Tiberian Light Chapter 2, an Arknights + Command & Conquer Crossover fanfic

In game, it only takes a few seconds for an MCV to deploy into a Construction Yard.

I felt pretty bad of myself for accomplishing that in two hours. Part of me was hoping that it would be as simple as finding a "deploy" button, slamming it with a closed fist, and watching the thing unfold into the marvel of science and engineering it was, but the MCV's dashboard was as dense as it was for a reason. I was pretty thankful that EVA was specifically stated to be non-sapient, else she probably would have lost patience with me while walking me through the deployment process. Seriously, whomever did this in-game must of had six hands! Did I forgot to mention that the MCV unpack came with additional drones?

You could imagine both my surprise and confusion when I saw the little buggers flying around. I mean, every player knows the GDI MCV doesn't come with drones that looks like the repair drones from the War Factory. The only reasons I could think of was that I got sent here with mods, or GDI got innovative with their tech usage after the 3rd Tiberium Wars and after the war against the Scrins. I really hope it's the former. Cause if it is, then I'm pretty sure I know what mod I got. Considering there wasn't really all that many C&C3 mods that adds repair drones to the MCV's.

By the time the process was complete, I was practically vibrating in my seat. I was still constrained to my cockpit, now a part of some variety of forklift, but I had no intention to explore its function. Part of me, especially the muscles in my back, was sore, pane like daggers digging into my core. My legs had lost feeling entirely, while I couldn't stop my hands from shaking. I really needed to get out of here, stretch myself out, refill a canteen I'd found shoved between the seat and the wall to my left, run for a few minutes, and investigate whether the MCV came with a restroom.

Was it safe to leave, though? I was a kilometer and a half outside the Red Zone, and it wasn't nearly developed enough to threaten me with bad weather or dust, but the building itself must have been coated in the stuff. There was a good chance I'd preformed some sort of purging maneuver in the deployment process, but I didn't remember everything I'd just done while fumbling through deployment.

"Eva, How bad is the Tiberium exposure outside?"

"No airborne Tiberium detected. Surface treatment reports effective in treating Tiberium infections."

I waited a second for EVA to continue, before deactivating the forklift. I'd have to look into "Surface treatment" later. Here goes...

With a hiss of air pressure hydraulics, the cockpit slid forwards, allowing me to take my first true breath of fresh air in hours. It was only then when I realized how clean… no, antiseptic the air inside the cockpit had been. Understandable, given where GDI operated, but I'd never found myself welcoming the smell of grass before.

I was up before the cockpit had fully retracted, but it had plenty of time to finish as my vision went black. The head rush took it's time to dissipate, but that allowed my jellied legs to recover before I tried walking.

So I'd escaped The Red Zone. Or soon to be, actually. Now what?

Now that I was moving around, the clothing I'd woken up in was starting to matter to me. I was certainly in uniform, but it didn't seem to hold much utility outside a briefing room. As I vaulted off the forklift, I noted the slate-grey fabric felt far too smooth for fieldware. All I had to carry ammunition or rations were a pen pocket and two slash pockets in my slacks. The only real consolation to practicality was the sidearm strapped to my thigh, but I didn't know enough about holsters to understand if this one was particularly effective.

The rain had trailed off to a drizzle, but I kept the snug patrol cap in case it started pouring again. I left the flack jacket in the forklift, though. If it came with a pocket or two it would have been welcome, but the typical sci-fi smoothness of the armor just made it dead weight. Plus, there was this strange gap around the neck that didn't make much sense to me. Was I supposed to be wearing a tie?

The clack of my polished boots on steel plate was drowned out by the rustling of wind in the grassland behind me. I wanted to admire the scenery and investigate that road, but putting the Construction Yard to use was a higher priority. I'd have time for a breather… later, hopefully.

There didn't seem to be any way to order a structure from the forklift, so I had two other options: The crane adjacent to my forklift or something inside the central structure. After so many hours sitting, I wasn't climbing in another cockpit if I could help it, so that left the possibility of a terminal or something inside the structure itself.

Well, it was pretty obvious where all the MCV's weight came from. The ceiling was cluttered with cranes, welders, drills, and other robotic appendages, each set on it's own track that painted the roof with an oddly mesmerizing pattern. Even though none were fully extended, they dangled menacingly close to head-level. I found myself nervously checking my patrol cap, wishing for something a little harder as I ducked deeper into the construction yard. The central bay where they all hung wasn't too well lit, either. Behind the arms in the assembly bay lay a wall of machinery, but their exact purpose was 30 years beyond me.

A walkway to the side of the bay passed through the machinery, allowing me to get a good look into the mess of LEDs and steel. Particularly unsettling were how many access panels, labels, and status terminals I could make out. It's designers intended someone to maintain this stuff. The only way I could think to work around my lack of experience would be to build a backup MCV or two, in case something broke down on this one. I moved on, deeper into the belly of the beast.

Bingo. A screen dominated the far wall, flanked by on either side by towers that must have been truly powerful computers. The screen flickered on as I approached it, already displaying a list of building names. A bare console in the center of the room sported a keyboard and mouse, and as I approached it I began reading the list. POWER_PLANT, BARRACKS_E, BARRACKS_O... hang on. This list was much larger than what I remembered from the game. Even a quick scan revealed things like ST_WALL_HUB, SONIC_BAR_POST, SPOTLIGHT, SHELTER, TIB_PROCESS_PLANT, and HI_TECH_HUB, whatever that was. Despite peaking my curiosity, exploring the computer network I'd woken up in would also have to wait.

Okay, POWER_PLANT was queued up. A symphony of fans and machinery roared to life behind me, and I found myself with actual free time. It was at this point my stomach mumbled. I could spot a drinking fountain nestled adjacent to a door indicated as a restroom, but for the life of me I couldn't think of any source of food. I wasn't too worried, though. I probably had the only powerful firearm on the planet, after all. God, the Laterano are going to fucking hate me.

I turned to exit the MCV, only to stop as I noticed a ladder opposite of the restroom. Instead of extending to the roof, it seemed to descend into some sort of basement. I shouldn't have been surprised, as I remembered the crane out front dropping crates into some subterranean section in game, but I was. Where had the dirt from before gone? What would happen if I deployed this thing on concrete or bedrock? If I planned operating anywhere that wasn't some floodplain, this would require investigation.

The basement lit up as I descended the ladder, but only the noise from above echoed throughout the room. In the center, a set of rails on the floor supported some sort of platform, as another set above hung an inactive robotic arm. A vast, dark honeycomb dominated the walls on either side of the railing, each cell occasionally filled by a device that lit the assembly with set of a white-blue LEDs. Curious, I vaulted the railing I'd been gazing from, moving over to inspect one of the hexes. A series of status lights surrounded a rather hefty steel handle. Behind that, a pair of pictograms dominated a yellow warning label: An ear, seemingly surrounded by some sort of explosion, and three hexagons, separated by a three lines that converged at the center of the warning label.

I'd been lugging Tiberium with me!

I was back on the first floor as fast as I trusted my dress boots to handle, leaving scuff marks on the wall behind the ladder as I hurried. I guess I needed something to build the Refinery with, but that meant I'd been slugging through trees and mud with the mass of two buildings trying to drive me into the ground. The MCV was a wonder of engineering insomuch as it moved at all!

I hadn't realized the noise of machinery had stopped until I had made my way into the assembly bay. Now, besides a monotone crate lying in it's center, the room looked identical to what it once was.

That was it? An entire building, shoved into a box smaller than a pickup truck? How was I going to move it? With barely a thought, the unit list reappeared in front of my eyes, showing my drone, a construction yard, the forklift...

...and about one-sixth of a Power Plant. Why had the it stopped, then?

After enduring a 5-minute rant to eventually dissolved into desperate pleading, EVA patently explained that I would have to remove the initial construction module for the refinery before the yard could go about fabricating the second one. Until all 7 ordered modules were completed, I could store them in the underground warehouse or deploy them sequentially at the construction site.

That, of course, meant that I'd have to get back into the forklift before I could accomplish anything. It also meant that I'd probably be spending the majority of my life in the damn thing. Awesome. Just, awesome.

The vehicle's forks effortlessly slid into the grooves at the floor of the assembly bay, and in no time my view was dominated by two sides of a hexagonal prism, shoved almost directly into my cockpit. With the crate in the way, I had to rely on views from the monitors above me to drive the thing.

Now, where do I put it? In-game the forklift was always letting the crane lower these crates into the underground portion of the MCV, but retrieving them from underground sounded inefficient when I could pile them up at the build site, and deploy them as the Construction Yard finished them. On a battlefield, it might not make sense to leave that much equipment in the open, but besides the tiberium itself I wasn't particularly afraid of anything I could run into here. A snake would be bad for my ankles, for example, but couldn't harm a steel structure.

Of course, anyone would place the power plant as close to the MCV as they could get away with, but there was a good chance I'd have to get out to work with this and I doubted the Red Zone would be very impressed with my dress uniform. The Forklift handled well enough, so using the drones as a guide and additional helpers, I decided to break ground about a half a kilometer from the construction yard and about a hundred meters north of my MCV's tracks, in case I'd dragged tiberium with me into the safe area.

The tall grass counteracted the mud today's constant drizzle had caused, but even on flat ground the forklift had inherited it's speed (or lack thereof) from the MCV. Since I couldn't exactly admire the scenery, I found myself focusing on the feed from my drone. While the drizzle that had held steady had petered out, the clouds hadn't broken yet and thus my view of the ground was restricted to the black-grey-white of it's thermal camera. To the west the fledgling tiberium field was a brilliant white, lending the border between it and the grassland the appearance of some shoreline, with my MCV as an island of heat against a vast, living sea. The effect was spoiled somewhat by the distant road.

The thing wasn't any different in color then the surrounding grass, but it refused to sway in the wind like the rest of the plane. Other then that, if I could make out how the wind disturbed the grass, then I shouldn't have any problems making out the ruts in the road, but there weren't any, really. Was it paved, or just very well maintained? If the sun had been heating it I would have been able to tell, but with the rain there wasn't any good way to determine what it was. Well, once I got proper transportation, I'd have to follow that road. The fact that putting a power plant together was taking this long was definitive proof that there was no way I was getting ahead of the tiberium without a lot of help.

Leaning against the forklift, I wiped my brow with my patrol cap, hoping to get some of the loose dirt and grass away from my face. As it turned out, the first one-sixth of a Power Plant was entirely foundation. Unlike with the MCV, it unpacked automatically, but I hadn't figured that out until after I'd activated it. The several seconds it had given me to clear the area were ignored as I examined the thing, and thus when it started to unfold I was wholly unprepared.

In hindsight, there was an beauty to it all that I hadn't appreciated at the time. Running solely on battery power, something the size of a propane tank had excavated a foundation with the area of a basketball court half a meter deep, reinforcing it with steel or aluminum. At time time, though, I was terrified! The innocuous olive container split open, sprouting robots and digging tools like some alien egg. Next thing I knew, I was running for my life, a wall of dirt, grass and machinery chasing me out. After getting clear, it was obvious I could have escaped by walking away, but the sheer volume of dirt that was being moved was intimidating.

I'm such an idiot. Of course I'd been standing in the shadow of larger power plant when it had gone off, I'm not sure what I was expecting. Something less explosive, perhaps.

My uniform had been ruined, of course. The wind had picked up (blowing into the tiberium field this time, thank god) so I'd re donned the flak jacket, meaning that once I'd taken it off again there'd be a clear u-shaped shadow on my shirt that wasn't stained by grass and mud.

Honestly, even at this distance I was sure I was getting some gamma radiation from the fields a klick away. Maybe it would be best just to follow that road down, and try to join any society that I met there. If I went far enough there was a good chance I could die peacefully before the tiberium became a problem, anyways. Well, unless ROB lets me.

No, I wasn't thinking straight. I was dirty, hungry, tired, and juiced up on adrenaline. Still, I was going to break eventually if I stuck with such a far-off goal as "contain the green stuff." and "help waifus and husbandos." I needed to break things down if I was going to stay sane.

Alright, Refinery's next.

I wonder, will it have the same defensive armament as depicted from the mod? Fuck, I must be really going insane. Alright, deep breaths. You got this, Dwane. You can get through this, it's not like the fate of numerous people rests on your shoulders. Nope, nada. Whew, ok. Got me sane and calm enough for me to start queuing the Refinery next.

Hang on, didn't I have like Neural Link with the Construction Yard and with EVA? "Uh, begin building Refinery?" That came out more of a question than an actual order or anything.

"Building." Huh, it works. Neat. Well, might as well know on how long that'll take. "Time for Completion?"

"Approximately 5 hours, 59 minutes, 20 seconds remaining."

Ah. Well, shit. What now?

Driving the forklift was getting old quickly. The thing was designed with the tork of the MCV it had been a part of, but that sacrificed a lot of speed. I wasn't military, scientific, or multicultural enough to really understand what speed '15 kph' was, but it was certainly less impressive than 15 mph. I felt like I could run this fast, but I was used to much lower viehicles so perspective might have been playing tricks on me.

Point is, I was bored. There was nothing but my previous tracks and the MCV to interrupt the grassland, which wasn't that interesting anymore. Beyond the Intel database I was familiar with, the MCV had come with was impressively large library of e-books, but while whatever enhancements I'd had might have nullified carsickness there was no way I was reading while driving. All I could really do to interest me was glance at the UAV feed… which itself was lazily following the road away from the field. I didn't want it too far away, but I was curious.

Meh, might as well find my Sleeping Quarters ROB gave me in this Conyard. It only took 20 minutes of searching before I finally found the room. The entry to the room was really hidden that I had to resort to EVA guide me. Entering the room, the only best way I could describe it was Spartan. It was a very small room that on the left had a good sized bed with a very soft mattress, 2 pillows, a blanket, and my cat Boris sleeping, curled up in the center. In the opposite side of the room held a mini fridge under a table with a lamp on top. Hmm, I am getting pretty hungry.

Giving my sleeping cat a one more glance, I then walked over towards the mini fridge under the table. Now that I was closer to it, the Fridge itself had this aesthetic look that just screams Sci-fi. Grasping the handle, I gently opened and looked at m the contents. There were some Coke, and a few sprites. But what really got my attention was the large pie sitting inside. What?

Grabbing it with both hands, I was surprised when it was actually still warm. Did the GDI found a way to properly store food without it getting cold? Gently taking it and closing the fridge, it was then that I noticed the Blue sticky note on the side. Taking it off, I then read what it said.

"Yo! Hope you enjoy Apple Pies! Baked it myself :D -ROB"

Huh, was not expecting that from a ROB of all people. Maybe he wasn't all that bad? ...Wait, no. He didn't give me any utensils to use, fuck! Well, might as eat it eating etiquette out the window, I used my hands and scooped up a gooey slice before taking a bite.

Ugh, I really hate ROB right no-

Is that a town? It appears my UAV Drone picked up a town north of the road. Well, better get that Refinery and that Barracks up and running. Cause First Contact with Terrans are going to be an absolute doozy.

Mmmh~ And dang is this pie good!

Author's Note: Hey, hey, heeyy! Second chapter for the third day! I am on a roll! Also, I changed the title due to how much of a mouthful it originally was. The summary may also be subjected for change anytime in the near future. Anyways, if ya'll wondering when and where our Protagonist is. Well, he's currently 15 months away from the Chernobog Incident and he's currently in between the borders of Kazimierez and the Empire of Ursus. Third chapter will have him getting both Manpower and Firepower needed for him to finally initiate first contact with the first terrans he'll meet. Hope you guys enjoy this as much as I do. I'll see you guys tomorrow, perhaps?