Hi, folks! This is periferal's pseudo-cowriter, CuChulainnX19. Welcome to the first foray into the other half of our experiment, "many years ago" (from the perspective of those idiots in a canyon somewhere)...


Agent North Dakota exhaled and waited for the moment between heartbeats, then fired and fired again. Two more faceless—mercenaries? pirates? terrorists?—dropped to the ground, and South darted forward into the base. The Mantis was lighter than he liked, but it could get up to a good rate of fire in skilled hands, excellent for high-target-density operations.

"South, remember, I don't have eyes in there. Did you set your tracker?"

They hadn't found any signs as to the identities of the men and women or the organization they were fighting, save a few leftover emblems of Conatix Industries.

"I can watch out for myself, North," his sister responded, irritation as clear as the implication that she had not, in fact, set her motion tracker.

The Project was a far cry from fighting batarians in the Skyllian Verge, to be sure, but North had faith that their work still mattered. South, for her part, had her eyes on a nearer goal, and it appeared that this was one more time when the leaderboard would drive her to push herself too far, too fast—and just as that thought coalesced in his mind, the air was rent with sirens.

"So much for quiet," the violet ex-N6 muttered as he collapsed his rifle and dropped to the catwalk below his position, catching the two guards he landed behind by their helmets and knocking them out cold.

He met up with South quickly, blowing away several more goons with his Mantis as he jumped down to her level before shoulder-rolling into CQC to give another grunt some abdominal surgery with his Locust. The siblings moved as one from there, swapping weapons as necessary and carving unstoppably through their opponents until they found themselves alone on a landing pad, surrounded on all sides by a catwalk full of soldiers.
"I think I can take about fifty of 'em, how about you?" South asked.

"How about you save your jokes until we get out of this?" North retorted. He could try putting up a barrier dome. Hells, he might even be able to sustain it. But without extraction in sight, he would only be wasting energy, and without a connection to the command server, the risk to his implants would be astronomical for a very small chance that he'd be able to form the dome at all.

Then he saw the flicker of a dissolving tactical cloak on the catwalk, and the tables turned again.