Xcom Er Journal.
Our next mission is a terror mission, our first one and one in a place with a very high terror level. Already gonna be hard, but Faith and Jim are still out, laying in the medbay with their guts on the table.
We got ourself a new member to take on the mission. His name is floki but everyone calls him Scrambles, probably because of the neon yellow armor. We gave him a scope, oh, excuse me, a S.C.O.P.E. thats actually just a scope. Fucking Scientists and their Acronym fetish.
We're headed toward Rosarid, Argentina and we can see the smoke from the air. Place is burning, nothing a wash of orange haze and black smoke. We land and the first problem appears: Civies. Civies we have to save. Great.
Mino saves some poor sap the second his boots hit the ground and we spread out, finding cover behind cars and against brick and mortar storefronts. Screaming is constant and somewhere in the distance a siren is blaring, almost drowned out by distance plasma fire.
Enemy turn goes...poorly. Two floaters wander down an alley. Followed by two crysalids. Followed by three more floaters. Shit. SHIT.
Mesk throws a grenade, wounding the nearest cryslid and Thomas finishes it. One down. Scrambles brings down a floater. Two. May grenades two floaters at once and Milno takes one of the injured ones down and Feyri goes into Overwatch. Good thing too. That second Cryslid bumrushes us; Feyri hits him first with the normal overwatch and again with a special power that lets her get a shot off at anything getting within 4 spaces of her. It brings it down just before it gets to her. Whew. Mesk, who was left exposed after the last exchange, takes a blast to the back and is critically hurt but still moving. I have him retreat as Milno and Feyri pop off the last of the floaters. And like that it's over
They hit us with their entire force right out of the gate and we brought them down without a single soldier lost. 17/18 civies saved as well. It's high fives all around, once Mesk finds his arm.
Those Argentinian bastards better love us after that.
Everyone but Feyri gets promoted, Milno to captain, May to Sergent, Mesk to Sergent, Thomas to corporal, and scrambles becomes an assault class squaddie. Mesk is gravely wounded though and is out for two straight weeks. May gets the Nickname "Doomsday".
While we wait for the next mission I throw some of the monthly budget into the development of a heavy weapons platform, as well as carapace armor for Jim, Feyri and milno, seeing as they're always wandering around near the front.
Finally the call comes in: A landed ufo in china again. Faith and Jim are both up and around so they're on mission with us this time, along with Milno, May, Thomas and Feyri.
Another forest in china, another ufo, another bug hunt. Oh well, lets see what we've got. Hopefully we won't get bumrushed by a million of them all at once again. Hopefully.
Spreading out, by the book, and keeping the place covered. It's not a good battleground; there's no where near as much cover as I'd like and we're all clustered together behind 2 foot chunks of stone and broken trees. Milno moves forward and...Mutons. Fucking Mutons. And three of them. The combined force of Milno, Thomas and Feyri bring one down but the other two are still moving towards us when my turn ends.
One buffs his friend while the other takes pot shots at Thomas, but misses.
Faith, new Laser sniper rifle in hand, uses her headshot skill to bring one down in a single hit, but the rest of us can do nothing but overwatch thanks to the guy's buff that breaks our accuracy. We manage to hurt him bad when he moves, but not so bad that he can't live long enough to hurl a grenade into the cluster of jim, milno, feyri and thomas, wounding them all. We bring him down the next turn but the damage is done. We keep moving, but thomas is hurt bad. Feyri, jim and milno tank the damage well thanks to their new armor, but Thomas was almost unprotected and he looks it.
Two floaters appear as we move and we take one down while the other runs. Feyri is holding the frontline well, overwatch murdering anything that appears. May cripples another floater and Thomas finishes it. It goes quiet again. We move in and Jim stumbles into a Floater that Feyri's special action reaction shot takes out. I love that thing.
We're into the ufo proper now, outer doors. We're moving in, slow, careful. God I hate these places, so many blind corners and places for alien rape to hide. Find another outsider and promptly let crippled, bleeding Thomas kill him. These outsiders man...their fight is not strong enough.
After all the tension of slowly scouring this fucking ufo, it turns out the last survivors we're looking for are 3 sectoids hiding behind a tree. Jim rockets them just for wasting our time.
Thomas Becomes "Scotch" and is out for 18 goddamn days, 14 of which I swear are him just being passed out drunk, and everyone except milno is promoted. Milno is out for 6 days from his injuries and Jim is out a week. At this point we've go 4 men down, 4 of our top men. It's not a good day.
A new misson comes in before any of them can heal. Of course. I grab two newbies from the barracks, Maurice and Bishop, and we head out.
Mission is an abduction one, in Berlin. It's rated as very difficult. And me with two newbies. Awesome.
Thinmen right off the bat, three of them. May takes one down, scrambles takes another, but the third lives long enough to poison maurice. May takes him down a moment later.
We move into what looks like a park of some sort or...no, it's a graveyard. Of course it is. Some sectoids come pouring out of a building near the back and are cut down almost instantly. Floaters a moment later as Scrambles moves up, but he takes out one of them, though the other lives long enough to splash Faith. Two more appear a few steps later but they're no match and the mission ends. Easy, for a "very difficult" if you ask me. But then again Faith is out for 5 days and Maurice for 3 so what do I know. Scrambles got himself a promotion but thats it.
We've got 5 out injured but milno is back in. While we wait for more contacts Jim heals up and he and May get heavy lasers. Mesk Gained the Nickname "Bishop" at some point, just to fuck with me.
Next mission is in Nigera and we've got the team back together, Faith, Feyri, Jim, Milno, May and Scrambles.
Another fucking cemetery? Really alien guys? Who are you going to abduct here? Corpses? Emo teenagers? Whatever. Murder ho.
Ho...fuck. Ok So it's a bit hard to tell what was happening with all the reaction shots but I'm fairly certain 3 thinmen showed up and just got creamed instantly by our concentrated fire, but also 3 mutons and 2 floaters showed up so...fuck.
Jim nukes a Mausoleum and almost kills two mutons in one go. Faith and Milno finish the injured ones and Scrambles mangles the third. Feyri Takes out a floater and May sprays fire at the other, but misses. The remaining muton and Floater retreat back into the larger buildings like the cowards they are. Whew. That went better then expected.
We move forward again, find two more floaters and Scrambles kills one. We catch glimpse of the muton and remaining floater spazzing out in the main mausoleum area and Feyri overwatch shoots down a floater. That fucking muton manages to drop a grenade on May and Jim before May just shoves a rocket down both the muton and floater's throats.
May and Jim are both out for 3 days, May gets promoted to captain and Scrambles makes sergeant and gains the name "Spitfire"
Oh good, a new Mission. A bomb disposal mission? What? Since when am I a goddamn bomb damn disposal unit?
FINE! Whatever you shadowly bastards. We'll do this. Oh wait, we're also still missing Jim and May? FINE AGAIN. Bring it on. I don't even care anymore.
Operation Bloody fear!? Who is naming these things? It's in America this time, at what looks like a Chuckie CHeese. Cool. The aliens scattered "power Nodes" around that charge their bomb. But rather then putting them next to the bomb they threw them fuckng everywhere. Guys? Guys? Are you ok? Did you forget to take your brain pills today? The ones that let you brain good?
Well, turns out the alleyways around here are swarming with Thinmen. It becomes a blur of dead aliens as we smash open doors and deactivate power nodes, each one buying us another turn till the bomb goes off. Feyri does most of the front line work, even stuns us a live one to take home to interrogate. Every damn door we open sends more of the things skittering out like cockroaches. Faith claims a place on the top of a nearby 3 story building as the rest of us search. Feyri eventually finds the bomb in the base floor of that 3 story building, but we're all sick with thin man poison and even after the thing has been deactivated there are more enemies around. We all make for the top of that building, hoping to rain death on anything that chances by. Two more Thinmen drop in and Maurice panics and runs to hide. It's a bit premature though, since the rest of the team murders everything with ease.
Despite all the poisoning, no one is actually injured and everyone except Mesk gets promoted. Maurice, despite is cowardice, becomes a heavy. Feyri reaches Colonel, the highest rank possible
We completed our Heavy weapons platform. It's name is Steve.
"Huh. No pain? Funny, I expected horrible agonizing pain right now. Maybe later."
Examine the tissue samples. Await horrible agonizing pain.
Hmm well the samples come in quite a variety. This one here looks almost like a section of your boneskin, torn off something. While this one looks like some sort thin, fragile membrane, and this one like...are those eyes in that meat? You bend down and look a little bit closer. They look back at you.
And then it feels like someone shanked you in the gut.
"YEP!" you shout, falling on your knees, "There it is."
The pain seems to radiate outward immediately, spreading out toward your skin.
(I'm a support. Appropriate.)
"Huh, they seem to be regular, run-of-the-mill wires. From our own ship, maybe? Disappointing."
Sleep 'til everything's fixed.
"Milno, wake me up when the Rec Room's back zzz"
(The game choses the soldier's profession. Hence why milno is playing medic to Jim's heavy at this point.)
You pass out in a bunk.
((Yay Captain!
So...how am I performing?))
Read the paper Jim had on the painkiller!
Then ask Milno.
"First time? You mean alien...anomalies affected the ship before?"
You've already read it.
Continue smoking, pondering on how to construct a free-electron lasing medium for a XASER, and whether it can still use the traditional focusing chambers. Also temporarily entertain the idea of using a free-electron laser to make a sort of "lightning gun", where the electrical discharge follows the path of the laser beam.
I'm not sure such a thing is possible, at least in most circumstances. From what I've found XASERS use a wavelength in the tens of nanometers, ie Extreme Ultraviolet, which puts them in the "Vacuum Ultraviolet" Band, meaning they'd be rapidly absorbed by normal air. They'd work great in Vacuum, but as an all purpose laser I'm not sure how you'd work it.
((Hah, loving these XCOM updates.
I'll be sad when we TPK. :P))
"Yeesh, messing with pain receptors doesn't sound good to me," Faith said, handing Jim the paper back. "Guess some people might like it, though."
Head to research labs. Ask what they do in there.
You walk to the door to the research labs and talk to the guy at the kiosk beside it.
"Us? We research anything that you all bring back to the ship and send the data back to whoever requested it. It already takes objective years for us to get anything, and it would take much longer to actually bring it to whoever needed it. So much so that they might be dead by the time it gets there. So we do the work and send any relevant data."
No action here.
(Well, of course Jim is always eating plasma. XD I'm surprised May is my apprentice, though, considering how she acts here in the thread...)
May's just the up and coming Heavy to your established vet. And you probably get hurt so much because I just keep having you lumber your fatass into combat firing rockets while wearing the "Deal with it" sunglasses and shouting "CRY SOME MORE!"
"I guess we'll never know. Maybe if it actually manages to survive or resssurrect after being shot with a G-shell and tries anything funny again."
Milno ignored his santification and moved off the barracks and towards the armory, to check if the armory master was there.
Go to the armory, tion and moveAM is there.
You head to the armory and find the Armory master there, at her familiar post. She looks up as you walk in.
"Would you prefer regular booze, or the strong stuff?" Stacy asks, pointing to Sambo.
If he wants the regular stuff, give him my bottle of regular booze. If he wants strong stuff, give him Xeno Spit. Try to determine more about St. Milno from what I've seen of him while enjoying my blue-smoke.
[intuition:3-1-1+1]
You blow out some smoke and then shrug. Eh, he's a guy. Does guy things.
Dry off, get dressed, drop into my bunk, light one of my blue smokes. Think about the lockdown events and pre-lockdown oddities.
You dry yourself off and get dressed, walking to your bunk with a towel around your shoulders, and sit down. You strike the bluesmoke against the wall and take a drag as the self-igniting tip lights up.
[intution: 1+1]
Eh. It is an anomaly. It does anomalous things.
Go back to where Renen left Maurice, stab through his heart, bring the body to the Doc.
I was pretty sure he was following me. Could you just wait a minute, we had to stop because of the countdown.
Ok. Problem here is we need to wait for Maurice to respond to that and maurice seems to have been walkabouts as of late. Anyone know where he is? Or the person controlling him, more specifically.
Head over to the Armory Master.
"Can you make a Tupac hologram?"
"Whats a Tupac?" The armory master asks, raising an eyebrow.
Mason writes When will I be able to talk again?
Then he will Go for a nap
"Give it a bit, we'll be able to unwire it soon." the nurse says. You shrug and go lay down in the barracks.
"Just the regular for now. Cheers."
Drink booze. Then climb back into stasis pod with time for waking set for "when actual player of Sambo Jin (sambojin) stops pissing it up with his mate for a few days".
(( Yeah, I'm definately going to miss some turns here for a bit. Have fun all. ))
You sit down in your bunk, drink several mouthfuls of near 200% proof booze, hand the bottle back and then promptly pass out.
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