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Also, something worth noting is that the preview notes that were posted online prior to the update that added explorer notes are not canon.
Starting from her first note, we learn that Helena has been on the ARK for a while, at least a few hundred days, that she's a biologist hailing from modern-day Australia, and that she has a tamed Argentavis named Athena. She's grateful for the opportunity to observe the creatures of ARK, animals that no biologist has ever had the chance to study before.
She begins to get suspicious of the island's peculiar climate when the winter in the tundra biome doesn't show any signs of stopping. Coupled with how strange it is to see an arctic region on a mostly tropical island, she takes this as a sign to investigate.
A tribe called the Howling Wolves lets Helena tag along in her expedition in the tundra biome, and it's shown that not only does she know Rockwell, another survivor with explorer notes, but that Athena was a gift from him.
As she's putting the finishing touches on the Mammoth dossier, she's surprised to see a Rex charge out of the snow and attack the herd. She's confused at how a Rex manages to survive in this climate and how the introduction of such a top predator doesn't completely throw off the ecosystem, but according to the Howling Wolves, this kind of thing is common. She vows to look further into this.
After doing some research and running experiments, Helena isn't successful at finding any sign of ecological imbalance despite the amount of competition between predators, the contrast between the tundra region and the rest of the island, and the fact that many of the creatures there are millions of years ahead of the dinosaurs. Something's not quite right, that much is clear...
This was a summary of the first five of the twenty six notes that are out at time of writing, not counting her notes in Scorched Earth. I'll do more later.
And they are all present at the same time. ~That~ is the most telling thing, and throws time periods out of the loop completely.
All of their notes have references to each other. Rockwell(Chemist) and Helena are initially amicable and friendly with each other, often going to each other for advice or an alternative point of view on a discovery.
Gaius and Mei-Yin's notes have been tricky for me to interpret, as I cannot read Latin nor Traditional Chinese. However, going from Rockwells and Helenas notes, it appears that Mei-Yin (Also reffered to as the "Beast Queen") was at odds with Gaius, using her beasts to harass and fire apon his men with guns that she quickly learned to use.
After Rockwell ran out of willing tribal volounteers for his experiments (His Fria Curry, Mindwipe Tonic, Lazarus Chowder) after some unfortunate side effects, Gaius approached him offering him "subjects"- (basically captured members of other tribes, Gaius was quickly forming a powerful legion. Essentially an Alpha Tribe).
Rockwell had started getting a bit... unstable, his morals becoming clouded and not quite scientific, after a spelunking trip exposed him to an artifact. While he was still on friendly terms with the tribes, he had asked them to collect more artifacts for him. The Obelisks and Artifacts quickly became an obsession for him. This too is why Gaius approached him, as he believed the obelisks were weapons and he believed he could get Rockwell to activate them for him.
Meanwhile, Helena had her own theories of the obelisks, after discovering a cave with a platform similar to the obelisks (We're presuming this is the Tek Cave), and had actually gone even a step further. After learning from a tribe they had entered an obelisk and killed the broodmother, they chose to give her the artifact aquired from killing the creature to her, as the chief was "too pained to keep the trophy remembering how many of his tribe had been killed".
Helena approached Mei-Yin to enter the second obelisk, and fought, and killed, the Megapithecus. When they were leaving, they were attacked by Gaius' Legion. It's unclear if Mei-Yin was captured or killed, but Helena definitely was captured and imprisoned.
Rockwell saw her in the cage, and became resentful. He believed that Helena was going behind his back trying to unlock the secret of the obelisks, that he was betrayed, and it served her right for being caged for teaming up with "The savage that eats the flesh of men with her beasts"
And that's a very brief and truncated summary of the Island. Interesting to note, most of the notes are found within ruined sections of a building. These buildings are all made out of the same stonework, implying they were all once one large mansion, that was somehow shattered and scattered throughout the entire island.
Sooo, should I continue, or...?
Latin isn't too terribly difficult either, as English and so many other languages stem from it.
Gaius seems to write more about the progress of his tribe than anything interesting.
After reviewing her notes, Helena realizes that the predatory species outnumber the prey by almost double on the island, "the opposite of how any ecosystem is supposed to work." Adding in human factors, she reaches the conclusion that the island is impossible to be completely natural and is possibly monitored and controlled by an outside force. She resolves to speak with Rockwell on the matter.
In note seven, she mentions the obelisks and finding a strange cave with a platform similar to those found at the base of the obelisks, but with a pedastal that had weird holes carved into it (possibly the Tek Cave?). She initially didn't think much of it at first, but after discovering the problems with the ecosystem, she began to wonder...
Rockwell convinced her that just because the island didn't follow scientific laws they were used to, doesn't mean they didn't follow any laws at all. "After all, science is about discovery, and new discoveries can invalidate old principles." She vows to gather more evidence before latching on to her theory.
With the help of a tribe called the Painted Sharks, Helena takes to the sea to study the island's marine life in hopes of correlating patterns between the separate habitats of the ocean and the mainland. She remarks that marine biology was never her strongest field, but looks forward to the trip.
The Painted Sharks treated Helena with much respect when she mentioned that she was a colleage of Rockwell, with Helena stating that she hadn't eaten better in her entire time on the island. The predator-prey balance of the ocean was consistent with the mainland's. She notes that the waters are teeming with Megalodons, which are unusually aggressive; odd, considering that sharks generally aren't territorial creatures. She chalks this up as a result of limited prey and decides to study them further.
She couldn't find any reason for why the Megalodons were so aggressive, but she did manage to observe their mating habits- no-one's ever witnessed great whites mating at home. She was even able to track the female for the entire gestation period which surprisingly only lasted one week. This explains why Megalodons are so common in the ocean, given that they're reproducing at "fourty-four times the rate of Aussie great whites." She decides to compare this this to how the sharks behave in captivity.
I'll shoot for summarizing five or six notes every post, so we're now at 11 of 26 notes. After these, I'll summarize her Scorched Earth notes, too.
At least once or twice a day.
After she decides to study captive Megalodons, on top of all the other oddities with them, the biggest shocker was how easy the sharks are to tame and train. While she'd heard of sharks getting some training, it's never to this extent, never this easy. Simply put, most fish just aren't intelligent enough to get much out of training.
The real nail in the coffin was the discovery of Procoptodons. Considering how they, along with nearly every other marsupial ever evolved exclusively in Australia sixty million years after the dinosaurs, there's no way the kangaroos should be there. And yet there they are.
Ever since the revelation that the island was artificial, it began to lose its luster to Helena. In addition, some of the tribes had begun fighting, with one in particular (Gaius's New Legion!) trying to conquer the whole island. Real or not, she fears that the ecosystem might be wiped out in a great war.
The tamed Megalodons stood out to Helena; it was almost like they had a genetic history of human obedience. This inspires her to begin observations on some of the tamed creatures on the island. She catches word of a single survivor that has tamed a lot of creatures herself, earning the nickname "The Beast Queen of the Jungle" (who turns out later to be Mei Yin). Helena decides to go to her for some insight.
Mei Yin was less than thrilled by Helena's visit, though she was civil enough to allow her to stay. Helena considered it a blessing that Mei Yin hadn't killed her right on the spot. She notes that it's difficult examining raptor dung with somebody watching you.
She couldn't find much difference between the diets of Mei Yin's animals and the ones in the wild, though that may be because the Beast Queen takes her animals on regular hunting trips to train them. They never have to go far to find prey either, despite the number of them and their high birth and growth rates. Meanwhile, Mei Yin starts to warm up to Helena a bit. "In hindsight, maybe starting by studying her animals' feces just gave a bad first impression..."
One of the most interesting thing she notes about Mei Yin's animals is the fact that they never fight each other. For long domesticated animals like cats and dogs, that's normal, but the instincts of a wild animal are hard to curb. More remarkably, Mei Yin has a herd of herbivores in her posse as well, but the carnivores refuse to attack them either.
Her studies of Mei Yin's animals leads her to the conclusion that the island's creatures are used to captivity and have been regularly tamed for decades. This brings her theory of the island being a controlled environment back into play, and she hypothesizes that not only are the creatures' populations controlled, but the creatures are also genetically modified. Before she brought that info to Rockwell though, there's one last rumor she wanted to check...
She finds a smaller island entirely populated by carnivores (possibly Dead Island), which was the final piece of evidence to confirm to her that the island is artificial. Even if the carnivores fed off of each other, the island was so small and the population so dense that there's no logical way they should be able to maintain itself. It's as if somebody put them there on purpose.
Despite settling on her theory with Rockwell, he didn't seem that interested in the subject. Helena notes that he's been focusing on the island's obelisks after finding a way to communicate with them in a cave. The nature of the obelisks has been a mystery, and thinks they may be linked to her own findings. She decides to follow up on Rockwell's observations.
That's 21 of 26 now! I won't at my computer tomorrow, so I summarized a few extra to make up for it.