7:47 PM: Metal Gear Solid

1.1 - Mission Briefing

It all started about eight years ago, in the winter of 2010. Back then, I had thought that it was the end--it was the mission during which I caught my own brother, after all.

Eli had always been different. He was competitive with me, but he also had always looked out for me as his little brother. "It's us against the world, David," he'd often tell me as we were growing up, training on the command platform of our father's Motherbase. But I was the only one Eli ever really tried to connect with on a personal level. He always hated the authority figures that were adults--for us, Diamond Dog soldiers, usually among the officers such as Master Miller and Revolver Ocelot, both of which I loved to talk to and Eli hated to listen to. On the flipside, there was Old Man Diné, or "Code Talker," whom I didn't necessarily dislike but always found myself bored or confused by, but Code Talker could always reach Eli in a way no one else could.

But Code Talker passed away when Eli was nineteen--I was seventeen--and my brother shut everybody out. He took to wandering around Motherbase's infrastructure sections, like the maintenance corridors or the support walkways under the bridges that connected the platforms. Before he was twenty, our father tried to reach out to him, but he was always the one Eli hated most, and all it did was push him over the edge.

That evening, Eli snuck out of his quarters and broke into the hangar, stealing for himself a Blackfoot and flying off in the middle of the night. Five great men were killed trying to stop him. Miller didn't expect to hear from him soon, but Eli didn't bother hiding, either. Before long, we were hearing about alliances with old enemies of our father's, such as Soviet Major Raikov and some ape called Brutal Hound. It was around this time that Eli also took on the handle Liquid Snake.

Although they didn't adopt their name until the fall of 2002, that was just the beginning of Militaires Sans Frontières, the terrorist organization they formed to rival Diamond Dogs, and later FOXHOUND Army Infiltration. An organization that FOXHOUND was now going to destroy once and for all.

That was the idea, anyway.

>!<

11:56 PM
USAF MC-130 Combat Talon
En route to drop zone over Tselinoyarsk, Tajikistan

Colonel Campbell's voice on the Codec woke me up from my traditional pre-mission snooze.

"Okay, team, you're fifteen minutes out of the drop zone," he said, addressing all six of the FOXHOUND agents sitting on the opposite sides of the military troop carrier's passenger section. "Time to get your heads in the game."

I looked at the mentioned team. Aside from myself, there were only a couple of us that had years of experience as FOXHOUND agents--everyone else were rookies pulled from other intelligence and covert action agencies from around the world. Credible soldiers, but not the kind of people I was used to working with.

From pre-existing FOXHOUND operatives, we had myself; Sniper Wolf, a woman whose specialization was marksmanship; and Gray Fox, a literal ninja on the battlefield, both of whom I'd worked with on multiple occasions, and knew fairly well. The other three had been given the callsigns Sunny Weasel, a hacker from the CIA; Labroni Badger, a footsoldier from Canada; and Ochre Sparrow, an infiltrator like me, formerly of the SAS. I'd been given a look-through of each of the newbies' records; they were capable, all right, and Sparrow certainly seemed like FOXHOUND material, but I still couldn't understand why Campbell hadn't assigned this whole team with a full FOXHOUND roster, like with Decoy Octopus or Vulcan Raven--I'd feel a lot more comfortable with either of those two, among others, on this team.