ER Xcom Journal: Fucking Mexico.
The interceptors brought down a Small ufo over in the UK. Operation "Sacred god" as opposed to operation "Mundane,kinda crap god".
We're rolling with what is quickly becoming the A team of Milno, Scrambles, May, Faith, Jim and Feyri. Middle of a desert by the look of it as we land, lots of shrubs and small plants amongst sunbleached dirt.
We see yet another Outsider running out from the depths of the shattered ufo. May hits him with a grenade before he can even fire. I'm starting to feel bad about these poor outsiders. We find a few floaters and Thinmen as we move through; the floaters don't put up much of a fight and one of the thinmen gets taken down from miles away by Faith as the two other just run for it. May hands them a rocket and it's already over.
It's almost too easy at this point.
Welp, thats done, time to fight another abduction. We've got STEVE with us rather then Scrambles. Lets see how his awesome roboty self goes.
Cape town South africa this time, in the middle of the city. At night. Of course.
We find Two mutons just squatting in a takeout place a dozen feet from the LZ, though their takeout appears to be some poor bastard wrapped in green crap.
We manage to take them down but take a grenade to our faces first. We find three more Mutons in an alley flanked by floaters that STEVE sees through a wall and proceeds to destroy half a building trying to get them. In the mean time Faith spends half a round dodging plasma.
The next rounds go..poorly. No one dies but these fucking mutons and their massive health and love of plasma grenades makes my life difficult and my soldiers injured. Milno in particular is near death, and jim is injured yet again. Feyri remains unhurt despite charging into the faces of a muton and floater and stunning them for capture. Milno patches himself up as we move to the last building and kick the door in.
Three mutons in here.
Feyri handles one on her own, charging in like a maniac, while Jim and may walk in like badasses through the back door, laying down a rocket and then a field of heavy laser fire to deal with the rest.
The mission is a success but the outlook is still grim. 4 of the 6 soldiers are injured, Milno gravely, and canada and brazil are panicking, overrun with aliens. No one died, but our victory was far from complete. We Tossed the Muton into interrogation and launched some new monitoring satellites, but it's still a game of catch-up. I wish we had more funding.
We get another mission soon enough, but luckily our men are all healed and ready to go. We bring scrambles instead of steve this time. Despite his rather awesome firepower and habit of tearing buildings in half to get at his target, I need my men to get some more experience.
France this time, a construction or demo zone filled with digging machines and the remains of buildings.
We move forward slow, all of us going into overwatch as we stop. It makes it especially funny when a group of sectoids comes out to do their big reveal and then all get mowed down in an instant, leaving the cut scene to glitch out and show a dramatic camera angle of a wall to the sound of alien hissing. Quality.
We find 3 mutons hiding behind a trailer and one goes down to overwatch while the other surpresses jim and the last splashes jim in the face. At this point though jim's face is pretty much nothing but a giant scab so he doesn't seem too annoyed.
At this point Faith literally has 100% hit and with her head shot skill 100% crit. She's basically longrange death. She proves this by downing a muton in one shot. It takes scrambles and may both running straight out of cover and practically up the muton's nose to take it down, but we manage. Two floaters wander out of nowhere as the last one drops, but milno drops one right away. Faith drops the other in one shot.
We move forward and manage to find 3 more mutons, all of which fire upon feyri and blow off all her skin. She crawls away as we all open fire like crazy. We take them down but then two floaters charge in behind them and splash scrambles THROUGH A GODDAMN WALL. THey don't even blow up the wall, it just clips through. Great, now we're fighting alien ghosts.
Feyri's out for 8 days and scrambles for 4. Feyri is now leading in murder with 31 kills and 17 missions. I think she's been on every single one.
Mexico starts panicking. I make taco jokes a their expense.
We got a new sniper as a reward for the mission, some guy named "snake eyes"Cog. If I remember right, snakes have poor vision. This does not bode well.
We get a terror mission literally seconds after sitting down once we get back, and to a hellhole the aliens practically already control. Well, time to go save that high value built in burning craters luxury warzone of a city.
We're bringing steve with us this time, can't afford more mangled men. Him, jim, milno, faith and may plus the new guy, Cog. Brazil is the burning hulk for today's trip and it is dark and shitty right away.
We smash into the nearest building, gun down a floater and then the cryslids show, charging suicidally towards us. Jim and May cut them down, firing then hitting overwatch and firing again as they move. Together they and milno take down the two we see but a third charges through the fray. It gets shredded by fire but manages to charge all the way to an adjacent tile with faith. Faith, never one to miss a moment to be badass, places her pistol against it's head and fires three times.
We're still losing civies. We can hear them screaming in the dark.
Milno's saved three of them so far and it looks like we have this building clear, but there's still at least one floater somewhere around here.
And then two cyberdisks just buzz right in. We open fire, tearing through the wall between us, but they're still going strong once the smoke clears on the overwatch shots.
May fires a rocket into the crowd of cyberdisk and drones, wiping out the drones and badly damaging both disks. We all rush forward, even may the sniper charges in to save a civie. We manage to bring down one of the fuckers but the other is still up and there's no one left but milno. He's got the firepower to bring it down and a 65% chance of hitting. It's all up to him.
He hits. It's gone.
The floater charges in on the next turn. No idea what he's thinking. We took down two cyberdisks but he things he's the guy with our number?
It takes a few guys to take him down in one turn, thanks to his cover, but steve delivers the final spray of machinegun fire and we're done. We fought two cyber disks at once and we won without taking a hit.
Fuck the council and their terror levels, fuck the lack of funding and our constant scrimping for tech. Fuck our doomed future. Tonight we won.
Jim, Milno and Faith all reach colonel. And Mexico withdraws from the Xcom project. Too many taco jokes I guess. FINE, go die in alien hell, don't come crawling back to me when your orifices are chaffed and worn with anal probes!
Bastards.
Try and stay upright. Don't die.
You see something black and very viscus begin to ooze out between the cracks of your boneskin. The fluid seems to crawl out and seals over your entire body, forming hard, chitin lenses over your eyes and some sort of bone like mask over your face. You start to feel a bit, odd. Not yourself somehow. You shake your head till the feeling goes away, replaced by the fact that you are starting to feel very hot.
((Steve's in, awesome.
Say, does it track SHIV kills or whatever? Never researched them myself.
And could we have another killcount and maybe promotions at some point?))
"Oh. You ever do anything unofficial, like requests from inmates?"
Ask science kiosk guy.
"Depends on the request I guess. If it's something interesting the one of the guys might get some free time." He looks you up and down for a long moment. "Or maybe you could just ask them real nice, there's not a lot of pretty girls in the R&D of a prison ship."
Mason sighs, unable too sleep he heads to the armoury, he clears his throat and writes
I was just wondering, and while I hate to be this forward, whats your name?
I was just wondering, and while I hate to be this forward, whats your name?
((Ninja.))
Milno heads to talk to the armory master, noticing Mason approaching as well. While the man writes, Milno starts talking.
"First of all, the G-Shells really work very well." he says, making no reference to the fact he got them for free, as she had said. "And second, what is your name?"
Ask.
The armory master looks first at Mason and then at milno and shrugs.
"I'll tell you what I tell everyone who asks that. You make it to 10 missions and I'll tell you."
After making his way into the barracks, Floki glanced slowly about the room before the robot selling weaponry caught his attention. He strode over to the strange figure and squinted at it. The only robotic sorts he'd dealt with before had been simple, mindless automatons, with perhaps a basic personality programmed in for ease of communication.
'This one looks a bit higher-end, but you never know... It can talk, at least.'
He cleared his throat, standing a few feet from the robot, and spoke up. "Sellin' swords, huh? Mind if I try one out? Get th' feel of it, the weight an' that?"
>Glance around room.
>Ask Jim about swords, request a brief trial of one.
You look around the room while waiting for Jim's response. There are a few people in here, many sleeping or at least passed out on bunks. However it looks like a lot of people are slowly filtering back out across the ship. The VR addicts are getting twitchy as well.
Finish smoking, then try to get some sleep.
You flick away the stub of the cigarette and lay down.
Draw a Tupac for the Armory Master.
((By the way Piecewise, I'm watching a Let's Play or X-Com right now, and I've been wondering, are the missions randomly generated? It seems that way, but I'm not completely sure.))
[handi:3]
You doodle a stick figure of a sort of angry looking black guy without a shirt. The armory master seems less then impressed.
(Well, in the original I know the mission areas and everything were randomly generated, where as here they're not. Enemy placement seems fairly random, but the actual missions themselves seem to play out in a somewhat scripted way, though not completely. I think it's a mix of premade levels, semi-random alien placement, semi-random mission times, types and maps.)
((Nice work, Caellath, pointing out the button at the bottom of the page for locking/unlocking
Also, Colonel, yay!))
"Well, Milno is at the Armory and the VRs are down, I'll be...heading off Jim."
Head to the Armory and wait while Milno and the AM converses, try to examine my scoped Gauss Rifle and intuit if the scope can be modified for short and long range encounters...something like a hybrid.
Or a thermal scope.
You lean against the wall and wait while everyone talks, fiddling with your rifle as you do. You think a hybrid scope would be possible, especially if it's electronic.
Head to the armory and inquire if they have any supplies for making a stained-glass window.
The armory master gives you a few small packets of colored glass and a glass cutter, plus some metallic substance to hold all the pieces together.
"Alright, now that I'm in the mood..."
Examine gauss rifle. Determine whether its generators would be sufficient to power a field manipulator. Also, figure out how the inertia dampeners work. After that's done, have a sip of booze.
You start to do that when you realize you have no idea how the power in the Field manipulator works. In fact you have no idea how anything in that works.
(I need a pair of those sunglasses now I think.)
Jim agrees to duel Floki, letting him use the cutlass for now. Should combat initiate this turn, Jim will attempt to sword-slap him in the side.
> Duel the robot fellow, feinting once before darting back and then trying to disarm him, all the while trying to get a feel for the cutlass, assessing just how good it is.
(sorry for brevity, posting from phone)
You both try to hold the one cutlass. It's a bit embarrassing.