Hell yes I’ve always wanted to be a fighter jet
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Perhaps spurred on by her near-death experience, the recovering Cania has revealed to the org the stack of files she received from David Vincent back when we tangled with the MiB.
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.
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.
Cuba 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 Cuba. It seems to be a bog-standard human citizen, like, the bog-standard human citizen. He pleads with Cuba to stop, saying that it’s all a mistake, that they just broke down and they need help. Cuba 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.
Meauxdal opens up the man who spoke to Cuba.
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.
BoojIII plugs it with a few rounds from a laser rifle, and it eventually goes down.
We might be able to use this.
We find what we came for, three strange 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 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.
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Extremely in character
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Rise and Grind
UFO containment continues.
The R-Type is really kicking ass out there, most UFO types can’t seem to pose much of a threat to the new hotness we got patrolling the air. It helps that AIs don’t need to eat or sleep.
Gary and Mr_Mechanical clear out a weird one, a type of UFO we haven’t seen before now.
Crewed by sectoids. We plug K.M. into the computer and they’re able to generally discern that it’s a patrol/observation ship of some sort.
Smaller fries just seem to be scouts.
Meauxdal, Felix, and Shahczyk come across one with particularly fiercely armed aliens. Plasma weapons, fired very often, by things we can’t see.
Felix and Shahczyk breach into the craft and exchange fire through a cramped hallway.
There’s a little vent thingie tied to the elerium reactor room, which Felix squeezes his rat bod into, going around back and chomping down on the unsuspecting snake monster blind-firing around the corner.
Yeesh.
Contrary to the name, there are male and female sneeple. You can tell because the female ones have a sweet rack, a trademark of snakes in general.
Outside, Meauxdal comes under pretty heavy fire from two out in the woods somewhere. They’re able to dome one of the sneeple, but the other gets close and coils them up.
Hearing the screaming on the walkie talkie, Shahczyk ducks out of the UFO and starts a slow advance with the M16.
A round through the neck gets the snakeman to drop its hold. Meauxdal slumps to the ground, trying to catch their breath.
The ensuing firefight is ugly. Shahczyk is hit dead-on in the chest and explodes into fucking fire, screaming.
There is no body remaining.
Meauxdal grabs a nearby log and, also screaming, beats the unholy thing unconscious.
Back at the base, the boys in the lab crack 'er open.
LOTTA EGGS
Some of the wounded are able to resume strike missions, so we put them to work.
Think we got this thing under control.
Hybrid Theory
Back at the lab, the vials of pink human goo lead to some interesting, ethically-questionable research. We sorta just side-step the whole “would you use the research of nazis” dilemma and just go with, “sure, I guess”. It is the main goal of our organization, to reverse-engineer alien tech for fun and profit.
This proves to give us a bit of a breakthrough on some of the cryptid research we had from earlier. We have just vats of these dead chupacabrii laying in storage.
Much like the hybrids have been melting down humans to create enyouthening stem cell cocktails, we can do something similar with cryptid juice.
It requires a new type of laboratory dedicated to biological processing, so, in it goes.
And soon enough…
CRYPTID JUICE CAPRI SUNS
Henceforth, these will be standard-issue and be known as crypti-suns.
This juice gets the remaining wounded in sicks bay back on their feet, their veins now coursing with the power of a really really big frog.
Back up to full readiness, at last.
Interrogation of the live hybrid prisoners from the convoy sheds a little more light on these things.
Whatever this “camouflage tech” is, it ain’t something they carry, and it still works on the corpses. The dead shifter Cuba put down stayed human-form on the slab for two days before the skin started peeling off.
We coordinate with Councilman 03 and identify a series of known gene-therapy clinics being helmed by the hybrids.
Best get to it.
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This sprite is stolen from Fallout, lol. I wonder how much fun a person could have going through and cataloguing all the stolen graphics in this megamod
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The lab’s able to patch up the blown-out alien drone we recovered with human tech. It ain’t pretty, but it works well enough to plug K.M.'s AI core into it.
Finally, at long last, our robit can shoot lasers.
We line up the three clinics passed on to us by Councilman 03.
One in Poland, one in the Ukraine, and one here in good ol’ Mother Russia.
The newly-juiced strike team piles into the Mutavore and heads out.
Prophylaxis
We set down just smack dab in the middle of a neighborhood in Częstochowa. We ain’t subtle.
Immediately spot two heavily-armed tacticool jobbers taking up position in two houses next to the ship.
They’re human.
Geoff and Cania trade fire with these guys for a few turns.
Meauxdal and Wisely start lighting up the house with the heavy laser.
They take three good hits each before they drop with a decidedly inhuman screech.
Patch on the shoulder is a symbol we’ve seen on some of the human goo tanks.
K.M. runs some of the text through the shitty translation program we’ve cobbled together from our earlier alien language research.
“Advent.”
Blood’s yellow.
Not human!!!
Advent Agent
This creature is very good at pretending to be human. A visual inspection can at best notice its slightly pale skin color. After about a week, the skin and muscles begin to degrade, the skin becomes grayish and the whites turn black. Among the captive’s possessions we discovered a set of micro-injections which can extend the duration of the disguise by several days.
Hybrids start spilling out of the clinic and into the streets, lobbing thick, fat, sticky ropes of some horrific acid chemical at the team.
DaleNixon takes one to the chest and it burns through the kevlar freakishly fast. He’s able to pop the buckles and drop it to the ground before it burns too deep into flesh. Gary pops a crypti-sun over the wound and that seems to at least neutralize it.
Chemogun
This weapon shoots jets of pressurized, highly active chemicals. It is absolutely deadly to living targets and unprotected machinery. The chemical mixture can be produced from common ingredients, but is highly unusual and likely made with extraterrestrial guidance.
The killing begins.
For the most part, the team holes up in the Mutavore and just picks them off from the safety of the drop door with alien laser rifles, drone zaps, and the good ol’ SVD. Very Millennium Falcon-ey.
GherkinForce in particular really fucks em up, some combination of luck and skill slurming together into a spicy kombucha of annihilation. He probably racks up 9 kills in this mission alone.
More hybrids on the second floor balcony of the clinic, a few in lab coats.
Cania decides to take the direct approach.
Watching their leadership blasted across main street seems to demoralize the rest of them. The team moves in, killing anything they see along the way.
An exception is made for one of the lab coats.
Geoff takes a taser stick to this thing and it goes down easy.
Hybrid Scientist
Hybrid scientists supervise human research and conduct experiments in biology, genetics and metapsychology. Their sharp intellect exceeds that of other hybrids, but their combat skills are mediocre. Capturing scientists alive should be a priority, as they often have extensive knowledge of alien research activities.
The remaining clinics fall with about as much difficulty.
In the first two, we find, well, a lot of medical machinery, the appearance of a normal clinic, a van. It’s pretty clear that, as we expected, this is where patients go in and never come out.
In others… shit gets freaky.
Tanks, full of hybrids, sectoids… embryos. All being pumped full of pink goo.
And then there’s the juice farms.
TacoTaskForce takes the cigar from his mouth with a “Sweet mother of geeead…”
Debrief
There is aaaaa shitload of info from these raids.
After a few hours in the X-Rat Pit, we’re able to glean another choice bit of intel out of one of the leader types…
…Confirming what we’ve suspected: The MiB, lackeys for Councilman 06/Gertrude, are working with the hybrids, presumably for vials of the pink refined human juice we recovered. Add to that Vincent’s ravings, it’s not much of a leap to deduce that Gertrude’s immortality juice is being wrung out of the disappeared citizens at Advent clinics.
Question is, what are the hybrids getting out of this? Is it enough that the 5-0 turns a blind eye to their horrific human juicero op?
We don’t have to wait long for our answer.
Well, fuck. They’ve taken Pogibi. IN OUR OWN MOTHER RUSSIA.
FUUUUUUUUUUUCCCCKKKKKKKKKK
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zap zap
Got a scientist!
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Fuck yesss
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“lockpicking lawyer here, and what I have for you today is a diplomatic level anti-intrusion facility constructed with extraterrestrial engineering from parts unknown.”
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@Team You’re welcome for taking a blast of caustic hybrid rope to the chest! @gary Thanks for the helpout!
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Holy shit. Just realized.
They actually made the thing from the old-ass X-Com: UFO Defense box art.
Wild.
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Ugh, making a gif-heavy post for this next one, and I can’t get these 500x316 px, 5 second gifs are all clocking in at over 10 mb each.
There’s gotta be some setting in Premiere I can use to cut these file sizes down without fuggin up the quality.
Edit: Okay it worked best if I imported it into Photoshop and converted it there.
This next post may or may not work, based on how the forum loads stuff. I guess let me know if it brings the browser to its knees or anything like that.
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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:
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.
Heading directly toward us.
Everyone got the same thought on their mind: that creepy warning from the sectoid navigator, weeks back.
Retaliation
We launch everything we got - Mr_Mechanical in the Mig, Wisely in the R-Type.
K.M. is currently plugged into the Icarus, and we ain’t got time to get him out. Guess he’s driving the bus this time.
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.
Literally everyone else 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.
Mr_Mechanical takes point, aiming to draw off the escorts.
First contact closes fast.
Light Fighter
These miniature UFOs are built for intercepting enemy vessels. They are extremely fast and deadly to any unarmed craft.
Mr_Mechanical cuts his climb, noses down and lines 'er up.
One of the plasma bolts scorches the side of the fuselage.
Mech gets into small arms range and lays on this lil’ fugger with depleted uranium shells.
Wisely, 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.
Wisely winces 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.
Second E.T. splashed, but at the cost of two missiles.
Plasma flashes past Wisely’s window, the IRST pinging two X-rays closing on his juicy 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.
Green globs of fire flicker past the window, really damn close.
Ain’t got time for this shit.
Mr_Mechanical radios to keep pushing forward. The glorious bastard blows by with - what else - Pugachev’s Cobra, dropping behind both interceptors.
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.
Just gotta hang in there a little longer…
Target lock.
One of them gets powdered, just a cloud of debris.
The other takes a hit and keeps chugging.
Mr_Mechanical 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.
Mr_Mechanical fumbles for the eject as the wing breaks off and he goes into a high-G spin.
The com goes dead.
MEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEECCCCCHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH
Wisely sheds a tear for his comrade-in-arms as he hits intercept range. The first burst of fire erupts from the top of the battleship.
His resolve is absolute.
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.
Wisely puts the R-Type into a corkscrew and dips low enough to get a shot at the underside.
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%.
Wisely grits his teeth.
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.
Wisely 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.
A beam digs straight across the rear of the R-Type, breaking the entire goddamn section off. The power cuts to all systems.
Wisely 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.
WISELYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY
K.M. takes fire from the descending monstrosity, dodging fire as best a dropship can.
Which is to say: Extremely poorly.
The aft engine of the Icarus evaporates, sending K.M. 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.
Please secure your restraints and prepare for 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.
K.M. 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.
Felix gnaws K.M.'s core out of the cockpit before the cabin fire melts his ass. Meauxdal gives Felix a pet and plugs K.M. into the drone.
Gary passes out flashlights and whatever laser weapons we got.
This is it. Us or them.
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holy shit
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great content
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hahahaha
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holy shit!!
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Just posting to voice my appreciation for the thread again and also to report for duty in the next batch of recruits you enlist to replenish all the guys that exploded in this last update.
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Wanna be an A.I.? I’m awakening one so I can use more vehicles.
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