Do cyberdiscs have individual intelligence? Has the AI-on-AI violence begun? 
this thread is so fun to keep up with. if you need a squad member to do some absolutely nasty work i’d love to sign up !
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I looked into this… it says the cyberdiscs and sectopods (which we haven’t encountered yet) are psionically controlled, remotely. I don’t think the aliens have true AI, since they don’t have or know how to use the Alenium Shards used to make AI Cores.
Seems like the aliens use a lot of wetware and biotech, but don’t have any sentient machines.
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Hell yeah, stim me(3) up, coach. I want back in the game!
Told ya so, coach. Third me has got this.
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Also, too simpleminded and self-assured to be damaged by psychic attacks
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not sure I want to commit to changing all instances of berserk status in my FFT patch to “Italian” but seriously considering it
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Basta! Basta!
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The wounded are - you guessed it - spilling out into the halls.
Few survivors of the retaliation made it out unscathed, and we’ve all but exhausted our supply of cryptid juice getting them stabilized.
We start looking at more creative options.
The boys in the lab and the grizzled sawbones in the medbay are able to collaborate on a modified version of the containment tanks we recovered from some of the more grisly hybrid clinics.
Hybrids build their technology with human machinery, so, it works with our existing power systems and relatively easy to function, even if we don’t quite understand how it works. Interlinked tanks allow us to just cycle our supply of energetic blood plasma through the cryptid cocktail into which each agent is submerged.
Elsewhere, Gary is not taking the loss of her arm super well.
In short, despite our rapid advances in reverse-engineered alien tech, we still don’t know jack about how the E.T.s are able to merge machine and flesh together across dozens of outlandish alien species. It involves a level of bio-engineering mastery we aren’t even close to understanding.
What we are able to do is pull some of the Red Dawn bio-augmentation research out of mothballs, merge it with what little we grasp of the alien’s breeding vats, and provide a way to re-grow enough nerve endings to make a functional prosthetic.
Has the added bonus of making her faster, stronger, and hardier. With no side-effects probably I’m sure maybe!
The prosthetic we’re able to piece together, to put it mildly, blows hogg, but it is functional.
With the new nerve endings hooked up, she rests.
Back in medbay, installation is complete, and early results are promising. The new juice vats cut recovery time fully in half. Not bad at all.
Sick Bay
The Sick Bay allows for agents’ hospitalization right in the base, which shortens recovery time. It can also be used for other medical procedures.
8128, coated with plasma burns, drifts through a calm and soundless void as the pods work their magic.
His mind, unburdened by the worries and distractions of his bi-pedal comrades, reaches out into the black, across the great, unfathomable abyss. He hears a familiar master calling out to him.
Calling him home.
He awakens.
Dreamscape
Are you for real
8128 opens his eyes to a surreal, alien dreamscape.
Crystalline structures grow like weeds out of glowing pools of Energetic Blood Plasma. The smells, the sounds… they feel right.
He looks down at his body.
YEAH SO HE’S A WEREWOLF???
This here in the biz is known as a “fursona”, and fellas, it’s a pretty dope one: 8128 is 9 feet tall, has glowing blue fur, has all the powers of Sonic and Shadow combined, wields a magnum dong and psionic claw attacks that have 100% accuracy at 35 damage per swipe.
HELL yeah.
He explores.
The sky is utterly alien, stars of an alignment no Earther has ever laid eyes on. And yet, he knows them like the back of his paw.
He recalls a time before his masters brought him to Earth, thousands of years ago.
They were fleeing the Others.
8128 clashes with several of these entities as he lumbers through the dreamscape.
They are feeble, but still, they lash at his sanity with psionic attacks, trying to dominate him once again. This was how they controlled his people, in the long-ago. Before they broke free, and fled.
He arrives before a fortress, ancient and teeming with psionic energy. It’s a construct of the mind, like everything else here.
It refuses his entry with illusions and psionic barriers, but he claws through each one in a dogged rage too simple and ballistic for any mental trick to genuinely impede.
The walls tear, shimmer, and evaporate, and the beast plods into the building. He surveys the minds of his masters.
Statues, paintings, icons to their greatness litter the hallways and marble staircases.
8128 effortlessly extinguishes dreamsprites he prowls through each opulent room of this construct.
In his paw forms a blade of pure edgelord, formed from the psionic energy of his slain foes.
He hunts.
The statues and figures seem to melt as these sprites are killed, as if the matter holding them together is falling apart.
Cloth on the tapestries begins to rot, fires begin to flicker and extinguish.
He heads up the stairs, uncontested by the few remaining sprites.
In a bedroom of some sort, he surveys the grisly form of his masters in mirrors and picture frames, lost in a state of endless atrophy.
Atop the bed is a single slice of delicious cake.
8128 regards this for a moment, and messily devours it, splattering the mirrors and frames with psionic frosting.
The world falls away, and he is back at the Red Forest, healing.
Psychobabble
What follows is, essentially, a sort of psionic de-briefing, beamed to 8128’s teammates in the recovery tanks.
They struggle to put into words what they were shown.
The “masters” that were shown were a sort of alien we’ve never seen before. We can only guess they were either the “Nephilim” described in David Vincent’s file, or the “Ethereals”, mentioned by the same file, and our muton captive.
Whatever the case, this experience has unlocked something in all of us. An ancient ability deep in our genetic code.
We’ve been made aware of something we’ve only heard described in our interrogations of the Black Lotus clan - psionic power wielded by humans.
We might actually be able to start putting practical use to this intel. The pointdexters in the lab get to work whiteboarding some sort of psionic-training facility.
For 8128’s part, the team swears they can communicate with him when they’re in the tanks.
Been weird week.
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phenomenal
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This mod is absolutely fuckin bananas
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flavor diagrams very effective, tasty
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holy shit
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The wrench hoggs over at the Shatterdome have been pulling double shifts since the retaliation, hurriedly prototyping our next-gen replacements for the Icarus and R-Type. It’s slow-going, particularly for the interceptor craft.
The R-Type was the absolute peak of what we can achieve with the resources we have, and it’s hard to do better than our best. For one, there is universal agreement that it needs to be a lot tougher. That means layering alien alloys, which means weight, and heavy thing fly bad.
The dropship, at least, is easier. Leveraging the advanced metallurgical techniques we squeezed out of the alien engineers, as well as their batshit multitool and welder tech, we’re able to create a craft that is light and fuel-efficient, yielding a far greater distance at an accelerated rate.
It will carry on the name Icarus, and remain stationed at the Red Forest. We’ll also keep the Vulture in service at Dantero Bay, with a separate team to run parallel operations.
Trying not to keep all our eggs in one basket for ah… reasons.
Work also progresses well on the cyberdisc disassembly. The anti-grav units are simply beyond our ability to understand, but we at least have collected them. The general design of the craft is small, unmanned, and powered by a constant psionic connection. We believe we can re-create this by actually plugging a mind into it. The research team gets started.
Elsewhere, the Council has been ruthlessly efficient in covering up the horrible demise of thousands at Krasnoyarsk, at the hands of fucking intergalactic aliens.
What was briefly all across the internet is now just a trail of broken links, suspended accounts, and disappeared reporters. The official line is that the destruction was the result of a major earthquake. The media machine kicks in, and this earthquake story is all across daytime TV, the news, discussion panels, comedy shows, you name it. The people of Krasnoyarsk certainly know better, but, what could they possibly do? Their version of events is conclusively wrong.
For X-Com, work is scattered.
Councilman 03 contacts us to assist the spetsnaz in defending “key assets” from “bad actors”. No further details. We take the new ship out for a spin.
Siege
En route on the Icarus, the team receives the briefing. We’re to repel an inbound assassination attempt by some group called “Exalt”.
Ugh… Americans…
The mission is pretty well beneath us, considering what we’ve recently been through, but it’s Council work. Need to keep this relationship strong if we’re ever to delicately approach Councilman 03 about the Gertrude Ellison situation.
The team ropes out of the Icarus and onto the roof of an unlisted building outside of Donetsk, Ukraine. Geoff orders the team to take up sniper and mortar positions on the roof.
New recruit by the name of yarusenai gets the task of barricading the politicians and Council agents on the second floor.
Outside, Geoff spots the first set of contacts. Then the next, and the next. They’re seemingly in all directions, surrounding the building.
Once the killing begins, we’re able to discern the enemy is about as well-armed as the spetsnaz. No laser weapons, nothing more than conventional arms, but, they do have explosives, like us.
Geoff puts binoculars on the arm patch.
The team begins to plaster the surrounding area with mortar fire, revealing the enemy and chipping away at their morale. A few of them start to panic.
A hotshot new recruit by the name of Mr_Mechanical funnels the lot through the front door, and gives the order to loose the napalm.
Pretty sure this violates every Geneva Convention in the book, but we got an alien war to wage here, folks!!! We’ll let the poindexters and pencil-pushers on the Council figure out what was and was not a “morally abhorrent” “war crime” when they’re back home, safe and sound.
On the east side of the building, an Exalt strike team breaches the first-floor wall, catching a suit in the process. He starts bleeding out on the stairs.
Tegiminis, Geoff, and BoojIIIboy lick some sniper shots from the roof, taking out the remaining goons. Mr_Mechanical gets a medkit on the guy.
Overall, pretty successful op. Whatever this Exalt hit squad was, they’re sharply outclassed by X-Com’s advanced tech. We sell the recovered arms on the grey market for a decent profit.
Interrogations turn out a pretty solid lead on where this group is headquartered. If they’re a threat to the Council, it’ll only help our standing with them to assist.
The lot of them genuinely don’t seem to be able to tell us what their goal is, or why they were attacking the Council agents, or even what they want.
All they seem to want is… this thing, this small metallic orb, which we’re pretty sure is alien. We recovered one on every single Liquidator.
Psiclone
This strange device has a potent psychoactive effect. It significantly improves the victim’s reflexes and morale, but also severely alters their mind, causing complex hallucinations.
Actually, the EXALT members claim these hallucinations are in fact visions caused by genuine psychic activity, since the device heightens one’s psionic perception and enables a human to ‘tune in’ to these alien signals, albeit erratically.
8128 isn’t able to pick up any ambient psionic potential on these jags. We run a few experiments with an active psiclone in the room, and the Exalt thugs somehow manifest low-level psi abilities. They gain purpose and a level of competence that is striking. They’re very tight-lipped from here on out.
Once returned to the gulag, they go through a sort of psionic withdrawal that most don’t survive. Those that do are left completely lost.
Councilman 03 agrees with our determination that this is some kind of alien plot that must be snuffed out. We set our sights on Exalt headquarters.
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The crossover we’ve all been waiting for