jill roe missed her wife. & it wasnt just something mild, like the sort of longing she had for her beloved to come back to her if her wife was on some particularly long business trip. her current situation wasnt anything even reminiscent of that- it was much worse.
her wife wasnt here anymore. it wasn't like they'd divorced--nothing like that. in fact, jill & jin had the strongest & most genuine relationship of that time, & she even tested that herself! she & jin had ended up laughing on the ground, clutching their sides as they got stitches from giggling their hearts out as they proceeded to call every single person in the neighbourhood to inquire them about their current relationship status. was it immature? sure...but it was one of the many core memories jill roe had formed with her time with jin.
she wouldn't get the opportunity to form any more memories such as those with jin anymore. & jill couldn't do anything about it.
she had tried. god knew she had tried, the god she spent every night & morning praying to for the safe return of her beloved wife. she was utterly distraught after the sudden loss of her, the sudden loss of her that hadn't been due to death. something much worse--
DUZII.
the thing was a virus. she knew that much. her wife had previously been hellbent on rooting out the alleged spy that was supposedly residing in the very town she & her wife had previously lived in, but jill had completely forgotten all about it after jin had dropped the idea shortly after marrying jill. during their honeymoon, jill could recall jin's exact words about what she now thought about DUZII; "to hell with it. i've got my wife by my side with me now, & im happy."
alas. jill had thought jin had dropped the idea. apparently, she hadn't. a new case arose in the town after the initial few years since jin had dropped her investigation on DUZII, & that seemed to have kick-started her obsession with rooting out the sole cause to DUZII once more. jill had initially attempted to talk jin out of it; but after her wife started planning another expedition to attempt to root out the conductor of the DUZII virus, jill only made jin promise that she would come back the very next day. jin had promised that, yet she didnt come the next day. nor the next. nor the next week. or the next month.
months--years passed, & during that time, DUZII made itself known. the town was shattered as more people were mysteriously falling ill to the DUZII virus & dying to it the next day. jill feared for the well-being of her wife if DUZII was this powerful-- would jin roe still even be alive? jill was determined to find out.
so, she set out. much like her wife before her had done, she planned another expedition; she gathered a group, most of which she picked up while she was on the road. she even managed to discover the now-abandoned & ransacked laboratory of that so-called alchemist, who had already since been exposed to have been a dirty, deceiving spy. rumours had also begun to circulate throughout the land that this world as they knew it was a simulation of itself & its entirety--jill tried to block out these thoughts. from the ruins of the lab, jill had picked up another companion. a sort of robot with the head of a tv, the screen of it somewhat cracked, but still functional. it was named "joanne"--joanne often burbled on about her creator, some person called 226w6, but jill never really had time to listen to joanne's rants-she was much too busy worrying about her wife.
eventually, a time came when jill & her group set up camp in the middle of the woods in some cabin they'd found. joanne had been sent to pick up sticks for the fire, but when she hadn't returned after some time, jill set off to find her. instead of finding joanne lost, as she'd predicted, she instead found joanne lying on the ground--bleeding out oil.
crap. how could she fix this? she didnt have the tools nor knowledge-- jill dropped to her knees beside the bleeding android, hands hovering, unsure of what to do. she didnt quite notice the DUZII marks in the oil--yet.