Chapter One – Misadventures Assemble

~RED BASE~

The thing about the RED base was that, on at least a daily basis, it would drastically change in appearance. In the distant beginning, it had been a proud structure; its tough red walls providing an intimidating, daunting barrier for attackers to face, casting a dynamic, bold shadow over the wasteland stretching in every direction.

Now it looked like that time Heavy accidently sat on a scale model of the Whitehouse in a museum.

Time and time again the nine mercenaries inhabiting the base would mess up, get in a fight, or simply sneeze and the poor building would suffer for it. Occasionally the Engineer would find a spare moment to fix a few things, but all in all they had given up on keeping their living space in one piece.

This all may seem fairly irrelevant, but we're getting there.

As it was, the mercs had decided to be as civil as they could manage and the nine of them had gathered in the kitchen for sort-of-breakfast-more-like-brunch. Except supposedly brunch wasn't manly enough for them, so really it was a nameless meal had during brunch time.

Now, the place stank to high Hell because Pyro had cooked, or, more accurately, incinerated both the food and half the kitchen. Fortunately they were able to beat the flames out with an empty fire extinguisher and a frying pan before they lost the ceiling, or a life, whatever.

Eventually, over the sound of ominous creaking above them, the nine mercs forced themselves to enjoy what may have been waffles in a past life. Pyro's flare gun was on the table so nobody felt any real need to complain.

"I do love waffles," Spy announced loudly, if only to break the uncomfortable silence. He didn't particularly care for waffles. "I'm going to go enjoy them anywhere that isn't here."

The Frenchman cloaked and would never again sprint from a room more quickly, leaving the remainder of the team to conjure up their own escape plans.

Medic took to gradually shoving his chair backward, moving about a foot every minute or so until he eventually scooted into the hallway and speed-walked away. Much less subtly, Heavy faked a huge sneeze then launched himself out the back window with a spectacular smash. The mercs only turned to watch that for a second, but when they looked back Pyro had somehow eaten half the waffle, and it still had its mask on.

"How- how did- what." Unable to comprehend this, the Demoman promptly exploded and made a further mess of the kitchen. Sniper casually removed the flying eye patch that hit him in the face and stood up;

"Y'know what? It's an, eh, Australian holiday today. I should go yeah see ya." The marksman dove out the window, bounced off the Heavy and flew flailing into the distance. Engy paused for a moment, taking tally of the mercs still in the room, and blanched when he realised he'd been more or less ditched.

He shot a glance to the Scout and Soldier at the end of the table, only to find them attacking each other with waffles. The defence class facepalmed slowly, because this was clearly the opening to some unexpected twist in events he would soon get dragged into.

"Cue disaster in three, two-" a massive crash interrupted his tired countdown "-one."

Ideally, what happened was that the second floor abruptly ceased to exist. Floorboards and pseudo-buried Mann Co crates cascaded down like rather destructive rain, probably sending Medic and Spy to respawn.

Outside, Heavy and Sniper screamed at a high enough pitch to piss off dogs all over the country and ran away, likely not having any idea where they were going.

Conveniently, the roof had in fact avoided crushing the kitchen and the garage, the former where the story is actually starting and the latter where RV, Teddy Roosebelt and Prometheus the Aperture turret were holding their weekly science debate. Still, the destruction was easily bad enough to extract a little 'dammit' and a pout from Engy.

Suffering an extremely weak attention span, Soldier and Scout suddenly sat up attentively, glancing around the wreckage as if only just noticing it. After a moment of puzzled silence they shrugged aloofly and sauntered away, chucking the waffles at Pyro.

It took maybe three-point-five seconds for Engy to turn and face Pyro, only to find the waffles gone and the merc letting out a contented burp.

"… What are you?"

~WHERE THE REC ROOM USED TO BE~

"Sure is boring around here," Soldier observed, fairly accurately. He had apparently made the decision that juggling bricks was a good idea and so far sported two rectangular bruises, but that didn't stop him. "We haven't kicked BLU's sorry butt in ages."

"Yeah, it kinda sucks," Scout agreed, in the process of fending off a brick sent flying in his direction, "We could mock Demo 'bout the nerfed sticky jumper again."

Now, it's safe to say they probably would've dashed all the way to respawn to do that (I mean, it's them) had it not been for the unexpected splintering noise nearby. The mercs rotated in place – twice, just for fun – to find the source, the juggling bricks clattering against both the rubble and Soldier's helmet.

"Ooh." The pair of them was greeted with the sight of what was pretty much the single remaining pillar pitching forward, destined to crush ALL IN ITS PATH.

In fact they weren't even in its path. So that really wasn't much of an issue.

However, something equally as awful as the world ending or the mercs running out of pie was underway- the shadow of the pillar loomed directly over an innocent hat. The part of the mercs, reserved for most humans as the 'protect the young' place, responded as their 'protect the hats' function.

They yelled 'No' in slow motion, which would have come out a lot like 'NOOOOOO' had it been written in a speech bubble. Like in a super hero comic book. Not that anything is meant by this simile. Wink wink.

Point is Scout and Soldier all but flew/tripped violently to the hat's rescue, managing to swipe it out of the way in the nick of time before the pillar hit home with an almighty- well, it probably should've been a crash, but it was a reasonably lame thud in actuality. Shame.

"It… it's okay! IT'S OKAY MAN! AW YES!" Scout felt the need to bust out a quick victory dance. Soldier treated the world to The Robot, suddenly wearing the costume for it. "We just saved that friggin' hat!"

"We're heroes," Soldier abruptly froze with the dramatic whisper. "Scout look at me-" he punched Scout upside the head for attention, extracting a disapproving 'ow' from his teammate – "WE ARE SUPER HEROES."

Scout paused to ponder this, then; "HOLY CRAP! You're right!" he yelled excitably, "We gotta do some super hero duties."

They high fived and sniggered because 'duty' and rushed away to do some good deeds.

~THE GARAGE~

The Engineer and Pyro lounged in the garage, the former wondering exactly what to do about all this mess. Pyro had convinced RV to play Do You Believe in Magic? on the radio and, blissfully ignorant, 'played' the fire axe along with that. They were still there to see Demo, Medic and Spy reappear through the respawn teleporter.

"That was unexpected," Spy admitted, either referring to the brutal collapse of the base or the fact he had arrived at the moment Pyro and co started an air band. Medic shrugged;

"At least it's over now."

Yeah he should've known by this late stage in spinoff stories that it's never just 'over now'. Demo was drunk enough not to care about this but felt like a quick evil laugh none the less, creeping out his fellow REDs to the extent they backed off as far as possible. Actually they went so far they met up with Heavy and Sniper, who had recovered from their small fright to an extent.

Point is that's why the Demoman was the only merc to bear witness to Scout and Soldier charging through the garage and taking Teleporter One to the distant city, and he figured he should have a lie down because he could've sworn they had capes on.

Capes that looked like they might've simply been ripped from one of Heavy's shirts. Hm.

…

Maybe he could go blow something up. That'd be better.

~CITY ONE~

Soldier and Scout made the classic mistake of jumping through a teleporter again, didn't they? Precious idiots.

One rattling, metallic smash against the door of resupply later, the mercs sprang to their heroic poses, which made them appear positively stupid. Negatively stupid? Well, as long as they're having fun.

"Where to first, Rocket Man?" Scout asked, all intense-like. The both of them threw some random awesome air kicks and karate chops in there.

"Wherever duty calls us. Heh heh, duty." Soldier had a little chuckle again, then adopted a rather belligerent expression. "AWAY WE GO, BAT BOY!"

And thus, the new super heroes stormed into the city. God help 'em.

Hey, uh, Scout here! Cuz this story's all about freakin' us, Falsie said me and Soldier could do the author's comment things. She said somethin' about not breakin' the forth wall too bad, but meh, what can ya do.

Thanks for readin'!