Halo 2 in MCC: Cairo Station's achievements, including The Return of Megg

Halo 2 in MCC: Cairo Station's achievements, including The Return of Megg Cairo Station encounter and easter-egg spoilers. Halo 2: Anniversary in The Master Chief Collection, not Halo 2 Vista. Cairo Station is a rough place to try to do everything at once. A normal Legendary clear can already take some work. Asking that same run to be fast, collect the skull, earn a score and get through untouched is adding several different problems on top of each other. The Return of Megg is the one to separate out first. It has a specific setup, and letting your shields recharge after being hit does not make the hit disappear. **The six Cairo-specific targets** - **Cairo Station:** complete the mission. Easy counts in MCC. - **Don't Hangar Around:** finish below the **15-minute** par time. - **Bomb Squad:** beat the **14,000-point** par score. - **Curious:** activate Cairo Station's terminal, Halo 2's first. - **Skulltaker Halo 2: Thunderstorm:** collect Thunderstorm on Legendary. - **The Return of Megg:** trigger the hidden PA announcement near the final bomb room under the required conditions. The Armory's **That's Just… Wrong** skull is a separate earlier mission. Don't go searching for that tram pickup in Cairo's combat armory. **The Return of Megg: the setup matters** Use **solo Legendary with Thunderstorm enabled**. For this easter egg, Thunderstorm's menu setting matters; simply having collected its physical skull on an earlier visit doesn't turn the modifier on. The documented route requires reaching the final bomb-room section **without taking damage**, including damage to your shield. It isn't enough to avoid dying, and it isn't enough to prevent the shield from completely emptying. If a shot clips you and removes part of the shield, treat the section as failed. You are listening for the station's PA system to page Megg near the end. This is not CE's hidden bloody M, and it has nothing to do with killing Keyes or climbing onto a yellow canister. **Helper skulls aren't all treated the same** Established MCC guides document **Envy and Scarab** as usable for this particular easter egg. Envy provides camouflage in place of Chief's flashlight; Scarab makes weapons enormously more destructive. Neither replaces the required Thunderstorm setting. Those helpers change how you approach a room. Use camouflage to reposition, and give explosive shots room to land away from you. Firing into a nearby wall or enemy can turn your own splash damage into the thing that ruins the attempt. Don't assume those settings also preserve your completion, time or score achievements. This is a separate Megg visit, not an all-purpose achievement loadout. Leave other optional helpers out rather than adding every modifier and hoping the same eligibility applies. **What to do when a shot gets through** Watch the shield display and damage flash instead of relying on whether you feel close to dying. Pause as soon as you notice a hit. The documented recovery is to **revert to the last clean checkpoint before the hit** and replay that section. If you continue far enough to record another checkpoint after taking damage, that new checkpoint doesn't erase the failure; restart the mission for a clean attempt. Don't deliberately die and assume that has the same result in every situation. Don't treat quitting and resuming as a guaranteed repair either. The useful distinction is whether you're returning to a checkpoint from before the damage happened. Near the final bomb-room section, listen for the special announcement before rushing onward. Reports place the notification at slightly different points around the approach and room, so don't invent a precise floor tile as the universal trigger. Stay careful until the line plays and check the achievement record. A missing notification alone is not enough evidence to conclude the whole run failed. **Don't Hangar Around: under 15 minutes** Any difficulty works for the par-time achievement. Easy is the straightforward choice for a dedicated timing attempt once you know the route. Get the skull and terminal out of the way on another visit. Climbing for Thunderstorm and stopping for the terminal presentation are distractions when you're trying to improve a time. Leave the Megg-specific helper loadout off too. The two boarding hangars are worth learning properly. Know which waves still need clearing before you move on, and where you're going after the second hangar. Wandering around because a door hasn't opened can cost more time than taking an extra moment to finish the encounter. Use the actual mission timer and finish with a margin below 15 minutes. This checklist isn't a guaranteed speedrun route, and an Easy par-time unlock does not give you a Legendary time for Monopolized. **Bomb Squad: finish with more than 14,000 points** Turn on scoring so you can judge the run as you go. Higher difficulty and eligible skull multipliers can help, but they aren't a guarantee that the final total will be enough. For this attempt, skipping every enemy is not the same objective as getting through quickly. Clear the hangar waves efficiently, use cover to reduce deaths and avoid friendly-fire penalties. Decide on a difficulty you can finish consistently before piling on additional modifiers. Check the skull warnings. Scarab being documented for Megg does not make it a scoring option. Keep the score run separate from that easter-egg setup. Crossing 14,000 during a fight is not the end of the job: complete the mission and check the recorded result. For both score and time attempts, Halo Support recommends completing the individual mission in one session because quitting and resuming can interfere with unlocks. **The two collectibles** **Curious** is in the combat armory after the second boarding hangar and MAC Storage. In remastered graphics, inspect the console to the left of the exit toward Commons B-01 and activate its incoming-message screen. Any difficulty works for the terminal. **Thunderstorm** is above the next large Commons room, on the high platform behind a trashcan. Clear the room, use the light-and-ledge route to reach the beams and rails, then pick up the skull. Use Legendary for its achievement. You don't need to enable Thunderstorm to collect it; enabling it is the separate requirement for Megg. **Broader achievements aren't extra Cairo requirements** **No Pain, No Gain** is an MCC-wide achievement for finishing a mission with the LASO playlist skulls enabled. It is not Cairo's name for a no-damage run. Don't turn a first Cairo clear into LASO just because you've seen that achievement mentioned in a guide. Likewise, **Silent but Deadly** is a broader Halo 2 challenge involving seven consecutive unseen rear kills, not something required to finish Cairo's checklist. **THE Chips Dubbo?** is dialogue-related and isn't a guaranteed notification at one fixed Cairo checkpoint. Those can be pursued separately rather than making this mission's six targets sound like an exhaustive list of everything that might unlock here. Finish the normal clear and collectibles first. Then give Megg, time and score their own attempts. It's much easier to understand a failed condition when you know exactly which condition the run was meant to satisfy.