C1 Angela Ziegler

"Beep beep beep beep beep, alarm, alarm, Agent Anna Amari's vitals are low, no response to automatic contact... beep beep beep beep beep beep..."

Startled by the urgent alarm, Qi Ann's eyes snapped open.

Despite a brief respite after over forty hours of intense work, she was still exhausted. But the piercing alarm from Gibraltar's monitoring station jolted her awake. She scrambled to the control panel and focused on the surveillance data displayed on the screen.

The digital name cards of Overwatch agents illuminated the large screen, pinpointing their current locations. The card bearing "Anna Amari's" image was flashing wildly, its edges now a stark, blood-red instead of the usual green.

This signaled that Anna was in mortal peril, triggering the life monitor to send out a top-priority SOS to Overwatch Headquarters and all monitoring stations.

"Anna, Anna, come in. This is Angela at the Gibraltar monitoring station. Please respond, Anna!"

In a state of urgency, Qi Ann commandeered the communication duties, desperately reaching out to her distant comrade.

But the silence was deafening.

Overwatch was formed in response to the Omnic Crisis. After the crisis was averted, Overwatch's renown soared, evolving into a global peacekeeping organization with deep roots across various sectors and widespread support. It harnessed an array of advanced technologies, including a satellite-based global communication network that was the agents' lifeline for contact, boasting formidable resistance to interference, impervious to weather or magnetic fields. Only a simultaneous failure of the communication satellite and all backups could disrupt it.

Qi Ann repeatedly called out for Anna over the communicator, but each attempt met with silence. Meanwhile, Anna's name card on the screen grew increasingly red—a grim indicator of her fading life signs.

The Projection Positioning System, Qi Ann's brainchild, was designed for monitoring stations to keep tabs on and communicate with agents worldwide. The color transitions of the agents' name cards—from green to yellow to red—were laden with meaning: green for healthy, yellow for injured, red for critically wounded, solid red for near death, and gray for lost contact, which typically signified "deceased."

Qi Ann could not bear the thought of witnessing another familiar face succumb to death. Once was already one time too many.

Qi Ann logged her observations at the monitoring station, armed herself, and boarded the latest model of smart aircraft to hasten to Anna's mission site. She clung to the sliver of hope that she could snatch Anna from death's grasp.

Twenty-three years earlier, upon first opening her eyes in this world, Qi Ann was greeted by the sight of her parents' demise. They had shielded their young daughter from the barrage of artillery with their own bodies, carving out a fragile sanctuary amid the turmoil.

The onslaught of smoke, gunfire, explosions, blood, and mortality was overwhelming, silencing the questions that haunted Qi Ann's mind: "Why am I here?" and "What am I to do?" In that moment, her sole purpose became to honor her parents' dying wish to persevere, relegating all else to the recesses of her thoughts.

How had she, merely playing a game, found herself within it? How had she transformed into the very character she once controlled? Amidst the iron-tainted air, any question unrelated to survival and combat felt insubstantial, lost in the urgency of fleeing death and charging into battle.

Qi Ann often revisited the world she knew in dreams, waking with a smile, relieved that the nightmare had ended, only to find herself still in this reality. She had fled the chaos, mastered new languages, absorbed fresh knowledge, and emerged as the esteemed Dr. Angela Ziegler. She bore witness to the Omnic Crisis and, as if by fate, joined Overwatch, taking on the role of Battlefield Doctor with the callsign "Mercy."

Her life mirrored the lore of the game Overwatch, which Qi Ann had once played.

Yet, no one could have imagined the weight of a 'backstory' confined to game introductions and cutscenes.

Qi Ann had lived out those few lines of text over a decade, transitioning from initial panic to tranquility, only to be thrown into turmoil once more.

The world she now inhabited edged ever closer to the game she knew so well, complete with the emergence of a 'game system' in reality. She struggled to articulate the experience, but the persistent visions of team members, maps, and status icons, especially the cooldown timers for her abilities after drawing her weapon, made it increasingly difficult to dismiss as mere hallucinations. It was as if she were inside a holographic game.

The more Qi Ann encountered phenomena that seemed to belong solely to the realm of gaming, the more she felt like an outsider in this world.

She likened herself to a digital entity, composed of zeros and ones, while everyone else seemed truly alive. Or perhaps it was the reverse: she was the sole living being in a world of data, which explained the ease with which she could 'die' and 'resurrect'.

In the game 'Overwatch', 'Angela Ziegler' initially possessed the Ultimate Skill 'Resurrect', which was later replaced with 'Valkyrie', relegating 'Resurrect' to a standard ability. Yet, in the real world, despite Qi Ann's development of the 'Healing Staff' using nanobiological principles, she couldn't bring back the dead, only hasten the recovery of the critically wounded.

'It's only in games that resurrection is possible, so this must be reality, not a game,' Qi Ann reassured herself. She abandoned the debate over whether this world was a simulation or genuine, resolving to shed her identity as Qi Ann and embrace life as 'Angela'.

It was a few years back when, during her research into nanobiological healing at Overwatch, Qi Ann glimpsed a hallucination-like game prompt: "Ultimate Skill Charged." Instinctively, she chose to "deploy the Ultimate Skill".

Golden radiance shrouded the lifeless agent, who, just declared dead, rose anew in the glow.

In that moment, her world shattered.

She was neither the naive gamer 'Qi Ann' nor the distinguished surgeon and biologist 'Angela Ziegler', but a misfit, a monster in this world.

Yet, the applause and cheers of everyone around her were genuine; they heartily congratulated her on her breakthrough. Even the typically stoic Reyes and Macrae smiled and offered her an approving thumbs up.