Sorry to post two Halloween themed things in such close succession. If I'm bothering anyone or cluttering the place up, just tell me and next time I've anything to post I'll just create a single thread and chuck everything in it from there on. The aftermath of the wizardly chaos. I had a beta for about the first four paragraphs, but it’s unchecked after that. —————— It’s not wrong if they’re not actually dead. Pretty ugly excuse, but I suppose it works. The Respawn started cocking up after that damn fool Yank managed to piss off his wizard friend with the magic stick and the bomb-book. Now and then, someone came back a bit wrong, but we didn’t pay it much mind as long as Merasmus was hanging about. Too busy trying to catch the bloody Scouts when the gravity stopped working or get a bit of shelter out of those showers of bombs the ghostly bugger liked to rain down. But when things settled down and it was all back to business, aside from the odd exploding pumpkin the Scots idiots liked to leave around, that was when we started to notice. Now and then, someone came back a bit wrong after Respawn. The body might come back dead. Or it might come back half-alive. Or it might come back undead. It didn’t happen too often, so we mostly just ignored it. If someone turned up dead, you just waited for it to restart and they’d be fine after - and if they turned up non-alive or undead, you just shot them, waited for it to restart and they’d be fine after. All pretty easy. And if the Scout turned up dead once a week, who cared? Kept the little sod quiet. When it started happening more than once a week, we started to pay attention. When it started happening to more of the team, we fell into a right bleeding panic. No one wanted to be the next one to come back dead, and we took to keeping someone in Respawn to shoot anyone that came back wrong before they even had a chance to groan or shamble. Truckie hadn’t a clue what was causing it. Sure, he said something about data corruption and off-site backups not being available, but then he started getting into all the technical details and none of us could keep track. Something about magic and technology not mixing all that well, I worked out, though I did get it filtered through the Doc to get the technobabble translated into English. What it boiled down to was Merasmus flinging spells about had done something to the system that he didn’t understand and didn’t know how to fix, and we were going to keep coming back dead til something got done about it. It got worse when the Respawn started finding little levels between alive, dead and undead. You might see the Scout as fast as ever, pink-skinned and whole, but dead behind the eyes and unable to comprehend as simple a weapon as his old bat. Or Truckie, poor Truckie, with his intelligence being beaten down by unnatural hunger and a body that fell apart as he tried to move. Sometimes they might be able to speak, and only me and the Spook could handle putting them down when that happened. We tried to get on with things anyway, still had BLUs to keep out of the way and a point to look after, but it was getting hard when there was one of us off the field on watch duty and sometimes two or three running through cycles of Respawn until they came back alive. I’m a good shot, but I can’t hold a field on my own. Someone had the bright idea of rounding up any of ours that came through mobile enough to run and sending them out on the field, maybe scare the BLUs a bit and save us running more Respawn cycles. I can’t even remember who suggested it, but none of us argued at the time. When the Scout came back fast but dead, we pointed his corpse in the direction of the field and backed off. Shortly after, we heard their Demo screaming something about unnatural horrors, a bit of yelling from their Soldier, and minutes later the Scout was walking out of Respawn asking what everyone was staring at. He wasn’t too happy when he found out what we’d done with his corpse, but he’d hardly been in a position to complain at the time. We didn’t see the superstitious nutter of a BLU Demo about for days after, either, so corpse-based warfare worked its way into our tactical repertoire. Incidentally, if anyone tells you that shambling corpse-based warfare is a good idea, deck him in the jaw for being both an arsehole and an idiot. Seriously. We wasted a lot less time now we were just sending our dead back out to fight instead of shooting them humanely. BLU started to get wise to it and stopped running away when they saw a mouldering corpse looming up, jaws wide, mostly started shooting at them instead. Except their Demo, who was accordingly one of the last of them to get infected as best I could tell. Did I not mention that bit? Yeah. The undead are mildly infectious, we learned. Depends on how they come back - the fast ones tended to outright kill, the slow ones were infectious if they could get a bite in, and a dead Scout with working vocal chords would get shot out of annoyance before it could do anything. You think a hyperactive kid from Boston’s bad enough, then you don’t want to hear it when it’s yelling about brains. Still, we thought it was ace, if a bit grim what with it being a member of your team that’s dead and all. Infect the opposition, we thought! Slow them down! Dull their reflexes, kill them quickly and take the point! And it worked for all of a day or two, til we found we’d spread the infection to their Respawn and they were in the same straits as us. So now we were trying to dodge carnivorous BLU and look after our own dead REDs and keep ourselves alive enough that we’d not miss an hour of two of the battle by being inconveniently a corpse til we got spawned alive again. And all the time, the problem with Respawn was ramping up. Me and the Spook, we keep out of the way. We don’t die too often. The lads down in the main line of fire, though, they’d be coming back several times a day, and we started to notice it was taking three or four attempts to get a living Heavy back out of there. Truckie said something about cascades or compound errors, something beginning with a ‘c’, but he was no closer to getting it fixed. It got bad enough that the Administrator called us off the point to get it sorted out. She wasn’t wasting money and resources on a team that wasn’t even alive half the time, she said, even if some of them were still functional despite it. We’d have a week, then she was putting Respawn offline and transferring however many of us were left alive out of there. She declined the Spook’s request for a little more information about the possible fate of any undead comrades we might happen to leave behind. BLU must have had something similar, because the whole shamble of buildings around the point was deserted when I went out for a smoke, and the point itself remained that dismal grey it sits as when it’s waiting. Their Sniper was out as well, but a truce was a truce and we left each other alone rather than work out the odd little lingering grudge. He was still out when I returned to the base, and every time after that I popped out for a quick fag. I don’t think he ever went inside, though if their side was progressing anything like ours then I don’t blame the sorry bugger all that much. Our Demo had taken to hiding in the basement with a few booby trapped doors between him and Respawn, convinced there’d be a zombie horde after him at any moment. I might have applauded his planning if he didn’t keep falling asleep with a lit cigarette near the thermite, and then of course the rest of us would have to help him navigate his little maze of traps to get back to his stuff. Alcohol and demolitions experts don’t go together, I’ll tell you that much for free. We weren’t getting sent through Respawn as much, what with the battle being off, but habitual carelessness is hard to break. The lads were just used to Respawn being there to catch them when they cocked something up, the Soldier more than most, and even in our enforced peacetime we’d still hear the system booting up a few times a day. I kept to my van. After a while, so did the Spook, inviting himself in but bringing coffee and cigarettes as a peace offering. Anything but inside the base. I know we’re not meant to admit it, but that Mann Co stuff that we get supplied with is shoddy. Tends to explode sometimes. Everything in my van I brought over from Oz, so I knew I’d not wake up dead of sudden combustion. The Spy had cottoned on, and he was at least good enough to spend most of the days out somewhere else, returning only to brush down his suit and get some kip. He’s the one that alerted me when things went totally up the Swannee. Respawn wasn’t bringing anyone back alive any more, and we lost the Doc when he went to try and sedate the dead Heavy instead of doing what anyone with half a brain would and just shooting the big guy instead. Truckie was still alive, barricaded down in his workshop and sending out the odd rambling radio message by way of an update on his attempts to fix things. Me and the Spook were okay, too, obviously. He said there weren’t many others alive, and even cloaked he didn’t want to risk going too far into the base in case it got hard to get out again. The Soldier, Heavy, Medic and Scout were definitely lost causes. Demo probably was as well. He never said what happened to the Pyro. I didn’t ask. They never got on too well anyway, and I don’t like to think about it much. The Spy said he had to go back in for something. Wouldn’t say what. Didn’t see him again. Truckie went quiet after a while, that tinny little radio getting weaker and more rambling, and I realised that if he hadn’t hoarded enough food - if he’d forgotten eat like he did when he had a problem to solve - he’d probably just end up letting himself starve to death down in that workshop of his. I saw the other Sniper out in the field now and then. Looked ragged, tired. He’d definitely not been back in the base, but he didn’t have a decent van to shelter in like I did. Must have been camping in a barn attic the whole time. He didn’t acknowledge me when I waved to him, and I wasn’t going to shout in case it brought our hungry dead down on me. The power to Respawn and the bases was cut eventually, as promised, though no evacuation team turned up, no radio messages or phone calls to tell me where to go. I didn’t stick around to wait. They haven’t given me my back pay. Some clause about desertion of the battlefield, though they offered to take me on as a ‘consultant’. Something about ‘handling hazardous bio weapons’, and I suspected I knew what, or who even, they were talking about. Didn’t take them up on it. Some other wanker’s at it now instead. Testing and handling and working out how to deploy the poor sorry corpses for RED’s benefit. The undead have this legal grey area, you see. Not dead enough for desecration and property crimes to come in. Not alive enough for basic rights, even animal rights. It’s not wrong if they’re not actually dead. Pretty ugly excuse, but I suppose it works. Not for me, though.