The first thing I see when I arrive in Hong Kong is a big indoor hangar bay. The first thing I have is Jock apologizing for messing up. MJ12 has the ability to override the flight controls of our fancy new stealth helicopter, and has forced us to land at their Hong Kong heliport. My mission, should I choose to ever get out of this place, is to find the override controls and deactivate them.

There’s not much of interest in the hanger itself, aside from a couple of the big garage doors that usually signify the existence of a security bot behind them. There’s a passageway leading away from the hangar to a set of stairs. A sign on the wall conveniently explains that the stairs up lead to the control room, and the stairs down lead to the barracks. The existence of a barracks implies the existence of armed men, so I head upstairs. There are two control rooms, and a couple of guards, which I investigate and shoot, respectively. Naturally, the controls require an access code which I don’t have. There are some security panels, so I shut down all the security panels and turrets, which is by now my standard operating procedure. Still not feeling like investigating the barracks, I return to the hangar and discover that some of the grates in the floor can be opened, allowing access to some maintenance tunnels.

These tunnels can get me pretty much anywhere in the base, including into the armory and the barracks. The barracks is in fact full of soldiers, so I avoid it for now. A datacube in the armory reveals that this base has been having chronic problems with toxic fumes, and gives me the code necessary to flush out the toxic gas so the storage areas can be properly cleaned and repaired. Naturally, this is supposed to be done only after the base personnel have been evacuated. I’m not the patient sort, however, and if my previous experience with MJ12 is any indication, everyone here is probably a dick anyway. It does say something about this game that I have to stop and think before releasing the gas, on the off chance that by doing so I’ll be icing some sort of important NPC.

I eventually decide to go for it, at which point Jock helpfully hops onto my infolink to inform me that I’ve flooded the maintenance tunnels with poison gas, and need to get out of there. I turn on my Environmental Resistance and stroll out of the tunnels with minimal damage. Judging by the screams I can hear, the guys in the barracks have not suffered minimal damage. I head downstairs to the barracks to see if anyone needs my help. Sure enough, while there are a bunch of dead MJ12 troopers, there are a couple who are still upright and need my help in order to go down permanently. I render assistance unto them in the most efficient manner possible. Naturally, within the barracks I find all the access codes I need for the base, as well as for the control room.

Before leaving, I decide to finish exploring the base and erasing any last vestiges of resistance I might find here. Sure enough, a ladder in the hanger leads up to the roof, where there are a couple of guards armed with heavy weapons. The roof is big enough, and has enough crates providing concealment, that I can get up close and knife them before they have a chance to shoot rockets at me. Among the supplies on the roof, I find a couple of swords. I immediately snag one, because they do way more damage than knives. I also rapidly discover that whenever I have a sword at the ready and try to put it away, JC gives it a badass little twirl before sheathing it. Excellent.

I return to the control room to remove the override from the helicopter controls, and notice a grate I hadn’t seen before. I check it out and discover that it doesn’t lead into the regular maintenance tunnels; instead, it leads to a ladder down into the area behind those big garage doors I noticed earlier. Sure enough, there are robots behind them. I’ve played enough computer games to realize that those robots will probably come out guns blazing as soon as I get the helicopter up and running again, and there’ll probably be some sort of escort mission where I have to destroy them before they blow up the chopper. I forestall this little subplot by dropping some explosives into the robot hutches. It seems like kind of a waste to use LAMs on enemies which are deactivated and which pose no immediate threat, but some experimentation demonstrates that if I try to destroy the robots using lighter weaponry, they’ll activate and murder me with terrifying efficiency. Explosives it is, then.

Back in the control room, I enter the code. I return to the hangar, where Jock tells me he needs to bug out, but he’ll blow open the front door with a missile so I can get out. He also tells me to stand back, which is good advice, as that missile has quite a blast radius, annihilating the door and collapsing part of the wall in the process. Needless to say, the doors which concealed the robots also open up, but nothing comes out, so it looks like I got them all. Jock flies away, and I stroll on out to the front elevator, ready for some sightseeing in Hong Kong. Now, if only I knew how to find this Tracer Tong guy everyone keeps talking about.  . .