Chapter 3: First Tests
The USS Exterminator
The uncomfortable silence that had settled on the ship was broken briefly after by the Engineer.
"Hey! boys! We got ou-," he said before looking down at the Spy's dead body.
"Engineer!" the Medic interjected,"you were too late. The Demoman here, the schiessekopf, killed the Spy."
The Demoman yelled something drunkeningly back in response, and the two began arguing.
"Aw, shucks, I ain't even gonna ask. I've had my share of the shenanigans and didn't care to come up to-"
"Yo, hard hat, get on with it!"
"Anyways, as I was going to work on this bucket o' rust, I built a dispenser-"
"Oh yeah, and you never do when I ask you..." the Scout muttered.
The Engineer ignored him and continued,"-and then when I was looking on the screen, I noticed a helluva lot of dots incomin'. They don't seem too friendly to me."
BLU Holding Center
All the tenants slowly filed into the room.
The Soldier waited for a brief moment, cleared his throat, and began to speak.
"Men, you are gathered here today for a very, very important meeting." Before the Scout could predictably tell him to get on with it, he continued.
"As you know, the authorities decided to move us here recently. But why?" He then proceeded to answer his own rhetorical question.
"They sent us here to keep us off something. Something big. They sent us here because they didn't want us in something."
"And if that isn't enough, they keep us penned inside this facility. There's something going on out there, something we should be doing. Yet they'll keep us in here until we rot, feeding us our own filth back to us and keeping us off!" A few others agreed with him, mostly about the "filth" comment on the food.
The others had come to oblige the Soldier in his insanity, partially because of their collected boredom, but now eyebrows were being raised; things being questioned.
The Soldier then softened up and bit, pulled out some papers, and threw them on to the table.
"This is it. They didn't the war to end."
The others looked on interestingly. The papers detailed how three RED Army members had mysteriously disappeared.
"Well, now, this is certainly a twist, but may I take the liberty of asking where and how you acquired these papers?" the Spy questioned.
The Soldier then told of how he had been exploring the facility and stumbled upon a few offices. Intrigued, he had busted his way inside, and when footsteps were heard approaching, ran off quickly with the most interesting ones.
"Now what do you want leetle team to do?" the Heavy said.
The Soldier went back into his speech mode.
"Men, this is no small discovery. With this, we can finally put an end to the bloody grinding stalemate. Win the war. Crush RED." He paused, then continued.
"The world has been under the heel of the companies for too long. It's time we got a fresh breath. That everyone will taste true American freedoms, know the value of it all. Even BLU has to go. Which is why we shouldn't be sitting on our asses here! We have a job to do!"
The last part caught the rest by surprise, which was best summed up by the Sniper,"Didn't take you for that type Soldier. But we all know you're serious about things, and that this has got to be something. So we'll follow in whatever mad scheme you got."
The Soldier grinned and continued,"That's what I want to hear. But don't get all sappy on me boys, because we haven't even started yet. Now here's how it will go."
The others listened intently to his plan. First, the Engineer would design some fancydohickywhajmacallit machinery and bust his way into the Armory. Next, they'd take the weapons. Spy'd sneak over to the Control Center, disable all the alarms and such, and make sure that, to the goddamn Announcer, it appeared all green lit. Then the Sniper would pick off all the guards in their assorted towers before any would notice communication with each other was offline and other things were going funny. Third, they'd all rush out and make a mad dash through all the BLU Security Personnel blocking their way and fight off to the dry dock, take whatever was in there, and get going. Finally, the Demoman would detonate all the explosives he would wire throughout the base to clear any evidence and possibly convince BLU they were dead. Then they could really get started.
The Soldier happily sat back in his chair after everyone left the room. It was the beginning of the end, and the world would come out free in the end.
Thanks to him.
USS Exterminator
As the rest of the crew finished preparing, the Scout looked around and yelled out,"Yo! Where the hell is the fat dude and Mumbles?"
The Engineer answered him,"Ah, shoot, they went down into the ship earlier when we all got on. The Pyro was in that fancy chef's hat of his and the Heavy probably wanted something to eat."
As if to reaffirm the Engineer's statement, an "Om nom nom" rang out from the core of the ship. A gleeful cry answered from the Pyro.
"Forget about them men! We have a situation!" the Soldier practially ordered.
The instant he said that, a few cabin boats along with some larger ones with a few turrets (gunboats) appeared. The men aboard them scrambled, and fired some projectiles over from launchers similiar to the Demoman's, who made a comment on their fine workings.
A few hit the deck, grenades of some sort exploded in smoke and gas.
"Engineer! Move to the controls!" the Sniper shouted as he strapped on a Villian's Veil in an effort to combat the gas.
"Hell, you don't have the tell me, I'm already going there!" he reported back to the Sniper, running off toward the cabin.
The rest of the men were coughing quite violently besides the Medic, who had mounted his Physican's Mask and Blighted Beak on. He then threw off some things to the other men and told them to stuff them on. They obliged, and got up.
"What the hell is this?" the Scout asked.
"Das ist mir furzegal! Just shoot them!"
The Engineer then took the liberty of moving the boat away from the gas.
The Soldier then answered Medic's call now that he had a clear line of sight, rocketed jumped to the closest boat, and aimed right at its cabin. He quickly dispersed of the few men inside with a rocket blast from midair, and landed on top of its cabin and shot the rest down with his shotgun.
"Quite a marvelous work of machinery if I may say so myself, considering the Soldier's unbelievable Mann Co rockets didn't destroy it. Probably been reinforced with some Australiam." the Engineer lamented over the mic, at the controls of the boat, and radioing at his leisure to their personal communication devices (courtesy of TF Industries). "
Yeah, yeah, just shut it and let us do our jobs, Engie! You can analyze all you want to later!"
While he was saying this, the Scout had used his arcane double jump to land right into the biggest enemy boat right by, actually a relatively small (by naval terms) gunboat, specifically an old PT boat built for the Pacific War against the Japanese and then requisitioned by RED to destroy anyone that might luck upon their naval anchorage by Hawaii.
"Hey, a little heads up here, but I think they aren't actually trying to kill us!" A few rubber bullets touched off on the Scout.
"What the hell did I just say, get it through your thick skull, hard hat!" The Scout smashed his bat into a man's head.
The Scout shot one of the men straight in the chest with his scattergun. Some of the pellets hit a few other men nearby, wounding them.
"Alright, I just thought..." his voice trailed off.
The Scout finished those other men off with two more shots and a pistol round to the chest of the last one. He didn't kill one of them all the way though, and the wounded man got up behind him and raised a cudgel dramatically as the Scout was taunting.
The Sniper saved him with a shot right to the medulla oblongata[1]. The man's cudgel still hit the Scout, but only on the leg now, and with less force.
"Thanks, Snipes!" The Scout was either on too much adrenaline to notice the pain or truly didn't care.
"Ya prancing show ponies," was all Sniper muttered back. He was in the zone and his Bloke's Bucket Hat reflected that, and their status at sea.
The rest of the team was in it too. Within a few moments, the other cabin boats and gunboat were all down. Their brief moment of elation ended as soon as some more boats appeared on the horizon, followed by a helicopter.
TF Industries
The Announcer tapped her nails impatiently as the machine faxed over the report.
It finished, and she snatched it up greedily. Then she began to read.
She skimmed through it, and then caught an important fact.
"The RED Spy... dead, is he?" she wondered to herself, and then the respawn system dawned on her mind.
"Well, that will not do at all. He will not get out so easily."
She called Ms. Pauling and told her to attend to anything that might warrant action.
Within thirty minutes, she had departed on a plane for Roswell, New Mexico, the closest location to Teufort with an airport. She quietly cursed herself for not thinking of it earlier, and hoped the RED Spy was still in the process of Respawn.
A/N: Meh, I got bored of waiting for the other guy to continue the work on the hat for Steam workshop, decided to write another chapter. Meh, it's President's Day in the States and I had figured I was going to waste time anyway.
