Author's Notations:
(Someone said they didn't like the author's notes (or possibly Administrator's Noticeboards), so I'll try to keep this short.)
My laptop's ground pin broke and it couldn't charge, which filled me with unspeakable rage. I was inconvenienced greatly and unable to access many of my beautiful documents. Then school began.
(Well, that didn't work.)
Last chapter, I don't think I stretched the limits of ridiculousness enough. I am going to go even further. I'm bringing in the big metafictional guns. Irrelevant linguistics, borderline offensive content, wonky old game mechanics…What more could you want? (Besides no a/n. Sorry, AlithiaSigma, I couldn't help myself...)
P.S. J'adore les papillons.
Spy's Espionage
The weeks had been dragging on. The latest setback in interteam relations meant that even getting people to come to the meetings to strategize before missions was now like pulling teeth. Tiger teeth. From a living tiger. In a conservation zone patrolled by hard-boiled park rangers with nothing to lose. The Engineers had enacted a non-optional two-way interaction ban between the Soldiers, and by that I mean they tied them up in their respective bases. That had worked up until the Soldiers chewed their way out and blew up the meeting room.
Back to the two-team model it was. For now, at least. Until the Engineers could make stronger, preferably cyanide-laced rope.
Spy thought himself above all this rancor; he never took anything on the battlefield personally. Certainly, he could appreciate his handiwork, but he never stooped to the petty rivalry that the Soldiers had, for example, nor did he use childish insults like the Scouts. Spy was a sophisticated killer, ruthless and disciplined, as collected and cool on the field and off as a widely cultivated plant by the binomial name of Cucumis sativus.
But little did he know, there was another.
The "Mentlegen".
The Mentlegen was the third cousin twice removed or something of someone somewhere. For some reason, on lovely day when Spy was out gathering intelligence on the robot advances, this third cousin twice removed or something of someone somewhere took it upon himself to infiltrate Mann Co. by getting himself hired as a mercenary. (Actually, he didn't succeed in getting hired, but bore such a striking resemblance to the former-BLU Spy that they let him pass. Also, he wouldn't stop smoking as many cigars as he could fit in his mouth, and they were beginning to forget what fresh air smelled like.) On his business card, which was actually a list entitled "favorite butterfly things", he had the following:
· the butterfly knifes
· the butterfly doors
· the butterfly strokes
· the butterfly effect
· the butterfly graph
· the butterfly guard
· the butterfly joints
· the iron butterfly investment strategy
· breaking a butterfly upon a wheel
· butter does not fly
At the bottom, "I 3 Buterflys" was inscribed in an elegant, practiced cursive.
He entered the room, greeting everyone with a smooth "Mentlegen". He casually took out an entire pack of cigarettes, jamming them into his mouth.
Engineer coughed politely. "D'ya need any help with that, sir?"
"Muiaiguh," replied the Mentlegen. He removed the pack of cigarettes from his mouth, strings of saliva hanging off of it. He shook the cigarettes onto his palm, and promptly shoved those into his face, deftly lighting them with a blowtorch he had produced from nowhere – at least nowhere the mercs wanted to think about.
"I guess not," muttered Engineer.
"Ah ahm heeah to bee ze Sphee," said the Mentlegen.
"What?"
The Mentlegen produced a flyer, which had a picture of a plate of indeterminate pasta on it. He flipped it over, and that side was graced with the image of another, slightly less indeterminate plate of pasta.
"Huh," remarked the Engineer. "I didn't know the BLU Spy left on a secret mission. Heck, I didn't know any of us could leave. Just out of curiousity, how would one be able to apply for a secret mission?"
And now, one may ask, how did he extract any pertinent information at all from a plate of slightly-less-indeterminate pasta? He was of course deciphering the lines of spaghetti code hidden in the looping, sauce-filled arms of the intertwined barbine. The BLU Spy was clearly a closet WET ("write everything twice", "we enjoy typing" or "waste everyone's time") programmer.
The Mentlegen smiled. This made the cigarettes slither out of his mouth like small, soggy brown legless lizards. (I say legless lizards because they generally have no venom and therefore cannot take their vengeance upon me in the way a venomous snake might if offended by this insensitive simile.) His speech became more clear, but he was still affecting a most outrageous accent.
"Akchually, that was a, how you say, cover-up. 'e ran off, presumably to find a female of the spheecies with great tracts of land and a sizeable inheritance with whom ' can discuss worldly matters and stimulating intellectual topics."
"Yeah...intellectual topics," muttered the Scout. The Engineer elbowed him. Scout scowled briefly at the Engineer, and turned to the Mentlegen, raising his voice again. "So...you're the replacement?"
"But of course! I am here to be his replacement so the aitch queue does not find out that he ran off, presumably to find a f -"
"Yeah, yeah, we got that. But why?"
"I 'ave always wanted to be a spy!" proclaimed the Mentlegen. "I 'ave 'ad some success in my current career as a professional cat burglar, bird watcher and assassin but I would be honoured to join you fine people and hone my skills."
"You're a bird assassin?!" exclaimed Medic, a look of horror on his face.
"No, I am a people assassin," reassured the Mentlegen. "Pardon my English; it is not my mother tongue. I should 'ave put a comma of the Oxford variety in that list of three or more items to avoid ambiguity."
"Oh. Gut."
"Well...how many people have you killed?"
"Scout!"
"What? We have to know if he sucks!"
The Mentlegen smiled enigmatically, took a fountain pen out of his secret right sleeve pocket, uncapped it and used the cap to scratch a number into the wall. After he finished, he added helpful diagrams explaining each job. It took him about four hours.
"That's...a lot of zeroes. And, um, very...detailed...drawings."
"So? May I join you?"
"I suppose..." said Engineer hesitantly, trying to pass off his hesitation as his natural drawl. "You know we'll be fighting robots, right?"
"Yes."
"And you know those robots are pretty mean mother hubbards, right?"
"I 'ave no idea what that charmingly colloquial americanism means, but I will nod in assent regardless."
"You don't care?"
"Mon ami, or should I say mon soon-to-be ami, I am not in the least bit scared."
"Alllllriiight then..." said the Engineer, again exploiting his Texan heritage to avoid social awkwardness. "You can join us for one day. If you can keep up, you can stay." Disappointingly, Engineer didn't finish his hedging with another couplet, adding, "It couldn't hurt."
The Mentlegen beamed. "You will not be disappointed!"
Incidentally, the Mentlegen was perfectly correct. Engineer found him to be a competent, if a bit eccentric, sentry guarder and sneak attacker. Both teams concurred – since he was neither former-RED or former-BLU, no ill will had been bred between any of them. He quickly struck up a camaraderie with all the mercenaries, winning them over with his quirky humour and obvious talent for cramming of entire cigarette cases into his mouth.
Well, all the mercenaries except one.
The (former) RED Spy.
"He is a disgrace to spies everywhere!" stammered the RED(-faced) Spy. "Look at his pinstripes!"
"Eh, you're wearing pinstripes," pointed out the Demoman.
"But my stripes are slate-on-redwood in colour! His are silver-on-cobalt!"
The Demoman stared at him for a moment, then averted his single eye, muttering about them needing a proctologist to remove the stick up Spy's rear end.
"It appears that my pistol is out of ammunition," declared the Mentlegen, a few hammer uni – uh, feet away. He slapped it against his face, somehow managing to exchange the magazine for a fresh one with. "Perfect," he spluttered, the gun still plastered against his face.
Spy facepalmed.
The robot nearest to them merrily decided to explode, sending the Mentlegen, Engineer and Spy to respawn.
In the respawn room
"Why, for the love of all that is holy, did you allow this menace to join us?"
"He's a good mercenary," argued the Engineer. "He's gettin' along real good with everyone on both teams."
"Yes, I am most good amis with them," said the Mentlegen. "They say I make them laugh."
"I bet you do," said the Spy.
"He speaks French," said the Engineer.
"Baguette," supplied the Mentlegen.
"That hardly qualifies as 'speaking French'," snapped the Spy.
"Baguette fromage?"
Spy snorted in disgust. "Salaud."
"Hein, me laissez-moi tranquille!"
"Vas-t'en, chercher ton tétine!"
The Medic gasped. "He tutoyed him! He tutoyed him! Not only has he told him to get his pacifier, thus infantilizing him, he used the familiar tu instead of vous"
Coincidentally, tutoy meant, among other things, "baby bottle". If anything, the conversation was perfectly on track.
"Je n'utilise pas les suçons!"
"Suçons? You mean sucettes?"
"What is the difference?"
"Well, in France, suçon could mean either hickey or lollipop. In Quebec, sucette can mean either hickey or lollipop. Or something. It's one or the other."
"That's Canadian French. That isn't real French."
Somewhere up north in the land of snow moose, poutine igloos and the occasional maple tree (as well as self-deprecating stereotype use), thousands of French Canadians felt a wave of indignation course through their veins and arteries and even capillaries.
"Shtop persecuting me!" yelled the Mentlegen.
"Oh no, we have a social justice warrior here," the Spy spat, flippantly using a neologism not coined until the 21st century.
"At least he is warrior," said the Heavy. The Heavy was there because of a mishap with Sasha – a robot appeared to reach out for her, so Heavy quickly threw her down and jumped on top of her to protect her. It didn't quite work.
"He has a point, too," said the Engineer. "It does no one any good to discriminate against different national varieties of languages."
The Spy stared at them in shock. His eyes narrowed. "Are you...siding with him?"
The Engineer shuffled back and forth. "Uhm...jus' sayin', Spah, you might have been a little harsh there -"
Spy abruptly turned around, hurled a balisong into the window, and left the room.
While they waited for the glass to stop tinkling, the Mentlegen asked, "Why is he like that?"
"He is an Arschloch," replied the Medic, who had just respawned, cheerfully. He was there because the former-BLU Soldier had mistaken him for a communist, and BLU rockets were still effective against former-REDs.
"An Arschloch," repeated the Mentlegen thoughtfully.
"Ja. Don't think too much of it."
Little did Medic know, he had meddled with forces beyond his ken.
The Mentlegen showed up at dinner without his customary fifty cigarettes, dressed in a slate-on-redwood coloured pinstripe suit. The Soldier was the first to notice.
"What the cussing cuss word? Do we have two RED Spies or have I finally lost my mind?"
"That ship sailed a long time ago, old man," retorted the Mentlegen.
"Well...French is weird!"
"Hey! That's culturally insensitive!" said the Scout.
"Since when do you care, you prepubescent whelp?"
"Screwez-vous, vous dirtbag," said the Scout in a bad Chinese accent for some reason.
"You managed to overgeneralize a grammatical rule and misuse it within seconds of each other. Congratulations, Scout, you've hit a new intellectual low. Impressively incompetent, even for you."
"Shut up," said the Scout, angrily reverting his accent to one less offensive to Asian-Americans of Chinese descent.
"Are you going to cry, little baby?" the Mentlegen said in a mock sing-song.
"No," said the Scout, unconvincingly.
"Alright, that's enough," interrupted the Engineer.
"No, let him go on," said the Spy. I want to hear what he has to say."
"Mit Kanonen auf Spatzen schießen," said the Medic, in an attempt to sound wise.
"You know what you all are? Pathetic worms enslaved to your limbic systems, desperate for another dopamine fix. Your combined IQ is lower than the freezing point of helium. One day, you will all die and rot away, and not a single second of your worthless existence would have mattered."
"Don't reify that concept! IQ is but a measure of a certain -" began the Engineer, completely ignoring the overdone existential discussion.
"Hey! I take offense to that! I'm not a dope!" the Scout protested.
"No, you idiot, that's not what he said!" the Medic replied, exasperated.
"Who are you calling an idiot? He called you all idiots and you're going after me?"
"Well, yer an easy target," said the Demoman.
"Hey!"
"You know I'm right."
The Pyro, who had been hiding under their chair for a few minutes, set fire to the tablecloth in an attempt to catch their attention, to no avail.
The table erupted into discordant shouts and impromptu fisticuffs. The Mentlegen had been a very successful agent provocateur.
The Spy looked approvingly at the proceedings, until he was yanked aside by an irate Sniper.
"Oi! What have ya done to them?"
"I did nothing. It was the Mentlegen – "
"Well, if you weren't such a jealous drongo, he wouldn't be acting like this!"
"I am not jealous!" scoffed the Spy.
"Well, then you're envious! We like him better than we like you, and you can't stand that! That's not jealousy, that's envy right there!"
"There's a difference?" asked a flummoxed Soldier, who had paused nearby in his punching in of Scout's head.
"Yes. Jealousy is when your possession of a good is threatened by a third party, while envy implies that you wish to possess a third party's good, something you do not have."
"How educational!" remarked the Medic, before roundhouse kicking the bewildered Pyro, who really just wished they'd stayed in bed.
Spy considered Sniper's words. He was reluctantly convinced that his priding himself on his impartiality was premature – he had initiated a petty rivalry with the innocent Mentlegen, and infected the entire team with the pettiness.
Suddenly ashamed, but still not yet willing to admit it, he sighed. The only way to somewhat reclaim what little dignity left of the situation was to tell the Mentlegen he was wrong in the most obfuscated way possible.
He approached the Mentlegen. "I would like to offer an explanation for my actions earlier. I perhaps gave the impression that I disliked your personality. That is absolutely true. But what I abhor more is when people modify their behaviour to pander to certain people." He paused. "Do you understand what I am saying?"
"Why aren't you speaking in French? I know French."
"Parce que tu es – " began the Spy. He stopped himself. He decided to switch to a more direct approach. "Apologies. I was wrong. Now apologize to them and fix this."
"You weren't wrong. This is far more fun. Toying with the emotions of -"
"No, you nitwit, I was wrong! I was envious of your instant fellowship with those I had to gain the respect of. You may not have my looks or my air of breeding, but you managed to befriend both Soldiers. That is a feat I will never achieve in my lifetime."
The Mentlegen eyed him carefully. "Do you mean what you say?"
The Spy considered denying it. "Yes."
The Mentlegen smiled, tore off the red suit to reveal a blue one, and spun Sniper around in joy.
"I feel as light as air!" sang the Mentlegen.
"How heavy is air?" asked the Demoman, who had stopped trying to hit Engineer with his Eyelander.
"Well, assuming 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 0.9% argon and 0.1% miscellaneous gases, we can calculate roughly by mass –" began the Engineer.
"Blah, blah, science, blah. I was just using a simile."
Just then, the BLU Spy walked in.
"What are you doing back? It's hardly been a day!" exclaimed the Mentlegen.
"It felt more like months of inactivity," said the BLU Spy. "The outside world is boring. I'd like to take my place back, please."
Everyone, having forgotten what they were all worked up about anyway, got up to send the Mentlegen off.
"Even though we only knew you for eight baffling hours, it's like you were a part of our family," said the Engineer.
"I like French people better now," said the Scout.
"Come back to visit anytime!" said the Medic.
The Mentlegen shook all their hands warmly, his eyes twinkling. "Au revoir, mes amis. Sucette bonbon."
~~C'est la fin~~
Stray thought: I see "R&R" all the time. I assumed it meant "rate and review", but that would just be the review. I also considered "read and review", but to review a story one had better read it. So it might as well be "redundancy and a review".
I just hope you guys "R": "Respire". Please don't stop breathing.