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Some of you have heard me (🔫🦢) talk about my my Metal Gear self ship OC Steel Heron before.
Finally wrote up about 1200 words of lore explaining her AU and how it differs from canon.
basics: Steel Heron is the genetic daughter of The Boss and Dr. Strangelove, burdened with a temporal mutation due to her mothers’ scientific research that snaps her back in time any time she dies.
Metal Gear Chronocide (Steel, Iron Gold) AU– A time travel fix-it fic.
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After the Boss is sent to space, the US government uses her and Doctor Strangelove for another, even more top secret project. A time travel experimentation project dubbed the Chrononaut Project.
The Chrononaut project is officially considered a failure and shuttered after interactions with the so ‘temporal radiation’ left various members of the project and observers with lingering aftereffects, some more desirable than others.
In the year of the Snake Eater mission, a mysterious young agent called Hazel appears and saves the life of a prominent leader of the shadow government from an unexpected assassination attempt. The agent claims to be from the future– a child of one of the members of the Chrononaut project. In a confusing political gambit too complex to summarize here Hazel is dubbed Flightless Heron and sent along with Naked Snake on the Virtuous Mission, and then on Operation Snake Eater.
It comes to light that Heron has an extremely desirable temporal mutation– every time she dies she is sent backward by a few minutes or more with enough time to change the outcome of her death. Essentially, she has access to ‘autosaves’.
Snake and Heron bond during Operation Snake Eater and fall in love. For their accomplishments they are given the titles Big Boss and Steel Heron. However, soon after the mission is completed, there is an assassination attempt on her life. It technically fails, sending her back to the future (her present) but to all appearances in the past, Heron has been killed.
Heron’s death, along with the killing of his mentor, the Boss, leads to Big Boss’ (formerly Naked Snake) disillusionment and abandonment of the US government.
Due to changes in the timeline, other members of the shadow government are responsible for the Les Enfants Terribles project without the cooperation from or knowledge of Big Boss or his direct associates. While Big Boss is an unwilling target of the Les Enfants Terribles project, its major target in this timeline is actually Heron, due to her temporal “autosave” powers being of major interest to the shadow government.Â
Big Boss discovers the project thanks to the intervention of Revolver Ocelot, and, outraged at the idea of his lover being exploited, they destroy as much of the project as possible (though this turns out to be futile).
After the attempted destruction of Les Enfants Terribles, rather than being inducted into the Patriots, Big Boss splits from the government entirely and creates his private military group Militaires Sans Frontières on his own with his associates.Â
Events of the timeline proceed generally uncompromised through until the creation of Metal Gear Sahelanthropus.
During this time, Strangelove is pregnant with a second child, this one created by her artificially in the lab, mixing her own DNA with the preserved DNA of her lover, the Boss.Â
In this timeline, when Huey shuts Strangelove into the pod to kill her, a combination of her own temporal mutations, and the temporal mutation of the baby she’s carrying (Heron), Strangelove doesn’t die but rather is ejected into an alternate timeline.
The Les Enfants Terribles project produces two viable candidates: Val (Iron Heron), and Georgia (Gold Heron). Neither of them possess the original Heron’s exact mutation, but both are considered potentially ‘good enough’. The two are artificially aged forward in order to train and utilize them as quickly as possible.
Big Boss loses an arm and an eye in the destruction of Outer Heaven, and spends a couple of years in a coma. He is not replaced with a body double, but is himself the leader of Mother Base during the Phantom Pain incident. Due to this there is no “Venom Snake”– Just Big Boss.
Iron Heron– as Val– is sent by her handlers to infiltrate the new Mother Base and assassinate Big Boss. Unable to do so, she is rescued by Gold Heron, who is celebrated as the greater of the two Heron siblings. Mother Base is destroyed, and Big Boss and his associates are driven underground.
The events of the timeline unfold with Gold Heron in the place of Solid Snake. Specifically, Metal Gear, Metal Gear 2: Solid Snake and Metal Gear: Ghost Babel, however due to changes in the timeline, these events take place in the 80s and early 90s rather than the 90s and early 2000s.
Meanwhile, Strangelove has been raising her daughter Hazel (Heron) in another timeline while trying to get back home. She manages to achieve a breakthrough when Hazel is 19, and pulls herself, Hazel and Hazel’s friend Simon back into the MGS universe at a coinciding temporal location– this happens to be just before the Tanker Incident is about to occur.
The returned Steel Heron is given a hero’s welcome after her identity is confirmed by the member of the shadow government whose life she saved in the 1960s. She is almost immediately (suspiciously soon) given clearance and about to be returned to active duty.
However, she discovers the old Chrononaut laboratories that her mother wants to show her, and the resonant energy throws her back in time to the 1960s where she takes part in the Snake Eater mission.
Less than an hour takes place in linear time from the time that Heron is sent back to Snake Eater, and the time that the assassination attempt sends her back forward in time.
Once returned to the future/present Heron is horrified to learn that her lover Big Boss’ name has become synonymous with terrorism, and tries to find out what drove him to such a change. However, all of the data about the incidents are classified over her clearance level and she comes under suspicion for trying to find out more.
An altered version of the Tanker Incident plays out, with Val (Iron Heron) in the place of Liquid Snake, and Steel Heron as the primary agent on the mission, while her now older counterpart Gold Heron is a consultant on the radio.
At the end when Hazel confronts Val the two get into an extended shootout. Val attempts to sway Hazel to her perspective, as Val lionizes Big Boss and believes that the government is in the wrong. Though Hazel takes Val out, her body disappears and no one knows if or when she will return. Val has placed more than just the seed of doubt into Hazel. She believes that she’s being manipulated.Â
From there the timeline diverges strongly as Hazel, her half brother Otacon, and Meryl dig into the shady truth of history and what’s being hidden from them.
Hazel finally manages to track down Big Boss only to discover that he’s attempting to launch a nuclear warhead packed with chronoradiant elements in order to rip a hole in the fabric of the universe and eliminate the walls between timelines in a way to gain back all the people that he has lost over the years.
Heron and Big Boss fight. Big Boss refuses to believe that Heron is real and not another clone or a trick. The two of them fight on top of the missile silo as it readies for launch, and Heron lets him kill her again and again and again until she finally manages to convince him she’s real. He gives her the codes to stop the launch but he dies in her arms.
As the steely grip of the shadow government closes around the world, and Heron’s companions are dying all around her, she and her associates finally find a way to send themselves back into the past in order to avert the events that led to such a failure state.
Heron, Otacon, Meryl, and a number of others wind up in the past, in the 1970s. At Mother Base.
And from there things get really wild.
Soooo excited to have actually started posting this. ðŸ˜ðŸ˜ðŸ˜
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