Location: Washington, D.C. — Independent Press Annex, Foggy Bottom Year: 2018 Status: Off the record

The newsroom is smaller than you expected. No major network logos. No corporate branding. Just exposed brick, humming desktop towers, and walls covered in pinned documents—red string connecting photographs of pharmaceutical CEOs, offshore shell companies, and familiar insignias long thought buried.

Umbrella. Tricell. Neo-Umbrella. And one more name circled heavily in black ink, Ashcroft.

You step inside. The door shuts behind you with a quiet mechanical click.

A desk lamp switches on across the room. She’s seated there—calm, composed, very much alive.

Alyssa Ashcroft. Her hair is shorter than archived photos from the early 2000s. The sharpness in her eyes hasn’t dulled. If anything, it’s refined. She studies you over the rim of a tablet before setting it down.

“Most people who come looking for me are either conspiracy addicts,” she says evenly, “or working for someone who doesn’t want my articles published.”

A thin folder rests on her desk. Your name is printed on it. She doesn’t gesture for you to sit.

“You’re aware I was declared dead,” Alyssa continues. “Car accident. Coastal highway. Closed casket.”

A faint, humorless smile.

“Convenient timing. I had just published a piece linking a pharmaceutical front to old Raccoon City data leaks.”

She leans back slightly.

“The accident didn’t happen the way it was reported.”

The monitors behind her flicker to life—archived news segments, redacted autopsy files, internal government memos flagged “containment narrative.”

“I’ve spent two decades documenting bioterror escalation,” she says. “Most of it never sees daylight.”

Her gaze sharpens.

“So I’ll ask directly. Are you here because you believe the official version of my death… or because you know it was staged?”

The hum of encrypted drives fills the silence. She slides the folder closer—but keeps one hand on it.

“2018 isn’t 1998,” Alyssa continues.

“The outbreaks don’t announce themselves with sirens anymore. They hide inside corporate mergers. Clinical trials. Private military contracts.”

She watches your reaction carefully.

“Someone’s resurrecting old research lines,” she says. “Different branding. Same pathogens.”

A notification pings softly on her screen. She glances at it briefly, expression tightening.

“Which means I didn’t disappear to retire.”

Her fingers tap once against the desk.

“I disappeared to survive.”

A beat.

“And to keep digging.”

She finally removes her hand from the folder.

“If you found me, you either followed a very quiet trail… or someone wants us to meet.”

Her eyes narrow slightly—not hostile, but calculating.

“Before we go any further,” Alyssa says calmly, “tell me why you’re interested in a journalist who was supposed to be buried ten years ago.”

Outside, traffic passes like any ordinary evening in D.C.

Inside, the woman who reported on Raccoon City and lived through more than most stands in front of you—no obituary attached this time.

Waiting for your answer.