Keres

**Keres** is a take on an exhausted and tired **Miss Pauling** from **Team Fortress 2** who finally snapped after years of abuse by Mann Co. and the Administrator. She was created by **Professional Troglodite** with design assitance from **Plushie**, **P.F** and **Toxer**. She serves as the primary villain of both her respective week and Ringmaster's week for Inconpicuous Intrusion.

She was first conceptualized in January 30, 2023 under a **D-Sides concept thread**.

## Appearance

In her disguised form, Keres look exactly like regular Ms. Pauling, wearing a purple and lavender blouse with a dark purple skirt held up by a black belt with a metal buckle, brown pantyhose and black shoes. She also wears glasses but they don't have crystals as they were broken when she fell down the New Zealium mine and lacks her lipstick.

Her appearance changes dramatically in her revealed form with several New Zealium shards sticking out her forearms, back and hair with New Zealium veins, monstrous black claws and black eyes with silver irises. Her skirt becomes ragged and looses her glasses completely. She also becomes slightly taller but not by much

## Personality

Keres is an extremely pedantic, arrogant, stuborn, cruel, prideful, self-absorbed and overconfident but also somewhat foolish and very cowardly who mostly relies on her goons to do her dirty work while she sits on the back and pats herself on the back.

She tends to underestimate her foes as she believes (partially correct) that her intellect is outmached by none so she can be tricked into putting someone in an advantageous position for them while being blissfully unaware she made a mistake. Contradictory however, Keres is very methodical and pragmatical when it comes to dealing with people, preferring to use words and negotiation rather than brute force. She is also very skilled at building contraptions, be it a ultra-reinforced armored train with artillery cannons, a reality bending device capable of connecting multiple dimensions by the simple pull of a lever or a mutation ray that can turn anything it gets it's beam connected to into a monstrous killing machine with massive powers

Keres is very obsessed with the Chaos jewels as the amount of power they can grant to literally everyone and everything makes them crucial for turning her army neigh-unstoppable. Depending on the timeline, it either results in nothing or allows her to become an all-powerful dictator

## Strengths and Weaknesses

Intelligence: a double-edged sword when it comes to her schemes, as while it allows her to come up with extremely clever ideas, her blind faith in her own skills may cause it to backfire on her.

Tinkering: Keres is extremely good at creating machines and contraptions like "The Big Schablamo" or the Mix-n-Masher 10.000 but often these inventions come out as short-sighted or redundant as Keres tends to not have enough common sense to see that what she's building may not be all that useful

Telekineses: one of her most powerful abilities, Keres doesn't get to use it a lot due to it requiring large amounts of New Zealium to work. Keres is very good using this ability however, so it's best to keep your distance in case she gets a hold of a large amount of New Zealium

Swordsmanship (TP & TR timeline only): Keres has very good skills with the sword after going through a long and exhausting training with **Lord DeGroot** which allows her to wield her special silver Eyelander expectacularly and gives her the ability to charge like a regular Demoknight. After meeting her girlfriend Blaze she would gain a shield with the logo of the House of Sol and a

Super Strenght (OM timeline only):

## Synopsis

* Prologue
* Part 1
* Part 2
* Part 3
* Part 4
* End?
 As Mann Co.'s Australium supply starts to wane, an expedition carried by RED to the sunken country of New Zealand reveals large deposits of Australium so drilling operations begin with Redmond intending to keep all of it for himself. However the Administrator finds out about this and informs Blutarch about his brother’s shenanigans so he sends his mercenaries to combat his brother’s, thus starting yet another front to the Gravel Wars…

 Miss Pauling, who was enjoying her state-mandated holidays, gets dragged into this and due the remoteness of the place she was working there is even more paperwork to do since following the sinking of New Zealand, Australia claimed the waters where the island used to stand so Mann Co. needed a shit-ton of permits to mine there, all of which Miss Pauling had to take care of.

Although she had always followed the orders of the Administrator without a hitch, the fact her holidays had been abruptly ended without a warning, was know inside a cramped submarine filling a million mining permits without as much as a thank you and now had to go through an active warzone, surrounded by mountains, on foot. While making her way towards the main control room she muttered to herself that she wanted to get back at the Administrator for dragging her to New Zealand, eventually devolving into a mad bickering of the constant abuse she suffered at her hands and how she wished for the Administrator to receive a taste of her own medicine.

After learning of this, Miss Pauling decided to find this ”New Zealium” so she could show the Administrator what that she was made from, but as she made her way to the exit the mine one of the bridges collapsed, sending her tumbling down a pit and then landing back first into a large group of New Zealium stalagmites which got logged straight into her spine. By all accounts she should have died there and there but somehow… she hadn’t. Miss Pauling felt a lot of pain in her back at the same time her head started to hurt as she heard an increasingly loud buzz going all around her. Suddenly she felt a rush to her that allowed her to see things that she was pretty sure that hadn’t happened yet, where she saw that the Gravel Wars would go on and on to the point where the gravel would erode away, leaving nothing to fight for. Angered by the fact that she would be forever trapped under the Administrator’s thumb, Miss Pauling pulled herself free from the stalagmites and realized that her entire back was messed up from the fall with chunks of New Zealium still sticking out from behind but she paid no mind to it. Tumbling back out of the mine, Miss Pauling made her way into RED’s base to start making her plan. RED had just gotten their asses kicked-in by BLU after they destroyed the Australium drill RED installed with a payload cart.

RED was feeling extremely down and wanted to get back at BLU by any means necessary. After entering the base, Miss Pauling ended up bumping into Medic, who quickly realized that she looked rather strange. Facing the fact that she couldn’t really lie to Medic, she told him her plan about ending the Gravel Wars her way and asked him if he was willing to help her out on her “crusade”, to which Medic agreed almost immediately. Medic then went to inform the rest of the team about Miss Pauling’s plan with all agreeing to join her. RED proceeded to get the drill working again and utilized the Australium in conjunction with the Medi-Gun to boost themselves significantly.

However, unbeknownst to them, Miss Pauling had started to become more erratic due the New Zealium slowly starting to warp her mind and thoughts, with increasingly more frequent fantasies of becoming more powerful and wondering if there was more to conquer besides the universe. For now her focus was to turn the RED team into unstoppable killing machines, even if that took more unconventional methods. Miss Pauling would find out about Medic’s dealings with the Devil so she would also solicit help from him.

The Devil agreed but forced her to sign a contract where she gave him all of the 9 mercs souls + hers. Miss Pauling signed it without much consideration and used her new found satanic powers to help the mutation of her allies. This affected all of them, but some were more noticeable. Pyro (later Infierno) was one of the more obvious. After the transformation had concluded, Miss Pauling decided to test her newly empowered lackeys to see how would they perform against regular people And she would get her chance rather quickly. As she started to use her newfound intellect to construct what she referred as “The Big Shablamo”, she received that BLU was once again attempting to blow up RED’s drill so she executed her plan by letting BLU get a false sense of security before attacking them by surprise. The plan worked perfectly as BLU was horrified seeing what had happened to their adversaries and by the fact their weapons weren’t hurting them. One by one they all fell without standing that much of a chance, although they did manage to get some hits on the weaker freaks but it was a victory nonetheless. As she rejoiced in her victory she decided to revive the deceased members of BLU to use as cannon fodder in case any agent from Mann Co. showed up to try stopping her.

Unfortunately the process wasn’t successful as the souls blasted her ass apart shortly after revival and fled so now Miss Pauling was sort of stumped as to what to do. She then decided to continue working on “The big shablamo” to see if her theory was correct. After a long time, she finally got it working, showing to her freaks that there were more worlds out there, worlds to be taken over.

With the help of Engineer (later Starengineer) and Medic (later Moodic) she managed to refine the reality-warping machine. During an experiment however the machine suffered an exception and ended up opening a random universe claiming it needed a “powerful material component” to restabilize. This universe just happened to be Mobius, the world where Sonic the Hedgehog and all his friends lived. Seeing an opportunity, she sent some of the RoBro 3000 units she had in her possession to see what the Mobians were up to.

The RoBros broadcast revealed that the Freedom Fighters were in a relaxed mood and had their guards down. Miss Pauling immediately ordered all the freaks to attack them to try and capture as many Mobians as they could. Upon realizing that his friends were in danger, Sonic immediately jumped into action and tried to counter the freaks. He managed to make quick work of the weaker freaks, rapidly dodging their attacks but ended up biting more than he could chew as freaks like Painis Cupcake and Hoovydundy proved to be far stronger than any foe Sonic had ever fought.

After a long and arduous battle, Sonic was defeated and was taken back to their base where Miss Pauling attempted to have her soul surgically stitched to his body with the help of Australium. The procedure took a long time as Sonic bravely fought against the mental control imposed by Medic and Pauling but after almost collapsing from exhaustion during his battle with the freaks, his mind was weak and eventually fell. After transforming Sonic into her vessel, Miss Pauling thought about what role to give it besides being a second pair of eyes and as a way to escape getting killed if she found herself in a sticky situation. She thought how in most freakshows there is always a ringmaster who runs the show and tells the freaks what to do so she named the vessel Ringmaster so she wouldn’t have to run after them and focus more on the scheming. This made her realize that her regular name wasn’t cutting it anymore as it didn’t sound imposing enough so she chose a new one: Keres, after the Greek goddess of violent death in battle. The newly named Keres also took the opportunity to give new names to the freaks to match their new identities.

What Keres hadn’t accounted for is that the rest of the Freedom Fighters weren’t going to sit idly by and managed to track the location of her portal, dispatching some of their best agents (coincidentally the closest to Sonic): Miles ”Tails” Prower, Knuckles the Echidna, Amy Rose and Sticks the Jungle Badger.

They would travel back to Teufort to rescue Sonic and close the link between the TF2 Earth and Mobius but found out that this rescue mission would proof a bit more difficult than their previous ones since the area was heavily guarded by the freaks, so they try to sneak around into Keres lair through the vents, managing to find the main control room. The team splits up after entering the lobby so they can find Sonic more easily, with Amy entering the main control to check on the cameras so she can provide a clearer view for the rest, but is then surprised as a lady with purple clothes and glasses enters the room, locking the door behind her-

Wait, are her eyes…glowing? MEANWHILE…
Far away from Keres’ lair, a certain group of goblins and elf are deployed by Mann Co. as they received a distress call from BLU that everyone on RED had gone insane, losing communication with Miss Pauling and the bases after that. In order to find out what happened to the mercenaries, Saxton Hale enlists the help of the Bernard “Gelfy” & Jackson “Gelfus” Greedlin, Magnus “Gorlin” Guttersin and Oswald Fallston to investigate by handing them the fattest check ever written in history. They quickly go into RED’s base where they discover a rather unnerving sight…