Angela Ziegler never saw it coming.

One moment she was briskly pacing the halls of the Johann and Elin Ziegler Memorial Clinic and Care Center for the Sick and Injured, just about to round a corner while mulling over a datapad of her patients, and the next moment she was on the ground, having bumped head-on into someone coming from the opposite direction.

Verdammt, she thought to herself. This is time I can't afford to lose right now.

As she shook her head from side to side and massaged the part of her forehead where she had made impact, she slowly searched around the floor for her pad, a task made difficult by the temporary blurred vision of her impact. Her sight cleared up, however, long enough to recognize just who it was she had run into.

"I'm terribly sorry Minister O'Deorain. I must not have seen you coming." Angela explained, extending a helping hand after she herself had gotten back up onto her own two feet and had successfully recovered her notes.

"Evidently." Moira mumbled derisively under her breath as she accepted the clinic's founder's assistance.

Straightening her tie and brushing aside an errant lock of auburn hair, she noticed the datapad clutched tightly in Angela's hand. "Whatever's on there must be extremely captivating." she said, a hint of sarcasm showing.

Angela noticed the observation and was far from keen to follow up on it; Moira O'Deorain had always been a person she had kept her distance from, a practice dating back to the last few years of Overwatch. Despite this and the fact that the Irish geneticist couldn't have been more different from the Swiss medic if she had tried, the two had constantly found themselves in relatively close proximity. First Overwatch, then Oasis, and now even in the supposed sanctity of the clinic, Angela couldn't help but notice (and be none too happy about) the fact that the circles she ran in so often intertwined with such disreputable characters.

She grasped her datapad tighter, holding it close to her chest. "It's nothing, really. Just looking over a few patient files, making sure everything's going smoothly." she answered hurriedly.

"Ah, yes. I have noticed that you run a tight ship. Very impressive considering how busy you keep yourself."

Angela checked her datapad over again, if only so she had an excuse not to make eye contact. "I have to be. If I'm not around to help my patients, I'd hate to imagine just what could happen."

Moira chuckled. "I'm sure your staff are just as capable as you are."

"Thank you. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm needed elsewhe-"

Before she could walk away, Moira extended her withered, black-veined hand outward, blocking Angela's path.

"There is a reason why I've paid you this visit." she stated, eyeing the doctor despite her best efforts to avoid it. "You may have forgotten, but today's the beginning of the joint effort between the Ministries of Genetics and Medicine."

Angela turned her head away and hid a scowl; The last thing she wanted was a former Blackwatch agent and current Talon associate getting her grubby hands on technology meant to save lives. "I thought that the motion had been denied." she queried, hiding her anger under curiosity.

"Yes well, I was able to appeal the decision and have the vote taken again. Opportunities such as this one simply can't be passed over if progress is to be made."

If by 'progress', you mean 'weaponization'. "I've informed the Ministry that my nanobiotics are fine as is. To alter the formula would be simply change for the sake of change."

Moira chuckled and let a sly grin spread. "But there's the rub; It's not that in the slightest. What we'd be doing is expanding the horizon, that's all." She placed her withered hand on Angela's shoulder. "Pacifism is fine to an extent, but don't tell me you haven't dreamed of the possibilities beyond simply making the blind man see or the crippled man walk."

Even through her scrubs, Angela could feel the icy touch of the hand as it leeched away at her energy like a parasite. "I have," she answered bluntly as she flicked the minister's hand off her shoulder. "and I wake up in a cold sweat every time."

Moira hid a flash of anger under a confident smile. "Come come now, I'm sure you'll find soon that nanobiotics have endless potential. But for now, I suggest you take the rest of the day off."

Angela's expression turned from disinterest veiling disgust to definite surprise. "Excuse me?"

"You've been working yourself too hard, my dear. I know you've said before that you're fine, but if you keep up this pace you'll drop dead, and as I've said before, your staff are just as capable as you are."

"I-I'm afraid I simply can't. There's too much work to be done without my superv-"

Moira shut her up with a sallow, dark-veined finger over the doctor's lips. "As a Minister of Oasis and therefore your superior, I insist." After sliding her finger down Angela's chin, she grasped the datapad, slowly but forcefully wrenching out of the doctor's firm grip. "Don't worry, I'll see to it that everything is taken care of. You have my word."

Angela glared back for almost a minute, trying to find the words that would allow her to rebut the argument placed before her, but rather than a scathing comeback, all she was able to utter was an angry sigh before trudging away.

After peering around the corner and assuring that Angela was a safe distance away, Moira placed two fingers on an earpiece. "We're in the clear. The clinic is defenseless and your target is on her way."

"Good." a raspy voice hissed on the other end. "You know what to do."

As he said this, Moira reached the end of the hallway she was in. Where the path she walked met its end, a doorway marked Central Nanobiotic Processing and Activation greeted her by gliding open soundlessly. On the other side of the doorway stood her objective; an immense machine with an aesthetic reminiscent of the very oldest computers made nearly a hundred years before, but with holographic displays instead of screens. Sprouting from the top of this device like branches from a tree were numerous tubes that ran up through the ceiling and through the rest of the building, drawing forth and distributing like water from a well a life-giving beam of yellow energy that flickered intermittently.

"Indeed." Moira replied through a slick grin as she reached into her pants pocket and pulled out a vial of black liquid. Shaking it lightly, she watched with wicked anticipation as the solution swirled and small, misty wisps ascended until they reached the stopper and coalesced like the winds of a storm. "It's an old experiment, but one that never produces bad results."

"It had better not." the voice snarled before the feed on the earpiece turned to static.

It seems Lacroix was right when she said he takes things too personally, Moira mused to herself. Ultimately though, it's mutually beneficial. The Son of York gets the chance to make glorious summer from the winter of his discontent, and I get to try a new variation of my greatest experiment.

With that, she locked the door behind her, leaving nothing left to stand between her and her twisted purposes. With the twist of the cap, she opened the vial and placed it upside down into a slot on the central machine. Standing back, she took in the awe-striking spectacle of her triumph as the liquid rapidly contaminated the nanobiotics, turning them the same sickly black colouration.

Raising the datapad in front of her, she opened a new page and jotted down several notes based on her observations before opening the door and disappearing in a puff of inky mist.

As much as Angela hated to admit it, Moira was right about one thing; She was working extremely hard as of recent.

The realization confronted her as she arrived back at her home, a town house in a suburb of Oasis, and was immediately confronted by a sea of mail piled at her doorstep, the dates of some of which dated back nearly two months.

Two months, she thought. Has it really been that long?

Two months before, she had barely been clinging to life, lying in a hospital bed in Watchpoint: Gibraltar's sick bay in an exquisite gown stained with her own blood, the product of being impaled with a giant steel hook during the disaster that was Versailles.

But teetering on the brink of death wasn't the problem, not compared to what had led up to it. For the first time in eight years she had had something to do with Overwatch and she paid the price; Two hundred Omnics dead in the blink of an eye, all of her hard work towards promoting peace gone faster than she could snap her fingers. She'd laid in that bed for over three weeks, most of which she spent in a coma. While she was detached from the world around her, her subconscious played around in the darkest recesses of her mind. For brief periods she could hear people saying and doing things, but the details were drowned out by a horrific nightmare, one so unforgettable it rewound and played back even during such slow moments as these:

She lays on the floor in the ballroom next to the lifeless frames of the Omnic dignitaries, the hook still embedded in her stomach. Blood pours out like a wellspring, gurgling every laboured breath she takes. She tries to close her eyes or to roll onto her back, but she finds she can't move. Around her, she watches, utterly helpless, as Overwatch fights back. One by one they're slaughtered until only Genji remains. Her heart leaps into her throat as he draws his katana, only to have it wrenched out of his hand by Reaper as he tackles him to the ground. As he raises a combat knife he's taken from his coat and plunges it through Genji's heart, she makes a pathetic kitten-cry. The green lights of the cyborg's prosthesis permanently snuffed out, his murderer glides silently towards her, shotgun in hand. Around her, the bodies of her colleagues are splayed out, their glazed eyes all staring her way in silent accusation. The inevitable grabs hold, and she makes silent peace with her death as he pulls the trigger.

Then, she woke up and realized she was still alive.

She flicked on the lights in her kitchen, pushed past the growing mountain of Chinese takeout on the table, and pulled her phone out of her pocket to check her multiple missed calls, she knew that her long list of missed calls had a multitude of names, chief among them being most of the same people who had been there that night in Versailles; Lena, Fareeha, Genji, Winston. She dismissed the voicemails without listening to them, almost entirely certain what the members of a reunion that had quickly gone stale wanted to say.

She set her phone onto the counter next to a ceramic bowl that held her house keys and continued on into the den, but as she entered she began to feel something... off. Normally, her house was bathed in light through the floor-to-ceiling windows, especially during this time of day. While she could see the sun was still glowing in the sky above, it felt like none of the light was reaching her, as though a storm cloud had dropped an ominous darkness over her house and hers alone.

Thinking nothing of it, so she headed for the stairs that led towards a long, hot shower that would go a long way to de-stressing. Before she could set off for her well-deserved treat though, her eyes caught one last thing left laying around in her clutter. On the coffee table in between the two sofas she had sitting facing each other sat a tiny shard of metal, no more than six inches long and barely two wide, the last remnants of her Cadeuceus Staff after it had been blown to smithereens in that horrible disaster at Versailles. She had placed it there for a very specific reason, one that played in her mind every time she looked at it every single day.

Overwatch was shut down for a reason. Maybe it's best it stay that way.

It was why she'd started working sixteen hour shifts at her clinic the day she had been able to stand up from her deathbed, and why she'd almost entirely severed ties with the family that had raised her. The old ways had failed, so she had to do something new, something more comfortable and more in tune with her views. Her clinic was now her reason for life, her resolution that she could make things work her way.

The swell of guilt and frustration she felt whenever she looked at that piece of her past subsided as she made her way up the stairs to the shower. Thirty minutes later, she was putting her hair back in its usual ponytail after drying it out and changing into a pair of sweatpants and a favourite t-shirt when suddenly, she felt a cold draft fly into her bedroom and envelop her, sucking away the warmth of the shower in an instant.

A draft, she thought. In a city in Iraq? Finishing up her ponytail, she stepped out of her room and peered down the stairs into the common room. Nothing seemed out of order; The air conditioning was operating just fine, the windows and doors were shut and locked, the coffee table was clear of anythin-

The shard of the staff was gone. In the brief time it had been out of her sight it had vanished. She hadn't touched it at all that day, so there had to only one possible answer, and it deeply disturbed her.

She crept down the stairs, exceptionally careful not to let her steps be heard on the hard wood floor and her eyes on a swivel for whoever had violated the privacy of her home. As quickly and quietly as she was possibly able to, she headed for the kitchen and reached for her phone. However, just as she was about to dial the police, she felt cold metal press up against her head and the clicking sound of a gun being readied to fire.

"You'll want to put that down." a raspy voice stated from directly behind.

The hairs on Angela's neck stood on end and a chill ran down her spine. Now she knew why her house had been so dark and why that icy draft had twisted through. At a glacial pace, she placed the phone back on the counter and turned around, her heart now racing in surprise and fear.

Reaper now stood before her like a revenant, a semi-automatic shotgun in one hand and the staff shard in the other.