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QUESTION #3:
Why is “rust lung” introduced?
Disease. Doctors. Contagions. Symptoms. Diagnosis. We know Gears of War is famous for blood and gore, but when did the franchise become a medical mystery show? Not only does the first hour take place in and around a hospital, but it’s full of spoken and written references to this new illness.
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Our best guess: As a couple of the doctor journals mention, rust lung is a fatal reaction to imulsion. When the military detonated the Lightmass Bomb in the first game, the particles were vaporized into the air and breathed in by the planet’s populace. In other words, the heroic efforts of the Delta Squad in the first game is indirectly responsible for these people’s deaths.
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Yet the disease must have been included in the story for more than irony’s sake. We know imulsion is a huge piece of the Gears narrative – it was the main cause of the Pendulum Wars before Emergence Day and, as seen in this sequel, it transformed many of the Locust into mutinous mutants. Sure, the first victims might die, but don’t be surprised if you’re fighting lambent humans in a future installment. And don’t be shocked if those lambent humans resemble the Sires...
QUESTION #4:
What is the relationship between the regular Locust and the lambent Locust?
Like the Covenant in Halo, the Locust in Gears are more complicated than they originally appear. The debut of a glowing, regenerating subspecies in Gears 2 proved that the Locust are not unified. They are waging two wars – one against humanity on the surface and one against the lambent versions of themselves in the underground.
But what caused this civil war? Why do the regular Locust want or need to fight the lambent Locust?
Our best guess: For some reason, both kinds of Locust desire control of the surface. Neither is satisfied with living underground. Both are willing to risk exposure and battle with humanity to attain this goal.
The twist, as described previously, is that both factions of Locust evolved from humanity to begin with. And if imulsion is the ingredient that transformed regular Locust into lambent Locust, how do we know imulsion wasn’t the key to transforming humans into the Sires? And, when the Sires were forced to live underground, closer to the sources of imulsion, did they change into the first regular Locust?
Every species in Gears of War, then, is linked. Every species could retain a subconscious instinct to populate the surface and, more importantly, to fear the mutative powers of imulsion. Every species, then, desires the exact same goal, and thus, must wage territorial war against its ancestral brothers.
