crotah:

i raise you: overwatch park rangers au!!

lately I’ve been absolutely obsessed with park ranger horror stories, from search and rescue operations to tales of creepy encounters with cryptids in the woods. this takes place in yosemite, or somewhere in the pacific northwest, idk. here goes:

-tracer is the educational ranger! she’s a rookie, but a talented one, and has already proven herself to be a skilled naturalist. a jack of all trades, she’s usually the one who leads the hikers and campers on tours throughout the park. all the kids love her, but the adults are sometimes exasperated with her because she can’t go 5 minutes without mentioning bigfoot at least once. she swears up and down that she saw him once, even talked to him! lúcio is the only one who believes her. she’s also adamant that their gps system, bastion, is sentient, and even lùcio is reluctant to believe her there. tracer is always the one who tells scary stories at the campfires. only ones with happy endings, of course.

-lúcio is tracer’s partner ranger, and an expert on the history of the area. he’s also fascinated by cryptids & the paranormal, and has had more than a few weird experiences since he joined the rangers, which he always writes campfire songs about. granted, he makes these songs using an app on his ipad, and they don’t have actual lyrics. they sound more like they belong at a party than around a campfire in the woods, but he claims the beats and tones of each song tell a story about the goings on of the forest. tracer is the only one who can interpret these songs.

-captain morrison, also known as 76, is the quiet & intimidating head ranger of the park. he’s ex-military, and he mostly stays behind at headquarters to do paperwork and deal with department heads. no one really knows what he was like back when he worked the forests with everyone else. everyone calls him 76 because apparently when he was a rookie, he was separated from his squad in the dead of winter during a rescue operation and had to survive 76 days on his own, living off berries/raw meat and fighting off bears and mountain lions. mccree says he killed a grizzly with his bare hands once when it tried to take the fish he caught, but 76 has yet to confirm this.

-hanzo is the head of the search and rescue division. he’s a skilled archer and horseman, and perfectly at home on dangerous mountain slopes that many of the others won’t even attempt to climb. he’s the only one who can get more than a few sentences out of 76, and probably the most practical member of the squad– he doesn’t believe in bigfoot or ghosts or the monster tracer says lives in the park’s biggest lake, but something obviously happened to him at one point because there’s a huge stone monolith in the middle of the forest that he gets nervous when he’s around. no one knows how it got there or what it’s for, but hanzo is deadly serious when he demands that no one is to approach it–EVER. don’t touch it, don’t look at it, just keep walking and pretend like it’s not there. sometimes it appears in different spots, sometimes you can hear soft noises emanating from it, but under no circumstances are you to acknowledge its existence. hanzo is usually the one who scares off the new rookies.

-mccree is a law enforcement ranger, and a bit of a vigilante; he’s not averse to breaking a rule or five if it means catching a dangerous squatter or putting down a rabid puma, but 76 can’t fire him because, in all seriousness, the man has a near-100% success rate in his missions at the end of the day. he can often be heard flirting with hanzo over the group’s radio system, much to everyone’s chagrin. mercy says that sometimes, if you’re on the night shift and the stars are perfectly aligned, you can hear hanzo flirt back–but you can’t be listening for it, or it won’t happen.

-genji is hanzo’s younger brother and technically not employed as a ranger, but he sticks around the park regardless to hang out with his brother over ramen and video games and because the local hippie, zenyatta, lives in a cabin just outside the park borders; he and genji are roommates, and apparently have some kind of spiritual master/apprentice relationship going on. mccree thinks it’s a little kinky, but hanzo is adamant that there’s nothing going on between them. tracer thinks they’re cute together. genji will neither confirm nor deny any accusations.

-dr. “mercy” zeigler works as an emergency responder with hanzo on the search and rescue team. she always looks perfect somehow, even after hours of hiking in the woods looking for lost campers, and is basically everyone’s mom, having a seemingly infinite supply of water bottles, bandages, and antiseptic ointment. she has saved both hanzo’s and genji’s asses from dehydration on multiple occasions.

-pharah is mercy’s fiancé, and the best damn firefighter the park has ever seen–she can spot even the tiniest smoke column from miles away. the running joke among the rangers is that if you see a particularly big tree or beautiful deer, you have to shout “thank you pharah!” because most of the park would have burnt down to ashes long ago if not for her. junkrat and roadhog, forest squatters and serial arsonists, are the bane of her existence. lúcio thinks they probably run around the parks all day setting fires just to test her abilities.

-winston is bigfoot, obviously.

I’ll do some of the other characters later lol