The gondola brought Snake up the roof another building, this one much higher up in the mountains. The air was thinner and colder (and a damp tanktop and no shoes was definitely not the most comfortable choice of attire here), but Snake had no problem with altitude. He noted the rectangular posts sticking up at regular intervals all over the roof and put his infrared goggles on. One easy laser maze later, he was through the door, down and elevator, and in a building with the exact same ungodly design as the one he had just left.
Groaning silently, he waited just inside the elevator door until the two nearby guards walked off, then slipped out and began looking around. He really wished these doors were labelled. If experience told him anything, Metal Gear 2 (which could actually be the Metal Gear he had been sent to destroy in the first place, not an inexplicable second one) was in a hangar. But which door led to the hangar?
Not this one. This one contained a slacking-off officer who blurted out, "Metal Gear 2 is seven times more powerful than Metal Gear 1" when Snake held him up.
So there really are two Metal Gears here! Snake thought. "Where is Metal Gear 1?" he demanded. His superiors for this mission, whoever they were, seemed to think it was at the bottom of the nonspecific body of water along with that boat Snake had sunk - but Snake was sure that wasn't true. The only Metal Gear on that boat had been four non-functioning models, too small to do anything even if modified.
The officer didn't answer; Snake advanced on him, Beretta M92F aimed threateningly between his eyes. "What happened to Metal Gear 1?"
The officer still didn't answer; Snake grabbed him and choked him out. No need to waste bullets on this useless man.
In the next room that contained something even remotely interesting, Snake found yet another hostage. Although there was no way the hostage could escape or even leave the room, at least right now, Snake still cut the rope around his wrists so he could at least be slightly more comfortable.
"Thanks for your help," the hostage said.
"Do you know anything about Metal Gear 1 or Metal Gear 2?" Snake asked. The prisoner just gave him a blank look. Maybe some of these guys really only did know one phrase in English.
Moving on, Snake picked up Card 6 in an otherwise empty room, some antidote (to what? Snake could barely read the label) in another otherwise empty room, and located another elevator, which took him back to the roof.
Some infrared lasers, a gondola trip, some more lasers, and another elevator ride later, Snake was in a building that seemed to consist mostly of zig-zagging hallways.
He located another hostage. As he cut his ties, Snake repeated the question he had posed to the earlier prisoner.
"What is Metal Gear?" the hostage said, confused, and added apologetically, "I have never heard of it."
"Hm."
Snake left the confused hostage and found the elevator. Back to the roof. Lasers, gondola… but at the end of the line was something strange: a castle. A large, stone, quasi-medieval castle in the middle of the mountains. It looked old, but not otherwise bad - in fact, it was quite impressive. Just… not at all what Snake had expected. Maybe the dungeon had been retrofitted as a hangar?
As he advanced into the castle, his radio beeped. "Lieutenant," a female voice said, "Nick is coming to us ahead of you."
"So Myer really was able to escape from his captors, eh?" Snake said, "By the way, is this Jennifer?"
"Follow him," was all Jennifer(?) said. Snake grumbled. It was like almost everyone in this op had collectively decided to pretend that he was mute.
Snake quickly found that the castle had been retrofitted with elevators, and rode one down as far as it would go - three floors. In a room not far from where the elevator let off, he found an enemy officer who said, upon noticing the gun pointed to his head, "The commander holds the key to this secret weapon."
"Secret weapon…" Snake said, "you mean Metal Gear? Where is the commander?" The officer just looked at him defiantly. Snake knocked him out and left.
In the hallway was a guard, so Snake ducked into another room that contained a prisoner who, like before, said that he knew nothing about Metal Gear upon being asked.
The next elevator he found went down another floor, so at least Snake was still making progress… assuming his theory about Metal Gear 1 or 2 being stored in the dungeon was correct. By his estimate, he was now at the ground floor. There were no guards, strangely enough, although there were plenty of crates. Unfortunately, none of them had any writing on them, so Snake had no idea what was in them. Hopefully nothing important, since they were very securely put together.
He went through a door and into a narrow hallway. There were some security cameras installed here, although not very well, and Snake was able to exploit their blind spots and slip by. The guards weren't as easy - they needed to be taken out. Fortunately, they were either pretty unobservant or all harbored a deeply passive-aggressive grudge against their comrades. There was also an inexplicably flooded section.
I hope this doesn't mean that the dungeon is flooded, too, Snake thought as he waded through the water, going around the suspicious-looking floating metal balls. He was pretty sure that the Metal Gear(s) he had been sent in to investigate and destroy were not aquatic.
At the other end of the hallway, he found what looked like their armory. All the crates in here were still sealed, but a few of them had items sitting on top of them. He walked towards the nearest one and rrrrumble!
A wide hole opened up in the floor. Snake just barely managed to jump to the side in time. He peered over it - it looked like, for whatever reason, the only thing below this room was a very deep pit - and wondered if that was an intentional trap or if this castle was in more disrepair than he originally thought. Watching his step now, he went and picked up items.
First he got Card 5. Good. Next he got ammo. Then he got - boots. They were just his size, too, and new. And dry. He gratefully put them on.
Seriously, the fact that they had sent him in with no shoes was just… bizarre. This whole op was just one absurdity after another, wasn't it…?
He passed through the hallway again, then took a different door, which lead through another hallway. It was much the same as the other one, except less security cameras and more inexplicable flooding.
The room this hallway emptied into actually had guards in it, which slowed Snake down a bit but was otherwise perfectly passable. These guards were dressed slightly differently from the ones he'd seen so far - they were clad in a rich blue. Snake wondered why the enemy had so many different uniforms, and why the soldiers all the way back in the first area had not been wearing shirts. He passed through a room with no guards, but nails on the floor (not his problem now), and took an elevator. Unfortunately, this one brought him straight to the third floor. Snake sighed.
I wish I could just call someone and have them lecture me about local animals or the items in my inventory, Snake thought as he moved slowly through a circular hallway, careful to stay in the soldiers' blind spots. Or anything, really. I just want to talk to someone…
He slipped into a closet, closing the door silently behind him. The lack of radio support was really starting to wear on him, although it was definitely exacerbated by the lack of cigs. He lingered in there for a minute, waiting for the footsteps just outside to pass, then picked up a directional microphone and stepped back into the hallway.
He found a bulletproof vest in another room. He put it on, which didn't feel too pleasant since his tank top was still wet. But it had been a while since he'd been ambushed, so it almost seemed like he was due.
He backtracked through the hallway and took the last door. Another hallway, although that was just what you expected from old castles, wasn't it? This one was the same as the others until about halfway through, when the ceiling suddenly became so low that Snake had to crawl to get under it - and it was in a water section, so that saw the return of the scuba gear that he had almost felt ridiculous for picking up in the first place. Hmm… the oxygen in the tank was close to running out. Hopefully he wouldn't need it again after this.
Anyway, removing the grates blocking his path didn't cause the ceiling to collapse, so Snake made it out of the strange little hallway just fine, exiting into an empty room with large columns in it. It probably would have been very impressive with some rugs and tapestries and suits of armor and whatever else they put in castles. On the other side of the room were the doors to yet another elevator, which Snake took up. At this point, he was hoping he was wrong about the dungeon thing.
Jennifer(?) called again as he was exiting the elevator. "I found the plans for Metal Gear 2," she said.
"What about Metal Gear 1?" Snake said, "are they the same thing?"
She ignored him, because of course. "The enemy commander's going to launch nuclear missiles all over the world."
"That's why I need to know about Metal Gear 1!"
"Hurry up!" She closed the frequency. Snake scowled.
He entered a nearby room and found another useless layabout officer, of whom he demanded, "Where is your commander?"
"Our commander is invulnerable," the officer said indignantly as he raised his hands in surrender, "no weapons can harm him."
Snake knocked him out and left, continuing down the wide hallway. Part of the floor crumbled away as he got close - this was probably why he hadn't seen too many guards on this floor. He checked the rooms nearby, which he could still reach by being careful; one contained a hostage who gave him the "Thanks for your help" line, and one contained Card 7.
He found another elevator, and took it down this time. Finding the commander may be a better bet than finding Metal Gear 2… and Metal Gear 1, assuming that they were completely separate machines. (Seriously, why was no one acknowledging that Snake had not already destroyed the very Metal Gear he was sent here for?)
The radio beeped as Snake wound through the twisting hallway. Jennifer again. "The commander is located on the top level of this base," she told him.
Snake turned around to go take the elevator back up, but in the minute or so he'd been away from it, a soldier had taken up residence in front of it. Snake couldn't see if this soldier was within eyesight of another soldier, so he decided to just keep moving through this floor instead of shooting him and potentially causing an alert. This castle had had so many elevators installed that he was sure to find another elevator soon.
After pushing some bricks out of the way to access a blocked-off hallway, Snake entered a dark room. After several moments of listening carefully for anyone in there, he took his flare gun back out and lit one. The room was unremarkable, although in particularly bad shape. Snake tread carefully lest the floor collapse again.
The dark room connected to three other rooms, one of which contained a hostage and one of which contained an officer with no good information, and one of which was another one of those out-of-place moving platform puzzles. Snake wondered how much these cost to install and maintain, and how they worked in the first place.
Snake moved across the platforms (or rather stood still and kept his balance at the platforms moved him) to check out two rooms - one had a prisoner who knew nothing about Metal Gear, and one had a door on the other side of it. It was blocked by those orange block things from way earlier, but those didn't take too long to pry off their tracks.
As soon as Snake stepped into the room, his eyes and nose started burning. Poison gas…! Thinking quickly, he removed his removed his bulletproof vest, slipped out of his tank top, and tied it around his lower face. At long last, the fact that it had never been able to fully dry out between water traps paid off! Although it didn't do much for his eyes, and it was hardly a gas mask. He had just bought himself enough time to attack the orange blocks with his knife.
Snake stumbled into the next room and gasped for breath. Damn. Hopefully he didn't do any permanent damage to his lungs. Or any more permanent damage, really. He looked around (blinking rapidly in an attempt to alleviate the pain in his eyes) as he resheathed his knife and put his tank top and bulletproof vest back on. One door in here, and he could just see another room around the corner. Still didn't hear any guards.
He opened the door with his foot, gun drawn. The man inside was lying on his side and was wearing that stupid orange jumpsuit Snake had seen about a million times. A hostage.
Snake crouched next to him and pulled out is knife to cut the rope. "Do you know where the-" His mouth went abruptly dry.
He saw the bomb before the 'hostage' spoke. "You have been trapped. Ha, ha, ha…"
Snake had barely made it out the door before it exploded. He looked around quickly for any guards alerted by the noise… none. He looked back at the ruined room, coated with what had once been the insides of a man. A suicide bomber…
There wasn't much else for Snake to do besides shrug it off and round the corner. No guards here (must have been why none came), but plenty of nails scattered about and sticking up. Snake walked right over them. The hallway narrowed, and Snake noticed the vertical notches on the walls.
A trap? Snake wondered. He took his now-practically-useless oxygen tank and rolled it over the invisible line on the floor between two notches. As it passed them, spears shot out of the wall and embedded themselves in the opposite notch. Snake nodded to himself absently. He was willing to bet that the tips were coated in some kind of poison.
He rolled through them, moving too fast for the spears to actually hit him. He continued down the hallway, only to hit a dead end. But something about it seemed… off. Looking at it more closely, he saw that the brickwork appeared much more recent than the rest of the castle; it must have been put here specifically to block access to something. And if something's access was blocked, that probably meant that that was exactly where Snake wanted to go.
He tapped the wall and found it to be thinner than the other ones, so he was reasonably sure that a small amount of plastic explosives wouldn't be too detrimental to the rest of the castle. He placed them, retreated to the nearest corner, hoped that there weren't a bunch of soldiers on the immediate other side of the wall, and set them off.
He ran through the hole as soon as the dust settled enough to see if the coast was clear. There weren't any guards in the immediate area, although he did hear a bit of commotion from the other side of the wall next to him. He supposed that there were guards in the next hallway over who were now on alert. Figuring they were on their way, he slipped into an empty room and pulled out the directional mic he'd picked up a little while ago. He aimed it at the wall, intending to keep an ear on them, so to speak.
He must have pointed it at the wrong wall, though, because instead of soldiers on alert he just heard someone making casual conversation. "The commander's only weak spot is the soles of his feet," they said.
"Soles of his feet?" Snake muttered. That was pretty strange. What kind of man was he…? He shifted the directional mic over to the proper wall and waited until the enemy soldiers shrugged off the large hole in the wall and wandered off. He then exited the room and kept moving forward.
He encountered some more spear traps, but right after them he found another elevator, so that was good. He rode it down for what seemed like forever - looked like this one lead straight to the bottom floor of the castle. He rubbed his eyes tiredly. Hadn't Jennifer said that the commander was on the top floor? Maybe he should just go back to hoping he was right about the hangar.
The elevator opened up in a spacious foyer, with red carpeting down the middle, imposing columns, and and large statues of muscular marble men wrestling snakes. Snake almost smiled at that. He supposed that those statues would have taken on a very different meaning if the enemy commander were somehow aware of who he was.
He advanced cautiously, hiding behind the columns as he went. There were a few guards milling about, but he could see the explosives strapped around their torsos - and he really didn't want to deal with any more suicide bombers tonight. One of them was walking along the edge of the room, towards Snake, although he hadn't seen him yet… Snake circled around in front of the column and passed by the suicide bomber, using one of the statues as cover this time.
As he crept in front of the statue, there was an sinister click. Snake looked up just in time to see the strangled snake's jaws opening up wide on a hinge. An R/C missile rocketed out of its maw. Snake quickly ran to the other side of the room, baiting the missile into exploding into the side of the one of the other statues. This caught the attention of the suicide bombers, who began jogging towards Snake.
Mentally swearing, Snake sprinted down the middle of the room. There were explosions behind him, although he didn't know if they were from missiles or men. He ran into a side room, locked the door behind him, and pried the orange blocks in front of the other door in the room off their tracks before edging out into the hallway beyond. He saw a guard, but he didn't seem to concerned about all the booming coming from the foyer. Snake slipped behind his back easily.
He took the elevator up, although this one didn't go all the way to the top. While he was riding it, his radio beeped.
"Lieutenant," Myer said.
"Myer?"
"It was careless of me. I, uh…" he trailed off. There was something oddly chilling about his tone of voice.
"Myer, what's going on?" Snake said into the transceiver. No answer. "Myer! Myyyyyeeeer!"
Still no answer. Snake got off the elevator and swept the room with the Beretta's muzzle. Nothing, no one. He approached the nearest door, hoping that it wouldn't be another suicide bomber this time.
Opening it, he saw a man in an orange jumpsuit lying face-down. Snake didn't lower his gun - while this hostage looked to be in pretty bad shape, there still might have been a bomb attached to him.
As Snake approached, his foot knocked a keycard out of the way, sending it clattering in the direction of the wall. The hostage looked up at the noise. It was Nick Myer, give or take a few teeth.
"Myer?" Snake said, crouching next to him.
Myer coughed. Blood trickled from the corner of his mouth. "We have discovered that Jennifer is a spy," he mumbled.
"Jennifer? A spy?" Snake said, "no…"
Myer squinted at him through two black eyes. "A life support system is in Big Boss' room," he continued weakly.
Snake's eyes widened. "Big Boss? No! Big Boss is dead…"
"Lead him out, then attack," Myer said, then his head dropped to the ground. "Uh…" he sighed, then drew a breath - not a breath, but a death rattle…
Snake stared at him, processing all this. Big Boss? Big Boss was the enemy commander all along? Snake's former commanding officer and father- wait, no, that wasn't right. Snake's brow furrowed. He was getting confused for reasons beyond just what was happening here. Big Boss was dead, though, he was sure of that. Or was he? Was this just someone who took the name? Was it the real Big Boss, or…? Somehow it didn't seem so far-fetched that he had somehow escaped the self-destruction of Outer Heaven. Somehow, it…
And Jennifer was a spy? Snake would probably care more if he'd actually met her, or if she'd had any kind of real impact on his mission. Telling him that Big Boss was on the top floor may have been her way of leading him into a trap… but sometimes, going head-first into a trap was the only way to complete the mission objective.
So Snake was going to continue upwards. He picked up the keycard - Card 8 - on his way out.
He beelined for the elevator, except since all the doors looked the same he accidentally walked into an empty, unrelated room first. He picked up some smoke grenades there, then found the elevator and rode to the top floor.
He moved quickly through the hallway - the part right by the elevator had some guards that he just snuck around, but around there corner there were some kind of robot things. They were pretty much just machine guns mounted on metal boxes that moved around stiffly on their spindly legs. The technology wasn't quite there yet, it seemed. Apparently their target-finding AI left much to be desired, because Snake just walked by them.
The rest of the hallway was completely empty, and at the end of the hallway, as he stood just before a door, he heard a familiar voice over a PA system…
"This is Big Boss."
"Big Boss!" Snake yelled. "How are you still alive?!"
He continued as though he hadn't even heard Snake, which maybe he hadn't. "You destroyed Metal Gear 1 and made me a cyborg," he said.
"Metal Gear 1…" Snake said, "this whole time, did that really refer to the TX-55?" That only made things more confusing… "And I didn't make you a cyborg!" Snake added, "I saw your metal arm at Outer Heaven - you already were one! You were just hiding it…"
"Now I want revenge," Big Boss said.
"And I want to be freed from these nightmares!" Snake burst out, and kicked open the door in front of him.
And there Big Boss was, just the same as Snake remembered him - a bitter old man with an eyepatch and a perpetual cold glare. He was wearing a blue uniform (which incidentally looked a hell of a lot nicer than what everyone else here was wearing) and didn't particularly look like a cyborg.
"Big Boss…" Snake breathed. Big Boss narrowed his eye and pulled out a submachine gun.
What followed was a battle of epic proportions, such that my meager writer skills cannot possibly relate it to you, the reader. Suffice to say much of it involved Big Boss chasing Snake around the room as he tried to take cover behind one of two large columns, and both of them firing submachine guns at each other. Imagine Yakkity Sax was playing in the background, if you think that's funny, although a more appropriate song would a bombastic, fast-paced, intense track appropriately titled 'Big Boss'.
Snake's bullets seemed to just be bouncing off of Big Boss without doing any damage, and in fact, they weren't. "Ha, ha, ha!" Big Boss laughed loudly, "I have no weak point you can penetrate." And then, in front of Snake's incredulous eyes, Big Boss suddenly swelled in size, his uniform ripping as his height shot up and his muscles ballooned to almost cartoonish proportions. Snake could now see that the parts of his body previously covered by his uniform were all comprised of shiny blue metal without even the slightest dent from the several magazines Snake had emptied into him.
"What the hell…" Snake mumbled.
A lesser man probably would have given up right then and there, but Solid Snake was no such man. His sudden bolt from the room was not be confused with giving up - he was just trying to buy himself some time. He remembered that conversation he had overheard about the soles of Big Boss' feet; if he could injure them, he could at least prevent him from moving, and possibly exsanguinate him too. But he had used all of his landmines back at the bridge, so he would have to use a more roundabout method… besides, Snake knew even before he heard the heavy, stealth-be-damned footsteps behind him that Big Boss wasn't about to let him just run away.
He slid into cover behind a column just before Big Boss rounded the corner. Big Boss slowed, obviously looking around for Snake. Snake knew he had only seconds before Big Boss found him - after all, it had been this man who taught him how to hide like this in the first place. Snake used these valuable few seconds to throw a couple smoke grenades his way.
They detonated, filling the room with smoke. Snake could still just see Big Boss' silhouette, immediately turned towards Snake's hiding spot, when he shouldered his R/C missile launcher and fired one off without bothering to steer.
As large and made of metal as Big Boss now was, the full force of an R/C missile exploding into his chest was enough to bowl him over. He hit the floor with a reverberating clang. There was a split second of silence before Big Boss laughed, as if to say, "You really think that will harm me?"
Not that, Snake thought as the smoke began to clear, but this will. And he threw a grenade directly at the exposed soles of Big Boss' feet.
BOOM!
Whatever Snake had been expecting, it wasn't for Big Boss to explode as soon as his feet were damaged. But that was what happened. No final words, no expositing about anything. Snake didn't even have time to reflect on this before an alarm started blaring.
"WARNING! METAL GEAR 2 IS OPERABLE. PERSONNEL ARE TO GO TO THE UNDERGROUND SHELTER."
"Shit!" Snake swore, immediately running back towards the room Big Boss had been hanging out in. If there was one place in this whole castle that would have a direct passage to Metal Gear's hangar, it was here. He crashed through a door that he previously hadn't paid much attention to, and almost smacked into an attractive ginger woman in a tight, knee-length red dress.
"Jennifer?" Snake blurted out, backing up.
"Thanks, Snake," she said, smiling at him.
"What?" Snake said, pointing his gun at her. "Myer said you were a spy. Where is Metal Gear?"
"You can go into the secret plant from this door," she said, jerking her head towards the other door in the room.
Snake, after hesitating for half a moment, backed towards the door she had indicated, still keeping his gun trained on her. Her smile widened - it wasn't malicious or anything, and she genuinely didn't seem to care that she was considered a traitor - and she raised one arm in what she probably considered a goodbye wave and what Snake definitely considered a fucking Nazi salute.
Snake put that room behind him quickly.
The door lead out to the roof of the castle, where another gondola was waiting. Snake stared at it. It could be a trap. Just then, his radio beeped.
"Snake, follow Jennifer's instructions on entering secret plant," the chopper pilot said.
"So I can trust Jennifer?" Snake said. Had Myer been mistaken or lying? Or was Jennifer a triple agent who was ultimately on their side?
"Use copter missiles to blow up the wall to enter. The spot is marked by a flare. You must not fail."
"Right," Snake said. He assumed the wall was on the other side of the short gondola ride, where there was… a wall.
Snake had only ever come up with two flares, both of which he had already used in lieu of the flashlight he never found, so he threw a smoke grenade at the wall and hoped the chopper pilot got the message. He did. One helicopter-to-bunker missile later, Snake was inside a building with red interior scaffolding and green floors.
"WARNING!" the PA system blared, "THE FIRST ATTACK POINTS ARE NEW YORK, TOKYO, AND MOSCOW!"
He ran through the winding narrow hallways, glad that all the enemy soldiers and scientists had already retreated to their fallout shelters. He came out in a small room overlooking a large hangar, which contained one Metal Gear, a hulking olive-green monstrosity of metal and weaponry.
"Damn!" Snake said to himself. He didn't have enough time to go back down and figure out how to approach Metal Gear directly. He looked around. He was separated from the hangar by bulletproof glass, but there was a vent… maybe it lead into the hangar? Snake quickly shot the cover off with his handgun and pulled out his R/C missile launcher again.
He fired one into the vent and steered it using the tiny video screen attached to the launcher. When it approached the first grate, he got a brief glimpse of the hangar and the top of Metal Gear's 'head' before the missile blew the grate clean off the wall.
Snake took another good look at Metal Gear. It was heavily armored, and attacking the radome would be pointless since there was no pilot to open the cockpit. However, there was a glowing yellow eye-looking thing that looked important. Snake figured he would aim for that and hope for the best. (This really wasn't a very good mission.)
It took several missiles steered delicately through the vent and into Metal Gear's 'eye' before it suddenly stopped shining. The alarm stopped blaring. After a second, Metal Gear settled into its huge armored legs like a bird going to sleep.
"It shut down…" Snake said. His eyebrows drew together. What was this bizarre feeling of finality - like he had just completed the mission, like this was when the credits should roll? Metal Gear wasn't destroyed. He still wasn't sure if this was the only Metal Gear they had, and he had never found out why they were shipping scale models of Metal Gear, or where they were shipping to, or where they were shipping from, because where on Earth was this place? Why had Big Boss been here? What was up with Jeniffer? What the hell had happened with Turner? Why the hell had Big Boss been here, and as a cyborg to boot?! What the hell-
Solid Snake (not his real name) awoke suddenly.
He stared at the ceiling of the Nomad for almost a minute before raising his arm and covering his face with one hand, closing his eyes again. He was trying to recall the details of his dream even as they slipped away from him like water flowing out of cupped hands. He'd been a young man again, back with FOXHOUND…
"Oh, you're up, Snake?" came Otacon's voice from nearby.
"Mm."
"You were talking in your sleep again. Sounded like you were having a really weird dream."
"You have no idea…"
Yes, an "it was all a dream" ending. That's the payoff for all those references to canon I made throughout the fic. It's also literally the only thing that could explain away Snake's Revenge's plot holes.
Anyway, hope you enjoyed. Normally this is the part where I thank my readers for all their support, but no one reviewed, faved, or followed. It's not too late to review or fav, though. Especially review.
I'm saying you should review. PRAISE ME. CRITICIZE ME!
