Achievement Unlocked: One day left until retirement!

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With the rest of your team prematurely alerted to your intentions, it's time to go to ground. You rip the vent cover off of an air duct running along the restroom ceiling. Of course it's just big enough for an adult human to crawl through and turn around comfortably-- this is a video game! You amble your way down the duct, peeking through the first well-lit vent you pass.

It's some sort of hotel conference room. Two NPC terrorists are patrolling back and forth, occasionally muttering a throwaway line. You're torn. You want the Style Points, but there's no way for you to kill these enemies while still remaining hidden from your team.

"INCOMING!" The enemies react as another player starts shooting the them from a spot you can't see. You realize it must be the rest of the rooftop entry squad that you broke away from. And once all the enemies in the room are dead, they actually take the time to cut their way through the locked door with a blowtorch instead of sequence-breaking around it any of a dozen different ways.

Shooting the terrorists with guns and actually completing the mission objectives? What a boring playstyle!

And of course, leading this charge is none other than the most boring player you've ever met in the entire game, MilladyKiller69. Too misogynistic to be a true gentleman, (whatever those look like,) and too polite to just pin you down and **** you once he's had enough of your bullshit, he exists in this weird grey area that would probably be creepy to you, if he could manage to make you feel anything at all. You're pretty sure even his cum would taste like wallpaper paste.

You decide to leave him alive, for now. Much like the NPC terrorists, they're not worth losing your stealth advantage to engage. You can kill him with a thought, later, after you take out your main target.

But just when you're about to move on, the swaying of a light fixture that must have gotten bumped during the firefight inspires you.

What if you could somehow do both? Maintain your cover and kill your teammates? Or at least fuck with them a bit?

You quick-switch to your pistol and load it up with Armor-Piercing rounds. Then you aim not at the players below, but into the side of the vent. Your first shot shatters the swinging light source, and then you quickly fire a few rounds into the general ceiling area, taking out a few more of the ceiling lights.

This sudden gunfire no doubt attracts the attention of your teammates below, but you quick-switch to the rappelling hook, fire it straight down the ventilation duct, and retract the cable, letting it pull you all the way down to the corner in the vent. It's almost comical how far you can get in the time it takes your teammates to start firing up at the unknown intruder in the air ducts.

Checking your map, you confirm your suspicions. These ducts form a nice big box around the central ballroom where your team is supposed to meet up before triggering the main boss fight, followed by the VIP escort mission.

You pop the cherry on a consumable Sinister Laugh emote. These things are designed to attract attention from other players, but in your situation, it reverberates all throughout the HVAC system, with an effect ranging from threatening to creepy depending on how far it echoes before a player hears it. You really have to hand it to the environmental sound designer. Sometimes, it's the little details!

You use your rappelling hook to slide around in the vents, and burn through almost three full clips of A.P. ammo shooting out the lights in various rooms and hallways. You hope that your intended prey, the notorious lech DarkSlayer6700, appreciates all the trouble you're going through "setting the mood."

When all is dark, you let out a high-pitched girlish giggle. Not another emote, but this time, using voice chat.

You are delighted to hear a sustained barrage of random gunfire coming from the main ballroom in response. You don't think they're even aiming at the vents! You wait for the gunfire to die down, positively giddy at how much you've gotten inside their heads.

Silence. You wait just a moment. Right now, they're thinking, 'did we get her?'

"I'm coming for you..." you call down the vents, in your best sing-song imitation of a creepy little girl voice.

Yes, the environmental audio effects in this game really are superb.

The moment the Diabolical Laugh emote started to play, DarkSlayer6700 realized he was going to have a problem this chick. That emote was his thing!

Six doorways and four vents led to this ballroom, all of them intended to funnel players back into the Critical Path after splitting them up for the breach & entry phase of the Mission. As those doorways went dark, one by one, he started to actually get nervous. Hadn't someone mentioned she was supposed to be really good at the game?

"Looks like it's lights-out for your ladyfriend," Dissonant-Soundtrack said, cocking his massive hand-cannon of a revolver.

"Will you cut it with the one-liners," DarkSlayer6700 said, "this is serious!"

Dissonant-Soundtrack scowled, working his mustache for maximum gruffness. "I don't tell you how to play," he said, breaking character but keeping the absurdly deep macho voice filter.

"She's almost out of lights," insertnamehere said. "Whatever her next move is, she'll be making it soon."

JakeSnakeCakes swallowed nervously, looking back and forth from door to door. He'd just wanted to hang out with random players and maybe get a few Style Points! How had it come to this?

All of the doors were dark. All of the vents were silent.

Then a girlish giggle echoed throughout the ballroom, seeming to come from all the vents at once, like the voice of some little girl's ghost in a horror movie. DarkSlayer6700's squad slowly backed away from the doors, until they found themselves back-to-back in the center of the room.

"We're here!"

All four of them turned and opened fire with everything they had.

Milladykiller69 exploded into a cloud of particle effects and giblets, and the other members of the roof infiltration team who'd been behind him dropped dead.

"Hold your fire!"

Great. Now they'd all been tagged as TeamKillers. Even JakeSnakeCakes had managed an Assist. Truth be told, he hadn't even really been aiming, he'd just wanted to feel included.

The high-pitched voice echoed throughout the ballroom, saying something, but it was almost too distorted to make out.

"What'd she say?" DarkSlayer6700 asked.

"You don't wanna know," came insertnamehere's reply.

"Nobody ever shoulda pinned a tits on that nice pair of badge," Dissonant-Soundtrack growled. Then he winced as he realized he'd flubbed the line.

Tense seconds passed. "Is it over?" JakeSnakeCakes asked.

Then, from above them, they all heard the soft wet plop of a bubble popping.

They looked up at the ballroom's main chandelier, and the game's Adaptive Brightness system momentarily blinded them as they went from staring into dark doorways to looking directly at the brightest light source in the room. Somewhere up there, behind the bloom and the light halos, they could just make out the silhouette of a player, standing on the arms of the giant gold-and-crystal light fixture. Somewhere above it, no doubt, there was probably an open vent cover.

"You should have checked the canopy," she said, with the same macho voice filter enabled, making a chandelier pun that probably nobody would get. Then she knifed the chain holding the chandelier aloft, before quick-switching to her pistol and unloading her last few A.P. rounds into it.

Everyone opened fire, but it was too late. They were too far away; their aim, too uncertain, as they stared into the sun.

Then, in a shower of sparks and broken glass, the sun began to fall.

You sink your rappelling hook into the ceiling, and just hang there as you watch the fireworks below.

+24 Style Points!