1 . Name: Anon @ 2011-11-09 08:16

So, I made myself a Hipstr (tinyblumedic) and figured I'd take a tiny, one night break from updating "Not the Same" to give myself a little exercise. I had to write in one go a 1st person narrative about a 10th class. I hate writing 1st person stories, and I hate anything involving an alleged 10th class. It was an interesting little exercise to see how it'd end up.

Here's the result.


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I don’t know why I signed up for this shit.

BLU certainly made it sound appealing. “Be part of the winning team!” “Join the nine, become the tenth!” The fat salary drew me in, the promise of my criminal record being cleared kept me. Talons digging in; I was trapped. I had no choice.

I imagine it was similar for the rest of them. Scout, I know, had the choice of either this, crime, or prostitution to help his mother. Heavy’s country was increasingly more hostile, offering little comfort to its residents. Medic’s country was slowly rebuilding, but his medical license (if he even still had it) was all but useless from the shoddy schooling he must have received after the war. Soldier would just be shipped to an asylum again. Demoman saw demons, and his father was in prison after claiming to have been possessed by one (he killed thirty people with a fucking axe). Pyro was a monstrous freak underneath his mask; only a circus would ever hire him, and all he wanted was to hide that twisted, hideous face from the world. Engineer’s lust for building creative killing machines had put him on several government watch lists. Sniper was homeless and badly needed the money to prove to his parents that his career choice was valid. Spy had been blackmailed; if he tried to leave, his family would be slaughtered by all of the enemies he’d made sleuthing.

I should have known my ‘class’ was bullshit.

They already had everyone they needed, really. The Scout for quickly retrieving the intel, the Demoman for laying sticky traps, the Soldier for aggressive pushes, the Heavy for tanking as much damage as he could dish out, the Medic for healing the team and offering rare glimpses of invulnerability, the Pyro for ambush and spychecking, the Spy for sapping sentries and backstabbing, the Sniper for plucking away key targets, and the Engineer for defending the intel. What purpose would a tenth class serve? What niche had yet to be filled?

Oh, how I learned.

I wasn’t allowed to room with them. If I was seen, they would fire me on the spot. Thus, I was only allowed on the battlefield at night. I used a cloaking kit, not unlike the Spy’s. However, mine allowed me to use my tools.

I was tied to Respawn to ensure I wouldn’t try to escape this hell. And oh, how I tried. My tools were a shovel, the edges of which were as sharp as any blade used in battle, a small pistol, and my ‘Eradicator’. Oh, how I hated that weapon.

At the end of the battle, the exhausted teams would crawl back into the inner workings of their bases. 2fort was frighteningly hot during the day, and bitterly cold at night. One always assumes the desert to be a place of extreme heat, but it’s the cold that is most terrifying. Only with the rooms beyond the intel room is the temperature comfortable enough. The team mates never leave it unless battle calls them out.

One hour after the sun set, I would come out.

My uniform is a thick, blue cloak, the hood of it shadowing my features. If the team saw me, I mused, they would assume that the Grim Reaper had finally come for them. I sweep out onto the battlefield, nodding over at my RED counterpart. We don’t speak to each other. We are, after all, enemies.

The first of the work is the least annoying. I scour the battlefield, my Eradicator in hand. To the naked eye, it looks like a massive, black funnel attached to the end of a Medigun. I sweep it across the battlefield, a dark blue light emanating from it as the only light source around-aside from the dark red light of my counterpart, of course. It sweeps over the blood of my team, the gibs; the pieces too small to even identify as human anymore. Whatever the light touches that once belonged to a BLU neatly vanishes.

The next step is my most loathed. I find the full bodies that never despawned, and start dragging them out of the battlefield. On occasion I have to use my shovel to chop them up; a soldier clogged into a corner too tightly to remove, a heavy too big for me to ever hope to carry. I pile them up outside, grumbling to myself the entire time. The cold used to bother me until I understood my fate.

Once all of the bodies are out of the battlefield, I do yet another run through with my Eradicator. The battlefield is clean, as if by magic.

The last step takes until 4 AM each morning. I shovel until I connect with the mass grave and dump their bodies in, then cover it and mark it with a single bullet. A curious sniper would see it as a ricochet, if they really wanted to look. For me, it was a marker.

My fingers are bony; BLU does not feed me. My home is a tiny, broken down truck. I sleep in the bed of it, my cloak covering my skeletal frame. Occasionally, Respawn takes me when I starve to death. Resets me to when I last had a meal. It waits until nightfall to release me, so as to not have me encounter the precious team.

I am the Gravedigger. I am the tenth class.