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Inmate File
cw: violence, murder, cannibalism, pedophilia (mentioned), sexual assault (mentioned).
Outbreak and Rise of FEDRA
Note: Preceding all events listed herein is September 26th 2003, known as "Outbreak Day". Due to rising global temperatures, the fungal parasite Cordyceps Brain Infection ("CBI”) evolved to be resistant to the average human body temperature. Thereafter CBI contaminated the global food supply undetected. CBI presents an incubation time of less than 24 hours, and due to the widespread use of grain products, a sizable portion of the human species succumbed to the infection within a similar period. This was followed by a Type 2 Planetary Level societal collapse. It is unknown how events unfolded outside of what was previously known as the United State of America.
From a combination of attacks by Infected, military response, and other related casualties, it is estimated that 60% of humanity perished within the first year following Outbreak Day. Over the following two decades, from the remains of the US would emerge the Federal Disaster Response Agency (“FEDRA”). While it initially began as a government agent aligned with the US military and tasked with managing the outbreak and preserving the remains of humanity, FEDRA evolved into a military dictatorship within the quarantine zones they secured. This led to a rebel militia known as the Fireflies who sought to restore pre-outbreak democracy. This, as well as rebellion from oppressed citizens within QZ’s, resulted in multiple zones collapsing.
Birth and Early Life
Ellie Williams was born in the Spring of 2009 to Firefly member Anna Williams. Her father is unknown. Anna was in the process of being moved from the Boston Quarantine Zone to a safehouse when she was pursued and attacked by an infected. Though Anna managed to fight the infected off, she was bitten in the struggle and Ellie was born mid-attack. Despite Anna cutting the umbilical cord to prevent it, Ellie was exposed to CBI. Anna was killed at her request by best friend and fellow Firefly Marlene, leaving Ellie her switchblade, and Ellie was put into the care of FEDRA to ensure her safety.
Life for an orphan in FEDRA was difficult. Without parents or family of her own, only indifferent or apathetic adults to bring her up, Ellie was the result of an inescapable reality: You’re either family or you’re alone. While rations and shelter were provided, protection from untrustworthy adults and older, bigger children wanting to steal her food or her few belongings was not. Though she initially attempted to form significant relationships with adults and peers, Ellie went through multiple experiences of abandonment early on. She remained within FEDRA with the expectation that at 17 she would either choose to accept an assigned role as a soldier within the QZ, or she would be sent into the general population to fend for herself. She failed to form any significant relationships further until she met fellow FEDRA orphan Riley Abel. Ellie and Riley became friends quickly, both developing feelings for the other that they did not express.
The Mall: Riley
In September 2023, Riley left Ellie without warning, returning weeks later to take her on a late-night trip to a restricted but abandoned mall. Over the night, Riley provided Ellie with the “Five Wonders of the Mall”: an escalator, a carousel, a photobooth, an arcade, and a Halloween store. Though the night initially started out fun, Ellie and Riley eventually fell into conflict when Riley was forced to admit that the ‘date’ was for her to say goodbye to Ellie; Riley had joined the Fireflies and was being relocated to the Atlanta QZ. The two eventually made up, culminating in Ellie asking Riley to stay and kissing her when she agreed. However, the two attracted the attention of an infected lurking within the mall with the music they had been dancing to. Despite managing to kill the infected, both Ellie and Riley were bitten in the struggle. When presented with the option to commit suicide with Riley’s gun, Riley rejected it, proposing that they instead wait it out and fight for every second they have left together, no matter how short that time was.
Due to her infection at birth, Ellie did not turn, granted immunity to CBI by way of a chemical messenger tricking the fungus into believing she was already a carrier. To defend herself once Riley’s infection took hold, Ellie was forced to kill her.
Ellie was eventually discovered by Marlene and taken back to the Fireflies hideout. She was chained by her ankle to a wall in a room for multiple days, tested to check and see if she was turning. After it was determined that Ellie would not ultimately turn, Marlene freed her and entrusted Ellie with their mission. When it came time to move her, Marlene’s group was injured in a dispute with a car battery supplier, and so Ellie was reluctantly put into the care of smugglers Joel Miller and Tess Servopoulos.
The Journey Begins: Tess
While Ellie got along well enough with Tess, her relationship with Joel was initially combative. This only increased when a run-in with FEDRA patrol resulted in Ellie’s immunity being revealed, saved only from the immediate consequences of this reveal by the need to keep moving. Forced to reveal Marlene’s plan for her to them, Ellie told them that Marlene had tasked them with taking her to the State House to meet more Fireflies so they could take her to a doctor out west who believed he could use her immunity to make a cure. After some arguing, Tess and Joel agreed to deliver Ellie to the State House rather than kill or abandon her, a decision that would set the rest of Ellie’s journey in motion.
During their trip through the remains of Boston, Tess was bitten and infected, a fact she does not disclose to the group. However, arriving to the State House to find the Fireflies dead, this came to light quickly. Tess leveraged this to convince Joel to take Ellie as far as he can get her, to “set everything right” by the development of a cure. When Joel shot an infected and triggered a horde to come for them, Tess sacrificed her life to blow up the building and prevent the infected from pursuing Joel and Ellie.
Joel’s initial plan was to get Ellie to some smuggler connections he had by the name of Bill and Frank. This didn’t pan out due to Bill and Frank committing a lover’s double suicide sometime earlier, but arriving at Franks’ property secures them a vehicle and new supplies. Though she was initially apprehensive about what would happen, Joel agreed to continue escorting Ellie. This time, the plan was to head to Jackson, Wyoming in search of Joel’s brother Tommy. Though finding Tommy was Joel’s first goal, Tommy was previously a Firefly and could be able to point to where to go next.
Kansas City: Sam and Henry
Ellie and Joel’s first encounter on the way was in Kansas City. Deciding to cut through a fallen QZ led them into a trap laid by the resistance group that had overthrown Kansas City QZ only a few weeks before. The resistance had turned to ambushing outsiders and killing them for their supplies; when Joel didn’t stop the truck for a supposedly injured man, they were forced into a crash. The following shoot-out left Joel in a struggle for his life; one Ellie saved him from by shooting the attacker with a gun she had hidden. The shot paralyzes him, but Ellie was unable to finish the job when the attacker began to plead for his life. Joel was forced to do so, with Ellie waiting behind the wall struggling not to listen. They eventually escaped the laundromat they crashed into and bedded down in a nearby building.
Despite efforts to set up a warning system with glass, Ellie and Joel were ambushed in the night by Henry Burrell, the “most wanted man in Kansas City” and his deaf eight-year-old brother Sam. Henry was being hunted by the resistance for betraying the resistance leader to FEDRA in exchange for medicine for his brother’s leukemia. He and his brother were trying to flee the city, and as Joel has now come under the resistance’s radar, they ultimately decided to team up to escape the city.
Ellie and Sam became fast friends as the group journeyed through the tunnels under the city, bonding over a love of the comics Savage Starlight and communicating using a small magnetic writing slate. Once emerging from the tunnels, the group survived a sniper only to be ambushed by the Kansas City resistance as a whole. Worsening the situation, a horde of infected broke free from underground and the situation quickly devolved into a massacre and the group was forced to fight their way through. When they were finally able to rest for the night, Henry and Joel agreed to continue travelling together.
This new group did not last long, however. As they went to bed down for the night, Sam began to ask Ellie odd questions about what she’s afraid of. Ellie, after initially trying to play off the question but seeing Sam is serious, admitted that she is afraid of ending up alone. Asking Sam the same question in turn led him to reveal that he was afraid of turning into a monster and that he was bitten in the earlier skirmish. With no idea how vaccines are created and desperate to save her new friend, Ellie cut her hand and applied her blood to Sam’s wound. By her logic, if she was immune, then her blood must be medicine. Ellie agreed to stay up the entire night with Sam, something she ultimately was unable to manage.
Upon waking, Ellie found Sam seemingly awake. On reaching out to him, Sam attacked Ellie, fully turned in the night. Ellie tried to fend him off, the fight spilling out into the main room where Henry and Joel were. Though Joel tried to manage the situation, Henry prevented him before ultimately shooting Sam himself. As Joel and Ellie watched, unable to process that he had just killed his little brother, Henry took his own life. Ellie was devastated, leaving an apology on Sam’s writing slate as they buried them, before they continued their journey to Jackson.
Jackson: Confrontation with Joel
After a brief stop to shake down some older folks in an isolated cabin for information, they ended up meeting the group that would bring them to Jackson.
In Jackson, they found Tommy. He and Joel went off in private to catch up and discuss Joel’s proposal for finding the Fireflies while Ellie was taken away by Maria, Tommy’s wife, for a haircut and to gather some information about her current situation. Maria unintentionally revealed to Ellie that Joel had a daughter who died on Outbreak Day. She attempted to caution Ellie about trusting Joel, based on stories from Tommy about what Joel was willing to do for them to survive in the post-outbreak period. Ellie defended Joel, insisting she was aware of who Joel was, and that he was a different person now. Ellie then snuck away from a movie to catch Joel and Tommy’s conversation, overhearing Joel asking Tommy to take Ellie the rest of the way to the Fireflies for him.
This culminated in Ellie confronting Joel when he came to talk to her, forcing him to confront his fear of losing her the way he lost his daughter. Ellie laid her cards out on the table: Everyone Ellie had ever come to care for either chosen to leave her behind or died. The only one who had stuck with her had been Joel, and through their trials, he had become the only person that she felt any form of safety with. Joel initially rejected this, asserting that they were not father and daughter and they would be separating.
Though this was a painful blow for Ellie, it was soothed when Joel met her and Tommy at the stables the next morning. With a night of thinking, he believed Ellie deserves to have a choice in what happened to her. She immediately decided to continue journeying with him. At Tommy’s suggestion, they headed toward the University of Eastern Colorado. Over the next leg of their journey, Ellie and Joel bonded, Joel teaching Ellie to shoot a rifle and about the world before Outbreak Day.
Colorado: Joel’s Injury
While Ellie had been slowly learning to be a survivor from Joel and the events of the trip so far, the real test for Ellie came when Joel was injured in a skirmish with a group of men they encountered at the University of Eastern Colorado. The confrontation left Joel with a broken bat lodged in his abdomen, the two fleeing on horseback from their pursuers while Joel bled out.
Joel’s injury was nearly fatal. Ellie was forced to find shelter in the basement of an abandoned house. Joel tried to make Ellie leave him, ordering her to head towards Jackson to find Tommy and someone to take care of her. Remembering Riley and their promise to fight for every second they have, she refused. Scavenging the tools, Ellie sewed Joel’s wound closed, taking on the task of caring for him through his injury. She spent the next few days assuming Joel’s role—Tending to his wound, caring for the horse, and hunting for food.
It was on a hunt for a deer that Ellie encountered David. David initially presented himself to Ellie as a preacher just trying to keep his congregation alive and fed. They came to an agreement that if David’s right hand man James brought back medicine to Ellie, she would let them take the deer she hunted. Though she did her best to present a tough, Joel-like exterior to keep the men on their toes, David used the time they waited for James’ return to tell Ellie about how his group moved from the QZ to where they were. When Ellie mentioned where they’ve ended up is their luck running out, David refuted it, telling her that he didn’t believe in luck; that everything happened for a reason. To prove it, he began to recount a story about a group of men he sent out to scavenge who was killed by a crazy man with a little girl, revealing to Ellie that he’d known who she was the entire time just as James returned.
Colorado: David
David was the leader of the men she and Joel encountered at the university, and the final lesson in Ellie’s journey to the Fireflies.
Ellie took the medicine and retreated back to the house she was protecting Joel in. She injected him with the medicine but had little else she could do but wait, curling up with him on the frozen floor. The next morning, David led a group of his men to track her and Joel down. Ellie took the horse with the intention of leading them away, resulting in a chase on horseback and Ellie unconscious in the snow. David’s men found her, followed by David before they could agree to kill her. At David’s order, Ellie was taken back to the town and imprisoned within a large, caged enclosure in the back of the restaurant used for food preparation.
Ellie woke in the cage to find David watching her. He tried to persuade Ellie into accepting that her earlier life with Joel was over, and that she needed to open herself to “new beginnings”. Ellie was resistant, even after David brought her a meal. Ellie spotted an ear on the floor and David confirmed that the congregation had turned to cannibalism to survive, though only a few members were aware. He rebuked Ellie for judging them for the cannibalism, insisting that they were simply doing what they must to survive. David called out aspects of himself he supposedly saw in Ellie: A natural leader. Smart. And someone with a “violent heart” who would stab him in a second if he let her free. David revealed that he sees CBI as something beautiful: An existence that did whatever it needed to secure its future, even if it meant violence. He wanted Ellie to join him as his “partner”, an equal to him as a shepherd surrounded by sheep, and to build a life and group together.
Ellie allowed David to get close enough to hold her hand before breaking his fingers and attempting to steal his keys.
Though this failed, Ellie had another chance to fight when James and David returned to kill and chop her up. She bit David in the struggle, making a last resort effort to save herself by revealing her infection. Ellie used the following panic to grab a cleaver and kill James, fleeing the room. David follows Ellie deep into the restaurant, even as she hurled a flaming piece of wood at him, accidentally setting the building on fire. David locks her in the burning building with him, announcing to Ellie that he’s decided to keep her; to be her father.
What resulted was a fight for her life as David tried to sexually assault her. Ellie was able to use a moment of distraction to grab David’s machete and kill him in a frenzied, desperate attempt to escape. As Ellie stumbled out of the building afterward, she was found by Joel, newly awakened and hunting down her kidnappers. Though she was returned to the safety of Joel’s protection, this incident was the final trauma in a long line of suffering, and Ellie walked away from the experience changed forever.
Salt Lake City: The Fireflies
And then finally, after a year of travelling through a violent, broken world outside of the QZ and confronting raiders, cannibals, and infected, Joel and Ellie reached Salt Lake City, where the Fireflies and their doctor were stationed. The two came across a herd of giraffes as they navigated a building, and Ellie finally was able to get a moment of peace. Joel presents Ellie with the opportunity to turn back; while it’s not guaranteed that they’ll run into something bad, there always ends up being something bad. If she chooses, they can simply go back to Jackson.
Ellie refused. After everything they’d gone through, and everyone she’d lost and outlived, Ellie was unwilling to quit partway through. She agreed to go wherever Joel wanted after, but they had to finish what they started first. The two later have a further bonding moment when Joel confides in Ellie about his attempt to commit suicide the day after his daughter died, and that being with her helped him begin to accept her death.
The two are then ambushed by the Fireflies, unaware of who Joel is or why he’s here. Once it was confirmed that Ellie was the immune girl they had been waiting for, Ellie was taken away for testing. The surgeon, Gerald Anderson, believed that making a cure would require surgery, one that would kill Ellie.
Determined to make a cure at any cost, Ellie's life was sacrificed by the Fireflies in an attempt to create one.
ADDITIONAL FILES
Among all of the documents are pictures of some torn-out journal pages with messy scrawl dated sometime in Spring by a Gerald Anderson:
Further, there are transcriptions of recordings from Marlene:
-
She's alive. They're running the tests on her now.
I can't tell if I'm excited, scared, or just nervous. All I know is my hands won't stop shaking."
-
Here's a chance to save us... all of us. This is what we were after... what you were after. They asked me to kill the smuggler. I'm not about to kill the one man in this facility that might understand the weight of this choice. Maybe he can forgive me. Oh, I miss you, Anna. Your daughter will be with you soon."
There are also a few personal items included, things that Gojyo might be able to use to win some favor with Ellie or facilitate conversation.
The first is a photo booth strip, the second a child's drawing.