hired space pirates led by mercenaries Locus and Felix. Hargrove's crimes are exposed when he is apprehended offscreen by the Reds and Blues ten months before the events of The Shisno Paradox arc. Starting with its eighteenth season, referred to as Zero, Red vs. Blue now centers on an elite team of special operations soldiers, known as Shatter Squad, as they try to stop another group of soldiers, known as Viper, from getting the keys to a powerful suit of armor known as the Ultimate Power. Unlike the original series, the current Red vs. Blue instead parodies action movies. While certain character, vehicle, and weapon models are carried over from Halo 5: Guardians, the series appears to now distance itself from the Halo universe, instead introducing a new military force known as the Alliance of Defense in place of the UNSC. While featuring a brand new cast, three members of the original cast appear in the new series in mostly cameo roles, these being Carolina and Washington, two Freelancers who joined the Reds and Blues later in the original series, and Tucker, a member of the Blue Team, though the three are established to have left their now former friends to join the Alliance of Defense and, in Tucker's case, another unnamed military organization. Rather than being a machinima produced in the Halo engine, the series is now fully animated in Unreal Engine 4, the same engine used for the menu UI and armor customization in Halo: The Master Chief Collection, and uses assets from the Unreal Engine Marketplace that are unrelated to the Halo franchise, although there are moments that scenes are animated to mimic machinima limitations. Cast and characters During its original run, Red vs. Blue featured characters whose personalities are skewed in different ways and to varying degrees. Character interaction and dialogue, instead of action, would drive the story. The original series centered on eleven main characters. Other characters, both team-affiliated and unaffiliated, human and non-human, have played significant roles throughout the story. Notable later additions to the cast include The Director and The Chairman, as well as the Freelancers, which are named after U.S. states. AIs are also important characters, and are named after Greek letters. As is a common habit in most forms of military, the soldiers usually refer to each other by their last names. Throughout the original series, the Red Team primarily consists