Chapter 3: A Pauling's Scale
Respawning was like taking a gulp of air after holding your breath for so long you'd forgotten how to properly breathe. You never really got used to it. It was intoxicating, exhilarating, and yet somewhat painful. Even more so when the cause of your death was a cleaver to the heart.
Eyes still closed, Heavy patted down his ribs, and knuckles, and the spots that had felt sore right up until they didn't anymore. He took note of the thankful absence of the weapon previously stuck in his chest.
Finally feeling confident in his chances of survival despite the deep fatigue that weighed down his limbs, the Russian opened his eyes to see that he was still standing over the bomb hatch at Mannworks. How...?
Now fully coming to his senses, he realized his teammates were doing what he'd just done: checking healed injuries, muttering surprised whispers and looking at each other in bewilderment at their location.
Engie let out a quick sputtering yelp, reaching for the back of his neck, only to then rub it in confusion. "What in Sam Hill?"
"... mrghfrr mhph," answered an equally confused Pyro. They touched their head, remembering how it felt when it had last been caved in.
Some weird noises were also coming from Demo's and Soldier's general directions. The others must have been quieter while waking up, which was to be expected from Sniper and Spy, and less so for Scout: the death by backstab must've gotten to him.
All around them a sea of steel and crackling wires surged, and sputtering engines faintly whirred weak cries before dying a quiet death.
Watching the battle, Heavy grinned; now they were the ones coming out on top! But at that moment, the lack of constant berating suddenly struck him-where was Medic?
Heavy's gaze sweeped the area, pinpointing a lump on the ground in the middle of the metallic slaughter. Carcasses of cold steel, reduced to tatters and scrap, piled high in a sea of carnage. At the centre laid Medic, unconscious, his head lolled to the side. It would have been a terrifying sight if Heavy wasn't so worried about him.
Lying on the ground unconscious, Medic didn't look like the god he had proven to be… he just looked human.
Somehow, Heavy put one foot in front of the other until he was able to kneel next to the German and slowly pick him up.
Like blacking out, he did not remember the journey back; only that he had picked up Medic, and now stood inside the infirmary.
Gently, he laid the doctor on the closest infirmary bed, like how he put Sasha to sleep.
Sasha.
Her name leaving his mouth melted into the blur of the next moment; shuffles of bedsheets and something scraping on the tiles, and she appeared next to him, a jet black sheen in the sparse rays of moonlight.
Amorphous voices hovered around him.
"Uhh... hello, ma'am... this is the Engineer speaking from… uh... from Team Fortress, assigned to Mannworks, just checking in...?"
"Rest easy, mate, we got you both."
"For once I'll agree with the bushman, stop worrying and go to sleep."
"How's a bloody sleepwalker gonna defend our proud nation?"
"See, this base is secure, but we just barely won. Hell, we're running out of food. Ammo especially. We need more supplies."
"Hey! I found your gun dude! You better thank me when you wake up!"
"Uh hrrlpd crrhy sushuh frr mfph!"
"Aye, have a lie down, lad. We'll handle it from here."
"Oh, and... you may want to send a repair crew down. Nothing else to report. Engineer out."
With his weapon and his friends at his side, he finally drifted into a dreamless sleep.
Earlier that evening
Miss Pauling dusted off her skirt and fixed her glasses once more. She stared down at the cup of coffee, remembering the mantra: "Darker than my soul, no sugar, and never let it out of your sight!" She mustered up the courage to grab it and headed for the control room.
The evening had started well with the new robot attack at the Mannworks mountain base, after weeks of preparation, gathering intel on Gray and scheming the perfect trap.
The first part was to cut all supplies running to their post, knowing full-well the mercenaries were either too stupid or too loyal to abandon it.
Their second was to disable respawn; whoever would die would stay dead, hopefully whittling their numbers to eventually none. And it had to be done inconspicuously in the thick of battle, hoping that pesky Engineer would have no time to fix or even notice it.
Lastly, the group of operators Pauling led had planted explosives in a passageway under the buildings; deep enough to evade the bomb's explosions (should it be delivered), but spread out enough to reduce the entire base to rubble when Gray's army of robots would arrive.
A brilliant plan, really. Foolproof. The Administrator, along with a panel of strategists, had closely studied it, and so did Pauling. Or, rather, much less the planning and more the legwork.
Like losing one of your rooks, the Mannworks gambit was ultimately losing a battle to win the war.
Or, to be more precise, would have led to winning the war. Because apparently the mercenaries of Mannworks had other plans that night.
At first everything had gone smoothly.
The Administrator barked into the PA system as the surveillance operators rattled off their reports.
"Team Fortress is holding on, but just barely ma'am! They're running out of ammunition!"
The room's many screens linked to the myriad of cameras at Mannworks, telling of the mercs' every move.
"Miss Pauling."
"Y-yes ma'am!" she answered, startled.
"Moving the analysts, in hindsight, was a better idea than I first thought. I no longer have to wait so long for the recordings to be ready just so I can see the reports. Also... I believe it could be good for morale."
The expression of disgust on the Administrator's face soured the sentiment but it was nice to hear the praise nonetheless. Truly, she never expected for the 'little people' to join her at the control room.
And the analysts truly were having the time of their lives, used as they were to getting the recordings only after the Administrator had rewatched them, essentially making their work useless.
"Thank you, ma'am!"
During the first downtime between the waves, the interns at the back were betting on which merc would be the first to die… permanently.
"Betting 40 on that Soldier dude. God's sake, he blast jumps. Guy was lucky not to have blown his legs off before he even joined Mann Co!"
"That moron with the baseball cap is half-asleep! What's he doing, huh? I'm putting in 20 more bucks."
"Scout. Hah! The Demoman is absolutely going to go first. I mean, half-asleep? Try blind-drunk! He's going to detonate his traps while he's standing in the middle of them. Tonight's definitely his night."
"I'm putting 50 on the Engineer."
"Losing odds, man. That's not just 'the Engineer', that's Dell Conagher."
"Well, who knows, maybe a Conagher can have a bad day too."
"You know, sending them to the slaughterhouse kinda looks like a waste, yeah? But he seems really attached to his team, and keeping up appearances for Gray is important 'n' all that."
"What about their doctor? He's pretty smart, but forgets himself when it comes to the others. 30 bucks."
"So, Soldier, Scout, Demoman, Engineer, or Medic. I'm so excited for the second wave! May the worst man die first! Oh crap, she's looking right at us! Go!"
The Administrator glared at the rowdy subordinates rushing back to their stations before announcing: "The robots arrive in three...
"Two...
"One!"
At that moment, Pauling discovered this plan was in fact, not foolproof.
At the dawn of the second wave, the team were carefully rationing their ammo. Even with respawn sabotaged, all nine of them were still standing.
"Something's wrong with Medic's tracker!" alerted a GPS analyst.
"He's popping up everywhere on the map! He's- he's going to every spot indicated but we can't catch the movements in between? He's just… in one place, then another!"
"A sentry buster arrived! This must be go- ... erm, it went down," an analyst coughed. "Ah, but Heavy and Demoman are dead! And it looks like- no, OK. That Medic revived them with a Reanimator. Stupid bloody things, we should've gotten rid of them."
The screens flickered between the view of Mannworks and static.
At that point, a fuming Administrator had sent (read: shouted at) Pauling to get her a coffee.
I hope the situation will have calmed down when I get back in there, she thought.
Even after setting the team up for failure, she couldn't bring herself to wish them death. She had been their manager for years.
Her musings stopped at the door to the control room, and, reaching for the door handle-
"I can't take it anymore!" the door swung open along with the cry of a distraught, teary-eyed analyst, storming past her and down the hallway.
She arched a brow. That does not bode well, she thought.
Entering the control room revealed that she was right. The employees had strewn themselves about the control room, anguished and distraught. The Administrator gritted her teeth, seated in front of the microphone. Pauling looked to where the Administrator was staring, and only saw static across every panel.
According to Vitals, the only thing still working... everyone was alive. Everyone. Even in spite of respawn stopping. It shocked her. How? How was this ragtag team of mercenaries doing it?
The backup generator announced itself with the shine of a red light. With the power returning, it meant that the emergency radio devices connected to it were booting up.
The room went silent. The analysts huddled together among the vitals and GPS systems, maybe finding in their numbers some kind of solace from the Administrator's murderous glare, when the clear audio from the Mannworks bomb hatch area finally cut through the static.
"I WILL CRUSH BABY ROBOTS WITH BARE HANDS! YAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHH!"
The Heavy. His battle cry was followed by the sounds of a brawl, and all the room's occupants held their breath as they listened to the fight going down.
Metallic clangs, bangs and cracks, soon enough followed by calls for Medic, the sound of bones crunching, flesh splitting, and one of the Vitals monitor screens flatlined. One by one, they all went down, until only the Heavy, and surprisingly, the Medic himself, were left. A quiet murmur preceded the Russian's confirmed demise, but then what could only be described as an inhuman, primal cry rang through the control room, distorted by the low quality microphones of the backup audio system.
What followed, Pauling couldn't describe even if she wanted to. Howls, shrieks, rattles of metal and cracks of electricity intermingled with a wholly indescribable echoing voice, and imagery of iron being bent like twigs and torn like paper painted themselves in the woman's mind.
One final explosion-like blast resounded - and the room fell into silence.
The vitals system beeped. Once. Twice. Thrice. Eight times, she counted.
A thud.
The rustle of clothes.
The shuffling of feet.
"What in Sam Hill?" in a heavy Texan accent.
And all hell broke loose in the control room.
The following morning
Miss Pauling yawned once, then again, just for good measure.
No, that second time wasn't her body deciding to. That was on her own accord. Her decision.
The moped droned on along the road to Mannworks.
She had left as soon as possible in order to cover the considerable distance between HQ and the base, urgently needing to reach the scene.
With the fiasco at Mannworks, last night had been a tour de force of consoling desperate employees and calming down a very murderous Administrator before leaving the Headquarters in a hurry the moment she got her new orders. Just like that, months of planning were thrown out the window; gone in just a few hours, and adequate response measures had to be defined on the fly.
Not because they didn't foresee this and therefore made plan B in advance, but rather… What was it? It felt so unlikely that the immaculate scheme of plan A would fail that they never made plan B.
Whatever. All that Pauling had left to do was contained in a folder marked as 'CLASSIFIED', containing a single sheet of paper:
Plan B - Pauling
1. Congratulate the Team Fortress Mercenaries to keep up the pretense. Disclose move location.
Then, added in the Administrator's scrawly italics:
2. Investigate the scene of the battle.
The backside was a hastily-sketched map of Mannworks. Certain areas were marked with red crosses.
I should ask for overtime, she thought, the tall buildings slowly coming into view. If nothing else, her frequent dynamite-planting expeditions taught her how to reach the normally well-hidden base.
Deciding to at least let the mercenaries get the sleep she was sorely missing, she parked her scooter under the abandoned mothership and made her way into the battleground. With the rising sun heralding a beautiful day and her pen and clipboard in hand, she started her investigation.
What was most pressing to find out was how Gray had so badly disrupted the surveillance. Next, she'd ask Medic how he had healed his team without a Medi Gun; something seen only in the few recordings that weren't tainted with static.
Walking through the abandoned battleground, she saw the sun highlight the aftermath of their battle. Scorch marks, scratches decorating the walls, bullet casings strewn across the ground. Bodies of robots lined Mannworks' labyrinthine alleys, thrown to the sides to make way for the bomb carriers.
Glass from broken windows and lightbulbs crunched under her every step, growing louder as she got closer to the first marked spot on her map: the EMP epicenter. A sense of dread filled her mind and anxiety flooded her gut; worry lacing her thoughts. It put hesitation in her walk and her hackles on end. A flash of days long gone renewed itself in her mind, a memory of a childhood's summer in the mountains, of recklessness and getting caught in bad weather, of hairs standing up before sky-splitting lightning strikes a pine tree on the next hill over, and thunder roars, shaking her very soul.
The air became heavy with that indescribable energy, and a renewed sense of dread crept up her arms, instilling a cold fright in her. She hugged her clipboard to her chest. The day was cloudless. Deep blue and clear. And yet, she felt like the sun mocked her.
A bolt? From the blue? No, I'm just- I'm just imagining things. The forecasts say nothing but sunshine.
The feeling only rang stronger in her head until she reached the mark. This spot... it was supposedly the epicentre of Gray's EMP. Searching the barren area, Pauling found only the feelings in her gut; nothing to help her. No clues, no traces, not so much as a mark on the earth. Nothing.
Sighing in defeat, she dusted bits of metal scraps and dirt into tiny forensics bags for further analysis. Feeling irked by the inconclusive search, she hurriedly left, chased by the broken glass crunching under her heels. She wanted nothing more than to go to her next destination.
Breathing in the crisp morning air, she tried to leave the dread behind. She took the path to the bomb hatch, feeling more optimistic about the presence of more useful clues there.
And when she rounded the corner, those thoughts immediately escaped her.
Carnage. Absolute carnage. A sight beyond what thoughts could describe. The husks of dead robots and the smell of burnt money.
Metal bent in ways that looked like contemporary art. Torn apart. In places shattered like glass. Others melted like lava.
Whoever… no, whatever had caused this. This was not done by human hands. No man was capable of this destruction. Breathe deeper, she thought, her hands trembling. Breathe. Breathe. Be calm. It's OK, she told herself, but it all fell short. No words could shake off the terror that froze her. She didn't know what this was. Trying to fall asleep that night wasn't going to be fun.
Her mind, struggling to process this, pieced together all the bits of discipline the Administrator had instilled in her. She put on her best poker face and started walking towards the mercenaries' barracks, where she'd find the first part of her assignment.
"Oh, hey Miss Pauling! Fancy seein' ya here!"
I'm definitely asking for overtime.
Engie slowly closed the infirmary door, careful not to disturb the occupants. The stress of Medic's duties were on him, now.
Heavy and Medic are probably safe here, thought Engie. By their snoring, he'd decided that they just needed a well-deserved rest.
To recharge their batteries, he thought. He still worried for them, though, knowing that eleven science PhDs wouldn't translate to much tangible medical knowledge.
Leaving the infirmary, he began tiptoeing down the hall, excited at the thought of breakfast after a night of little sleep and mostly reliving the day's battle over and over again.
I could've avoided this! I should've been checking respawn! Why didn't I check that darn thing after I went to the backup gen... why didn't I notice-
"Oi, Engie, mate, want some coffee?" interjected Sniper.
"Oh... thank y'kindly." He gladly accepted the mug, hoping it would wash away his loud thoughts. "Careful, mate, it's hot," continued the bushman, but Engie digressed and quickly downed a few mouthfuls, his throat scorching.
The team was unusually late for breakfast, piling in long after the sunrise. Spy, Demo, Soldier and Pyro were sitting on the benches surrounding the dinner table, and Sniper leaned against the kitchen counter, waiting for his coffee to brew. Scout was missing; Engie guessed he already had breakfast, though he remembered how he's often the last to get up. He joined Sniper by the counter, anxiety tugging him away from sitting down.
"So. How is our dynamic duo holding up?" Spy asked, primly lowering his tiny cup of espresso. Hang on. We only have vaguely-bitter-wake-up-juice branded as coffee. Where'd he get that?
He pushed that thought aside. "Not bad; Heavy woke up for a moment at 5, but otherwise they're both still sleeping. They look fine."
"Dynamic duo!?" Soldier jumped from his seat. "I love referencing great American comics!"
"Wot? Who's who, then?" mused Sniper, swirling his coffee.
"What?"
"Y'know! Heavy an' Medic, Batman 'n' Robin. Who's who?"
"Oh, ahh know... Heavy... he's Batman, 'coz he's, ya know... big an-" Demo burped, "-strong. Medic, ohh, Medic is Robin," he waved his finger, "he's 'is sidekick, aye?"
"Negatory! Medic has all the gadgets so that makes him Batman!" shouted Soldier.
"Uphin muddin hudduh bbuhmn dunmphs," Pyro decided, caught in the middle.
"Aye lad, ye said it," Demo gestured to Pyro with his bottle, before taking another swig.
"No way!"
"Yes way, Soldier-boy!"
Demo and Soldier stared each other down from either side of the long table, while Pyro watched excitedly from their seat in the middle.
"Yeah... mate, I'm with Soldier here." Sniper broke the silence and immediately felt the room's focus shift to him and his coffee, which he nervously took a sip of.
"... Aye. Fair enough," and Demo slumped back down for a moment.
"Hang on! It's wrong both ways! Batman an' Robin are just two lads, and Medic... well, Medic's a bloody, I don't know… He's got superpowers! He can fly! He's..." he burped, "a god," and he took another swig.
The room then fell silent. Engineer's vivid recollection of the battle resurfaced.
"From what little I've seen, I have to wonder why he never disclosed such a... Who knows. Gift?" Spy finally mused, looking to the coffee grounds in his cup for answers.
The murmur of a group hmmm filled the kitchen.
"Roight, was he hidin' it? Did we just... never pick up on it?" quizzed Sniper. He turned his back on them to pour his coffee.
Engie, offering his cup for a refill, faltered for a moment. "Uhm, well… the prototype Medi Gun let him fly around with Demo an' Soldier. At the time, we thought the Medi Gun was just like that. But now... I think that was him."
The room buzzed with more thoughts, until Soldier sprung up like a jack-in-the-box.
"THIS IS GREAT NEWS!" he exclaimed. "A NEW WEAPON! ONE MORE POWERFUL THAN ANYTHING!" He shook his fist. "We will win ANY battle!"
Demo cheered and Pyro clapped happily. Sniper glared daggers at Soldier, whose booming voice had almost made him drop the pot of boiling coffee.
"Mate probably kept it secret for a reason," he grumbled, gently placing down the Mann Co. Bean-Juice Retainer™.
"Huh?" voiced Soldier.
"Well if he's been 'ere for six years and we didn't know, that's gotta say something."
"If I may add, mes amies, I read the files they had on you-"
"You what?!"
"Bloody hell! That's shonky business, mate!"
"You looked through classified documents?"
"Please, now is not the time. My point is, they knew next to nothing about the doctor, and they hired him anyway because they were desperate for mercenaries."
"What did they know?"
"Name, age, country of origin, class and field of expertise. It ends there. Not even qualifications."
That raised some eyebrows in the room.
"That aside, he's obviously not in good shape after overusing his powers, god or not," Engie said with a frown.
"So... he's not omnipotent," Spy added.
"I dunno. Before he fainted, he told me he's a god, and shucks, I wanted to think it was delirium talking. So I pat him down, thinking there'd be some kind of gadgets, anything, but I found nothing. Zilch. Something supernatural is goin' on."
Spy nodded, his gaze not quite meeting Engie, but the wall behind him. He was absent.
"Whatever happens, though, I believe we should keep it a secret," he concluded.
Soldier's head whipped around to face Spy, his face wrinkled in hurt and his mouth slightly open in shock, ready to form a retort. Spy raised a hand.
"To have a secret weapon against Gray... one that not even the Administrator knows about... wouldn't that be a good position to be in? If I was able to find those 'classified' documents with such little effort... what's stopping Gray?"
Realization dawned on them all.
With an unsaid agreement, everyone began shuffling around the kitchen to finish up as Demo walked to the sink full of dirty dishes. A voice sounded from the hallway, above the sound of footsteps and plates clinking.
"...so I woke up early to get the leftover money. Might've been a bit singed but hey! It's still money."
"Uh… sure."
"Anyway, what moron decides to fuel their robots with money? Heh, uhh, not like I'm complainin'." Two people entered the kitchen. "Hey guys, look! It's Miss Pauling!"
The woman nodded. "Team Fortress," she announced, fixing her glasses. She received tired mumbles for replies.
The team shuffled back to their seats, seemingly snapping out of their spells of tiredness and looking at Pauling attentively.
She cleared her throat, recollecting herself.
"First of all," she began, "congratulations on behalf of the Administrator and Mann Co. for holding out during last night's waves. Great job, team!" She clapped her hands together, offering a brief, happy smile. Her gaze swept the room to find puzzlement, and a distinctive lack of their Heavy and Medic.
"Wait, where's Heavy and Medic?"
"... Ah. See, they're out cold." Engie scratched his head. "They were both very tired after the battle. I'm sure they'll wake up soon."
"Oh," she replied flatly. "Well, did you notice anything..." she paused, "weird... yesterday? Kind of important."
Soldier barged in. "MEDIC! MEDIC IS A-"
And the word stopped in his throat. He caught the burning stares of everyone who knew, and then decided against finishing the sentence, so he settled down.
Pauling, awaiting what he would say, tilted her head.
"He's a what?"
"He's a... umm..." he looked around the room for ideas, then back to the woman. "He's... a sissy who can't stand a battle without fainting! Heavy too!" he boisterously declared.
The room breathed a sigh of relief, which bemused Scout and Miss Pauling, who were equally unaware.
Spy wormed his way into the conversation. "He is a valuable team member who was pushed to his limits. Some kind of bomb detonated yesterday, mid-battle, and the Medi Gun was faltering. I am sure you are aware of our circumstances?" A subtle dig at the recent terrible chain of supply.
Miss Pauling nodded. "Yes. I apologize for our lack of resupplies. That was... a mishap on our end. And that EMP? Also an unexpected occurrence. On the bright side, you all made it through!"
Spy stared at her intently, then looked to Engie, seeking any similar thoughts.
"Those are the circumstances that Medic had to fight through. With respawn offline, that was more work than he'd ever done to keep us alive. Letting him rest is the least we can do to repay him," asserted Engie. The discussion ended there.
Rather, it would have. Apparently not to Scout, who opened his duffel bag, and said "Medic? He's still out? He's-"
Pauling's knife of a glare snapped to him, and he quickly realized that everyone was staring at him, mostly in disapproval. Engie put a finger to his mouth. Shush! he mouthed. Spy glared at him with wide eyes.
"He's… actually very scary. Like... woah when he's mad! Have I ever mentioned that?" he laughed nervously.
Pauling's eyebrows fell, but she still nodded. "... Yeah... I think he can be scary too. Maybe even a bit sadistic. Sometimes, I think he's hiding something. Well, I mean everyone is, but he gives me a different impression."
They exchanged concerned looks among each other, then Scout approached the table and dumped the fruits of his search.
Shrugging, Pauling was ready to finish her impromptu reunion- and then it struck her. "Oh! By the way guys, you'll be moving posts soon, about an hour south from here. Expect a messenger in the next couple days or so. And, remember, please don't shoot them."
Her bespectacled eyes looked pointedly at Soldier, who grunted in faux innocence.
She sighed in resignation, took a couple more notes on her clipboard, then shut it. "I should get going; the Administrator wants me back before sundown. Umm, really quickly- do you guys know how Medic healed everyone without, well, a Medi Gun?" she asked, less professionally and more 'Please Help a Friend Out'.
Engie chuckled. "Heck if I know. We were just as shocked when he did that."
Spy nodded in agreement, which everyone else followed suit.
"Well, it was worth a try," Miss Pauling said, defeatedly. "Anyway, it's time for me to take my leave. Take care, Team Fortress. See you soon!"
A chorus of 'you too' met her as she turned to leave.
"Oh wait, Miss Pauling! Let me walk you back!"
If Engie caught a muttered "overtime" escaping from the woman's lips, he didn't say anything to their chatterbox of a Scout, especially when he came back from seeing her off with a smile so big you might have thought it was early Smissmas.
The Administrator turned in her swivel chair, clasping a manila folder with an inexplicable look in her eyes.
"Get your bags, Miss Pauling. You're flying out to Germany tomorrow."
A/N:
Hey y'all, it's Langodan. The maps here are bigger and more elaborate than in-game. I hope the map (which Aster drew, based on the one on the TF wiki) can kinda show that a bit.
Special thanks to our editors for helping clean things up! Especially MGAINNOKO, thank you so much for your work, I think you ended up rewriting like at least 70% of this. Check them out at .com.
Hiya everyone, Aster here! How are you enjoying the fic? I think my favorite line to write was Engie's second "What in Sam Hill?". It could have been a short chapter with a cliffhanger but Lango's too nice to the readers so here you go haha :D
Anyways take care, and see you all again soon!