Anchorage was cold in the early morning hours of January 6, 2015, but it was always cold this time of year.
Is was just a little below freezing as Adamska walked along its streets, trying to clear his mind.
The early morning walks had been occurring more and more as of late, Adamska noticed.
"Probably because I'm running out of money for drinks, hard to be awake this early when I'm drunk.", he thought, trying to clear his head of the hangover resulting from the previous night's drinking. His head swam as he tried to think about recent events.
It had been six months since his ... no, not his, Liquid's plan ... to create the world Big Boss dreamed of, his Outer Heaven, had failed.
It had been six months since he was presumed dead by the world at large.
It had been six months since his true personality re-emerged from his damaged mind on Outer Haven.
"My possession by Liquid certainly worked to fool the Patriots, but I should have had more of a plan in place before I took on the persona of Liquid. I knew that Liquid, as good a soldier as he was, wouldn't be able to come up with a simple, practical plan on a strategic level is his life depended on it. After all, my success at Shadow Moses depended on Liquid's inability to see the eventual outcome of the plan I devised and he implemented."
Some points of Liquid's Outer Heaven plan were brilliant, Adamska admitted, setting up the Big Shell Incident had been a master stroke for implementing Big Boss's vision in the Third World. Generally, however, Liquid's plans tended to fall victim to being inflexible, requiring a large number of variables to have exactly the right values to ensure success. Adamska's plans, while equally intricate, worked largely on playing his enemies off each other to allow important parts of the plan to succeed without interference. The fact that enemies naturally fight being the most certain of all variables in a plan, this allowed Adamska to attempt portions of any given plan more than once, certain in the knowledge that another opportunity would come around.
In any case, Outer Heaven was all behind him now. Liquid's plan had failed, and by extension Adamska's plan had also failed.
Adamska's goal of turning the world into a soldier's paradise was now out of reach. The Patriot's system of control was broken enough to restore freedom to the world, but not broken enough to throw mankind into .
This was a painful truth to be discovered through such a mundane medium as cable television.
After determining that the Outer Heaven plan would succeed at the cost of Outer Haven and his mercenaries, Liquid's personality had retreated, allowing Adamska to return. At this point, Adamska determined that his own preservation would mean both escaping from Outer Haven and faking his own death at the hands of his nemesis, Solid Snake. If Solid Snake believed that he was dead, then the world would believe he was dead.
He dragged Snake to the highest point on Outer Haven and proceeded to fight him with CQC. He could have just shot Snake at that point, but that would have defeated the purpose of the fight. Instead, he let Snake think he had won, that he had finally succeeded in killing him.
Given their respective levels of nanomachine enhancement, it would be implausible for Snake to think that Adamska had survived. Adamska, as part of his general desire to be prepared for any eventually however, had been injected with an experimental batch of a new variety of nanomachines. This breed of nanomachines was one specialized for physical combat, part of a project commissioned by some young upstart within the PMC hierarchy named Armstrong. Adamska did not pretend to understand the means by which they functioned, his understanding was limited to something about "hardening in response to physical trauma". But the enhancement worked well enough, he survived even as Snake presumed him dead and took his leave, his final assassination supposedly carried out.
After feigning his death, Adamska stole an inflatable boat and made his way across the Alaskan countryside to Anchorage in a matter of days, anticipating a total breakdown in the social order. Instead, he found Anchorage much as it had always been, cold and rowdy, but still civilized. Not realizing that Philanthropy had managed to preserve the reptilian hindbrain of the Patriot's AI, just enough of it to preserve the infrastructure of civilization, Adamska simply assumed that the final phase of the Outer Heaven plan would take a few weeks while society collapsed under its own weight. After that, it was only a matter of time before he noticed, mostly through regular and notably anarchy-free news coverage on various bar television sets, that the world forged under the Patriots was not coming to an end, and it occurred to Adamska just what Philanthropy had done.
Adamska sighed as he continued his walk.
He had failed his idol, Big Boss, and had failed to bring about Outer Heaven.
The overarching dream of his live would never come to pass, decades of effort were for naught.
He had nothing to live for.
Beyond creating Outer Heaven and his support of Big Boss, nothing else was important to him, and it had come at quite a personal cost. No friendship, no family, no bond was important enough to avoid being broken in the pursuit of his ill fated vision for the world. He had, at least, brought about the destruction of the Patriots, and maybe that was enough for a lifetime.
"That's it, perhaps my job is done. Was it worth it?", Adamska pondered this for a moment, "Doesn't matter anyways, I've spent the last six months drunk in Alaska. It looks like Revolver Ocelot won't be making a comeback to the world stage, and I have no life to live other than that of Revolver Ocelot. Perhaps I'll end it now, I think I have enough whiskey back at my hotel room for an alcohol poisoning even with the nanotech. Funny, the nanotech saved me from death at the hands of Solid Snake, but here I am, about to die at my own hands. I wonder how many cowboys in the old west put themselves out this way?"
It was at that moment, dead set to return to his apartment and die, that Adamska noticed something through his receding drunken haze. A cardboard box was lying on the ground a few feet away, just inside a narrow alley. Adamska's first instinct was to reach for his namesake revolver and kill the operative who was certainly hiding underneath it. Adamska and his soldiers had been fooled one too many times by the cardboard box trick and Adamska was going to die on his own terms, not at the hands of Solid Snake.
This course of action was stopped when Adamska felt an empty space where his Single Army Action should be, recalling that he had lost it during the escape. Deciding that death at the hands of a worthy enemy, Solid Snake, was better than a true suicide, by alcohol poisoning, he walked up to the box to meet his end fighting Snake.
Arriving at the box, and with his sobriety improving, Adamska realized four things:
The box was oriented right-side-up, meaning that either Solid Snake was loosing his touch or the box, in fact, contained no assassin.
The box was far to small for an adult to fit in, ruling out any operatives who were not child soldiers.
A small note was scrawled on the box with a pen in a poor hand, the underlined text reading "Give To Good Home".
A small cyan blue creature resided inside the box, its head covered with a rainbow of long hair.
The first three observations simply indicated to Adamska that his expected fight to the death with Solid Snake was not to be. The fourth observation surprised Adamska for the briefest of moments, before he regained his composure.
Adamska was about to disregard his observation entirely, and return to his original plan, but a spark of memory stopped him.
"I have seen this creature before."
The circumstances of the memory evaded him, but Adamska was a spy by profession, a person whose mission and life sometimes depended upon the smallest of details.
"Where have I seen this before ... ? It seems to be some sort of small quadruped, not unlike a horse really. And what's this? Wings on a small, blue horse! How odd. Where would I have seen this before?"
Deciding that he needed to know where had seen the creature before, if only from the force of habit, Adamska proceeded to grab the box and begin the walk back to his hotel room to continue his examination.
"I will let myself pass on after I find the answer to this one last question.", he resolved.
