Difference between revisions of "The War Hits Home"

Latest revision as of 20:20, 24 November 2014

XCOM:_Gray_Dawn#Recaps
Previous...Next

When we last left off...

Game #12 7/13/14

Day 12

The night begins at the alien safe house. The cavalry has arrived, and the residents have fled. Brock sweeps the buildings and finds no further resistance. While investigating the wreckage of the house, he finds a crawlspace access. When he checks to see if any aliens are hiding out, he finds a long tunnel that looks to have been dug with excavator probes. He walks the tunnel while Doug follows its path overland. The other end of the 300' passage opens into a clearing beyond a small hill behind the scene of the battle. From his vantage point at the crest of the hill, Doug is able to see a familiar pattern: a UFO landing site! He had seen similar markings in photos from a site in South America near Project Covenant Bunker Kilo, or "Lovecraft."

It appears as though the aliens have retreated. Doug calls home to check on his folks, and finds that his mother has fallen suddenly ill. Doug's dad tells him to get Fayth there. The group hauls ass to the Wilson farmstead. They find Mr. Wilson performing CPR on his wife, as her condition has rapidly degraded from worse to "knockin' on Heaven's door." Fayth takes over for him while Doug, Brock and Marie try to figure out what happened to her.

Mr. Wilson explains that they were getting ready to turn in for the night. His wife took her pills with a glass of water from the bathroom, then she started feeling poorly a few minutes later. Doug gets his mom's pills and hands them over to Marie to check for tampering. Brock suspects the water as the culprit. He escorts Marie to Doug's barn (as that is where her chemistry stuff is located). Doug continues to check the bedroom and bathroom. Remembering what Brock had said about the water, he checks it, dipping a finger in the flow from the tap and tasting it. Why? To check for poison, obviously!

While keeping Marie from turning into a phobic mess of neuroses in the barn, Brock is keeping his dim eyes peeled, and spies Doug through the bathroom window as sees him convulse and fall. Brock and Marie rush back in as Fayth is calling "Clear!" She doesn't even know what has happened to Doug because she has had to break out the defibrillator paddles and is shocking her mother.

Brock collects some tap water and emphatically tells Marie, "Test this!" Slowly, Doug regains consciousness, but he feels woozy and his ears are ringing. He has likely been infected by whatever toxin has poisoned his mother. Marie is able to get a water sample under a microscope in short order, and quickly finds microbe-sized nano-thingies in it. With their cursory studies of alien nanotech, Marie believes these nanites in this state and medium would be very fragile; direct sunlight, radiation or even an electrical jolt would probably render them inert. Brock strips a wire from a nearby lamp and zaps Doug. The ringing in his ears goes away and he soon feels better. After Fayth hit her with the paddles, Mrs. Wilson seems to have stabilized, as well, but her condition is much worse, and is not improving. They need to get her to the hospital.

Enroute, they get word out to Colonel Ruger that the city water may be contaminated and he sends deputies to the water treatment plant to shut things down. When they get to the hospital, it is a madhouse; dozens of people are there. This incident is reaching epidemic proportions.

Doug takes the opportunity of being at the hospital to get a head-to-toe X-ray scan done (to "knock out any lingering nano") but also to check for secret implants that he's always suspected malevolent entities may have secreted onto his person. Much to his horror (really?) he finds a rice-sized capsule under the skin behind his ear. Fayth removes it and turns it over to Marie, because when people find science-y shit in their possession, their natural urge is to toss it her way like a hot potato. With her oven mitts of science, she determines it is a human-made tracking device. Doug wants everybody to get scans now, just in case. Because with the alien menace looming, it probably won't be a few extra Roentgens that kills any of them...

Other than some old buried shrapnel in Doug and Fayth's dad, everyone comes up clean (not counting the bullet Brock tucked behind his own ear before the scan just to mess with Doug). There is some debate as to what to do with the bug. Marie wants to get it the hell away from them all, to lead whoever is tracking them away. Doug, however, realizes that if the watchers already know where they are, and see the bug moving off, then their cover is blown and they might shut the pincers of some trap on them. They must keep it near him, he says, to perpetuate the ruse. Marie is bowled over by his bravery and sacrifice, and very nearly swoons. Doug's valiance is quickly rendered moot, however, when Marie discovers that the bug is powered by waste heat from Doug's body, and outside of his body it will go dead right about...when Marie's phone rings. It is her mother, calling out of the blue to see if Doug is okay. Mrs. Kjelstad doesn't explain herself, but the cause/effect going on here doesn't leave much to the imagination.

Fayth stays at the hospital to take care of her mom and help with the influx of nano-poisonings. Doug asks her to try and get the story out of Dad about where the shrapnel came from. Fayth has a small stress-related meltdown at her brother and his approach to very personal issues. They part ways a bit on the frosty side, allowing Doug, Brock and Marie to unravel the next mystery of the night: What the hell happened to the Assault Drones?

They figured out earlier that two of the four drones were straight up missing, but with family members threatening to keel over, burglary kind of went on the back burner. Marie is able to activate video feed from the missing drones and finds that they are flying west. Though they are shut out of the drones' flight controls, Doug and Marie manage to jack into their audio send/receive and are able to talk to the person controlling them, who goes by the callsign "Faraday." This person claims to have used an artifact that has long been in his possession to take control of the drones because the prison break at Stafford Creek has left him under siege by marauding escaped cons. Doug recognizes Faraday's name from his time spent trolling the seedy underbelly of the Ham radio-verse. (Doug's callsign is Cassy, by the way, short for Cassandra; an apt moniker for a harbinger of Doom such as he.) Faraday is also a fellow UFOlogist. Because of Ham operator licensing guidelines, Doug is able to locate Faraday's meatspace coordinates. Brock borrows the Skyranger, and the group stages an impromptu extraction for the beleaguered voice on the radio.

Brock flies like a man possessed (possessed with the desire to improve his piloting skill!) and they see some of the chaos from the prison break: barricades along SR 105, and escapees and other...things...roaming the land. They spot the soaring yagi arrays and home in on Faraday's dilapidated house just off the highway. Brock brings the helo in for a landing, as mutated human creatures break through the nearby treeline. AJ and Carville on the door guns call out contact rear, and open fire. The windows of the run-down house are barricaded as though to ward off a zombie apocalypse, and Doug sees multiple shotgun blasts tear through the house's door from the inside. The door is kicked down, and a svelte young woman, dressed in survival gear and wielding a Franchi SPAS 12. She darts toward the helicopter and dives in under the curtain of AJ's withering suppressive fire.

Faraday turns out to be a girl. A rather attractive, smart and caustic girl. The only unoccupied person for her to interact with in the back of the Skyranger is Marie. As one can imagine, the meeting is unpleasant. They regard each other awkwardly, each probably feeling like they are looking at a grotesque funhouse-mirror image of themselves. Brock doesn't mind so much, because Janice Faraday is kind of hot. And she's not Doug's arm candy. On the way back, Doug asks Brock to hover near the top of Stafford Creek's water tower so he can get a water sample, to see if the nano-toxins have spread this far. The tests come back negative; this sample is as clean as prison water can be.

The team gets word from Colonel Ruger that his deputies dispatched to the water treatment plant have not checked in. The team leaps into action, but because of the potential for an encounter with aliens, they hit the armory of the Elma Resistance, first. Brock looks longingly at the fifty-caliber sniper rifle they looted from the White Supremacists, and remembering how a Behemoth could shrug off rifle fire like hail, he scoops it up with some AP rounds. Marie grabs a few grenades, and Doug integrates Janice into the team by giving her control of his one operational Assault Drone. He will utilize one of the Scout Drones and provide intel to the team.

The treatment plant is just on the outskirts of town, at the beginning of an old country road. Trees and cover are plentiful. The team advances toward the plant, using the embankment on the far side of the road to cover their approach. Doug slides his scout drone far ahead, darting around like a black pat of butter. He finds the deputies' vehicle, and the two deputies. One is clearly dead, a hole burned into his chest. The other is also out, his injuries not so evident. The drone spots movement around the facility. They spot a Behemoth moving among the pipes between the two small buildings here! From the charring and marks on its armor, it is probably the same one that survived Doug's attack at the safe house earlier in the evening.

They encounter a new type of alien when it sneaks up on Doug's scout drone, a stealthy, snake-like creature Marie dubs a "Shay-Tan." It appears to excel in close combat, and is very slippery and difficult to nail with small arms fire. Marie takes cover in a tree, climbing like a monkey, and gets some high ground. She manages to wing the Shay-Tan, distracting it from attacking Doug's drone, which causes it to take cover and advance toward their position. It moves extremely fast by coiling into a ring and rolling, but before it can get on top of them (and the relatively defenseless Brock who is nailing the hell out of the Behemoth with his sniper rifle), Marie cleverly tosses a grenade into its path and blows it to hell.

Brock completely consumes the attention of the Behemoth, allowing Janice to advance her drone and flank the monster. She blasts it at point-blank range with a railgun weapon and obliterates the alien heavy. Meanwhile, Doug has pulled his drone back and around, and spots two Grays inside one of the buildings. He pulls back, preparing to charge through the windows, but Janice nails a skulking alien Attack Drone with her railgun. The drone detonates, blowing out all the windows right before Doug can smash through them, stealing his thunder just a little. He zaps one of the Grays, and from her vantage point, Marie catches a glimpse of the other. She has one chance to take it out before it dumps the mysterious vial of stuff it's holding into the water supply. With a hope and a prayer, she fires off a burst, and nails the alien in its big fat head! The vial drops and breaks, loosing a shimmering silver cloud that Doug's drone zaps and turns into soot. The site is clear, and the team moves in.

Marie finds some kind of computer device in the possession of head-trauma Gray, and she is able to deduce that it monitors and tracks the spread of the nano-toxin. She figures how to shut it down, and has to make the choice between having live nano samples to study or saving untold lives. It is not much of a choice, and after only a few heartbeats, she takes the less monstrous route and shuts it down. The signal spreads through the nano array, and the swarm goes inert. The day is saved...kind of.

Saved though it may be, plenty of damage is done. The nanites being gone doesn't bring the dead back to life, and back at the hospital, they find Fayth still caring for her mother. She is in a coma, clinging to life. Fayth suspects that the nanites attacks the nervous system, which leads to organ failure. Her mother is on life support now, and without it, will certainly die.

The darkness of the night gives way to the dawn. Will the sun bring a new resolve to Doug and Fayth, and those who care for them? Or will they shrink and flee from this attack which has become all too personal? Only the light of day will reveal the truth.