>>4651112
>Take a dose of Diazepam, and nod at Vorts so that he knows to back you up in case they try anything unwanted, like altering your memories.
>Kick the migraine a little, just enough to let that wriggling feeling on the other side in for a moment, and let them look for what they need to trust you.

You just stay silent for a moment, wondering how much you’re willing to trust these creatures. If they need to trust you, the easy solution is right in front of you, they can pick through your brain and lay your intentions out in front of them. Of course, you’ve seen what they’ve done to people. An entire division of marine’s was routed through their ability to manipulate a person’s memories, and you’d be letting them into your head. It’s not an easy agreement, but neither is the world you’ve seen on the horizon, nor are you willing to start a three way firefight in the same room as a planet killing ball of exotic matter.

You reach into your bag, thinking to yourself that you’re not making a pretty decision, these creatures are slavers, tyrants, and manipulators that just a moment ago wanted your species subjugated, but they might also be necessary to keep nearby if you want to prevent your own extinction. Squeezing and screwing off the cap of the diazepam bottle, you give Vorty a quick nod, and hold it up slightly higher to make sure he understands what you’re about to do.

“An uneasy agreement.” Vorty says unprompted, and you only nod in response. You need these creatures on your side down here, but you can’t hand over the keys to your species extinction in the process. This is the best option, you think to yourself as you shake out one of the little blue tablets, then add some prussian blue and iodide right next to the thing, knowing you’re gonna have to peel the gas mask off your face for a brief second, while the geiger counter screams at you. You stare down at the cocktail in your hands for a second, hesitating. Instincts that you work hard to train away grab your hand, to remind you that this is the enemy, beings from another universe beyond your comprehension and intent on enslaving you and your people.

Having shaken hands with both the dictators and insurgents of foreign nations, you’re no stranger to making deals with people you don’t trust, but even if you feel making an alliance with these creatures is the best option, you can’t bring yourself to say that this is the same. Instead of trying to justify away instinct, you just take a breath, shove it all away, and then grab your gasmask by the side and put a small crack of air between it and your face, slipping your fingers underneath with the pills in hand, and slipping them into your mouth before sealing the gas mask against your face once again, exhaling before you swallow as to hopefully reduce any radioactive elements that slipped in with the pills.
(cont.)

>>4654439
(cont.)
“You don’t trust me right?” You ask the creatures, after you swallowed the pills.

“Their slave… you are their slave… you are…” As the vortigaunt once again translates these words, you feel the stabbing pain drilling and wriggling against your temple. Closing your eyes, you focus on it. Nerves shoot up your spine as you question what you’re about to do, before you take another breath, and focus on it. Just beyond the painful barrier in your head, you can hear another alien voice, muffled but present, a beat ahead of the words coming from the vortigaunt translator. The more you listen in on the words, the more the pain in your head scratches and bites in retaliation.

Instead of dwelling on it, you relax your mind once again, shoving all your nerves somewhere in the far back end of your mind, then once you’re as close to calm as you can get in this hell hole, suddenly focus on nothing but the wriggling pain in the side of your head, and the voice creeping behind it. The pain immediately flairs as your thoughts ram up against the auditory hallucination. Something snaps in the migraine, and for a brief moment the voice grows ear shatteringly loud, and it’s the only thing you can hear.

”Win… you cannot win…” A face flashes in front of you for the briefest of moments, discolored by a blue tint, and ever so slightly transparent to the background behind him, you can barely make out the hint of an old man kept young and wealthy through the decades.

Then, a second later, your eyes are open. The voice in your head is silent, and the Xen controllers are floating in front of you, considerably closer. For a brief second, instinct hits and you almost reach for your gun again, but catch yourself. The creatures are still non-hostile. You can’t tell if they’ve removed all memory of what they did fishing through your skull, or were so damn quick about it that you didn’t catch it, but you get the feeling that you won’t learn what they took unless if it comes back to bite you.

“With you we shelter… with you we shelter...” The vortigaunt translator suddenly mumbles, the only vortigaunt that hasn’t put a slight amount of distance between you since you last opened your eyes. Carefully, vorty approaches first, while you still look around. Saulson and Kirchoff are still standing back.

While Vorty grows closer, you shout up to the Xen Controllers, “We have an agreement? Trust me now?”

“Yessss…” The vortigaunt translator simply mumbles. Oddly enough, there’s no pain in your head that time. Although, you feel as though there’s something on the tip of your tongue, something in the back of your mind packaged back there, just like when the vortigaunts left that message for you after disabling your radio. You wave forwards your allies, as Vorty suddenly mumbles “The Oppenheimer cultivates dangerous trust.”
(cont.)

>>4654442
(cont.)
“Entrench… the hive entrenches… they entrench.” The vortigaunt translator mumbles. “Breach… they watch the breach…”

“Gabby.” You hear Kirchoff say from behind you. “What the hell is going on here?”

“March… we must march… we must…” The translator continues. Looking forwards, the hole where the machinery once stood bends downwards like an upside down volcano, providing the creatures within ample cover. Poking your head into the cavernous opening would likely be met with a torrent of alien fire. Above and around the lip, five Xen controllers hover around you. “Approach… they approach…”

Even though you can’t see the creatures, as you slowly approach you do hear things scuttling underneath. Heavy steps on taloned feet bend metal inside, then something else shifts in the ground below you, and you hear tons of steel groan as something moves below… or above depending on your fame of reference. Regardless, it seems like they’re using the time you spend negotiating to further reinforce their little hold out position. The last time you looked up there, you saw eyes looking down at you, one bigger than the rest. Now you’d probably just see electrical bolts and fungal explosives hurling towards you if you don’t think of a good breaching strategy. “Struggles… the worm struggles…” The vortigaunt translator suddenly says besides you.

“Are these things on our side now?!” Kirchoff says again, seeming worried as to what you might’ve agreed to. If he’s worried though, you’re subtly terrified of the deal you just made. You don’t know what you just traded in exchange for this alliance, and in your line of work that can be a death sentence. Not to mention that thought packed and locked away in the back of your mind, either by the vortiguants, or the Xen controllers, likely to pop at some point in the future.
(cont.)

>>4654445
(cont.)
>Tell the three vortigaunts to “charge” the xen controllers, like you’ve seen them do while enslaved, then have them act as a moving barricade while you humans move in slowly.
>Tell the vortigaunts to “charge” the xen controllers, and have the things dive into the whole and release a stunning burst, like you saw them do to the CIA ambush team.
>Ask Saulson which of the exotic matter canisters would cause the most temporary chaos within the machinery, then throw that in, and all of you make your push.
>Tell the Xen Controllers to rain suppressing fire from above, while you and vorty drag Saulson into the machine through the chaos.
>Don’t give the Xen controllers too much more of your trust yet. Tell them to watch your back while you and Kirchoff flash the breach, then get a foothold inside.
>Write in any clever ideas.
(Optionally, respond to Kirchoff.)
>”Kirchoff, you don’t rank high enough to know what I just did, so just know I probably saved our lives.”
>”All I did was make a treaty with them in exchange for information, sensitive information yes, but this is a sensitive situation. You’re not authorized to know the contents.”
>”Kirchoff, there’s a lot worse things coming after this is over, I know it. You don’t have to like these things, but we can’t afford to stay hostile.”
>”Kirchoff, don’t forget, you shot me. You wouldn’t be alive if I weren’t willing to make deals with the enemy. Intelligence work isn’t pretty.”
>”Frankly Kirchoff, I still don’t trust them. I don’t even really know what I just did, but we need them on our side for the moment.”
>Ignore Kirchoff for a moment, but before moving forwards try to demand that the Xen Controllers tell you what they did in your head. Although if they wanted you to know, they probably would've left the information in your skull.
>Write in.

>>4654458
>Tell the three vortigaunts to “charge” the xen controllers, like you’ve seen them do while enslaved, then have them act as a moving barricade while you humans move in slowly.
This requires the most trust from us all. That the vortigaunts would help their enslavers, that the controllers would put themselves at the forefront of danger to protect us, and that the humans would advance behind them and destroy the threats before they can overwhelm. A fair deal for all, and one of the first steps towards building up this alliance.
>”Kirchoff, there’s a lot worse things coming after this is over, I know it. You don’t have to like these things, but we can’t afford to stay hostile.”

>>4654486
Supporting this.

Even if the information they got from us comes back to bite us, I'd say it was worth it if we can all remain allies after this.

>>4654486
>>4656319

Ditto. The shitshow happens in under a year from this event.
And we know to some extent now that it's happening and relatively soon.

>>4654486
YOLO +1

>>4654486
>>4656319
>>4656376
>>4656810
>Tell the three vortigaunts to “charge” the xen controllers, like you’ve seen them do while enslaved, then have them act as a moving barricade while you humans move in slowly.
>”Kirchoff, there’s a lot worse things coming after this is over, I know it. You don’t have to like these things, but we can’t afford to stay hostile.”
https://youtu.be/t7Gz8jJOLAk

“Kirchoff, all I can say is that there’s a whole lot worse coming after this is over.” You start, quickly interrupted by Kirchoff.

“Like what?” He immediately interjects, with an accusatory tone. “Seriously, what’s going on here?”

“You’re right. These things are on our side now.” You explain, not able to see whether he’s baffled or relieved below his gas mask. “Look, we don’t have time to go over it all, but I’m sure of what I said. You don’t have to like this deal, but with whatever’s coming next we can’t afford to stay hostile. Now we gotta move in soon.” You turn to the physicist. “Saulson, you ready to start the process?”

“There’s nothing to set up.” He explains. “I’ve gotta get in there.”

You nod, then turn around looking towards the aliens under your command. “Vorts, is it possible for you to… charge those creatures-” You glance up towards the Xen Controllers, “-even now that you’re free?”

The creatures remain silent for a brief moment… each sharing short but telling glances at each other. For a short moment, it feels like the encapsulated thought in the back of your mind suddenly surfaces, hitting you with a revelation before it suddenly dives back down, and you forget what it was, leaving it on the tip of your tongue. You wipe it aside for the time being, knowing you’ll have better opportunities to dwell on it later. “I get it, you don’t like these things, and you don’t trust them either. Like I said to Kirchoff, you don’t have to, but right know none of us can afford to stab each other in the back. They know that too. Are you with us?”

“This one is willing.” Vorty grumbles. “His kin follow reluctantly.”

“Yesss…” One of the other vortigaunts responds. “A grave agreement.”

“Follow… you will follow…” The Xen controllers suddenly say, still speaking through your vortal ally. They’ve slowly begun to approach, as if already knowing your plan without you having to shout it up to them. The creatures nod to you slightly, then begin to turn around. The Xen controllers descend, still upside down from your perspective.

“Kirchoff, Sualson, we’re moving in soon. The aliens are gonna work together to give us cover.” You explain. “Stick behind them. Avoid shooting at the vorts if you’re gonna take any shots forwards. The controllers and a bit of the space around them will be bulletproof, just like when we fight them. Got it?”
(cont.)

>>4659015
(cont.)
Kirchoff moves in behind you as the group of aliens approaches the mouth of the breach, then asks, “What if they start shooting at us, while invulnerable?”

“It’s our vorts protecting them.” You respond.

“Can’t they pull in more?” He responds, as you begin to hear an odd, grumbling chanting from your three vortal allies.

“Probably.” You respond as you move forwards, climbing onto the warped metal of the machinery remaining above the Dark Matter. “It’d be stupid for them to attack us though.”

“It could still be useful down there.” Kirchoff responds. “Makes me wonder why they’re not doing it already.” He glances around the test chamber, where a few were already pulled in by the creatures before your alliance was formed. Before you’re able to ask the Xen Controllers, you’re attention is pulled away by the voice of the translating vortigaunt.

“Control... we lose control… we lose... ” The creature grumbles, before adding, “March… we must march…. We must… Comes another… Comes another…”

The three of you climb up the hill that was left behind when the operational end of the anti-mass spectrometer fell like a chandelier into the orb of Dark Matter below, presumably being broken up into god knows what. As you approach the top of the hill, with the Dark Matter orb humming ominously above you, the wall of three Xen Controllers, each with one freed vortigaunt have begun emitting orange sparks from their bodies.

“Saulson, be ready with the Liga, tell me if any complications come up with the machinery down there.” You say, slinging your submachine gun around your shoulder. “Vorts, controllers, stick close, give us cover. Let’s move.”

The nine of you finally begin to crawl over the lip of the massive hole in the center of the test chamber ceiling. As the Xen controllers fly over it, they’re immediately greeted with glowing alien rounds spitting forwards, cracking into them and dispersing with zaps of orange energy. Slowly, they begin to descend, massive heads going in first into the tunnel. Creatures down below begin to call out in warbled alien languages.

From a foot behind the vortigaunts, you watch the Xen Controller’s massive heads, then small spindly bodies descend below the lip of the hole. Over the overbearing sounds of shockroaches being fired in volleys, and every so often a spore grenade cracking against the invisible force surrounding the controllers, you shout “Vorts, you’re turn, in! “

Continuing their alien chant as it’s drowned out by the wet booms of spore grenades popping in the air, they step forward, then clamber down off the edge, into the whole, climbing the pipes around them like a jungle gym. Realizing that gravity’s gonna be a lot less convenient down there, you let go of your MP5, letting it hang by the sling while shouting to Saulson, “You good to climb?”
(cont.)

>>4659017
(cont.)
He just nods, and you signal your group down as you hold onto the ceiling. Once again, gravity is slowly getting lighter, as the migraine twists in your head, but you don’t have the time to wait until it’s negligible, so while it’s still only a fraction below earth’s gravity you drop your legs over the ledge and slip in, placing trust in the wall of three Xen Controllers below you as eyes within the dark chasm of machinery fire off rounds in your direction. With the Xen Controllers in a triangular formation just below you, there’s a small cone where none of the shots can touch you, like a parted sea of gunfire.

As you clamber down busted pipes and bent rebar, Kirchoff begins to move in just above you. A lot larger than you, you can occasionally hear pieces of debris shift as he grabs hold of them. Just behind him, Saulson begins carefully pulling himself down off the ledge, clinging onto the many jutting pieces of concrete as he scrambles down the ledge, further into the safe area behind the Xen Controllers. He’s reckless and slightly panicked as he climbs downwards, and he very nearly slips a few times as shocks of lighting whiz past all of you. Still, he manages to get down into the safest area below the cone of fire, holding onto piping.

With the three of you now behind the cover of alien energy in the pipes, you take a second to get a good look at all the machinery around you Now up close, you’re not sure how Saulson can be so confident that the machinery is still able to work. The entire upper section of the machine tangles around itself with tubes, colossal magnets, that were all torn out as the machinery fell, like a bee’s innards being ripped out with it’s stinger. Thing’s collapsed towards the center, before swinging back when gravity switched, leaving massive gaping dents in the sides of the clearing where pipes and wiring was crushed below. In other sections, the machinery was cleared out by chemical solvents or extreme heat, leaving solidified shells of what was once machinery large enough to stand in in some places. As though the machinery and darkness within it’s cavities wasn’t bad enough, a cloud of orange dust has filled the entire area, glowing slightly, but barely illuminating any surface enough to counteract its own thickness.

Amidst the many cavities and maintenance spaces in the world-destroying machine you can see the glowing eyes of alien shock troopers, concealed by the constant, slightly glowing blue smoke that permeates this place, poking their heads and weapons out of cover to fire up at you. At the moment, you spot ten of the insects scattered around the place, but you have no doubt that there are more burrowed deeper in the machinery. Further down though, the eye with a diameter like a dinner table you saw before is opening again, it’s round iris getting wider. Something big is staring at you, although it doesn’t seem to be doing anything just yet.
(cont.)

>>4659020
(cont.)
As you look around the pit left behind by the centerpiece of the anti-mass spectrometer, it looks like an animal that’s been picked apart by wolves after it died in an artillery blast. “You’re sure you got what you need for the plan?”

“Yeah!” He shouts back. “All we need is the centrifuges…” He carefully hangs further out, peaking beyond the heads of one of the Xen Controllers. “See it? Big tanks either side!”

You pear out the same way he did, and spot them. Amidst the debris and broken machinery, two large cylinders covered in scorch marks. Below the ash and molten aluminum that cooled on their resilient exterior now coated with a thick layer of the exotic dust that’s settled atop it all, they’re covered in hundreds of different indicator lights, all of which are dead. They’re not far below you, but in between you and them is two of the alien eyes, one of whom isn’t far from the nearest centrifuge, while the other is nearly at the opposite side of the pit, firing at you from a small dark platform created where the machinery crushed itself outwards.

“If they burst, they can bury the lab!” Saulson shouts. “So we built them to never burst! We need to inject some of our tri-inflation hydride into the system, which needs the electromagnets powered. I might be able to hotwire it into the emergency power to kickstart it!”

“This one harbors electricity.” Vorty suddenly says amidst his grumbling.

“It could work.” Saulson says. “It’s resilient, a big kick will do.”

“Won’t that leave us vulnerable?” Kirchoff shouts from above. He’s right, threes barely enough to cover you, but it would also be way quicker than manually poking wires together until the centrifuge turns on. “How many shots from one of these would it take?” Kirchoff shouts, holding his shockroach down.

“A lot.” The physicists responds. “The current can’t be much in those things.“

“The worm feeds… the worm feeds…” The translating vortigaunt suddenly grumbles, barely audible below the torrent of alien weapons fire. You look away from the centrifuge for a moment, wondering what they could mean by “The worm,” glancing around, until you suddenly notice that the eye at the bottom of this massive machinery pit has transitioned from a vibrant green to a light blue, the iris glowing like a ring of fire as the pupil expands outwards. Suddenly you begin to notice that the thick orange dust cloud that permeates this place is beginning to get thicker around the bottom of the pit, where it’s beginning to swirl as the creature releases this long, deep bellowing sound like a siren and a vacuum combined. Occasionally, small strips of the fog are turning a light blue.
(cont.)

>>4659023
(cont.)
https://pastebin.com/Lte0sgmY
>Try to land a flashbang near the centrifuge below, then quickly scramble down the wall and start providing Saulson cover while he hotwires the centrifuge open.
>Pull vorty off of his assigned Xen Controller, then you, Kirchoff, and the controllers provide suppressing fire while he zaps a centrifuge back to life.
>Take a risk, drop out of the cover of the Xen Controllers, down to the centrifuge, and hopefully draw the hail of electrical shockroach fire towards the centrifuge while you take cover behind it.
>Put the centrifuge on hold, instead, tell everyone to hold on very tight while you drop an anti-tank mine down the pit, and hope the impact is enough to set it off, and the blowback doesn’t dislodge any of you.
>That’s a very big eye on Race X’s “worm”. Test how good it is at picking up light with a flashbang dropped right onto its massive iris.
>Tell Kirchoff to head back up to give more wiggle room behind the Xen Controllers, and so he can cover you with his sniper rifle.
>Demand that the Xen Controllers start pulling in some grunt or vortigaunt backup, seems strange that they haven’t already…
>Write in.

Apologies for the delay guys. I know I said I wanted to start putting out updates a little faster but school's still kicking and this update ended up a bit of a book.

>>4659027
>That’s a very big eye on Race X’s “worm”. Test how good it is at picking up light with a flashbang dropped right onto its massive iris.
I don't like it feeding...not one bit.
After doing that, let's try to:
>Pop a smoke grenade and pull vorty off of his assigned Xen Controller, then you, Kirchoff, and the controllers provide suppressing fire while he zaps a centrifuge back to life.
The LIGA might be able to help with this, and we do have some leeway we can create with the smoke grenade.

>>4659049
Agree but a flash too maybe if we got cover?

The situation is kinda oof

>>4659049
>>4659132
https://youtu.be/t7Gz8jJOLAk
>That’s a very big eye on Race X’s “worm”. Test how good it is at picking up light with a flashbang dropped right onto its massive iris.
>Pop a smoke grenade and pull vorty off of his assigned Xen Controller, then you, Kirchoff, and the controllers provide suppressing fire while he zaps a centrifuge back to life.

Holding onto the wall with one arm as the creature roars out below, you quickly decide you’re not letting it “feed” without interruption. As it bellows out its ominous mechanical roar, you reach down onto your belt, and pluck a flashbang. “Cover your eyes!” you shout before flicking the pin off, and letting the flashbang drop out of your hands.The grenade drops the pit as the fuze shortens, occasionally small pings and cracks back up as it bounces off the edge of the wall.

For the few seconds it drops, you watch it fall, counting down the minimum fuse time in your head before quickly closing your eyes, and burying your goggles in the wall of broken machinery behind you. The ear piercing bang of the stun grenade turns into a distant boom when it detonates at the bottom of the pit, but even louder is the mechanical scream below. The sound shakes your sternum and causes every piece of jagged metal around you to vibrate, while a sudden gust of searing hot wind rushes over you.

Opening your eyes again, you look down to the source of the scream, seeing the creatures massive pupil contract back down to the size of your first, it’s colossal iris like a tent over the cornea. The iris has returned to its natural luminescent green, with the exception of a small halo around the outer edge of the iris that’s been left the same glowing indigo as the gas you once saw flicking out of the wormholes taking you between Xen and Earth.

“Fascinating... “ You barely make out the words Saulson mutters under the constant zapping sounds of alien gunfire. Many of the shock troopers themselves, especially towards the bottom of the pit, have recoiled away from the blinding light of the flashbang, and the rate of fire has dropped significantly. For a brief moment, you have to room to breath, to think, and to plan something out. Something doesn’t sit right with Saulson’s “hotwiring” plan, this is an advanced piece of machinery that can according to him, blow this place to hell. You’re not about to spend minutes defending him from volleys of alien weapons all for the physicist to electrocute himself or find out that the emergency power isn’t enough.

You reach down towards your belt once again, reaching for one of the smoke grenades. Not even pulling it off your belt, you yank the pin and let the lever flick away. As a jet of smoke sprays from your waist, you shout out, “Vorty, when I say, drop the controller and shock the centrifuge, Saulson, prep the LIGA. Everyone else, be ready to start laying out suppressive fire, got it?”
(cont.)

>>4664220
(cont.)
Kirchoff raises his mp5 under his armpit, still holding onto the wall with one arm out. It’s not an efficient firing position, but it’s good enough for suppressing fire. Saulson keeps one arm on the wall as well as you all hang to it. “How much longer till we climb down?” He asks, his arm shaking slightly from exhaustion. With the arn he takes off the jagged metal, he practically slaps a button on the LIGA, and immediately the billowing smoke starts to flow in new directions around Saulson. Once the analytical machine whirs into it’s protective overdrive, the physicist quickly scrambles to grab hold of the wall with both arms.

You grab your own submachine gun, smacking the bolt down by kicking it while you hold it with one hand, then bracing it against your torso just like kirchoff did. “Not long. Vorts, you ready?”

“This one awaits.” The vortigaunt responds.

“Then get on it.” You shout back. “Kirchoff, cover us!” In the still spitting cloud of smoke mixed with ever permeating orange dust you can barely make out the glowing protective force around one of the Xen Controllers die. In the fog of your smoke grenade, you lift up your MP5 with one arm and begin firing wildly down the pit, blindfiring at the positions you saw the aliens shooting from just a few seconds ago. Even the smooth firing of the mp5’s delayed blowback causes your one handed aim to pull wildly, and stress your tenuous grip on the metal, concrete and plastic fragments of machinery preventing you from falling meters down onto the centrifuge below. With every burst, you and Kirchoff smack against the wall you’re clinging to. Despite slowly becoming lighter and lighter with the waxing and waning of gravity in this chamber, it still takes considerable effort to hold on, and that fall doesn’t look any nicer.

Within the thick cloud of smoke, a glow green glow begins to grow, along with a dull electrical buzzing that’s slowly rising into a crackle. Alongside it, a much quicker orange glow pulses, with screeches coming from the Xen Controllers. The energetic orange pulse suddenly cracks, and you see blurs of orange and green light zip away from the creature’s position.

“Fuels’ low.” Saulson suddenly shouts over the rapidly increasing rate of fire. “Can’t refill it without both hands.”

Despite the Liga’s antigravity, and the increasing rate of fire from you and your comrades, the flickers of blue electricity are still whizzing past, occasionally pushing through your defenses and smacking into the debris around you, sending jolts of electricity through even your insulated gloves. One of those shots could be enough to make a person lose their grip here. Thankfully, the cloud of smoke is still providing concealment, even if the patch in your cover is rapidly growing smaller and smaller, while the green glow and electrical snapping is getting stronger.
(cont.)

>>4664224
(cont.)
Slowly, the jet of smoke from the m18 on your belt is slowly beginning to flicker, and with it, the cloud of smoke grows thinner. “Vorty! Clocks running out!” You shout over the gunfire. More and more of the alien rounds are pelting the area around you, and they’re getting closer and closer. While your team fires wildly, some of the eyes do flicker away momentarily, either dropping into cover, or recoiling from wounds.

Suddenly, just below you and to your left you hear a massive jolt of electricity, and a beam of green lightning tears across the pit, clear even through the slowly thinning smoke. The bolt slams into the centrifuge, causing it to spark with green electricity for a moment, Vorty’s electrical attack kicking it into life. The many lights all glow in unison, and a few even pop before the shock dies down, and they’re all left flickering. WIth the smoke thinning, you’re able to make silhouettes once again, and can see Vorty quickly reshifting to his post on the Xen controller.

“It’s on!” Saulson shouts, before slapping the LIGA once “Out! I need to get down to…”

Suddenly, a blue flash flickers through the smoke, and you hear a low groan, and something tumble, shaking the debris your holding. Just as he was about to return towards shielding the Xen Controller, Vorty was hit by a small electrical bolt. His taloned hand twitched for just a brief moment, enough for him to slip from where he was holding himself to. Even in the reduced gravity, he immediately begins to tumble down the jagged slop of crushed machinery.

Immediately, you let your MP5 hang by the sling so you can try to grab out towards him. It’s no use though, he was nearly out of arm’s reach before he fell, and almost immediately dropped out of your reach. The poor creature drops down, below the smoke and disappears for a second as you hear metallic clanging combined with meaty thuds, until the smoke thins a little more and you can just make out the last few seconds of Vorts attempting to catch himself before crashing just below the centrifuge.

“Vorty’s down!” You shout out to your team, seeing him lay still. Gravity is a good chunk lower now than normal earth levels, but it’s still pulling hard enough to hurt, especially when falling a story or two onto jagged metal. You can’t tell if he’s still breathing from this distance, but with the reduced gravity, it’s not unlikely he did survive, but he’s bruised and bloodied from the tumble. Some of the nearby shocktroopers seem to be interested in the body looking and approaching slowly, worried he might get back up. The quicker you get down there, the better his odds are.
(cont.)

>>4664227
(cont.)
However, further down the pit, you suddenly notice that some of the shocktrooper eyes are pulling away, alongside a distant alien hissing sound. The colossal round eye at the bottom of the pit is a different story. It’s pupil remains small from the bright light of the flashbang, but now it’s staring directly at you. It releases its ominous mechanical bellow once again, reverberating through the debris around you. You’re just about to try dropping another flashbang when you suddenly see the iris itself reduce down even further, just as a high pitched warbled ring tears through your eardrums, as though reality itself was being torn apart around you. You can’t tell if the creature is learning from it’s mistakes, or just getting ready to flash you,

The thin ring of blue around the outer edge of it’s eye begins to grow even thinner, as if it’s being digested. In turn, you begin to feel oddly lighter, as suddenly around you and your comrades, small flickers and flashes of blue light appear in the air. Quickly glancing around the area, you suddenly notice that within the depths of the machinery, you can see other points where blue energy is shining in twinkling vertical streaks. The migraine kicks you hard, and for whatever reason, you’re reminded of the corrupted image you saw before all this started.

“I need to get to the centrifuge!” Saulson shouts over the madness.

https://pastebin.com/Lte0sgmY
>Drop another flashbang near Vorty, Then try to climb down as quickly as possible to the centrifuge while under fire while avoiding any shots coming through the hole in your defenses.
>Get to Vorty right now. Drop down there yourself, ahead of the rest of your team, and protect him while you wait for your allies to catch up.
>Tell the three Xen Controllers to fly down towards Vorty, and secure him and the centrifuge, while you carefully climb down.
>Climb down carefully with the protection of the Xen Controllers, but permit the Vortigaunts to do as they see fit to protect their kin.
>Write in any clever ideas.
(Optionally, choose to do any of these before moving down towards vorty and the centrifuge.)
>Before you move anywhere, drop your last remaining frag grenade down the pit, towards the massive eye in the center.
>Drop one of the anti-tank mines down towards the bottom, and hope that gravity is still strong enough to give it the pressing force this thing needs to detonate when it hits.
>Tell Kirchoff to climb up before you start climbing down, and have him cover you with his rifle.
>Help Saulson reload the LIGA while he hangs onto the wall. It's quite a complex reload that takes a minute, it's not meant for combat.
>Write in.

>>4664236
>Get to Vorty right now. Drop down there yourself, ahead of the rest of your team, and protect him while you wait for your allies to catch up. Pop another smoke grenade while you're at it.
The smoke seemed to be doing wonders for keeping fire inaccurate.
>Tell Kirchoff to climb up before you start climbing down, and have him cover you with his rifle.
>Drop one of the anti-tank mines down towards the bottom, and hope that gravity is still strong enough to give it the pressing force this thing needs to detonate when it hits.
If it doesn't work, that just means it's a conveniently placed deus ex machina for later!

File: atmine.jpg (3.84 MB, 2850x1880)

3.84 MB JPG

>>4664712
>Get to Vorty right now. Drop down there yourself, ahead of the rest of your team, and protect him while you wait for your allies to catch up. Pop another smoke grenade while you're at it.
>Tell Kirchoff to climb up before you start climbing down, and have him cover you with his rifle.
>Drop one of the anti-tank mines down towards the bottom, and hope that gravity is still strong enough to give it the pressing force this thing needs to detonate when it hits.
I was originally gonna post a picture of a torn iris in a human here but... man that shit's gross.

“Kirchoff!” You shout over the warbled wringing of the creature… or maybe even space and time. “Move back up top. Overwatch with the rifle.” As you tell him to pull back, you wrestle with the bag of equipment hanging off your shoulder, carefully balanced between pulling out a heavy shaped explosive, and clinging desperately onto the walls of the pit as space seems to reverberate around you with the ringing.

“Oscar Mike.” Kirchoff shouts back as you manage to finally breach your bag from the side of the wall, tearing out one of the heavy anti-tank mines, the simple force of you freeing it nearly making you slip off the vibrating shards of metal. You hold it under your arm for a moment, reaching back towards its cap and twisting until it’s armed.

“Everyone brace!” You shout as the storm of alien energy continues to grow around you, shifting the debris around the edge of the pit. With the bomb armed, you flip it over and give the heavy shaped charge a small toss with its pressure plate aimed towards the ground. Despite the reduced gravity, it falls like a brick down the pit. Right after it drops, you begin to shout “Follow me down!” but are cut off by a massive booming sound, followed by the bottom of the pit suddenly erupting into a massive ploom of exotic dust, pulverized metal, and a mist of alien fluid. The blast shakes the walls of rubble, causing it to slip and spill around you.

For a brief instant before it all washes over you, the combination of dust and the universe continuing to tear itself apart around you, you suddenly hear a man yelp and see a blur of orange and grey failing in the havoc. It’s at that moment you decide it’s now or never, if Saulson just got added to the list of allies unconscious at the bottom of the pit, you need to be down there now.
(cont. 1)

File: portalstorm.png (1.05 MB, 1087x445)

1.05 MB PNG

>>4668121
(cont. 1)
Just as you let go off the ledges, there's a flash of blue in the dust, with the warbled ringing of the worm’s ability reaching its apex. You’re not there to see what comes of the alien spacial shitstorm that pierced your ears, with the dampened gravity pulling you down, occasionally sliding on sloped edges of the pit where jagged rubble scrapes and cuts you. Once the fog clears below you, and you’re able to actually see the slope of ruined machinery you’re falling against, you scramble at it, trying to slow your self down and not bounce back off… or worse, get flung past the centrifuge down towards whatever remains of the alien creature below. Your begin to scrape across the slope of steel and concrete, getting closer to the edge while alien weapons fire cracks and cascades through the wall.

After a second of slipping, you feel your legs swing free off the ledge, while you barely grapple onto the edge, frantically scrambling against it, then holding yourself for a brief moment before the edge of the pit gives way, and you and a small cluster of falling debris freefalls a few meters, cracking you down on something hard, and metallic.
”Minor fracture detected. Warning, suit power critical.” Your head is spinning, and your vision is blurred, but when an ominous mechanical bellow rips out once again through the pit, a spike of adrenaline wakes you back up. Above you, reality has been torn open, and a curved storm of exotic gasses flckers and spins around, within its distorted eye another section of space is barely visible. The two shielded Xen Controllers are held up behind it with their paired vortigaunts, volleys of alien weapons fire blasting into them only to be dispersed with a fizzle of orange energy. Just behind them, a man in spacesuit-like hazard equipment is still hanging on to the wall, desperately clinging to it as shots whizzed past. Maybe you were mistaken when you thought he fell, or… perhaps he was grabbed by one of the aliens, but he’s still up there. The third Xen Controller though, is nowhere to be seen.

You pry your attention away from the physicist and his alien cover, instead pushing yourself off your back, placing one hand on the back of your head and thankfully nothing but bruises. Quickly glancing around, your on top off a large cylinder covered in blinking lights, hanging precariously off of a gash in the wall of machinery. Right off the side of this machine is vorty, laid out on a platform of torn and blown out metal plate supported by crumbling concrete and bent rebar. You see his breath push his malnourished and hunchbacked chest up and down just barely enough to indicate life.
(cont. 2)

>>4668122
(cont. 2)
Looking down at him, you see down in the depths of the pit behind him, the source of the mechanical screaming resurfaces above the dust and rubble your anti-tank mine left behind. It’s colossal canopy of an iris has been torn apart by the mine, and now its pupil seems to smeer across its eye. Surrounding the nearly deformed worm are sets of smaller portals, some of which are accompanied with their own smaller eyes, firing out shots through the holes in reality, no doubt some, or maybe all of which are being warped towards saulson, whose now protected by two Xen Controllers and two vortigaunts, giving just enough coverage to prevent him from being blasted apart. Had you not sent Kirchoff up to cover you with his rifle, it’s not unlikely one or both of your fellow humans would’ve been shot off the wall to follow you down far more violently.

The creature continues to bellow, and its broken, twisted iris shifts further, peeling itself off its retina. It’s scream is far less threatening now, the fear it instilled is now replaced with an empathic sense of agony. However, despite its damage, the creature is still attempting to open its eye up further, tearing the iris further as the air and dust below begins to shake and stir, gaining a faint blue glow. As it pulls its eye open further once again, the dust at the bottom of the pit begins to decay into a misty blue exotic gas, swirling and shaking as a new color seems to slowly spill over the edges of the torn and broken iris. Despite the creature still being alive somehow, it seems to be in great pain as it “feeds” once again. The mine damaged it, but it’s far from dead.

Pulling your attention away from the wounded worm below, you begin to notice eyes dotting the many cavities left in the crushed machinery surrounding you. Finally beginning to realize what just fell from the barricade of Xen Controllers up above, they start to stare you down, some sending off pot shots as you scramble for some set of cover, while another close by disappears for a moment. You catch glimpses of the alien creatures body as it moves with a strange grace for a creature of its size, before you quickly grasp at one of the smoke grenades in your belt, yank the pin off, and let the lever ping off like a bullet. Instantly a plume of smoke floods the air. Right before a cloud of smoke obscures your own vision, covering you, the centrifuge, and Vorty, you see the body of a shocktrooper peeling through the tangled web of machinery and building material, stalking around you.

With your last glance out of the smoke, you see that Saulson and the controllers haven’t moved an inch, fearful of moving while under fire through the curved alien portal the worm has created… but above you see a slight glint of light. It’s not bright, but it’s a conglomeration of colors in the environment, a scope glare, meaning Kirchoff’s in position.
(cont. 3)

>>4668126
(cont. 3)
https://pastebin.com/Lte0sgmY
>Jump down off the centrifuge and grab Vorty under fire. Hope that he’s good enough to be moved, and carry him best you can into cover.
>Jump down off the centrifuge, and stand over Vorty, providing suppressive fire outside of the smoke cloud while shouting for Saulson and the aliens to move.
>Grab a frag grenade, and toss it into the web of empty space in the debris, flush that alien bastard out before he can flank you.
>Pick up your USP, and flick the infrared laser on, shouting “Kirchoff, targets!” towards the top of the pit, and start spotting aliens shooting through the portals at Saulson.
>Grab another flashbang off your belt, throw it into the pit, and hope it still has enough of it’s retina left after the anti-tank mine to be stunned.
>In the smoke, scramble around the centrifuge and machinery debris, see if you can’t find the emergency power connection Saulson mentioned, and hook yourself in under fire. (Roll 3d6-2.)
>Write in any clever ideas.

>>4668127
>Jump down off the centrifuge and grab Vorty under fire. Hope that he’s good enough to be moved, and carry him best you can into cover.
Best we move him, so that he is no longer in a memorable position.
>Leave a live concussion grenade where you just were in the smoke, to catch the stalking xeno when it tries to follow you down.

>>4668647
>Jump down off the centrifuge and grab Vorty under fire. Hope that he’s good enough to be moved, and carry him best you can into cover.
>Leave a live concussion grenade where you just were in the smoke, to catch the stalking xeno when it tries to follow you down.

Thinking quickly, you reach down onto your belt once again to grab one of your concussion grenades. Under the pained sound of the alien worm “feeding,” you can hear things moving through the piles of rubble and machinery, and with the growing cloud of smoke, you know they’ll be looking for you from memory. You flick off the pin of the concussion grenade, releasing the lever and immediately placing it on the ground before you scramble over to the other side of the centrifuge.

Seeing flashes of blue blur through the thickening smoke, you quickly clamber up onto the centrifuge, vaulting over it and towards vorty. Climbing over the large, illuminated centrifuge is easy even in the smoke, as it’s blinking LEDs guide you up and over, but once you reach the other side, your forced to slow down. Knowing that you’re on a precarious ledge before another large drop, you feel your way closer and closer to your vortigaunt ally. The closer you get, the more electrical bolts flash through the barely illuminated smoke. The moment you’re able to make out Vorty laid out on the ground, you scramble quickly towards him, and slip your arms underneath, finding him much lighter as you lift under fire, with a beep of the HEV suit. Every so often, a loud boom will ring from up above, followed by the report of a five-five-six round tearing straight downwards, and the rate of fire suddenly slows from a certain angle.

As you begin carrying the alien through the smoke, there’s a sudden blur of green light from, behind you. You start moving quicker, ensuring vorty is between you and the spore grenade you fear was just thrown behind. As you run, you hear a deafening crack tear out from the other side, and an alien yelp. Before you’re able to make use of it through, there’s a booming sound behind you, and you suddenly feel a torrent of dry dusty material slam into your back, burning wherever it touches your skin. The force of it throws you to the ground, and it takes all your dexterity not to fall right on top of Vorty’s body.
(cont.)

>>4671432
(cont.)
You slam down with your back against the centrifuge, Still carrying the thankfully malnourished Vortigaunt in front of you. You get up once again as your suit beeps and whispers, “Warning: Suit power critical.” Once you're away from the torrent of shots aimed at Vorts’ previous location, you set the creature down, and take stock. You can’t see anything, but you can hear the “feeding” of the alien creature below begin to slow as it’s low, agonized bellow becomes quieter. On the other side of the centrifuge, shocktroopers might have just been hit, leaving you with another opportunity to attack the creatures. Vorty is on the ground, but he’s barely conscious, and in a lot of pain. Thankfully, you do have a temporary fix on hand, in the form of a morphine drip… although there’s no telling what that would do to his alien brain. Although… you remember the last time you gave a vortigaunt opioids you were affected as well.

Before you’re able to finish assessing your options with what little information you’re able to gain through the cloud of smoke, you begin to feel lighter again, feeling as though your were on the moon as the warbled ringing tears through spacetime again, blue streaks of light tearing even through the smoke, illuminating the area as the rubble around you begins to shake. Whatever the creature did up top, it’s doing it again around you, only this time, it’s “feeding” was uninterrupted. Just above the alien ringing, you can hear Kirchoff shouting something through the warbled ringing, but you can’t make it out.

As the blue streaks tear through the smoke, you notice other blurs, a green flash of light appears nearby in the smoke, with an electrical fizzling noise. Something’s just teleported nearby.

https://pastebin.com/Lte0sgmY
>Keep low, quiet, and concealed in the smoke while you put the IV drip in vorty, giving him just enough of a dose to clear the creatures head.
>Quickly run towards the nearest flash of green light, and throw a blind kick, hoping your boot connects with a hostile.
>Leave Vorty to recover, and vault back over the centrifuge, shotgun gun in hand, and pepper the area blindly, hopefully hitting stunned hostiles.
>Pull out your Barret M99, load a .50 round into the chamber, and move to the edge, poking out of the smoke so you can put another hole into the alien worm below.
>In the smoke, scramble around the centrifuge and machinery debris, see if you can’t find the emergency power connection Saulson mentioned, and hook yourself in under fire. (Roll 3d6-2.)
>Put some distance between yourself and Vorty, then start flashing your flashlight up and out of the smoke in regular intervals, hopefully convincing your allies above that you have a foothold down here.
>Take advantage of your unknown position in the smoke, shut your eyes, and try to see if there’s any presence… beyond the migraine that you can abuse or aid.
>Write in.

>>4671434
>Take advantage of your unknown position in the smoke, shut your eyes, and try to see if there’s any presence… beyond the migraine that you can abuse or aid.
Hmm...time is an ocean, not a river, to the vortigaunts. We must endeavor to give a vortigaunt, any vortigaunt, a dosage of morphine in the future. Perhaps as soon as we’re not in immediate danger? Or...we could try to reach out to ourself, and try to nudge a tiny change in the timeline, one that wouldn’t change much - just giving one of the dying vortigaunts from the past a few drops to ease their pain as they pass on. Hmmm...could be difficult though, that. We shall see what we can reach.

>>4671434
>Take advantage of your unknown position in the smoke, shut your eyes, and try to see if there’s any presence… beyond the migraine that you can abuse or aid.

Pretty slow around here lately, huh?

>>4671858
I know, and I hate it. College has been kicking my ass lately. I was hoping I could get the next update out by today, but at the moment that doesn't seem like it's gonna happen, apologies guys.

>>4671565
>>4671858
With the weapons fire focused in on a position you’re safely away from, and noting space itself seeming to rip apart around you once again, you duck deeper into cover, leaving your USP in your hands in case you need to attack quickly while you close your eyes, focusing on the pulsing pain in the side of your head. With each ring of the growing portal storm the worm is manifesting around you, the migraine kicks you once again, something beyond it screeching in tune with the censored sound.

Trying to keep your focus among the constant chaos isn’t easy, but with every passing second, you slip closer and closer, abusing the chaos surrounding your own head, as the migraine tries to punish the various impossible stimuli that your subconscious brain is processing, your consciousness moves silently forwards, towards the small pinhole of painless space at the side of your skull. At the very last moment of your approach, the migraine notices your escape attempt, and a sudden pain rips through your skull in the last moment you spend in your own body, before suddenly the pain falls away, and you’re able to “see” the universe around you in new colors that you couldn’t before. A wave of green suddenly washes over you before you slip into a dark stormy sea of neurological activity.

In this strange dimension, the smoke provides zero concealment, nor does the machinery provide cover, and in fact the glaring dashes of blue anomalous energy that tore open yet another hole in space glare even brighter in this space, making the normally dark cloudly ocean even brighter than ever in this storm of glowing indigo. The dashes of blue lights, like long fluorescent bulbs given a new color, are interspersed with beams of green energy, the rays seeming to pick out the anomalous wisps at random, and causing them to inflate and expand.

From your initial position within the cloud of exotic lights, you can see the small glare of crimson that seems to surround your own skull, its normally dark, insulated color now illuminated by the light of alien interference. In this new light, the migraine seems oddly angular.

Not held in space now that you’re beyond the migraine, you quickly slip a few feet over to the side, beginning to make out a blur of green light and alien pain in the glare of light. Within the glare of light seems to be some sort of anomalous… even your brain’s interpretation of these alien stimuli fails to create a visual that makes sense. The best you can describe it, it’s a tunnel in space itself. It’s mouth opens from all directions, and from every direction you look at it, it seems as though you would see more tunnels branching off of it, only for them to disappear as you rotate around the opening that’s tethered to Vorty’s weakened, unconscious mind.
(cont.)

>>4675922
(cont.)
Looking out beyond the storm of anomalous lights, the piles of machinery no longer provide the cover they once did, but you can’t make out the eyes of the shocktroopers in them any more. Whether they lack any presence in this strange dimension, or your inexperienced brain simply can’t detect them, you have no idea. What is visible within the dense piles of machinery however is small red dots, the same deep crimson of the migraine. They move quickly within the machinery, and with an odd efficiency too. The dots are almost like fire ants quickly surrounding a larger attacker.

As you survey the area, the inflated blue streaks in the air suddenly seem to “burst,” popping into a flash of blue light before leaving a glowing blue disk, that from one side, and only side, seems to curve inward. More pop open , one after the other more alien portals tearing open in the storm, each one originating from one of the dashes of exotic energy that was selected by a green alien beam. As space is torn apart around you, your disembodied consciousness is thrown around like a leaf in the wind through all the chaos. You barely manage to stop yourself from being thrown into something else by the insanity of it before a moment later it all settles, and the alien portals sit still. The green rays are still present, and now that you can focus on you trace them down to a ring of blue light below, the same place you saw the massive eye of the worm, and the ring itself is distorted in all the same ways the worm’s iris was torn by your explosive earlier. For each ray that connects to a portal near you, another splits off connecting to a portal somewhere else, splitting off from the warped pupil of the creature, likely based on convenient locations for attacking shocktroopers.

The dashes of blue light that haven’t been torn open into portals are slowly beginning to fade, but as they do the space around you leaves occasional orange scars, not unlike the color you see looking up towards Saulson’s position, where the bulbs of bright red are surrounded in a haze of protective orange. Maybe you could try using this energy to your advantage somehow.

>Look for a way to help Vorty in the strange green “tunnel” that was connected to him. Perhaps it’s an opening into his head, or the strange network of neuropathic tunnels the vortigaunt’s minds establish.
>Investigate those distant swarming red lights the same color as the migraine. Perhaps its another creature's brains sharing some sort of similarity to your own.
>Try disrupting the green beams of light to disrupt the worm’s portals, or perhaps reorienting them, whatever your able to achieve with your limited experience.
>Give the orange, scarred space a kick and hopefully make some use out of the energy residing in it.
>Write in.

>>4675923
>Look for a way to help Vorty in the strange green “tunnel” that was connected to him. Perhaps it’s an opening into his head, or the strange network of neuropathic tunnels the vortigaunt’s minds establish.

>>4675923
>>Look for a way to help Vorty in the strange green “tunnel” that was connected to him. Perhaps it’s an opening into his head, or the strange network of neuropathic tunnels the vortigaunt’s minds establish.

Is Gabby at risk of getting cancer, or will there be vortigunt related shenanagins to prevent it?

>>4677321
As far as you're aware, there's nothing protecting you from the radiation other than your HEV suit, which is very high quality protection by itself, a gas mask and hood provided by the CIA, and some antirad medication you took.

>Look for a way to help Vorty in the strange green “tunnel” that was connected to him. Perhaps it’s an opening into his head, or the strange network of neuropathic tunnels the vortigaunt’s minds establish.

Moving quickly, knowing that these creatures are gonna start pouring through those newly created portals soon you zip back into the storm of portals towards the glowing blur of green where Vorty is still sitting. The closer you get to the non euclidean opening in space, the more it seems to unfold before you, as though the cave in spacetime was being eroded further the closer you get. Eons of expansion turn the cave in spacetime from a simple incomprehensible hole in space to a cavernous gash in reality while the rest of the universe progresses normally. It doesn’t feel like you enter the tunnels of the Vortal mind, instead the vortessence simply becomes everything around you as you enter it, the hole you entered growing smaller.

More tunnels seem to erode around you as you slip through the breach, new sounds and lights emanating from each of them, new options opening up in the vortessence, all the while a small lagoon, illuminated with various lights interconnected seems to grow as neurons drip from the caves green, intangible ceiling. The lights in the lake don’t come into view, rather they seem to develop and grow into a massive, incomprehensible neural network right before you’re eyes, like microbes developing in a vat of primordial amino acids before connecting along thousands of various lines. For a brief moment, you instinctively pull back away from the underground pond, but stop quickly as you see the lights grow dim and lose their color, as if the brain aged with your very movements. With every movement, similar things happen, as though every angle within this place is an optical illusion that reveals itself in layers.

As you grow closer to the pond, neural pathways form branching off the main “brain,” and the water erodes away new tunnels splitting off in various different directions. Different sights and sounds echo out of the tunnels. You try to dive into the water, but it seems to boil around you, the neural lights glaring in the creatures mind like a christmas tree, but simultaneously turning from a lime green to a deep crimson red. The branching neural pathways wither and decay, and the increasingly necrotic walls begin to fall apart, exposing more holes and sores in the creature's mind.

Down the collapsing halls where old neural pathways lie, you hear the voices of separate vortigaunts, their grumbling and chants growing more distant as time seems to accelerate around you. The synapses that connect them are quickly dying off, and you realize that the neural network of lights in this neuropathic cove is being spiked with pain shortly afterwards.
(cont.)

>>4681285
(cont.)
Hoping for some sort of solution, you reach out to the dying neurons, hit with strange memories of dog-sized insectoid creatures before you find yourself able to drag them with your presence, creating new synapses for a brief point in time, that even slight movements drag you out of. For a brief moment, there’s a flash of pain relief as the Vortigaunt reconnects to the greater vortessence, before it’s actively kicked away by the creature’s own neurons, and pain shoots through the creature’s unconscious mind once again, keeping it down.

Realizing that it might not be and easy task to fully re-establish Vorty’s connection to his kin, you start to listen in to the other opening tunnels, hearing new voices, and the interconnected minds of other creatures echoing through tears in spacetime.

Slipping through the boiling chasm that Vorty’s pained mind occupies, you approach another hole in the vortessence, each one not unlike the tear you came through. Beyond one of the tears in reality, you hear the low grumbling and moaning of an alien creature, repetitive and authoritarian. You hear the sounds of the Xen controller’s beckoning, “Descend… we must descend… we must... “ accompanied by a glow of orange light as tendrils subconsciously probe their way into the creatures exposed brain, the Xen controllers naturally pushing wherever they can. Occasionally Vorty’s synapses reach out to touch the strange tendrils, too weak to establish any connection.

Peering through another tear in the viel surrounding the vortigaunts mind, you “hear” the sound of scurrying insects scuttling around, entire generations born as small grubs, maturing to adulthood and releasing the same alien screams you last heard spitting bouts of acid and protecting small cyber-augmented grubs in the ground, before dying of age as you get closer. The darkness of ant-hill like tunnels and the texture of spider-like silk, all augmented with robotics and reorganized with a factory intelligence causes the vortigaunts brain to feel an uncanny familiarity with it, like a human staring down nosferatu. However, from certain angles in this fourth-dimensional space, you spot a brief window in time where vorty’s synapses seem to naturally move towards it, for better or worse.
(cont.1)

>>4681290
Apologies for the abyssmal update speed.
(cont.1)
The final leak that doesn’t open up to a void in spacetime seems oddly familiar from the right angle, and as you approach, it gets bigger the same way the hole you entered gets smaller, allowing you to realize why, it’s your own mind. For a brief moment, you *hear* your own thoughts, your own memories of events that… you don’t quite recognize, yet the internal monologue is almost certainly yours, if spliced and spread across time, broken up occasionally with a sterile, cynical, and robotic voice not far from your monologue. As you examine it, you notice that a small snake of synapses has begun to follow your own consciousness around, despite being weak, frail and necrotic, it seems to have an odd animal intelligence as it moves through vorty’s breached neurological haven, seeming to look to you for a solution.

It seems that Vorty’s mind is being disconnected from his kin for some odd reason, perhaps as a defense mechanism or some sort of euthenasia. Either way, the fact is that the isolation is preventing the poor creature's brain from recovering. Perhaps… you could try connecting him somewhere else? You don’t know much about this, but it is an option.

>Pull the creature’s synapses back home to your own brain, and hope you can handle whatever that brings, or that the damn migraine doesn’t interfere. .
>Give the xen controller’s neurological tendrils access to Vorty’s brain, and hope they play nice considering the deal you made.
>Take a risk, and plug Vorty into the hive of screaming ant-like beasts and machinery. It seems familiar to him at least in an uncanny way, but what isn’t hellish down here.
>Try and jerry rig a solution, tie up the loose ends of Vorty’s synapses and hope it’s enough to convince the brain it’s not dying.
>To hell with whatever consequences it has on the wider vortessence, Vorty’s your friend. Grab one of the dying synapses and force it against those of the next vortigaunt until it sticks.
>Don’t mess with anything, just leave this place.
>Write in any clever ideas.

>Pull the creature’s synapses back home to your own brain, and hope you can handle whatever that brings, or that the damn migraine doesn’t interfere.
We do apparently bring opportunities, I believe they said. And we did risk taking more diazepam earlier to help with the migraine.

>>4681292
>Pull the creature’s synapses back home to your own brain, and hope you can handle whatever that brings, or that the damn migraine doesn’t interfere.
I understand less about what's going on with every update. Great job Lazlo, keep it up.

>>4681568
>>4681808
Sometimes I feel the same way. There's a grand plan in my noggin somewhere but it's slowly getting buried under Calculus lectures.
>Pull the creature’s synapses back home to your own brain, and hope you can handle whatever that brings, or that the damn migraine doesn’t interfere.

Remembering what Vorty said when you pulled out the morphine drip from your arm, you return to one of the numerous symapsial cords, one of which isn’t far, having grown exhausted as it tried to follow behind you.The Synapse seems to stick against your consciousness as you move away from the main cluster of pained neurons, dragging with you an increasingly long glare of green electric light. The line takes on impossible proportions as it seems to trace your path through this non-euclidean space.

The tear in the walls of this strange fourth dimensional cave the vortigaunts mind occupies grows wider as you approach, having collapsed at the moment in time Vorty’s brain was overrun with pain. You don’t know if this is just how you’re brain is interpreting something absolutely inexplicable, but space in the vortessence seems almost indistinguishable from time. Every motion doesn’t just move you to a different point in space, it changes where you are in time, as though space in here had been draped over a mountain range of time.

The tear in the vortessence that Vorty’s mind produced in its vulnerable state erodes further and further, showing more of the inky sea outside, illuminated by the swarms of alien minds surrounding the place, and the misty glow of exotic matter. As the green glowing cave seems to erode and shift around you with your own movements, it doesn’t feel as if you ever truly “leave” it, in fact the tunnel seems to be built further into space as it erodes, despite time returning to a more comprehensible flow.

The increasingly long strand of neuropathic synapse cord suddenly shoots ahead of you as you gradually return to effectively linear time. It immediately traces a path through space to the sphere of dim painful crimson that you recognize as your head, tracing towards it and slipping in through the left temple, the very same spot you recognize as the location of an infinitesimal pinhole in the migraine, the same place you slip out. As you attempt to move away from the line, the tunnel continues to extend around you, locking you into following the line. You keep trying to push free on principle, to push ahead before the extending vortessence can catch you, only to find it suddenly accelerating to grab you before you can get more than a few inches from the line.
(cont.)

>>4686090
Apologies if this one feels a little janky, it was a bumpy one to write.
(cont.)
Always just beyond the mouth of the tunnel, you see your own head or more aptly the migraine, a dim bulb of crimson with sharp edges,with the unconscious body of Vorty always behind you, still glowing green but extending out a long, thin tunnel you’re still bound to. Beyond the small pulsing bulb of the migraine are two large orbs of red and orange energy, practically radiating the orange energy around them, although for each of them it skews to a direction between them, where two blurs of green nearly merge into one large shape. In the thin, glared space between them you see an odd, perfectly circular cloud, like the models of atoms you occasionally saw while undercover as a security guard. Somehow, as you travel along the line Vorty’s extracranial synapse has created, you just seem to understand that this is a patch of exotic matter, the same one that’s within the LIGA, as though you’ve been able to see it before.

With nothing else new, and the constant funneling of the vortessence tunnel, you push your consciousness back towards your own mind, riding the wire between the migraine and vorty, until the tunnel around you builds towards the pinhole in the migraine. You prepare to squeeze back through, hoping you can avoid the detection of your neuropathic warden and subsequently another seizure, but instead as the tunnel connects, it forces the hole open wider. For a brief moment you hear a voice, distant and quiet, “VITA… ...RT INTRUSION DETEC-” before suddenly there’s a buzz of electricity in the side of your head, and then you realize you’re already back in your own head, your own body, no fuss and no seizure.

Pulling your eyes open, the concealment of smoke is barely residing, and you see portals scattered around the small ledge you and Vorty have occupied, glaring through the thin grey mist. A small pain shoots through your head as you acknowledge the existence of the creature below that made these portals, before a sudden electrical tingling makes the pain suddenly feel distant. It’s a relieving sensation, like boiling water below a stuffy nose, not numb, but not totally gone either. With the relieving sensation also comes a sense of… no, not a sense at all. You’re suddenly hit with a revelation about the portals, or more aptly about the creature that created. Born from a blank genetic state, it grew in a matter of hours, molded by its environment, all for the purposes of Race X’s domination. You don’t know where the information came from, but it feels like knowledge you always held somehow, or a memory from somewhere. Had you the time to dwell on it, it might be worrying, but right now your only concern is the newly acquired knowledge that this alien creature is currently better adapted to your own planet than even you are.
(cont.1)

(cont.1)
In the confusion and chaos surrounding you, you suddenly look to Vorty scrambling around to ensure he’s alright. You barely get a glimpse of his body, no time to check for a pulse or new injuries before you hear Saulson shouting, and grabbing you by the wrist. Reflexively you try to grapple him, throw him away, but a slight muscle spasm from the diazepam throws off carefully practiced muscle memory. He yanks you by the elbow and in the nearly weightless gravity that the test chamber has pulled into, he easily pulls you between the two Vortigaunts standing half a meter apart from back to back. They chant and hold their taloned hands out, charging two Xen Controllers with an orange energy that sparks every few seconds. There’s a sudden electrical buzzing in your temple, and as if the memories of the vortiguants were your own, the sight seems strangely disturbing.

Just beyond the creatures are the the portals, through which exotic gas is flung out, almost concealing the torrent of alien weapons fire that would’ve redirected towards you as you stirred into life. Being outside of your own head may have very well saved your life, given that you practically played dead with perfect efficiency. One of the shocktroopers lays dead, draped over the massive cylindrical centrifuge buried into the piles of destroyed machinery, a bullet wound indicative of five-five-seven or smaller round travelling at a high velocity. Two portals, the ones closest to you that aren’t hovering over a thirty foot doop, are only traversed by alien suppressing fire, however peering over the chest high centrifuge reveals three other portals, through which two shocktroopers are stepping out of, another behind them.

One of them quickly turns around however, when a loud, harmonious scream rips out through the rubble and debris. Lime bioluminescence and red blinking lights flash through the colossal piles of machinery. The migraine tries once again to hurt your mind, but instead it fizzes, and you suddenly understand the roar. It was once a marking of territory, then it turned into a call for cattle under the vortigaunts careful cyclopean eye, but now it’s become a warhorn, and the creatures themselves mutilated to serve the role of an expeditionary force-
(cont.2)

>>4686092
(cont.2)
The migraine pulses hard, even managing to push past the fizzling force. For a brief moment, you lose your train of thought, and it doesn’t return even as the migraine retreats further than it started. The shocktroopers stop firing for a brief moment at the roar, immediately scanning around them for any possible flanking creatures. Saulson, unwisely uses the moment to run towards the centrifuge, causing the Xen Controllers to run after him, recognizing his importance in this plan over yours. Thinking quickly, you follow him, not before grabbing Vorty and attempting to drag him, only to be shocked, both psychologically and in your temple as he jolts awake, and you feel your hand against his shoulder both from his perspective and yours. It’s odd, not like a present feeling but rather the memory of something that never happened to you. Without the time to experiment, you just yank him towards the centrifuge along side Saulson, before ducking into cover behind the Xen controllers, finding it easy to pull the creature in such low gravity. Your vortigaunt brain surgery is giving the creature’s mind the breathing room it lost when the rest of the vortessence cut it off, but its having strange, not useless side effects.

Saulson has kneeled next to the centrifuge, shouting “It’s gonna take a minute to get this ready! I need to inject tri-inflaton hydride directly into the system, then we’re gonna need to dislodge it.” as he pulls out a canister of exotic matter. “Are you sure you’re okay? Are you gonna pass out again? ”

>Flick a flashbang over the centrifuge, and tell Vorty to join you in unloading on whatever’s coming through the portals on the opposite face of the centrifuge.
>Pick up your shotgun, tell Saulson to get to work while you throw a concussion grenade through, then move into one of the nearby portals to shake up the alien lines while their suppressing fire is paused.
>Pull out your rifle, and start making some early potshots at the horde of whatever’s currently tunneling through the machinery, hopefully getting a much better look at them and scaring them a bit.
>Tell Saulson to hand over any exotic matter he doesn’t need for the plan, and throw one of them to the incoming shocktroopers to stir some chaos.
>Shout at the Xen Controllers to get some damn reinforcements down here, why are they dragging their feet?
>Grab one of the Xen Controller vortigaunt pairs, and clamber over the centrifuge to force the encroaching shocktroopers back with submachine gun fire.
>While your hooked up to Vorty’s brain, take a minute to get a good long look at the massive Dark Matter Orb in the center of the test chamber, focusing to ensure the Migraine doesn’t interfere again.
>Write in a response.

>>4686093
>>While your hooked up to Vorty’s brain, take a minute to get a good long look at the massive Dark Matter Orb in the center of the test chamber, focusing to ensure the Migraine doesn’t interfere again.

>>4686093
>Tell Saulson to hand over a canister of the most debilitating exotic matter we've got that he doesn’t need for the plan, and throw it into the incoming shocktroopers to stir some chaos.
>While your hooked up to Vorty’s brain, take a minute to get a good long look at the massive Dark Matter Orb in the center of the test chamber, focusing to ensure the Migraine doesn’t interfere again.
I trust Saulson to know the properties of the exotic matter the most, he'd know which one would probably be best to use here. The chaos is necessary to give us enough time for saulson to work and for us to gain clarity on the Dark Matter Bomb.

File: Spoiler Image (521 KB, 696x511)

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>>4686155
>>4686162
>While you're hooked up to Vorty’s brain, take a minute to get a good long look at the massive Dark Matter Orb in the center of the test chamber, focusing to ensure the Migraine doesn’t interfere again.

“I’ll be fine, get on the centrifuge.” You shout, as you begin to lean away from the cover of the centrifuge, closer towards the barricade of the two Xen Controllers as you glare up at the massive, pulsating orb of Dark Matter that sits “above” you. The perfectly round spot of pure darkness is almost confusing to your eyes, like your staring into the mouth of a pitch black cave of inverted space. As you stare at it, your head begins to spin, but you’re ability to focus is broken by the constant sounds of warfare, but at the moment you’d rather focus on figuring out what the thing Saulson described as an interplanetary bomb is and how it works before doing anything that might disturb its careful balance any further.

You push away from cover, leaning in next to the Xen Controllers, feeling a buzz run across your suit and skin with every shot that smacks and fizzles against the creatures, the energy painfully, but not dangerously dispersing into you. The shocks burn against your skin, distracting you for a moment from the orb while careful but heavy footsteps crush chunks of metal on the other side, advancing further towards your position. Recognizing the sound, one of the Xen Controllers moves up in his position, forcing Saulson to duck in closer to the centrifuge controls alongside vorty as shots lick closer. However, for a brief moment, you're spared from the sizzling pain of electricity dispersing into space in proximity to the Xen Controller. However, with the sudden brief relief from burning pain, there’s a moment of clarity in your head.


The migraine tries to give you a quick pulse as everything just seems to simply click in your head, your thoughts snapping back into lectures you’ve never attended, books you’ve never read. Your thoughts turn towards Dr. Magnusson for a brief moment, and oddly enough your reminded of old documents you yourself read on Post-Soviet missile silos as meaningless numbers strike your thoughts, underlined with far more comprehensible fears of tyranny and extinction. The elements of a reaction flood into your mind, a way to rip open the border worlds and punch a hole straight into another reality. Glancing over to Sualson, you seem to recognize another one of these elements, a bright glowing white material contained in a glass and metal canister. You have to focus with all your willpower not to be overwhelmed by the slamming pain of the migraine, thankful for the diazepam you took earlier.
(cont.1)

>>4689872
(cont.1)
As you glare towards Sualson working on saving the planet from an admittedly quick and painless death, the sudden feeling of being watched washes over you, something that has admittedly followed you since you first felt the migraine in your head. Continuing to steel yourself, you feel the migraine try to slam your mind as you suddenly recognize an understanding within the pain. Code in languages you don’t understand, diagrams you’ve never seen all act as evidence in your mind somehow drawing you to the conclusion that the migraine knows the formula too, although it harbors no intention but to simply censor such knowledge from your own brain. The alien roar rings out once again, but this time the sound reminds you of past experiences from the vortigaunts, rather your own mind, bringing with it the revelation that the migraine does have an ally tunnelling through the rubbled machinery like ants in sand, deliberately not pushing against you, knowing what you intend to do. Hiding in the walls of this lab is an expeditionary force, waiting for an opening to welcome a much larger army. You try to focus on it, fishing for more information by staring at the Dark Matter orb, the walls holding the creatures, and the exotic matter in Saulson’s hand, but as you focus, you’re not hit with a further revelation on the nature of these creatures, but rather a wave of panic you haven’t felt in a long time, something you thought CIA training had washed out of your mind.

Images, no… memories of trauma from a war you never fought, whole cities being atomized into particles in milliseconds, the residents having a brief moment of consciousness to feel their bodies dissolve before death. Prisoners whose only crime is a will for continued existence mutilated, their tongues removed and their minds lobotomized, paraded as an example. Your gas mask begins to feel tight and restricting, as though it’s been covering your face for decades. Your hands shake, and reality around you begins to fall apart as though you enter memories you’ve never experienced, you’re beating people to near death, shooting innocents, and with every passing question in your mind you’re beaten as well by a synthetic pain burrowing into the left side of your skull. You don’t remember your own name, you don’t even know if you have a real name anymore, you don’t see yourself as an individual. You’re a part of a machine, a machine designed to suck humanity dry like a vampire and- you’re suddenly hit by a searing pulse of pain that crashes through your skull like getting slapped in the face.
(cont.2)

>>4689874
(cont.2)
The real world… you wonder if it real for a moment when you notice you’re floating a few inches off the ground with gravity nonexistent, snaps back in the flash of pain. Real memories flood back to you, washing away the ones that overtook you. A dead vortigaunt floats before you, his body charred with small but numerous electrical burns that slammed into the poor creature. As memories hit you again, you suddenly quickly begin to glance around as you dive into cover, spotting only one Xen Controller, accompanied by a charging vortigaunt as the creature fires shots atop the centrifuge.

Meanwhile, shots are raining down unfettered through portals and euclidean space, crashing near Saulson, Vorty and you. The physicist has ducked in terror towards the ground, barely given cover by the jutting out debris with his old model of environment suit burned partially by the alien electrical shots. He’s still alive, conscious in fact, but definitely hit. A large port, not unlike the one you’ve seen on the LIGA, is open on the centrifuge just above him, letting a small amount of white glowing gas disperse rapidly as Saulson holds protectively onto a half empty canister of the stuff below.

“Oppenheimer what the hell are you doing!?” He shouts in response to what you can only describe as a flashback to trauma you never lived. Realizing that you’re still in the opening, you quickly pull yourself into the closest position to prone you can manage in microgravity, trying to burrow behind the jagged floor of machine debris to avoid the multitude of incoming shots. Burning pain ripples across your body from past shots and new shots incoming. The shots that ripple across you now burn even more, the active protection of your suit totally disabled as its powerful batteries lie drained.

There’s a twisting in the migraine that’s slowly getting stronger, and stronger, in tune with the last of the remaining gravity lessening to zero. The tight feeling had been slowly building up, but in the stress of adrenaline and other pain from the migraine, you barely noticed it. However, it’s beginning to plateau, but as a saving grace perhaps, the smoke that once protected you is rematerializing around you, blurred and only providing partial concealment from the variety of portals and enemy entrenchments. You hear the heavy footsteps and electrical shots of the shocktroopers growing closer unloading into the Xen Controller covering the other end of the centrifuge. With the suppression of the aliens pinning you down, the sound of the damn creatures advancing sounds to you like the bells of execution, only delayed by the Xen Controller holding up the fort above. You’re just thankful of Kirchoff’s killzone, turning that flank into the only route they can advance from.
(cont.3)

>>4689876
(cont.3)
The alien creatures burrowing through the machinery let out deafening harmonic roars every few moments now, causing the shocktroopers to shake. From your suppressed position in the pit, you can just barely see eyes blinking away through the other side of the portals, getting removed by something. This doesn’t stop a deep, bassy bellow ringing out down below, vibrating every piece of metal machinery, and the bones in your chest, as the portal worm “feeds” again.

>Tell Vorty to charge your suit while you stay low in cover, pulling out your anti-tank rifle and firing some shots at the creatures on the other side to hopefully kill suppressing fire.
>Start demanding the final Xen Controller to call for some reinforcements to replenish the alien allies you lost. They seem awfully quick to retreat.
>Ask Saulson if any of the exotic matter canisters would disrupt the portals, or the alien weapons fire, throw it, and hope it doesn’t affect you as well.
>Swap Vortigaunts. Jump up next to the controller, ask his vort to charge your suit while he floats down to protect Saulson under Vorty’s power, and you cover the flank with your MP5.
>Throw two concussion grenades into the portals covering your side of the centrifuge, then rush in to finish off any dazed or knocked over shocktroopers to hopefully stop their suppressing fire.
>Make use of the near non-existent gravity. Throw a flashbang over the centrifuge, and jump up higher to the top of the pit’s cavity to outflank the flankers.
>Write in.

>>4689878
>Tell Vorty to charge your suit while you stay low in cover, pulling out your anti-tank rifle and firing some shots at the creatures on the other side to hopefully kill suppressing fire.
>Start demanding the final Xen Controller to call for some reinforcements to replenish the alien allies you lost. They seem awfully quick to retreat.
Bring 'em if you've got 'em. If they say they can't, then we should try the exotic canisters - I don't want to prevent potential backup for us from arriving, but if there's no backup coming then we're good to throw those canisters for disrupting the portals.

>>4689878
also came across this that you might find cool: https://twitter.com/TristanRiedford/status/1369389223074291713

>>4689878
>>>Tell Vorty to charge your suit while you stay low in cover, pulling out your anti-tank rifle and firing some shots at the creatures on the other side to hopefully kill suppressing fire.
>>Start demanding the final Xen Controller to call for some reinforcements to replenish the alien allies you lost. They seem awfully quick to retreat.

>>4689902
>>4690112
>Tell Vorty to charge your suit while you stay low in cover, pulling out your anti-tank rifle and firing some shots at the creatures on the other side to hopefully kill suppressing fire.
>Start demanding the final Xen Controller to call for some reinforcements to replenish the alien allies you lost. They seem awfully quick to retreat.’

“Vorty!” You shout, as you struggle to stay low and reach around your back, alien electrical rounds pattering against the centrifuge just behind you. “Suits dead! Charge it!” You have to twist your arm painfully to grab a hold of the heavy anti-tank rifle, yanking it back around. You roll yourself over in one motion, leaving the Barrett M99 resting diagonally across your chest. Electrical tingles burn through your radioprotective gloves, the aluminum alloy barrel catches blue orbs of energy in the air like a lightning rod. Ignoring the minor pain, you glare up at the Xen Controller floating above, it’s allies having retreated fearfully the moment they lost their barrier supplied by the vortigaunts. They’re barriers saved your lives on the way in, and you’re not about to have them cower out of your agreement. “Controllers!” You shout as you twist and pull the heavy, smooth bolt of the Barett. “Controllers!” You repeat even louder, screaming over the roar of alien creatures through a thick, heavy gas mask. It’s large head doesn’t seem to buzz as the orange energy forms a mist as it fizzles with every incoming shot.

Whether it truly can’t hear you over the deafening sounds of war, or if it’s simply ignoring you until the creature itself has an opportunity to slip away, you realize there’s no way you’re gonna get any message across while still forced to the ground by the hail of electrical shots. You pull a fifty round off your belt, and slot it into the chamber. You’re outnumbered, outgunned, in the middle of a covert civil war with the DoD, and painted in hazard colors. With so many regular options down the drain, you need to seem more powerful than you really are, or at least make the enemy feel small. Nothing reminds someone of their mortality better than being downrange of a sniper, and given that they’re not pushing Kirchoff’s sight line, they have just the sense of self preservation you can exploit. You roll back onto your chest, setting up the heavy gun’s bipod with the barrel half hanging off the ledge.

A low hum adds to the cacophony of sounds while you press your eye to the scope, and with it comes a simultaneous electrical tingling that puts every hair on your body standing on edge. It’s followed a second later by a warbling beep, and a deep, electrical buzz. Bewewe mmhzzzzzzzzzzzz... the sound spills from the powerful batteries of the suit, its systems whirring into a minor reboot as Vorty recharges it behind you.
(cont.)

>>4694353
(cont.)
Scanning the scope over the opposite wall of the pit,you see large orbs of lime green staring back at you through bent rebar, corroded steel sheets, smashed concrete and clouds of dust both natural and from other worlds. Shots start to fling closer, and as the tense twisting of the migraine plateaus, the hail of shots frozen in time become all the more apparent as you realize they’ll be added to the storm too. You pick a target at random, hold your breath, and gently squeeze the rifle’s crisp trigger, crosshair’s set on the eye of a xen controller peering through a small cluster of gaps in the rubble. The gun punches into your shoulder with a thundering roar, and you see the glowing eye pop into a splatter of blood, the rubble in front of it torn apart in a second.

Instantly, the creatures react by ducking, their eyes blinking out as they dig themselves deeper into their cover, and the volley of gunshots quickly dries. You swiftly lift the bolt and yank it back, the shell falling and slipping through the pile of steel. You pop another round into the breach and chamber it, scanning across once again, this time looking for any other signs of alien life ducked behind the piles of rubble. Occasionally, you see one or two peak their heads out, returning brief bursts of covering fire, and when they do, you pick one out, guesstimate where it’s body would be when it retreats back into the machinery, and pull the trigger once your scope is aligned over it. The powerful piercing 50 BMG round cuts through the ruins of advanced machinery like tissue paper. You can’t make out the sound of alien pain, nor can you see anything through the wreckage, but you’re somewhat confident in your shot. Even if you missed, you gave that creature a nice reminder that your gun demotes “cover” to “concealment,” and he’ll spread the message to allies with whatever alien communication they use.

Instead of loading in a new round however, you quickly stand up, leaving the gun floating, turn around, and push yourself off the ground towards the centrifuge, shouting out to the Xen Controller as you quickly enter his sphere of protective energy. The creature is oblivious to your commands as shots roar into it from a pair of shocktroopers slowly walking forward by gripping onto the rubble with their taloned feet, followed by the ghostly visage of themselves standing hallway through the portals. Another anomaly sits atop the centrifuge, captured in it’s moment of death, a five-five-six round poking into the crown of it’s head. The controller is halfway through creating a large glowing orb when you grab onto one of it’s spindly arms, the orb dissipating as you shout out like a drill sergeant, “Alien! Reinforcements, teleport them in, now! Understand?”
(cont.)

>>4694360
(cont.)
The creature sits still for a moment, before suddenly something seems to click in its alien head. You know it understands you… could it be planning something? Hearing damage? Is it afraid of teleporting. After the creature acknowledges your command, it raises both arms, and around it, pulses of electricity warble through the air, suddenly cascading, causing space to flicker with the same blue wisps as before. Green electricity shudders and sparks through the air, pulsing in a bright blinding flash of energy before suddenly there’s a blast of light, flashing before you then fading to show a hoard of Xenian wildlife, confused and flailing in the air.

There’s a brief moment of confusion among the encroaching shocktroopers as acidic spitballs and pulses of ear piercing sound rip through the air. “Cover…” The translating vortigaunt mutters, his voice barely audible over the confusion, “They will cover… they will… cover you must... cover you must… ”

The wave of xen wildlife the controllers summoned has become a floating ball of pure chaos and carnage as the creatures gnaw and thrash at each other while flailing wildly in the air, Vortal zombies scratching at hound eyes, which send out deafening sonic pulses that ping the other creatures away. The shocktroopers have begun firing widlly, and swatting at large, dog sized flailing creatures as if they were damn bees. “Demand… I cannot demand… I cannot... “

As the creature says that, you feel another electrical tingling in your skull. Reasons, justifications, and fear flood into your head. You have to steel yourself to prevent them from overwhelming you once again, pushing away any solid memories, being left with the abstract thought of a fate worse than death, and asking for far more than one’s owed.

While you’re distracted managing an involuntary flood of memory, the migraine both reaches it’s painful apex, the anomalies moving, sending ghostly shots to locations you were a minute ago, the translucent smoke now shifting in the air. Light flickers above, drawing your attention “upwards,” where you see ruins of something being torn apart drawn up into the dark matter orb. Deciding to add yet another element of chaos to this mess, the portal worm stops feeding the, mechanical bellow from the bottom of the pit quieting for a moment, only to be replaced with the warbled ringing as whisps of blue light begin to appear in the air around you once again, this time, with no visible alternative spots.

“Centrifuge almost ready!” Saulson shouts from the other edge. There’s a short pause, and then with the aliens just beginning to resume to peek out of cover once again, he shouts. “I don’t know if we should blow it yet though.”
(cont.)

>>4689912
That is pretty nifty. It does kinda make me wish there was more of that in half life Alyx though, since I recall correctly most of that stuff was just in the opening section I do always love the monolithic look of the combine, and the way those massive wires all trailed into the citadel made me feel so tiny in VR.
>>4694362
https://pastebin.com/Lte0sgmY
(cont.)
>That’s not what you asked for damnit, start demanding some real reinforcements, like more Xen Controllers and vortigaunts. Start twisting it’s arm if you have to, you gotta deal.
>Make full use of the chaos of Xenian wildlife, throw a flashbang into the brawl, then slip through one of the portals before they change to disrupt the aliens’ suppressing ranks, doing a little more than suppressing.
>Tell Saulson to toss the multi-spectrum goggles to you, flick infrared on, and return to the anti-material rifle. It seems to scare them.
>Hope that the aliens’ don’t get brave, and use the moment of confusion to move over and talk to Saulson, hopefully getting a good idea of his concerns, then tell him what the vorts told you, and get his opinion as a physicist before blowing a hole in the universe.
>To hell with the risks, let whatever knowledge Vorty was trying to show you enter your head, risking another bout of pseudo-traumatic flashbacks in the middle of combat.
>Don’t let that damn worm open any more wormholes, grab the rifle, and start firing shot after shot into its eye, hopefully poking it enough until it stops.
>Write in.

>>4694373
>>Make full use of the chaos of Xenian wildlife, throw a flashbang into the brawl, then slip through one of the portals before they change to disrupt the aliens’ suppressing ranks, doing a little more than suppressing.

>>4694373
>Make full use of the chaos of Xenian wildlife, throw a flashbang into the brawl, then slip through one of the portals before they change to disrupt the aliens’ suppressing ranks, doing a little more than suppressing.
Time to spray and pray behind enemy lines, boys!
YEEEEHAAAAW!

>>4694373
>Make full use of the chaos of Xenian wildlife, throw a flashbang into the brawl, then slip through one of the portals before they change to disrupt the aliens’ suppressing ranks, doing a little more than suppressing.

>>4694386
>>4694397
>>4694554
Next update will almost certainly be on another thread. It might take a while due to schol. Apologies for the slow speed guys.
>Make full use of the chaos of Xenian wildlife, throw a flashbang into the brawl, then slip through one of the portals before they change to disrupt the aliens’ suppressing ranks, doing a little more than suppressing.

Ducking down towards the floor of the centrifuge, you quickly reach down to your belt, knowing that the only thing more confusing than a floating storm of wild animals is a blind storm of wild animals, you pluck a flashbang off your belt. You pull yourself down by the centrifuge, gravity allowing yourself to float into the air slowly. After flicking the pin away with your thumb, you fling the small bomb upwards over the centrifuge before it smacks into the jagged debris above. The flashbang pings off the top maw of machinery crushed by the collapsing of the centrifuge, bouncing down.

“Just get it working!” You shout, as you quickly push off the centrifuge, reaching back around to grab your free-floating sniper rifle. “I’ll be back in a minute, we need to clear the area!”

“Is that possible?” The physicist shouts back the moment before an ear rattling crack rings out, and in the darkness, the flash beams out through gaps in the crushed up rubble, and over the centrifuge. You begin to make your move, slinging the rifle around your shoulder to jump over your shoulder quickly, kicking off the compacted rubble and concrete towards the centrifuge, scrambling over it, reaching for your pistol while you peer over cover.

The chaotic storm of flailing xenian wildlife has grown far more confusing. Half of the creatures are rearing their faces away from where the bang was just a moment ago, they’re eyes slammed shut, while all of them are deaf with ringing ears. From the pain and surprise of the flashbang, many of the poor beasts have begun to flail around even more, bull squids grabbing anything their tentacled maw touches, houndeyes pulsing thunderous explosions of sound, the small headcrabs flung away or eaten. You even spot something you haven’t seen before; a few large, bug eyed creatures around the size of a jungle cat gripping on to other creatures, such as the shocktroopers, blinding and mauled in the center of the brawl. You pull yourself over the centrifuge, keeping low as possible and as consequence, moving almost like a snake or worm slithering an inch above the ground as gravity fails to pull you downwards for the time being, occasionally pushing off the ground towards one of the numerous sources of billowing exotic gasses.
(cont.)

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>>4698121
(cont.)
Keeping a close eye on the swarm of creatures, avoiding anything that’s been pushed away from the pack, you push towards one of the numerous holes in reality. Through the glare of exotic matter decaying into something possible in your universe, you spot large creatures moving in the dark cavities beyond the portal, accompanied by flashes of electricity, or blurs of lime chitin scuttling past, releasing alien screeches. The sounds of alien shots coming through the portals is suddenly accompanied by the sizzling sound behind you as well.

With the alien’s now beginning to realize that you’re sniper rifle is no longer trained on them, you start to move quicker, pushing yourself off the ground with your silenced pistol in hand, almost grabbing at the edge of the portal like you would the side of a door, only to yank your hand back when a crushing, tearing pain sears through the bone and flesh. Pulling your hand back so hard you almost slip off course, bumping into a jagged stalactite of concrete clinging onto a vertical pipe that burst open at multiple points.

“Warning- acute spacetime distortion detected.” The suit whisps as you quickly flex your left hand to confirm it’s not broken. “Administering Morphine, Caution advised.” Ignoring the unhelpful advice of the suit as liquid morphine drips down your wrist, you begin to scan the area around you. The portal brought you into a small cavity in the compacted machinery, with barely enough room for the aliens to slither through. Jagged, sharp metal jolts out from every possible angle, with no smooth floor in sight, the space getting thinner and thicker, or stabbed through with girders, pistons and rebar. Through the clutter of debris that the collapsed machine provides, you see the focused yet constantly scrambling eyes of Xen Controllers, dipping and snaking through the machines. The only one of them that seems to have been guarding this section of their flank is a corpse, what’s left of their burned and disfigured body slammed and stabbed against the jagged metals of the walls. Some smaller tunnels seem to break the trend however, their walls being porous, but dull, with a lime-cream complexion that seems to glow at odd points.

While you take a brief moment to glare at the deadly wounds the alien inflicted, there’s a brief electrical pulse in your temple, and a distant buzz scrapes your ears, followed by the past experiences of other vortigaunts, of building tunnels on distant worlds, ant-like creatures that corrode the walls with their spit. As you’re reminded of images you’ve never seen, and nauseating chemical scents you’ve never smelled, you look at some of the other tunnels and pathways through the place, immediately recognizing that there smoother walls arte the product of the very same chemical that mutilated the poor shocktrooper before you.
(cont.)

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>>4698123
(cont.)
In your brief moment of surveyance, something beyond the smushed together piles of machinery begins to chit and chatter, the creature’s large green eye barely visible at the end of the winding clearing. It’s massive pupil stares directly at you, at your bright metal orange plates reflecting the ambient spots of light glaring through rubble. The creature starts moving down the tunnel towards you but reflixely you raise your gun, clicking it’s auxiliary flashlight on and safety off with a single motion. The MK23’s bright flashlight glares in the dark space, and the creature’s wide pupil is immediately hit with a blinding glow cutting through the gaps or bouncing off the metal fragments. You hear an alien screech even before you pull the trigger, sending an armor penetrating round to weave through the rubble where it can, and use it’s high velocity APDS ballistics where it can’t to cut straight through cracked concrete and bent aluminum. Before you can even guess wether the first shot hit, you pull the trigger again, and then again. In the hail of advanced bullets, a ball of glowing green spores is flung into the tunnel, suddenly bursting halfway through its approach. PIeces of shrapnel are dislodged from the walls, violently smashing against the chestplate of the HEV suit or the kevlar of your gasmask before floating off, metal spinning away in zero gravity. You have to catch yourself as your thrown back, the suit whispering “Minor fracture detected…”

Adrenaline surging through your body, you peer through the piles of rubble to see the eye of the creature that initially spotted you slowly floating limply through the air. The iris is torn and the surrounding steel is covered in alien blood, but the air is filled with alien chatter, no doubt warning each other in their inhuman language. New eyes, healthy ones moving through the tunnels with a purpose begin to stare at you as they march rapidly towards your position. The shocktroopers muscled, hefty bodies making it difficult to move through the cramped spaces, yet they still do it calmly and confidently. With each one of them that shifts on to tracking you down, another one of the creatures is now absent from the firing line that had pinned you down a moment ago.

With the hive stirred, another swarm adds to the commotion, a sudden hissing alien scream reverberating from everywhere around you, the electronic undertone far more prominent in the chorus. Intuition that’s not your own suddenly buzzes in the side of your head, and the migraine pulses as you connect that territorial alien roar to the gruesome death of the shocktrooper you investigated before they spotted you.
(cont.)

>>4698125
https://pastebin.com/Lte0sgmY
(cont.)
>Keep the confusion up by scrambling into one of the tunnels dug out through corrosion, using it’s smoother edges as cover, and to hopefully flank them wherever you come out.
>Drop a smoke grenade, pull out the MP5, and rely on it’s small profile, and rate of fire while you steadily push ahead in the blindness.
>Throw a concussion grenade into the debris near the encroaching shocktroopers turning the debris into shrapnel, then book it back through the portal.
>Pull out the shotgun, and dig yourself further into cover, daring the aliens to push your position in these tight spaces.
>The last time you heard that hissing roar, the creatures that made it got really angry at you for coming to close to one of the biomechanical grubs you’ve stowed in your bag. Try throwing the grub at the shocktroopers.
>Write in any clever ideas.

>>4698130
>The last time you heard that hissing roar, the creatures that made it got really angry at you for coming to close to one of the biomechanical grubs you’ve stowed in your bag. Try throwing the grub at the shocktroopers.

>>4698130
>Drop a smoke grenade, pull out the MP5, and rely on it’s small profile, and rate of fire while you steadily push ahead in the blindness.

Rolled 1 (1d2)

>>4698142(1)
>>4698170(2)
Pretty stupid of me not to do this before archiving the thread initially but I’m gonna do a quick tiebreaker.

>>4698142
>>4698170
Actually what am I doing, fuck it, these two aren't mutually exclusive. If there are no objections, I'll combine them.

>>4699367
Sure, go for it

>>4699367
be my guest
yeet then smoke and spray

I really hate doing this to you guys when the update rate is already in the shit, but I'm gonna have to delay the next thread untill sunday at the worst, hopefull just saturday. I really wish I didn't have to but I've been ill these last few days on top of having no free time between work and college. When the next thread goes up however, I wanna try to push the update rate back up to once every two days. This update rate is honestly terrible, and I really don't like that it's become normal.

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>>4702464
Stay strong, brother.
Or else.