Author's Note
I feel proud of myself. I've quit procrastinating and finally posted the first chapter of this most wondrous of parodies. To those who think that this first chapter has nothing to do with Metal Gear, I apologize. I felt the need to give the story some setup. I should get to the actual Metal Gear parody-ing (is that even a word?) by Chapter 3 if not Chapter 2. If you squint really hard at it, there might even be some Metal Gear references in this chapter, too.
Don't expect more updates soon. This took six months to happen, so it could be awhile before anything else gets done. *prods co-writers with a stick*
Oh, and Fish refuses to quit procrastinating, so there is a part where the character Fish is writing as is supposed to say something, but doesn't. You'll know it when you see it.
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Doug didn't even need to open his eyes to roll over and hit the snooze button on his alarm clock. It was a daily ritual so engrained in him that he would set his alarm for ten minutes before he actually needed to get up instead of just waking up the first time it went off. When the beeping didn't stop, Doug hit the snooze button harder, but the noise continued. He blinked sleepily a few times and looked around for the source of it. Looking at his bedside table, he realized that the noise was coming from his cell phone. He grabbed the phone quickly and flipped it open, wondering who would be calling him this early in the morning.
"Hello?" he croaked groggily.
"Doug!" came the loud reply, "Where are you? The recruits are already here, and YOU'RE LATE! Get over here right now or I swear to God you're going to be fired."
Recognizing his secretary's voice, Doug laughed. "They wouldn't fire me. I've been here for too long."
"I'm not so sure about that," she said. She paused for a moment, and then whispered, "Your boss is sitting in your office, and the look on her face says that you're dead meat if you don't get over here soon."
"Shit, Denise, why didn't you tell me before?" he yelled into the phone. "Speaking of which, what time is it?" Doug asked.
"It's ten o'clock right now, and you're the deadest son of a bitch I've ever met if you aren't in here by ten thirty."
"Fine, fine. I'll be there," Doug sighed, glancing over at his alarm clock. Its screen was blank.
"You'd better be," Denise grumbled before hanging up on him.
Doug sighed again, set down his phone, and examined the alarm clock. He pulled on the cord, and when it offered no resistance, he realized that it had not been plugged in. He briefly remembered tripping over the thing on his way to bed and almost smacked himself for his stupidity. Doug rushed through his morning routine, barely having time to get his first cup of coffee before leaving for work.
When he reached his office, Doug gladly took the coffee Denise offered him, gulping it down quickly. Anticipating this, Denise already had another cup waiting for him by the time he finished the first one. Doug thanked her, picked up the stack of folders on the desk, and walked into his office. Inside, he found no one.
Confused, he poked his head out the door and asked Denise, "I thought you said my boss was waiting in my office. Where is she?"
Denise grinned. "I lied," she said mischievously. "I knew that would get you over here faster. I didn't lie about the new recruits waiting for you, though. I'll start sending them in now, whether you're ready for them or not."
Doug sighed. This was going to be a long day. "You'd better have more of that coffee ready soon, Denise. I can already tell I'm going to need it."
---
"So, Hannah, you want to be a…" Doug glanced down at the file in front of him, "a medic."
"Not just any medic…THE MEDIC!" she happily bounced in her chair, waving her arms in an erratic fashion. "You'll see…yes."
"Okay, then. Do you have any military experience?" Doug asked, even though he was pretty sure that she hadn't.
"Um…I went through like, a five year survival training camp thing set up by the military…I made it through six months, before the major kicked me out for borrowing body parts from my comrades…they didn't need them, really."
"Um…riiight… And what skills do you have that qualify you for this position?" Doug asked, mentally going through the list of interview questions he was supposed to ask.
"I have an excellent survival rate for my patients," Hannah replied, then muttered, "provided they have no morals," before continuing with, "and I have a really good sense of taste…and hearing. Please don't insult my mother."
Doug sat there in confusion for a few seconds before asking the next question. "So, what kinds of things do you like to do outside of work?" he asked hurriedly, wanting to finish this interview as quickly as he could.
"Do you really want to know?" Hannah asked, peering at him intently.
Doug sighed, irritated that he was required to get an answer. "Yes, I really want to know," he replied sarcastically, even though he couldn't care less what the recruits did in their free time. It was just one of the things he was required to ask about.
Not catching the sarcasm in his voice, Hannah replied cheerily, "Well, since you really want to know, (insert longwinded Hannah Zanzibar hamster response here)"
(insert Hannah's response here)
After Hannah left, Doug sighed yet again and looked down at the notes he had taken during the interview. At the bottom, he wrote a final comment: Recruit is rather strange.
---
Doug rubbed his eyes sleepily. This was, thank God, the last interview of the day. This day had been filled with so many people whose aspirations far outweighed their skills and intellect that Doug wanted to just go home. He really didn't want to deal with even one more of them. He chugged his latest cup of coffee, then pressed the button on his desk that would tell Denise to send in the next and final recruit. A few seconds later the door opened, and Doug mentally prepared himself to deal with one last idiot before heading home.
The interview did not have the best beginning. "Um…" Doug started, "Is there any particular reason that your file doesn't include a name?"
"Don' got one," the recruit shrugged. "Everybody just calls me Ambi, like Bambi, the Disney movie, without the B."
"Riiight…" Doug eyed Ambi for a second, but the recruit showed no signs of lying. "Okay, Ambi, do you have any previous military experience?" As with most of the recruits, he highly doubted that Ambi had any.
"Slept with one once," Ambi replied. Doug jerked upright in his seat. Ambi continued, reminiscing, "New Year's party, couple years ago. God, that was great."
"Um, okay," Doug mumbled, shocked at the direction this interview was going. He asked, almost afraid to do so, "So, what kinds of skills do you have that would qualify you for the position of heavy armaments?"
Ambi looked straight back at him, as if this were the Big Question, the most important one to answer well. In a confident voice, Ambi replied, "I can flip tanks."
Doug waited a moment to see what else the recruit would say, but when Ambi just sat there, he asked again, "Are there any other skills you'd like to add?"
The recruit stared at him. "I can flip tanks," Ambi said, accentuating every word. "Do I need any other skills?"
"Um, I guess not," Doug muttered. "Moving on, then. What do you do in your free time, Ambi?"
The recruit blushed timidly, a dramatic change from a few moments ago. Doug repeated the question, adding the fact that he was required to get an answer.
"I…"Ambi almost whispered, "I write."
Doug just stared for a few seconds. How was writing a hobby that anyone would be embarrassed about?
Misinterpreting his stare, Ambi muttered, "I know it's a silly hobby. I bet your other recruits probably lift weights or something like that. I probably seem like a sissy compared to them. I'm sorry."
"No! It's nothing like that," Doug said, trying to calm Ambi down. In truth, Doug thought that Ambi was, sad to say, one of the most promising heavy armaments recruits he had seen that day, minus the inferiority complex. "Writing is a fine talent. Besides, we don't look too much at a recruit's hobbies, unless those hobbies would negatively affect that recruit's performance in the field. For example, if the recruit used drugs in their spare time. Things like that."
Ambi looked up, confused. "Wouldn't a druggie just say they didn't do drugs when you asked them about it?"
Doug blinked a few times, then a grin broke out on his face, and he cracked up laughing. "I completely agree with you, kid," he chuckled, "but unfortunately, I don't write the interviews, I just give them." Despite how the interview had been going before, Doug had to admit that Ambi had brains as well as muscles. "Y'know, Ambi," Doug smiled, "I think that you may go far if you can just get over that inferiority thing. You're just weird enough to make it out there. You pass. Good luck with the field test next week."
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The following Friday came all too slowly for the recruits. They spent the week preparing themselves as best they could, restlessly wondering what trials the next test would bring.
Hannah was the first to arrive at the designated meeting place, an abandoned warehouse a few miles out of the city. Being so early wasn't a bad thing. It gave her time to take in her surroundings. If this was where the field test was going to happen, Hannah wanted to be sure she knew the layout of the place.
Just as Hannah finished exploring the building, she saw someone approaching the warehouse. From a distance, all she could tell was that the person coming towards her was extremely tall. As the person entered the warehouse, she recognized them as one of the recruits from the interview session. Unable to remember the recruit's name (no one talked much while waiting for their interviews) Hannah settled for a simple "Hey" in greeting.
The other recruit waved. "You're sure here early."
"Yeah. I had a surgery scheduled near here, and I got finished early, so I decided to just wait," Hannah replied. "I'm Hannah, by the way. What's your name?"
"Ambi."
"Hmm..." Inquisitive and tactless as she was, Hannah felt the need to ask, "That's a rather ambiguous name. So what gender are you anyway? It's hard to tell with all the layers you're wearing."
Before Ambi could reply, there was an exploding sound from outside the building. "I wonder what that was," Ambi mused calmly, wandering in the direction of the door, Hannah's question completely forgotten. Hannah, more than a bit less unfazed than Ambi, ran out the door to see what had happened.
Once outside, Hannah looked in the direction the sound of the explosion had come from and saw a teenage girl dusting ash off of her jeans. Everything around her was charred and black, but she seemed completely unaffected by the destruction. "Dammit! It didn't work! Again!" The girl angrily kicked a now horribly misshapen hunk of metal. What it had been before the explosion was impossible to tell, but it seemed to have been the cause of the explosion.
The girl turned and, for the first time, noticed that she was not alone. "Oh, hey! I guess I'm not the only one here, then. I hope this," she motioned towards the burnt area, "didn't bother you too much. I'm Ellen, by the way. Nice to meet you."
Ambi and Hannah both introduced themselves, and then they all settled in to wait for everyone else to show up, Ellen cradling her lump of metal, Hannah rechecking the supplies in her medic bag, and Ambi sitting silently, watching the other two.