DURA MATER

CHAPTER 1:

CONVERGENCE

XOF facility, location unknown, a few months prior…

In the world of black-ops, strange and exotic sobriquets were the norm. Sometimes, they seemed to be pulled out of the very air itself. Other times, they were frighteningly apposite.

Take the man known to the world at large (where he was known, anyway) as Skull Face. The commanding officer of XOF had a face that resembled a skull (of course), albeit a skull covered in sometimes smooth, sometimes wrinkled masses of bluish-grey tissue. His mouth was unnaturally wide, his nose flat and warped, it was impossible to tell what his ethnicity or home country was (he was of Hungarian extraction, not that he told this to many: his past was an unhappy memory), and for reasons only known to himself, of late, he wore a domino mask over his eyes. Given how distinctive his face (or rather, lack thereof) was, it seemed like an exercise in futility if the mask was to conceal his identity or his burns.

However, the domino mask was concealing something else entirely.

SKULL FACE

A Ghost Whose Past Was Burnt Away

Not that was relevant at all to the matter at hand. A small but immensely irritating crisis had spiralled out of control, and he needed to resolve it, lest his plan fall apart because of that idiot Emmerich's foolhardiness.

A knock on the door signalled the arrival of one of his top agents. He put the file he was studying back on the desk, and then said, "Come in."

A woman strode in, with short brown hair and green eyes. Utterly beautiful, even without makeup. It was a hard beauty, but even so, she looked more like a model than military. Only her bearing and her hard expression told otherwise. Her true name was lost to history, present only on a few files, including one Skull Face possessed. Her life's history was known only to a select few, including herself. However, Skull Face, and most of the XOF personnel who had any reason to interact with her, knew her as Atropos, after the Fate who severed the thread of a mortal's life.

ATROPOS

A Quiet Cutter of the Thread of Life

She stood at attention. Skull Face took a moment to look at her beauty, something he envied. With his injuries, it was hard to even buy the services of a woman, let alone seduce one. Amongst his few conquests were female prisoners he had raped, including Pacifica Ocean, aka Paz Ortega Andrade. He wouldn't attempt anything of the sort with Atropos, not out of any principle, but out of pragmatism. She was a valuable asset, and any attempt to exploit that would lose him her services, if not lead her to betray him outright. A brief fantasy played out in his head regardless, though, to be savoured later at leisure in private. Right now, he was all business.

"Atropos, we have something of a crisis on our hands. You are aware that Dr Emmerich has left us?"

The woman nodded.

"Very well. Are you aware of the circumstances that precipitated this course of action?"

"Not fully, sir," Atropos said in her quiet voice, English with a faint accent. He knew she was Dutch in origin(1), and had once been one of the BVD's(2) top wetwork people (despite her relatively young age) until she joined XOF a few months ago, having become dissatisfied with the politics of the job.

"Very well. It seems that Dr Strangelove had acquired some annoying qualms about her work. I believe it is something to do with the child she had with Dr Emmerich. Maternal feelings are inconvenient in a world like ours. Of course, her work was still exemplary, until she argued with Emmerich on using her son as a test pilot for our Metal Gear project. The current design can only be controlled by a child, unless we use the A.I system, or remote control. Strangelove fled a few months ago, and because her work was done on Metal Gear Sahelanthropus, we haven't stepped her status up that much. We searched for her, but as long as she kept her head down and didn't try contacting her old friends in the MSF, I can wait. That being said, one of Code Talker's experimental hybrids has gone missing at about the same time, we found after we conducted an audit. But Emmerich's work and attitude has become ever more erratic. He's left our organisation too, while I was busy attending to other matters, and these imbeciles let him leave, his work still incomplete. He's obsessed with bringing his wife and son back to him, or at least his son. I think he intends to kill Strangelove."

"Retrieval then. Alive, I presume," Atropos said. "What of Strangelove and their child?"

"If the boy can be used as leverage towards Dr Emmerich, keep him alive. But Strangelove has outlived her purpose. She is in love with a woman long dead and vilified as a traitor. Strangelove has proved a traitor to my cause, though I have to commend her for being able to evade my security and my searches. However, Dr Emmerich, once he got back to America, has not been so subtle, and I think he is leading us to her. Indeed, I believe that he may have found her."

"Where does he think Strangelove and the boy are?"

"An obscure resort town in Maine(3), known as Silent Hill. I doubt you will have heard of it: I never have until I heard where Emmerich was heading. Then again, I am sure that one of Cipher's little assets lives nearby, in a town called Brahms. It may be coincidence, but I have heard that said asset has disappeared. You and I are heading there, along with a small squad of covert operatives."

"What about the operation to eliminate Big Boss?" Atropos asked.

"The original operation was that I send you in to kill him. Should things go awry, I would have sent in our troops and blame it on the Soviets. Apparently a couple of their more destructive assets are heading there, and we can claim that the Soviets tried to cover up their tracks(4). I'm sending Thanatos in. Big Boss is a spent force, he's been in a coma for years. And if by some miracle he does make it out alive, then we will have concluded our business by then, and we can eliminate him." Skull Face smiled. Well, given the scarring on his face, he had little choice but to do so. But he smiled a little wider and deeper, a disturbing look on his grotesque face. "I'm coming personally to oversee the operation, but also to see if we can subvert Cipher's asset."

Well, he was stretching the truth a little. Technically, he didn't need to be in the field. But besides his stated reasons, and the enjoyment he would get out of personal revenge against Strangelove and Emmerich for fouling things up (he wasn't going to kill Emmerich, but for putting him to this trouble, he was probably going to push him down some stairs at the very least(5)), there was something…odd about this town, Silent Hill. It had piqued his interest. It was as if the name called to him.

"Understood," Atropos said. And that was what was great about her. She did understand her role in things. She knew how to balance initiative with obeying orders.

"You see, if someone who knew the future pointed out a child to you, and told you that that child would grow up totally evil, to be a ruthless dictator who would destroy millions of lives…could you then kill that child?"

"Yes, you idiot!" Doctor 'Huey' Emmerich snarled at the screen angrily. "Put those fucking wires together! Blow those mobile garbage cans to hell!"

DOCTOR 'HUEY' EMMERICH

Abundant in Intelligence, Lacks Moral Fibre

But no, that long-scarfed, bulging eyed imbecile dithered. Huey snarled in annoyance. Just when he thought he got one of the few good shows on PBS while sitting in this crappy motel room, it went downhill within minutes of starting. He hadn't seen that many episodes of Doctor Who, but what few he had seen, he had enjoyed to some degree or another. But this one was just plain stupid(6).

He watched the rest of the episode half-heartedly, snorting with disdain when he first saw Davros, the creator of the Daleks. What was with the entertainment industry and crippled geniuses creating weapons of mass destruction? He emitted a slight chuckle when he remembered discussing Dr Strangelove, the Stanley Kubrick film, with Strangelove herself. She had told him, utterly deadpan, that she was torn between hunting him down and killing him, or else letting him continue making his films, as she had enjoyed a few of them. Indeed, they had a mutual interest in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Then again, it seemed that that was one of the few things they had in common.

Huey scowled as that occurred to him. He thought that they had had something, that he had broken through her cold shell. But in truth, that icy bitch had used him. Used him, a cripple! All to have a child that she said, in the grip of delusion, would be that of the Boss! That traitorous harridan had been dead for two decades now! If she wanted a child so damned badly, why not get artificially inseminated like cattle? Why string him along? Why treat him as a disposable commodity? He was a genius, and his seed was at the top of the line! She should have paid him to have his child!

And now, she had stolen Hal from him. His child. The test-pilot for Metal Gear Sahelanthropus. Taken him, and fled to the United States. Traitorous hag. Like everyone else, she looked down upon him. Because he was a cripple, because he couldn't walk.

Well, not until now, anyway. He did have to remove his leg braces in public so that he could remain less conspicuous, instead hiring a wheelchair (how humiliating!). He was now in a cheap motel in Brahms. And he was planning the death of the woman he had considered his wife.

Although now that he came to think about it, he wasn't sure why that weird ghost with the red eyes (who calls themselves the Sorrow, anyway?) told him. Or how that ghost knew. Or why the Sorrow would help him leave the XOF facility in Afghanistan. It was only thanks to the ghost that Huey had been able to evade a plethora of soldiers, surveillance, and customs.

It didn't matter, though. He was well on the path to revenge. His just, well-deserved revenge.

The Doctor Who episode ended with the Doctor and his companions tumbling through time and space, the Doctor making some inane observation that even with the Daleks still in existence, some good would eventually come out of their evil. Huey snorted, even as the distinctive scream of the title music's introduction sounded, and the eerie wail of the title music began. He went over to the TV (having re-attached his leg braces while inside his room), and switched it off. That was a waste of time. Much like his relationship with Strangelove.

He went over to a bag beside his bed, and gently fished around within it, before plucking out a handgun. He grinned as he thought of the manifold ways he could use it to make Strangelove's life a living hell in the moments before her death. At the very least, he was going to make her understand what it was like to be unable to walk. To be crippled. To be defenceless. Maybe he would do that, and then kick her down some stairs, just like Hot Coldman did. Then again, that might kill her, and he wanted her suffering to be prolonged.

Yes. Her fate was calling out to him. It would be just, it would be painful, it would be right. He would have his son back. And everything would be right in the world.

And not so far away, in Silent Hill, a woman was making a decision about her own child. After an argument with her daughter, who stubbornly refused to lend her her power, Dahlia Gillespie had come to an epiphany. An epiphany that many would be horrified, but which she saw as necessity.

DAHLIA GILLESPIE

Yearns to Bring Forth a Dark God At All Costs

She didn't care that what she was about to do would make her daughter suffer. Suffering was necessary, in order to bring forth a paradise where there would be no more suffering. And her daughter would at last do her bidding.

An application of some drugs she obtained from Doctor Kaufmann, a spell or two, and a touch of applied arson, and she would soon achieve her goal. Soon, God would be reborn in this world…

CHAPTER 1 ANNOTATIONS:

Okay, setting things up. I was wondering how Strangelove and Huey would have managed to escape XOF, and decided that the Sorrow helped them. Bit of a cop-out, but never mind about that.

You'll notice that I've repeated the caption for Atropos and Minerva. I will do so for Hal, Strangelove, and Alessa in their introductions. None of the other characters seen in the prologue will make an appearance, though, at least those given captions. But there will be another Metal Gear character making an appearance as a key character. You've heard him alluded to in the chapters so far, but next chapter will be when he makes his first appearance.

1. Stefanie Joosten, the woman who provided the face, voice, and mo-cap for Quiet, is Dutch, though she speaks Japanese fluently, and can speak English quite well.

2. The BVD was, prior to 2002, the name of the Dutch Secret Service (BVD standing for 'Binnenlandse Veiligheidsdienst' or 'Domestic Security Service'). Whether they have assassins or not, I don't know, but considering that many intelligence agencies are coy on their black-ops and wetwork, it's plausible. Quiet's age is a little more problematic (I view her as being about 26 in the game), but I hopefully will work on that later in the story.

3. I heard that there are references in the game series to Silent Hill being in Maine, so I'm running with that here. It certainly seems appropriate, considering Maine seems to be a mainstay for Stephen King's works.

4. He's referring to Psycho Mantis and the Man on Fire.

5. A reference to what he actually does in the game, mirroring what Hot Coldman did to Huey.

6. Actually, this episode is part of one of the best Doctor Who stories of all time: Genesis of the Daleks. Genesis of the Daleks, AFAIK, reached American shores in the late 70s, with some editing and some rather dubious narration by Howard da Silva.