(A/N) Hey guys, sorry that this is going up late, had a problem with our DocX system, but that's all sorted out now! This chapter provides some action and some exposition, so I think you should all consider yourselves lucky! Loved this chapter, written by the always brilliant anna1795, and I think you all will too. After all, it's been too long since our last Virginia chapter.
Couple of days left before the application process for Grifball: Running Rampant ends, but you all know that at this stage. Just don't come running to me afterwards saying you wanted to apply but didn't have the time! Consider yourselves warned.
Enjoy!
Chapter Eighty-One – The Mantle of Leadership
Agent Virginia
Written by anna1795
"The dedication of time, service, and life to the cause of freedom and prosperity requires strength of will and perseverance of spirit that not many possess. I heard those words back when I was graduating from the Academy, and I didn't really think that anyone who hadn't gone to Cursor could understand what it took to really go the distance. Carolina is one of those people who understands, but she knows because she graduated from the Academy. There are others here who do, too. Virginia? If she doesn't give it her all for everything, she certainly comes damn close." - Agent Arkansas' personal log
Meal times were becoming increasingly uncomfortable for Virginia. With more people trying to crowd into the table with all of the freelancers, it was hard to find some decent peace and quiet as well as have meaningful conversations with individuals that she could handle being with, such as Massachusetts, Florida, and sometimes York and North. Facing antagonism from Carolina and South Dakota also didn't sit well with Virginia, and it was sometimes more worth it to just skip out on meals than be subjected to their scrutiny.
After skipping out on three meals like that and being confronted by both Massa and Florida, Virginia begrudgingly made her way to the dining hall. Her hands were stuffed into the pockets of her jeans, and her old Black Sabbath t-shirt hugged against her more protectively than the MJOLNIR armour. She nodded to Florida at the door. "Hey, how're you?"
"Alright," Florida replied. "Just got back from trying to see Al."
"What did the medics say?" Virginia asked, interest piqued. The team dynamics had been slightly altered since Al had been quarantined. Deep down, she sort of missed his quips and muttering to himself.
Florida simply shook his head. "That I shouldn't worry and that it's better for him this way. I couldn't stay long; they pushed me out the door."
"He'll get better soon," Virginia clapped a hand on her roommate's shoulder. "Then he'll be back and ready to tear peoples' heads off again with the flip of a switch."
The older man's lips twitched at the deadpan. "Come on," he pushed against Virginia's back. "Let's go get something to eat. And you WILL eat today."
"But 'Rida…" Virginia mock-whined to the elder.
"They've got roast chicken and mashed potatoes," he offered, and Virginia let herself be pushed into the cafeteria, further encouraged by the delicious aroma wafting from the servers' counters. She grabbed a tray, piled it high with several pieces of chicken and a spoonful of potatoes, grabbed an apple and a glass of water, and started making her way with Florida to the freelancers' elongated table.
Just as Virginia got near the freelancer table, something tripped her foot up, and she started falling towards the ground. Her mind flashed back to her first night on the Mother of Invention, and she purposefully sent her tray flying straight up into the air so that it wouldn't spill. She balanced with her knees and hips on one side, caught the tray, and intercepted the plates of chicken and potatoes, the apple, and the glass of water just as deftly as before. She held the tray in front of her for a second, breathing slightly harder.
Unlike the night before, something fast and red slammed into the side of her tray, tipping it and spilling the contents all over her face and down the front of her shirt. Virginia slipped backwards and landed on her back. The cafeteria erupted in laughter. She gruffly wiped the potatoes from her eyes to see another apple roll from in front of her and into South's waiting hand. The blonde freelancer was laughing uproariously while her brother gave her an unidentifiable look. Minnesota, California, and Wyoming were all joining South and the other soldiers and staff in laughter. York looked like he was trying not to laugh, and Carolina only had a grin on her face as she poked at her food. Florida looked slightly disgusted.
Virginia stayed on the floor. Her eyes were watering slightly (either from the heat of the food or the humiliation, she couldn't tell). Memories were flooding back into her mind: a dark haired little girl sat curled up in a corner while shapes around her pointed and laughed, stole her things, tripped her on her way home, called her names…
With a huff, Virginia stood up, forgot her tray, and walked around the table to where South sat. The blonde woman had barely a chance to look up before Virginia grabbed the back of her head and forced her aggressor face-first into her plate of macaroni and cheese. The laughing in the cafeteria quieted down almost instantly. The other freelancers were giving her looks that she had no time to contemplate. Shrugging off Florida's hands, she walked to the door and pushed through, racing to the nearest bathroom. She pulled open the door roughly, made her way to the sink, and turned the water on so that she could splash it across her face. Food slipped into the sink and went down the drain as she scrubbed furiously at her face.
Finally, Virginia looked up into a mirror and stared at her reflection. Her black hair was becoming soaked from the water that she had used to clean the muck off her face, and the dripping moisture disguised the few furious tears that dared trickle out of her eyes. She wiped her face furiously and took a few deep breaths.
My anger is harder to control these days, she thought to herself. Not a surprise, seeing who I have to deal with. The brunt of her anger was focused not on Carolina anymore, as it had been, but at South now. Just because she had managed to make it to the leaderboard didn't mean that she could use the opportunity to make Virginia's life anymore of a living hell than it already was.
'No,' Virginia thought as she straightened up. 'She's not going to get to me that easily. I can stay strong and last through the Project.' She straightened up and wiped off her face with her sleeve. She started walking towards the exit. 'I'll prove to them all that I can be great on my own. Nothing is going to stop me.'
"All Freelancers are to report to the briefing room immediately," F.I.L.S.S.' voice rang through the lavatory. Virginia jumped, and she made for the door. Her personal feelings would have to wait until later.
'Just swallow your emotions and keep your mind on the mission,' she told herself, and she rushed out of the bathroom towards the locker room. The Director wouldn't approve of the agents coming before him without their armor.
After hastily strapping her armour on, Virginia ran up the stairs and into the briefing room. Carolina and York were already there, and she met Penn at the door. The Counselor and the Director were busy talking in a corning, and Virginia fell into the established line of attention. Massa rushed in as well and stood next to her. Virginia turned to look at her friend.
"Do you know what's going on?" Massa whispered as others ran through the door. Virginia shook her head in response, and looked back to the Director.
"He hasn't said anything since we got here. He and the Counselor just keep talking."
"He's found him," Penn muttered, interjecting in his own helpful way…begrudging, angry, totally destructive kind of way.
However, Virginia was still slightly confused. "Who?"
"Harper. The Insurrectionist Lieutenant."
An emotion-charged fog swarmed through Virginia's brain unbidden, and she forced it back down aggressively with a shake of her head. Massa gave her an inquisitive look, then reached up and picked a speck of mashed potato out of her hair. They nodded to each other, and turned back just as the Director and Counselor separated and made their way to the holographic table.
"Agents, as you may have noticed, our initial Insurrectionist objective has been found. Unfortunately, it appears that he survived the Covenant attack on their ship, just as we did," The Director pulled up a grainy blue image of a planet, with very few land masses. "This planet, Aurora, is an Insurrectionist hot-spot. The city of Athos is where Lieutenant Ian Harper is stationed, according to our information. The agents on this mission will be tasked with a simple infiltration and assassination."
"Yes, if you want to call sneaking through a rat's nest of Innies 'simple'," Wyoming muttered. Virginia barely stifled a chuckle at the other sniper's remark. Carolina silenced the Brit with a stare.
"The team for this mission will be small, to allow for maximum efficiency, and will be comprised of the utmost infiltration experts," the Director continued as though nobody had said anything. "Agents North Dakota, Minnesota, and Massachusetts will be with the team, and Agent Virginia will be the mission leader."
Virginia had to stop herself from reeling. A mission leader, for an assassination of a primary target? This was a chance to prove herself capable of her place on the leaderboard, to show those other agents that she had the figurative balls to stay in the Project.
Her leadership position, however, was not met without resistance. "WHAT?!" two female and one male voice rang out simultaneously. Carolina looked mildly annoyed, Penn looked furious, and South wore a murderous expression that would've looked more appropriate on Penn during one of his good moods.
"Director, with all due respect, shouldn't somebody like myself, or even Pennsylvania, be leading the mission?" Carolina asked, managing to keep a civil tone in her voice.
"While you, Agent Carolina, are well-trained in stealth missions, your area of expertise lies within hand-to-hand and close-quarters weapons combat. Agent Pennsylvania, quite frankly, lacks the subtlety necessary for such a delicate mission. Agent Virginia has been specially trained for infiltration and assassination throughout her military career, making her an ideal choice for this mission," the Director answered effortlessly. Carolina backed down silently, and Penn with a short snarl. South looked over at Virginia, who looked back. She kept her face impassive, but was roaring with laughter inside at the macaroni noodle protruding from South's nostril.
"Agent Virginia, have you been practicing with your cloaking capabilities?" the Counselor asked.
"Yes, sir. I've been practicing with various weapons, hand-to-hand, and my…other preferred methods."
"Are you able to use it with less difficulty than the initial trial?"
"Yes."
"Then you are ready," the Director decided. "Assemble your team. Pilot 343-R will be transporting you down to the planet. Good luck, Agents. Do not fail me."
"Yes, sir!" they barked while saluting, and marched quickly out of the room. Virginia beckoned her team over to one side as the other's passed.
"Okay, guys. Probably not your first infiltration, so I don't need to go through everything. Just pack light, check all of your equipment, pack silencers, and we'll meet in the hangar in 30 minutes. Sync?"
"Sync," the other three responded. Sota and Massa took off, but Virginia held North back for a moment. "Look, I don't want us to have any difficulties on this mission, and I just wanted to say that I'm sorry for smashing South's head into that plate of mac and cheese."
"I won't say that it's okay, but no harm, no foul, right?" North responded, and Virginia agreed. "Besides, she could've done it to worse."
"True," Virginia joked. "She knows that Carolina will scalp her in training, Penn would tear her to bits before she even tried, and Carolina again would skin her if she tried that with York. I wouldn't kill her in front of everyone."
"How about we DON'T kill our teammates and focus on killing the bad guys?"
"Good idea," Virginia said, shaking North's hand and seeing him off. She started to follow, marvelling at the blonde's easy-going nature, his friendly demeanour, his strong, broad chin and those shining, handsome eyes…
Figured that she'd have a crush on the brother of the woman she hated.
Speaking of, Virginia saw something purple come flying out of the corner of her vision, and she caught it in one hand and rotated, incapacitating the angry female blonde who had been about to piledrive her face in.
"I know forty-two ways to break your arm and wrist with this one hand, and completely shatter it with both of them," Virginia growled lowly to South. "I don't think the Director would like it if I did that, but when somebody messes with me like that, I personally don't care."
"You…BITCH!"
Virginia raised an eyebrow. "I've been called every name in the book, South. You can't hurt me, and I won't take any attempt to try lying down." She released South, who rubbed her entire arm. "Save it for the training floor."
"You…you nutso!" South shouted after Virginia as she made her way to the locker room. "Maybe Alaska isn't the one who should be in the loony bin! You're crazier than he is."
With one final shake of her head, Virginia continued walking away, even though South kept on shouting obscenities at her as she walked away.
"Everything okay?" Massa asked as Virginia hopped on the barely departing Pelican, aimed toward the glistening blue planet below.
"Yeah. Just South saying goodbye, you know."
"Did she give you a hard time again?" North asked exasperatedly.
"Almost. I just told her that I could break her arm forty-two different ways. Hopefully she listened," Virginia answered offhandedly, checking her 'bag of tricks' for the essentials.
"You seriously know forty-two ways to break someone's arm?" Sota asked.
"With one hand. I can kill her with one hand as well. " Virginia held up her hand and closed four of the fingers into a fist, then adopted a cheesy French accent. "With this thumb."
The entire Pelican laughed heartily for a good portion of the trip down to Aurora before getting down to business.
"Drop down low over the water, and take us up along the shore," she directed 343-R. "We'll need a quick drop-off if we want this to work right."
"A quicksand drop, eh?"
"Right."
"Can do!" the pilot responded, and he dropped into a dive down towards the water. He pulled up and skimmed over the surface, speeding towards the shore. The four members of the infiltration team shimmied their way up to the protruding platform.
"We'll drop onto the sand and make our way into Anthos on foot!" Virginia shouted over the roar of the engines. "Keep your radios silenced except for an emergency!"
"This is the spot!" 343-R screamed from the front. "Go, go, go!"
They all jumped out of the plane, their sniper rifles strapped to their backs and magnums in their hands. Virginia revelled in the air flowing through the gaps in her armour before tucking and rolling onto the soft white sand of the beaches. Three other thuds accompanied her, and they stood up to take in their surroundings. A dusky sun was sinking to the north, and a skyrise of windowed skyscrapers reached towards the clouds of the ocean planet. A storm was coming in from the east, greyish-purple clouds rumbling ominously.
"Harper's expected to be making his way to his bunker in the south-east side of the city with a small convoy," Sota reported, reading the mission schematics. "The city looks like it's all just skyscrapers and a couple of boulevards. He'll be coming down Coastal and Sunset to get to his location."
"We'll take Coral straight into the city and move along this adjacent alley to the bunker. We can take out the Lieutenant as well as a good number of Innies, and be out of there in no time," Virginia decided for the group, putting her magnum into her hip holster. "It's gonna be tricky getting in. Keep your armour abilities ready to activate."
"What about a patch back to the command server?" Sota whispered. "I don't know if North and I can manage without assistance from Command, and we're incognito at the moment."
"We'll go up the nearest alleyway until we get to this building, right across from the base," Virginia responded, pointing to one on the map and the corresponding medium skyscraper in the real-life city. Once there, I'll go in and eliminate the guards up to the fourth floor, and we'll use the third for positioning. Synch?"
After a moment of thought, the others responded in kind. They started weaving through sand dunes and low brush towards Anthos, with extremely little conversation so as not to attract attention. At the border where sand met concrete, they waited patiently for two civilian cars to drive by before making a break for the alley. The freelancers ducked into the shadows, and Virginia signalled for them for them to attach their silencers to their magnums. They continued to creep along the alley, protected by the shadows of the behemoth architecture around them.
At the building where they were to be stationed, Virginia motioned for them to stop and hold back. "Keep me posted if anything changes," she whispered to them, and activated her cloaking before proceeding forward.
Carolina had been right when she said that when she activated her abilities, it had felt like someone was there with you in the back of your mind. It wasn't a guardian angel, Virginia was sure. The thing that was with her, while mostly unfamiliar, still had traces of familiarity. She didn't think that she was crazy, because when she had been training with the device before, the 'spectre' had whispered on occasion. Most of it she couldn't make out, but if she screwed up, she could almost say for certain that it had said, "Son of a –"
Without even noticing, Virginia had walked right behind a group of guards entering the building and had gained access without issue. Her 'escorts' stopped at the front desk to speak to the guard on duty, while about ten others milled around the main foyer. Checking that her clip was full and that the guards still largely had the soft-shelled camo armour, she withdrew a handful of small, sharp blades from her back and laced two into her fingers, then forced one into a vital area of one's lower spine, killing him instantly.
Before his buddy could react, she forced the other into the side of his neck and pulled it back out again. He collapsed the floor, bleeding out with every quickened heartbeat. Smoothly, she turned and put a silenced bullet through the seated guard's head. He toppled out of his chair, the wall behind him sprayed with blood.
The other ten jumped up from their positions and began scouring the room for the invisible assailant, twitching and making various noises. It wasn't hard to kill them off as she danced her way through the crowd; a slice here, a shot there, a broken neck here. Killing Innies didn't bother her as long as it was quick.
Four floors of monotonous death later (it got most interesting when one of the soldiers had bumped into her and had screamed that he felt a ghost before a shot to the throat silenced him), Virginia took the stairs back down to the third floor and signalled through a window that the other three could join her. "That was quick," Sota remarked quietly as they stowed their magnums and pulled out their rifles, waiting for the convoy to drive up.
"Just how I like it. Gives us more time to prepare," she hissed back as they checked through their scopes.
"There's the convoy," North said after a minute, disregarding the milling soldiers down below, right outside the conspicuous concrete bunker in the middle of the city. "Wait a minute…"
"That convoy's WAY too large for just one lieutenant," Massa said concernedly.
"Whoever is coming, they're WAY bigger than Harper," Sota agreed as Virginia turned away to radio command.
"F.I.L.S.S., patch me through to the Director…Director, this is Agent Virginia."
"Agent Virginia, this had better be important if you are breaking radio silence to contact Command," the Director's Southern drawl had a snap to it as he answered.
"Yes, sir. We are in position and we see the convoy. However, it's much larger than we originally anticipated. We think that Harper may not be alone."
"A larger convoy may simply be that Harper has gotten paranoid about his security and wishes extra protection," the Director responded. "Keep an eye on the situation."
"Yes, sir," Virginia obeyed, grumbling as she resumed her position. The convoy was just pulling up, with eight heavily armoured vehicles parking directly next to the bunker, and another eight parking alongside those. From the cars closest to the building, soldiers streamed out, pointing their weapons in all directions. The doors of the outer eight cars opened on both sides as well, but soldiers came out the side closest to their building, securing the perimeter.
"They're like a Roman turtle," Massa whispered. "How're we going to get through that?"
"Wait," Virginia hissed back, focusing on the people exiting out of the vehicles in the middle of the parked cars. She recognized Harper immediately from their first failed attempt to eliminate him, after Florida has gotten shot, and her back twinged painfully. He wasn't the only one, though; other highly decorated people were exiting the cars too. She recognized many of them from mission files in the past. There were a LOT of the Insurrectionist high-command here. It was when an older, white-haired man was helped out of the middle-most car that she knew she had to resume talking to the Director again.
"Agent Virginia, I am most displeased that we are repeating a conversation-"
"Sir, it's General Allen."
There was a very pregnant pause on the Director's end. "What?"
"Director, General Allen and a lot of other high Innies are here. The convoy wasn't just for Harper."
"Show me," the Director ordered, and the four of them turned on their cameras.
While the Director was looking at the picture below, Virginia said to the others, "Can any of you get a clear shot from here?"
"Negative," they all said. "Too many cars and soldiers blocking our way.
"None of us can get a clear shot from here, Director," Virginia said finally. "What do we do now, sir? It's your call."
There was a pause, then the Director's voice finally crackled over the radio once more. "Continue to provide surveillance on the building. If a shot presents itself, take it. I have a team prepped and waiting. We'll see if we can't draw them out."
