Medicals conclusions about Snakes condition were… inconclusive.

It didn't help that he had told them about the recurring hallucinations of Paz, although one of the doctors mentioned that it did answer their questions about why he'd kept visiting an empty room and what he was doing there.

They'd just never brought it up because, well, he was Snake.

Who were they to question him?

The best they could do was reassure him that he wasn't suffering from a concussion at this point.

And with him no longer seeing his hallucination of Paz, they were confident that whether or not he had been hallucinating during the battle, he likely wasn't going to be hallucinating now.

His hopes to test if what he'd experienced was real before talking with Ocelot were thwarted by Ocelot waiting for him outside the examination room.

"Are you ready to tell me what happened now?"

Snake found himself frowning at Ocelots tone of voice.

It was as if Ocelot considered himself the leader and Snake one of his officers, for lack of a better way of putting it.

"Maybe. I can't be sure yet if what I saw was real. We need to find somewhere better, so I can show you. You wouldn't believe me otherwise…"

Snake led the way down to the courtyard like area of the platform.

"If this doesn't work, it'll be very embarrassing," he muttered to himself as he dug out the amulet. "Right, let's see if that really happened… Freelancer."

"What are-"

Ocelot cut himself off at the sight of energy emerging from the amulet, to once again form into the same figure, the Freelancer who'd aided him in battle.

"The suits had something similar, ones they called 'Strix' and something else. He was interrupted."

Ocelot stared at the Freelancer.

"Where did you find it?"

"There was someone who'd entered the… the suits leader called it a prison rather than a temple… he ran afoul of the first trap, and the amulet was in his armour."

"How did you figure out how to call out this…"

"The Freelancer?"

The figure turned to look more fully at Snake, clearly accepting its name.

"I was suffering from a possible concussion, picked up the amulet thinking it might have been a grenade, and said the word I'd started to associate with it, after the doctor decided it wasn't relevant to his research. Luckily that was what it needed, otherwise things would likely have gone much worse."

Ocelot raised an eyebrow.

"Snake, nearly killed by three jeeps of hostiles? That doesn't sound like the Snake the men have heard of."

"Next time I'll be ready for people to shoot magic beams from their hands," Snake retaliated, only to freeze.

"Ocelot, the prisoners we'd already secured, did any of them have their own… well, these."

"None of them had anything that looked like that," Ocelot answered, barely sparing a glance for the amulet.

"They don't all look the same, the 'Strix' ones look like a rolled up armadillo, or maybe one of those insects, with a sting, and the other one they tried using looked something like a clawed gauntlet."

"We may have secured some," Ocelot allowed.

"Get them to RD for analysis. If I'm wrong about them, we'll be able to figure out the mechanism behind them."

"And if you're right?"

Snake looked him dead in the eye.

"Then we've stumbled across something that recontextualises everything."

]

Machinegun Wasp stared at the artifact she had been told to analyse.

It looked like a cheap piece of jewelry certain vendors would try to pass off to tourists as antiques.

"What exactly are we supposed to be looking for?"

The soldier who brought it in shrugged.

"Apparently they are supposed to be some kind of energy weapon or something."

"Really? This, some kind of weapon?"

"Orders came from the boss, Snake himself."

Wasp sighed, irritated.

"Fine, I'll do what I can. First step, disassembly."

]

Hours later, Wasp glared at the supposed weapon.

It had proven immune to all tools she had brought to bear on it, almost seeming to laugh at her efforts.

"And no sign of any kind of trigger either," she muttered to herself.

It did look sort of like a claw, she admitted to herself, perhaps that could be part of it.

She picked it up, holding it so the claws extended from her grasp, and tried swinging it like a weapon towards a target she'd set up.

Nothing, besides a faint glow at most, though that could easily have been the lights.

Growling, she tried stabbing it into the target, practically punching it, and the supposed weapon continued not to respond.

Wasp slumped into the chair at her desk, and opened the current report.

"Artifact continues not to respond to anything. It comes across as a solid slab of a material tougher than any of the tools in the lab can damage, despite the way it has demonstrably been worked. No conclusive readings of any kind. About all I can say is that I have no idea what this is or what it's made from!"

The door to the lab opened.

"Um, Wasp, have you finished your analysis or…"

"You want my analysis? Fine! This is some kind of impossible object Redcap, or whatever your name… was…"

As she'd said 'Redcap' a glow had formed from the artifact, forming into a humanoid figure, that reminded Wasp vaguely of the zombies in a film she'd seen once before being taken prisoner, with claws extending from the ends of its arms. What looked like the cross between a blindfold and a visor was tied over where she'd expect its eyes to be.

The two of them froze at the appearance of this creature before bursting into motion, Wasp checking the recorded readings from the moment it appeared while the other soldier opened fire, sounding the alarm on his radio.

The Redcap leapt forward at the man threatening his master, only for the bullets to tear it apart, sending it back to the realm Titans lived in.

]

Both Snake and Ocelot were present to debrief Wasp, a fact that she tried not to let make her nervous.

"What exactly happened?"

Wasp glanced at Snake before answering Ocelots question.

"I'd tried everything I could think of to examine the artifact, to no result. When… uh… the soldier," she tried to avoid their eyes, "asked for my analysis, I told him I hadn't got anywhere, and called him by the name I thought he was called, and that thing came out of the artifact. It only appeared in the recordings of the visual spectrum, until it had fully formed, where it came out on infrared as being colder than the rest of the room. Then he shot it and it… disappeared or something."

"So there doesn't seem to be a scientific explanation for what happened?"

Wasp didn't hesitate to answer Snake.

"Nothing that fits our current understanding of science. But, well, it happened, and didn't Newton say about gravity working through unknown means? There is some explanation, we just don't know what it is yet, even if whoever we got it from figured it out."

"The problem is that these are ancient, we have evidence that they have been around for more than hundreds of years."

"Impossible," Wasp dismissed. "I don't see how they could be made in the modern era, even without considering what they are capable of. For some ancient civilisation to make them… it's completely implausible."

"I found this," Snake held up a vaguely similar looking artifact, "on the body of a medieval Freelancer."

Wasp watched as a figure formed from energy emitted by the artifact.

"That… if you already had one of whatever these are, why was I studying this one?"

"Because Freelancer helped save my life against people who had a lot more of these, and I wasn't about to risk losing it. And I wanted to be sure whether these was a reasonable explanation."

Wasp found herself starting to life.

"A reasonable explanation? What other explanations are there?"

"Magic."

Both Wasp and Ocelot stared at Snake in disbelief.

"Or maybe whatever started the idea of magic, I don't know. What I do know is that we have these… amulets, I guess… and people have been shooting at me with energy blasts from their hands. Do you have any better explanation than magic? Something that would make sense of being able to pick up one of these, call out a name and have their… whatever we call them answer, or people throwing beams of cold or lasers around from their bare hands?"

"What do you mean?"

"The hostiles we encountered on my last mission, they know more than us about this, whatever this is. What they were able to do…"

"You must realise how ridiculous you sound right now, Snake. Magic? Really? There's some rational explanation, Wasp just hasn't discovered it yet."

"Even if this was just some group with technology far ahead of the rest of the world, what would be their reason for their interest in an archaeological site in the middle of nowhere?"

Snake froze, seeming to realise something.

"It isn't just them."

"Snake? What do you mean?"

"Their leader made it clear he was only after some 'small trinkets', as he called them, as someone who didn't know the secret would consider these, they only attacked when they saw I had one myself and knew of their significance. And the reason the doctor hired us was because he was heading into an active warzone, to get to the site before one of his colleagues who he was sure was removing relics from sites. What if they were doing the same? Two groups, securing these artifacts before they could enter the public eye. Keeping them a secret from the world."

"Sounds like a conspiracy theory."

"Like the Philosophers?"

Ocelot froze.

"This is not the place to discuss some matters."

"Maybe, but you must admit they existed. Is it so hard to believe that another group exists, with a different form of power to money?"

"And we never encountered this group? Found no evidence of their existence?"

"None of us have that much interest in archaeology," Snake pointed out. "And if that is their focus, recovering these relics, would we really cross paths?"

"They'd have to have other goals."

"Other than gaining power?"

"You… have a point," Ocelot admitted. "I'll see what I can find out from their leader…"