive in their respective fields, all working toward similar goals of figuring out how to take humanity to the next level, but then Ozzy has an experience that causes him to double, triple, and quadruple down on the whole eugenics thing. Shortly after World War II, Spencer gets hopelessly lost during a mountain hiking trip in Eastern Europe, and almost freezes to death until he’s rescued by a woman named Miranda. And Miranda has a hell of a life story.
©CapcomHaving watched her entire village, including her 10-year old daughter, get annihilated by the Spanish Flu, Miranda, in her grief, makes the decision to hole up in a cave far away from the village, and kill herself. The cave, however, just happens to be home to a mutated strain of black mold that had been killing any hapless villagers who touched it for millennia before Miranda got there. However, Miranda actually survives her contact with it, curing her sickness, and shockingly developing an instant connection to the fungal hive mind, which seems to have absorbed the memories of the region’s dead, which also happens to include her dead daughter.
Believing the mold to be a “black god” of sorts, Miranda starts using it to cure the sickness of people in the region, a miracle that causes the populace to start calling her Mother Miranda. Driven by the belief that she could maybe use her new powers to bring her daughter back to life, Miranda goes to work with the region’s scientists, using the mold to mutate any life forms she can get her dirty little hands on, including the heads of the four aristocratic families who rule the region: Alcina Dimitrescu, Donna Beneviento, Salvatore Moreau, and Karl Heisenberg. Most of these experiments either killed the subjects or mutated them beyond recognition, though the aristocrats wound up surviving and developing powers on par with Miranda’s, which, of course, they attribute to their colloquial blue blood.
All of this is a huge intellectual turn-on for Ozwell Spencer to say the least, and he ends up staying with Mother Miranda for quite some time, learning a vast amount about next-level biology while assisting with her experiments. While Miranda’s ultimate goal of bringing her daughter back never wavers, Spencer finds himself wanting to do more than the mold will allow. The two part amicably, and Spencer goes back home a changed man, and not for the better.
The Founding of Umbrella
Spencer brings his findings back to his friends, whereupon they spend most of the ’50s studying the mold, eventually hitting a dead end. By the ’60s, the Cold War is in full swing, which just makes Spencer more certain that humanity needs to be culled down. It’s during this time that Spencer discovers the Natural History Prospectus. Likely recognizing the parallels between Mother Miranda’s story and Travis’ account of his travels, Spencer’s obsession with the latter eventually leads him and his colleagues to take a trip to Africa and obtain the Stairway to the Sun for research.
©CapcomAs one might expect, the Ndipaya don’t take kindly to the white folks trying to take their most sacred resource, but again, since Vibranium weaponry and armor aren’t on the table, Spencer and his cronies wind up killing a hell of a lot of the Ndipaya and getting their samples of the flower. By 1968, the Ndipaya no longer had control of the caverns where the flower grew, and Spencer had used a chunk of his fortune to build a research facility dedicated to its study. While neither he nor his colleagues were able to convince the larger scientific community of the merits of their research, Spencer, being stupidly wealthy, decided to pull a Thanos and do it himself, eventually founding a successful, legitimate pharmaceutical company whose immense profits would secretly be funnelled into studying the plant. With the aristocrats in charge, much like the four families that ruled Mother Miranda’s lands, Spencer chose to copy the village’s symbol for the company’s emblem and name, which just so happened to look like–you guessed it–an umbrella.
The Progenitor
Very quickly, Spencer’s scientists were able to find out that the flower was actually a host for an RNA virus that they dub Progenitor. The virus does manage to prevent and repair cell death, provided it reproduces under the strict conditions of the Ndipaya’s cave garden. Otherwise, it’s simply a lethal supervirus. That won’t do at all for what Spencer plans to do, and so, he decides to take things worldwide, with his colleagues all taking samples of the virus and establishing labs all around the planet to study under varying circumstances, hoping that the shotgun approach might achieve results. Results are indeed achieved, and hoo boy, those results are something among the core group.
©CapcomEdward Ashford ends up building a lab in the Antarctic and starts using his version of the virus to experiment with cloning technology, trying to keep a pure bloodline by making a copy of his family’s founding matriarch, Veronica Ashford. James Marcus, over time, winds up graduating from animal experimentation to human in a hurry, using the Umbrella Executive Training School for gifted children as a secret neverending supply of human test subjects. Eventually, they stop finding gifted kids, and decide to start breeding their own with a bit of exposure to the virus, in the hopes of getting a few Nazi-style ubermenschen out of the bunch.
Spencer, for his part, has the prime laboratory built under his own mansion in the U.S., somewhere in the midwest near some backwater called Raccoon City. To bump up the amount of money coming in, he decides to take on a side contract with the U.S. government to fund military research, eventually developing a special strain of Progenitor for use as an all-purpose bioweapon, which is eventually dubbed the T-virus. The altered virus’ main advantage is that instead of killing so quickly an extant population might be spared, like with Ebola or Hantavirus, survivors’ brains are damaged. While they have some basic regenerative ability, they are driven to extreme bouts of aggression coupled with obsessive hunger, causing them to kill on their own. Surely none of this is a recipe for disaster in the near future whatsoever.
Oz, the Great and Powerful
Now with a multinational conglomerate, government and military influence, and a stated mandate to craft the next stage of human evolution in his own image, Ozwell Spencer does what anybody in his position would do: go absolutely bananapants insane. Believing more and more that none of his colleagues are worthy of becoming the men of tomorrow, he starts depriving them of influence and usurping their research for his own ends, starting with a guy named George Trevor, the poor bastard who builds the labyrinthine Raccoon City mansion/lab, who he doesn’t trust to stay quiet about the things he’d seen. Spencer invites him and his family for dinner when the mansion is finished, kidnaps all three and runs his first set of Progenitor experiments on them.
Edward Ashford is “accidentally” exposed to the Progenitor virus and dies, leaving his son Alexander–notably a geneticist, not a virologist–holding the bag on his research. James Marcus holds out a little longer, actually managing–through the masterful strategy of killing and experimenting on a LOT of children, to be clear–to make a few breakthroughs on Progenitor/T-Virus applications for human enhancement, which Spencer thanks him for by ordering the Executive Training School closed, taking all his research to the main facility, and stealing two of his star apprentices, Albert Wesker and William Birkin, in the process. We will watch their careers with great interest.
Marcus wasn’t about to go down without a fight, though, using his stripped-down lab to keep doing experiments through the years. When a few of his findings were strong enough, he intended to utilize them to make a case to Umbrella’s board to remove Spencer as CEO. Marcus never got the chance, though, being shot and dumped in a sewer in the late ‘80s.
In the meantime, Spencer would start fortifying Umbrella with its own paramilitary secret service, pushing for more bespoke weapons development and buying up more locations in Europe for laboratory research. By the ’90s, the now-wheelchair-bound Spencer had a pretty good racket going, with multiple labs doing research on eugenics and senescence, as well as animal experimentation and studying the effects of the Progenitor virus on intelligence and consciousness. Specifically, Spencer spends a lot of time trying to get all the fun mutations of the Progenitor virus on an ideal test subject without any of the brain degradation. Any research that didn’t result in the supermen Spencer wanted–which, as it turns out, was most of his research–wound up in the hands of the bioweapons division or the U.S. government. The company’s on the verge of a breakthrough, however, with William Birkin working in conjunction with the French branches of Umbrella on a new strain of the T-Virus, named “Golgotha,” allowing for reproduction of favorable results after the subject’s mutation.
And they would’ve gotten away with it if it wasn’t for that pesky James Marcus.
The Lonely Grave of James Marcus
©CapcomAs far as the world was aware, James Marcus had been shot in the late ‘80s and dumped in a sewer, along with his research and multiple infected specimens. The reality, however, was much weirder. See, a good portion of Marcus’ research had been focused on how the Progenitor virus mutates in the bodies of leeches, the exact mutation that results in the T-virus, in fact. When Marcus’ body and research materials were discarded, nobody really expected that any of those specimens would survive. But sure enough, one does; a T-virus-infected leech remained active and intelligent enough to feed on James Marcus’ corpse to sustain itself. The feeding apparently triggers some sort of genetic fusion, reanimating and rejuvenating Marcus over the course of nearly a decade as a mutated leech with shapeshifting properties when the T-Virus infects his brain. The leech, now carrying Marcus’ memories, decides to take his human shape, then decides to take some revenge.
The Raccoon City Incident
Up till now, it’s been useful to lay things out as a straight narrative, but since the Raccoon City Incident is basically *the* big Spider-Verse-style canon event for all things Resident Evil, with numerous games covering just this specific stretch of time, we’d be here all week if we had to break down everything that happens in the days surrounding the incident. So, in lieu of that, it’s perhaps easier to give you a bulleted briefing of the major touchstone moments.
©CapcomMay 1998–The Marcus/Leech hybrid entity, known as the Queen Leech, finally arises. Carrying Marcus’ intimate knowledge of Umbrella’s workings, the Queen Leech orchestrates an accident at the Arklay Laboratory underneath the Spencer Mansion. One of the new, highly developed bioweapon types, dubbed “Tyrant” and carrying the Epsilon strain of the T-Virus, is compromised, releasing live virus into the air. The virus’ exposure forces an immediate lockdown of the facility. Umbrella Security are given orders to shoot any personnel who attempt to escape, and many wind up killing themselves and/or their colleagues to avoid being infected with the virus. William Birkin manages to successfully safeguard the Tyrant within the facility; however, during the weeks that follow, multiple bioweapons wind up breaching containment and escaping the laboratory into the mountains.
June 1998–Over the course of the month, multiple gruesome murders occur in the Arklay Mountains, caused by T-virus-infected dogs and humans.
July 23, 1998–After a particularly bizarre incident involving an Umbrella supply train being overrun by leeches, a formal investigation is ordered, led by Raccoon City’s Special Tactics and Rescue Service (S.T.A.R.S.), an Umbrella-funded counterterrorism unit.
–Bravo Team is sent first. Much of the team is decimated on the ground by the free-roaming bioweapons and infected humans. However, team medic Rebecca Chambers manages to find the abandoned Umbrella train, eventually restarting it to reach its ultimate destination: the abandoned Umbrella Executive Training School. Chambers encounters Queen Leech at the facility, and kills it before the facility is destroyed remotely by William Birkin.
–After hours of no contact from Bravo Team, Alpha Team is sent, with similar results. The survivors are Chris Redfield, Jill Valentine, Barry Burton, helicopter pilot Brad Vickers, and team leader Albert Wesker, who all wind up at the Spencer Mansion. The team is able to rescue Rebecca Chambers and further their investigation, discovering the laboratory under the mansion. During their sweep of the lab, however, the team discovers not just Wesker’s status as a direct Umbrella employee, but his actual, primary mission: the thorough destruction of all evidence of Umbrella’s bioweapons research–save for samples and embryos of the Tyrant bioweapon–and the elimination of all S.T.A.R.S. officers by the Tyrant, ensuring no witnesses, with the combat data relayed back to Umbrella for further research. Wesker is impaled by said Tyrant after he releases it; however, the survivors are able to trigger the self-destruct sequence at the facility and destroy the Tyrant with a rocket launcher during their escape.
Early August 1998–The Spencer Mansion survivors are debriefed. Chris Redfield quietly continues investigating Umbrella, eventually being suspended for misconduct. Umbrella forces the S.T.A.R.S. unit to shut down shortly after, with classified standing orders to neutralize the survivors should they perform any further inquiries. After learning about the existence of the G-Virus, Redfield and Burton leave for Europe. Jill Valentine remains in Raccoon City an additional month to look into the local Umbrella facilities further.
Late August 1998–No longer trusting Umbrella with his discoveries due to the Mansion incident, William Birkin begins to finalize his research, and make arrangements to ultimately give the G-virus directly to the U.S. military in exchange for protection for him and his family. To distract Umbrella leadership, Birkin allows for “controlled” release of the T-virus at other Umbrella facilities. Minor containment breaches result in scattered reports of “cannibal” attacks in Raccoon City proper.
September 22, 1998–Word reaches Umbrella leadership about Birkin’s plans for Golgotha. A squad of Umbrella paramilitaries is sent to his lab to neutralize him. In desperation during the assault, Birkin infects himself with an unstable dose of the G-Virus, mutating him with superhuman strength and size. Birkin kills his assailants; however, during the chaos, samples of both T- and G-Virus are spilled, remnants of which wind up in the Raccoon City sewer. After rats ingest the leakage from the samples, the viruses spread into Raccoon City’s water supply.
September 23, 1998–Multiple infected humans assault the patrons at Jack’s Bar in Raccoon City. One of the survivors, a journalist named Alyssa Ashcroft, would begin to chronicle her experiences in the city from this point; however, due to Umbrella’s strict control over communications and media in the area, no news makes it out of the city during the incident.
September 24, 1998—The infection of Raccoon City spreads at extreme speeds, forcing the Department of Defense to declare martial law. The U.S. military quarantines Raccoon City.
September 25-27–The Army, National Guard, even Umbrella’s own biohazard containment mercenary forces are deployed to assist with the evacuation of the city, with most of the populace ordered to shelter in place until rescue. Raccoon City PD is fully overwhelmed by the infected. Sensing an opportunity, however, Umbrella secretly releases multiple advanced bioweapons into the city to test against the populace in a real-world scenario.
September 28–An advanced Tyrant mutation dubbed “Nemesis” is released by Umbrella, imprinted with the single purpose of neutralizing any remaining S.T.A.R.S. members still in the city. Brad Vickers is killed, after which Nemesis locates Jill Valentine at her apartment. Valentine flees across the city, eventually aided by a group of surviving Umbrella mercenaries also attempting to escape. Despite their best efforts, Jill has a confrontation with Nemesis. Valentine causes enough damage to force the creature to retreat, but is infected by Nemesis’ T-Virus in the process. One of the mercenaries, Carlos Oliveira, moves her to high ground within a clock tower, as he scours the city for a way to help her before the virus turns her.
©CapcomSeptember 29-30—Chris Redfield’s sister Claire and Raccoon City police officer Leon S. Kennedy arrive in Raccoon City; the former to search for her brother who hasn’t contacted her since leaving for Europe, the latter reporting for his first day on the job, oblivious to recent events due to the media blackout. Both wind up at the Raccoon City Police Department searching for answers, discovering a secret transport from the station to William Birkin’s underground laboratory in the process. Umbrella releases a second Tyrant unit (T-00, a.k.a. “Mr. X”) into the building to eliminate any surviving police or civilians, as well as search for a new sample of Birkin’s G-Virus to deliver to Umbrella.
During their search, Claire makes contact with William Birkin’s daughter, Sherry, who is being hunted by her mutated father, while Leon makes contact with Ada Wong, an agent from an unknown rival corporation to Umbrella. The mutated William Birkin eventually finds Claire and Sherry, implanting the latter with the G-Virus; however, with assistance from Birkin’s wife Annette, a prototype vaccine is synthesized and administered, successfully stopping Sherry from mutating. Ada Wong attempts to obtain a sample of the G-Virus from the facility, but as the facility’s self-destruct sequence is activated, Wong is attacked by William Birkin. She survives and escapes with a skin sample from him, but fails to obtain the G-Virus. Kennedy and Redfield escape the laboratory, using the laboratory’s extensive weaponry to eliminate Mr. X as well as William Birkin in the process. After their escape, Claire immediately leaves the city, leaving Sherry Birkin in Leon’s care.
September 30–An emergency meeting of Congress is called. With their approval, the President makes the decision that Raccoon City is to be sterilized via thermobaric missile strike. All uninfected citizens are ordered to evacuate at once.
Carlos Oliveira manages to obtain a sample dose of the synthesized T-Virus vaccine from Raccoon General Hospital. Jill Valentine makes a swift recovery. Valentine and Oliveira plot an escape route from the city through an abandoned Umbrella factory, utilizing the weaponry to destroy Nemesis in the process. Valentine and Oliveira are rescued by Barry Burton, who had returned to the city to extract Jill personally via helicopter.
October 1–The operation to sterilize Raccoon City commences at 5:35am. The strike is successful. Raccoon City is fully vaporized. There are an estimated 100,000 casualties, civilians, infected, and military included.
©CapcomThe Fallout
–Public outcry over the decision to eradicate Raccoon City forces the current president to immediately resign.
–Alyssa Ashcroft not only escapes Raccoon City before the sterilization, but takes extensive notes and documents along the way, eventually turning the material into a newspaper expose. The article aids greatly in turning public opinion swiftly against Umbrella.
–Claire Redfield eventually attempts to join Chris in Europe in December of 1998. She is arrested while infiltrating Umbrella’s facilities in Paris.
–Leon Kennedy and Sherry Birkin are taken into protective military custody after they leave the city. Sherry is considered a high-value research subject. Leon, with his extensive experience with bioweapons, is recruited for a classified government project: a new group of special forces operatives covertly formed by the new president specifically to combat Umbrella’s mercenaries and bioweapons. He begins training in November of 1998.
–Chris Redfield spends the remainder of 1998 doing investigations in Europe, but once he finds out Claire has been arrested, he breaks off to find her. He is eventually informed that Claire has broken out of prison, and somehow wound up at Umbrella’s base in Antarctica. Chris travels to Antarctica, discovering the now-mutated offspring of the Ashford family wreaking havoc, and assists Claire with destroying the base, the Ashford line along with them.
Return to Oz
So, tl;dr, Umbrella as a company is in a veritable Mariana Trench of deep shit after Raccoon City, and in 1999, the U.S. government and the families of the victims take the company to trial. Ozzy goes down swinging, though, using all his power, money and influence to hire an army of lawyers, discount the victims, debunk the Alyssa Ashcroft story, everything. What ultimately lets him stall for time is the fact that the government can’t exactly bring forth any real killshot evidence, since much of it ties Umbrella’s bioweapons projects to its covert sales to the government. It’s a real “but Black Dynamite, I sell drugs to the community” situation. As such, the Raccoon Trials stretch on for a few years, enough time for Ozzy to quietly set up shop in Russia and continue his little passion projects, though they have a little trouble taking hold thanks to not just the U.S. military’s crackdown on bioweaponry, but Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine creating their own private agency to combat the threat.
©CapcomThe stalemate is ultimately broken in 2003: an absolute treasure trove of top secret Umbrella data, along with the A.I. program Spencer had running his Russian facility, are leaked to the court. An international arrest warrant is issued for Spencer, who goes into seclusion at one of his family’s estates. Umbrella is officially bankrupt by 2004, and at long last, the day is saved, thanks to….
…..Albert Wesker?
Bad Albert
So, remember how Wesker got impaled by Tyrant in the Arklay laboratory? Well, turns out, in order to see his mission through to the end, Umbrella hooked Albert up with a contingency plan: a special dose of the T-Virus, allowing him to regenerate over time. Wesker, as fate would have it, is one of the lucky few genetically compatible with Progenitor strains, and gains all sorts of handy supernatural powers as a result. In retrospect, kind of a bad move on Umbrella’s part considering Wesker’s a dirty no-good turncoat working for a rival corporation. Letting the world believe him dead, Wesker starts making serious moves behind the scenes. When Ada Wong was supposed to hand over a sample of the G-Virus? Wesker was her liaison. The reason Claire Redfield broke out of prison? It’s because Wesker’s own private mercenary company raided the island, looking to bust up Umbrella’s operations and retrieve virus samples. Chris Redfield finds out Claire was there because Wesker actually shows up to tell him. When Umbrella’s fortunes are in free-fall, they try to start selling bioweapons on the black market, which would’ve worked if Wesker didn’t undercut the company by selling his own versions of the virus. The actual killshot comes when Wesker himself raids the Russian laboratory, killing its supervisor and leaking Umbrella’s archives to the prosecuting court.
©CapcomAlso, did we say the day was saved? What we meant was that “With Umbrella out of the way, bioterrorism is now absolutely rampant, and Albert Wesker is now the common denominator at the center of it.”
The Golden Age of Bioterrorism
The years after the fall of Umbrella are basically the Wild West as far as the war on bioterrorism goes and the previously mentioned broad strokes that Capcom is especially concerned with get real damn broad around this time. So, for everyone’s sake, let’s just run through another handy timeline of highlights, shall we?
Early 2004–The fall of Umbrella runs a risk of blowing back on its legitimate pharmaceutical business partners. As a public relations move, those companies collectively decide to bankroll a privatized counterterrorism unit dedicated to fighting back against black market bioweapons: The Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance. Chris Redfield, Barry Burton, and Jill Valentine join shortly after. Unfortunately, the U.S.’s own Federal Bioterrorism Commission holds jurisdiction over most global operations, making the BSAA far less effective than it should be at this point.
Mid 2004–An extremist group known as Il Veltro launches a bioterrorist attack on the floating city of Terragrigia using a T-Virus variant called T-Abyss. The city is overwhelmed; however, despite three counterterrorism units being deployed, the commanding FBC officer of the effort, Morgan Lansdale, orders all teams into full retreat a few weeks into the conflict, opting to redirect a satellite to sterilize the city.
Late 2004–The president’s daughter, Ashley Graham, is abducted by an ex-U.S. SOCOM mercenary named Jack Krauser and held captive in Valdelobos, a remote area of Spain controlled by a cult, Los Illuminados. Due to suspicions that a government mole provided Krauser with the intel necessary to perform the abduction, a covert surgical rescue is planned, with Leon Kennedy sent to the region alone, with only a single point of contact via radio. Kennedy’s investigation reveals that both Krauser and Ada Wong were sent to Valdelobos by Albert Wesker. Their mission was to obtain a sample of a native, mind-altering parasite called Las Plagas from Illuminados cult leader Osmund Saddler. Saddler’s ultimate goal with Graham’s abduction was to infect her with Las Plagas and send her back into high society, allowing the cult’s parasite to infect the upper echelon of government.
©CapcomKennedy’s mission is a complete success: He is able to rescue Ashley Graham, neutralizing Saddler and Krauser in the process, and Ada Wong double-crosses Wesker after learning his ultimate plans involve genocide. However, due to Krauser’s ingestion of Las Plagas for the strength to confront Kennedy, Wesker is able to obtain the sample he’s seeking after recovering Krauser’s corpse. Kennedy files a full report on the dangers of Las Plagas and the region with the BSAA.
Summer 2005–A follow-up investigation on the Terragrigia incident by the BSAA reveals the attack as a false flag operation, meant to grant Morgan Lansdale additional governmental power. While investigating the three ships used to launch the initial attack, Jill Valentine and Chris Redfield are able to obtain a T-Abyss vaccine and expose Lansdale, resulting in his arrest. The FBC is folded into the BSAA, and the United Nations then officially sanctions the BSAA’s actions going forward, shifting the organization’s funding from private to public.
August 2006–The BSAA receives a tip on the exact location of Ozwell Spencer’s estate. Spencer has spent the years since the fall of Umbrella feebly using his resources to try to divine immortality for himself, but to no avail. Chris Redfield and Jill Valentine are dispatched to the location, only to discover that Albert Wesker himself got to Spencer first, killing him by punching through his sternum. Valentine and Redfield attempt to engage Wesker; however, the result of the fight is Valentine tackling Wesker through a window into the jagged cliffs below the estate. Both are presumed dead, though no bodies are ever found.
2007-2009–Thanks to the obviously-still-alive Albert Wesker’s research on Las Plagas, the Tricell Corporation–ironically one of the original funders of the BSAA–is able to take over the Umbrella facility initially built by Ozwell Spencer in the Ndipaya’s caverns. They use the Progenitor research to develop both an enhanced version of the Las Plagas parasite–granting the expected superhuman strengths, but also making infected controllable by a host–as well as a perfected Progenitor variant called Uroboros, which would actually achieve Ozwell Spencer’s dream of killing everyone except those with the specific genetic traits required to achieve “godhood.” The first test subject for Wesker’s new toys? Jill Valentine, whose exposure to the T-virus vaccine makes her a perfect candidate.
March 2009–Chris Redfield is dispatched to the Kijuju region of West Africa after BSAA learns a noted bioweapon smuggler, Ricardo Irving, has been distributing the new Las Plagas variant to the leaders of an insurgency to bring the populace under control. Together with a local BSAA agent, Sheva Alomar, Chris is able to track Irving across the country and ultimately neutralize him, even after Irving infects himself with one of the Plaga parasites. With his dying breaths, Irving gives up the location of the Ndipaya lab, as well as implicating the Tricell Corporation and its CEO, Excella Gionne, in his crimes. Chris and Sheva reach the lab, but are confronted by Gionne, Albert Wesker, and the new and improved Jill Valentine: infected with Las Plagas, blessed with super speed and power, and her mutation kept in check with a mind-control device. Chris and Sheva are able to subdue her and restore her to sanity. The duo neutralize Gionne after a failed mutation attempt, but Wesker, genetically suited for the virus, infects himself several times over with Uroboros, growing stronger each time. He is ultimately, finally killed after Chris and Sheva drop him into an active volcano. Jill Valentine makes a full recovery after rehabbing in a BSAA lab, and returns to work.
2011–A paramilitary sect abducts multiple members of TerraSave, a human rights group. The abductees include the group’s leader Neil Fisher, Moira Burton, daughter of Barry, Claire Redfield, and a 10-year-old child, Natalia Korda, orphaned by the Terragrigia incident years before. The group is taken to Sein Island in the Baltic Sea for experiments led by one Alex Wesker–unrelated by blood to Albert, but part of the same development program started by Ozwell Spencer that produced him, with all subjects sharing the surname.
Alex Wesker uses the abductees as part of an illegal human trial for her own bespoke Progenitor variant, T-Phobos, modified to kill or mutate infected humans when the biological fear response is triggered, theoretically allowing those without fear to receive the superhuman Progenitor traits. After unleashing the island’s thousands of pre-infected natives on the group and observing, Wesker takes particular interest in Natalia Korda upon discovering that her trauma from the Terragrigia incident leaves her without a fear response. She orders the child kidnapped for a more personal experiment: Wesker, dying of a degenerative disease, attempts to use new technology to copy her own consciousness into the child, while infecting her with T-Phobos to potentially resurrect as a superhuman being. Claire Redfield and Moira Burton find Wesker during the process, prompting Wesker to attempt suicide and triggering a dead man’s switch which self-destructs the facility. Claire is found floating in the ocean and rescued. Against BSAA orders, Barry Burton organizes a rescue mission some time later which successfully rescues Moira and Natalia Korda. The BSAA sterilizes the island soon after. Though Korda experiences hallucinations and some mild superhuman response, Wesker’s experiment is a failure. Barry Burton moves to formally adopt Korda upon return.
December 2012–The BSAA is alerted that a civil war in the Eastern European nation of Edonia had developed into a bioterrorist incident after the Edonian Liberation Army were given a new virus variant, known as “Chrysalid” or the C-Virus, under the guise of “performance enhancers.” The situation is complicated by the fact that one of the rebels, Jake Muller, is not only the illegitimate son of Albert Wesker, but turns out to be immune after injection. The Division of Security Operations–the current form of the U.S. military’s special ops bioterrorism team–sends an agent into the region to make contact with Muller and extract him, with the hopes of developing a C-Virus vaccine. The agent turns out to be Sherry Birkin, granted freedom from custody after coming of age and agreeing to work for the government. While Muller is extracted, the BSAA, led by Chris Redfield, is sent to eliminate all infected ELA soldiers and their bioweapons. Both operations fail, however. Birkin and Muller’s helicopter is shot out of the sky during their escape and the two of them are taken into ELA custody. The BSAA team is ambushed when a woman masquerading as Ada Wong infects the entire team with the C-Virus. Chris Redfield suffers severe head trauma during his escape, leaving him with post-traumatic amnesia.
June 29 2013–The current U.S. president, Adam Benford, is infected with the C-Virus in a terrorist attack on the city of Tall Oaks in New England, minutes prior to delivering a speech fully disclosing the government’s involvement with Umbrella’s bioweapons division. Benford is eventually neutralized by Leon Kennedy before he can attack a Secret Service agent, Helena Harper. As the virus ravages the city, the real Ada Wong finds Kennedy and informs him the current National Security Advisor, Derek Simmons, is responsible. Simmons is part of an organization calling itself Neo Umbrella, which has been secretly parlaying the combat and research data from Raccoon City into an ongoing secret bioweapons arms race against China. Because President Benford’s full disclosure policy would endanger that effort, Simmons has him assassinated. Simmons orders the sterilization of Tall Oaks as cover for the crime, which Kennedy and Harper use to fake their deaths and go after Simmons, who is on his way to China.
June 30 2013–Neo Umbrella executes another bioterrorist attack in Langshiang, China. Piers Nivans, one of the only other BSAA survivors of the Edonia conflict, manages to recruit a despondent Chris Redfield to assist the team with search and rescue. While reckless in his efforts, including a tense meeting with Leon Kennedy, Redfield, along with Nivans, manages to destroy several missiles containing the current supply of C-Virus, with Chris recovering his full memory in the process. They eventually discover the fake Ada Wong: a woman named Carla Radames, engineered by Simmons, who wished to recreate the Raccoon City disaster on a worldwide scale.
Sherry Birkin and Jake Muller escape captivity during the chaos, eventually linking with Leon Kennedy and Helena Hunter. The group confronts Simmons who, despite injecting himself with C-Virus, is temporarily incapacitated. However, Sherry and Jake are abducted again in the aftermath. Still recovering from the fight with Simmons, Leon informs Chris of Muller’s importance after being provided files by Sherry and has Redfield and Nivans move in pursuit, rescuing the duo after Nivans injects himself with the C-Virus to deal with a massive new bioweapon named Haos. Nivans sacrifices himself to provide their escape. Simmons and Radames are eventually neutralized with an assist from the real Ada Wong, who also destroys the Neo-Umbrella labs and provides Leon with evidence of Neo-Umbrella’s culpability in the attacks, completely collapsing the organization. Muller provides Sherry Birkin with a blood sample, allowing a C-Virus vaccine to be developed, fully stemming a further outbreak.
2014–The BSAA is alerted that a black market bioweapon syndicate known as The Connections makes a major breakthrough. Having obtained a sample of black mold from Mother Miranda in the early 2000s, along with some of her dead daughter’s DNA, The Connections manage to clone a child, named Eveline, with mind-control abilities so powerful, an army could be manipulated or decimated without a single shot fired. The discovery of Eveline sends shockwaves through the biochemical underworld. Sensing the growing hostility to what is effectively a weapon that could put every major player in the biocriminal space out of business, the leadership at The Connections decides to move Eveline from their headquarters in Germany to an undisclosed location in Central America aboard an oil tanker, accompanied by two handlers, Alan Droney and Mia Winters, posing as her parents.
©CapcomOctober 5 2014–While travelling along the Louisiana coastline, the oil tanker LNG Annabelle finds itself in the path of a hurricane. Aboard the ship, Eveline loses control of her powers in all the chaos, eventually resulting in an explosion which demolishes the ship.
October 10 2014–Pieces of the Annabelle wash ashore in the Louisiana bayou, near an estate owned by Jack Baker and his family. Baker himself manages to recover Eveline as well as one of her handlers, Mia Winters, and shelter them in his home. The Bakers would completely disappear from public life by the end of the year.
January 19 2016–Alyssa Ashcroft, writing for a newspaper in the Bakers’ parish in Louisiana, pens an article reporting that over 40 people had gone missing over the course of the last 18 months.
July 2017–The BSAA is contacted by Blue Umbrella, a private military corporation meant to completely undo the damage done by the original Umbrella corporation. They are informed that Eveline had used her powers to completely overtake the Baker family and manipulate them into bringing dozens of victims to the Baker house, infecting them with mold in the process. Due to developing an unhealthy attachment to Mia Winters as her “mommy,” Eveline allows Mia to live in the house’s basement. BSAA and Blue Umbrella arrive at the estate in time to see a fully mutated Eveline attack Mia Winters’ husband, Ethan, who was the last victim lured to the house by Eveline, and who manages to kill Jack and Marguerite Baker thanks to his Mold infection improving his healing abilities. After Ethan and Mia are rescued, Chris himself goes to seek out Lucas Baker, Jack’s son. Lucas is killed in a gunfight with Chris in a nearby salt mine, where Chris discovers The Connections had given Lucas a serum that made him immune to Eveline, and had him “play along” to gather real-world research data on her. At Ethan Winters’ request, Zoe Baker is also rescued from the property, having assisted Ethan greatly with surviving the rest of her family.
The incident is considered a severe, internal black eye for the BSAA, having failed to safeguard Eveline before she was transported out of Germany, and the incident is fully covered up with the local sheriff’s office to save face. Mia and Ethan Winters are given new identities and moved overseas. Zoe Baker remains in the U.S. but is also given a new identity.
2017-2018–Chris Redfield’s frustrations with the BSAA in the wake of the Baker Incident lead him to take a squad of BSAA soldiers known as Hound Wolf Squad rogue. With all the resources at his disposal, Chris sets his sights on finding the source of the mold that created Eveline. Blue Umbrella gives their blessing, providing Hound Wolf with supplies for their mission.
2018–Alyssa Ashcroft is murdered by a hooded assailant at the Wrenwood Hotel somewhere in the midwest while in the middle of researching the location for details on a series of mysterious killings that occurred there over the years. Her daughter Grace is the only living witness.
August 2 2020–Ethan and Mia Winters, still under BSAA protection, welcome their first child, Rosemary.
January 2021–Possibly owing to the family now residing in Eastern Europe, Rosemary’s first medical checkup finds its way to Mother Miranda, who believes that Rosemary–the child of two mold-infected survivors–may be the perfect vessel for her daughter.
February 2021–Hound Wolf Squad raids the current Winters household, taking Rosemary into custody and seemingly murdering Mia. While being transported for testing, “Mia” wakes up, slaughtering all soldiers in her transport and escaping. Ethan is later informed that “Mia” was actually Mother Miranda shapeshifting to imitate her.
Distraught, Ethan wanders across Mother Miranda’s village, killing all mold-infected villagers in his way, as well as the four Lords of the region, in search of Rose. While Chris crosses paths with Ethan along the way and urges him to let the professionals handle things, Ethan is undaunted until he faces Mother Miranda herself, who kills him by ripping his heart out. Having retrieved her Holy Grail human vessel, Miranda prepares a ceremony to implant Eva’s consciousness into Rosemary, ordering the lycanthrope mutants in her employ to slaughter everyone still alive in order to feed the black mold.
Once informed of Ethan’s death and the black mold growing into massive tendrils consuming the village, Chris Redfield orders an all-out assault, killing all Lycans on sight. A bomb is placed at the fungal root to be detonated upon confirmation of Miranda’s death. Redfield takes a final sweep of the village and discovers the real Mia Winters.
Elsewhere, Ethan Winters’ regenerative powers allow him to make a final attempt to face Mother Miranda himself at her altar. Winters is successful; however, with Miranda’s death, the black mold no longer holds him together. Ethan hands Rosemary off to Chris Redfield, asking him to raise her to be strong. Taking the detonator, and waiting until Chris, Mia, and Rosemary are at a safe distance, Ethan destroys the fungal root of the black mold, eradicating it for good.
Or, y’know, until we find out what the absolute fuck is about to happen in Requiem.
Now if you’ll all excuse me, I’m going to shotgun two bottles of scotch like Stone Cold Steve Austin. JFC, this lore.
English (US) ·