Truth be told, Peter still doesn't quite get why he left his previous job. All he knows is that one day he found a cryptic note in his coat, with the writing being almost indecipherable—there are huge gaps between the words, as if someone has erased the sentences between them. Weirdly, it's written in his own handwriting—and he should remember writing it, or at least know what to do with it. Either way, whether it was him or someone else capable of forging his handwriting, he felt its importance on some emotional level. Following whatever advice he did find on the note, he did his best to rescue his father from Russia, abandoned his job in 13th Battalion in favour of a cosy job at the BGA and signed up for a “Kerry Payne” concert.

Peter hadn't realised how much he needed a change of pace until he joined the BGA. Now he's got a more flexible schedule, more freedom in the direction of his research and much less tension with the coworkers. When he first walked into the office, it felt like they'd known each other for years. Well, there is the small amount of scepticism towards the Guardianist school of parascience that you would normally expect, but most people are very understanding. Funnily enough, people would sometimes complain about the lack of funding, but honestly, this is a big improvement over the 13th.

At first, Peter was nervous about going to the concert. The ominous note definitely didn't help. The only solace Peter had were his theories, or rather his theory, that maybe this concert was actually an undercover meeting where he will be told more. Some faces there seemed familiar, but he couldn't tell where he knew them from. Everybody seemed to know each other, and all the worries of the world have been swept away for a day. Just one day.

Tonight, alas, is another sleepless night. Peter quietly puts on his Antarctic coat and steps outside. After a few minutes of walking, the coat gets unbearably warm and he unzips it, but refuses to take it off. Once he enters the park, he notices a figure on his regular bench, reaching out to the night sky with its melancholic gaze. Peter silently sits down next to it and lets himself become mesmerised with the moon. Peter has seen this face around the BGA, and maybe even somewhere else before, but has never wanted to ask their name. In fact, the two have never spoken—Peter worries that a single shared word could cause this small tranquil corner of the world to collapse, and they both understand that. And yet the two strangers invariably meet every full moon and sit in silence, together.

This time, however, something is different. Peter's hazy mind drifts, and he feels like he's sitting on cold, cold snow stretching as far as the eye can see. The nature itself surrounds him, and promises some unknown grand purpose. But there is a shadow moving across the snow. It rushes directly at Peter, lurking under the ice, and suffocating the light around it. Boundless fear seizes Peter, and he shuts his eyes. He hears a roaring wind rising, and a loud explosion echoes through Peter's mind. He opens his eyes and sees some sort of metallic structure consumed by flames, and despair spills all around, like dark and viscous oil. As he keeps looking it, the metal corrodes, but instead of turning to rust, it warps into bulbs of flesh, merging and then engulfing the sooty metallic finish. People—no, some kind of crystalline humanoids—rush out of it in panic. The vision blurs and morphs into a different picture—the pulsating organic hunk melts into the ice, the humanoids disappear into that puddle and the flames dissipate with a grandiose flash. What is left is a puddle of gore laid out on the ice, carefully and deliberately cut up and displayed in a spiral-like shape and covered in some sort of sea of blackness. The scene persists, clearly asking Peter to do something. As he bends down to examine it, the whole view gets pulled out from right in front of him and disappears into a far-off point. Clearly this wasn't the thing Peter was supposed to do.

Looking around, Peter is relieved to find himself back on the bench, with the moon already nearing the end of its voyage. It feels like hours have passed in minutes. To his right, Ralf is still looking off into the distance. Wait, how does Peter know that name?

Some strange compulsion makes Peter dig out his note from of his pockets. While looking for it, his mind wanders off again. Sometimes it feels like there is a door behind which all the answers are hidden, and the world is dangling the keys right in front of his nose, yet he is blind and can't see them. Peter knows that they are out there, right in front of his face, teasing and mocking him, daring him to… go somewhere? All of this must fit in together somehow, but unlike his other theories, no connections can be made. It's like someone threw away almost all the pieces of a puzzle and is now asking Peter to solve it. What are these visions even a metaphor for? Before today, he never thought that he would entertain these occultist ideas, but right now it seems that all this can only be explained by demons or deities or some weird stuff like that. Damn, if only he stayed in the 13th Battalion, he could've asked Bohdana about all this. Does she remember Peter after him leavving?

Having finally found the note, he hastily unfolds it and, to his surprise, finds a phrase that he has somehow missed. “Do not return to this godforsaken place”. Weird. Perhaps the note is right—life here is much better than with the 13th, after all.

Written by Michael N.

Scared of the effects his exposure to Antarctica’s anomalies may have had on his mind, Peter allows himself to be bound during the hazardous journey to Sky Blu. Thrown about in the back of a Sno-Cat by the violent terrain and ravenous winds, he keeps a close eye on his fellow passengers, alert for any sign of sabotage. He is the first to notice when Ding Buyu, sitting across from him, grows agitated and tense, eyes filled with paranoia and nightmares only he can see; he is the first to shout in alarm when Ding draws a pocket knife, and at his cry Johannes and Andrei rush forwards to restrain him.

Moments later, Valerian draws a gun, and Ding is shot dead.

After he and his son were ‘broken out’ of a Siberian research station by the ‘13th Battalion’, Peter’s father was returned to his home and his ordinary life, under the watchful eyes of Unit 13. He was the unit’s bargaining chip, their leverage to force Peter to work for them, in case he ever found out their true motivations. But whilst he was in APERIS, Peter became an afterthought: to his handlers, his father ceased to be Peter’s father, and became just a random civilian they had to surveille. And no-one could have expected Peter to return from Antarctica with the full backing of the BGA. With their, admittedly limited, resources, he arranges rapid transport out of Russia for his dad, fast and discrete enough that the 13th won’t be able to interfere.

The greatest obstacle, as it turns out, is his own father’s stubborn insistence on staying in the village he’d called home for all his life. It takes an hour-long phone call in which Peter explains that the ‘revolutionary militia’ that had freed the two of them was actually an arm of a secret organisation called the JCP; that Peter was escaping them to join their German rivals; and that the JCP would threaten his life when they realised, in order to get his father out of the house and into his car.

But a day or so later and the two are reunited in a safehouse in Germany. With Valerian’s formal ascension to Direktor of the BGA, Peter is hired on at the agency as a field researcher.

The date of Kerry’s house party rolls around. Peter notices a weird entry in his calendar, but can’t remember what it’s for. He forgets about it soon after, anyway.

Four years and several promotions later, Peter is invited to a meeting with Valerian, Ralf and some other senior officials. The Direktor introduces a major operation, an expedition to the Antarctic. The BGA has received reports of potentially supernatural anomalies there: strange clumps of flesh; abnormal perception of time; even an entire modern icebreaker vanishing without a trace.

Peter doesn’t remember while planning the mission, helping to organise supplies and transportation and accommodation for the BGA’s agents.

Peter doesn’t remember while he prepares to leave, packing a bag full of the same winter gear he bought with him the first time.

Peter doesn’t remember on the flight over, not even as the plane touches down at a reoccupied Sky Blu.

But as he clambers into a Sno-Cat and prepares for the journey south, deeper into the Antarctic wastes, a thought passes into his mind with no apparent cause or source.

The Guardian called me back.