While I did not oversee Shephard's integration personally, I did keep an eye on him.

For his first few days back on Earth after over a twenty-year absence, Shephard did his best to assimilate with Red Bay's citizens. While most accepted him right away, there was an air of suspicion about him. All humans in the town had already been well conditioned by a world ruled by the Combine, and Shephard was bizarrely unacquainted for someone his age, just three years older than me at twenty-three. Although, the argument could be made that he was technically in his early forties chronologically.

Regardless of Shephard's unfamiliarity with this new and drearier Earth, the people generally put that past them and made sure that he was familiar with what had changed. And that's what I found so unsettling. Nobody questioned where Shephard had been. And even those who did, like Sabrine upon first meeting him, did not pursue further beyond that initial question.

Perhaps this worked in Shephard's favour in some way if it meant a less suffocating experience, but it soon arrived at a point where everyone's lack of questions was starting to creep him out. Aside from that, however, Shephard's standing was gradual but optimistic given the circumstances he had been forsaken with.

While he was busy getting familiar with the town and getting assigned to communal duties, I had been spending a fair amount of time with Doctor Mofuni, who had been tinkering with the bounty of wafting plates in his lab. He expressed great confidence with the idea of using these things to help lift the Cloud Runner off the ground so that it could be towed here; the greatest challenge lay with the length of the journey and the outland scanners that flew through the region semi-regularly. Even still, the plan continued to evolve closer to coming to life, and the thought of the Cloud Runner becoming airborne again always made my tail swish involuntarily.

No sooner would that happen would we plan my eventual return to the Lylat System, but it was better to pace myself. I dared not bet on anything. In the meantime, as I always did, I did my routines on the fishing scene.

Those on the trawler had begun taking me further out into the bay in hopes that I could draw greater quantities of fish―and even nearing the mouth of the cove where open ocean awaited. While not a tremendous concern, we were weary of straying too far away out of range of the masking poles around Red Bay's general area. While their range spanned much of the bay itself, we could never be too careful.

While the concern was justified, I was a little disappointed to not reach the ocean. It was a captivating sight, just like any other ocean in any world with nothing but miles of open water extending for miles over the horizon. I daydreamed occasionally whether or not there would ever be a chance to cross that ocean one day and see what awaited on the other end. I was at least happy that my hypothesis of sailing closer to the ocean yielded true when we managed to wrangle up a whole netful of catches―the biggest thus far I believed.

"So…like an honest-to-God space fighter?" Shephard asked me as I walked along with him on his way, carrying a roll of hoses for the pier debonding stations around his arm.

"Yes. That's what she's primarily designed for," I confirmed.

Having a room in the same building as me, we often left for our morning duties together around the marina―though I was actually heading for Mofuni's lab to go over a few proposals that I had thought of the night prior. Now that he had established a small but reliable routine on top of accepting the current state of his planet, Shephard started showing a bigger interest in me and in my part to play in all of this. Not that he wasn't interested before; he had been too distracted by losing his former life to really start committing to much else.

He had been informed by his new neighbours that I had crashed on Earth in a spaceship, something that he had been itching to see if it were true from the source. He began to laugh in amazement when I had affirmed such things as fact. "Can't say that sounds so surprising given all that I've confronted now, but I am continuously swept off my feet," Shephard said, sliding one of his hands into the pockets of a hand-me-down blue jumpsuit he was wearing. "What exactly do you do in it? You in some kind of space force or something?"

"I'm a mercenary," I said. "My team and I take down all kinds of villainous scoundrels. All for a reasonable fee, of course."

Shephard looked at me from top to bottom a couple of times, wearing an almost incredulous expression, leading me to wonder what flaw he saw in my brief synopsis as his subconscious thoughts suggested. "What?" I wondered.

"Nothing really. Just didn't know a dainty-looking thing like you would be cut out for a profession like that."

My knee-jerk reaction would have been indignance to such a comment, but telepathy always enabled me to see hidden layers to word choice. From what I could gather, Shephard had a bold habit of pushing boundaries with his peers as a means of testing their limits. Perhaps this was how he and his fellow soldiers in his time would have treated each other.

"I assure you, my friend, I am not as petite as my looks might portray," I warned, though more in a manner meant to adapt to his boisterous language. "I've taken down brutes many times your own size on countless occasions."

"So the old man has told me on personal accounts," Shephard said, referring to Aaron. "It ain't my place to question any of that. You've got the modest demur of a covert badass. I guess that especially helps in your favour when you don't exactly look like one."

"What's your angle, Corporal?" I wondered, crossing my arms.

"Just feeling these things out, is all," Shephard shrugged. "I generally don't really believe most things until I see 'em―which is why I kind of struggle with the idea that all of this Combine crap is even real and that I'm still in a crazy nightmare. A little validation is all I really need."

"Such as…?" I wondered, raising a suspicious eyebrow once I sensed his deliberation in making me the cornerstone of a scheme in the making.

Shephard grew a mischievous smirk and dropped his hoses as we stopped for a brief moment with the plaza close by. "Nothing special. Just a punch in the arm," Shephard shrugged, putting his hands on his hips. "It's like getting pinched, but producing much better results."

I found his proposal eyebrow-raising as we both slowed our stroll to a stop. "You want me to punch you?"

"Just a little. Right here on my good arm. Just to see how good you can land one," Shephard said, circulating his hand around his right tricep.

I have always disciplined myself to never pry any deeper into one's mind past their ambient subconscious, but I did a little bit this time and found out that this instigation was apparently something that he and his fellow soldiers would use to do with each other as a form of sparring. Shephard seemed to select me as a new sparring partner. I found the idea disconcerting on my end.

"Shephard, I'm not going to hurt you for the sake of it," I insisted, but Shephard interpreted that as a tease.

"Come on, I can take," Shephard insisted stubbornly. "You've got some good tonnage on you, but dunno, you're still a little thing."

"Shephard, enough."

Shephard made a closed sneer of dissatisfaction. "All right, fine then," Shephard shrugged complacently. "No shame in being a taco when you've got one yourself."

At first, I had no idea what that meant until I conducted some more quick preening of Shephard's subconscious, where I realised that this word not only referred to cowardice but also certain anatomy below my belt. I hadn't had many realisations that had left me utterly floored like this one, and it must have shown on my muzzle because Shephard began to grimace.

"Jeez, sorry. I thought having a pelt would be helpful in―"

Without giving him a moment to finish what he said, I ran up to him, jumped up on his shoulders, crossed my legs around his neck and heaved myself backwards, doing one complete flip before Shephard crashed flat on his back with me on top of him, pinning one foot over his clavicles and my hands restraining his arms.

He was a little disoriented at first but quickly met my gaze as I hovered above him, practically nose-to-nose. "How real do you want this nightmare to be, Adrian?" I dared in a really low voice, tapping one of my clawed toes on his neck. Shephard could hardly speak given how quickly everything happened. While stunned by my actions for sure, I found that great fear was not among the flurry of thoughts that streamed through his subconscious, which was unexpected.

Shephard's bewildered face then slowly shifted to a more analytical one. "Hmmm… Short fuse," he concluded, having the gall to grade me on behaviour. "Not amongst the traits of a good marine, foxy."

By all accounts, this man should have made me want to strangle him with my own tail, but I couldn't help but smile, and so did he. I stepped off of him before offering him my hand, where he graciously took it. "I'm not one of your soldiers, Shephard," I said, giving some lift as he climbed to a stand.

"No, I guess not," Shephard concluded, brushing some dirt off his jumpsuit. "Those were some killer moves though; could have easily popped my head off if you really wanted to," he grinned, looking at me with a newfound esteem. "Where'd you learn to get by in your profession? Special forces training in your animal-person universe?"

"No. I've taught myself," I said honestly, looking down at the ground for a moment. "I was orphaned when I was around four and lived in isolation for most of my life. I had to learn to survive by myself."

Shephard's face dropped slightly at the mention of this. "Oh," he said, his voice softening as well. "Sorry to hear that."

"It's all right," I dismissed. "I've gotten by well enough. I would surely be dead if I didn't."

"Guess the same could be said by me and the other folks around here, huh?"

A mindful stillness occurred between us as we both kind of assessed each other in our own ways. Shephard was no telepath, but I could tell he was an observant man who, in all seriousness, watched and listened much more often than he spoke. And likewise, Shephard found an interest in me beyond what his boisterousness may have implied. I found him rather compelling as well and longed to know his story just as much as he wished to hear mine.

"Say, from one 'survivor' to another," I initiated, putting my hands behind my back, "would you like it if we shared a few stories sometime? I'm rather interested in knowing about who you were prior to your landing here in this period of time."

"Only if you're willing to do the same," Shephard bargained. "I'd like to figure out once and for all why the pretty blue fox girl is somehow the only thing making me feel like I haven't lost my mind."

Aside from my discourse with Doctor Mofuni advancing our plans to reclaim the Cloud Runner, the remainder of my day had been rather mellow.

We now had a little more fish than we had potatoes, which was astonishing, and there were already enough scavenging parties out in the outlands to be permitted at once. It was nice to get a day off every once in a while. I regretted that I did not have the books I had been reading with me prior to my marooning in this universe, as this day of inactivity would have been wonderful for them, so I spent much of the day grooming my fur instead. It was worth it to get all the knots out of my tail.

Shephard's day was relatively easy-going as well so he told me. He was on track to becoming a certified professional at deboning fish and helped out by keeping the storerooms and marina clean and organized. It delighted me to see that he was at least getting by as he helped around the community like all new residents do. Even still, I sensed contained restlessness in him, and perhaps a way to manage it was to goad me into one of his old hazing routines with his old soldier friends.

When early evening came around that day and Shephard had finished all that was assigned to him, he returned to our building, and we began to sit down and converse within the office spaces of my floor―dually for its open girth and lack of tenants at present time. All the pre-war prepackaged teabags found in the old pantries were well past their expiration dates, so I made myself my own from wild lemon grass picked just outside the building. Shephard, a man of simple tastes, fancied himself a beer of course, taking a particular liking to the ones that the dispensary seemed to have a surplus of―apparently being the only one to like it.

We each had a couch to ourselves in the communal space outside the old executive offices. We made some small talk at first to get things rolling, getting our taste buds going with our beverages, and insisted that Shephard tell me a bit more about himself. He surprisingly thought there was little of note about himself.

"What can I say? I'm just a jughead who got put on the cosmic dunking chair," Shephard shrugged as he sipped from his dark brown bottle. He was lying comfortably on his tattered old couch, still wearing his blue jumpsuit with his sleeves off, revealing him to be wearing a stained white undershirt underneath. He was also incredibly well-toned and muscular, much more than any human I had met aside from Aaron. He had nice arms as well.

"Oh, that's rubbish," I shook my head, denying the notion that he lacked worthy titbits. "Everyone has a unique story to tell. Who were you before…well…all of this happened to you?" I wondered if I were doing Shephard wrong by insisting he reminisced on his life before the events that led him to this point, but if there was any true reluctance to it, I couldn't sense any―both in expression and mind. He just didn't find himself interesting.

"Not much to say," he shrugged, casually resting his cheek on his propped hand. "Lived in Arizona most of my life, went Cub Scouting in Zion when I was eleven, graduated Bowie High with a decent GPA, enlisted in the Marines, managed to make Corporal. I later got dispatched to Black Mesa where I got thrown into a Lovecraftian wet dream, stuffed into purgatory, only to be then freed twenty years later and told by a fox lady that the world had been taken over by aliens. I'm not good with in-depth details; probably because I can hardly remember them myself. But yeah. Thems the brakes."

He might have played himself off as nonchalant, but I could tell that he withheld many other details that he clearly remembered, though not for personal reasons. I felt it wasn't in my right to press him on them (at least not at this time). "You claim what you said isn't interesting? I know nothing of the places you mentioned. Earth is still quite the mysterious world to me; would you mind telling me about them?"

With the talk of Shephard's earlier life and the places he had lived and been to, it eventually turned into a broader scope of the former nation he was reared in, its history, and its relations with the former nations of Earth. The United States of America was his homeland―the state of Arizona specifically―and he apparently grew up in a county that had many families of Mexican origin, the bordering country just a hundred miles south of where he lived.

"Interesting," I said, sipping my hot tea. "The people here in Red Bay are from many of the old countries having been shuffled around so often by the Combine, but they're essentially like distant memories to them. You appear to have the freshest memory of the former Earth yet."

"Guess so, considering I was living in it about a week ago," Shephard shrugged with an ironic smile, taking another swig of his beer. "But wow. Twenty years. I honestly don't know whether to call myself lucky or not. Nobody here seems to have fared particularly well while I was asleep in that space osprey."

I thumbed the rim of my plastic cup, remembering exactly who it was that orchestrated me and Shephard's present relationship. The two of us had an irrefutable bond over our shared relationship with that entity. Even when 'absent', I knew that he, like myself, could still feel his timeless eyes watching us, even as we conversed now in peaceful solitude. It was also clear to us that he was still meddling with things even after letting us go, the most obvious clue was the lack of questioning the whole town seemed to show over Shephard's previous whereabouts.

"You think it's weird too, right?" Shephard eventually asked me after looking at his bottle for a contemplative moment. "How nobody questions where I came from? Or why I knew nothing about the current world?"

"It is strange," I nodded, holding my tea close above my chest. "Sabrine seemed to resonate with where you said you were from, but I have not seen her pursue further than that. Unless the two of you spoke more after I had left?"

"Nope. She's treating me no different than any other refugee here," Shephard said. "I ain't complaining really, but I feel it's been too easy settling in. That spook's up to something; I could barely even say what happened to me before I appeared here."

I knew precisely what he was talking about. It was a dreadful feeling that both of us had felt when he attempted to recall where he had been to the others when he spontaneously lost the will to, moments before Aaron appeared to save the day. Some strings were obviously being pulled, and it was just as obvious to us as to who was holding the marionette.

While we were on the same page, I asked an important question that I was surprised hadn't occurred to me yet. "How did you get roped into this conspiracy of his, Shephard?"

Shephard tapped his index finger on the glass bottle as he took a lengthy sigh. "To tell you the truth, Krystal, I've actually been seeing him for a little while," Shephard revealed. "Before the disaster at Black Mesa had even happened."

Shephard began to recall for me a more extensive amount of his tenure at boot camp while training to be a marine. At one point, when granted the course of advanced training, someone from his country's government had been visiting the base he was stationed in and observed the men preparing themselves to be soldiers. Specifically, from Shephard's unbreakable certainty, there to watch him. The entity was this very person from his government, or at least that's what he was posing as at the time.

Why he took an interest in Shephard was still a massive mystery, though it was this first association with a government official that led Shephard, later on, to dub this entity as the "G-Man" ―a name that I too adopted. Shephard would not see the G-Man again until he was dispatched to Black Mesa at the time of the Resonance Cascade; which was the scientific term for the dimensional cross-rip that occurred during the incident as explained to me by Doctor Mofuni. This was a rather significant moment for me, as I had yet to hear a firsthand account of the Black Mesa incident from somewhere who was there as it was happening.

"That shit was utter insanity, man," Shephard recalled. "Us guys stationed at Santago; we knew what Black Mesa was and the kind of under-the-table experiments that they were up to while huffing government funds. We were told that should anything go awry out there we would be deployed to help evacuate and get the place back under control. But when the call actually happened, it wasn't any baby-sittin' job like my buddies were led to believe; these monsters were literally teleporting out of thin air. Tearing up the place, mowing down good marines. Hell, the whole place made bootcamp look like Disneyland."

"I've been told the ramifications of the sole experiment that caused all of it were truly catastrophic, though I'm sure you require little affirmation of that."

Shephard chuckled. "The details barely mattered to me; I just tried to escape with as many marines and trapped scientists that were willing to follow. Many troops stayed behind though, insisting that they were told to guard walk-in closets for whatever reason."

Finishing his bottle, Shephard set it down on the floor and sat upright, crossing his legs in a manner that mimicked me. "I knew shit was about to hit the fan when Black Operations rolled in unannounced and began killing anything that moved―including my men and the remaining science team."

That development unnerved me. "Why were they there?"

"Same as us," Shephard said, "fix the teleporting monsters problem, only they wanted no witnesses. Guess the government deemed Black Mesa a lost cause and opted to just nuke the place to kingdom come instead."

"Nuke?"

"A really, really, really big and potent bomb."

"I see."

"Not when the flash goes off," Shephard corrected, though did not remain on this sideline for long. "As psychotic as Black Ops became, I've come to the conclusion that Black Mesa may have had this coming for a long time. Like…for years."

"How so?"

"Well, while trying to find a way out of that deathtrap of a facility, I came across subterranean labs that held enclosures housing the same monsters that were making a mess of the place. Seemed like oversight had been asleep at the wheel once when everything began blowing up."

"Doctor Mofuni told me that his employer their rival Black Mesa competed with each other in the portal-tech race, spending much of their research exploring the realm of Xen," I referenced. "I believe those in the enclosures were from that realm, or maybe one close to it."

"I figured as much, seeing as I've been there." Shephard mused, making me blink in surprise.

"You have? When?"

"A few times, actually," Shephard said. "I found this crazy portal gun thing that took me there and back several times, though I left whenever I saw the corpse of a researcher at the place in which I spawned. But hey, at least a few managed to leave me a battery or two to charge up my PCV."

As incredible as all of this was, I knew it was only inevitable that the G-Man would wave himself amidst the chaos. "When did you see…you know who again?"

Shephard's face turned tepid as he looked down at his sock-covered feet. "A few times, actually," he admitted. "He actually saved me from a room flooding with toxic sludge. I almost thought he was a friend at first, but it was obvious he had his own agenda. He was always one step ahead of me somehow, avoiding all dangers and liked to watch them from afar."

Shephard put his hands to his sides and looked up at the ceiling lamp for a second as he recounted further details―disturbing ones from the sensation of things. "Things didn't start getting particularly weird until I started venturing down into the giant ventilation shafts. A giant worm octopus thing was coming out of a wall made of pepto bismol or some shit. I blew it up…I think…and then in an instant I was in an osprey with the spook standing over me, talking about employers, loose ends, and witnesses. Don't know why he didn't just kill me outright if he saw me as a liability, but he preserved me for reasons I don't know, and truly don't wish to know honestly."

He then looked at me, leaning back on the backrest as it creaked with age while putting his hand behind his head. "And that brings us to where we are now," he said, looking and sounding accomplished with all that was spoken. "So, tell me, space-faring mercenary, where'd you come from? And how'd you get roped into all of this garbage?"