Borneo was a humid climate choked with stagnant ponds and near emaciated crocodiles that stalked the mossy swards. Vines festooned the high canopies like velvety green ribbons while the birds chirped their merriment in a series of medleys. To Zoran Lazarevic, their song was more a dirge then a melody. He'd escorted his carvan through the rain forest into the its heart. Flynn informed him that Marco Polo's fleet should have been washed ashore are their respective position, but Lazarevic thought Flynn as incompetent as his lowest-ranked mercenary. Aside from his whimsical attitude - which Lazarevic altogether despised - and his innefficeny in completing assigned tasks, Lazarevic somehow managed to stomach his Aussie employee.
Late that afternoon the nefarious warlord was skulking around his quarters which was erected from a sturdy wood platform. Its walls were littered in maps and tokens; markers that would, hopefully, guide him on his journey to discover the Chintamani Stone. He sent for Flynn some hours ago but hadn't heard even a word. Infuriated, he stormed outside into the hot, humid air. Despite the climate he somehow managed to endure his all black attire, no doubt encumbered by his sash of shotgun shells and heavyset bullet-proof vest. "Where is Flynn!?" His Russian intone resounded through the expanse like drums of war. His hired guns and mercenaries - who at the time were mosying about, moving debris from Marco Polo's ships and unloading weapons - all came to an abrupt halt and gawked at him with frightened gazes. One man stepped forward, evidently a higher ranked individual, and inclined his head towards Lazarevic.
"He's on his way," the man reassured him, but Lazarevic wasn't quite convinced. "Fools!" he hollered, "I'm surrounded by incompetence, and fools!" Meanwhile, as he went about his tyrannical tirade, one of his affiliates was fairing better in the cool confints of her yurt. She was an Egyptian woman half a decade shy of her late twenties with almond-shaped eyes littered with flecks of gold. She could hear her employer's voice shotgun through the yard. Ramses warned her not to irk Lazarevic. "He may be in need of my ships," she remembered him saying, "But don't think for a second that he'll hesitate to put a bullet between your eyes, habibi."
She absentmindedly flicked her labret piercing with her tongue, briefly eyeing over a sheaf of documents Lazarevic was looking to decipher. She was no scribe, however, and gently laid her work aside. The day was inexplicably humid though she had been accustomed to similar heat. Her bronze flesh was weeping sweat but she still managed to smell of spice and cloves, a scent that clung to her lion's mane of black hair as if it were a veil. She saw no reason to sort through Lazarevic's paperwork nor was she immensely content with being holed away in a tent sweltering with heat. It was his command, however, and as Ramses had warned, irking Lazarevic may very well have been the last thing she did.
"I instructed you to be here an hour ago!" Lazarevic hollered. The scar marring the right side of his faced appeared more disfigured when he was agitated. He paced, ponderously, about the platform with his eyes virtually screaming hatred. By then a copse of grunts had collected, attempting to make their presence unknown and feigning labour. "What do you fools think you're doing!?" They all balked and scattered like the frightened birds that took wing overhead. "Mr, Flynn." His voice fell to a lower decibel; it was eerily calm all of the sudden, a tone that often heralded doom.
"I will not suffer your inability to follow instructions any longer. It becomes increasingly evident to me that I have hired the wrong man. Perhaps Nathan Drake would have been more efficient." Suddenly, he clasped Flynn by his neck and guided him into his tent where suspicious eyes couldn't pry. While the scene played out Ramses' affiliate emerged from her tent with a pair of reflective aviators to protect her eyes from the sun. She gazed over the yard and stole long, elegant strides around a sea of crates and cargo. Despite Lazarevic's being some insidious warlord, she wasn't all too frightened of him. Her complaisance seemed to pacify him to some degree, however displaced it may have been. His employees were often grateful to have her around even though she was obscenely silent.
As Lazarevic was chiding Flynn, she waltzed into his tent on a pair of terrain-worn, shin-high combat boots. Mid spiel Lazarevic halted, glaring at the nubile vixen with disinterest. "Ms. Zeitoun," he said with alarming courtesy, "Have you come to present me with something of use? Perhaps you could teach Mr. Flynn some efficiency. There must be some reason as to why you are called Messiah, after all." In retrospect the Egyptian's name was Cacia, but she seldom had use of that title since she signed on to Ramses' payroll. "Mr. Lazarevic," she said, her voice as sonorous as a bossa nova, "I have." Admittedly, Messiah could stomach the Serbian's shouting any longer. "The sun will set in a few hours and we'll likely have to put this operation on the back burner until the morning. Perhaps it's best to continue searching for remains with all available hands?"
Lazarevic scowled. As much as he wanted to berate the woman for her audacity, she held a valid point. He glared at Flynn and finally removed his hand from his neck. "Very well," he said solemnly, "You seem capable enough, Ms. Zeitoun. Take this imbecile with you, over the ravine where the others have been searching. Perhaps you'll set an example for him."
Messiah hadn't known Flynn from a hole in the wall. To her he appeared as a smug Aussie with a flaxen slick-back mane and mischievous eyes. He seemed harmless enough but she knew better than to underestimate a mouse when it was so small and could easily go unseen. Quite frankly she was surprised that Lazarevic didn't plant a bullet in Flynn's chest yet. Compared to this Nathan Drake she'd been hearing about, Flynn was undoubtedly incompetent, yet, Lazarevic stomached his failure for some clandestine reason.
Eventually the silence grew more deafening than the jungle ambiance. Messiah vaulted over a rotten log and circuited around the remnants of a pond riddled with wooden shrapnel and debris. "Why is it you irk him?" she eventually asked, her tone mellifluous though flat, "Does he not frighten you?" She wiped a few beads of sweat from her forehead and visored her vision as she gazed up beyond the canopy, gauging the hour of day. Several of Lazarevic's men were nearby; they'd managed to lower themselves into the ravine while others inspected its bluffs. For makeshift excavators they were quite well armed - most were toting some degree of long guns as they raftelled into the ravine; snipers hid in the canopies, too, eagerly sorting through the numbers in such of an anomaly.
Messiah was equipped with her own weapons, two rafica pistols nestled within their respective holsters. Suddenly, a man came barreling towards Flynn. He was heavily clad for Borneo's climate and armed from head to toe with a sash of MK-NDIs. "Flynn," he panted, "we think we've found remains. It's something."
"Unlikely," Messiah blurted unconvincingly, "If a flood washed the ships so far inland, survivors would have sought higher ground as refuge. If you've found any remains, they'll misguide you."
Messiah quickly found that Lazarevic's underlings were equally as stubborn as he. One night she spent virtually two hours trying to convince him of her logic, presenting certified evidence, but Lazarevic would have none of it. He merely waved a hand dismissively at her and commanded that she do as she was bid. Despite being simply an ambassador, she took her title seriously and did her very best to facilitate a successful mission.
"Down here," the man grunted. He lead the two down a expedient stone path besmirched with moss and lichen. Messiah was careful to avoid losing her footing - one misplaced step and she'd be plummeting into the ravine with a cracked skull and broken back. "We found bones." He gestured to a tiny enclosure along side the bluff where a human skeleton laid scattered and timeworn. Messiah was the first to investigate, anchoring herself down to analyze the remains. Unabashedly, she plucked the skull from a heap of lukewarm mud and brushed her finger over its cheekbones.
Two guards paroling nearby were directly in her line of sight and cringed at the display. "Have you found anything else?" Lazarevic's grunt shook his head. "Just that." Messiah made an ill-humoured face. "The skull is cracked," she noted, "And so are most of the bones. This man fell to his death here. I suppose it's a red herring, but nothing of notable importance." She wiped a smear of earth from her jaw and grimaced, leering almost menacingly at the guard and Flynn. "Are you both fucking touched? They were Spaniards, not single-celled organisms. When it rains, anything possessing even the mildest hint of sentience knows to move to higher ground."
She took the skull and thrust it into Flynn's chest. "Is your skull cracked as well, Mr. Flynn?"
Gunshots sang like a mournful dirge hummed for the dead. Immediately Lazarevic's men reacted with their myriad of weapons, each different to some degree, barrelling and vaulting over debris towards the campsite. Messiah couldn't begin to fathom what caused the commotion - maybe an arrant jungle animal or perhaps it was an accident. Either way she found herself being dragged by Flynn.
By the time they arrived, Messiah was drenched in sweat. Her comely mane stuck in clumps to her cheeks. She lazily braided what parts she could and eased down over a rocky parapet into the campsite. Corpses littered the sward; Lazarevic's pavilion was ransacked, the tower had virtually imploded and nearly three quarters of their supplies were in ruin. In case of such emergencies, Ramses came prepared. He secretly dispatched a group of pirates to oversee Messiah and in times such as these, they were all too convenient.
Messiah reached for her belt and unfastened her walkie-talkie. The words that flitted from her mouth were some vernacular dialect of Arabic and the receiver on the other end spoke similarly. Alert, she plucked a pistol from her holster, slapped a clip in and kept it readily available in her hand. "Where's Lazarevic?" It was a rhetorical question but she felt Flynn felt obliged to give a slapstick response. "Check for survivors."
As Flynn became prisoner to panic, Messiah combed through the corpses with a look of pure dread twisting her roguish features. Each she approached were slaughtered; gunned down by some unknown trespasser. She was faced with a similar scenario when she and Ramses were plundering a passing vessel outside of Syria one night. He was ruthless and the ships sailors were altogether innocent, but he taught her that remorse would have her dead in a day.
Eventually she came upon on man choking for breath in a low puddle of water. He was clutching the wound on his chest - a bullet bit through his protective vest and lodged itself within an inch of his heart. When he saw her approach his eyes flashed with some semblance of hope. Messiah threw herself to the ground, her usual nonchalant facade replaced with that of a kinder nature. She touched his forehead - it was sweaty and clammy, half covered in congealing blood. "D-D-Dra ... ke ... Drake," he wheezed. "Who? I - ... that doesn't matter. Take small breaths, habibi." Her reached for her shoulder but his hand fell short and splashed in the puddle below. He croaked his final breath and his face went white with one last sigh. Messiah cringed.
She found her way into her tent, procuring her untouched SAS-12 that sat ensconced among her bedroll. "Get a hold of yourself," she said almost kindly, "That man mentioned the name Drake."
Messiah cocked her weapon. "There will be no more messes, then. See if you can get a hold of Chloe." Messiah strapped her SAS-12 to her back and proceeded over the debris near the stone parapets that bordered the encampment. Lazarevic's watch dogs erected a cabin from the mast of a broken Spaniard vessel. Evidently it was blown to smithereens; what was left of the splintered mast had descended upon the parapet creating a natural bridge to the mountains.
"Up here," she said, gesturing to the mast. "You said he's after what we're after ... so he's searching for the Spaniards' remains as well? Lazarevic was scant on the details, he merely told Ramses and I that he wanted to know where the ships were. When we found them, he said he wanted remains. When we find remains, what's next?" She absentmindedly chewed on her labret piercing, gently easing across the bridge with feline grace. The fall was back breaking and she had no intent to beg Flynn to euthanize her in the middle of some unmapped jungle. If she were to die, it would be at sea or in the sands.
"When I first came here, Lazarevic mentioned that you were a skilled affiliate, yet you're trembling like a child. I'm unimpressed ... Impress me, habibi."
"That is potentially one of the most cliché lines I've eyed laid ear upon. So, not only are you a child, you're unoriginal as well." Messiah disliked speaking as often as she had, but secretly, she was making an attempt to cope. The scene laid before her strung a very sour note and sent her stomach flopping and roiling with discontent. While he made an attempt to contact Chloe Frazer she, herself, took initiative to touch base with her men. Lazervic wouldn't be all too pleased when he learned she had a score of pirates ready to pounce at any second, but in a situation such as this, they'd likely be useful.
She spieled off a few more Arabic terms into her walkie-talkie but the response was static. As she climbed stony ledge after stony ledge, she pursed her lips and clutched her knees in an attempt to catch her breath. No doubt she'd be sore the following morning, but like most pirates, Messiah was concerned with the here and now. She glanced up at the mossy green slope ahead and the fearsome looking jungle trees that careened inward with their twisted boughs and branches. Admittedly, she didn't even believe that this Drake character had went this way. It was likely, with legion of Serbian mercenaries chasing after him, but there wasn't a way to be certain.
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