A/N: The world may sadly never get to see Adjustment Periods, the audio drama BUT I did want to share the script (with the voice actor's notes) that was supposed to make that happen. I hate to call it a remake so this is a reimagining of my original story, "Adjustment Periods", that I wrote two years or so ago. A lot of the scenes are different but the overall arch and outcome plays out the same. The biggest difference is the exclusion of Otacon's backstory with his mother and all that jazz. That whole bit just made the story feel like it had emotional excess, like it was trying too hard. The events leading up to Snake's death are also different and he's in it even less if you can believe that. Hope you guys enjoy it! Feel free to review it. I don't mind, honestly. :)

IMPORTANT: Everything after "Entry" will be Otacon talking into the tape recorder. Everything after "Scene" will be a real-time insert of the event he's talking about.

ENTRY

OTACON: April 8th 2014, 10:25pm. Mei Ling suggested that I start keeping an audio journal for myself, at least until the first draft of Snake's...uh, Dave's story is done. She said hearing myself talk out ideas could help the writing process. I think her suggesting this just means she's getting sick of listening to me. I honestly don't have anyone else to talk to, though. I wouldn't dream of burdening a child or a dying man with all of my woes. So...I guess I'll give this a try.

I've actually never kept a journal of any kind before. I've never had a need to remember or record anything that's happened in my life. In fact, most of my life has been a series of events I've been trying to forget...and the next couple of months aren't going to be very different.

About a week ago, I began asking Dave about his missions with FOXHOUND, pre-Shadow Moses incident. He's been surprisingly cooperative but that's far from good news to me. It means he's getting too weak to feel like giving me a hard time about this. Three years ago, this book couldn't have ever happened. He was a machine...a perpetual motion machine. Every tidbit we got about a new Metal Gear unit, we followed it, no matter where it lead us. We went weeks, months even without stopping or slowing down. Dave loved it that way, though. He said doing nothing gave him too much time to think about things he didn't want to think about.

(he chuckles a bit)

I guess Dave's never been much of a philosopher...

Over the last several months though, it's like his body's morphed into someone else's-someone twice his actual age. We've seen doctors and talked to medical experts all over the world and the only diagnosis any of them could give us was Werner's but it didn't make sense for someone like him-not with his genetics. I think we both knew that but we didn't have anything else to blame at the time. When we were finally able to track down Naomi Hunter, she told us that it wasn't a genetic anomaly causing his accelerated aging. He was created by our government to have a short life span in order to take everything he's seen and done to the grave with him. I think that's when it hit me that the truth about all of Dave's work over the years with FOXHOUND and Philanthropy was soon only going to belong to me.

It may not matter much to him...but I don't want the world to remember him as the enemy-as some kind of rogue mercenary working against humanity. The right story needs to be told so that his name doesn't end up on all the wrong pages of the history books. This world owes him at least that much...

Sunny is starting to ask questions about what I've been writing and why I'm writing it. She knows Dave is sick but she's waiting on him to eventually get better and that's my fault. I haven't been telling her everything-I'm not sure how to. I need to sit her down and ready her for what's going to happen to him.

She cares about him a lot and her whole little world is going to shift in a couple of months.

I know what that feeling's like. My world tends to shift a lot.