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Description
October 2, 1957; Deadwood, South Dakota

Bromden always loved the sight of the Black Hills. It took his mind off things like the Templars and the Soviets. It was just one of those calm, tranquil scenes that was pleasing to the soul. He was so glad he and his family had moved out to this little town. Macha hated living on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation down south. It was cramped and violent, and reminded her of a history of subjugation she'd rather forget. Her grandfather was an Assassin named Chaytan, a Lakota man, who fought and failed to secure these lands for his people when the white men came. It was a sentiment Bromden could understand. His own grandfather was Apache, a rough but noble cowboy named Artie slinging guns with the other wild characters of the wild west. He was a man proud of his heritage, and was often disappointed when he was stuck in situations he couldn't defend it.

There was an Assassin base not far from where Bromden and Macha lived. A tiny little community just outside of Rapid City that they simply called “the Farm”. It was a nice little place with some nice people, especially that Miles family that sort of ran things around there. But it wasn't the kind of place for Bromden and Macha. It had the constant aura of their deadly work, and that was the one thing they wanted to be able to get away from. So they came here to Deadwood instead after the birth of their little girl, Wanbli. And it was perfect to them. It was home.

It made Bromden smile. He ended up zoning out sitting there on his front porch, forgetting about the stack of intel paperwork in front of him and the little rod-shaped Piece of Eden he was twiddling between his fingers.

The only thing that was able to snap him out of it was the sudden weight that fell onto his back and the arms that wrapped around his neck.

“Hi Daddy!” he heard. The sweet little voice immediately softened his startled nerves. He chuckled and turned his head to look at his little girl.

“Hey there, pumpkin,” he laughed. “What do you think you're doin’ sneaking up on your old man like that?”

“I'm training!”

“Training?”

“Yeah! Cuz I'm gonna be an Assassin like you! And Assassins gotta be sneaky!”

Bromden laughed again, gently brushing his daughter off of his back. “Well hey, you're doing a really good job at it so far, honey,” he told her, ruffling her hair. Wanbli gave him a beaming smile in response.

“So what're you up to, Daddy?” she asked, looking at all the papers on his little porch table.

“Ah, nothing pumpkin,” he said. “The usual stuff. This is all messages from other Assassins around the country letting me know what's going on and if they need my help.”

“Cool!”

Bromden chuckled. “Yeah I guess it is,” he said.

Then suddenly their conversation was interrupted. Their front door creaked open, and they were greeted by the sight of Macha, who waved to her husband.

“What's cooking, good looking?” he joked to his wife, causing her to smile and roll her eyes.

“Phone just rang, honey,” she told him.

“Someone for me?”

“That's what he said.”

Bromden pushed himself out of his chair, ushering Wanbli to run along and play. “Well you gonna give me a name then or…?” he joked.

Macha simply smirked at his sass. “He said his name’s Jesse Marcel. Said he has some sort of breakthrough for you?”

Bromden's eyes widened. Marcel? He hadn't heard from Marcel in years. They'd kept in touch after the whole Roswell incident, but the whole investigation seemed to die out after a few weeks. All they had been able to dig up was some citizens who had been harassed by Abstergo or babbling that the whole incident was aliens or some nonsense like that. Nothing solid. Nothing pertaining to whatever the Project Mogul that Commander Weyland had mentioned. And then life just seemed to get in the way as well. Marcel had requested relieve from the Air Force when his mother became gravely ill and needed her son's help. And Macha had given birth to Wanbli not long after. Eventually, Bromden and Marcel had just given up the search, deciding all they could do was wait until the Templars slipped up again. It seemed like a dead end.

But if Marcel was calling Bromden now, something told Bromden that wasn't the case.

Bromden followed his wife back into the house, and she pointed over to the phone set down on the kitchen counter before making her way back to the sink to finish the dishes she was cleaning. Bromden grabbed the phone, slowly and cautiously bringing it up to his ear and lips. “Marcel?” he asked. And the response was almost immediate.

“Bromden, we need to meet. Privately. ASAP.”

------------

October 3, 1957; Houma, Louisiana

Bromden started the conversation out with a sort of chuckle.

“Why is it I always have to fly to the opposite side of the country whenever we cross paths?” he half-joked to his old friend.

“I'm sorry I had to drag you away from your family again, Bromden,” Marcel told him. “But this is important. Extremely important. I needed to talk to you immediately.”

“You sound like you've seen a ghost, Jesse. What's gotten you this shaken up?”

Marcel kept firm eye contact with Bromden as he pulled a few sheets of paper out of his coat and slid them across the table. “This,” he said.

Bromden picked them up and looked at them. They were photographs, photographs clearly taken from a plane of what Bromden could only assume was some sort of military base. He raised an eyebrow. “The hell is this?” he asked his friend.

“I don't know, and that's what scares me…”

Bromden was getting a sinking feeling in his gut. This really wasn't good. Not one bit. “Why don't you tell me what happened from the beginning?” he asked. Marcel nodded.

“When we first had that run in with Abstergo 10 years ago, the trail seemed to run real cold real quickly,” he explained. “But I always kept my eyes peeled. I always kept going back to it whenever even the smallest thing came up. And I knew I was right to do so because hot damn, it was worth it.”

“What did you find?”

“You remember how you told me that those Abstergo clowns mentioned something about a Project Mogul at New York University?”

Bromden nodded.

“Well, I did a little digging around there, sticking my nose in whatever I could without getting caught. And I found out that ‘Project Mogul’ is supposedly some sort of Air Force program making high-altitude balloons designed to listen for any Soviet bomb tests. Or at least that's what it says on the tin.”

“Let me guess, not everything is as it says on the tin?”

Marcel gave a sort of smile and shook his head. “No. And unfortunately I don't exactly know what's in that tin, but I think I know how to find out. Project Mogul ended back in ‘49, and for a while there wasn't anything. But I heard whispers about it continuing, about it being moved. I couldn't get a location or any evidence of it. But then suddenly… this thing.” He pointed to the photographs. “They call it Area 51. It's right next to Groom Lake in Nevada. Popped basically out of nowhere. The government started constructing facilities and runways there a couple years ago. Bunch of men in suits and stuff crawling all over the place.”

“How many of those men had Abstergo pins on their suits?”

“Too many. And I tried to get down there and scope it out myself, but I couldn't get very far unfortunately.”

“So you decided to call in the guy that you know can.”

“Exactly. It's going to be dangerous though. All those Abstergo goons… they have security locked down tight there. Whatever they have going on in there, they have it under lock and key, and they don't want anyone getting any peeks inside.”

“Sounds like just the type of party to crash then. If Abstergo wants to keep me away, then I'll make sure to fly over there as soon as possible. You did good, Marcel.”

Marcel smiled and nodded. “Well hey, couldn't let those corporate clowns keep us down like that, am I right?”

Bromden smiled and nodded in return. “Damn straight. Thank you Jesse. I'll keep in touch.”

“Stay safe, Bromden.”

Bromden reached up and pulled his hood up over his head, casting his golden eyes in shade. “Always.”

------------

October 4, 1957; Area 51, Nevada

Bromden’s car found itself being abandoned in the middle of the desert yet again, left as a motionless, lifeless heap of metal while Bromden slipped away into the desert under the cover of darkness. He trekked across the dirt and debris, keeping his eyes peeled for when his destination came over the horizon.

The first thing he noticed was the salt flat. Groom Lake, Marcel had called it. Even in the dead of night, only a little bit of light was enough to make the massive sea of salt light up like a neon sign. There was a runway built on top of the flat, a long eerie road that slinked back into the huge military compound sitting right on the flat’s edge. The lights were on, and even from the distant hill, Bromden could see guards and vehicles skittering around the joint like a colony of ants.

“Area 51, huh?” Bromden mumbled to himself. “God I miss the good old days when names were more creative.”

He pulled up his hood, and did a last minute check of all his blades and equipment, and from his pocket he pulled out a little photograph of his wife and daughter, smiling for good luck. He was reminded of his days in the war, sneaking around the jungles in the Philippines and Java while the plane guns rattled in the distance, missing the sweet embrace of Macha’s arms the whole time. Sometimes he wished he wasn't such an expert in his field. But for now, he pushed those wishes to the back of his mind. He stowed his family photo back into his coat, and then he began his silent trek down towards the base.

Security was definitely tight, Marcel was right about that. Bromden found himself ducking behind cover even before he managed to get onto the base grounds themselves, as trucks full of guards stalked past in the night with spotlights obnoxiously bright. Moving forward was slow and tedious, but that tedium was rewarded when Bromden found himself creeping through the shadows of the labyrinth of buildings. Great, he thought. Now I'm here; I just need to find out what I'm here for.

He looked around every direction, half looking for anything that peaked his interest, half keeping an eye out for guards. There had to be something around here other than the U2s that were littering this place and its runways. A secret door maybe? Or a hidden hanger? Or…

“Has it launched yet, soldier?”

Bromden gasped and sprinted to the nearest hiding spot, holding his breath to see if he had been spotted yet or not. To his thanks, he wasn't.

“Yes sir, Mr. Billings,” another voice said. “Just got the confirmation from Korolev. Sputnik’s in orbit now."

Bromden raised an eyebrow, and he risked a slight peak out of his hiding spot. He caught a glimpse of the men who were talking not too far away. Two of them were regular soldiers, clad in average uniforms save for the Abstergo logos on their jackets. Walking between them was a large man, sporting a tight and decorated military uniform, groomed to perfection just like his black slicked-back hair. He had the face of a man who had definitely been through more than one battle in his lifetime, and his entire appearance was topped off with the tiny Templar pin resting on his collar.

“There were some hiccups,” one of his soldiers told him, “but overall things are going as planned.”

“Excellent,” the large man, Billings, grinned, too focused on walking to wherever they were heading to notice the Assassin stalking them from the shadows. “How long until the satellite passes over the United States?”

“The first observations should be possible within the next few hours, sir.”

“Good. I'm glad to see things finally running so smoothly after Mogul was such a bust.”

The Templars wandered the maze of buildings, eventually coming up to a large hanger not far off from the salt flat. Bromden tailed them as close as he dared, slipping inside to follow them and clinging to the shadows like a ghost in the night.

“If you don't mind me asking, sir,” one of his bodyguards said. “Why are we going through all this trouble to finance the Soviets’ little satellite project? Wouldn't it be more efficient to just focus on the work being done here?”

“In the short term, that would make sense, yes,” Billings said. “But you need to take the atmosphere of our modern world into consideration, and how we can use it to exceed our own capabilities.”

“Sir?”

“When the Americans see that big ball of metal going across the sky, that big Soviet ball of metal, how do you think they're going to react? Their jaws will drop, their blood will run cold, and the whole nation will be utterly dumbfounded by the fact that the Russians had made it to space first. And so they'll scramble to begin work on their own projects. And then the Soviets will start scrambling to make more of their own, and with us pulling the strings on both sides making sure that competition keeps going and going, we could very well have this project completed within the next few decades.”

Bromden's head was spinning. Soviet satellites? He'd heard rumors about something like that but… is it true? God, the implications, he thought. If they could get into orbit, what's stopping them from using that position to place cameras and bombs? It would be a whole new theater of war if the Templars were behind the wheel.

But… there was something more, Bromden could tell. Something about the way they talked. What was he missing? What were they up to? He decided he had to find out. He kept tailing his foes, silent in the shadows of the hanger. His prey eventually came to a door, one with a little keypad that Billings typed a code into. Bromden got as good a look at the keys the Templar had pressed as he could. The door made a beeping noise, and then slid open, revealing only a dark foreboding abyss beyond.

“Stay on your guard, men,” Billings told his soldiers. “Of all the places you should be more careful than usual in, this is that place.”

His guards nodded in understanding, and then the three of them disappeared into the abyss, the door swooshing shut behind them. Bromden waited a few moments before rushing up to the door himself, looking over his shoulder for guards, and then putting his finger on the keypad.

“Oh dear God please work the first time…” he mumbled to himself. And then, holding his breath, he pressed the keys one by one.

1-2-2-1-2-0-1-2

Beep beep!

Bromden sighed in relief as the door swooshed open, the abyss widening to greet him. He didn't waste any time. He stepped forward into the darkness, down the rabbit hole, praying that he'd be able to get out of here alive once the door slid shut behind him, and the darkness engulfed everything.

Description
October 2, 1957; Deadwood, South Dakota

Bromden always loved the sight of the Black Hills. It took his mind off things like the Templars and the Soviets. It was just one of those calm, tranquil scenes that was pleasing to the soul. He was so glad he and his family had moved out to this little town. Macha hated living on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation down south. It was cramped and violent, and reminded her of a history of subjugation she'd rather forget. Her grandfather was an Assassin named Chaytan, a Lakota man, who fought and failed to secure these lands for his people when the white men came. It was a sentiment Bromden could understand. His own grandfather was Apache, a rough but noble cowboy named Artie slinging guns with the other wild characters of the wild west. He was a man proud of his heritage, and was often disappointed when he was stuck in situations he couldn't defend it.

There was an Assassin base not far from where Bromden and Macha lived. A tiny little community just outside of Rapid City that they simply called “the Farm”. It was a nice little place with some nice people, especially that Miles family that sort of ran things around there. But it wasn't the kind of place for Bromden and Macha. It had the constant aura of their deadly work, and that was the one thing they wanted to be able to get away from. So they came here to Deadwood instead after the birth of their little girl, Wanbli. And it was perfect to them. It was home.

It made Bromden smile. He ended up zoning out sitting there on his front porch, forgetting about the stack of intel paperwork in front of him and the little rod-shaped Piece of Eden he was twiddling between his fingers.

The only thing that was able to snap him out of it was the sudden weight that fell onto his back and the arms that wrapped around his neck.

“Hi Daddy!” he heard. The sweet little voice immediately softened his startled nerves. He chuckled and turned his head to look at his little girl.

“Hey there, pumpkin,” he laughed. “What do you think you're doin’ sneaking up on your old man like that?”

“I'm training!”

“Training?”

“Yeah! Cuz I'm gonna be an Assassin like you! And Assassins gotta be sneaky!”

Bromden laughed again, gently brushing his daughter off of his back. “Well hey, you're doing a really good job at it so far, honey,” he told her, ruffling her hair. Wanbli gave him a beaming smile in response.

“So what're you up to, Daddy?” she asked, looking at all the papers on his little porch table.

“Ah, nothing pumpkin,” he said. “The usual stuff. This is all messages from other Assassins around the country letting me know what's going on and if they need my help.”

“Cool!”

Bromden chuckled. “Yeah I guess it is,” he said.

Then suddenly their conversation was interrupted. Their front door creaked open, and they were greeted by the sight of Macha, who waved to her husband.

“What's cooking, good looking?” he joked to his wife, causing her to smile and roll her eyes.

“Phone just rang, honey,” she told him.

“Someone for me?”

“That's what he said.”

Bromden pushed himself out of his chair, ushering Wanbli to run along and play. “Well you gonna give me a name then or…?” he joked.

Macha simply smirked at his sass. “He said his name’s Jesse Marcel. Said he has some sort of breakthrough for you?”

Bromden's eyes widened. Marcel? He hadn't heard from Marcel in years. They'd kept in touch after the whole Roswell incident, but the whole investigation seemed to die out after a few weeks. All they had been able to dig up was some citizens who had been harassed by Abstergo or babbling that the whole incident was aliens or some nonsense like that. Nothing solid. Nothing pertaining to whatever the Project Mogul that Commander Weyland had mentioned. And then life just seemed to get in the way as well. Marcel had requested relieve from the Air Force when his mother became gravely ill and needed her son's help. And Macha had given birth to Wanbli not long after. Eventually, Bromden and Marcel had just given up the search, deciding all they could do was wait until the Templars slipped up again. It seemed like a dead end.

But if Marcel was calling Bromden now, something told Bromden that wasn't the case.

Bromden followed his wife back into the house, and she pointed over to the phone set down on the kitchen counter before making her way back to the sink to finish the dishes she was cleaning. Bromden grabbed the phone, slowly and cautiously bringing it up to his ear and lips. “Marcel?” he asked. And the response was almost immediate.

“Bromden, we need to meet. Privately. ASAP.”

------------

October 3, 1957; Houma, Louisiana

Bromden started the conversation out with a sort of chuckle.

“Why is it I always have to fly to the opposite side of the country whenever we cross paths?” he half-joked to his old friend.

“I'm sorry I had to drag you away from your family again, Bromden,” Marcel told him. “But this is important. Extremely important. I needed to talk to you immediately.”

“You sound like you've seen a ghost, Jesse. What's gotten you this shaken up?”

Marcel kept firm eye contact with Bromden as he pulled a few sheets of paper out of his coat and slid them across the table. “This,” he said.

Bromden picked them up and looked at them. They were photographs, photographs clearly taken from a plane of what Bromden could only assume was some sort of military base. He raised an eyebrow. “The hell is this?” he asked his friend.

“I don't know, and that's what scares me…”

Bromden was getting a sinking feeling in his gut. This really wasn't good. Not one bit. “Why don't you tell me what happened from the beginning?” he asked. Marcel nodded.

“When we first had that run in with Abstergo 10 years ago, the trail seemed to run real cold real quickly,” he explained. “But I always kept my eyes peeled. I always kept going back to it whenever even the smallest thing came up. And I knew I was right to do so because hot damn, it was worth it.”

“What did you find?”

“You remember how you told me that those Abstergo clowns mentioned something about a Project Mogul at New York University?”

Bromden nodded.

“Well, I did a little digging around there, sticking my nose in whatever I could without getting caught. And I found out that ‘Project Mogul’ is supposedly some sort of Air Force program making high-altitude balloons designed to listen for any Soviet bomb tests. Or at least that's what it says on the tin.”

“Let me guess, not everything is as it says on the tin?”

Marcel gave a sort of smile and shook his head. “No. And unfortunately I don't exactly know what's in that tin, but I think I know how to find out. Project Mogul ended back in ‘49, and for a while there wasn't anything. But I heard whispers about it continuing, about it being moved. I couldn't get a location or any evidence of it. But then suddenly… this thing.” He pointed to the photographs. “They call it Area 51. It's right next to Groom Lake in Nevada. Popped basically out of nowhere. The government started constructing facilities and runways there a couple years ago. Bunch of men in suits and stuff crawling all over the place.”

“How many of those men had Abstergo pins on their suits?”

“Too many. And I tried to get down there and scope it out myself, but I couldn't get very far unfortunately.”

“So you decided to call in the guy that you know can.”

“Exactly. It's going to be dangerous though. All those Abstergo goons… they have security locked down tight there. Whatever they have going on in there, they have it under lock and key, and they don't want anyone getting any peeks inside.”

“Sounds like just the type of party to crash then. If Abstergo wants to keep me away, then I'll make sure to fly over there as soon as possible. You did good, Marcel.”

Marcel smiled and nodded. “Well hey, couldn't let those corporate clowns keep us down like that, am I right?”

Bromden smiled and nodded in return. “Damn straight. Thank you Jesse. I'll keep in touch.”

“Stay safe, Bromden.”

Bromden reached up and pulled his hood up over his head, casting his golden eyes in shade. “Always.”

------------

October 4, 1957; Area 51, Nevada

Bromden’s car found itself being abandoned in the middle of the desert yet again, left as a motionless, lifeless heap of metal while Bromden slipped away into the desert under the cover of darkness. He trekked across the dirt and debris, keeping his eyes peeled for when his destination came over the horizon.

The first thing he noticed was the salt flat. Groom Lake, Marcel had called it. Even in the dead of night, only a little bit of light was enough to make the massive sea of salt light up like a neon sign. There was a runway built on top of the flat, a long eerie road that slinked back into the huge military compound sitting right on the flat’s edge. The lights were on, and even from the distant hill, Bromden could see guards and vehicles skittering around the joint like a colony of ants.

“Area 51, huh?” Bromden mumbled to himself. “God I miss the good old days when names were more creative.”

He pulled up his hood, and did a last minute check of all his blades and equipment, and from his pocket he pulled out a little photograph of his wife and daughter, smiling for good luck. He was reminded of his days in the war, sneaking around the jungles in the Philippines and Java while the plane guns rattled in the distance, missing the sweet embrace of Macha’s arms the whole time. Sometimes he wished he wasn't such an expert in his field. But for now, he pushed those wishes to the back of his mind. He stowed his family photo back into his coat, and then he began his silent trek down towards the base.

Security was definitely tight, Marcel was right about that. Bromden found himself ducking behind cover even before he managed to get onto the base grounds themselves, as trucks full of guards stalked past in the night with spotlights obnoxiously bright. Moving forward was slow and tedious, but that tedium was rewarded when Bromden found himself creeping through the shadows of the labyrinth of buildings. Great, he thought. Now I'm here; I just need to find out what I'm here for.

He looked around every direction, half looking for anything that peaked his interest, half keeping an eye out for guards. There had to be something around here other than the U2s that were littering this place and its runways. A secret door maybe? Or a hidden hanger? Or…

“Has it launched yet, soldier?”

Bromden gasped and sprinted to the nearest hiding spot, holding his breath to see if he had been spotted yet or not. To his thanks, he wasn't.

“Yes sir, Mr. Billings,” another voice said. “Just got the confirmation from Korolev. Sputnik’s in orbit now."

Bromden raised an eyebrow, and he risked a slight peak out of his hiding spot. He caught a glimpse of the men who were talking not too far away. Two of them were regular soldiers, clad in average uniforms save for the Abstergo logos on their jackets. Walking between them was a large man, sporting a tight and decorated military uniform, groomed to perfection just like his black slicked-back hair. He had the face of a man who had definitely been through more than one battle in his lifetime, and his entire appearance was topped off with the tiny Templar pin resting on his collar.

“There were some hiccups,” one of his soldiers told him, “but overall things are going as planned.”

“Excellent,” the large man, Billings, grinned, too focused on walking to wherever they were heading to notice the Assassin stalking them from the shadows. “How long until the satellite passes over the United States?”

“The first observations should be possible within the next few hours, sir.”

“Good. I'm glad to see things finally running so smoothly after Mogul was such a bust.”

The Templars wandered the maze of buildings, eventually coming up to a large hanger not far off from the salt flat. Bromden tailed them as close as he dared, slipping inside to follow them and clinging to the shadows like a ghost in the night.

“If you don't mind me asking, sir,” one of his bodyguards said. “Why are we going through all this trouble to finance the Soviets’ little satellite project? Wouldn't it be more efficient to just focus on the work being done here?”

“In the short term, that would make sense, yes,” Billings said. “But you need to take the atmosphere of our modern world into consideration, and how we can use it to exceed our own capabilities.”

“Sir?”

“When the Americans see that big ball of metal going across the sky, that big Soviet ball of metal, how do you think they're going to react? Their jaws will drop, their blood will run cold, and the whole nation will be utterly dumbfounded by the fact that the Russians had made it to space first. And so they'll scramble to begin work on their own projects. And then the Soviets will start scrambling to make more of their own, and with us pulling the strings on both sides making sure that competition keeps going and going, we could very well have this project completed within the next few decades.”

Bromden's head was spinning. Soviet satellites? He'd heard rumors about something like that but… is it true? God, the implications, he thought. If they could get into orbit, what's stopping them from using that position to place cameras and bombs? It would be a whole new theater of war if the Templars were behind the wheel.

But… there was something more, Bromden could tell. Something about the way they talked. What was he missing? What were they up to? He decided he had to find out. He kept tailing his foes, silent in the shadows of the hanger. His prey eventually came to a door, one with a little keypad that Billings typed a code into. Bromden got as good a look at the keys the Templar had pressed as he could. The door made a beeping noise, and then slid open, revealing only a dark foreboding abyss beyond.

“Stay on your guard, men,” Billings told his soldiers. “Of all the places you should be more careful than usual in, this is that place.”

His guards nodded in understanding, and then the three of them disappeared into the abyss, the door swooshing shut behind them. Bromden waited a few moments before rushing up to the door himself, looking over his shoulder for guards, and then putting his finger on the keypad.

“Oh dear God please work the first time…” he mumbled to himself. And then, holding his breath, he pressed the keys one by one.

1-2-2-1-2-0-1-2

Beep beep!

Bromden sighed in relief as the door swooshed open, the abyss widening to greet him. He didn't waste any time. He stepped forward into the darkness, down the rabbit hole, praying that he'd be able to get out of here alive once the door slid shut behind him, and the darkness engulfed everything.