Moments after the general alert siren finished blaring, Adira and I sat down to eat in the cafeteria. Though as we were, I noted that there was something peculiar about the people who streamed in.

For the most part, it seemed nobody was bothered in the slightest about the interruption of their day. I could guess that, while perhaps not strictly common, it wasn’t unheard of for there to be a call to general quarters. Whether for training or for actual biotic incursions was irrelevant to them.

On another note, I hadn’t suspected that such an organization would employ decorations as enthusiastically as they did. It was decorated, somewhat, by the crew, leaving what was ordinarily a very spartan space with a pleasing, homey feel. Painted emblems and other personal works adorned some of the tables, well made and protected under a lacquer. Adira and I sat at one with what appeared to be a collection of shimmering, vibrant coral reefs as though viewed from above. The warm lighting overhead cast silvery specks on the artwork, and Adira caught my glance with a pleased grin.

“They’re nice, right?” She asked, “We’re quite proud of our local artists.”

I nodded, “Very nice. I forget to just enjoy the sights sometimes.”

She took a bite of food, some spaghetti with meatballs and briefly considered her other sides; garlic bread, and a rich chocolate cake slice on a separate plate. I’d opted for a thick beef stew with a side of mashed potatoes with a generous helping of country gravy. While the food was very good, I still preferred the cooks of the Legion, though I had to admit that might have been more from a personal bias than anything else.

Idly she scooped a bit of cake, something I briefly considered it odd that she was chasing spaghetti with cake, but to each their own.

“So, where are you from, Matt?” She asked casually.

“Damond,” I said, “my family and I grew up there.”

“Wait… didn’t Damond…” her words halted, the question drying on her tongue.

I nodded, “Damond was destroyed by the meteors. I happened to be studying in Gilramore at the time. But my family didn’t travel often.”

She nodded, letting go unspoken what I inferred from that. Plenty of people had lost family at the beginning and subsequent months of the apocalypse.

Thankfully, she didn’t linger on the topic, “Well, I hear tell that you guys have set back up there, rebuilt from the ground up. How’d that go?”

I considered for a moment, “Quickly, actually. The Legion’s approach to construction moves more towards modular designs - we can build highways and outposts quickly with it - but cities were something we hadn’t considered. Most of our buildings still have some very personal flair to it, but,” I shrugged at that, “we wanted to ensure that city planning itself took the forefront.”

“So you’re saying you copy and pasted a city?”

“More like we created several versions, and then did that,” I corrected, “but, it’s since been heavily modified.”

She mulled that over, dipping into the spaghetti and eating a bite, “Y’know, my knee-jerk reaction is to say that building a city from the ground up would be a pain in the ass. But, considering how crappy the city-planning of the old world could be, that might be a good thing to correct.”

“That’s what we thought,” I nodded, “though, hopefully we won’t ever have to put to use some of the finer points of our city layout. Not having to deal with a biotic incursion that deep again would be more than welcome.”

I watched, once more, as she lifted it up, and this time I focused fully upon it. My visual acuity enhanced, the image bombarding my brain. Even so, the shift was almost invisible, and without my power armor feeding me additional information, I doubted I’d ever notice something like this if I wasn’t specifically looking for it.

Cocoa looked up at me, even as it licked it’s chops, and for a moment I saw shock in her gaze. Not because I saw her eat, but because I was making eye-contact directly.

“Wow, you can actually see her?” Adira laughed, “That’s a first.”

“Side perks of not being made of flesh and blood,” I answered distractedly, “now, what in the actual hell is that stealth? That’s insane.”

Cocoa’s fur rippled, color shimmering across the long creature, a pleased look on its face.

“It’s how she survived early on, before she met me,” Adira scritched its chin, “she’s not much of a fighter, but she’s pretty good with the stealth stuff.”

“We fought some cat types down in Sunvilla with some nasty stealth ability, but nothing like that-” I watched as Cocoa shimmered out of view again, and even moving was invisible to the naked eye “-thankfully nowhere near as effective.”

Adira gave a tired sigh, “Yeah, we’re still finding new biotics every day. The Deep is hard to get to, so there are some older creatures down there. Luckily, they don’t get along with each other, otherwise we’d be up to our necks in Leviathans.”

“I’d imagine so. Do you not have any smaller variants, though?’ I asked with surprise. We had many different varieties after all, it’d be very strange if we saw a different pattern here.

“So-so,” she gestured with her hand side to side, “the smaller ones we see tend to be almost reliant on the larger Leviathan, and tend to look pretty similar, just smaller.”

I frowned at that, “Like they’re children?”

“I don’t think it’s like that. It’s more like they’re drones, they help the Leviathan find and bog down prey at range, but they don’t grow or anything.”

“The little things, I guess,” I murmured, “I’d hate to deal with one that could grow independently.”

“Yeah, so far the Leviathan’s seem to push their weakest members out of their territory, but we’ve gradually seen their quality step up. But, I think we’ve advanced faster. So, maybe the Red Zone Raid won’t fail again.” Adira stared idly into space, considering something.

What I heard out of that statement, though, did not bode well.

“What do you mean, fail again?” I frowned, “what exactly is the Red Zone?”

She gave me a humorless smile, and started in on the description of what I had initially assumed was simply a dangerous area. Quickly, I realized that this was going to be far more complicated than I’d hoped…

-Benjamin Hart P.O.V.-

My grip on the chair arms relaxed fractionally as I read over the report once more. “So, probably not here for me, then,” I murmured to myself, the bright light of my office, embedded in a nondescript, old-town building in Basilisk Port. At some point, I wouldn’t have been surprised if this building had belonged to some small time press agency.

Regrettably, it was the perfect size for my new operations. My eyes involuntarily panned back over to the small key-shaped statuette, gold-leaf coating the small thing, a small imprint along the length of the antique. ‘Key to the Office’ was carved into the lead beneath the gold coat, and I remembered what I’d lost thanks to the Legion.

A case of theft: this story is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

Sunvilla had been both a wild success and a grave mistake. I’d been in the political scene even before everything had gone to hell, and my father, and his father before him had been elected mayor, time and again. It was, to my measure, my right to follow in their footsteps.

And yet, I’d never officially won the right, and had watched, time and again, as someone else filled the chair, someone else bore the Key to the Office.

‘Well, then the apocalypse happened,’ I huffed, wondering again at how things had gone so wrong. I’d like to say that it started with Mack Thompson, the south-west’s leader in the city - only an up and comer at that point, trying to keep everyone together - or to blame it on the many unsavory elements that forced my hand, bringing together people who knew that, sometimes, bad things had to happen to the bad people to make them go away.

Once more, I was faced with the stark reality that I’d pulled together a collection of people that did what I told them to with the promise of payment and benefits. And that with them, Mack, and a lot of luck, we’d managed to procure a hive core to modify the Obelisk quietly. And, more than that, I’d felt a certain sense of satisfaction that I was damn good at what I did.

Then Mack Thompson happened, and instead of taking control, he presented me with an olive branch, that we might share the city.

‘That got tangled quickly,’ I shook my head, plucking the key from its place. I still remembered when one of my men showed up and presented the key to me.

He’d been particularly mum on the details on how he’d come into the possession of the object. But I didn’t push the topic, I rewarded him and went on my way.

The problem with your hired help being too eager to please, and also tending towards violence, was that you eventually ended up with a tyrannical reputation among those that weren’t benefiting directly from you.

When Gerry Brueter showed up, the cracks were already showing, people steadily becoming aware of what was going on. That I and Mack were positioning people against each other, that we were profiting off of the Us or Them mentality, consolidating power.

I have no doubt that it would have become something of our own personal civil war, sooner or later. And I certainly didn’t want to consider the details in depth again at the moment. Gerry represented a convenient third party to force a stalemate, though I had to take great care not to give Gerry and his men room to work with.

Because, ultimately, I knew that if people ever realized what I’d done to the Obelisk, how I stacked the odds against them, that they would tear me apart.

And then one day the Legion showed up, and the balance I was so careful to control came tumbling down. That day, I packed up with my most trusted inner circle and those that could have no future in Sunvilla, and escaped. I took with me a glut of resources, people, armaments, and went north. Mack did as well, but he was living a far more humble life these days in Basilisk, a guardsman, perhaps making up for what he’d done.

I didn’t much care either way, he stayed out of the way and kept his mouth shut. That was enough for me.

But for me and my own people? We wanted to work our way up the ladder. I wanted to have that power again, but stronger, built on foundations that couldn’t be so simply destroyed.

Also, it behooved me to ensure that my position was unassailable in the event that the Legion came for me after what had happened in Sunvilla.

Which is why I’d been anxiously awaiting confirmation of the news that I’d gotten from some of my contacts around the upper echelons of Basilisk. Rather than confirmation, I sought clarification on the Legion’s purpose here.

I knew that they’d entered the territory en force. Knowing what had happened in Sunvilla, I was briefly afraid that somehow they’d attempt a coup here as well, forcing me to relocate once more. Quickly, I displaced that paranoid fear - Sunvilla had been a garbage fire of a mistake since the onset, Basilisk was run mostly above the board and its foundations unshakeable in comparison - and began to have more information collected.

Surprisingly, I only had a shred of information by chance, and even the source didn’t know much. Just that the Legion was partaking in some kind of joint action.

Given that the Legion and Basilisk barely even knew the other, I verily doubted that was the case. That meant it was a cover.

“But why?” I stood, hand to my chin, “What do you stand to gain?”

The confirmation I’d sought was that they’d come through the city, and boarded one of the fleets. It seemed that the Leviathan Brigade hosted the Legion, and that told me that whatever was happening would be out at sea.

Otherwise, why use one of your ace fleets as babysitters? Moreover, the fact that I only heard this from one source told me that someone else was pulling strings. Someone big. I could think of four people off the top of my head in the political environment here that might have the clout. One was Commander Morrison, who was on the southern side of Basilisk, stationed there for the time being. The other was Captain Darkwood, a political savant that may well have contacted the Legion proactively. Either of them could have leveraged the Leviathan Brigade into accepting the task, but I couldn’t narrow down either of them.

Morrison was more than capable of making tough decisions if she believed it was in the best interest of Basilisk. Darkwood would further his own agenda, which often involved consolidating his power and Basilisk. Both were major players, and I couldn’t figure out which made more sense.

And so, the rest of my conjecture quickly spiraled into wild theorizing. Without knowing the Who I had to guess with murky information as to the Why. I did, however, have a general handle on how the Legion operated. They weren’t politically savvy especially, meaning that their objectives were likely more material than not.

‘They probably wouldn’t come all the way here to hunt biotics, especially not ones they’re unaccustomed to. Basilisk is doing fine with handling things here, so there’s no need to have military support. They’d be insane to think they could take this place from them, so if nothing else they’re not here for them.’ I mentally walked through the steps, and then begrudgingly gave my paranoia an out, ‘There is a remote chance they’re here for me, but I doubt that. So, they’re after something? Maybe a place? What’s out there on the water, then?’

My thoughts were interrupted by a knock at my door.

“Come in,” I answered, sitting myself back down, composing myself.

The man who walked in was blonde haired, lean, but sturdily built. For a long time now he’d been at my side, and while I didn’t strictly trust him to help me if it went against his better interest, that oddly made him more trustworthy in my eyes. I knew what to expect from him.

“Seems that your information was solid, I can confirm the Legion is on The Wendigo and is in force. Looks like their leader is there too.” He spoke, not bothering to sit down since he knew this would be a short conversation.

I nodded, “Good work. Did you get an idea of what they’re here for?” I gauged his response carefully.

He shrugged, “they’ve come loaded to the gills in weaponry and mechs. Arguably, they’re better equipped for a land war than Basilisk is.”

I huffed, “They’ve got too few for a land war with the city.”

The man shrugged once more and flippantly answered, “Then maybe they’re going for some sort of beach party.”

I rolled my eyes, opening my mouth to tell him off when I froze.

“Maybe they are…” I blinked, thinking of any islands that could be off the coast. I pulled up a map in my vision, using the Obelisk implant to toggle over to the location. Very swiftly I discovered that there were a few, though only one large enough to bother with.

“Do you still need me?” He shifted impatiently while I sorted information.

“What’s your rush? Hot date?” I glared at him disapprovingly.

“Only with a tall cold one,” he grinned widely at me, “I’d normally have a little talk, chat, what have you before work, too, but it’s been a busy day.”

At that I could only groan, his humor incorrigible at times.

“Just answer if I call you.” I shook my head, “I’ll probably have work for you and some of the men tomorrow.”

The man paused in the doorway for a moment, “You know… maybe you should take a page out of Mack’s book, take a step back from all this. It’s not too late to start over, here.”

The statement dumbfounded me enough that he was able to slip away an instant later, calling over his shoulder a farewell.

“The hell was that about?...” I stared at the open door, wondering if the man thought I wasn’t suited for this line of work.

‘Maybe I’m not,’ I admitted privately, ‘but, at the very least, I want to see what else is going on here.’

And so, I took up as much information as I could and readied myself for a trip to the library. If there was ever anything that I’d discovered in my time in politics, it's that sometimes you had to get your own hands dirty. And, also, that everything leaves a papertrail somewhere.

‘Finding this one’s gonna take all damned night…’ I sighed, looking at the setting sun as I stepped into a ferry bound for the library.