And so it is. This, I hope, will be better than my last TF2 fanfic, despite taking place in approximately the same universe.
/
A bird twittered in the morning air, dancing through the sky like a leaf on the breeze.
Then it exploded.
A flurry of rockets sailed through the air where it had been, trailing smoke and expletives.
"STUPID DOVES! What's wrong with a good old American eagle, I ask you?" yelled a helmeted American, reloading his rocket launcher and turning it on the enemy just inside the door. Before he could fire, though, a hail of lead bored through his skeleton and tossed him up against the wall, where he dropped to the ground.
The broad Russian holding the minigun in question laughed mockingly and took a bite out of a ham sandwich. "We make good team!" he yelled over his shoulder to the thin German, who replied in his own language.
Before he could finish speaking, his head exploded. The Russian's followed suit immediately.
Far away, a tall, long limbed Australian pulled back on his sniper rifle, replacing the two bullets he'd just expended. "Wave goodbye to yer heads, wankers," he mumbled to himself.
And then a knife appeared in his back. He dropped his weapon and fell down dead. Behind him, the smartly-dressed man appeared seemingly out of thin air, wiping flecks of the Australian's blood off of his suit.
He turned around and stepped out of the room, saying, "Your precious Jarate won't save you now!"
And then he caught fire.
The masked man wielding the offending flamethrower stepped up to the burning Frenchman and decapitated him with a fire axe wrapped in barb wire. Turning around, he barely had enough time to ready his flamethrower again before a small glowing cylinder bounced off his face and exploded.
A black man stepped out of the shadows with a sword on his shoulder and a grenade launcher at his side. "Didn't you see the bloody bomb?" he said mockingly in a Scottish accent. He took a swig from a brown bottle.
The bottle shattered as a baseball passed through it. He dropped it and lifted his sword, only to be knocked in the face with a baseball bat. He fell to the ground and the wielder of the bat pulled out a short shotgun and fired both barrels at him.
The Boston youth looked down the barrels and grinned. "Oh, sorry, I didn't mean to hit ya'. Oh wait, yes I did." He turned around and ran outside.
A hail of bullets and explosions erased all trace of him.
At the other end of the courtyard, a short, stocky Texan reloaded the rocket bays of his sentry turret. His task complete, he jumped back up onto the dispenser behind him and rested his feet on the Sentry's barrel. He looked at a readout device.
All respawn machines functioning at full capacity, just as they were when he had built them at the request of his boss in 1960.
His BLU clone's devices were working just as well.
He looked around. Nobody. He went back to the display on the readout device.
There was a loud sparking noise. He looked up. There was a radio-like apparatus suckered onto his inactive sentry, emitting sparks. He stood up and knocked off the device with a wrench, and then dodged to the side just in time to escape the knife scything down through the air at his right shoulder. The weapon missed and the Spy wielding it became visible. The Sentry gun beeped, indicating it had acquired its target.
The BLU Spy had just enough time to mumble, "Merde," before the rotating barrels of the sentry plugged him with enough bullets to blast him against the wall.
Unfortunately, it was at that exact moment that the teleporter underneath him activated and disgorged the RED Scout, swinging his baseball bat, and displaced the Spy with Sapper in hand. The Sapper sparked once before disappearing.
"That ain't never happened before," said the Engineer curiously. The Scout turned around.
"What are you talkin' about, Engy?" he asked.
The Engineer didn't have time to reply before the teleporter exploded, knocking him off his feet. When he got up a moment later, he saw that the sentry and dispenser were both inactive. Not destroyed, but inactive.
He turned on a radio transceiver carried by all team members. "Did anyone else feel that?" he asked.
"Ja," replied the Medic. "Mein Medigun is broken. What has happened?"
"I think probably the BLU Spy accidentally disrupted the transfer matrix. Aside from that, he got sent through the wrong way. The entrance was never supposed to reconstitute matter-"
"Okay, okay, we get it, smart kid. Frenchie screwed something up. What does it mean?" asked the Soldier. "In English, please."
"It means everything more complicated than these radios within about a mile radius of all RED network hubs-" He coughed. "Spawn points, is now useless."
"Merde. Ze disguise kit is ruined." The Spy could be heard breaking something.
"That includes the hubs themselves. We won't be able to respawn until I get them fixed. So nobody die until-"
"What about them Mann brothers?" asked the Sniper. "Aren't they being kept alive by machines?"
Engineer stopped for a moment. Before he could continue, an announcement came over the loudspeaker system.
"All Team members, gather outside your forts immediately." The Administrator coughed. "The Mann Family immortality machines have spontaneously deactivated. We are going to officially terminate your employment."
Scout swallowed loudly, and then walked out front, uncharacteristically slowly. Engineer followed.
In the courtyard between the two forts, both the RED and BLU teams assembled, looking at their opposite counterpart across the arena's moat. The exception was the RED Spy, who stood smoking a cigarette nonchalantly. His opposite number hadn't respawned before everything shut down.
The Administrator and her assistant, Miss Pauling, were already present. RED Scout thought back on the time he had spent employed by Redmond Mann.
Come to think of it, he couldn't remember how long it had been. He knew it had been a long time, but it couldn't have been that long. None of them looked any older than the day they signed up.
The Administrator looked at each one of them. She rubbed her temples briefly and then started to talk.
"We are gathered here today, yadda, yadda, yadda, skip a bit, rest in peace. Now enough mourning. As I'm sure you're aware, your eminent employers Redmond and Blutarch Mann passed away about an hour ago. As your job description is kill one or the other of them, this renders your employment redundant. I've already taken your names off the books, but there is one other matter that needs to be attended to in person."
"You've no doubt heard the rumors flying through your respective teams that the other team are clones of yourselves. This is true. Engineer and Medic were paid extra to arrange it."
Several team members shot surprised or nasty looks at their respective Medic or Engineer.
"You both believe with absolute certainty that you are the originals. This was also intentional. However, now that your contracts are terminated, we can't afford to have two of all of you running around. This was planned for. The clones have a self-destruct gene encoded into their DNA, which is activated by radio waves at a certain frequency. Miss Pauling?"
Miss Pauling shuffled through a sheaf of papers in her hands and came out with a tiny remote control, no larger than the palm of the Administrator's hand. "I'm going to press this button, and half of you are going to die. The other half can go back to whatever you did before this," said the Administrator, holding up the device.
"Goodbye, gentlemen. And thank you for your service." She pressed the button.
The BLU Team jumped slightly, and then collapsed to the ground. Miss Pauling removed a clipboard from the sheaf of papers and passed it to the Administrator, who began writing.
She looked up for a moment, at the dazed RED Team. "Well? The door's open, and your last paycheck is already in your accounts." She waved a bony hand at them. "Shoo. I have paperwork that needs filling out." She started writing again.
As one, the RED Team turned to the fence door next to them and filed out silently.
/
The plane taking the team back to their cities of origin was surprisingly quiet and comfortable.
Still, a lot of the team members were slightly incensed at Medic and Engineer.
"Gentlemen. I believe that this is a horrible breach of our privacy. Those… things, that you made out of us, they knew everything we did, yes?" said the Spy angrily.
The Medic retorted, "Zhey did not just have your memories, zhey had your personalities as well. Zhey would not have willingly shared anything zat you would not. Zhey were, in fact, you. Except blue."
"And I'd like to know how exactly you managed that. Last time I checked nobody had scooped out my brain and stuck it in a jar." The Soldier mimed exactly this action as he spoke.
"Memory implants from the respawners," answered the Engineer. "It wasn't difficult to save a copy of the file and transfer it to the clones. And look at the bright side: This way, we know we didn't kill anyone, really."
"Ha. Zhis is really a load off of our consciences, engineer." The Heavy laughed sarcastically. "Most of us were some type of killer before being recruited. Nine more over and over again would have made no difference."
"Hudduh! Hah whoosh hah aheh hoo hurr, heh heh heh!" The Pyro, sitting in the corner seat, appeared to be making paper snowflakes, and was still wearing his mask. "Heh ahoo hudduh hudda hud."
"I rest my case." Heavy gestured to Pyro, who chuckled and mimed hacking at something with an axe.
"On the bright side," interjected the Sniper, "Now we get to see our families again. I barely remember the last time I talked to mum."
"This is true," said the Scout, pointing his baseball bat at Sniper. "My brothers are still probably just as annoying as they used to be, but I've honestly missed my mother over the last… uh… does anyone know how long it's been?"
"Nah," answered Demoman. "Probably jus' a year or so. I mean, you're still twenty-something, and Medic is still fifty-something."
The speaker blared, and they jumped. "Austin, Texas. Engy, there'll be a Mann Co. car outside waiting to take you from here to Bee Cave." The pilot was Australian, like most of Mann Co.'s employees. He sounded larger than the Sniper, but not as much so as Saxton Hale, the Australian Chuck Norris.
Engy stood up. "Well, goodbye everybody. Maybe we'll meet again sometime." He picked up his suitcase and disembarked.