1 . Name: ZiGraves @ 2012-09-26 04:33

BEEP!

“Hold on, baby, Daddy’s comin’!”

BEEP!

“Aw, sweetheart, lookit you - ! I’ll have you patched up in two shakes, darlin’, you sit tight.”

BEEP!

“Now, how’d you manage to - ? Well it’s okay now, sugar, I gotcha.”

Every day it was the same. At the first hint of distress from one of his machines, the Engineer would drop everything and rush to their aid. It didn’t matter if he’d been defending one of his teammates under fire, he’d leave them to it and go to his machines instead.

And, to a certain extent, this was fine. Everyone had their little quirks, their foibles. The Medic had long since stopped healing the Demoman when he blew himself up with his own stickybombs, the Spy for some reason never disguised himself as his opposite number or the opposing team’s Sniper no matter the circumstances.

What wasn’t fine was the rage the Engineer went into when something happened to one of his machines that he couldn’t get back to and fix in time. Everyone, RED and BLU alike, dreaded that moment when he yelled “Sentry down! Teleporter down! Dispenser down!”, each shout growing steadily more raw and vengeful. He had no care for his personal safety when one of his machines had been destroyed, launching a berserker attack on whoever was perceived to have destroyed his machines.

It didn’t usually take long before he was trotting back out of Respawn. He never rebuilt a machine, always waited until his next life to give it a fresh start.

When he flew into that peculiarly black rage, he was a danger to his own team as much as to the enemy. Between throwing them into the line of fire to get to someone he’d set his sights on and his outright refusal to rebuild Sentries no matter how important the choke point, he was not fit for team service as long as the enemy had the wrecking potential. They hadn’t been able to get him transferred, or even get him recommended for a psych eval that might have calmed down his peculiar mania.

It got worse when the opposing team got an Engie of their own, one with more sense in him than theirs. This Engie would patch up his machines if he was near enough, and he’d lash out at any Spies that happened to be nearby if one of his machines got sapped or damaged, but he’d just rebuild if the machine got wrecked. He never put himself or his teammates in the line of fire. He never rushed away from a point seconds from capture to check on an ailing Dispenser.
The Engineer hated him.

This enemy Engie not only let his machines get damaged, but he’d ignore their plaintive beeps for help because he was too busy trying to destroy the Engineer’s own buildings instead. The Engineer began going out of his way to sabotage the Engie. Dumping his toolboxes in the canal, moving the buildings - never destroying them, just moving them - arranging to have the Engie’s respawn covered in sticky bombs. The best explanation anyone could get out of him for this peculiar vendetta was as follows:

“They’re only babies. They trusted him. They can’t defend themselves.”

It was not a particularly illuminating comment.

When he took to kidnapping the enemy Engie’s buildings, his team put in the request for psych evaluation and off-team rotation again. It was denied, again. The Administrator seemed pleased, if anything, that someone on the team was taking their machine maintenance seriously enough to avoid costing the company more money than necessary.

It was clear that he was going to be a problem they’d have to solve themselves, and the Pyro drew the short straw. From there on out he’d be helping look after the Engineer’s buildings and spychecking around machinery before even checking his own teammates, all in an effort to keep the Engineer from going off in the middle of a fight.

The solution worked, for a while. The team got to keep their Engineer on the side of relative sanity instead of kamikaze rage, and the opposition’s Spy got out of the habit of regular sapping after the first few immolations.

But the Engineer didn’t stop kidnapping the Engie’s buildings, somehow circumventing the security measures both teams used to prevent buildings being handled by enemies. It wasn’t a problem, exactly, when he was hiding enemy Sentries away from their vantage points in secure cupboards and other areas with no foot traffic, but when he started taking their teleporters into the home base to keep them safe it became clear that another intervention would be needed. Particularly since he started chasing the Engie down when the man destroyed one of his *own* buildings to keep it out of the Engineer’s hands.

His justification was the same as ever.

“They’re only babies. They can’t defend themselves.”

The Administrator was amused, and continued to deny their pleas and petitions for a full evaluation or a new Engineer. She suggested instead that they might consider encouraging him to adopt the enemy buildings and steal their technology, rather than put the company through the expense of replacing their Engineer and continuing extra R&D work to keep up with the enemy’s technology.

It was the Pyro who began to notice what was going on, through dint of bad enough luck to be spending more time around the Engineer and his machines than anyone else was willing to.

Every build was a little bit different. No one machine would look quite the same as its predecessor, possessing a slightly different paint-job or a new targeting quirk or a difference in speed or balance. Some variation was to be expected in any hand-built machines, but this was outside the usual range of minor calibration adjustments, this was quite deliberate craftsmanship.

Stuck for most of each match around the various machines, the Pyro spotted little names painted where a serial number would be more usual.
“Dennis”
“Sandra”
“Mabel”
“Gregory”
Never the same name twice. The Engineer could keep the same buildings intact for weeks a time with the Pyro’s support, but if James the Sentry went down, it wouldn’t be James II that sprang up after Respawn. It might be Michael, or Herbert, or Colin, but it wouldn’t be another James.

On one occasion, the Engineer had been relaxed enough after a match to let the Pyro help him carry one of the teleporters down to the workshop. After looking in, the Pyro swiftly found some other work that really did need to be done, it shouldn’t have been delayed until after the match really, so sorry it wouldn’t be possible to stay and help with the other machines… and fled to the rec room to share the strange sight.

One long wall was covered in blueprints, as might be expected for an Engineer’s workshop. The other, second largest, wall was covered in little Polaroid snaps of the machines, names and lifespans written underneath in painstaking cursive. The wall behind them was painted black, and each photo had its own little place with a little shelf containing some bolt or screw or washer that had presumably belonged to the machine. There were pictures of enemy machines appearing more and more toward one end of the wall, their colours standing out and a conspicuous gap where the names and dates would have been for the Engineer’s own builds.

The Spy managed to sneak a few surveillance shots of the macabre scene before escaping back to the blissful normality of the Intelligence room where he was able to share them with the rest of the team… and with the Administrator in yet another a beleaguered attempt to have their Engineer removed from the team. She did not seem concerned about what she charitably termed his “harmless little folly”, but appeared distracted by some other problem that was beyond the little team’s purview and security clearance. She made it quite clear that she had greater priorities than the personal habits of one eccentric tinkerer, and that any further attempts to waste her time would be met most harshly. She was already speaking to someone else when she cut the line.

The team muddled on as best they could, despite a crazed Engineer and a Pyro mostly absent on babysitting duty. At least with the enemy Sentries being consistently stolen, they didn’t have to worry too much about lethal automated ambushes.

Then the Spy started to get cagey and drop out of missions without notice. He would return, oozing unctuous apologies for his negligence and smelling faintly of oil and smoke, with absolutely no explanation for his absences.

Communications with HQ and supply shipments became patchy, threatening to drop out entirely.

No one was giving out answers, and it appeared that the enemy team was afflicted by the same growing isolation from their command. Their Spy was, if anything, even less reliable and even more prone to returning smoke-blackened, oil-stained and close-mouthed.

When the Engineer disappeared and stayed disappeared for nearly a week, the rest of the team still waited for the Spy to return before breaking into the heavily secured workshop. Though no one could accuse the men of being particularly bright, they had enough sense to fear potential booby-traps and demanded the Spy apply his skills to disarming anything that might wait behind that ominous, bolted door.

The workshop was empty, but for a box. Upon nail-bitingly cautious investigation, the box appeared to contain nothing more than neatly arrayed stacks of Polaroids, each one with a name and dates on it.

The next week, the Grey invasion began. Every dead robot they found had, in place of a serial number, a name.
“Johnny”
“Arnold”
“Peter”
None of the names had been used in that little box of Polaroids. Pinned to the back of the first tank in the first wave was a note.

“They ain’t babies anymore. They can defend themselves.”

(Captcha - flesh ondayix. No captcha, not flesh. Not any more.)