Beyond the unsettling file on the Nephilim, there is also a bit of juicy info on our benefactors on The Council. They are not as aligned as they might have us believe.
Big Dogs
For one, the MiB is not just some rogue organization. They are another Councilmember's X-Com, raiding UFOs for technology and violently covering up the invasion so they can hold a monopoly on extraterrestrial tech.
We're getting the distinct sense that the Council as a whole has never been unified on how to deal with the alien invasion. Maybe they never really believed it would happen. Now that there's cold, hard evidence that Kiryu-Kai's warning was real, they're all scrambling for their own piece of the pie.
In this light, it's clear that our direct superior on the Council, Councilman 03 - owner of the Russian bloc - is in direct competition with the other Councilmembers when it comes to "handling" the invasion. They have funded our project as an alternative to orgs like the MiB, one under their control, where they stand to benefit.
The European Bloc representative, Councilman 06, is named in the file as being a woman by the name of Gertrude Ellison. What little there is in the packet gives us this: She has a sweet rack, she is well over 80, and she runs a human trafficking operation. There are frenzied scrawlings from David Vincent on the margins, theorizing she is juicing on some kind of "elixir" to stay eternally young.
We have no clear evidence she's the power behind the MiB, but, the fact that they targeted Vincent - the only man who knows her name - for a swift extermination makes us think that, yeah, probably.
V. horny file on Gertrude Ellison (nsfw):
⇳ Click to Expand Summary
We're cautious to tell none of this to Councilman 03, merely stating our interest to continue growing our field of control, and to eliminate any trace of the alien menace.
Impressed by the info we gathered from the lab ship, he has agreed to bring us into the fold on an unknown, growing threat across the continent, originating in Europe. The "Hybrid Network".
Half-Breed
We take the second of our UAC dropships, the Icarus, to a remote spot in Italy's Accona Desert.
What we find are unmarked vans being loaded by... human-shaped... sectoids...
For the most part, they're armed with regular-ass rifles, but a few them also have these weird featureless metallic spheres.
Grath opens fire on the group clustered to the south. They take a hit like any human and go down easy.
A few make a go for the van, but the distance is too great, and they're easy pickings.
One puts its hands up and starts towards Grath. It seems to be a bog-standard human citizen, like, the bog-standard human citizen. He pleads with Grath to stop, saying that it's all a mistake, that they just broke down and they need help. Grath does not hesitate to kill this thing as it advances. It bleeds yellow.
He pops open the back of the van, finding dazed citizens packed in. They seem like they're only now starting to come out of whatever haze they were locked into. Cubes starts asking questions.
The guy claims he had entered a specialized clinic for his advanced form of cancer. Others have similar tales. Miracle cures, advanced treatments, incredible new medical technologies.
We take down the address of this clinic.
Beyond the abductees, we find rows upon rows of hefty vials, containing some acrid pink liquid.
We load up the Icarus and head back to the Red Forest. The lab starts parsing through the latest haul.
Atog opens up the man who spoke to Grath.
The hybrids themselves are not too dissimilar.
We follow up on a similar lead from Councilman 03.
Again, the hybrids are armed with human weaponry, some even with rudimentary tools like axes and knives.
The higher-ranking ones are an exception, carrying the alien laser rifles we've seen sectoids start using in the field.
There is also this thing.
Some kind of hovering, autonomous disc that fires off laser beams.
It has pretty bad accuracy, but it can FLY, and from what the group can tell, there is no obvious means by which it should be able to do this. No propellers or visible field of any kind, it just floats.
Mazian plugs it with a few rounds from a laser rifle, and it eventually goes down.
We might be able to use this.
Seems to be the burn marks from a UFO landing.
We find what we came for nearby, three cobbled-together machines loaded with bizarre chemical packs. We shut it down and recover the tech.
It's made with human farm machinery, for the most part, but configured and fused in a way we've never seen. It seems like it shouldn't function, but, it certainly does.
Okay NOBODY DRINK THE WATER JESUS
Next up, the clinic.
