(8x13) Terra Resurgent: Part 2, Episode 1
Metis dismisses her expedition and temporarily suspends their mission to find Xio at the base of Starbridge America. Instead, she sends them to return to Columbia with news of these latest discoveries concerning Pacifica and Alexandria. She asks the Alexandrians if they have someone among them who can and would like to accompany her party back to Columbia, to speak on behalf of Alexandria and begin preliminary talks between their two peoples. The Alexandrians select an ambassador, and the expedition departs back to the north. But as for Metis herself, she remains behind, and asks to be taken back with the next Alexandrian ship to visit their country, to learn about them and speak on behalf of Columbia. The Alexandrians are excited by this prospect, and welcome her to do so.
So Metis travels across the Atlantic, into the Mediterranean, and then across the arid Sahara Desert to finally behold the Arcology of Alexandria, capitol of their empire and, as they explain (as Metis still remembers little from her second life yet), the Internation's final settlement upon reuniting the ancient world, which was uniquely poised to survive the catastrophe that befell it. The Arcology of Alexandria was the crown jewel of the Internation's project to develop the undesirable interiors of the world's continents into luxurious technological paradises. It is an enormous pyramid-shaped structure in the middle of the Sahara Desert that houses a great museum of both natural and human history, as well as many libraries, botanic and zoological gardens, aquariums, and every other kind of educational attraction you could think of, plus housing for its enormous staff and quarters enough for its many guests from around the world, and all the infrastructure needed to feed and otherwise support them. It was of course surrounded by vast stretches of other civilization filling much of the rest of the desert, but during the fall of civilization much of that fell into ruin, and as the climate changed over the millennia the desert became even less habitable than it had been before the Internation's technology had transformed it.
As the ecological ravishing of the world settled down after the fall, Alexandria began to spread its influence to lands across the desert boundaries that isolated it. Those settlements, built up and industrialized over time by the preserved knowledge of their founders, gradually grew into a great empire, colonizing Africa and Europe. They think themselves, with good reason, the great civilizing forces of the world, doing a great good to restore humanity. But when they met the expanding Empire of Pacifica on the shores of the Indian Ocean, they could not find an amicable way to share that mission and the power that came with it, and war broke out, an interminable war that has consumed all of the eastern hemisphere for centuries, and now threatens to consume the western hemisphere as well.
Metis, by now remembering much of her first life as an immortal now tens of thousands of years old, thinks she may have a way to negotiate a peace, by exploiting her position as a mythological figure in the strange syncretist religion that the Alexandrians seem to follow. She takes advantage of her visit here to the greatest library the world had ever known to study the history that she has forgotten, to jog her lost memories, and to fully remember everything of who she is and what the world was like before the fall.