The X-Com Files: All Y'All Gonna Die

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Re: The X-Com Files: All Y'All Gonna Die

Postby Mongrel » Thu Oct 07, 2021 11:52 pm

WHOA.
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Re: The X-Com Files: All Y'All Gonna Die

Postby Mothra » Sun Oct 10, 2021 5:20 pm



3am.

Sirens blare across the Red Forest as agents scramble for their gear.



Command room's geoscape just shows a big red splotch over Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. Just south of us.

Printout from the Council is brief:

Code: Select all

X-RAY ASSAULT AT KRASNOYARSK.

SCALE OF CRAFT FAR EXCEEDS EXPECTATIONS.

HIGH CIVILIAN CASUALTIES.

A rather large blip appears on the geoscape, then several other, smaller ones.

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Heading directly toward us.

Everyone got the same thought on their mind: that creepy warning from the sectoid navigator, weeks back.

"There will be consequences."

Retaliation



We launch everything we got - Grath in the Mig, Ziiro in the R-Type.

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Mharr is currently plugged into the Icarus, and we ain’t got time to get him out. Guess he’s driving the bus.

Mutavore takes off from the Shatterdome, but it's far enough out that it very likely won't get here before this shitshow is over.

Every other blessed soul piles into the Icarus.

If we can stop this thing before it reaches the Red Forest, we have a chance. If we fail, HQ is the next Krasnoyarsk, and there ain't jack a few meters of concrete and stone can do to stop it.

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Grath takes point, aiming to draw off the escorts.

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First contact closes fast.

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Light Fighter

These miniature UFOs are built for intercepting enemy vessels. They are extremely fast and deadly to any unarmed craft.

Grath cuts his climb, noses down and lines 'er up.

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One of the plasma bolts scorches the side of the fuselage.

Grath gets into small arms range and lays on this lil' fugger with depleted uranium shells.

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Ziiro, meanwhile, blows past the furball with an eye on the prize. If he can hit the main UFO with his full compliment, maybe, it might be enough.

No such luck.

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Ziiro's monoeye narrows as the first avalanche missile whiffs.

He has just the 12, and something tells him he's going to need em all for the primary target.

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Second E.T. splashed, but at the cost of two missiles.

Plasma flashes past Ziiro's window, the IRST pinging two X-rays closing on his chrome-plated ass. The two remaining escorts.

Well, fuck.

Dead ahead, the clouds give way to the hull of a massive UFO, slowly rotating as is lumbers toward home base.

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Green globs of fire flicker past the window, really damn close.

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Ain't got time for this shit.

Grath radios to keep pushing forward. The glorious bastard blows by with - what else - Pugachev's Cobra, dropping behind both interceptors.

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The fighters take pot shots as he dips behind, plasma shredding a portion of the tail and melting a bit of the hull.

Lotta alarms going off on this old hunk of junk.

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Just gotta hang in there a little longer...

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Target lock.

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One of them gets powdered, just a cloud of debris.

The other takes a hit and keeps chugging.

Grath piles on the autocannon fire, taking a grisly hit to the wing as the X-ray desperately licks out shots.

Both craft start plummeting from the sky, exchanging gunfire as the Siberian tundra below draws closer and closer. The light fighter turns around just in time to pancake against the rocks in a spectacular green explosion.

Grath fumbles for the eject as the wing breaks off and he goes into a high-G spin.

The com goes dead.

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GRAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAATH

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Ziiro registers something adjacent to sadness as he hits intercept range.

The first burst of fire erupts from the top of the battleship.

His resolve is singular.

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B-BIG FELLA

Various panels across the top of the battleship slide open, revealing lil' ocular lenses that flicker in sequence. Some kind of green flak starts peppering the sky above, utterly denying the airspace.

Ziiro puts the R-Type into a corkscrew and dips low enough to get a shot at the underside.

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A crack of green hits the nose clean and digs across the body of the R-Type, boiling through the alien alloy-reinforced aluminum. Damage readout jumps from 20% to 60%.

Ziiro regards this poorly.

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The mass drivers find purchase in the closest of the four pulsing pylons stretched across the bottom of this hefty motherfucker, opening a hole in the hull.

Some sort of green aliens are blown out the opening, plummeting to the tundra. There's the reassuring red/pink glow of an elerium reactor in there.

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Ziiro puts the R-Type on its side and pulls up to narrowly dodge a spray of plasma from the broad side of this monstrosity.

He lays in with avalanche missiles, burrowing deeper, chunks of molten alien alloy boiling off with each hit.

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A beam digs straight across the rear of the R-Type, breaking Ziiro's entire ass clean off. The power cuts to all systems, seconds left on the AI backup.

Ziiro's eye watches in silence three remaining missiles sail to their target, punching through the last of the hull and into reactor. There's a brilliant flash as the featureless goliath begins to sink toward the wastes below.

A final blast from the battleship finishes the job.

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ZIIROOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

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On the Icarus, Mharr takes fire from the descending monstrosity, dodging bolts as best a dropship can.

Which is to say: Extremely poorly.

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The aft engine evaporates, sending Mharr into a tailspin. His calm voice comes in over the loudspeaker as the crew frantically straps themselves to their seats, alarms inside the cabin going wild.

Code: Select all

Please secure your restraints. Impact in 5. 4. 3.

The battleship impacts the rocky Siberian floor, setting off another pylon. This seems to drop the power completely.

The bulk of the ship is very much still intact, but the weapons have halted, thank christ.

Mharr boosts the port thrusters and manages to not outright explode as the craft rolls across the ground. After a few spins in the dry cycle, the Icarus lists to a stop.

The gang unbuckles themselves and hurriedly puts out the various fires.

Angry Beaver gnaws Mharr's core out of the cockpit before the cabin fire melts his ass. Atog gives Angry Beaver a pet and plugs Mharr into the drone.

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Friday passes out flashlights and whatever laser weapons we got.

This is it. Us or them.

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Re: The X-Com Files: All Y'All Gonna Die

Postby Mongrel » Sun Oct 10, 2021 6:05 pm

Holy shit.

what a fuckin' entry
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Re: The X-Com Files: All Y'All Gonna Die

Postby Upthorn » Sun Oct 10, 2021 6:31 pm

Welp. Goodbye human-ruled Earth, I hardly knew ye!
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.

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Re: The X-Com Files: All Y'All Gonna Die

Postby Grath » Sun Oct 10, 2021 8:47 pm

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Re: The X-Com Files: All Y'All Gonna Die

Postby Upthorn » Sun Oct 10, 2021 9:48 pm

I keep expecting that plane to fly straight into the fan
How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of ducks.

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Re: The X-Com Files: All Y'All Gonna Die

Postby atog » Mon Oct 11, 2021 1:25 am

CYKA B-B-B-BLYAT
Placeholder for something witty that doesn't make me sound like an asshole

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Re: The X-Com Files: All Y'All Gonna Die

Postby Z%rø » Mon Oct 11, 2021 1:43 pm

Getting shot down while going toe to toe with an alien battleship is a pretty solid way to go lose another shell
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Re: The X-Com Files: All Y'All Gonna Die

Postby Mothra » Mon Oct 25, 2021 12:46 am

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The crew finishes their loadout. A few putting on our newer H.E.V. suits for lack of knowing what, exactly, we're gonna run into out there.

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It has better armor padding than kevlar everywhere but the front, where it's slightly worse.

It's also 3:30am, so everyone's using flashlights. These are coded in-game using grenades as a template, where you "activate the grenade" to turn on the light radius. Works well, takes one hand to carry, but it also means we have to take the time to drop them if we're using a rifle.

Definitely... gonna take the edge off the alien-infested pitch-black wide-awake nightmare out there. Yeah.

Okay.

Goliath



Buge hits the release on the dropship ramp.

First into the meat grinder are Mharr, Zaratustra, and a fresh-faced new recruit with the callsign Hngkong. He is a young, dumb, full of cum, and boy shucks howdy determined to take point to prove to the gang he's got what it takes to be a real agent of X-Com. Taking the FIGHT to the ALIENS, for the MOTHERLAND BABY!!

There is absolutely zero time between the moment Hngkong's foot hits that ramp and the moment he explodes into a shower of viscera as three streaks of boiling plasma plaster the area surrounding the ramp.

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Oh!!

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What floats before us is a big, sleek, metallic Tylenol disc with energy flowing from the Earth itself, up into the ring. Like the drone, we have no clue how this is possible.

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Zara and Buge go down on a knee and start plastering this thing with fire from their alien laser rifles. It is utterly unphased, continuing its slow, steady, forward advance as bolts disperse along its hull. The energy seems to be pulled to the ring of the disc, where it collects into plasma globs that fire back as reaction shots. One catches Zara bad in the gut, boiling through his webwear.

Mharr gains some altitude with his floaty new bot bod and licks shots with his built-in alien weapon, some kinda blue beam we haven't done much research on yet.

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Well, it flickers red on hit, which means it actually takes noticeable physical damage to the hull. The disc stops and regards this, whiffing on a few reaction shots.

Taking advantage of the brief distraction, Buge wipes the Hngkong from her eyes and keys the timer on a high explosive. She presses the big red "0-turn fuse" button - notably the only button on this thing because what psychopath would ever set an explosive to go off at any other point in time - and manages to lob it onto the face of the disc, where it slowly slides off the brim and onto the ground underneath.

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The explosion tears open the circuitry like a firecracker and the next round of concentrated laser fire is enough to bring it down for good.

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Atog stuffs Zaratustra's guts back in and applies cryptid slime to the boiling wound, sealing it up. A few hits with the stim pack and the Zara's back in the game.

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Friday signals for Zara to scout ahead, and the for the rest to move in line with her. If the E.T.s are still getting their shit together in there, speed might be only advantage we have.

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The battleship is just over the hill, sitting in a shallow, smoldering crater. This goliath had more of an uneasy landing than a genuine crash, the vast majority untouched.

The power is dead, but the ship is teeming with activity, like a coke can full of wasps. An open door at the center pylon says to Friday that we most certainly got aliens out here.

From his scouting location on the west-side hill, Zaratustra spies the dim shimmer of a personal shield. It's got a big head.

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Zara goes prone, lines up an aimed shot, and domes this dude, painting the tundra with bright-green brainmatter.

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A smattering of plasma shots come out of the pitch black, missing Friday by a country mile. Definitely fired while moving.

Friday keeps her rifle to her shoulder and steadily advances on the center pylon. With a flicker of purple from the dark, she goes down on a knee and caps two 'toids scurrying back toward the door.

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Another, very different creature slinks through the doorway, barely visible.

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Friday catches the dim pulse of its personal shield as it sails through the air, completely weightless.

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Friday is far too stunned by the sight of this thing to do anything but gawk as it disappears into a rectangular slot in the hull.

As the rest of the team moves in, we start taking fire from the pitch black to the northeast, causing everyone scramble for cover behind rocks and shitty little hills.

Morale is not great.

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Add to that the fact that everyone has the feeling of a piercing, crushing dread, endlessly pressing down on them. Gonna assume that's just some hot new flavor of fear we're just now experiencing. Maybe we got "fear of alien squids" buried in the lizard brain somewhere and we ain't used it in a few millennia.

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Mongrel takes off barking at something in the shadows. It's humanoid. The team trades fire with a few sectoids before downing two and moving in to catch up with the struggle. Upthorn gets one in the shoulder. There is the sound of inhuman screeching and tearing, the silence.

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Upthorn finds Mongrel covered in blood - red blood - happily chowing down on a dripping severed throat. He kneels down over the corpse below and gives Mongrel a scritch behind the ears.

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Alien Diplomats

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Hybrid Diplomats are essential to diplomatic and business activities of ADVENT. Typically they reside in countries where policies are heavily influenced by the aliens. They are cunning, insidious and eloquent, and are supported by advanced psionic abilities. They often possess key information about alien ground activities in the region.

The fuck...? Hybrids?

Everything we've gleaned from our alien interrogations has pointed to the simple fact that every alien services a clear, established, inbred purpose. They're grown into them, from the moment they're spat out of their incubation tube. To have a half-breed serving on a battleship... it's a surprise.

(Also: Red blood?)

Aside from their weapons, the sectoid and hybrid corpses alike are all carrying the same thing.

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And some - the hybrids in suits - are carrying these as well.

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A cursory check of the markings on the sectoid's neck indicates these are, as you'd expect, sectoid engineers. The hybrids are a random mix of diplomats and infiltrators, however, tasked with helping with the repairs. It normally wouldn't seem significant, but aliens do not do tasks outside of what they're specifically grown for. But hybrids can?

Mongrel's ears perk up and he takes off to the east. Mazian rallies a team to follow.

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To the east, Mazian, Wheels, and Mongrel encounter another alien cyberdisc, and this time they're able to avoid blowing it completely up, using a combination of dog bites and taser sticks to bring it down. If we survive this, might be some valuable tech in there.

They also encounter two hulking pink monstrosities that take a pretty unsettling amount of punishment to drop. They are both armed with the largest plasma weapons we've yet seen.

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Aliens bred the donger clean off this dude... pretty fugged up...

Back at the center pylon, Friday rallies the rest of the troops - Angry Beaver, Zaratustra, Brentai, Buge, Upthorn, Mharr, and Atog.

The dread has not passed, even with the ground they've gained. It's the feeling of a piercing sound nobody can turn off, without the sound, or any discernible source. It sucks.

The gang engages in a daring 11-way isosceles lock of a rock-paper-scissors match to determine who's gonna dive into this shitstorm first.

Atog proceeds to lose eleven times in a row with her daring "just rock" stratagem. Buge almost overthinks it but nah they go paper.

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Mannnn...

Atog slinks through opening in the pylon, readies her rifle, takes a breath, and steps into the elevator field. She's very gently carried up to the next floor and set safely onto the floor of deck 2.

She looks ahead.

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Nothing. Eerily silent.

She turns around.

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NNNNNNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA

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Atog's comm channel goes dead.

The team stares at each other in stunned silence.

Angry Beaver bolts through the door and jumps into the elevation field.

His first sensation is that of electrified alien tendrils wrapping about his thicc ratty barrel and shocking him for a shit-ton of damage. He lets out an absolutely horrific rattly screech, sending further worried glances about the team downstairs.

Buge says quote "y... you alright?" unquote into the elevation field.

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Angry Beaver bites down hard on the tendril, gnawing through until the hold goes slack. He slurps it up like a pisghetti noodle, spins around, and goes for the eyes, chowing through a big jelly peeper to what maybe might be this thing's brain.

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Takes quite a lot to get through the personal shield, but once that drops, it's like grubbing down on squid. It looses an absolutely harrowing shriek as it's consumed alive.

Friday signals for Upthorn, Zara, Buge, Mharr, and Brentai to move up, finding Beaver a bit roughed up and overstuffed but altogether alright.

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Brentai gets some cryptid juice on him.

Absolutely no sign of Atog's corpse. Did it... eat them? Did Beaver eat the alien that ate Atog, thus eating Atog?

The electricity burns on the Beavster points towards "vaporized by lightning". A painless way to go possibly!

Upthorn immediately spots another one of these unholy things on the other side of the hallway.

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Upthorn brings his rifle to bear and joins Friday in gunning it down.

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Eugh.

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Cerebral

This specimen is not your typical alien: its genetics are completely different than those of both Earth and most alien species, and it seems even stranger than most other types of alien life.

Most of its body mass is neural matter, and the rest is almost exclusively advanced cybernetics to keep this enormous 'brain' running. It seems unable to use hand weapons, and it has no significant natural means of defense. There is little else we can say about this terrifying creature.

The gang is quick to notice their brains don't feel like they're being wrung out by a space squid no more. Whatever it was, it died when we fried that calamari.

As the team presses on, Brentai theorizes it might be quote "like Havana Syndrome but for real" unquote. Everyone nods sagely.

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Combat is fierce in these hallways, packed with mutons, hybrids, the occasional 'toid, and a whole lot of squids. The way the squids sail through the air continues to be extremely unsettling

As the team pushes forward, Mharr and Brentai happen upon a particularly weird room, containing nothing but a dazed muton, just standing there, non-existent dick-in-hand, staring at an orb on a stick. The fucking spaceship he was standing in having plunged to the Earth was not enough to phase him from this evidently dope-ass orb.

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Brentai waves his hand in front of this muton's slack face, snaps his fingers a few times, shrugs, and drives his taser stick into this thing's neck until it falls unconscious.

He scopes out the orb.

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They are big orbs on sticks, pulsing with subtle color shifts, rhythms, and shifting patterns. There is sound - a droning ambience of unearthly animal chitters and whines. It somehow makes Brentai nostalgic for a place no human has ever been. It's really quite fascinating, this orb. Really starting... to ah... to get the appeal...

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Mharr is utterly unaffected by the Symphony of the Orb. He rams into Brentai's shins like a roomba until the man snaps out of it and keeps moving.

There are control stations and some sort of red, pulsing power relays packed into room after room.

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The middle section of the battleship seems to be mainly engineering.

Although a good deal of real estate is devoted to these pattern rooms. There are notably not any seats, the muton from earlier simply standing in front of the sphere.

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Friday, Zaratustra, Upthorn, and Buge continue to carve through the western wing of the battleship. Their advance stops dead at this hallway as they are absolutely plastered with plasma fire.

Alien Light Plasma Turret

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This stationary turret is a powerful plasma weapon, widely employed to protect alien bases and large UFOs.


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Buge's right arm is blown clean off by the third blast. She shakily beholds her stump for a moment before succumbing to shock.

Down, but not dead.

Upthorn and Friday take the opportunity to return fire. They score a few clean hits on the large, pulsing plasma turret jutting out of the floor.

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It sprays out a few reaction shots, then finally frizzles out.

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Upthorn rushes over with the medpack and slathers Buge's bleeding stump with cryptid juice. The wound seals, and the bleeding stops. Nothing but the pure sweet slime of the megaworm.

They dump every stim in the pack into her bloodstream, and she bolts awake. An absolute fuckload of morphine later, and she's pretty okay with the missing arm thing. She picks up her rifle with the other arm.

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Hey gang quick morale check???

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Crew is feeling: bad

Down below, Mazian takes Wheels, Mongrel, and Angry Beaver to the third floor. They're joined by Mharr at the elevation pad.

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Angry Beaver and Mharr tango with two cerebrals to the south. Both are unarmed, floating in place, pulsing with a diffused yellow energy. It has no effect on either the bot or the rat, to the aliens' apparent horror. Mharr blows a hole through his target, and Beaver feasts on the other.

Mazian engages another plasma turret around the northeast corner. Taking note of Buge's screams over the comm earlier, they prime another high explosive and toss it at the turret. With a flash, flaming chunks of this thing skitter across the floor, and Mazian motions for the group to advance into the next room.

It is not pretty in here. Lotta turrets, a couple mutons, a couple hybrid. Add to that the constant, sharp mental spikes of pain seemingly from nowhere.

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Mongrel takes a mean electro-tentacle lash in the neck by a cerebral, which Wheels quickly cuts down with his katana. He spears the big squiddy eyeball with his blade and FOLKS: It's a gusher!!! Lot of slime here!!! We got slime!!!

When the team is ready, Angry Beaver pushes into what we're assuming is the control room.

He leaps onto the first thing he seems: some sort of fucked-up plasma-shooting mini-UFO, piloted by a half-formed cerebral.

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The creature makes weak attempts to lash out at Angry Beaver, but his rat teeth are already plunging through its eyeball, and it can do little but loose an unholy screech. As Beaver's chompers hit paybrain, the little craft instantly loses power and clinks to the floor like a hubcap (covered in squid goop and a giant blood-soaked rat).

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The team pushes in. This is it. We're not letting up this pressure.

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A brutal spike of pain hits Wheels square in the bean. He clutches his head and falls to his knees, katana clattering to the floor. His eyes roll back, and he turns to Mazian, a slack expression across his face. Mazian is quick to kick the katana out of his reach as Wheels makes a go for it.

Wheels doesn't respond to anyone's yells, just desperately trying to get a hold of his katana. Mongrel, sensing an enemy, mauls Wheels until he's bleeding out. His senses seem to snap back. Mazian gets a medpack on him.

Friday and Zara breach the final door, immediately faced with another cerebral floating front and center, locked into the same stationary, flickering pose as the ones in the hallway. Friday charges, striking it with the butt of her rifle repeatedly, breaching the shield and knocking it to the floor. He starts a-stompin'.

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A second, larger one moves its tentacles in a decidedly "I surrender" motion, and is met with a barrage of taser prods from Zaratustra.

Friday and Zara proceed to take turns kicking these things while they're down until both stop moving.

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The nightmare ends. The pain lifts, everyone can think clearly again.

It's done.

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Fallout

The team sweeps the rest of the UFO and rounds up their prisoners at ground-level.

Russian Ground Forces arrive within the hour in a long caravan of armored vehicles. They ask few questions, and start the process of transporting the recovered UFO to the Red Forest. Unsurprisingly, Councilman 03 seems to own these people.

An Mi-26 Halo shows up to haul the surviving members of X-Com and the writhing zoo of alien monstrosities back home.

The airfield outside of the missile silo is set up to disassemble the battleship and research the everloving bajesus out of it.

It's a productive month.

First, the technology is utterly beyond us, in a lot of ways. This thing's gonna be our whole-ass Q4, I can tell you that right now.

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This gives the grunts in manufacturing some ideas about what our next intercept craft might look like. God forbid we ever have to fight another one of these battleships again.

The bio-research is... as usual... unsettling.

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COOL.

This gives some pretty good motivation to the proud men and women of the Red Forest gulag, which is now packed with an insane mix of farmers, prisoners of war, genetic experiments, and literal space aliens.

Placing his hand gingerly on Atog's memorial plate, Zaratustra dons his stretchy surgical gloves and picks up a lead pipe.

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Using the same tech we recovered from Black Lotus, the lab is able to determine that what we felt and saw were unrelenting psionic attacks from these nightmare squids. Wheels got straight-up mind-controlled out there, like the Golden Lady mind-wiped her witches.

Fucking alien mind control is possible.

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"Ethereals"? We open a file next to the Nephilim and the Golden Lady. Going to assume there's a connection.

The muscles of these things are of particular interest to the medical research team.

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Considering what we just survived, I am liberally using the big red "Approved" stamp on my desk. I don't blink at the "Request to Harvest Muton Synthmuscles for a Battlesuit Woven from Alien Orc Yoke" form, that shit gets stamped post-haste.

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click "Hey Janice? Yeah, can you put them in the rat pit please? This is some truly weak shit we're getting right now in these reports. Thaaaanks!!" click

The screams heard throughout the base are grotesque and haunting. We hear them in our brains.

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Now we're getting somewhere.

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God and I thought the Dilbert guy was depressing.

So. Mars.

Just... gotta get to Mars.

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Re: The X-Com Files: All Y'All Gonna Die

Postby Mongrel » Mon Oct 25, 2021 2:45 am

I appreciate that the gravest threat the aliens faced during that entire mission wasn't advanced energy weapons, (s)trained elite soldiers, advanced battle tactics, or co-opted alien tech wielded by their enemies, no, the most dangerous shit the humans brought was a big motherfucking bitey rat.

Mothra wrote:So. Mars.

Just... gotta get to Mars.


Well, the team sure could use a two-week vacation.
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Re: The X-Com Files: All Y'All Gonna Die

Postby mharr » Mon Oct 25, 2021 4:41 am

The Rat Thing, just a tiny dark thing close to the ground, visible only by virtue of its shadow against the flames, and by the chain of white sparks where its claws dig into the pavement, makes a tiny correction in its course.

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Re: The X-Com Files: All Y'All Gonna Die

Postby Angry Beaver » Mon Oct 25, 2021 8:58 am

I am an engine of death and vengeance, powered by an unholy hunger. Grath, Ziiro, Hngkong (we barely knew ye), Atog, you have been avenged. See you when the pop fresh clones out of the tanks.

Man, did they pull that Cerebral they autopsied out of my front or wait for it to come out of the back?

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Re: The X-Com Files: All Y'All Gonna Die

Postby hngkong » Mon Oct 25, 2021 9:56 am

Mothra wrote:First into the meat grinder are Mharr, Zaratustra, and a fresh-faced new recruit with the callsign Hngkong. He is a young, dumb, full of cum, and boy shucks howdy determined to take point to prove to the gang he's got what it takes to be a real agent of X-Com. Taking the FIGHT to the ALIENS, for the MOTHERLAND BABY!!

There is absolutely zero time between the moment Hngkong's foot hits that ramp and the moment he explodes into a shower of viscera as three streaks of boiling plasma plaster the area surrounding the ramp.

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I hope I continue to immediately die in terrible ways in order to act as a warning and an inspiration to the team.


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Re: The X-Com Files: All Y'All Gonna Die

Postby Z%rø » Mon Oct 25, 2021 10:27 am

Abductions and small research actions escalating to parking a battleship on the planet and deploying psionic squids, cyber disks, and clone warriors is a real step up
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Re: The X-Com Files: All Y'All Gonna Die

Postby Mongrel » Mon Oct 25, 2021 10:31 am

Z%rø wrote:Abductions and small research actions escalating to parking a battleship on the planet and deploying psionic squids, cyber disks, and clone warriors is a real step up

I think that's because Mothra mentioned he's not writing out all the grindy lesser repeated missions.

Though even so, yeah, the actual UFOs have been pretty small up to this point other than the research ship.
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Re: The X-Com Files: All Y'All Gonna Die

Postby Mothra » Mon Oct 25, 2021 10:52 am

I cut out a lot of the repeat missions, like the dozens of hybrid convoy massacres, the cryptid missions, etc. But one thing you kinda get here is how many UFOs I was shooting down - it got to the point where I was just having the pilots solo UFO missions, to save time.

I'm pretty certain it was this huge number of downed UFOs that compelled the aliens to retaliate with the battleship.

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Re: The X-Com Files: All Y'All Gonna Die

Postby Newbie » Mon Oct 25, 2021 10:55 am

I'm so hype for this struggle that I just read the whole thing twice! ;-P
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Re: The X-Com Files: All Y'All Gonna Die

Postby IGNORE ME » Mon Oct 25, 2021 11:40 am

Huh, what? Oh, right. Aliens... n shit. Gotta... gotta shoot em, right? Haha, yeah. *goes back to listening to darkwave*

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Re: The X-Com Files: All Y'All Gonna Die

Postby atog » Mon Oct 25, 2021 12:00 pm

*hums to self as proceeds to turn around to take in scenery outside elevator pad* This shit's got me going like General Electric

ZZZ-ZZAPpp

*sound of airpods plinking onto the alien corrugated walkway of the deck*
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Re: The X-Com Files: All Y'All Gonna Die

Postby Upthorn » Mon Oct 25, 2021 3:05 pm

Mothra wrote:The team trades fire with a few sectoids before downing two and moving in to catch up with the struggle. Upthorn gets one in the shoulder. There is the sound of inhuman screeching and tearing, the silence.
...

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Takes quite a lot to get through the personal shield, but once that drops, it's like grubbing down on squid. It looses an absolutely harrowing shriek as it's consumed alive.

Upthorn immediately spots another one of these unholy things on the other side of the hallway.
...
Upthorn brings his rifle to bear and joins Friday in gunning it down.
...
Upthorn rushes over with the medpack and slathers Buge's bleeding stump with cryptid juice.

I must be misreading this action report, because it almost sounds like... I was actually useful?! That can't be right.

Mothra wrote:Image

"Ethereals"? We open a file next to the Nephilim and the Golden Lady. Going to assume there's a connection.

Wrong image?

Mothra wrote:So. Mars.

Just... gotta get to Mars.

Oh, this should be fun!
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