Emmeline Ayuba

Emmeline Ayuba, known as Emmie, was a journalist on the Ganymede colony whose pursuit of the truth led her into the heart of the Church of Unitology and, ultimately, into belief. Sent undercover to expose a murder and to find her vanished sister, she instead found the Church's experiments with the Markers and was made to commune with a Red Marker, an experience that turned the investigator into a convert.

Early life on Ganymede#

Emmeline and her sister Madrigal, called Maddie, were raised by their mother in the outer crater of the city of Enki Catena on Ganymede. When EarthGov appeared to abandon the colony, the family fell into hardship as Ganymede declined around them. Emmeline was a curious child, described as always asking questions, and Maddie often looked after her. In their teenage years Maddie began to vanish for days at a time, saying she did so to support the family, which set her against their mother. One day she disappeared for good. In her room the family found a Unitologist book and a Marker replica and realized that Maddie had joined the Church. Their mother died soon after, and Emmeline was left alone.

Determined to seek the truth in everything, Emmeline began working with the Ganymede colonial police on their cases, befriending an officer named Gabriel Maxentius. She later became a journalist, and had been at the work for six years by the time of her final investigation.

Infiltrating the Church#

In 2510 or 2511, Emmeline's editor Marsh showed her footage taken inside the apartment of Professor Fumihiro Zane, who was filmed being torn apart by a strange humanoid figure. Zane had been trying to expose Unitologist corruption within the Ganymede colonial government, and with the colonial police unwilling to investigate, Marsh asked Emmeline to find proof of the Church's involvement. He also reminded her that the assignment offered a chance to look for Maddie. Despite her hatred of the religion, Emmeline agreed.

With a recording device implanted in her jawbone, she entered the Unitologist cathedral at Enki Catena under the cover name Emmeline Lambert, promising herself she would not let the Church change who she was. Overseer Jonathan Rader saw her as a promising recruit, and she was soon taken in for a Soul Cleansing, a painful rite that drove a needle into the brain to remove doubt. It was during this procedure that she first hallucinated her sister Maddie, in truth an apparition of the Red Marker present on Ganymede, who told her she was growing sicker. A Vested member named Erasmus Horvath revealed that he had secretly sabotaged the Cleansing to spare Emmeline its true purpose of permanently damaging her mind. Horvath was a heretic who believed the Gospel of Markoff, the claim that Michael Altman had been not a prophet but a man warning of the Black Marker's danger, and that he had been killed by the Church's two founders, Stevens and Craig Markoff.

Uncovering the experiments#

With Horvath's help, Emmeline searched the cathedral basement, where she found frozen bodies in a cryogenic chamber and the experiments of Dr. Hannah Milevska, who was creating Necromorphs from a shard of a Red Marker. Discovered by the doctor, Emmeline fled as the creatures were loosed, and Milevska was killed in the chaos. Before escaping, Emmeline found a recreation of Zane's apartment that proved the Church had murdered him by releasing a Slasher into his home, along with plans for a similar attack on another academic, Werner Brant. She also found the records confirming that Maddie had been dead for eighteen months.

Sent by Rader to preach outside the cathedral as anti government riots broke out in Enki Catena, Emmeline used the moment to warn her friend Maxentius of the Church's plans. Returning for more evidence, she witnessed Horvath executed by the Paragon Ibanez for his heresy. Studying the transcribed Marker symbols afterward, she began to feel their power and to understand the appeal of the Unitologist faith, though she was not yet ready to believe. When she tried to escape the locked down cathedral by starting a fire, Rader caught her and revealed that he had known all along that she was an undercover journalist and had been watching her to learn how the Church's enemies worked. The confrontation was broken when Horvath's reanimated corpse, raised by the Marker shard, attacked them both, and Emmeline fled.

Maxentius guided her toward the Enki Catena spaceport through the old colony tunnels, but she was pursued by Necromorphs and unwittingly brought them into the crowds gathered to flee Ganymede, unleashing an outbreak. Maxentius was killed protecting her, and the escape ship she reached turned out to be flown by a Unitologist, who knocked her unconscious and carried her back to the Church.

Communion with the Marker#

Emmeline woke in an underground facility beneath the Ganymede capital of Marius Landing, haunted by hallucinations of Maddie, Horvath, and Maxentius, all urging her to stop running and accept the truth. Rader offered her the chance to learn that truth directly. Because of her strength of mind she was a prime candidate to commune with the Red Marker that the Church had taken from the government and that powered the colony's radiation shielding. Still driven to understand what Convergence really was, she agreed.

Strapped beside the Marker as its signal was redirected, leaving the surface shields briefly down, Emmeline was carried through a hallucinatory journey. She was shown Altman's death and that the real Altman had never come near the true purpose of the Black Marker. She was taken to Aegis VII to watch Isaac Clarke fight the Hive Mind, where Maddie told her she was much like Isaac, caught up in seeking truth, and that humanity's every encounter with the Markers brought a pain that was necessary to reach the next stage of existence. She witnessed the beginning of the Convergence Event on Titan Station, learned that bodies were needed for Convergence, and was finally brought to an ocean of flesh where she saw the birth of a Brethren Moon, joined by countless others spread across the universe, all watching her and repeating a single word: Soon.

Becoming a leader of the Church#

In the aftermath of the riots, the spaceport outbreak, and the shield shutdown, the Church offered aid to the injured and gained public support, opening a new oncology ward beside the Enki Catena cathedral, ostensibly to treat radiation exposure but suited to continuing the Necromorph experiments. By the following year, 2511 or 2512, Emmeline, shaken and convinced by what the Marker and the Brethren Moons had shown her, had become a prominent member of the Church. She led its effort to take full control of Ganymede and stood as a strong candidate in the election for the colonial parliament, her conversion coming as the Church made Ganymede a base for its drive toward Convergence and its growing war against EarthGov.