After teasing Vantage’s reveal on Twitter last week, Apex Legends developer Respawn Entertainment released a new episode of Stories From The Outlands that gives players a closer look at her past before she joined Apex Games.
Born on the icy, abandoned planet of Pagos, Vantage—real name Mara Contrares—grew up with no one to entertain her except her mother, Xenia, and the diverse wildlife of Pagos that Mara hunts every day. She enjoyed more freedom than the average child, living by only one rule: survival.
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Although Mara and her mother’s cool mansion is safe, free and private, danger lurks beneath the planet’s snowy surface, making Vantage’s mother a little overprotective. We see this in the trailer when Mara shoots a bat-like creature that bites her, injuring her arm. After being bitten, Mara uses a carved whistle imitating a bird call to signal to her mother that she is unharmed. But as she sits in the snow, she notices something underneath: a freighter named the GDS Vantage.
After the biting bat incident, Mara’s mother chides her for her curious nature, but seems somewhat understanding. “When the ship crashed, I was curious, like you,” her mother warns. “And it almost killed me.”
Xenia has a huge scar on the side of her face and is blind in one eye – almost certainly the result of messing with the danger lurking inside the GDS Vantage. Clearly, she raised Mara to be a skilled hunter for a reason.
Vantage’s mother, Xenia, has a huge scar over her right eye.
Back home, Xenia bandages her daughter’s injured arm, assuring her that there is nothing worth exploring on the GDS Vantage and describing it as an “empty cargo ship run by computers”. This shows that Xenia has explored the spaceship for herself, a detail that Mara likely notices, strengthening her determination to learn more about the ship. Mara asks her mother why there is a cargo ship on Pagos with no actual cargo, but ends up getting no answer.
“It doesn’t matter to the outside world,” Xenia tells her when asked what the ship’s initials stand for.
Unfortunately, Mara isn’t listening. She returns to the crash site, abseils into the interior of the derelict ship, and makes the place look good for herself – with disastrous consequences. Contrary to what her mother had led her to believe, the ship was far from empty. As Mara explores, she comes across a number of cells, some of which still contain the decomposing corpses of the ship’s unwitting occupants. One of the cages has broken bars, and Mara notices that her sniper rifle is the same type that the ship was equipped with, indicating that her weapon of choice was looted from the downed freighter.
Approaching the cockpit, Mara makes another grim discovery: a corpse in the pilot’s seat. The ship appears to have been neither empty nor controlled by computers. Upon reaching the cockpit, Mara finds another, smaller, bat-like creature resting on the console. When she startles him, he presses a few keys, awakening the ship’s AI system and revealing a terrible truth: Mara’s mother is a liar.
She is also on the wanted list. She was not born on Pagos, as she told her daughter. In fact, Xenia only arrived when the GDS Vantage crashed on the planet. Mara’s mother is – or was – a prisoner.
A holographic wanted poster of Xenia appears, showing her as she appeared before the ship crashed. The AI system’s voice also answers a question Mara’s mother wouldn’t, revealing that GDS stands for Gaean Detention Ship, indicating that Xenia may have originally been a resident of Crypto and Caustic’s homeworld. Ksenia’s crimes are not publicized.
Xenia’s holographic wanted poster reveals that she has lied to her daughter about almost every detail of their lives.
Instead of passing on additional bits of valuable information, the AI system attacks, scans Mara, and mistakes her for Xenia. The ship’s giant metal arms moving the cargo seem to have been programmed to be hostile, tossing and snapping at Mara as they try to drag her to her mother’s cell. (Interestingly, each of these cargo arms has a Hammond Robotics logo ).
Mara barely survives the fight, saving herself with her teeth. As she lies bleeding on a snow-covered cliff, she watches as her bird whistle slips off the edge of the cliff, crushing any chance of rescue. Fortunately, she is not completely alone. Echo, the baby bat that triggered the AI system, retrieves her whistle, but she is too injured to use it when Echo returns. Instead, the creature carries the whistle to Xenia, who frantically uses her own whistle to search for her daughter.
Echo tries to convince an injured Mara to use her bird whistle.
As Vantage slips away and passes out, her mother approaches, surrounded by a flock of little bats that seem almost attracted to her, much like how Bloodhound interacts with ravens. Crouching down, Xenia activated her personal prisoner distress signal, thrusting it into her daughter’s arms and declaring that she could not save Mara. The scene ends as the Gean Space Authority arrives to pick up Mara in response to the activation of the distress beacon.
This episode of Stories from the Outlands answers a lot of questions about the upcoming season, but if you’re still hungry for Season 14 content, you won’t have long to wait — the season launch trailer will be released on July 28 at 8am PT / 11am ET. as Apex Legends Season 14: Hunted will begin on August 9.
Apex Legends is free to play on console and PC. A mobile version of the game, Apex Legends Mobile, is available for download on Android and iOS devices.
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