Hello all, this is a new plotbunny me and my co-author cooked up quite a while ago. We...
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Paging Dr. War
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Introduction
Saraphima
Getting sticky.
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Hello all, this is a new plotbunny me and my co-author cooked up quite a while ago. We rediscovered it in our google drive recently and decided to refurbish it for posting.
Small word of warning, this is my first time making my own thread on this site, so if I did anything wrong please tell me.
Enjoy!
Doctor Angela Ziegler gave a small smile as she approached Watchpoint Gibraltar, chuckling at the sight of Tracer talking animatedly with Winston.
The two seemed to notice her as she approached.
The only warning she got was a shout of "Angela!" before she was suddenly wrapped up in a hug from an exuberant Tracer.
"It's so good to see you, Angela!" Tracer declared.
"As it is to see you, Lena," Mercy said, smiling. "Is this it?"
"So far…" Tracer said, somewhat sadly. "But the recall hasn't been on long, I'm sure everyone's just scattered to the winds right now."
Angela nodded understandingly. "May I come in?"
"Sure."
"You could get in a lot of trouble for this, Winston."
"Talon attacked the outpost here. They were looking for deactivated Overwatch agents, and I'm sure I don't need to tell you about the 'incidents' recently," Winston explained. "I activated the recall to warn everyone… and possibly to get a team together to try and stop them."
Mercy and Tracer nodded.
"It's been a month, and you're the only ones that have responded so far," Winston said. "I saw the leader of the Talon Agents… he seemed to vanish into smoke when I tried to hit him."
Mercy furrowed her brows and frowned, her cheery mood at the reunion quickly fleeing.
Winston sighed as he looked around at their current base. "It seems that Overwatch's enemies have been gathering strength since Overwatch was disbanded… and without someone to stop them..."
Both Tracer and Mercy nodded.
"We have to stop them ourselves before they can complete their objectives…" Angela said, sighing as she leaned back in her seat.
"We have some time, for now, but we'll need to do something. Plenty of Overwatch's old Agents aren't going to come back, or have gone to ground, and we'll need supplies for those that do come back… see if you can convince some people to help out. Ask Athena, she'll do what she can for you," Winston said.
"I will. Thank you, Winston," Angela said, smiling.
To say Mercy had just had a frustrating two hours just now would be an understatement. Most of her colleagues weren't really suited to Overwatch work, and those that were had other priorities.
Her old contacts within Overwatch weren't much better, and the exchange typically ended with "I'm sorry doctor, but no," or they had been impossible to contact in the first place.
She had all but given up, and had resorted to routine maintenance of her Overwatch gear when she noticed a little mark… a manufacturer's mark, from someone who had helped her put it together in the first place, an old- if eccentric contact from her days in Medical school.
She reached for the phone and dialed a number she'd thought she wouldn't have to use again, and reminisced about the last time she'd seen him.
"I'm detecting another life-sign in the red zone." A technician shouted over the cacophony of the command center, carefully picking his way through various triage beds sitting around the makeshift hospital to show his scanner readout to his boss.
"Mercy only just got the last one back," The coordinator said.
The Commander and his aides scrutinized the scanner's results on the PADD.
"Well, we can't get to them. She'll have to go," someone else said, already rushing off to help another patient.
All eyes fell on the tall, blonde, blue-eyed medic currently tending to another victim of the disaster. The superwoman stood taller, having overheard their conversation, and rolled her shoulders, her mechanical wings flexing and glowing somewhat brighter.
"I'll go," Mercy said simply, standing and lifting her caduceus staff before taking several steps and taking to the skies on those golden wings of hers.
The flooding had been particularly terrible for him. The flood had cost him dearly, his lab was ruined, and all but his research notes were lost.
He felt a blast of wind as something landed behind him, and spun around to see a beautiful lady in a suit of form-fitting, winged armor.
"Are you alright? Nothing is broken?" The woman asked.
"Nothing at all Dr. Ziegler," Krieg said, smiling as he holstered his small handgun.
Mercy's eyes lit up in recognition. "Dr Krieg?"
"Please, just Nick, Angela. We've known each other for years now, after all," Nicolaus Krieg said with a small smile.
"What are you doing here? I thought you were still in Switzerland," Mercy asked.
"I had a small lab here in the Americas working on some prototypes away from prying eyes… none of them survived, but I do have my research," Nick said. "...Not everything was lost, however. I understand your job is rather dangerous, and I thought that this would serve as a capable tool for self-defense."
Nick handed Angela a small handgun with a similar design aesthetic to the rest of her kit. "I call it the caduceus blaster, a match for your staff."
Angela knew Nick wouldn't take no for an answer… and she'd been singled out a few times before in hot zones, despite what the Geneva Convention demanded. Something small to defend herself with would be appreciated.
"The offer to join Overwatch still stands, Nick," the blonde tried as she attached the blaster to the magnetic clamp on her suits hip.
"I've got a lot of projects to reconstruct, and I would prefer not having someone else controlling my science," Dr Krieg said.
Mercy just sighed, having expected the familiar response. "Suit yourself."
Mercy gave one last look at the ruined lab before gesturing for Dr. Krieg. "Come on, let's get you out of here."
Mercy nearly dropped the phone when the other side picked up.
"Angie! How good of you to call! You'll never guess what just happened," Nick's voice greeted her from halfway across the world, and in her mother tongue to boot.
"Nick? How'd you know it was-" Mercy began before switching to German. "How did you know it was me?"
"That number's old, and the only one who still has it is you… the rest have all showed up in the obituaries," Nick said. "Though, from recent news, it seems that they've become rather unreliable… more on that later. You don't call me unless you need something, so, what is it?"
"Well… we're getting the old team back together," Angela began.
"Overwatch? Now is a good time as any with Talon and their ilk running amok… I'm in," Nick said quickly.
Mercy blinked in surprise. Nick had always turned down her offers and she had been preparing to have to try to convince him. "What?"
"Talon showed up, 'asking' for my services. I told them to 'get lost'- as the American's say- and they didn't like that… things got a bit… 'dicey' for a bit before they got the message. If you are going to put them in their place, I would love the opportunity to join in…"
There was a brief pause before Nick added, "And you asked nicely," seemingly as an afterthought.
Mercy gave a small laugh at the familiar eccentricity from her long-time friend. The laughter was cut short by shouting from Kreig's end, followed by smashing and the heavy thud of a body slamming into drywall before a single deafening report overloaded the microphone.
"Those verdammte idioten got blood on my good coat! I just got it washed!"
Mercy nodded at that. Nick Krieg liked his lab coats a lot, and the last assistant to stain one of them… well, it'd been brilliant- like most of his plans- especially in its capacity to fly under the radar until it was too late… to this day, Mercy had never been able to figure out how exactly he'd managed it, especially with only three vials of what she was fair sure were-
Angela shook herself from her memories. As far as she knew, the poor assistant was still recovering and still woke up in the mental ward in the middle of the night screaming and crying something about cyborg spiders climbing up the walls.
She'd had to come down hard on Nick after that. The man had been begging and sobbing at her desk every day for a month after she'd had the locks to his lab changed… and then reinforced after he'd unsuccessfully tried to blow the locks open. The man was resourceful, she had to admit, but she'd managed to get one up on him that time.
Angela was brought out of her musings by Nicolaus calling her name.
"Angela? Are you still there Angela?"
"Sorry, I drifted off. Remembering the 'good old days'. You were saying?" Angela replied.
"It's not like you to get lost in memory, Angela. I said I'll pack my bags now and be in Gibraltar in a day or so," Nick said.
"I don't recall mentioning where I was," Mercy said, somewhat bemused.
"I had the call traced," Nick replied, sounding nonchalant.
"I'm using an encrypted Overwatch phone," Mercy countered. It wasn't actually encrypted, but she knew Nick was hiding something from her.
"Black Market goods?" Nick asked more than stated.
"You? Black Market?" Mercy asked, raising an eyebrow. Nick would never be caught dead dealing with those kinds of people.
Nick was silent for several seconds before sighing. "...there are a few tracking devices in your suit. In case anyone ever got the bright idea to steal it. I just need to tap the frequency and input my key, and I'll know exactly where you are."
"Where I am?"
"I meant the suit," Nick corrected slightly too quickly.
"...Nick, did you put a tracking device in me?" Angela demanded, sounding particularly annoyed.
"Oh, look at the time! I really must get to packing. It was good speaking to you again, Angela!" Nick said quickly, ignoring Angela's shouts of protest.
"Dr Nicolaus Xavier Krieg, don't you dare-" Angela paused when she heard a familiar dial tone. "-hang up… Verdammt."
Angela sighed as she put her phone away, before looking back down at her disassembled Caduceus Blaster. She would have to get herself scanned as soon as possible.
They were standing on the helipad as Nick arrived.
He was still tall, fit, and had that air of eccentricity about him. As the tiltjet took off again, Nick dropped his suitcases and spread his arms wide for a hug.
"Angela, how good to see you again!" Nick exclaimed, greeting Mercy with arms wide and a burst of German. His face was stretched wide by a sincere smile.
Tracer watched with mild interest as Mercy met up with her 'old friend'. It was odd because this was the happiest she'd seen Mercy in… well, years. The way the two were talking, it was like watching an old married couple banter with one another, even if Tracer couldn't speak more than six words of German to save her life.
"I just realized, we've never seen Doctor Ziegler like this before," Winston commented, tilting his head curiously.
"Yeah. Who do you suppose this Nick guy is?"
"I'm not entirely familiar with human… courtship, but…"
"Certainly looks that way, huh?" Tracer said, gesturing at how happy the two were to catch up.
Winston didn't say anything for a minute.
"Honestly, I never pegged Dr Krieg as the type to date anyone," Winston said, a pensive look on his face.
Tracer raised an eyebrow. "You know him?"
"Of him. Occasionally he'll do something that no one thought possible and cause a giant stir in the scientific community," Winston said. "I've read some of his theses and watched his speeches on occasion and the man is brilliant but was rather..."
Tracer looked at the man and took in his general demeanor as he talked animatedly with Angela, a slightly mad glint in his eyes. "I get what you mean."
"As far as everyone knows about the man, he's a savant. Hasn't stayed in any one field for more than a year or so. Seemingly plays around in a field until he grows bored before simply moving onto the next," Winston elaborated. "But whilst he's there, he'll usually publish a thesis or lay the groundwork for something else and suddenly we're left scrambling to catch up to whatever it is that's going on in his head."
Tracer furrowed her eyebrows. "But Angela said they met in Med School. I don't really see him as the Doctor type…"
Winston shrugged. "Kreig is… a 'mad scientist', for lack of a better term. Utterly brilliant, able to see things in ways few people can, but… also unstable, if you believe rumors."
This understandably alarmed Tracer. "Rumors about what?"
"About him having no taboos," Winston said plainly. "I personally don't fully believe them myself. He's highly respected, but in his lectures, I do get a sense that he doesn't see the world as we do, making connections we don't… and I can see why even unsubstantiated rumors of unscrupulous behavior would persist."
Tracer perked up as the two walked closer, before smiling widely as Angela introduced Nick.
"Lena, this is Doctor Nicolaus Krieg. He's an old friend of mine- we went to university together!"
Nick tilted his head politely in greeting, his smile noticeably subdued, though still clearly present. Given his name and clear German looks, Lena was surprised at his impeccable English when he spoke.
"A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Ms. Oxton."
Tracer quickly overcame her surprise. "Same to you... wait, how'd you know my name?"
"I read the news. Your disappearance made headlines," Dr Kreig said. "I am very sorry about the failure of the designs. I'm afraid I had a part to play in your accident."
Tracer didn't get to formulate a response before Mercy tapped Nicolaus on the shoulder.
Nick turned to face her and smiled brightly. "Yes my dear?"
Krieg wasn't able to react before Mercy grabbed him by the collar and pulled him forward threateningly. "Tell me everything about that tracker you installed. Now."
Nick's eyes widened almost imperceptibly as he swallowed thickly. "I- I'm sure I do not know what you are talking about Dr Ziegle-"
Mercy twisted her grip and tightened Krieg's collar enough to lightly choke him. "Tell. Me. Now. You only call me Dr. Ziegler if you're trying to hide something."
Winston decided to throw his physical presence in and loomed over Krieg as a silent threat: there were almost 700 kilos of silverback gorilla ready to break him in two if he tried anything.
Krieg gulped. "I hid it inside your femur. It was a simple-"
"We scanned my entire body with a full-spectrum scan, it's not there," Angela stated, staring the beleaguered man down.
"It's shielded," Krieg told her. "Supposed to fool scans so you didn't find out."
"Then it would be too large to fit within the bone marrow," Mercy said. "And I don't have anemia."
"Replaced your T-3 vertebra?" Krieg tried with a hopeful smile.
"Not even you of all people would have been able to pull that off, Nick."
"Your nanites would've fixed everything after I was gone. Just wait for an all-nighter, disable a few safeties and you'd never know you'd been under the knife," Krieg added.
At the mention of her nanobots, Mercy stiffened. Krieg had helped her with some of their initial programming and design, creating the networked intelligence that ensured she was kept in top shape.
She barely noticed her grip loosening enough for Krieg to pull away and suck down a large gulp of air.
"You didn't," Mercy groaned.
"Didn't what?" Tracer asked, not following Angela's thought process.
"My nanobots work from a networked intelligence… The good Doctor here helped immensely in their initial design and coding. If Nicolaus inserted hidden code…"
Krieg's face adopted a pained expression. "The signal was encrypted heavily and is designed to be as close to a tight-beam as I could manage, and all the receiving gear and transmission protocols are entirely proprietary. Following you through the news was too slow, too reactive. I knew you were destined for great things, so I… decided to keep a remote eye on you."
Mercy sighed, relaxing her grip and finally letting the poor man go. "You never could let go, could you?"
Nicolaus waved his hands in the air animatedly. "You're one of the few people I have ever met who has understood even 75% of my ramblings! Certainly the only one still alive! Do you know how tiring it is to have to dumb down my speech for those who can't keep up? It is simply infuriating!"
Mercy sighed at his words, not surprised at his reasoning in the least.
"You… what?" Tracer said, her eyebrows furrowing in confusion.
Mercy sighed again, pinching her nose. "He does this to everyone he works with. An old co-worker discovered he'd given her a bugged SIM card once."
"...Right." Tracer said, giving the man a look like he was crazy.
"Is there a way to disable the tracker?" Mercy asked, pinching the bridge of her nose.
"No."
There was a silence until Winston cleared his throat.
"...Well, assuming you got past compilation protection, function obfuscation, encryption, and more you'd have to go rifling line-by-line through the basic source code of the nanomachines to find stray bits of uncommented code hidden inside the literally hundreds upon millions of uncommented lines of code, using custom-made machinery that no longer exists to gain that level of access, let alone the encryption protocols we designed and the machinery to decrypt it is both destroyed and out of sync, bypass the many security protocols to prevent code tampering, find the tracker coding itself and then remove it." Krieg babbled, clearly trying to smooth things over.
"Translation?" Tracer asked, looking bewildered, only to get ignored by two of the three scientists present as they moved away.
"You need custom machines to connect to the network, a number of passwords that can't be brute-forced, and then if you wanted to remove that one tracking device, you would need to find a whole collection of needles in a mountain of hay and then lay them end-to-end in the correct order with no hints where they are or what that order may be." Winston translated as best as he could. "In short, it's at best impossible in a practical sense, and at worst literally impossible."
Angela sighed in defeat, patting her beleaguered friend on the shoulder before leading the way inside. "Never change, Nicolaus. Never change."
"I could do it if I had maybe a decade, and I know roughly what I'm looking for," Nick said, cautiously following Angela and rambling apologies and the like as Winston and Tracer watched in confused amusement.
Small word of warning, this is my first time making my own thread on this site, so if I did anything wrong please tell me.
Enjoy!
Doctor Angela Ziegler gave a small smile as she approached Watchpoint Gibraltar, chuckling at the sight of Tracer talking animatedly with Winston.
The two seemed to notice her as she approached.
The only warning she got was a shout of "Angela!" before she was suddenly wrapped up in a hug from an exuberant Tracer.
"It's so good to see you, Angela!" Tracer declared.
"As it is to see you, Lena," Mercy said, smiling. "Is this it?"
"So far…" Tracer said, somewhat sadly. "But the recall hasn't been on long, I'm sure everyone's just scattered to the winds right now."
Angela nodded understandingly. "May I come in?"
"Sure."
"You could get in a lot of trouble for this, Winston."
"Talon attacked the outpost here. They were looking for deactivated Overwatch agents, and I'm sure I don't need to tell you about the 'incidents' recently," Winston explained. "I activated the recall to warn everyone… and possibly to get a team together to try and stop them."
Mercy and Tracer nodded.
"It's been a month, and you're the only ones that have responded so far," Winston said. "I saw the leader of the Talon Agents… he seemed to vanish into smoke when I tried to hit him."
Mercy furrowed her brows and frowned, her cheery mood at the reunion quickly fleeing.
Winston sighed as he looked around at their current base. "It seems that Overwatch's enemies have been gathering strength since Overwatch was disbanded… and without someone to stop them..."
Both Tracer and Mercy nodded.
"We have to stop them ourselves before they can complete their objectives…" Angela said, sighing as she leaned back in her seat.
"We have some time, for now, but we'll need to do something. Plenty of Overwatch's old Agents aren't going to come back, or have gone to ground, and we'll need supplies for those that do come back… see if you can convince some people to help out. Ask Athena, she'll do what she can for you," Winston said.
"I will. Thank you, Winston," Angela said, smiling.
To say Mercy had just had a frustrating two hours just now would be an understatement. Most of her colleagues weren't really suited to Overwatch work, and those that were had other priorities.
Her old contacts within Overwatch weren't much better, and the exchange typically ended with "I'm sorry doctor, but no," or they had been impossible to contact in the first place.
She had all but given up, and had resorted to routine maintenance of her Overwatch gear when she noticed a little mark… a manufacturer's mark, from someone who had helped her put it together in the first place, an old- if eccentric contact from her days in Medical school.
She reached for the phone and dialed a number she'd thought she wouldn't have to use again, and reminisced about the last time she'd seen him.
Years Earlier
"I'm detecting another life-sign in the red zone." A technician shouted over the cacophony of the command center, carefully picking his way through various triage beds sitting around the makeshift hospital to show his scanner readout to his boss.
"Mercy only just got the last one back," The coordinator said.
The Commander and his aides scrutinized the scanner's results on the PADD.
"Well, we can't get to them. She'll have to go," someone else said, already rushing off to help another patient.
All eyes fell on the tall, blonde, blue-eyed medic currently tending to another victim of the disaster. The superwoman stood taller, having overheard their conversation, and rolled her shoulders, her mechanical wings flexing and glowing somewhat brighter.
"I'll go," Mercy said simply, standing and lifting her caduceus staff before taking several steps and taking to the skies on those golden wings of hers.
The flooding had been particularly terrible for him. The flood had cost him dearly, his lab was ruined, and all but his research notes were lost.
He felt a blast of wind as something landed behind him, and spun around to see a beautiful lady in a suit of form-fitting, winged armor.
"Are you alright? Nothing is broken?" The woman asked.
"Nothing at all Dr. Ziegler," Krieg said, smiling as he holstered his small handgun.
Mercy's eyes lit up in recognition. "Dr Krieg?"
"Please, just Nick, Angela. We've known each other for years now, after all," Nicolaus Krieg said with a small smile.
"What are you doing here? I thought you were still in Switzerland," Mercy asked.
"I had a small lab here in the Americas working on some prototypes away from prying eyes… none of them survived, but I do have my research," Nick said. "...Not everything was lost, however. I understand your job is rather dangerous, and I thought that this would serve as a capable tool for self-defense."
Nick handed Angela a small handgun with a similar design aesthetic to the rest of her kit. "I call it the caduceus blaster, a match for your staff."
Angela knew Nick wouldn't take no for an answer… and she'd been singled out a few times before in hot zones, despite what the Geneva Convention demanded. Something small to defend herself with would be appreciated.
"The offer to join Overwatch still stands, Nick," the blonde tried as she attached the blaster to the magnetic clamp on her suits hip.
"I've got a lot of projects to reconstruct, and I would prefer not having someone else controlling my science," Dr Krieg said.
Mercy just sighed, having expected the familiar response. "Suit yourself."
Mercy gave one last look at the ruined lab before gesturing for Dr. Krieg. "Come on, let's get you out of here."
Mercy nearly dropped the phone when the other side picked up.
"Angie! How good of you to call! You'll never guess what just happened," Nick's voice greeted her from halfway across the world, and in her mother tongue to boot.
"Nick? How'd you know it was-" Mercy began before switching to German. "How did you know it was me?"
"That number's old, and the only one who still has it is you… the rest have all showed up in the obituaries," Nick said. "Though, from recent news, it seems that they've become rather unreliable… more on that later. You don't call me unless you need something, so, what is it?"
"Well… we're getting the old team back together," Angela began.
"Overwatch? Now is a good time as any with Talon and their ilk running amok… I'm in," Nick said quickly.
Mercy blinked in surprise. Nick had always turned down her offers and she had been preparing to have to try to convince him. "What?"
"Talon showed up, 'asking' for my services. I told them to 'get lost'- as the American's say- and they didn't like that… things got a bit… 'dicey' for a bit before they got the message. If you are going to put them in their place, I would love the opportunity to join in…"
There was a brief pause before Nick added, "And you asked nicely," seemingly as an afterthought.
Mercy gave a small laugh at the familiar eccentricity from her long-time friend. The laughter was cut short by shouting from Kreig's end, followed by smashing and the heavy thud of a body slamming into drywall before a single deafening report overloaded the microphone.
"Those verdammte idioten got blood on my good coat! I just got it washed!"
Mercy nodded at that. Nick Krieg liked his lab coats a lot, and the last assistant to stain one of them… well, it'd been brilliant- like most of his plans- especially in its capacity to fly under the radar until it was too late… to this day, Mercy had never been able to figure out how exactly he'd managed it, especially with only three vials of what she was fair sure were-
Angela shook herself from her memories. As far as she knew, the poor assistant was still recovering and still woke up in the mental ward in the middle of the night screaming and crying something about cyborg spiders climbing up the walls.
She'd had to come down hard on Nick after that. The man had been begging and sobbing at her desk every day for a month after she'd had the locks to his lab changed… and then reinforced after he'd unsuccessfully tried to blow the locks open. The man was resourceful, she had to admit, but she'd managed to get one up on him that time.
Angela was brought out of her musings by Nicolaus calling her name.
"Angela? Are you still there Angela?"
"Sorry, I drifted off. Remembering the 'good old days'. You were saying?" Angela replied.
"It's not like you to get lost in memory, Angela. I said I'll pack my bags now and be in Gibraltar in a day or so," Nick said.
"I don't recall mentioning where I was," Mercy said, somewhat bemused.
"I had the call traced," Nick replied, sounding nonchalant.
"I'm using an encrypted Overwatch phone," Mercy countered. It wasn't actually encrypted, but she knew Nick was hiding something from her.
"Black Market goods?" Nick asked more than stated.
"You? Black Market?" Mercy asked, raising an eyebrow. Nick would never be caught dead dealing with those kinds of people.
Nick was silent for several seconds before sighing. "...there are a few tracking devices in your suit. In case anyone ever got the bright idea to steal it. I just need to tap the frequency and input my key, and I'll know exactly where you are."
"Where I am?"
"I meant the suit," Nick corrected slightly too quickly.
"...Nick, did you put a tracking device in me?" Angela demanded, sounding particularly annoyed.
"Oh, look at the time! I really must get to packing. It was good speaking to you again, Angela!" Nick said quickly, ignoring Angela's shouts of protest.
"Dr Nicolaus Xavier Krieg, don't you dare-" Angela paused when she heard a familiar dial tone. "-hang up… Verdammt."
Angela sighed as she put her phone away, before looking back down at her disassembled Caduceus Blaster. She would have to get herself scanned as soon as possible.
2 Days Later
They were standing on the helipad as Nick arrived.
He was still tall, fit, and had that air of eccentricity about him. As the tiltjet took off again, Nick dropped his suitcases and spread his arms wide for a hug.
"Angela, how good to see you again!" Nick exclaimed, greeting Mercy with arms wide and a burst of German. His face was stretched wide by a sincere smile.
Tracer watched with mild interest as Mercy met up with her 'old friend'. It was odd because this was the happiest she'd seen Mercy in… well, years. The way the two were talking, it was like watching an old married couple banter with one another, even if Tracer couldn't speak more than six words of German to save her life.
"I just realized, we've never seen Doctor Ziegler like this before," Winston commented, tilting his head curiously.
"Yeah. Who do you suppose this Nick guy is?"
"I'm not entirely familiar with human… courtship, but…"
"Certainly looks that way, huh?" Tracer said, gesturing at how happy the two were to catch up.
Winston didn't say anything for a minute.
"Honestly, I never pegged Dr Krieg as the type to date anyone," Winston said, a pensive look on his face.
Tracer raised an eyebrow. "You know him?"
"Of him. Occasionally he'll do something that no one thought possible and cause a giant stir in the scientific community," Winston said. "I've read some of his theses and watched his speeches on occasion and the man is brilliant but was rather..."
Tracer looked at the man and took in his general demeanor as he talked animatedly with Angela, a slightly mad glint in his eyes. "I get what you mean."
"As far as everyone knows about the man, he's a savant. Hasn't stayed in any one field for more than a year or so. Seemingly plays around in a field until he grows bored before simply moving onto the next," Winston elaborated. "But whilst he's there, he'll usually publish a thesis or lay the groundwork for something else and suddenly we're left scrambling to catch up to whatever it is that's going on in his head."
Tracer furrowed her eyebrows. "But Angela said they met in Med School. I don't really see him as the Doctor type…"
Winston shrugged. "Kreig is… a 'mad scientist', for lack of a better term. Utterly brilliant, able to see things in ways few people can, but… also unstable, if you believe rumors."
This understandably alarmed Tracer. "Rumors about what?"
"About him having no taboos," Winston said plainly. "I personally don't fully believe them myself. He's highly respected, but in his lectures, I do get a sense that he doesn't see the world as we do, making connections we don't… and I can see why even unsubstantiated rumors of unscrupulous behavior would persist."
Tracer perked up as the two walked closer, before smiling widely as Angela introduced Nick.
"Lena, this is Doctor Nicolaus Krieg. He's an old friend of mine- we went to university together!"
Nick tilted his head politely in greeting, his smile noticeably subdued, though still clearly present. Given his name and clear German looks, Lena was surprised at his impeccable English when he spoke.
"A pleasure to make your acquaintance, Ms. Oxton."
Tracer quickly overcame her surprise. "Same to you... wait, how'd you know my name?"
"I read the news. Your disappearance made headlines," Dr Kreig said. "I am very sorry about the failure of the designs. I'm afraid I had a part to play in your accident."
Tracer didn't get to formulate a response before Mercy tapped Nicolaus on the shoulder.
Nick turned to face her and smiled brightly. "Yes my dear?"
Krieg wasn't able to react before Mercy grabbed him by the collar and pulled him forward threateningly. "Tell me everything about that tracker you installed. Now."
Nick's eyes widened almost imperceptibly as he swallowed thickly. "I- I'm sure I do not know what you are talking about Dr Ziegle-"
Mercy twisted her grip and tightened Krieg's collar enough to lightly choke him. "Tell. Me. Now. You only call me Dr. Ziegler if you're trying to hide something."
Winston decided to throw his physical presence in and loomed over Krieg as a silent threat: there were almost 700 kilos of silverback gorilla ready to break him in two if he tried anything.
Krieg gulped. "I hid it inside your femur. It was a simple-"
"We scanned my entire body with a full-spectrum scan, it's not there," Angela stated, staring the beleaguered man down.
"It's shielded," Krieg told her. "Supposed to fool scans so you didn't find out."
"Then it would be too large to fit within the bone marrow," Mercy said. "And I don't have anemia."
"Replaced your T-3 vertebra?" Krieg tried with a hopeful smile.
"Not even you of all people would have been able to pull that off, Nick."
"Your nanites would've fixed everything after I was gone. Just wait for an all-nighter, disable a few safeties and you'd never know you'd been under the knife," Krieg added.
At the mention of her nanobots, Mercy stiffened. Krieg had helped her with some of their initial programming and design, creating the networked intelligence that ensured she was kept in top shape.
She barely noticed her grip loosening enough for Krieg to pull away and suck down a large gulp of air.
"You didn't," Mercy groaned.
"Didn't what?" Tracer asked, not following Angela's thought process.
"My nanobots work from a networked intelligence… The good Doctor here helped immensely in their initial design and coding. If Nicolaus inserted hidden code…"
Krieg's face adopted a pained expression. "The signal was encrypted heavily and is designed to be as close to a tight-beam as I could manage, and all the receiving gear and transmission protocols are entirely proprietary. Following you through the news was too slow, too reactive. I knew you were destined for great things, so I… decided to keep a remote eye on you."
Mercy sighed, relaxing her grip and finally letting the poor man go. "You never could let go, could you?"
Nicolaus waved his hands in the air animatedly. "You're one of the few people I have ever met who has understood even 75% of my ramblings! Certainly the only one still alive! Do you know how tiring it is to have to dumb down my speech for those who can't keep up? It is simply infuriating!"
Mercy sighed at his words, not surprised at his reasoning in the least.
"You… what?" Tracer said, her eyebrows furrowing in confusion.
Mercy sighed again, pinching her nose. "He does this to everyone he works with. An old co-worker discovered he'd given her a bugged SIM card once."
"...Right." Tracer said, giving the man a look like he was crazy.
"Is there a way to disable the tracker?" Mercy asked, pinching the bridge of her nose.
"No."
There was a silence until Winston cleared his throat.
"...Well, assuming you got past compilation protection, function obfuscation, encryption, and more you'd have to go rifling line-by-line through the basic source code of the nanomachines to find stray bits of uncommented code hidden inside the literally hundreds upon millions of uncommented lines of code, using custom-made machinery that no longer exists to gain that level of access, let alone the encryption protocols we designed and the machinery to decrypt it is both destroyed and out of sync, bypass the many security protocols to prevent code tampering, find the tracker coding itself and then remove it." Krieg babbled, clearly trying to smooth things over.
"Translation?" Tracer asked, looking bewildered, only to get ignored by two of the three scientists present as they moved away.
"You need custom machines to connect to the network, a number of passwords that can't be brute-forced, and then if you wanted to remove that one tracking device, you would need to find a whole collection of needles in a mountain of hay and then lay them end-to-end in the correct order with no hints where they are or what that order may be." Winston translated as best as he could. "In short, it's at best impossible in a practical sense, and at worst literally impossible."
Angela sighed in defeat, patting her beleaguered friend on the shoulder before leading the way inside. "Never change, Nicolaus. Never change."
"I could do it if I had maybe a decade, and I know roughly what I'm looking for," Nick said, cautiously following Angela and rambling apologies and the like as Winston and Tracer watched in confused amusement.
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