Eddie clears his throat noisily a few times, and unhooks himself from the corner he wedged himself into.
"My report is a little less detailed than Hasala's sir, since I've never had a photographic memory, but I will do my best to explain the mission as I experienced it.
We approached the anomaly, and halted at the entrance to the sphere. Several team members performed what I am informed is the usual science method for weird stuff, namely throwing bits of metal into it and waving sticks through the edge. That's not a euphemism for a device I don't understand, incidentally. They were just sticks and screws.
After determining that nothing horrible happened to objects entering, we entered as a group, although this seemed to be an oversight in the sense of "no longer considering the spherical anomaly a threat and wishing to proceed further", rather than a conscious test or decision. At this point, we discovered that we were unable to leave the anomaly from the inside, and were trapped without QEC comms with Steve.
Further attempts were made to penetrate the dome, and I dug a small trench to confirm the sphere extended below the surface. I considered high-explosive use to attempt to breach, but the commanding officers decided to move further in.
There, we encountered a group of frozen-in-place entities which looked like civilian workers, who ignored all communications. A 20 foot "safety zone" was established around all such people, and we split into two teams in order to cover more area inside the University.
It shortly became apparent that the entities were not in fact, frozen in place, and I pointed out that their movement seemed to be directly based on line-of-sight. Where we could clearly see them, they stayed in place.
My team encountered a barricaded building, and I believe that is the point where Hasala left us? I was not on a level of recognition in the group beyond Team Leader Pancaek, so wasn't very certain. We attemped to demolish the barricade, made of furniture, by hand, discovering it to be more extensive than we previously thought, and were surprised and ringed in from behind by the line-of-sight creatures, which Hasala calls Puppets. The puppets were positioned at the entrance in such a way that it was impossible to exit the building, even vertically from the door, without coming cloner than 10 or 15 feet - or, well within the exclusion zone set up.
Team Leader Panceak decided that the best way for him to escape the area was to ignore the safety perimeter established and attempt to fly out of the door. He entered some kind of "area of effect" around the puppets, within the 20ft exclusion zone, and was frozen in place. Luckily, this did not extend the exclusion zone all the way back to the rest of the group.
Since Team Leader was unresponsive, we demolished the building from the inside until we could get to the roof.
From there, we observed the events Hasala described including the strange figures. When the entity claimed to be Morul's attack smashed a hole in the dome, we descended the building and, to be informal, ran like stink for the escape route. After clearing the dome, which we did without any difficulty, we continued to run at an angle, spurred by radio reports that Maurice was activating a nuclear device and that Steve would be kinetic-kill-vehicle-ing the site, at an angle to the hole so as not to be smashed.
Flying teammates subsequently escaped and picked up the groundbound guys, including me, and evacuated to a safe distance. There, we smashed our way into a ship, and took off. I am not sure whether we destroyed all origin tech other than the ship before hitting an ominous black cloud which was covering the whole sky. Either way, we escaped the planet.
That's all I have to report, sirs."
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Topic: Mission 21 On Trial: No Smart Subtitle (Read 21784 times)