Author's note: When a penpal promises to tell you something interesting, don't trust them. It's probably not going to be that interesting.
Have you ever read one of those fics where an OC (usually a self-insertion) either has the team come to "our world" or find themselves transported to the Australium-saturated lands of TF2? Here you go!
Squeaker: A young child who's favourite button on the keyboard is "v". They will usually press this button when they are playing TF2. Through no fault of their own, their pre-pubescent voices become some of the most irritating sounds you may every have the dubious pleasure to hear on the internet. What is their fault, however, is their unwillingness to press buttons other than the aforementioned "v" key to communicate. For completely understandable reasons, these squeakers tend to be avoided by many players, even those of their own age.
[The rest of this entry was anti-spycrab propaganda, and nobody wants to look at that.]
"Hey guise, I kinda hafta go now; sorry. See ya doods later kay?" BLU was losing. The REDs only needed to keep the point for thirty more seconds before they won. Timothy, who "all you guise" can call "Timmy" knew he had to cut his losses for the sake of his win-loss ratio. Even though he was the only one who counted how many times he won or loss, it made him feel better about bragging to all two of his friends that he still has yet to lose a single game of Team Fortress two. This announcement never failed to make his peers look to him in awe and have them confirm he was still actually playing the game.
Before he could reminisce on his friends' adulatory cries of, "Wow, Timmy, you're still playing TF2? Waaaaaaaaaow", he noticed an advertisement appear on his mother's laptop screen.
"Are you the BEST TF2 player? Get HATS for FREE now!" claimed the advert, flashing in bright colours. While most would simply ignore the potentially malicious advertisement or read the fine print at the bottom saying "We are not responsible for stolen accounts or any stupid thing that happens to you if you click this ad, lolololololol", our ambitious little Timothy clicked the ad.
The computer seemed to stall for a moment, then the screen promptly turned black.
It stayed that way for what Timmy considered a significant amount of time, so Timmy clicked randomly with the mouse. Nothing happened.
He tried the ~magical~ combination we all know as "ketruhl alt de-leet" (or "Ctrl-Alt-Del"). That also failed to procure a result.
After giving the computer the type of glare only a child being denied by something immune to screaming could make, he decided to give the electronic device a good, hard whack.
After this too failed, our diminutive protagonist called upon his final resort.
"MOOOOOOooooOoOoOoOoOooooOOOoooOM!" he yodeled at the top of his lungs.
He waited for a response. There was neither the customary answer of "WHAT?" nor the sound of feet pounding the staircase to come to his aid. In fact, the only sound he heard was his high-pitched display of vocalization echo around him.
Once he realized this, he did something he hadn't done for a full seven hours. He looked away from the computer. What he saw utterly stunned him.
He was no longer in his house. In fact, he was no longer in any place he recognized. His desk and chair were now on top of a sand-coloured plateau, surrounded by other sand-coloured plateaus.
Now that he was no longer distracted by the laptop on his desk, he realized that it had gotten quite warm; swelteringly hot, actually, to the point some people would call boiling. He looked up unto the cloudless sky and saw the sun, bright and high above him. It was at that moment he realized that he hadn't gone outside once all weekend.
Timothy had no idea what to do. He was lost, seemingly teleported to the middle of hot, sandy, rocky nowhere. Alone.
Understandably, he began to cry.
After about a minute of crying, he found that he could not sincerely shed another tear. Whether this was because of dehydration or a sudden onset of apathy, he could not tell. It was unlikely that he would have been capable of distinguishing the two anyways. He stared at the unresponsive device before him for a few minutes before he closed it. He sat there, nearly catatonic, wondering what to do.
A few more minutes in the sun was all it took for the heat to feel far too oppressive for little Timmy to bear, and the child vainly tried to hide in the shade of his desk. He thought that if he'd stayed put long enough, his mother would eventually find him. She was a mother, after all, and mothers always know where to find their children, even when they've been mysteriously teleported into the middle of nowhere. He closed his eyes.
He woke up an indiscernible amount of time later without realizing that he'd fallen asleep. Someone was talking, and from under the desk, the child could see a pair of boots, and attached to those boots, a pair of pants. Something about the voice sounded familiar, but young Timothy was too delirious to recognize it or really tell what it was saying.
He felt rubbery arms pick him up, and, vision blurry, he saw his laptop and desk shrinking away from him. That laptop was important and he didn't want it to go away. He heard a high-pitched keening sound, only slightly aware that he was the one making it as he reached for his precious possession.
As if beckoned, the device made its way to his arms and he hugged it close to him and passed out again.
Pyro entered the building, carrying the small, heat-stricken child over his shoulder. Engineer was walking in front of him, holding the boy's device. The kid had nearly dropped it almost immediately after Engi had handed it to him. Engi would probably take a look at it soon. It didn't look like a teleporter. The kid was still unconscious as Pyro carried him in. Pyro looked at him.
Scrawny kid, a few years old at most. Blond hair. Soft. Probably pampered. His clothes seemed odd. Different texture. Odd colours. Reddened skin; sunburnt. Still sweaty; not too dehydrated. Flammable, but that went for a lot of things. Might not wake up in a while. Weak.
Pyro decided that it would be a good idea to get the kid some water.
Pyro wondered how the kid had gotten there, slowly dying under a random desk on a sandy plateau, and what the child's presence would mean for the future.