Claire - Raccoon City - Shiki
After being saved by Shiki, Claire had woken up in a hospital dazed and confused. Though it seemed like a safe place, Claire had refused to believe that they were out of the woods yet. She'd tried to leave and sneak away from the doctors, but her efforts had been met with failure. Despite their resistance to her leaving early, Claire found that the staff treated her gently and with care. It was far from what she'd expected, but she was still suspicious of her situation. After all, the doctors had only given vague explanations at best for what had happened. The idea that they had all experienced some mass coma and had shared in their dreaming was something Claire couldn't quite come to terms with.
Upon their release, Claire learned that Aiden had been one of the group to perish in their sleep. Her anger was reignited at this news, and Claire promised Aiden that she would get to the bottom of this. It was not fair that he wouldn't live to see his sister. His story had been so akin to hers-- Both of them seeking a sibling they loved. Claire's story would continue, and yet Aiden's was unjustly snuffed out. She would not stand for this.
After a year of searching, Claire still didn't have answers.
That she had found herself in Raccoon City almost a year before she had last been there didn't surprise Claire as much as she thought it would. This was all still a part of Silent Hill's twisted design, after all. Right? Everything that had happened to her and her brother, she couldn't have possibly imagined all of that,
right? She had two sets of memories at this point, one where her brother had lived and another where her brother had not; Yet, both agreed that a calamity would befall Raccoon City in the fall of 1998.
She stuck with Shiki, the woman who had saved her not just once, but twice. Without Aiden, Shiki was now Claire's closest ally, and Shiki didn't seem to care enough who was with her for it to be an issue. As leaving the city was impossible, Shiki had nowhere to go, so Claire opted for them to rent an apartment together while she did some research into Raccoon City.
As time went on, everything seemed so weirdly
normal and without incident that Claire was on edge just about every day, waiting for a new nightmare to come around the corner. As the months passed, nothing came. As unsettling as it was, it gave Claire time to look into Umbrella. It was weird having knowledge of at least two possible futures inside her head, and Claire couldn't be sure that either would come true. Still, she knew it all lied with Umbrella, but her efforts to look into the company was met with a resounding nothing, as she honestly expected. Their security was unbelievably tight at the time, even with Shiki's help. Claire managed to get a low-level secretary job with the company, but it wasn't enough to get her any answers.
With the direct approach a failure, Claire instead looked into the Birkin family, who had to have been living in Raccoon at the time. Aside from learning of William Birkin's connection to Albert Wesker, she didn't find out much that she didn't already know. It was entirely possible this William Birkin would not go on to commit the atrocities of the guy she was familiar with, but as he was still a head researcher for the Umbrella Corporation, she doubted much had changed.
She was far from a hacker, but Claire had memories of researching into the skill so that she could continue her search for her brother. In that memory, she'd been led to an Umbrella facility in Paris. She'd even managed to infiltrate it, but she'd been caught at the time. It felt like it had happened only yesterday, even though Claire was fairly sure it had never happened at all. Still, she still had the experience of that memory to assist her in seeking out the S.T.A.R.S. members.
To her surprise, Chris was alive and well within the city. She'd wanted to meet him in person multiple times, but couldn't bear to do so when she felt that her time there was ultimately temporary. She didn't even know what to expect from this version of him, so all she could do was talk to him over the phone. She pretended to be back home, still going to college, happy and naive. In her last conversation with him, she dropped the act and told him not to trust Albert Wesker or Chief Brian Irons. He was confused, obviously, and wanted to know how she knew those individuals, but Claire had only hung up on him. She didn't tell him what she planned to do.
She started contacting prominent members of the city anonymously in order to make her plea. She tried to spread fear and doubt about Umbrella and its most influential members. Her information was vague at first, for Claire feared that the rumours would be tracked back to her and put her in danger. However, when she was met with only disbelief and ridicule, Claire got more aggressive. She knew an awful lot, and she did what she could to put it out there. Umbrella never linked it to her, as far as she could tell, but the company was successful in putting a stop to her rumours.
Now, after a year in this city, Claire was running out of time. Angry and lost, Claire had become desperate. She needed to infiltrate Umbrella and somehow
stop what was going to happen. She needed to save this city and all of the people that inhabited it. She recruited Shiki and, using the job she still had at Umbrella, managed to get the woman inside after hours.
There, they gathered at Umbrella's lowest level, in hiding from the security guard roaming the halls. Claire passed Shiki a 9mm pistol that matched the one in her possession. Without rousing suspicion, Claire had been unable to gather much else.
