The Mystery Item

The room was filled with tension. A tension thick enough to break a knife. In this room sat two figures, intensely staring at something they had brought in and put on the work table. It was as if they were inspecting some strange, potentially dangerous foreign object that had just crashed onto the table from the sky. They didn't know if they should mess with it or have it placed into some sort of container for long, complicated sessions of intensive study and experimentation. Either way, they continued to stare.

They weren't the only ones in the room, however. There was one other who had entered without their notice. A woman with pink hair, and muscles that any would-be body builder would love to . She had been standing there for about three minutes, trying to figure out why it was that they were staring at some random container. This woman wasn't the most patient when it came to waiting for people to do something, and waiting for 3 whole minutes, with nothing to do but watch people stare at an immobile object tended to drive her over her limit. No longer wanting to wait for them to notice her, she spoke,

"Well?" asked the woman.

The two jumped in response to the sudden break in silence. The strength of her voice, and the presence of her Russian accent allowed them to recognize who it was that had caught them off guard.

"Zarya!" said one of the figures.

"Tracer. Winston. It is good to see that the both of you are trying to staying active."

Tracer blushed at the sarcasm, while Winston merely pushed his glasses back up. Winston had expected the Russian woman to arrive, just not now. She was supposed to show up to pick up her particle cannon today. It had been acting up lately, and Winston had agreed to fix the problem.

"I thought you were supposed to show up at 3:00."

Zarya raised her brow.

"It's 3:00 right now, isn't it?"

Winston sighed at his lack of time-keeping. Zarya just chuckled and shook her head. It was normal for people to make mistakes. What wasn't normal was whatever her friends had been doing a moment ago.

"What were you looking at anyway?" she said as she picked up the container.

"Wait! Don't-"

Zarya opened the container before the scientist could stop her, and braced himself for whatever might have been in it...A moment passes...Two moments...Winston didn't feel any different. Had anything happened? Was a soft poison spreading from it and killing them? Was it a beacon that allowed some horrible organization to find them? Had whatever was in the container already killed them, and Winston just hadn't felt it? After a moment, Winston opened his eyes to find out for himself. What he found was something that he honestly hadn't expected to see. At least not in this day and age.

"A USB? People still use those?"

"Well...no. They're kind of obsolete now."

Winston picked up the USB, and inspected it. He thought that it may have been some kind of trick. No one used USBs anymore. Not since more reliable storage devices had been created anyway. It was the way of things. Old tools become obsolete, and replaced...unless they're computer programs or A.I. Those just get updated. Why would someone even have one of these?

"Well?" asked Zarya. "Are you going to look at what's inside?"

"That's...um..you see..."

Winston stuttered on what he was trying to say. He coughed in order to take a second to collect himself. He was kind of embarrassed to say,

"Well, I don't really have a USB port. I can have Athena extract the data, but it might take a while."

Winston placed the USB on some sort of device, which Athena then used to levitate the object and scan. Through an unseen process, the A.I. had begun extracting the data in the device, setting up firewalls and countermeasures in the event that the data attempted to corrupt and disable its systems. Even then, Athena proceeded with caution. Since the attack from Talon, the A.I. didn't want to take a chance that would endanger Winston. Still, it was taking a while.

Zarya, out of curiosity and a wish to start up a conversation, asked them how they had gotten the item in the first place. Tracer attempted to tell the story in a grand way, as if it had been an epic adventure all on its own. Winston fact checked. The short version is that, apparently, they received it as thanks from a weirdo that they had saved earlier in the day. Winston and Tracer were simply going to the supermarket to get more peanut butter and cookies (or as Tracer would call them, "biscuits"), when they stumbled upon a small group of miscreants attempting to mug someone. Winston's intimidating size scared half of them off, while Tracer easily took out the ones that stuck around to fight. The victim gave them a small box and ran off.

Zarya then understood why they were suspicious of it earlier. In hindsight, she probably almost gave them heart attacks by carelessly opening up the box earlier. Still, nothing happened...yet. Fortunately for the Russian woman, Athena had notified them that she was finished, and the contents of the USB was ready to be viewed. Thoughts of what might have been and might be will have to haunt someone else today.

The data contained within flowed into Athena's memory. Athena had already processed it when she put it up on screen. Winston stared at the data wide-eyed, as it scrolled out before his eyes.

"This...This is...!"

"What is it, Winston?!"

Tracer was worried. Winston usually didn't stutter like this. What if the data contained government secrets? Or maybe it was a secret plot from Talon to attack a major city! Or maybe it was a plan from some other terrorist group to shut down the Hearthstone servers! Winston LOVES to play Hearthstone!

Winston continued to stare at the screen for a moment, then shook himself out of his little trance. He got to work controlling the flow of the data so he could analyze it all more carefully.

"This is...hilarious!"

Tracer and Zarya gawked at their currently laughing gorilla friend.

"Look at this! Bios on strange characters, notes on abnormal abilities, blueprints on technology I haven't even heard of! It's like they pulled a bunch of stuff out of fiction and organized it to look like it was important!"

As Winston looked through the information with glee, Tracer and Zarya took a peek at it themselves. Before them was information on some...very strange characters, ranging from normal-ish looking people to dinosaurs and strange-looking creatures. They had to agree with him, it all kinda seemed a bit too fantastic to be real info. Even with everyone they've met and fought, giant lizards and evil pig wizards were definitely not something they'd see in even the strangest of situations.

"Look at this. There's even a tiny horse in this list!" laughed Winston, scrolling through even more of the data. "There's no way that-"

He froze when he came upon a certain file. The other two looked at it as well, and were equally as shocked.

It was a file on Tracer. She opened it up, and found that it had information on her abilities, equipment, and even some of her background information was on it. Tracer was always open about how she joined Overwatch, so that last part was understandable, but the notes on her chronal accelerator were supposed to be known by Athena and Winston only. Not only that, the file also contained HD, up close and personal clips of a certain unfortunate event that she had attempted to prevent.

The three of them silently stared at it all for a moment. They didn't know what it meant. There was no way someone could've recorded her without being noticed. Especially when both she and Widowmaker were falling. They would have had to be dangerously close to the bullet, avoid it, and change angles. All without being noticed. Not exactly something that people could do. Besides that they'd have to have had cameras all over the place, even where no one would be allowed!

"Do you think it's an assassin?" Asked Zarya.

"No" replied Winston. "They would've had plenty of moments to kill her."

"Why else would they go through all this trouble?"

"Maybe it's a stalker."

"That's worse!"

"A stalker is worse than an assassin?"

"Clearly you've never been stalked. I have. They are worse. I had to break a few of them during training days."

Both Winston and Tracer stared at the pink-haired Russian woman. They imagined her breaking some creepy guy...then they dismissed those thoughts as it had begun to drift over to something weird, wrong, and likely to end with her breaking THEM if they ever brought it up.

"I'll...just take your word for that." said Tracer. Winston agreed. "Still...why me? I don't know if you've noticed, but there are quite a few people that find me annoying."

"Who are these people? I will crush them for you."

"No! That's okay! There's no need for that! I'm just saying that I don't know why someone would stalk me."

"Well, there's always your body."

"...what?"

While the two conversed about reasons why a stalker would possibly choose her as their target, Winston was busy looking through the file to see what else this thing had on her. To his relief, it didn't have much else on her personal life before the Slipstream incedent. Still, it was concerning that someone had collected all this intel on her. As he continued to check the file's contents, he had run into a rather strange thing.

"What the...? Hey, you two might want to see this."

Tracer and Zarya stopped and went back to the screen. On it was was a video file titled "DB Sim: Tracer and Scout"

Winston took a moment to look at Tracer, who shrugged at the sight of it. Then, after swallowing down any fears of what might be inside, opened it up.