Uneasy Alliances
XCOM:_Gray_Dawn#Recaps
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When we last left off...
Game #9 6/01/14
Day 8
The early morning hours of day 8 finds AJ and Brock scouting out the Briggs nursery on the South Bank Road, thanks to a flyer AJ found the day before. It offered a bounty for "Spics, Slants and Niggers," with bonuses offered for children of said ethnic groups. This being an unquestionably wicked proposal, these two stalwarts cannot stand idly by and allow this evil to go unpunished. So, they lie in wait to gather intel in order to motivate their more standoff-ish counterparts into the realm of righteous indignation.
What they find is a sort of "collection point" for severed heads. Then, they witness someone dropping off a captive; none other than Janelle, the girl Doug had tried so hard to rescue from skinheads just a few days earlier. This time, however, she has her infant child with her, a two-fer for the dick-bag that has captured her this time 'round. With stern warnings from the flyer (and evidence to support the claims), AJ and Brock are reluctant to try and rescue the girl and her child for fear of incurring the wrath of one or more snipers keeping a scope on the collection point. While they wait, Janelle's father shows up and proves the wisdom behind their hesitance; he tries to rescue his daughter, and gets his skull evacuated for his trouble. AJ and Brock cook up a plan to drop a tracking device (Draco's bracelet) onto the pickup vehicle.
When the vehicle shows up (a pickup, no less), the duo track it (with Marie's help) to an incongruous mansion set just off the South Bank Road. The out-of-place edifice is located on a hill surrounded by several hundred yards of wide-open space, a perfect kill-zone in the case that a bunch of Aryan Brotherhood-types had appropriated the place from the hands of a pair of local homosexual lottery winners (which they completely did, 'cause they're dicks that way).
After their initial reconnoiter, AJ and Brock get the rest of the gang on board with turning over the Pershing clan's apple cart by staging a rescue of Janelle. Doug buys in and uses an assault drone to probe the backwoods of the estate, looking for a likely insertion point. What he finds, however, is completely unexpected.
A squad of men in power armor (eerily identical, in more ways than one, to the the men he encountered on Tiger Mountain) are laying in wait, giving every indication that they are about to assault the mansion, as well. Doug lays low with his drone, managing to avoid detection, while the dudes in power armor position to advance. AJ and Brock draw up a plan to use this other group's attack as a diversion under which they will stage their own insertion.
Their plans are stymied somewhat when one of the power armor guys draws a bead on them and opens up on Brock's truck as he hurtles across the killing field. The shot from the coilgun narrowly misses, however, only peppering the driver's side door with rocks kicked up by the near-miss. Brock whips a perfect bitch and rolls the tailgate of his truck up to the terraced staircase leading up to the front door of the mansion.
AJ leads the charge up to the front door while Brock covers his advance. Brock tries to take out a sniper on the mansion's third floor, but his fire is completely defeated by the defender's highly effective cover. Marie tries to follow after AJ, but the sniper, armed with a stupidly high-caliber rifle, almost ends her participation in this story right then and there. Brock provides some much-needed covering fire, giving Marie some much-needed safety.
As Marie hunkers under cover of the terraced approach to the front door, determined not to emerge until the way is made safe, one of the power armor guys rapidly advances from her flank. He uses some arcane power to calm her to almost a catatonic degree. While the strange interloper is soothing the beautiful academic who is way out of her element, Doug, the supposed boyfriend of said damsel-in-distress, swoops to the rescue. He blasts his assault drone into the room of the sniper trying his damnedest to kill Marie. Doug unleashes one of the drone's weapons he understands is not not the explosive missile, and finds the mystery weapon is horrifically lethal, anyway. The sniper is left in a heap of quivering gore, having been perforated way more times than is necessary by flechettes. At the top of the stairs, AJ wages a daring one-man assault on the front door, evidently unaware that none of his comrades are following close behind, backing him up...Brock manages to deliver a head-shot to one of the redneck defenders at the front door, who was ready to dump a mag at point-blank range into AJ. Captain Kamastafall manages to butt-stroke the other guard with his rifle, neutralizing the opposition.
With AJ safe at the front door, Brock emerges from the bed of the pickup to verbally engage the trooper holding Marie under his spell. The man in power armor has the formidable Brock holding an assault rifle aimed at his unarmored noggin, while the other man holds a coilgun aimed vaguely in the direction of Brock. In the stranger's favor, he seems to be protecting Marie (in a strangely violating sort of way), even though he shot at Brock's truck just a moment ago. The other power armor troops and a squad or two of regular soldiers appears to be keeping the rest of the White Supremacist forces busy at the back of the property.
AJ makes entry into the house, and meets up with one of the power armor troopers himself. Perhaps because of the color of AJ's skin, the trooper holds his fire, doubting that he is with the dirtbags occupying the mansion. With a brief dialogue, the two strangers join forces, and make their way to the sniper's nest to discover what mess Doug had already made there. Meanwhile, Doug's telepresence through his drone has moved to the scene at the front, where the apparent leader of the power armor troops (who Doug recognizes as a spitting image of a young Vladimir Gurov) is holding Marie. In a show of good faith, Gurov releases his hold on Marie.
Gurov and his troops do not seem immediately hostile toward the members of the Elma Resistance, and are surprisingly helpful, letting them know that they have found some captives held in the garage, which is why AJ and his crew are there. Gurov lets it be known that his men are here looking for a hidden facility, and that this mansion, built on top of a man-made hill, seemed a likely hiding spot. When it turns out that there is no secret base hidden here, Gurov loses interest, and is more than willing to cede the spoils to the Elma Resistance. The group also finds Jules Saint, tucked away in a research sweat-shop down in the basement. The Pershings had pressed him into service trying to unravel the mystery behind some high-strength fabric they had discovered, hoping he would be able to make body armor for them.
Fortunately, the Elma Resistance rescued Saint before he made much progress, but he also tells them about some other strange artifacts the rednecks had procured, one of which is "robot parts," which Fayth is able to identify as limb segments from one of the Construction Drones that are so fond of her. This makes Fayth extremely interested in the well-being of said drones, and draws the group's attention back to Draco's buried ship. Thanks to pressing recent events, the group felt the need to put the existence of the ship on the back burner (and considering it was buried, they probably felt justified doing so!) When they arrive on the scene, they find evidence that a battle had taken place, and one drone has been destroyed with anti-tank weapons. Another drone, with a blown off leg, is camped out at the entrance to the ship, holding a chunk of timber in a manipulator. It is playing whack-a-mole with redneck forces trapped in the ship. Fayth beckons the damaged drone away, while AJ and Brock charge underground and neutralize the intruders.
Piecing the evidence together, Fayth realizes that the access bays for the construction drones are located on the lower levels of Draco's ship (which are now several stories underground), and that Draco had left the drones topside to aid in camouflaging the vessel once he'd excavated a cavity to hold it. With this in mind, she realizes that the most likely explanation as to why the Pershings discovered the site was because the SUV-sized drones milling around without any direction had likely led them right to the ship. With that, she pushes that they take the drones back to their base of operations, to make them safe.
In an effort to take care of a few other loose ends before they come back to bite them in the ass, AJ also makes sure that the out-bound power lines have been cut (so no outside entities can prey on their local source of electricity), he checks on the WSP's incursion point (to find that it has been abandoned and that they did not leave their potentially handy M104 Wolverine for them to scoop up), and he begins drawing up a plan to further secure Draco's ship so no one else can get their grubby hands on it.
Our heroes have helped deal a major blow to the Pershings, with the unlikely assistance of a group that showed every sign of being their enemy. Trust toward the Red Hand faction has hardly been achieved, especially since the group suspects that the hidden facility they are looking for is probably Project Covenant Bunker November. The group likely has more questions than answers.
