Introduction
Ethan Winters was an American mutant trained as systems engineer. One of many mutant victims of biological weaponry. Winters was infected with a weaponized species of Mold during the 2017 Dulvey incident.
He and his wife Mia were rescued by the Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance. They were placed under witness protection in Eastern Europe. This protection ultimately unraveled in February 2021 when their daughter, Rosemary, was abducted by Mother Miranda.
Winters was successful in rescuing Rosemary, but gave his life to protect a BSAA tiltrotor.
Biography
Early life
Little is known of Winters’ early life, though it is known that by 2017 he was living and working in Los Angeles, California as a systems engineer. In May 2011 he married his Texan girlfriend.
Mia, who he believed was a high-ranking employee in a trading company but was in fact a research assistant for The Connections, a manufacturer of illegal bioweapons. Mia disappeared in October 2014 while crossing the Gulf of Mexico during a hurricane, and was assumed dead.
Baker House Incident (2017)
On 18 July 2017, Winters received an email purported to be from Mia, giving him instructions to pick her up at the Baker ranch in Dulvey Parish, Louisiana. Rather than alert the authorities, Winters promptly drove out alone to find out for himself. Due to this choice in action, Winters was left unaware the general area was being investigated by law enforcement following a spate of disappearances, in fact instigated by the Baker family.
Winters’ initial search of the “Old House” uncovered Mia’s driver’s license, as well as a snuff film depicting the death of Andre Stickland, with Winters finding his remains soon after. When searching the basement, Winters found Mia locked in a cell and freed her. Mia was found to be amnesiac, hearing voices and actively self-harming, before becoming hostile and forcing Winters to defend himself with an axe. Locked in the house by Jack Baker, Winters received a phone call from Jack’s daughter, Zoe, which warned him too escape via the attic window.
During this attempt, Winters was attacked once more by Mia, who cut his left hand off with a chainsaw before he could take her down with a handgun. This escape attempt was all for naught, however, and he was quickly captured by Jack, who inflicted severe brain damage on him with a stomp on the head. He then took the two back with him to the Main House.
Unaware to Winters at the time, he and Mia as well as the Baker family had become contaminated by the Mold by a human bio-weapon named Eveline; this fungus replaces cells with more resilient fungal imitations. For mere minutes he was in a state of clinical death, only to begin waking up while being dragged into the Main House. As night fell, he was patched up by Zoe, who reattached his hand and provided him with the Genome Codex, a special device which once belonged to Mia. Seeking a means of escape herself, she conscripted Winters into helping her, using his mutations to her advantage.
Winters woke up strapped to a chair as the rest of the Baker family ate dinner – Jack, Marguerite, their son Lucas and Eveline. The family tried to pressure him into eating contaminated food to speed up the spread, but when he refused he was threatened with murder. Winters was, at this moment, only saved by the arrival of Deputy David Anderson on the property, who was sent out to investigate the disappearances.
As the family left, Winters unstrapped himself and got the deputy’s attention, though he was killed by Jack once entering the garage. Using the deputy’s sidearm, Winters was able to weaken Jack, who then shot himself with the gun as a psychological tactic, knowing he would only recover later.
With Winters, for the time being, free from pursuit, he received another call from Zoe, who instructed him on how to escape from the house by restoring puzzle pieces Jack had taken away to trap runaway victims.
During Winters’ search of the house he avoided attacks by the Molded, humanoid colonies of Mold created by the Bakers out of the decomposing corpses of their victims. During his search of the basement he encountered Jack once more, who was in the possession of one of the puzzle pieces while propping up Anderson’s body.In his attempt to reach for it, he unknowingly walked into a trap, and was cornered in the Morgue with Jack armed with a chainsaw. Winters was, ultimately, victorious having used a second chainsaw to horizontally bisect him.
After his escape from the Main House, Winters received further instructions by phone at Zoe’s trailer in the backyard. There he was told that she and Mia were indeed infected by the same substance that afflicted her family, but there was a chance of treating them with a serum. Having already planned this for the past three years with Mia, Zoe pointed Winters to the dilapidated Old House, where he was to recover the arm of Dahlia, a human bio-weapon prototype; Zoe meanwhile had already recovered the head of Dahlia’s sister, Dolores.
In his search of the Old House, Winters briefly met up with Mia, who was no longer in a delirium. She was, however, snatched by Lucas from behind a chain-link fence, leaving him alone once more. As he explored further, Winters was attacked by Marguerite, who anticipated his search for Dahlia’s arm. Their fighting collapsed part of the house, where a sinkhole had formed beneath the floorboards.
Following her through a tunnel, Ethan fought Marguerite once more at the nearby greenhouse where she was killed and calcified. Returning to the Old House, Winters ventured upstairs and tracked down Dahlia’s arm, attached to a lifelike doll in a shrine created by Marguerite. During his search of the upstairs he began to suffer visual and auditory hallucinations indicative of Mold infection, both seeing and hearing Eveline as a child.
When Winters returned to the trailer to meet with Zoe, he found that Zoe had been captured by Lucas and was being held captive with Mia at the family barn. To gain entry, however, Lucas forced him to return to the Main House to recover two keycards. During the search, Winters was forced to insert his hand into Anderson’s headless corpse, which was being quickly consumed by the Mold.
When he did arrive at the barn, he was made to watch a video recording of Lucas self-harming while boasting the regenerative powers he had gained from the Mold, finally mocking Zoe’s obsession with seeking a treatment. While navigating the barn and the many traps rigged by Lucas, Winters was forced to participate in an escape room activity themed on a birthday party.
While solving the puzzle, Lucas tossed a bomb into the room through a hidden doorway when his intended booby trap failed. Winters’ quick timing sent the bomb back, and Lucas ran out across the bayou to escape the explosion, leaving Dolores’ head behind.
Heading across the bayou, Winters reached the Boathouse where Mia and Zoe were being held captive. Winters freed the two women and gave the ingredients to Zoe to make the serum, intending to use a docked boat as their escape. When serum was produced, however, they were attacked by a heavily mutated Jack, who burst through the building and dragged Winters out where they fought once more.
During the fight he was forced to use one of the serums, which caused an extreme reaction in Jack’s body, causing rapid calcification. With one remaining serum left, Winters made the difficult choice of treating his own wife Mia over Zoe. Despite telling Zoe that he would help her, she angrily ordered him to leave with Mia on the boat.
During their travel through the bayou, the two came across the wreckage of Annabelle, the tanker which transported Mia and Eveline. The ship had become home to a Fungal Root, which responded to their presence by destroying the boat and snatching away Winters.
Embedded within a pile of Mold, he became mentally linked to the Fungal Root, and encountered an archive of Jack’s mind. The man begged him to save his family in the real world by killing Eveline, but still he sympathised with her for her need of affection. Winters woke up being dragged out of the Fungal Root by Mia, who threw him off the ship to continue his mission while she remained on board, giving him a preserved tissue fragment from Eveline on the way.
Close to the wreckage of Annabelle, Winters found himself at the Abercrombie Salt Mine, an abandoned mine being used both for Lucas’ research and as storage space for hundreds of the Bakers’ victims who were being consumed by the Mold. When he reached Lucas’ lab, Winters was able to produce E-Necrotoxin, a poison designed by The Connections as a contingency should Eveline go rogue.
As dawn arrived, a major operation was underway handled by the BSAA and Louisiana Army National Guard with support from the Louisiana State Police; while preparing for this battle however Eveline was not unaware of Winters’ own progress in the caverns and sent Molded after him.
Chased throughout by Molded, Winters found himself being led back to the Guest House he rescued Mia from the day before. As he explored the building, he was tortured with hallucinations of Mia attacking him with a chainsaw. In the attic he discovered Eveline herself, who was hiding from the BSAA that had already taken control of the Main House. Though she was able to hurt Winters with painful hallucinations, he was ultimately successful in injecting the E-Necrotoxin into her body.
No longer being fooled by her hallucinatory abilities, he saw Eveline as the rapidly aged woman he met at the dining table rather than the child she once was.
In spite of the poison, Eveline was able to temporarily reconstitute herself, merging with the Mold in and beneath the Guest House to become a gargantuan, eldritch abomination bent on destroying Winters. This quickly got the attention of the BSAA, who flew a helicopter above to supply Winters with experimental anti-B.O.W. weaponry: the “Albert-01” and its “RAMROD” ammunition. The weapon was far more effective against Eveline, and after several rounds she quickly calcified.
Following Eveline’s death, the BSAA set up a basecamp where they coordinated the quarantine of the area. With information provided by Winters, a team rescued Mia from Annabelle and evacuated the two to the nearest BSAA base to get medical attention, while a search was underway to locate Zoe.
