Back in the Saddle
XCOM:_Gray_Dawn#Recaps
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When we last left off...
Game #28 3/14/15
Days 36-37
Back in the Saddle
When we last left off...
The team had managed to escape the alien Matrix. AJ and Carville cleared the alien "medical ship" in Hyde Park, London, and made their way to the ruins of Vauxhall Cross nearby. Beneath is an X-Com bunker.
Marie, Douglas and Fayth work feverishly to try and make the rest of the survivors mobile. This would allow them to be pulled out of the Matrix elsewhere without garnering the attention of the ominously named "Masters" that Collier, the Gray rebel, is so worried about. While Marie's goal may be theoretically possible, the sheer number of procedures ahead means the whole process will take at least eight hours. Collier is worried that this will be too long, and that reinforcements will arrive long before the task is complete. She also says that since no one has interrupted them yet, it might be possible that the only crew left on the ship are the Commander and bridge crew, because they absolutely will not abandon that position. Collier proposes that they may be able to rush the bridge and take them out.
They consider this option, but decide first to try and disable the ship's repulsor drives to prevent the ship from moving while they are on it and separating them from the rest of their team. Douglas volunteers to go with Collier to the engineering deck. He is also armed with a basic schematic of the ship from Marie and a knife. The two depart, and shortly, Douglas realizes that Collier is leading him off the path, to parts unknown. He follows suspiciously, preparing to face betrayal at every corner. Collier leads him to a room where most of the dead X-Com agents had been moved to. She gestures to their bodies and suggests he salvage some of their weapons and equipment. Douglas breathes a sigh of relief and arms himself with something better than a knife. He also loots some C4 from one of the soldiers, and the duo make their way to the engine room.
Douglas is surrounded by humming machinery and indecipherable widgets. He paces around the room, touching the gleaming alien alloys here and there until he finds the one that juuuust feels right. His instincts tell him this is the component he must destroy. He tamps the plastic explosive down into the mechanism, then fiddles with the timers and detonators until he figures out how they work. Armed with all the demolitions training that Hollywood circa 2003 could teach him, he primes the explosive, then moves out and trips the detonator. The charge goes off, and he goes back into the room to see if his handiwork was up to snuff. It simultaneeously was and was not, but more on that in a second.
Oh, how time flies! Douglas is quickly overcome by something and passes out. A moment later, a frantic Collier shows up in the med bay, urging Fayth to come to Douglas' aid. Fayth rushes out and finds that Douglas has been knocked out by some kind of acute radiation sickness. She determines that he is not in life-threatening danger, but that is probably due to the fact that the diminutive Collier risked her own life trying to drag him out of the hot zone and into safety. She gets him up on his feet, and they reunite to plan their assault on the bridge.
Meanwhile, AJ and Carville are welcomed to X-Com bunker Echo or "Underworld," as it is known to X-Com staff. They are ushered to the sick bay where corpsmen tend to their injuries and get them some shoes. They are introduced to the base commander, a grizzled German named Manfred Mederow. He informs AJ that their topside perimeter alarms were tripped, and a ground force looks to be in-bound toward the ship in Hyde Park, designated UFO-14. AJ tells him of their dilemma there and the plan to rescue their people. Mederow says that the aliens will get there long before their mission is complete, and asks if AJ and Carville will help him cut off the reinforcements. AJ gets in contact with the rest of the team on the ship and finds that their plans have changed. He hatches a plan of his own with Commander Mederow to hold off the aliens with mortar fire and heavy weapons using some of the base's support staff. He and Carville are given access to the base's armory and they reunite with the team aboard UFO-14. They bring a bunch of grenades, because enough explosives can usually solve just about any problem, right?
AJ's plan is stupid-simple and befitting a demolitions expert such as he. The team approaches the bridge unopposed. They gather outside, open the door and throw in a volley of grenades, then shut the door so no one inside can run out or throw the explosives back at them.
This approach turns a potentially dicey confrontation into a walk in the park, a freshly napalmed park. The door to the bridge is blown off. The Gray pilot and gunner are shredded, and the ship commander, another Gray, staggers out from behind a wrecked partition and catches one of AJ's bullets with his big brainy head.
With the ship clear and Mederow and his forces holding off the reinforcements, the team gets the rest of their people back to the real world. They form a debriefing assembly line to minimize their people's disorientation and confusion and eventually get them safely back to Bunker Echo. Those that have survived, anyway; several of the civilians and soldiers are nowhere to be found, and one of the children they rescued is AWOL, presumably dead. Douglas tries vainly to get any information from the computers on the bridge, but finds them resolutely busted. "Explosives giveth, and explosives taketh away" is the lesson of the day, and no amount of pouting will change that.
The core of the team immediately wants to get back in the action. They want to get back home. Douglas' looting of the X-Com soldiers came up with a map that had the location of a grounded UFO nearby submerged in the Round Pond in Regent's Park. According to Manfred Mederow, this was the damaged ship UFO-14 towed here, and Fayth has her hopes as to what this might imply. After gearing up, they move out to investigate.
It is quickly discovered that the only one among them with any formal swimming skill is Douglas, so he volunteers to dive into Round Pond and see if he can gain access to the ship. Eventually he finds a kind of force field around the access ramp that is keeping the water out and he makes his way inside. Much like Fauxglas, he isn't really keen on keeping people in the loop. This leads to Fayth, topside, noticing that her brother has been underwater and hasn't surfaced for several minutes. Since Marie's efforts to build a raft have not reached the point where her MacGuyvercraft can actually float anywhere, she dives in to see if Doug (Douglas!) is okay, fearing he may have drowned or been jumped by aliens.
Finally, Douglas gets the idea that maybe he should let the others know that he hasn't drowned. Plus, there is a spooky clanging noise coming from somewhere and he doesn't want to tackle it alone. He heads out and runs into Fayth while she swims for the access ramp.
Thanks to the murkiness of the soot-choked pond water, neither one realizes the other is not an alien, and they almost kill each other. The Ref reels in horror and has flashbacks to the last time Dieter went off the deep end and wonders if every incarnation of Fayth's brother is just doomed to turn on his allies. Fears are allayed when Douglas chooses not to stab his sister in the face, and identifies Fayth in the dim glow of a cyalume stick. They get onboard. Fayth recognizes the layout as similar to the Firestorm. They find a couple spent shell casings, suggesting that humans have indeed been here.
Again, the clanging sounds. The two go to investigate. It seems to be coming from the cargo bay. The hall outside looks like some heavy fighting has taken place here. They approach and open the door, at which point a grenade flies out at them. Douglas and Fayth dive into the cargo bay to avoid the blast and confront their attacker.
The massive limb of a construction drone sweeps toward Fayth. Douglas shoulders her out of the way and takes the hit, getting pinned by the enraged machine. Atop the hull, one of the fine manipulator arms wields an M249 SAW and another grenade. On the leg holding down her brother, Fayth sees a word etched in Brock's handwriting. "Alamo!" Fayth screams. "It's me!"
The machine stops its assault, and carefully offers the grenade it is holding to Fayth. She finds the discarded pin and safes the weapon before pulling it from the drone's grip. Alamo lets Douglas go, then hops around gleefully like a giant puppy whose master has just come home. They see a large stack of dead aliens. The most basic forensic analysis would reveal that Alamo had ambushed each of them as they passed the door, dragged them in here and killed them. They also see a large stack of boxes and crates. Brock's over-zealous planning prior to the Base assault provided enough supplies and tarps to allow Alamo to stack them all around and hide from the aliens. Fayth makes contact with the ship's computer and finds that the aliens have fixed their ship. The computer worked in tandem with Alamo, having the drone lay in wait until the ship was repaired, then set it loose on the alien repair crew. Thus, the two have made sure the Firestorm was ready to receive her crew properly. Fayth warms up the repulsors, and moves the ship back toward Vauxhall Cross.
Reunited with their ship and their equipment, the team offers to help Commander Mederow with one of his most pressing current operations, but tells him that they have to get back home. He would really like them to stay and bolster his forces, since he lost his entire tactical team trying to rescue them, but they offer to get him some soldiers from back in Elma, which is a compromise he can live with.
Before trying to tackle the UFO terrorizing Bunker Golf, "The Doughnut," the team takes care of a few smaller matters. One is the fact that earlier, AJ had picked up an alien plasma pistol and saw the indicators on it come to life. He suspects he may have one of those rice-sized implants in his fingertip, and he wants Fayth to remove it. Maybe she can give it to Brock, he suggests. At the very least they can study it. She tries to give him a local anesthetic, but it doesn't numb him, and the contents of the injection just seep out of the puncture. This is strange to say the least, so Fayth must investigate further.
She uses the equipment in the sick bay to perform pre-op scans of AJ's hand, and finds that his hand appears to be almost entirely metallic. It feels like a hand, moves like one and it even hurt when Fayth jabbed him with a needle. They opt to leave this mystery be for now, and turn to Collier to find out what is going on.
The Gray confirms that the hand is artificial, and that several of them were augmented with replacement limbs that were lost during the assault on the Firestorm. None of them remember this attack, which brings back one of Collier's earlier comments, that she could restore their memories if they so chose. The team is leery of letting the alien fiddle with their minds, but someone has to know what happened. Fayth volunteers, and Collier gives her an injection that will supposedly dissolve the chemical blocks in her brain and allow her to remember the events that the masters wanted them all to forget.
Whatever Fayth remembers, it does not change the fact that they have escaped their alien captors, recovered their ship, and made contact with European X-Com forces. They are not out of the fight by a long shot, and soon, they will be riding back home. Or, to Elma, at the very least.
