Terror from the Deep
XCOM:_Gray_Dawn#Recaps
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Game #15 8/23/14
Day 17
Terror From the Deep
Through Doug's scouting efforts with the drones, the group learns that the coastal fishing and tourist town of Westport is eerily quiet and devoid of activity. With the possibility of good loot (and perhaps the chance at solving a mystery), they set out to investigate.
The small recon force consists of AJ, Doug (in person, no less!), Fayth, Marie and Brock as chauffeur. They travel in a small plane and land at the Westport Airfield. There is only one other plane here, a single-engine Cessna. It is loaded with survival gear, but there is a prominent puddle of blood on the tarmac with no body to be found. Fayth spots some strange blood marks nearby, as though something with very tiny feet walked through the blood and away from here.
AJ finds a motorcycle and sees another one up the road at a gas station nearby. He takes Fayth to secure it while Doug and Marie hoof it. Brock stays behind with some drones to guard the airfield.
About halfway there, AJ and Fayth can hear blood-curdling screams coming from the gas station. They tell the others to pick up the pace and back them up. AJ and Fayth get there and briefly recon the store, then make entry through the back.
The two are about to enter the main cold-storage area when thick, menacing tentacles burst down from the hung ceiling and attack! In the front of the store, Doug and Marie see a tentacle drop down and slip through the door handles, preventing the door from being opened. Doug opens up with his shotgun, blasting the tentacle at point-blank range, freeing the door so Brock can charge in to support the others in the back.
At the fracas in the back, Fayth narrowly avoids a swipe from one of the razor-clawed tentacles. She barely keeps on her feet, stumbling through the swing door into the cooler. Once she gets her bearings, she sees three more tentacles rise up from behind a pallet of beer to attack her! She opens up with her assault carbine, burning a mag at them in sheer panic. One of the appendages is riddled with bullets and crashes down, while another lashes out and grabs her, dragging her deeper into the cooler...
AJ busts in to help her, quickly slapping a bayonet onto his rifle, then spears the tentacle holding Fayth. He pins it to the wall and manages to help her get loose.
While being dragged toward the bowels of the cooler, Fayth caught a glimpse of the Lovecraftian madness behind this attack: a bloated, pulsing mass only seen in flashes behind a writhing wall of mucid flesh. Fayth has had about enough of all this ickiness and takes the bull by the horns. She reaches into her satchel, where Sgt. Carville left her a care package. She pulls the festive bow off the M67 frag grenade, yanks the pin and tosses it toward the back. It misses the target, but in the confined space, rattles off the walls and stacks of goods, right back on top of the target! It detonates, sending wet, chunky gore flying everywhere, and all of the tentacles drop like limp timber. Never have high explosives been quite so romantic.
The group gets the hell out of Cthulhu's Qwik-e-mart, and contemplate what to do about the horrible discovery. While the initial opinions run toward nuking the place from orbit--just to be sure--a more reasonable response eventually prevails. They find that the alien thing is truly dead, and it appears to be an overgrown squid. With chainsaws looted from a nearby hardware store, they dismember it for easier collection and take samples. Fayth overcomes her initial repellence toward the horrid thing and finally musters the courage to perform a quick, on-the-spot examination of it. In the midst of the shredded squid meat, she finds something that chills her to her bones: A vicious, razor-sharp beak, towards which she was not doubt being dragged a few moments ago so this thing could eviscerate and eat her. She smashes the beak with the butt of her rifle and moves on.
The group finds a bunch of food to loot here, and load it into a pickup they have appropriated. The nearby police station has also been abandoned, and yields little that is useful. AJ and Fayth commandeer a police cruiser and roam the town looking for survivors using the cruiser's PA to call out to people. Meanwhile, Doug and Marie scour the marina looking for sonar devices on the boats moored there. While searching for signs of life, AJ sees movement in the upper story window of a beachfront condo just in time for it to swing a rifle at them. Automatic fire sprays at them, but luckily neither AJ or Fayth are hit. AJ throws the cruiser in reverse and peels out of there, getting cover between them and the incoming fire. They decide to ditch searching for survivors if that is the kind of reception they're going to get. The group decides to meet at the Coast Guard Station to see if they can find any answers as to what happened here.
The logs at the CG station recount the events during the sweeps. The SR 105 bridge was taken out. The base commander dispatched a vessel to check the damage and provide water rescue if needed. The boat reported strange debris in the water. They sent divers in to inspect it. This was their last contact with the boat or its crew. The station was inundated with reports of aggressive wildlife coming onto land, attacking people and driving them from their homes. The coasties offered to aid the handful of local police, but after only three days, they were forced to abandon the station. The last log tells that the surviving base personnel will depart in the USCG Invincible II, but the ship is ominously still moored at the docks...
The coasties also left their Dolphin helicopter. This makes the group realize they have a pilot shortage. They make a call back home and ask for Dave Monroe and Bob the UH-60 Pilot to be trucked in so they can make off with the extra vehicular loot. Unfortunately, by the time they get here, it will only be about an hour before sundown, and the group has learned from records at the police station and the Coast Guard station, the creatures from the sea begin coming out to prey at night. They definitely want to check out the wreck of the CG boat near the bridge, but it is incredibly unsafe under or near the water. With some time to kill, they look for some remote submersibles, finding a couple on a small salvage vessel at the marina. While they secure this loot and discuss future plans, Doug spots a huge crab silently climbing up a nearby piling from the water below. He levels his shotgun and blasts at it. Buckshot mostly scatters off its armored carapace. More of the chitinous horrors climb out of the water onto the pier, resulting in a full-on melee! Pincers clack like mad and people fire at these beasts in a frenzy. With a few scuffs and minor injuries, this small group of early-rising terrors from the deep are dispatched.
After seeing the arthropods' legs, Fayth now knows what left those strange tracks in the blood at the airfield. The group now knows what all the spent shell casings they've seen all over town were fired at. The big question facing the team now is whether they should brave Westport after dark. The opinions are several and varied. There is the notion of staying to see what sort of resistance the sea has to offer. There is the thought that staying overnight could be exciting. On the other end of the spectrum is the thought of "Fuck that. We are not staying here overnight because...monsters!"
What path will our heroes take? If they stay overnight, will they live to see the dawn, or will they simply...rest in peace? And will anyone else have anything to say about their plans...?
