The last hours of the night had come and gone as the moon reached its peak and then drifted along. Spy's pocketwatch ticked on ever so constantly, the forward march of time relentless and powerful above all else. The hour hand touched midnight for a moment, before it crept towards one in the morning. Then 1:00AM arrived, and the hour hand never stopped moving to its next milestone in tandem with the moon. The hands crept along the face of the clock endlessly, a forever march with no true goal or end that would continue to mindlessly spin as long as someone was there to wind it up again, and again, and again. Even when its current owner was long dead and free from the clutches of mortal chains, it would hopefully have been handed down to an heir and continue to do so from a parent's to a child's hands until there were no more humans left to keep the golden pocketwatch spinning.

That was the kind of thing Spy liked to think about when it was quiet, and was it ever quiet in the early hours of the morning. There were no signs of anything being out across the mountain ranges - no giant blue tankers, no unsynchronised footsteps of a thousand robots, no birds or wildlife. The only things out there were a million stars glittering across the night sky like a woman's evening gown under the warm lights of a ballroom, and the RED Pyro who stood silently a few feet away.

Pyro hadn't said a thing since he and Spy had taken their shift. His filter was clipped back on and he sat on the floor with his back up against a crate, the oil-stained axe never once leaving his grip. With his gas mask on, his stare was nothing short of soulless and unblinking, almost emotionless like a creepy visage of a jump-scare mannequin at some shoddy theme park.

There was no need for conversation to be exchanged between the two. Spy occasionally glanced over at Pyro, curious to know if the firebug had unintentionally fallen asleep, but there was always some indication that he was awake, whether it was his fingers gripping the hilt of his axe just a little too tight, or the tiniest movements of his head here and there whenever there was the slightest change in his surroundings. No doubt he was alert, perhaps eager for some kind of adversary to appear so he could get some action. It was no secret that bloodthirsty mercenaries who had known nothing but violence and combat all their lives were always excited for such things to happen.

Spy's mind drifted once again to night sky, and his mind thought once more of the picture of a woman in a shimmering black night gown. He couldn't help but imagine the figure of his wife in that dress, seeing her cascades of auburn hair complement golden skin. There was nothing more beautiful than she in his mind, and he wanted nothing more than to be back home in the sunny beaches of Miami with her in his lap, on their deck that faced the sea. It had been months since he had seen her, and no doubt she was busying herself with her own work - after all, there was much to do when one ran a company in the real estate business, but Spy did wonder if she thought of him at night before she headed to bed alone.

"You okay?"

Spy looked over as Pyro's voice cut through the silence. Pyro's unblinking stare was fixed on him, though Spy could almost see the human behind it. To some, especially Scout, making what could have been assumed to be eye contact was difficult given that one couldn't actually see Pyro's eyes behind the darkened lenses of his mask. Spy got around this by simply looking beyond, imagining Pyro's eyes and acting like the mask wasn't there.

The BLU sighed and readjusted his stance, leaning his weight on his left leg to give the other a rest. "Why do you ask?"

"Dunno. You got that look like you're thinking of something."

"I could be thinking about anything."

Pyro shook his head. "Nah, people always have a certain look when they're thinking of something important. It's different from when they're thinking of what they want for dinner or if they're going to be alive tomorrow in the middle of a robot war."

Spy couldn't help but chuckle a little. "Is being alive not that important?"

"Not when the respawn system is online. If it shuts off, you can tell all of us. Then we'll be more concerned about being alive and staying alive." Pyro's head turned back to the alps ahead, where foggy shadows of towering mountains broke up the glistening sky. He got to his feet all of a sudden, as a pair of little blue lights shone over the horizon.

They were faint and hardly there, but it certainly caught the attention of the two mercenaries. The lights moved erratically, stumbling across the rocks and tripping over uneven patches of wild grass. The two guards only needed to share a look of mutual understanding, before they left their post to investigate the sudden appearance of what could have been hostile.

They headed down the compound, weapons ready in case an attack began, though the horizon remained duly silent. Pyro cast a small ball of light that floated alongside him, shining a warm glow on the nearby surroundings. It illuminated the intruder, and it was revealed to be a Scoutbot that had clearly seen better days.

The robot almost looked pitiful. Its left arm was completely severed, wires that clearly had been cut apart dangling out of its socket. Its right hand lacked an actual hand and part of its forearm plates were torn out. Many of its outer plates had been ripped off and left core systems exposed, and whatever remained was scratched and dented. It bore a few burn marks here and there. It attempted a weak swing at the two mercenaries, clearly still remembering its inherent objectives. Pyro blocked the pathetic swing with his axe and sent the robot crashing to the ground.

"Is this it?" Pyro huffed, more unimpressed and bored with the encounter than anything. When the Scoutbot tried to pick itself up, knowing nothing else than to kill the mercenaries, Pyro quickly severed its head from the rest of its metallic body with a well-timed swing of his axe. The lights in the Scoutbot's glass eyes sparked before shutting off.

Spy knelt down next to the ruins of the bot. "Weird…" He muttered.

"What's weird?"

The assassin picked up the Scoutbot's severed head, sparks of electricity running across the broken machine. Spy's grey eyes turned a bright blue for a second, almost like the bots they had been fighting for weeks now before they went back to their usual grey. Then, he set down the head. "It's objective was to kill us."

Pyro shrugged. "Thanks, it took a real genius to figure that one out. Aren't all of their objectives to kill us?"

"Exactly." Spy stood up, a frown already furrowing between his brows. "If they only have one objective and that is to kill us, how would this one have escaped? I read its data log and it wasn't given any additional orders to retreat, so why would it have gotten away?"

"Right, right, you can do that weird thing with machines and shit," Pyro muttered, twirling his finger by his temple like Spy was crazy for being able to do stuff like that. It was still weird for him to see it in action. "Anyway, I don't know. Maybe Soldier blasted it or something."

"It would have blown up."

"Or Engie's sentry rockets threw it somewhere."

"It would still have tried to come back."

"Man, you're really pushing for this, aren't you?"

Spy glanced around the quiet alps, getting a weird feeling like he was being watched. Years of working with the Direction du renseignement et de la sécurité de la Défense had gotten him very used to knowing when someone was watching him - whether it was a superior glancing over his shoulder or an enemy doing so. Yet in the darkness, he couldn't pinpoint anyone or anything that seemed out of place. "I'm pushing because I'm right, Ax-"

There were two flashes of movement that were only noticed after it was far too late. The two mercenaries on watch found themselves pulling out tranquilizer darts one moment, before things got very blurry and dark in the next few seconds.

Makina watched from the treeline he was hiding behind as his shots hit their targets dead on. Within seconds, the two mercenaries were on the ground and completely vulnerable. His part of the job was done, and he watched as a pair of Spybots did their thing. A teleporter leading back to Gray Industries Headquarters had been set up. The Spybots grabbed one of the mercenaries each before heading through the teleporter. It was only after everything else had gone quiet and Makina was sure that no one had realised did he take the teleporter back as well, before it was remotely destroyed and leaving nothing but unusable scrap metal in a heap.

Engineer woke up at the crack of dawn. In his mind, he could almost hear the sound of the chickens back in his childhood home crowing and calling, their noisy demands to be fed still echoing years into the future when the Texan was no longer a kid and the chickens from back then were all dead. No doubt his parents still reared chickens for they could never handle the silence of not having the noisy little beasts getting in the way when trying to clean the coop or collect eggs.

His late-thirties back did not agree with sleeping on the floor. It ached terribly as his muscles screamed with stiffness. Engineer did his best to slowly stretch before he picked himself off the floor, shoving aside his work bag that had become a temporary pillow. It was the only comfort that had been afforded. If he had know beforehand just how bad the situation was at the factory, he would have brought a sleeping bag. Alas, Mann Co. did not really care about its employees; there was no reason to anyway, given how they tended to die in weeks of starting their jobs. In the case of the mercenaries, jobs like this were unusual and clearly the Administrator had not thought about this - or if she did, she hadn't cared.

There were mercenaries scattered around. Soldier was still sleeping with nothing but his helmet clutched in his grasp, but he seemed perfectly comfortable. All that spouting about how the floor was a better option than what he had put up with weren't entirely lies, though perhaps the stories had been embellished here and there.

On the other side of the room, the BLU Sniper and Scout were asleep. Sniper slept sitting up with his back against a wall, hat pushed over his face as a symbol not to bother him. Scout was - admittedly rather adorably - resting with his head on the bounty hunter's lap. The boy was curled up in a loose fetal position, certainly not willing to get up. Engineer didn't frankly care, because it was time for their shift. Spy and Pyro were bound to be tired and needing a rest.

The Texan genius approached Scout and nudged him gently with a boot, trying not to wake Sniper up in the process. Scout rolled over and grumbled a little, swatting Engineer away while screwing his eyes shut tighter.

"C'mon boy, it's our shift," Engineer quietly muttered. When Scout refused to get up, Engineer squat down and looped his arms under the Scout, hauling him to his feet. Sniper didn't react at Scout was lifted off him.

Scout's eyes snapped open and he tried to shove the RED away, though his hits could have been adorably called a 'nudge' instead of a shove. "Hey- get off me," He hissed. Engineer only let him go when he was clear of stepping on Sniper. "The hell was that for?"

"It's our shift, boy. C'mon, Pyro and Spy have been waiting for us." He didn't wait for Scout, turning his back on the BLU before he had a chance to argue. It worked, for the boy's lazy steps could be heard dragging against the scuffed concrete floor.

Before leaving the main facility, Engineer grabbed his shotgun that had been left leaning against his sleeping spot. He knelt down and dragged the shutter up halfway, the mechanism working with the upward momentum to roll the shutter up entirely to allow people to get through. The Texan's back strained against the force and he grit his teeth for a second, before the brief ache ebbed away. He was starting to get too old for this nonsense, and when he finally got a few days off he was going to get a massage for sure.

The two mercenaries were met with a cool breeze that lazily whipped over the alps. The gloom and rain of the evening before had since dispersed, dull clouds finally breaking up to make way for spots of a baby-blue morning sky. The sun finally had an opportunity to truly shine through in the distance, casting visible rays like a spotlight onto the frigid mountains ahead.

Things were quiet, which was not all so unusual since neither Gray nor his mechanical army had shown their presence in recent days. Engineer yawned as he made his way throughout the facility to look for Pyro and Spy. Surely they were eagerly awaiting the end of their shift.

"Alright boys," Engineer called out in the hopes that they'd hear him and come to him instead of making him go look for them. "We'll take over from here."

His call was met with nothing but the sound of birds calling in the distance. "C'mon now boys, y'all need some rest."

Once again, nothing.

Both he and Scout were starting to realise something was up. The BLU scrapper joined the RED's side, looking out over the rest of the quicklime facility. "Ya see them Engie?" Scout asked.

Engineer shook his head, a frown already finding its way between his brows. "No. And that ain't right. Pyro ain't the kind to turn down some rest when he's got the opportunity. Search the place. Maybe they're somewhere out there."

The two of them split off, each covering one side of the facility to cover ground quickly. Scout pulled his scattergun close to his chest as he carefully crept along the left side of the facility, going over wooden walkways and checking every single room in case the two mercenaries previously on shift had just fallen asleep somewhere sheltered to get out of the rain. Each time he found an empty room, he was both concerned yet excited at the prospect of some kind of action starting to build up. Missing mercenaries? Perhaps Gray had stormed the facility at night - no, that didn't make sense. Everyone would have heard it. A scheme was starting to form in the boy's mind, playing out like some kind of movie. He could almost picture it like he was the director on a set seated in that high chair with a megaphone in his hand, a pair of sunglasses and that stupid beret - okay, maybe no beret. His coworkers would be on the set, particularly Spy and Pyro as the good guys and Gray Mann as the bad guy. Hell, throw in a few hundred robots to make it look exceptionally dramatic. A huge fight between both sides, with endless waves of robots climbing over each other in an attempt to get in on the fight and closing in on the heroes of the story. Then, a dramatic moment where Spy and Pyro finally ran out of ammo and a shrill cry from a woman, soap opera style as the protagonists were finally overrun and taken away. Scout could almost hear Gray's maniacal laughter in the distance as he let his mind-movie take flight.

The daydream was ripped away as his mindless walking led him to tripping over something on the ground. "Hey-!" He grabbed the nearest surface he could reach to stop himself from falling, before glaring behind him at the offending object. What he saw was a pile of metal that looked like it had exploded. It was blue. It was hard to tell exactly what it was before now that it looked like a good blast had ripped it apart, distorting the metal where the worst of the tiny blast had torn through it. Metal plating was bent outwards in certain areas, and the blue plastic covering bore burn marks and soft ridges where the heat had melted it.

"Oh, shit," Scout muttered. He picked up one of the scraps of metal and turned it over in his palm. He looked around for Engineer's presence and when Scout couldn't see him, decided to just yell for him. Soldier and Sniper be damned if they wake up. "Hey! ENGIE!" His voice echoed through the mountains, ringing like he had yelled down an empty tunnel.

In seconds, Engineer's short frame came into view, running over with his shotgun armed. "Damnit boy, you yelled like you were getting torn apart or somethin'." The short Texan doubled over briefly, panting from the sudden exertion. He took a moment to catch his breath before straightening up.

Scout handed him a piece of the ruined machine he had been looking over. "You know what this is? I found it here." He decided to leave out the part about tripping over it. No reason to give the RED anything to mock him over.

The Texan accepted the offered mystery metal, turning it over in his hand while giving occasional glances back at the rest of the pieces. In his mind he was putting it all together in a way that made sense to him through his understanding of mechanisms and how everything worked together to create something. "It's a teleporter. Or the remains, at least. This ain't good. Run back to base and call Miss Pauling."

Scout nodded and took off, his light and quick footsteps barely making a sound as he disappeared back to the main factory building. Engineer gathered up the ruined teleporter and started to haul it back since Soldier and Sniper were going to need to know what had happened.

By the time he got back to the base, he saw Scout and Soldier arguing over who got to talk to Miss Pauling. Scout had jumped up onto a crate and was trying to hold the phone receiver as high as possible while Soldier grabbed at his legs and tried to pull him down. Sniper stood a little ways from them, just watching the whole thing go down without trying to do anything about it.

"Let me talk to her! You have no idea what you're talking about!" Soldier yelled.

"Dude, get off me! Engie asked me to talk to her, you ain't even see what we saw!"

"If there's any maggot robots to kill, I should be the one to know!"

"I said get off!"

Engineer dumped down the broken teleporter on the floor, letting it all come crashing down with a clang. That was enough to get everyone to stop, before he silently stuck out his hand to Scout for the phone. With the two fools no longer yelling at each other, it was easy to hear Miss Pauling asking if everything was okay. Scout handed the phone to Engineer with a pout before getting off the crate and scurrying away from Soldier.

Engineer put the phone to his ear. "Hello Miss Pauling, it's Engie. Uh, sorry about… all that."

He could hear Miss Pauling breath a sigh of relief at finally getting to talk to someone with some level of common sense. "Oh, thank goodness. Are you guys okay? What's going on?"

"Nothing good, I'm afraid. Pyro and Spy went missing and I found the remains of one of Gray's teleporters on the grounds. Seems like he came in the night and took them when the rest of us were sleeping."

There was a moment of silence, then Engineer could hear Miss Pauling swearing under her breath. He let her process it in silence, perking up when she cleared her throat.

"Got it. The Administrator doesn't know yet, right?"

"Nah, you're the first one we called. I asked Scout to call you while I brought the teleporter back and I see him and Soldier fighting over the phone."

"Of course. Okay, she doesn't need to know. You guys need to settle it as quickly as you can in whatever way you see fit. As long as Pyro and Spy are brought back in one piece, I can explain everything to the Administrator. Got it?"

"Yes ma'am."

"Okay." Engineer could hear a slight tremble in her voice. "Good luck, guys."

Engineer put the phone back on the receiver cradle mounted on the wall. Scout, Soldier, and Sniper were all looking at him expectantly. Since he had been the one to receive Miss Pauling's instructions, he had to be the one to put everything together and get the missing mercenaries back with the team.

"What did she say?" Sniper asked.

"We're gonna get Pyro and Spy back in any way we see fit as long as they're back in one piece. Now that means we need a solid plan without Gray coming down on all of us. Remember - we're gonna be venturing beyond the safety of Mann Co.'s borders, so we got to be careful."

Everyone on the team was eager to get some action and get their friends back, but it seemed no one knew where to start yet. Engineer ran through each of their strengths in his mind and started to put a plan together. If things were to be executed smoothly and as quickly as possible, planning was important. And he was good at that. It didn't sound like Miss Pauling was going to send any backup, so it was just the four of them against Gray and however many thousands of robots he had.

"We need to know what we're up against. We ain't know where Gray's taken them or if he even did it, so-"

"What do you mean we don't know if he took them? Of course it was him, Engie! Who else is all the way out here screwing with us?" Scout butt in. He got a glare in return.

"You don't know who's out there, boy. But it sure does sound like he'd do it. Anyway, the point is we need to know what we're dealing with to know what we gotta do. That's your job, boy. Can you climb the rock wall that the bots come down from?"

Scout puffed out his chest. "Am I a human being that's alive?"

"Good. You're gonna climb up and see where Gray's tankers are coming from and scout it out if you see one. If we know what it's like, we can hitch a ride on it to take us back to wherever it comes from. As for the rest of us, well, just gotta wait for the intel before we can do anything. So part one's all on you, boy."

"Heh. You got it."