2062d Tactical Division Special Mission Force
"Team Fortress 2"

"It's anyone's guess how any of these guys are still alive, much less all of them."
- Yuri Daniels, Deputy Chief/CID

History

All spacers know that strange things happen on the Rim. Thousands of years ago, the region that is now the Outer Rim Territory was where galactic civilization's center of gravity was, and today relics of those byegone days abound on the sparsely settled worlds of the Rim. Fortunes are made - and sometimes lives lost - by corporations and individuals who choose to explore these worlds and uncover these relics.

And then there was Badland.

Badland (pronounced bad-lnd, like Iceland) is undistinguished even by the standards of the Outer Rim, possessing neither ancient ruins nor significant mineral wealth. Class M (barely) but arid and not very hospitable, it supported a small but stable population of colonists from Earth for whom its very isolation and obscurity were reasons to stay - or barriers to escape. As the initial United Earth prospective-colony survey of 2076 phrased it, "The only thing Badland possesses in abundance appears to be gravel."

Strangely, this didn't prevent the planet from becoming the site of the most absurd corporate war ever fought. Beginning some 60 years after Badland was settled, a struggle broke out between two local companies for control of the planet's vast gravel reserves. [I promise you, I did not make that last sentence up. -V-] This quickly escalated into an armed conflict involving small mercenary armies, presaging the Corporate Sector wars of the 22nd and 23rd centuries, albeit on a much smaller and more ridiculous scale.

The war between the mercenary forces of Reliable Excavation & Demolition and Builders League United went on for centuries, becoming part of the background noise of life on Badland and attracting, like everything else about the planet, almost no attention from the outside galaxy. It might still be carrying on today, except that in early 2409, Badland finally got noticed by somebody from the outside.

Unfortunately, that somebody was the Scientist Supreme of Advanced Idea Mechanics (the weird science division of Big Fire's terror and mayhem department, HYDRA), who decided that Badland would be the perfect place to test a new bioweapon one of his researchers had developed. Sometime in early June of that year, A.I.M. operatives infiltrated the planet and released the agent, codenamed GREEN FLU, in Badland's capital city, Teufort. Within a month almost everyone on the planet had been reduced to a raving, mindlessly violent, cannibalistic psychopath by this extremely virulent pathogen and a full-scale zombie apocalypse was underway. The Scientist Supreme was very pleased with this result. A.I.M. went on to conduct a larger-scale test of GREEN FLU on a more densely populated Inner Galaxy world, Faliszek III.

None of this was known to the IPO until after the Faliszek III incident, when the Tesladyne Action Science League investigation of that incident led Atomic Robo and his team first to the facility where GREEN FLU was developed, and then to the Alpha Test Site on Badland. By the time they arrived in mid-December, most of Badland's pre-attack population of 25 million had perished... except for one remaining stronghold of humanity. At one of the bastions formerly used in the RED v. BLU corporate war, a handful of RED's mercenary troops had managed to hold on for six months in the face of the zombie hordes, protecting a few dozen uninfected civilians until they were finally relieved by Tesladyne's investigation team.

This ragtag band, looking to get a little revenge for the millions slaughtered in the Badland Apocalypse, joined up as a Tac Div SMF with a particular focus on countering A.I.M. and HYDRA operations. In honor of the location where they had held out for so long, they adopted the codename "Team Fortress 2".

Overview

2062 SMF is an unusual outfit even by the liberal standards of Tac Div Special Mission Forces. Originally the last survivors of a small mercenary army employed for a deeply stupid purpose, they're a heterogeneous, unorthodox bunch with an extremely loose dress code, no ranks, no chain of command, and no apparent leader. Many of them aren't even all that bright, and they're all at least a bit crazy.

On the other hand, sometimes crazy works, and Team Fortress 2's members are each among the best at whatever he, she, or it does. Their strange and highly personalized equipment, all handbuilt or personally modified, might be incomprehensible or useless to anyone else, but it's all startlingly effective in the hands of its owners. Their tactics, similarly, seem like anarchic chaos to an uninitiated outsider, but it all works in the heat of battle.

There are definitely jobs for which 2062 SMF is unsuitable. You wouldn't want to send them to act as security detail for a peace conference or other gathering of dignitaries, for instance, or assign them to have anything to do with public relations or noncombatant liaison in any context whatever. But if you need a secret HYDRA base taken out, some new A.I.M. superweapon destroyed, or the leaders of a Galactor terror cell eliminated, these are the guys you call.

Personnel

Soldier

"If God had wanted you to live, He would not have created me!"

Randall Jenkins is the younger brother of Tesladyne security specialist and all-around ultra-badass Carl Jenkins. [Yes, "last survivor of the Vampire Dimension expedition" Jenkins. -V-] He idolizes his elder brother and wishes to be just like him. Unfortunately, he's a bit too dim to realize that ambition properly, but within his own extremely limited sphere of expertise he's really quite effective. His core competencies include being a dab hand with a rocket launcher and shotgun, using an entrenching tool as a weapon, imitating R. Lee Ermey, and disregarding his own and everyone else's safety with a gleeful panache that it's hard not to admire. He also knows 101 uses for an old-fashioned steel pot helmet, some of them extremely creative.

Scout

"If you order now, I'll throw in a second beatin' absolutely free."

A cousin of IPO CID Sergeant Janice Barlow, Scout - Michael John Patrick Barlow to his driver's license - belongs to the branch of the Barlow clan that didn't leave Boston for the colonies in the 2100s. As the youngest and smallest of eight brothers growing up in Southie, baseball-crazy Mike developed a fists-and-smacktalk-based negotiating style and a facility for running like hell at a young age, then parlayed them into a career as a fast-moving, hard-hitting, big-mouthed mercenary. He's completely fearless and willing to take on absolutely anybody or anything to prove how tough he is - so it's fortunate that he's almost as tough as he thinks he is. It might be a little nuts to bring a bat to a gunfight, but on the other hand, he's got a shotgun too.

Pyro

"Mmmphya harrgh mrgha hrghgph!"

Some say he lives in an idealized fantasy world full of rainbows and kittens, and that he may or may not actually be a woman inside that insulated suit. All we know is, he's not the Stig, but he is the Stig's arsonist cousin. Even Pyro's teammates, who lived cheek-by-mask with the flamethrower-wielding enigma for six months during the siege of Fortress 2, don't know who or what he is, other than a) he likes to set things on fire and b) he's very, very good at it. He's been seen to sleep (or at least become dormant), but never to eat, use the bathroom, or utter an intelligible sentence. Sometimes he seems to have a sense of childlike wonder at odds with the brutality of his chosen weapon, reinforcing the theory that he's not really aware that his job is burning people to death.

Demoman

"Oh, they're gaun'tae have t'glue you back t'gether... in Hell!"

Tavish DeGroot claims to come from a long line of black Scottish explosives experts, with a centuries-old family tradition of mercenary work, child abandonment, and eye injuries. Hard-drinking and prone to occasional fits of morose self-loathing, the Demoman is only truly happy when he's blowing things up. Luckily, that's his job as well as his calling, so he's usually a pretty cheerful guy. Weirdly for someone whose line of work involves a life-or-death need for scientific precision, he also has a strangely mystical side, and has been known to haul out a possessed claymore sword and start yelling in Scots Gaelic in the middle of particularly hectic battles. When that happens, his teammates known to keep their heads down and stay out of the way.

Heavy

"I am most dangerous man in history of world!"

One of the relatively few members of 2062 SMF who was a veteran of a proper armed force before joining RED, Maxim Andre'evich "Heavy Weapons Guy" Ivanov once held the rank of sergeant in Earthforce. He deserted when the Earth Alliance Crackdown of 2406 abolished the Russian Federation and headed for the Rim, initially planning to offer his services to the Novaya Rodina Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, but wound up on Badland instead. Maxim isn't very smart, so it's entirely possible he thought he had joined the Red Army, as opposed to the RED army, for the first few months, and then was having too good a time to care. Heavy, as his friends call him, loves his job to a degree that's striking even among his teammates. A jolly giant, he has an especial fondness for his enormous handmade minigun "Sascha" and for Dr. Müller, his closest battle buddy.

Medic

"THAT was doctor-assisted homicide!"

A native of Stuttgart, Germany, Dr. Heinrich Müller (Dr. med. Universität Tübingen, 2398) has a checkered history as a medical man. Records indicate that he lost his license to practice medicine on Earth in 2404, for reasons which are not specified in the surviving accounts. It was for that reason that he had gone to the Rim and was there to be recruited by RED in the first place. Initially he worked as a medical researcher, but after his first taste of battlefield medic work, he decided he had found his true calling. Despite his strange taste for violence ("first do no harm" went by the wayside fast when people start shooting at him), he's actually a brilliant doctor - so brilliant he invented the Medi-Beam, a miraculous healing technology that could revolutionize emergency medicine galaxywide if it can ever be brought to mass production.

Engineer

"You done incurred my wrath, son."

Like the Demoman, 2062 SMF's Engineer claims descent from a long and honorable tradition - in his case, one of tough, inventive Texans adept at building things that kill people. Dell Conagher's grandfather Radigan invented the Man-Portable Automatic Sentry Gun in the 2300s, and the younger Conagher makes extensive use of the very same design. The credit for the invention of the Build-Matic Wrench (popularly known as the "ultraspanner"), on the other hand, is all Dell's. Not just a crack designer, 2062's Engineer is at home on the battlefield, setting up and maintaining his creations under fire and even dishing out some of his own when the situation warrants it. It wasn't just as an intellectual exercise that he made an instrument as high-precision and complicated as the ultraspanner sturdy enough to be used as a bludgeon.

Sniper

"There was you: very full of yourself. Then, very briefly surprised. Then, dead."

Lachlan Mundy is another of Team Fortress 2's relatively few members to have had regular uniformed experience before joining RED. Hailing from the parallel dimension where Gryphon spent much of the mid-24th century, Mundy was a member of Starfleet and a security NCO aboard the Chief's last extradimensional command, the starship USS Invincible (NCC-1717). Following the Invincible's crossover to this universe, Mundy joined the Wedge Defense Force during that force's reconstruction in the 2380s. After the War of Corporate Occupation, he left the WDF and went freelance, working as a hunter-investigator and independent contractor on the Rim for years. It was Mundy who suggested that the team join up with the IPO after the zombie siege on Badland. An expert bushman and well-regarded investigator, he's probably the most genuinely competent member of 2062 SMF.

Spy

"Gentlemen."

2062 SMF's Spy believes that he is a complete enigma, a man whose identity is lost to history and unknown to all. He would thus probably be dismayed and disappointed to learn that we know he's Martin Lucas, formerly a detective sergeant in the Murder Squad of the French Judicial Police. Dispossessed and rendered homeless by the 2406 Earthdome crackdown, Lucas appears to have gone a little bit insane and hurled himself headlong into a sort of Walter Mitty life as an espionage and assassination specialist... or possibly there's a method to his madness that he has not yet seen fit to reveal. Regardless, he genuinely is a master of disguise and infiltration, a deadly marksman, a lethal knife fighter in the Marseilles style, and a sophisticated gatherer of information... even if he is out of his mind.

Current assignment

Team Fortress 2 are currently assigned to Tactical Special Command 2 (Counter-Terrorism), in which capacity they undertake operations against specific terror threats as directed by Deputy Chief Rogers. Their recognized area of specialty is against HYDRA and A.I.M. cells.

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