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[[XCOM:_Gray_Dawn#Recaps]]<br>
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When we last left off...

Game #27 2/28/15

Days 36

Strangers in a Strange Land

When we last left off...

The team is trapped in a shared hallucination spawned by the Collective.  The aliens' goal?  To tease information from the minds of their human captives.  The flaw in their plan?  One of their own throwing off the yoke of slavery to help the humans!

With the aid of a Gray collaborator, Fayth has been freed from the mind trap.  Her efforts to guide AJ to free the other people trapped (through the use of simulated murder) has fallen on deaf ears; AJ thinks the extra voice in his head is just a symptom of crazy that AJ is disturbingly okay with, and as such, he is largely ignoring it.  The Gray pulls Fayth out of the simulation and tells her he has found a way for her to jump back in with a physical form.  Brock's machinery is suffering a malfunction (largely because Nate was unable to show up).  Fayth could jump into his avatar.  Alternatively, because of the widely varying perceptions of Lillian Kjelstad among the "actors" in the simulation, her presence in the simulation is tenuous, which would allow Fayth to slip in and animate her.  For reasons that may never be known, Fayth chooses not to inhabit a body that has the same genitalia as she, and decides to jump into Brock's bones.

From elsewhere, Doug, who has been written out of the aliens' simulation, finds the opportunity to jump in, as well.  Unfortunately for him, the only vacant body is the one that Fayth passed on.  Now, Doug knows more than he would ever care to about sweet, MILF-y boobies.  Of course, he will probably never tell anyone that he was secretly playing the role of Marie's mom.

Shenanigans ensue, and eventually the group meets in the sick bay (in one role or another).  Marie and AJ are there as patients, locking themselves away for their own good.  "Brock" and "Lillian" show up as observers.  Here, they are exposed to the mad ramblings of Doug, prisoner under guard in the adjacent treatment room.

Doug shares with them that, once again, he knows the TRUTH!!! that will save them, even if they probably won't heed his wisdom, yet again.  Since they've got nowhere else to be, they give his rant a listen.  He tells them that this world is a hallucination created by their shared hopes and expectations.  When they ask how he can be so sure, he further explains that they all expect him to know the answers, even--and especially--when they sound crazy.  His solution?  Everybody needs to shoot each other dead so they can jack out of this fake world and fight the aliens in the REAL one.

Some of Doug's words seem to ring true to AJ, who wants to hear more.  He climbs up through the ceiling tiles over to Doug's room, distracts the guard (which naturally succeeds) and springs him from the clink.

Marie is torn.  She has absolute faith in her sweet Dougie-Poo, but she's not so keen on all this face-shooting that he's advocating.  Fayth/Brock (Frock?  Broth?) knows the score on this one and tries to help out by handing her rifle over to Marie, who tosses it to the side so "Suicide Solution" Kamastafall can't get at it.  Doug/Lillian steps in, taking the gun.  Hilarity and mass murder ensue.  Fauxglas is left in the room full of dead people within the alien simulation.  The others wake up, alive and well in an alien ship,   proving--once again--that Doug was right all along.

Meanwhile, in the real world (whose Matrix-status is still hotly debated!), the team finds themselves in a series of med bays in an alien facility.  They meet the supposedly benevolent Gray who introduces himself as "Collier."  He explains that they were abducted ten days ago.  In the last few hours, a group of humans attacked the ship they are on and killed much of the crew.  The human attack was repulsed, but it gave Collier the opportunity to free the humans from the "Masters'" mind maze.  He says that they need to leave soon before reinforcements arrive.  They also find Douglas, who was being kept separate from the rest of the team because of course he was.

Only a handful of the team was freed, though, and if they jack the others out from the outside, Collier warns that the Masters will be alerted instantly; as it stands, they believe the simulation is still running.  They don't want to leave the rest of their people, so Marie, Fayth and Douglas work feverishly to try and alter the neural connections on all the other survivors to make them wireless and mobile.  While searching around, the team finds a couple of those humans that attacked the ship, and takes the gear from their corpses.  They also take their radios and establish contact with a heavily-accented X-Com agent stationed just two miles away at Vauxhall Cross.  With the others working to free those trapped in the Matrix, AJ and Carville make a run for it.  They clear the perimeter outside the craft where a small group of aliens are setting up defenses, then run assholes and elbows through the rubble that is the heart of London, their alien hospital gowns flapping in the breeze.  They don't stop their sprint until they reach the nearby X-Com bunker hidden beneath the ruins of Vauxhall Cross, the former headquarters of MI6 and James Bond's work address.  There, they meet the German voice on the radio.

Back on the alien ship, Marie works feverishly.  Each neural helmet upgrade only takes a little while, but with the number of people she must work on, she's easily got eight hours or work ahead of her...