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You’re leaning forward, fingers mashing the keyboard as pure monster energy runs through your veins. Adrenaline and dopamine pumping like all hell in tandem with the synthesized bullet sounds ringing in your headset. Your teammates are out of the game, watching as you jump off an in-game ridge, one-tapping the last opponent with your deagle, their high-pitched shrieks blaring at the victory screen pop-up.
“No fucking way, dude! No fucking way!” Your childhood best friend, Alex, screams into his shitty three-dollar earbud mic from the gas station electronics section. “Bro, you’re actually cracked!”
You pressed the push-to-talk button, yelling at the other team: “My grandma has better plays than your dogshit room-temperature IQ camping garbage—”
Hearing the other team begin yelling back with equal ferocity, spicing it up with a few slurs, your friends begin joining in until all that’s left is a cacophony of incomprehensible sounds. Fuck. What a feeling. You lean back and try not to look at your electrical engineering homework online. The deadline isn’t until tomorrow—it can wait.
You blink, and suddenly you’re all kitted out, standing in dim light with a stranger in front of you, gnarly scars crawling up his jaw to rest just underneath his Tom Cruisesque aviators. You see a woman standing near a roll-up garage door, leathered up and sketchy-looking. What the fuck?
“Bell. Welcome to West Berlin,” he says, blowing out smoke. Gee wiz. Save some pussy for the rest of us, dude.
You look down at your hands, seeing them covered in woolen gloves. What is even happening? You move back a bit. You crack a joke to lighten the mood. “Hey man, I’m not tryna catch corona. Six feet social distance.”
“Corona? Social distance?” He replies, frowning. “Bell, stop spouting nonsense. We’ve got a job to do.”
You get hit with a sense of vertigo from two sides. One, something tugs in your head suddenly, like you’ve got a brain wedgie you can’t get rid of. Two, is that you remember those words. You played BO:CW just last month as soon as it came out—was hyped after the trailer dropped in Warzone, only to be let down by multiplayer. You remember most of the campaign, including the bitchass that killed you, but honestly just played it to get the most out of the game. You really only cared about multiplayer.
Still, this fucker looked a lot like—what’s his name? Hitler? No, wait, Adler. Which meant that the lady was Helen Park. You remember her because you wanted an option to romance her, but Treyarch said no apparently.
What the shit? Is this a dream? Or did you just get fucking isekai-ed?
You pinch yourself, feeling a spark of pain. Motherfucker. When you told Alex you wouldn’t mind getting isekai-ed, you meant into a harem anime, not Call of Fucking Duty of all things. Sure, you’ve shot a gun before, but only because your dad is sort of a gun nut. Other than that, no combat experience. Or even military experience. You’re a regular middle-class white college dude in the good ol’ US of A.
Park slammed on the door twice, a signal. You decide to follow Adler into the safehouse, looking around. Fuck, the BO:CW graphics actually were impressive, now that you think about it. The real life version looked a lot like the in-game version, except you could physically feel the cold and miserable energy permeating the space.
God, these people need to lighten up. Sure, they’re trying to track down a highly successful wrinkly Soviet spymaster with the goal of undermining western power and setting the Soviet Union as the leader of all the world's nations by setting off the greenlight nukes in Europe, but would it kill to at least not look depressed? Where’s the small talk?
“Park,” Adler says.
“Adler.” She turns to you in acknowledgement. “Bell.” Finally, some semi-friendly engagement. But you’re not going to forget this bitch worked with the other bitch in front of you to kill the original Bell’s memories. Jokes on them, you already knew the worst of them already. The only time you’re ok with spoilers.
“Let’s get started,” Adler says, walking up to the table in the center of the garage. Let’s not get started actually. “There’s been a surge in Russian chatter in the last 48 hours. The CIA and the DoD are tapping their inside sources for anything substantial, but so far there’s no leads on Perseus.”
Holy shit this is really happening isn’t it. You’re actually in the Cold War, working as a Soviet-turned-American agent. You feel the reality settling in, hyperventilating in your head. Outwardly, you don’t change expressions even beneath your balaclava—it’s a skill you acquired from reading ecchi manga in public. Listen, you were a horny little shit in highschool with a privacy screen protector living life on the fucking edge. Sue you.
“MI6 has come up empty-handed as well,” Park adds.
“We’ll have to start somewhere, so we’re going back here…Vietnam, 1968. One of our closest encounters with Perseus,” Adler says, walking over to the bulletin board sparsely filled with documents.
Sims curses. “Shit. Some part of me always knew that mission wasn’t done with us.”
“Pull up everything we’ve got on the attack in Da Nang and run it past Park. She’ll cross reference it with MI6.”
“We’re looking for code names, encrypted transmissions, Russian activity with the NVA - anything that could be a lead,” Park says.
Lazar replies, “you got it”. You already know Lazar is simping for Park. You would like to romance her still, but you never go after your homeboy’s crushes. That’s creed #2 for the boys. #1 is the bedtime kisses.
“Bell, this is where you come in,” Adler says.
BeLl tHiS iS wHeRe yOu cOmE iN , you think in the nerdiest voice you can think of. Shut up, Adler.
“We needed the best of the CIA in SOG, and that’s exactly why I requested you again.”
Sure , that’s exactly why.
“Head to the evidence board. We’ll retrace our steps through Da Nang. Anything that could give us a lead on Perseus.”
No. You head towards Park instead, who sits down in front of her desk.
Adler grunts. “Bell, what did I tell you to do?”
Shit. Turns out he doesn’t just stand there and repeats the same lines like an NPC in real-life. Damn.
“Hold your horses, I’m getting there,” you say, the urge to disobey every one of Adler’s orders almost overwhelming your actions. Dragging your feet to the board. “My grandma always said ‘patience is a virtue’. She also said ‘you’re a disappointment of a grandson’, but that’s besides the point.”
Looking taken back, Adler says, “...what?”
“That was my reaction too,” you reply, giving him a thumbs up. You think maybe you should just completely fuck up this timeline. All the endings sucked ass anyway. You're a patriotic fucker so of course you picked the Solovetsky ending, only to be killed by Adler's bitchass. After that, you chose the Duga ending.
Man, but that was a video game. You don’t actually want half of Europe to get blown to bits in your new reality.
Adler looks very unamused. And confused. Good. Bell in the game was just a passive little fucker, but you as Bell? Yeah, you're fucking hilarious and a grade-A bossman. Time to serve Adler the real all-American brain twister. Preferably with a side dish of the ol' wet wipe noogie on his stupidly luscious hair. It's actually starting to piss you off with how perfect it looks.
Then, as if regaining his cognisance, Adler tilts his head, indicating at you with his cancer stick. “You’ve just moved up on my favorite team member list, right past Lazar.”
The fuck?
Oh hell no, bro.