I miss when my updates took twenty minutes to write.
>>4757415
(cont.)

>Wave Kirchoff and Saulson down to get started on the centrifuge while we create a pocket of heat down below and search for the heat signatures Kirchoff saw.

“Kirchoff! Saulson!” You shout up towards the lip of the pit, your voice drowned out by the roaring of the fire- thankfully not spreading but certainly growing, and the simmering of oxygen below. You wave both arms wildly, counting on the bright orange of your HEV suit to shine through the thickening white mist of cold oxygen mixing in with sweltering, radioactive air and the smoke rising from burning rubble. Waving your arms down and towards yourself like signalling a taxiing plane, you can barely make out the pair’s silhouettes starting to move, first Kirchoff hanging his rifle around his shoulder before he begins to clamber down the side of the pit, moving slowly, but in large strides as he descends from solid chunk of rubble to solid chunk of rubble, testing each foothold first with a kick or shove before moving further down. Saulson sticks close above, carefully following the marine.

Seeing that they’re climbing down, you shift your gaze to scan across the frozen or fiery rubble. The sound of alien hissing and screeching is growing to encompass you from different directions, and you can just barely make out what sounds like large creatures scuttling through the wreckage. You keep your head on a swivel as you look downwards, occasionally flicking your head back up with another roar or screech. Down below, looking for the possible source of heat Kirchoff mentioned, you peer over the edge of your platform, visor fogging as a gust of white mist strikes it. The massive closed radial eyelid of the portal worm looks far less frosted over then a moment ago, but the area still seems desolate and lifeless. Rubble has caveed around the edges, occasionally leaving small paths and caves within the collapsed metal and concrete that promise something hiding within.

Just as you start to consider descending further into the pit, you hear Kirchoff shout to you from behind. Slowly, as though at any moment some secret could reveal itself from the pit below, you turn around to face the marine as he hangs onto the loose chunks of rubble, now sloped shallower closer to the bottom of the pit.

“Kirchoff,” you shout in response, quickly glancing towards the scientific equipment floating in space a few inches away from the side of the pit. “Take Saulson towards the centrifuge. We need to start moving, and soon.”

“Got it.” The marine shouts over the cacophony of sounds. “Doc, get your gear ready and get down there.”

“Erhh… not yet.” Saulson replies. “Gabby those platforms could drop soon… fire’s heating it up.”
(cont.1)

>>4757419
(cont.1)
Already interested in the icy pit below, you just nod, finishing taking samples of the busted machine before you approach the edge of the platform. You take a quick few steps towards the edge of the platform, feeling it shift and shake beneath your feet before you leap off, grabbing tightly to the wall of rubble you slam against, the sound of debris sliding down masked by the constant boiling.

“Saulson!” You shout out as you slow your slide down the edge of the pit. “What else do you need to blow the wormhole open?”


“I need to get it spinning…” He shouts out, pausing a moment to think. “Not hard… but it- it needs to build up negative energy… otherwise we won’t get anything large enough to start a reaction. It could take… take maybe a few minutes to get started… then we need to move it up..”

“We can wait until gravity drops.” Kirchoff suggests.

“That’s what I was thinking.” Saulson explains. “Once it’s near the orb.. we need to put a hole in it. If... if something goes wrong.. If whatever lambda team is trying doesn’t work… antihydrogen will be annihilated here instead of in the wormhole.”

“What does that mean?” Kirchoff shouts back loudly.

“It kills us... ” Saulson responds, his voice shaking, “Then the orb kills the whole planet.”

“We can get this done Saulson.” You shout out as you pull up the small flamethrower once again. “We have to… no other option.” With that, you mark out an area around the ground below, finding it difficult to focus as a familiar yet novel sensation of a tight, twisting pain in your left temple begins to grow. Shoving it aside, you shout “I’m gonna search the bottom of the pit. We’ve got missing vortigaunts! Watch out, firing!” With that, you push down the triggering lever of the flamethrower for only a fraction of a second, and let the machine spit a lance of white flame down towards the floor, burning gas billowing off around in a plume of red and orange, leaving behind a thick black cloud while a pool of fuel lands at on the eyelid of the massive portal worm. As the burning liquid touches it, you hear a massive- bellowing groan join the cacophony of alien screams, alongside with a brief but deafening rip of sizzling oxygen.

“By god!” Saulson shouts as the brief roar of the flame subsides.”What was that?”

“Flamethrower” you respond, “I just need a spot of warmth down there,” while you stow your flamethrower. At first, you start scrambling down the walls of the pit, but as you descend the sides become more and more lose, eventually leaving you in a controlled slide down what is practically gravel, getting closer to the glowing plume of fire that’s settled in a crescent shape below. The heat hits you like a wave when you start to get close, feeling oddly relieving as the migraine twists an anomalous muscle in your temple.
(cont.2)

>>4757421
(cont.2)
Even the small amount of fuel at the bottom of the frozen, fleshy eyelid is creating a blindingly bright fire half your height, and causing the portal worm to groan and screech in pain below. Had you the time, you might regret not ensuring it’s death, but instead you just move, dropping down onto the eyelid, past the mist and towards the warmth of the flame, your hearing encompassed entirely by the massive sizzling sound of oxygen boiling.

The fire roars around and above you, while every surface you touch is ice cold. You’re right about to step off the slope of the platform when you suddenly hear Saulson shout, “It’s near critical-” before you hear the loud, heavy sound of rubble once again collapsing. Looking up, you watch as the centrifuge suddenly drops as though it were only being held in place by the hand of god now choosing to let go. The massive piece of super-reinforced scientific equipment slams into the slope of the pit wall, embedding itself while small chunks roll down towards the bottom of the pit. A few short seconds later, another floating object; the platform of floating debris closest to the centrifuge- drops like a stone, dissolving into chunks of concrete and alloy before it all comes rolling down the pit wall like an avalanche. The massive sound of destruction leaves you deaf to everything else you hop down quickly onto the creature’s massive alien eye lid.

The warmth of burning fuel hits you even harder as your feat bounce against the portal worms rumbling, groaning flesh. Here, at the base of the pit where the portal worms massive claws meet their titanic base, what was once intact machinery has cracked, but not pounded into dust and shrapnel like the upper layers. Large girders and machine frames have propped up millions of tons of gravitically inverted rubble, only barely. With an avalanche of debris from only the first platform rolling towards you, you quickly scan the area for any indication of Kirchoff’s heat source. Hoping to see any real indication of life, you see a glowing red light beyond an opening in the rubble. Out of time to search or dig, you tell yourself it’s vaguely in the direction of the heat source, and dive into the rubble, quickly scrambling forwards prone to prevent your legs from being smashed under falling machinery. Your heavy suit scrapes past metal jutting into the passage, while dust falls over your back.
(cont.3)

>>4757423
(cont.3)
Behind you, you hear the rubble begin to settle for a brief moment, likely not long before another platform reaches critical temperature and collapses once again. A brief glance over your shoulder shows only a pile of rubble having landed mostly a few meters away from the opening, mixing with the inferno you placed to warm you. The portal worms bellowing is only growing louder, and you can feel it in your chest once again. Up ahead, now that your eyes have adjusted to the light, you can see what appears to be one of those portal orbs from earlier, a bluish blurred hole in space growing and pulsing with the twisting of the migraine in your head. You begin to crawl towards it while your head twists and tightens in your temple. The air itself seems to twist as well within this space, and as the migraine plateaus once again, you begin to see cloudy new colors start to materialize within the space.

A still anomaly appears up ahead, an insectoid shape forming in the darkness. In this tight tunnel, you’re simply faced with a set of six legs, and a large alien’s thorax. You reach out your arm, hoping that it will slip through, letting you pass and see the creature from other angles, but instead you touch it gently, and feel the chitin as though it were real. This anomaly is young. Realizing you won’t be able to progress until it becomes animated, you look between the creatures six legs, seeing what at first looks to be an anomalous piece of metal, then seeing it as a clump of some foil or tarp with someodd clear section. You push your head beneath the creature, inching forwards to get a closer look… only to realize you’re looking at a member of Black Mesa’s staff, dressed in a bright silver colored hazmat suit, the same as Saulson was before he found his current Xen exploration suit. With the blur of the anomaly, the smudges on
your visor, and the darkness of the tunnel, you can’t make out the poor person’s face, but what can see is their shoulder being grabbed by a set of mandibles, other arm paused in the middle of some weak desperate swing for survival. It seems the creature is dragging him through this portal. You don’t know what the hell he’s doing here, but this place’s only consistency is its insanity, so you feel no surprise, you just wonder if it’s worth helping him with no vortigaunts to pull you out of the fire.

As you see all of this, your ears pick up yet more groaning and bellowing, more alien screeching, and above all else, rubble collapsing. The shaking gets louder and louder, seeming even more than falling platforms could provide.
(cont.4)

>>4757426
(cont.4)
>Don’t mess with time, wait for the anomaly to animate and move out of your way, then go through whatever portal opens up in the center of the orb.
>Pull out your revolver while you wait for the anomaly to animate, then blast the bug and free the one in the hazmat suit, and hope there are no unforeseen consequences.
>Try to quickly get out of this hole, and shout at Kirchoff to climb back up the pit and grab another vortigaunt off the orb.
>Leave this hole, and instead look for any vortal survivors in Kirchoff’s final heat source- within the alien tunnels on the pit wall.
>Pull back out, and instead just protect Kirchoff and Saulson as things shift in case the creatures making all the noise decide to make a move.
>Write in.

I'm gonna try to have the next update after this one out a bit quicker to make up for the terrible speed on this one.

>>4757429
>Don’t mess with time, wait for the anomaly to animate and move out of your way, then go through whatever portal opens up in the center of the orb.
It's dragging him, and it's fresh. I think he might still be alive. Can't risk death by being on the wrong side of the coin flip.

>>4757429
>Pull out your revolver while you wait for the anomaly to animate, then blast the bug and free the one in the hazmat suit, and hope there are no unforeseen consequences.
Given how recent this one seems, I believe the chances of a large shift in events is unlikely. It's worth the risk to save anyone we can.

File: gnomerider.png (7.5 MB, 4500x4500)

7.5 MB PNG

Rolled 1 (1d2)

>>4757705 (1)
>Don’t mess with time, wait for the anomaly to animate and move out of your way, then go through whatever portal opens up in the center of the orb.
>>4758176 (2)
>Pull out your revolver while you wait for the anomaly to animate, then blast the bug and free the one in the hazmat suit, and hope there are no unforeseen consequences.
Throwing up a quick tiebreaker roll, but if anyone would like to throw up a final vote to break the tie in the next few hours, feel free and I'll use that instead of the roll.

>>4757705
>>4758176
>Don’t mess with time, wait for the anomaly to animate and move out of your way, then go through whatever portal opens up in the center of the orb.

You pull back from the still creature, giving yourself some distance to react if it backs up in this tight, cramped tunnel. While the migraine continues to grow tighter, you try to shift your focus off the growing pain, and instead further survey the creature before you. It’s almost certainly the same creature that attacked you in the dark crevices of the pit walls earlier, it’s insectoid body sporting the same biotics- metal “boots” at the tip of its sharp legs… some sort of attachment on it’s head that glows bright red like an eye, and the same angular chitinous plating. There’s little else to spy however, with the increasing quantity of dust spreading out quickly from every chunk of platform that slams against the tightly shut eye of the portal worm.

Beyond the bottom of the pit, just barely over the combination of boiling oxygen, you notice that some of the shouting and screaming noises aren’t only coming from these aliens in the walls, you distinctly hear Kirchoff’s graveled voice yelling out something unintelligible, but before you can consider retreating the pain in your head begins to accelerate. The twisting seems to fold your entire head in on itself, pulling your eyes closed in a wince just as you hear another chorus of alien screeches, and the knot in your trapezius snaps. Even before you open your eyes once again, a wave of relief washes over you, and you hear slightly warped scuttling from something far heavier than any terrestrial insect, it’s metal “feet” slamming against the machine plating of the anti-mass spectrometer’s guts.

Before you, you barely see the creature scrambling off while a torrent of exotic gas spews past your eyes, blinding you in indigo light. You hear meaty thumps as the creature races ahead, and a loud human scream of desperation follows after it. Immediately you start to crawl forwards, scraping your armor through the rubble. Small pieces of debris and metal collapse down into the passageway as you drag yourself through it, not enough to stop you, but enough to make the crawl seem all too grueling when your objective is being hauled away. The creature speeds off as you chase, the plume of indigo gas spewing from the wormhole growing thinner as you approach. After a moment of crawling, you push past the cloud, and begin to make out the hole in reality before you.
(cont.)

>>4761591
(cont.)
The creature dashes straight through the wormhole into another section of reality, where no light shines except for a red emergency light that, from your perspective, seems to grow dim, then rapidly blink red as it sways across the room. However, despite the only electric light being the product of a dim battery backup, the room is still well light by a beam of bright sunlit coming from the ceiling… the ceiling which is right side up in comparison to you, despite the fact that you’re upside down. A massive hole runs through the ceiling, revealing a bright blue sky. The creature drags its prey straight through the portal, not checking to worry if it might somehow walk into a trap- or some unknowable hell dimension. It simply slips in as though it fully recognizes the concrete walls- empty weapon racks, and buckled blast doors. Alternatively it doesn’t care, like it’s running from something. Maybe from you, whispers your well trained paranoia. Is it possible the creature knew what you currently want to do, even before you came down here?

You ignore the thought for the moment as you track the creature running through the room, the poor scientist flailing and grabbing on to anything he can. First, the physicist tries desperately to grab hold of pieces of rubble while he’s still halfway through the portal, then as he’s pulled through the room he grips onto a piece of incomplete shelving, only for the creature to keep dragging him as though the added weight was nothing. The shelf is yanked off its base before the physicist loses his grip, pulling the entire thing down on the both of them. The metal and racks of small hard drives slam down on the top of the creature, crushing alien insects on top of the physicist.

Loaded with adrenaline, and the fear of death, the physicist isn’t knocked out as he begins to scramble out from underneath, only twitches and angered churrs make the alien’s reaction. However as he jumps to his feet, pulling himself up against the wall, the creature doesn't do much to follow after him. Despite it’s immense speed and strength, it’s chitin cracked like a walnut when the computer shelf fell down on it, although it’s jet black and blue-oxidized biotics seem oddly intact. Still, the horrified physicist doesn’t feel safe. He feels along the wall he’s backed up against, and manages to reach a fire extinguisher. With shaking hands, he pulls it off the wall, and prepares to use it like a bat. Before he can however something long, sinuous, and blue lowers from the hole in the ceiling like a trio of pythons dipping down from a jungle branch.
(cont.1)

File: hl2hydra.png (1.95 MB, 1600x843)

1.95 MB PNG

>>4761593
(cont.1)
The blue, semi transparent creature immediately grabs the eye of both the physicist and yourself. In the haze of the anomalous repeat, the creature seems oddly illusive as its three serpentine bodies drop down into the room. The physicist freezes, while one head- tipped with a red glowing camera in a black and blue-oxidizing casing, quickly lock’s its gaze on him. When the physicist hesitates in confusion, the new creature has no such fearful pause, and instead stabs down towards the man. You start to reach for your gun, but the second head with a spiked tip twirls quick enough for it’s transparent indigo body to become one illusive blob to your eyes, before it swiftly stabs its head like a spear into the frozen physicist, impaling him against the wall. Frozen up against the wall, you can just barely make out the man’s face before the three tentacled hydra lets him drop to the ground. The man was one of Magnusson’s team; Dr. Johannesburg.

The head that stared at Johannesburg while he killed him begins to spin around the room, scanning while the spearhead retreats back into the hole. After the strange, confusing display of this new alien creature, those two heads don’t shock you. What does send a chill down your spine is when you realize that the third head- another camera tentacle, is staring directly at your current position. Directly at you, from its position in the past. When the first head finishes it’s roomwide scan, it retreats into the ceiling, leaving you face to face with the last camera.

As your shock and adrenaline begin to wear down, leaving only the early nerves of you wondering how the hell this creature can see you from the past, you begin to glance around at the room. Some sort of emergency closet, somewhere else on earth. The only door is used by an electrical rail buckled beyond use, leaving the only passage as the portal and the hole in the ceiling currently occupied by the three-tentacled creature. Near to the door, a large crate reads, “WARNING: EXPLOSIVE. USE ONLY IN CASE OF COLLAPSE.” There, Johannesburg’s body has slumped onto the wood. On the wall opposite the door, one of the cabinets is labeled with a large, identifiable red cross; medicine. Finally, a centerpiece of the room now is a shelf once holding computer parts, now all spilled across a dead alien insect. The blue tentacle stares at you a moment longer, and you stare back into it in case it makes a move, only for it to simply slip back up into the ceiling. With a moment once again to think, the migraine slams and pounds against the side of your head, censoring any attempts your mind makes to process what you just saw. All the while, the sounds of collapse, the alien screams, and the absolutely massive bellow only get louder behind you.
(cont.2)

>>4761597
https://pastebin.com/Lte0sgmY
(cont.2)
>Quietly slip into the room, and head over to the medical cabinet to patch yourself up, and take the remaining supplies.
>Check the present bodies of Johannesburg, the dead insectoid, and look up through the hole in the roof, and hopefully get an idea of what just happened.
>Crawl over the mess, and salvage one good thing from the chaos by taking some of the explosives.
>Don’t leave your team alone for much longer, turn around and return to the pit quickly, ready to torch back anything possibly attacking Saulson.
>You’ve seen the devil, and he wears a three piece suit, but that blue thing ain’t far off either. Torch that damn hole in the ceiling.
>Write in.

>>4761599
>You’ve seen the devil, and he wears a three piece suit, but that blue thing ain’t far off either. Torch that damn hole in the ceiling.
I wonder if the flames’ll linger enough to fuck up the hydra’s repeat as well. Seems like it has a zone of influence it’s stuck to.
Not sure if i hope it would or if i hope it wouldn’t...

>>4761599
>Quietly slip into the room, and head over to the medical cabinet to patch yourself up, and take the remaining supplies.

>>4761612
>>4762478
>You’ve seen the devil, and he wears a three piece suit, but that blue thing ain’t far off either. Torch that damn hole in the ceiling.
>Quietly slip into the room, and head over to the medical cabinet to patch yourself up, and take the remaining supplies.

You watch the hole in the ceiling for a few long seconds, your eyes locked to it as though the creature’s head was still staring dead at you. Paranoia makes your bright orange and metal suit feel like a blaring police siren as you try your best to sneak over the fallen metal shelf and computers draped over a dead alien insect only a little shorter than you, and about as long. Now in the light, you can easier make out it’s angular chitin plates that squished into the softened body under the weight of the shelve. Having seen how sturdy chitin plating can be on the grunts, your almost shocked that something so simple killed the creature… although from what little they let you observe of these creatures, you’re sure their pure numbers make up for it.

With every shift of the debris, or scrape of your armor your eyes glance up to the hole in the ceiling of this closet. A beam of sunlight shines through it, letting you see easily a writhing combined mass of translucent tentacles that seems to merge into one, only made more hazy by the blurring of the anomalies. You can’t tell if they’re dug into the dirt that sits above the ceiling like hostile alien flora, or some kind of serpent sticking to the walls. Tempering your nerves with a watchful eye, you step onto one of the chitinous plates of the creature, between the knocked over shelves. Even under your boot you feel the corpse squish, letting computer parts slide off and clack against each other. Each sound feels like another opportunity to grab the creatures attention,making you grab on to your newfound flamethrower far tighter as you sneak towards the medical cabinet.


The cabinet itself is just as ruined as the rest of the room; buckled like the shock-wave of an artillery strike resonated through it. Just moving the latch elicits a loud squeak that almost makes you flinch, ready to spin around at a moments notice and torch anything blue coming out of the hole, but nothing comes yet even as you pull the twisted hinge open, only able to push it so far until it pushes against the corpse of the massive alien insect, shifting even more of the debris.
(cont.)

>>4768442
(cont.)
Through the few inches of space you put between the cabinet door and it’s shaky frame, you can at first only make out simple civilian quality first aid kits, however in the smudge of your lenses, you can just barely see a light, artificial glow emanating from somewhere in the back of the cabinet, like a computer screen or TV. With another small push, you test the door and the debris in its way, hearing the hinge scratch like nails in protest, and letting more of the mess clang and crack against itself as it collapses further. You swear for a moment, you see something blue gently slither above the horizon of the hole in the ceiling, poking its head out ready to attack. .

Fearing that the creature might still be present, might still be observing you somehow, you decide you aren’t going to take chances with the hydra’s ability to hear you into the future as well as see you in the future, and instead hold up your flamethrower once again, carefully aiming the nozzle by eye before you press the heavy lever right near it’s triggering point, hearing the fumes leak out. Watching the hole, you take a few final steps closer, one foot on the spindly leg of the alien insect. Suddenly, you see the red machine eye of one of the blue heads pop out to stare dead at you, and in reaction you push the trigger past that final threshold. A small crackle of electricity precedes a sudden loud fwoosh. Had it not been for the small hole for the hot burning fumes to rise through like the muzzle gas of a cannon, the room might’ve gone up in one massive ball of fire, roasting you with it. Still, the heat toasts your skin beneath the suit as flame sticks to the ceiling. The spew of fire stops as soon as it begins, but that still leaves a roaring inferno on the ceiling, with something inside flailing and twirling in the excruciating heat. Your suit beeps as you duck below the clouds of smoke as they mix with the exotic gasses filling the air. “Warning, intense heat detected.” You ignore the warning, the blistering of your own skin enough of an indicator. Something translucent within the hole of rising flame flicks its heads out, flopping and twisting in agony within that hole.

You wish you could watch the creature burn alive in it’s hole, but with every lick of fire that ignites something other than sticky fuel, or chunk of burning ember that drops from the ceiling, you lose time you could be raiding the medical cabinet for some of Black Mesa’s advanced medicine. You quickly turn around, yanking at the door and shoving the pile of alien body and melting computer parts away. Before you is stacks of simple first aid kits, rolls of gauze, epinephrine, even respirators and emergency oxygen tanks. However, you shove many of the simple supplies to the side, looking for any remaining stock of Black Mesa’s powerful field medicine, having had bullet wounds healed in moments by the stuff.
(cont.1)

>>4768446
(cont.1)
It doesn’t take long, knocking over a defibrillator that was destroyed long before you got to it, you reveal a large panel on the back of the cabinet, boxy with a red cross and the words “FIRST AID,” written in white. With a little keypad and blue screen, the machine awaits an input of some statistic, but a quick random tapping of the buttons returns it to blank while you fish out a small IV from the hole in the casing. The machine begins it’s loud, roaring whir as it’s pumps force some strange green liquid into your veins, calming every scar, burn, cut and bruise simultaneously.

For a few seconds, the building burning down around you seems only secondary to the full body relief you receive from this machine, only for it to be cut short when you're whipped by something just as you turn around to check over your shoulder. Your whole body is smacked to the ground as something red hot slams into you. Instantly a searing pain tears through your neck and shoulder, so much so that you struggle to breath, struggle to think. You grab at the spot of agony, and the painful heat spreads to your hands. Burning through your gas-mask hood, through your gloves, your own damn skin is on fire. There is one silver lining though. As the maddening heat rips into your nerve endings, the pain goes away, and your able to focus only for the briefest of moments, letting you remember the vague position of Dr. Johannesburg’s fire extinguisher. The things were lined against the walls in this closet for storage sake, so as you push yourself to your feet, you slide your numb hands along the wall, your arm eventually gripping something round and metallic. Reaching around it, you clasp at where the tag would be until there’s something yellow and plastic between your fingers, and pull. You don’t even remove the thing from the wall before you pull the lever, simply placing yourself in it’s cloud. In an instant, the haze of red and clouds of thick black smoke is met by a wash of white foam splashing across you, just as your suit whines, “WARNING, USER DEATH IMMINENT.”

The pain that wasn’t already nullified by your dying nerve endings begins to slow, but you’re still not able to slow down. In the center of the room, the body segments of the hydra have dropped down into this closet. The fuel of your flamethrower sticks even to the anomalies, and is cooking the poor creatures before your very eyes. You keep up the spray of extinguishing foam in your direction as you try to avoid getting hit by these living flaming whips once again, until one smacks you again, leaving another burn ripping across your waist quickly put out by another spray of the extinguisher. You pull your pistol out of your pocket, and send a torrent of nine-millimeter bursts into the creatures bodies wildly, needing two hole clips before they’re finally no longer twitching and flailing from either the pain or some biological excitement of the nerves.
(cont.2)

>>4768448
(cont.2)
With the ceiling still burning, and your flesh still boiling in some places, you quickly crawl back to the cabinet, holding the fire extinguisher as you do. Quickly, you reconnect the partially drained, partially melted IV, and let the machine slowly do it’s work. Had it not been for adrenaline, and the little chunk of medicine you gave yourself before, you would probably be dead. In these confined spaces, with the extra volatility of fire, the flames are still chaotic, and as you wait for the medicine to close up the burnt, ruined skin exposed by the hyperoxygenated fire, you keep having to spray extra extinguisher. The inferno’s already destroyed much of the room here, including what must have been thankfully plastic explosives in that crate given how the wood has burned and allowed the plastic explosives to become a slow fuel for the inferno. After less than a minute of the health charger working, it stops, with a deep bassy beeping. With much of your burnt skin still scarred, numb and raw, you look for anything more you can use on quick notice, like one of Black Mesa’s automated medkits, but all you find is a simple battery for your suit.

The noises of aliens and collapse still continue below the sound of roaring fire. With Saulson’s practically nonexistent combat experience, Kirchoff might as well be alone against any arising threats back in the pit. However, looking back through the path in the rubble you took to get here, you see numerous red, alien eyes glaring through dark spots in the rubble. That crimson light is almost the same color your brain perceives the migraine as. The hissing screeches are all too loud in here, and you can here it all coming from those walls in the rubble. Through the wreckage of some ruined machine casing, you can make out segments of the pit in the center, just barely able to see the far sides where the chemically dug tunnels were exposed, or the few remaining floating platforms, as well as what remains of the ledge that mostly collapsed when superconductivity tore the centrifuge off.

>Pull out your revolver, and pop some of those red lights, see if you can convince them back into cover while you move back to the pit
>Use a flashbang to blind these red eyed creatures, while you simply dash towards the center of the pit.
>Exit the room through the portal, but try pulling out the Xen Controller’s spine you took earlier, it did affect these portals. See if you can use it tactically somehow. (Feel free to specify a direction in the pit to point it.)
>Let Kirchoff handle himself for now while you finish patching yourself up through conventional means.
>Spray down some extra fire foam before looking ove the bodies of the two dead aliens, retrieving anything studyable or salvageable.
>Write in.

Forgot the pastebin: https://pastebin.com/Lte0sgmY

>>4768452
>Grab Johannesburg’s body and take it with you. It shouldn’t be too hard with the suit’s servos assisting with the weight, and he may have something important.
>Exit the room through the portal, but try pulling out the Xen Controller’s spine you took earlier, it did affect these portals. See if you can use it tactically somehow. (Feel free to specify a direction in the pit to point it.)
Point it towards the floating platforms. They won’t last much longer but that means if the portal stays output on them the weird things might get fucked by them if they follow us through.
I feel like that scientist had to have something mission critical to be down here.

>>4768555
+1

>>4768555
>>4772132
>Grab Johannesburg’s body and take it with you. It shouldn’t be too hard with the suit’s servos assisting with the weight, and he may have something important.
>Exit the room through the portal, but try pulling out the Xen Controller’s spine you took earlier, it did affect these portals. See if you can use it tactically somehow. (Feel free to specify a direction in the pit to point it.)
https://youtu.be/FH_XpwphsmE

The sight of Johannesburg’s remains is disturbing as it is depressing; small licks of burning fuel still clinging to the corpse. The silver radiation suit he was wearing having fused into burnt and blistered skin. You don’t think too hard about the man’s thankfully quick execution at the hands of the hydra, but you do have to wonder why he was down here. You hadn’t seen any hint of the man on his way in here, making you wonder if he took some other entrance, and what made him think it was a good idea to come down here. Could he have had something that could have changed things down here? Was he even here of his own will? Where is Magnusson, and Hartford?

Letting these questions simmer in your head, you spray the remains with the fire extinguisher once again, leaving the body coated with a layer of foam before you stride over the remains of the alien and the destroyed shelf. Once the fire is suffocated under an extraordinary amount of foam, you pull out the spine of a xen controller, remembering how it affected the portals when you were in the border worlds. You hold it under your armpit as you move to pick up the body, not wanting to spend any time closer to the aliens than your have to.

Reaching under the physicists armpits, you begin to drag the dead weight of his body as quick as you can manage, yanking him towards the portal where you can see the creatures encroaching. Still, on this side of the portal the fires are inevitably spreading once again with the hyper-oxygenated atmosphere down here, while Saulson and Kirchoff are currently defending themselves alone. Through a haze of whirling indigo gas you cross the threshold of non-euclidean space backwards, dragging the corpses legs along the ground until they hit the edge of the portal threshold. As though it’s being pushed into an infinitesimal meat grinder, charred flesh and lead lining gets torn and shredded as the physicists legs almost seem to be gripped onto by the portal. Moving quickly as the creatures behind you release another hissing scream, you hold up his back with one arm and cradle the legs in the other. For the first few seconds of lifting, your pained and exhausted muscles protest, unaided by the lacking coordination of the diazepam, however after a second or two you feel whirring servos awake alongside your joints, letting you easily lift the physicist over the barrier, bringing his body into the rubble once again.
(cont.)

>>4774579
(cont.)
However just as you cross the threshold, you feel something blunt smash you in the back, like a hammer slamming into the metal plate of the HEV suit. You’re immediately knocked over, dropping both the body of Johannesburg and the alien spine, the former of which you land on top of, putting a barrier between you and the edge of the portal, which shreds the physicists burnt decrepit skin while the spinal cord clatters and bounces across the metal. In the brief few moments you’re on the ground, something bites into your shoulder, and yanks you off the body of Johannesburg, dragging it with you for the immediate few meters. The clunky weight of your own suit makes every movement a struggle as you’re pulled forcefully into the tight spaces of the machinery.

Thinking fast, you kick at the creature, making it as a struggle for it to drag you as it is to grab your sidearm from the holster, yanking it out of the holster, nearly ripping the polymer as the suits assisted strength kicks in. Gripping on to your gun as tightly as you can manage, you curl your body up, twisting it as your dragged until you can just barely make out a blur of bright red light glaring into your eyes. You point your glock at it, your aim shaking along with your entire body, and yank the trigger one, two, three times sending nine wild bullets slamming into it. With the first burst, the creature recoils, hissing and screeching. Then the second is fired as you’re still rolling onto your back after being forcefully contorted through pipes and pistons, and it suddenly stops the noise coming from the creature, and replaces it with another desperate swing that you counter with the final bursts, letting the limp arm swing only by inertia towards you. The flying dead weight smacks you in the chest, knocking you hard backwards into rubble and machinery behind you.

Dazed only for a second as adrenaline continues to pump through your body, you crawl yourself back towards the body of Johannesburg immediately, scrambling through the tight mess of piping you were forcibly dragged into as you watch the creatures encroach on the physicists body, and the alien spinal cord. With an extra burst of nine millimeter rounds, bracing yourself against the, you nail one of the creatures, causing it to jump back in pain while you move in quickly towards the body. One of the other creatures makes a move for the spinal cord, and you race towards the artifact with a desperate speed knowing it’s your best way out of this.
(cont.1)

>>4774581
(cont.1)
However as you move for it, the creature redirects its attentions, suddenly dashing towards Johanensbug’s body, far more adept than you at moving in these tight chasms. You reactively fire off another burst, but you miss in the tight space. Another burst, this one only spitting out two shots before the pistol slide stops open. However one of the shots is lucky enough to scrape across the red glowing eye on the creatures prysmic chitinous head. Rearing in pain for just barely long enough to reach out towards it, grabbing onto it and wrapping your entire elbow under the decrepit shoulder. Digging your feet into the cracks of the rubble, you pull against the strong alien creature, feeling servo motors kick to life in the suit's mechanism. With your glock empty, you reholster the sidearm and use the now free hand to reach backwards, stretching as much as the suit will let you until you can just barely reach the alien skeletal pyramid.

Once you’re able to pull the spinal cord closer to you with the tips of your fingers, you raise it up into the air, seeing through one of the many dark holes in the rubble a spot where reality tears open and indigo gas spills through. You try to pull yourself back, into the portal behind you in the dear hopes that it will take you through, but two chitinous angular plates on the creatures thorax part, revealing insectoid wings that buzz and flap with every second, making it near impossible to see anything beyond the now larger creature. You just keep holding the spinal cord as steady as possible, while you yank the whole body backwards best you can, feeling the alien creature tug back with all its might.

However, just barely begin to win out as the HEV’s servos and your own body further exerts itself. Your shift your legs through the portal, feeling more rubble beneath you in a place you can’t yet see. The further you pull, the more creatures from around you begin to encroach. As your HEV suit touches against the edges of the portal wall, you can hear the metal plating crushing and warping under the impossible bend of spacetime. You ignore it for the time being, but as your head begins to poke through the hole in reality, you notice that the edges of the portal are starting to ungulate and shrink, rapidly growing smaller with each pulse, the reverse of it growing out. It is still slow, in tune with the slow reduction of gravity all around you. However, as you slowly tug the physicist and the alien behind it, now using both your legs and the hand that’s holding the alien spinal cord, massive slices and chunks are ripped from the corpse, dripping through the rubble in a torn slurry. Massive chunks of the physicists thigh, ribs, and skull are peeled away along with an entire arm, the larger loses leaving behind disgusting chunks of human innards that spill out.
(cont.2)

>>4774586
(cont.2)
Despite the dangerous edges of the wormholes desecrating the very body you had hoped to preserve, at least temporarily, it also wounds the alien insect just as it steps into the light. With another yank, you pull the body and the creature clinging onto it through the portal. However the insectoid beast steps its forelegs, if they can called that given how they originate from the thorax only to reach in front of the creatures head, and the portal pulses smaller once again, dragging the deadly knife’s edge barrier of spacetime upwards rapidly. The spindly legs are caught by it, suddenly dragged into the intense turbulence of spacetime localized within an infinitesimal ring. The outer chitin is immediately torn, and the exoskeleton cracks like chicken bone, letting alien innards spill out while the creature drops down, flailing and screaming in pain. Taking your chance, you quickly move back, finally standing up as you swing the dead body of the physicist behind you.

With the alien creature demobilized, and the body of Johannesburg behind you in the center of the pit, you have a moment to gather your bearings, although brief. You did manage to just barely get on the final platform, now standing on the very edge where the physicists burnt and ruined body hangs off the side. However, both within the walls of the pit, and the corridor you just exited through a portal, you can see clearly a mural of glowing red lights, all staring at either you, or the body you just secured. The creatures scream and hiss, and from both sources you can see them moving within cover, preparing. In fact, through the portal, you can see multiple of them sliding out of their cover, one of them a clearly more ant-like organism with its rounded features contrasting heavily against the angled bodies of the other biotic insectoids, alongside it’s skin growing a lime green in the dark, making it even easier to see.

At the same time, looking down on the pit you can see that, while the portal worm’s eye is closed for the time being, the forces of Race X have definitely received reinforcements at some point, as two new shocktroopers have arisen out of the rubble, and are now engaged in a firefight with Kirchoff and Saulson, the latter of the two is ducking in cover, staring up at the hole in reality you just came out of.

Finally, small spot of frost and ice coat the platform you’re still on, but with the presence of fire below you, the smoke drafting heat upwards, it’s quickly melting, leaving you with little time to vacate the platform. As well, after you moved through the portal with the xenian spinal cord in hand, the portal seems to be no longer responding to it’s alignment, as though it’s fixed in place.
(cont.3)

>>4774591
(cont.3)
https://pastebin.com/edit/Lte0sgmY
>Fire back through the portal with the SMG in controller bursts to pick off anything that advances while you kick the body off the platform.
>Kick the body off the platform, then jump down after it to rummage through it’s pockets and look for anything of significance that wasn’t totally melted in the fire, or lost to turbulent spacetime.
>Use your elevated position to deal with race x’s forces as quick as possible. Pull your anti-tank rifle, and send a .50 BMG round through one of their heads.
>Use your flamethrower to torch the walls of the pit where you see large clusters of red lights while you and the body drop to the bottom of the pit.
>Write in.

>>4774612
>Fire back through the portal with the SMG in controller bursts to pick off anything that advances while you kick the body off the platform

>>4774612
>>Fire back through the portal with the SMG in controller bursts to pick off anything that advances while you kick the body off the platform.

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>>4774623
>>4775890
>Fire back through the portal with the SMG in controller bursts to pick off anything that advances while you kick the body off the platform

Barely a few seconds of observation pass between you watching the alien get its legs broken clean off before you swing your MP5 around the shoulder, while you watch the closer dots of red light that have all begun to stare you down, like a firing line of laser sights pointed towards your head. Meanwhile, in a swift practice you stomp down on the writhing alien insect below you, your boot crashing into it’s chitinous head, the weight of your HEV suit turning what should have been a meaty thump into a loud crack. The creature squeals, before you pull your foot back to kick it like a football.

With one last crunch, the creature goes silent , the force of your knocking him back from the entrance of the pulsating portal. With it, more space opens up, giving you a direct avenue to fire down the tunnel. You drop, and pick out a red light that glares through your vision while you align the MP5’s angled iron sights. With a quick burst of five rounds, the light suddenly ducks back away from you. With more bursts of nine-millimeter you track the creature. Before you can hope to see the creature’s death, more hissing screams pierce the air from all directions. Something glowing bright green in the dark begins to shift. However, as you line your sights onto it’s path, ready to pull the trigger, you suddenly hear an intensely loud flapping buzz behind you.

You twitch your head behind you, quickly sweeping the MP5 around a moment later as you’re suddenly faced with one of those four legged insects soaring through the air. It’s biotic eye tracks you perfectly as you instinctively raise the gun to your shoulder. The creatures three tusks and two mandibles are almost face to face with you by the time you slam down the submachine guns trigger, sending a wild burst of rounds towards the creature.

All you see in the final fraction of a second before the creature slams against you is the muzzle flash of your gun and a burst of alien blood. The chitinous exoskeleton slams into you with a mass only just barely softened by the slowly waning gravity. You’re immediately thrown to the ground, even as you reflexively brace with your MP5. The barely stable platform shakes, pieces crumbling away as in a second you’re in the ground, the alien creature quickly rearing back it’s legs to slam down against your head while it’s five total massive teeth grip down on your neck. Before you can even consciously register where it’s aimed, you hold down the trigger of the MP5. The gun stock kicks against your chest while the creature is slammed with the full muzzle velocity of fully automatic nine millimeter rounds, knocking the creature back off you, it’s body pummeled with rounds just as it prepared to stomp you.
(cont.)

>>4781035
(cont.)
Still on your back, you give one last kick with the iron boot of the HEV suit, knocking the creature on it’s back where it flails and struggles before it falls off. Adrenaline rushes through you, and with it, alongside the numbness of your scientifically treated third degree burns you almost don’t feel the massive punctures where the creature’s large teeth punctured through the HEV’s sheet metal, breaking the skin like butter and leaving muscle and blood exposed to the open air.

You push yourself to the ground, your muscles protesting against the weight of the suit before it’s servos whir in assistance, all the while the migraine pounds in the side of your head at every thought of the alien creature's biotics, almost blurring your vision as you quickly return your sights to the portal, picking out the rounded glow of lime green accented with a glowing red dot that you blast with a succession of rounds.

The shots fling down the increasingly thin space of the portal, some rounds bouncing and cracking against the buckled machinery within, kicking plumes of dust into the air. The rounds crack against something organic within, given the audible sounds of pained screams in between the shots. However, even as one of the lights blink out, more and more approach, deafening choruses of aliens hissing from all around you, all preceding a sudden glare of lime luminescence

A wave of green light piles towards you, just in the moment the portal reels back form its most recent inward pulsation. Glowing liquid, fired with an arcing velocity spills through the portal, some just missing the edge of spacetime, other parts crashing into the dead alien corpse in the way, splashing off and burning into it, but a large chunk of the stuff splatters or smacks into the the metal suit or the exposed skin of your wounds, sizzling at the metal, and burning at the flesh for just a moment before the skin goes numb.

The suit beeps in warning, before its voice alerts, “Warning, acidic compound detected.” Afterwards, a small dribble of some sort of medicine weakly pours down your wrist from the disconnected suit IV.

You start to back carefully away from the portal, keeping up the rate of fire while you feel with your leg for the body of Johannesburg. “It’s online!” You hear Saulson shout from below, along with a loud bang of a fist on metal. “It’s spinning!”’A brief glance down to his position shows the physicist celebrating as if it had been a conundrum of physics he’d spent his life on, however in that brief moment he lets himself peak out of cover, a torrent of ball lightning from the aliens redirects from suppressing Kirchoff towards him. The glaring cyan orbs zip through the, the first two or three arcing into his neck and arms, immediately knocking him down like a taser and causing his muscles to spasm as his skin no doubt burns beneath the suit.
(cont.1)

>>4781036
(cont.1)
As you watch this, considering how to help him, you finally feel your heel touch something fleshy, but covered in rubber and lead. Not turning from the portal, you pause your automatic bursts, and kick backwards, your leg feeling ever so slightly more limp. At first, you hear the body shift only slightly, but after another burst of gunfire, you kick again and hear it tumble down off the edge, crashing against the debris below. Just as you begin to turn around to follow after it, just starting to kick off the ledge towards the wall of the pit besides you, does the superconductive material of the last floating platform finally reach its critical temperature. Like a stone dropped by the invisible hand of god, the platform all drops as one, every piece suddenly reminded of the existence of gravity, and acting accordingly.

Despite having almost jumped off the platform, your taken by surprise as your instantaneously dropped into freefall, feeling momentarily weightless for the seconds before you crash against the sloped edge of the metal pit, bracing yourself best you can against the impact before you roll down along with the pile of rubble a meter or so below you. Each bump against the rubble is every so slightly softened by the slow waning of gravity’s pull, but still bruises and buckles your entire body.

With your deadly rate of fire rapidly and fully stopped, and yourself momentarily stunned against the ground, a flurry of scuttling sounds throughout the walls, and from up above. In some places along the walls, the rubble begins to shake and stir, and up above, the hissing screams grow closer to the hole in reality as it makes its last few pulses. Moving with a ferocious speed, a rounded for legged creature bounces out of the portal, insectoid wings buzzing and flapping as it glides down to the edge of the pit, landing only a few meters above the corpse. Behind the creature, more of the insectoid drones chase out, but by then the portal has grown two small. The next one out is trapped within with a sickening crunch as its chitin is ripped apart by a ring of timespace bent into an infinitely small volume. Meanwhile as you push yourself to your feet, apparently random spots in the rubble around you begin to shift, before thin spindly legs with biotic feet at their ends stick out, followed by the triangular faces of the insectoid creatures that are so insistent on recovering this physicist's body. Three of the creatures, adding on to the rounded antlike specimen that flew threw the portal, now in the light easier to see than ever, are worming their way up through the ground once again.
(cont.2)

>>4781040
(cont.2)
Kirchoff is too busy firing at the encroaching shocktroopers, resorting to the nearly ruined M60 to fire off small bursts of seven-six-two, every so often needing to unjam the belt as it slips on the smooth corroded metal that’s now turned the same yellow as the alien corroded tunnels- a yellow that’s now begun to show up on your suit. With the efficient care of the deteriorating machine that only a marine could provide in combat, he’s wounded both of them already, one laid out on the ground clearly still alive but in pain, while the other has taken cover and is returning fire. However, with that rate of fire kept high, he isn’t giving to any attention to the wounded physicist next to him.

Worse, just below, the massive wormlike alien creature sitting at the bottom of the pit is beginning to shift, bellowing out as the massive eyelid that had become covered with rubble and debris pulls open, dragging all the metal and machinery to the walls of the pit. As the eye opens, the two massive, tree trunk like talons begin to shift on either side of the pit, the joints at their base slowly beginning to shake and shove, breaking up the rubble around them.

>Defend the body of Johannesburg. Fire at the rounded alien with your revolver while you move in on top of the body to defend it from the insects.
>Just make sure these bugs don’t get to the body of Johannesburg, torch the corpse completely, until it and nothing on it could possibly be recoverable.
>Try to scare the creatures back with the last few bullets in your MP5 while you quickly as possible search for anything that might be on the man they might want before leaving it.
>Let the creatures have the body, and instead move quickly towards Saulson, and get the man back awake, maybe with some of the suits morphine drip.
>Quickly run across the eye, and move to flank the shocktroopers as they suppress Kirchoff, and assault with the Spas-12.
>Take cover, and quickly connect the HEV’s IV drip to your wrist.
>Lay down fire on top of the opening eye of the portal worm. If it wants to wake up now, make it painful.
>Write in.

>>4781041
>>4781041
>Defend the body of Johannesburg. Fire at the rounded alien with your revolver while you move in on top of the body to defend it from the insects.
>Command Kirchoff to Frag his shocktroopers ASAP and to secure Saulson when they're down.
The thing's finally online, we're so close to the finish line

I really apologize guys, but due to finals week hitting me like a truck, the next update will be late for quite a bit, at worst until wednesday, however after that I'm good for the summer, which should mean updates will move way faster.

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>>4785267
The right QM at the wrong time can make all the difference in the world

Good news everyone, I'm officially done with the semester. I had hoped to have the update done today, but as of right now that's up in the air. However, I can guarantee you we're gonna go back to a decent update rate after today. Home free from this god damned semester.

>>4781064
>Defend the body of Johannesburg. Fire at the rounded alien with your revolver while you move in on top of the body to defend it from the insects.
>Command Kirchoff to Frag his shocktroopers ASAP and to secure Saulson when they're down.

“Kirchoff!” You shout loudly as you let your submachine gun drop, hanging to your shoulder by the strap. Through fatigue and gasmask combined, you struggle to push your voice past the hammering report of the M60s bursts overlaid with alien screams. “Kirchoff!” You scream once more, pulling at your pistol from its holster. Only a second before the belt in the marine’s broken gun slips, and the roller seizes do you finally free your revolver from the holster, line up the large glow of bioluminescent skin and glowing acidic spit while you pull the trigger. The Colt Python kicks like a mule with a deafening bang, and there’s a splatter of yellow while the creature hisses in pain. The three fifty seven round punches through the thick rounded chitin, cracking the brittle exoskeleton like an egg and letting alien bodily fluids slowly drip out of the wound. Astoundingly however, it still lives, screeching and growling in pain as the worker’s soldiers move forwards to protect it.

While the shot still rings in your ears, you turn to shout “Kirchoff!” Once more as he struggles to clear the weapon. With the marine no longer deafened by rapid gunfire, he turns towards you, while you shout out, “Flush them out and help Saulson!”

For a brief moment, you pull your hand off your gun to point at the shocktroopers, your eyes off the bugs, and in that moment one of the creatures strikes with a lightning speed. With a sudden flapping buzz filling your ears, you’re suddenly struck by a powerful punch from one of the insectoid creatures, slamming against your kevlar gasmask and immediately knocking you to the ground.

The force of the biotically enhanced kick sends you reeling back, the migraine slamming you again and again as your brain processes what just hit you. For a second, you roll down the side of the pit before one of the creatures lands atop you, it’s four legs holding you in place. Your vision, limited by the corroded visor of the gasmask is nothing but a flurry of alien tusks and scuttling legs. Not even thinking, you place the barrel of your revolver against the creature's belly, and yank it’s heavy trigger. The shot rings in your ears as the creature’s midsection is blown open by a three-fifty-seven magnum. Chunks of chitin and inner organs are splattered across the pit wall, but you take no time to rub the alien innards sticking to you as you get up, quickly scrambling up the rubble as the other creatures approach.
(cont.)

>>4793178
(cont.)
Where you have to climb, these aliens simply scuttle along vertically with biotic footpads. As you climb back up this steeper section of the pit, you hold your revolver out, two of the creatures rushing down the wall towards you. Meanwhile behind them, one of the soldiers grabs Johannesburg's body, rushing up a far steeper section of the wall. You pause in your climb for a moment, lining up another shot the best you can with one hand at the creatures moving quickly down towards you. When the pistol’s hammer drops, the gun nearly flies out of your hand, while the report rings in your ears, only for the magnum round to zip through the air past one of the creatures as it ducks down a moment before you fire, and the recoil of the shot sends the round high. In response, the insectoid creature lunges towards you. With a motion almost too fast for the eye to catch, the creature smacks you in the chest with another alien punch, slamming you into the wall, almost knocking you off the pit had it not been for the mechanical assistance of the suit’s servos. “Warning.” The suit whines, “Power depleted.”

Pieces of rubble crumble down from the impact, and for a brief moment the creature almost slips, scuttling backwards against the wall as if the falling chunks of metal were a treadmill. Thinking quickly, you flip the revolver around in your hand, holding it now by the barrel and cylinder as you slam the wooden grip against the creature’s softer underbelly. The strike knocks it forwards, and with a loud buzzing of wings it tries to stabilize itself only for you to swing at it again as it now slides down over you, bashing it with your armored elbow, the creature’s feet only serving to drag the rubble it sticks to down with it as it’s knocked upside by the swift strikes, it’s wings unable to correct while it plummets and rolls towards the bottom of
the pit.

You give yourself no time to watch the creature fall as you continue to climb, magnum still in hand.The second alien rears back it’s body, letting out a warbling hiss through it’s alien maw concealed within it’s strange combination of tusks, mandibles and chitin. It almost seems to be returning to the defensive, like a stray cat protecting its young. However it’s attention is grabbed by a loud, ear piercing crack that rips through the air. Alien screams ring out, while a few chunks of stray shrapnel slam into the rubble nearby.
(cont.1)

>>4793182
(cont.1)
Exploiting the distraction, you aim once again, this time laying your arm out along the rubble to brace it as you fire another powerful shot, crashing through the insect's head like a truck, cavingin and exploding. The body of the creature goes limp, but the biotic feet hold it, hanging on to the side of the wall while you assess further past the creature, only to notice that you’ve lost the spitting alien and the creature holding onto the physicist’s corpse.

Your eyes dart around the walls of the pit, searching desperately for where the creatures might have gone. Above, just near the tunnels that have exposed themselves, wrapping around the “Irradiated periodic containment,” is a new hole in the wall, dug clearly through the same method that dug the semi-exposed tunnels, and judging by the bright luminescent yellow, the same corrosive chemical that hit you earlier, and ruined Kirchoff’s machine gun.

Meanwhile, from down below, the alien bellow from the awakening portal worm is getting louder and louder, it’s two massive claws beginning to bend and turn down over the pit, like two redwood trees falling down into each other. They crash through a section of the yellow insectoid tunnels, breaking open sections and crushing the creatures within, leaving a gory mess of corroded metal and alien innards. The blue cyan light glowing down from the pit mouth is eclipsed by the large masses, while every chunk of rubble shakes and vibrates, some pieces of machinery breaking off and rolling down. At the same time, the loud warbled ringing picks up again, with the creature’s eye pulling open, it’s still damaged iris does it’s best to contract as it glares up high into the pit. The blue wisps return, screeching up above the tunnel network, causing the smaller chunk of debris to float up off the ground.

You quickly begin to climb up crawling the walls, while more of the creatures scramble through the rubble behind you or out of the tunnels above, sticking their legs up through the pulverized machinery and thrashing through it. As gravity continues to reduce, the climb becomes a lot quicker and easier, although your burnt and bruised bones and muscles protest through every second, old cuts coming close to reopening as you lug the bulky HEV suit up the side.

You approach the tunnel as some of the creatures begin to surface, three alien heads poking out of the side of the pit, their biotic legs pulling the rest of their insectoid bodies out. By then, you’re already gripping onto the edge of the small tunnel, holding up your revolver ahead of you, hearing some inhuman belching sound alongside crumbling rocks within.
(cont.2)

>>4793189
It is so fucking nice being done for the summer man.

(cont.2)
Slipping your eyes and weapon over the ledge, you immediately see one of of the many biotic insectoids, staring you down, hissing at you while the body of Johannesburg sits a few meters behind it, and beyond that is a lime green glow, methodically vomiting out it’s bioluminescent enzymes that soften the metal, concrete and rock like clay before thrashing through it, digging a little bit further towards the home tunnel set. Before you can even process the first alien staring you right in the face, instinct has you pulling the magnum’s heavy trigger, immediately sending a round straight through its head, tearing apart it’s innards. After the loud bang and muzzle flash, the creature drops dead, it’s torn open underbelly spilling organs onto the floor of the tunnel.

The creature at the other end doesn’t stop however, quickly trying to tunnel through, and away from you presumably so it can drag Johannesburg's body into the main network of tunnels. However, the corpse itself is a few meters behind the creature now, which is either deafened by the bullet you put in it’s head, intent on tunneling, or faithful in the soldiers defense that you might be able to quickly move past the alien soldiers body and grab it.

Looking back however, three biotic insects are closing in on your position from behind you, while two more burrow out from the mess of broken tunnels above. They’re likely to chase you in or try and corner you if you don’t protect the exit behind you. Further away, the shocktroopers that knocked down Saulson are either dead or own the ground wounded or in pain, but with the reawakening of the portal worm, now moving it’s massive claw downwards, much of the rubble is piling up near them, like a slow steady tidal wave. Kirchoff is quickly moving the incapacitated Saulson away from the centrifuge, which is being half buried with increasingly lightweight rubble as the claw moves atop it.

>Quickly throw a concussion grenade into the tunnel, wait for it to detonate, then try to quickly grab Johannesburg's body.
>Channel your inner tunnel rat, and move in the tunnel, lighting the entrance with the flamethrower and letting the worker insect tunnel to the main tunnels. Kill these creatures from the inside while you drag the body to an alternate route.
>If it wants to hide away, let it, pull away from the tunnel, and torch the outside to turn the tunnels into an oven.
>Quickly make use of your last Anti-tank mine by moving across the pit and trying to wedge it into the path of the crushing portal worms’ giant claw.
>Move back towards Kirchoff’s position and help provide covering fire with the spas-12 if the aliens charge while he revives Saulson.
>Write in.

>>4793191
>Quickly throw a concussion grenade into the tunnel, wait for it to detonate, then try to quickly grab Johannesburg's body.
I really do not trust them with that body, there must be some truly good shit on it if they've been trying this hard to retrieve it.

>>4793237
>Quickly throw a concussion grenade into the tunnel, wait for it to detonate, then try to quickly grab Johannesburg's body.

Moving quick, stow your revolver in the holster for a brief moment, you With one motion, you yank a concussion grenade off of your belt, pulling the pin and poking your head back into the tunnel. With a quick toss, the grenade bounces past the body of the insectoid soldier, the lever ejecting off and bouncing down the side of the pit. You immediately duck your head back down, below the tunnels mouth, quickly glancing in every direction as the creatures hone in on you. They crawl quickly up the side of the pit, charging up as if it were any floor while you cling to the unstable pieces of rubble and rebar. The creature’s hiss and scream below, while you reach for your USP. As you pull the gun from it’s quick holster, one of the creatures makes a lightning fast dash up the wall, wings flapping as it moves creating a sudden blur of chitin.

Reacting quickly, you swing your leg around and downward, the weight of the suit’s alloy plating like bronze knuckles as you kick the creature, jamming your boot into its neck, feeling the chitin crack as it’s thrown off to the other side. Just as the creature is knocked off its course by your swift boot, the two creatures awaiting behind it pounce in one synchronized, orchestrated formation, leaping up the wall to you. In a flurry of motion, one of the creatures lands atop you, suddenly grabbing your neck with it’s five tusks, fluttering its wings, drowning out every sound other than buzzing and flapping. The sharpened teeth, aided by a biotic joints and alloy reinforcing cut through the kevlar of his gasmask and the collar of your HEV suit, only stopping when you feel them against the skin below.

As you pull your sidearm out of the holster however, you feel something another one of the creatures bite down on your wrist, puncturing the plate and the PCV just the same as the creature that slammed down on top of you. However, where it grabs your wrist it lets the barrel of your gun point towards it. With a pull of the trigger, the sabot of the stealth pistol bores through the creature’s neck like paper, causing the creature to crumble. Only in that short delay of time you spent killing the second creature, you feel the creature on your collar begin to yank you backwards. The force and weight of the creature’s powerful biotic legs jerks your entire upper body, straining your arm, the powerless servos failing to lock and pulling you off the side of the pit, away from the tunnel.

With the creature still attached to your neck, you freefall for a moment, crashing into the inward slope of the pit walls a meter down, crushing the creature underneath you before you violently roll further, catching yourself on a piece of bent rebar while broken pieces of alien chitin and innards continue to tumble and slide down.
(cont.)

>>4795407
(cont.)
You look up defeated, the energy knocked out of you as you watch the two creatures that had crawled out of the rubble from up top approach the mouth of the tunnel. One of the creatures moves over then pokes its head in to secure the body and worm its way into the tunnel. It’s at that moment when the concussion grenade bursts.

The force of the blast, normally nonlethal, within the tight confines of the tunnel the concussive blast bounces back in on itself over and over, crushing what’s left inside and turning the artificially smooth edges of the tunnel into the bore of a cannon. With the shear force of moving air visible through the muzzle blast of dust and flying corrosion visible behind it, the living soldier within is sent flying back out. Right after the live one, the body of the other insect, already killed by a three-fifty-seven round flops out, making it only a few meters before it sinks like a stone.

Just behind it, having transferred almost all of it’s ballistic energy into the two flying corpses before it slumps half off the mouth of tunnel, limply hanging with bodily fluids slowly dripping out of the grievous wounds.

Realizing your chance, even as more the creature's attempt to slip out of the tunnels or burrow through the rubble, you take aim with your pistol at the soldier currently closest to the mouth of the tunnel, bracing your entire arm against the rubble with the iron sights lined onto the creature, tapping the trigger once, twice before it goes limp, clinging to the wall like all the others even in death. The moment it stops moving, you waste no time abusing the low gravity of the test chamber, almost leaping up swaths of rubble.

As you climb, the massive tree trunk sized claws of the portal worm are continuing to move, the one closest to you smashing through a section of the alien tunnels begins to slow it’s turning, only to start raising itself, slowly moving through tons of the rubble, as it ascends, letting a massive cloud of dust build up above, falling incredibly slowly in the weakening gravity. The other claw continues to bend downwards, crushing things in the path of its joint, just narrowly missing centrifuge, which would’ve easily crushed and ruptured it, instantly killing all of you, instead burying it under a small mountain of loose rubble that almost bounces back up in the lower gravity.

A few meters away, Kirchoff has placed down Saulson, and is working best the man can with a half-expended bleeder pack to get the man back up through the hermetically sealed radiation suit. Knowing he can’t actually cut open the man’s suit without exposing him directly to an intense amount of radiation, he instead injects a dose of morphine straight through the suit, before starting to perform CPR on the chest. Had you brought a medic here, a lot more could’ve been done, but now working blind the marine simply tries anything he can to awaken the unconscious physicist.
(cont.1)

>>4795409
(27/100 health. 0/94 Armor)
https://pastebin.com/Lte0sgmY
(cont.1)
Continuing to climb, you reach the mouth of the tunnel, creatures around you surfacing from every direction, but it’s far too late for the aliens. With the intensely low gravity, you’re able to reach up, and yank Johannesburg’s body by the arm, flinging it limply out of the tunnel in a way that would’ve pulled you down had it not been for the fractional gravity of the tunnel. You let the body drop, rolling down the sides of the tunnel. Moving quickly as to note give the fast chasing creatures any edge, you run and slide down the edge of the pit, moving back towards Kirchoff.

Up ahead however, the creature’s have lost the opportunity to chase, as the massive single claw of the portal worm bends and pushes across the pit, it approaches the network of tunnels dug by the alien insects, not showing any signs of slowing or stopping. The creatures begin to scramble away, like rats fleeing a sinking ship.

However, the warbling screech of the portal storm up above the network of tunnels suddenly comes to a stop, and in the place of the many blue wisps that had hovered there comes a set of purple rifts in space and time, small little glares of light flying out of each for a brief moment in time before pouring out comes loads of barking pit drones, it massive numbers swarming down the side of the pit wall towards the insectoid creatures.

Just behind the pack of ten or so pit drones, now hopping down the massive wall of the pit as the alien claw prepares to crash into the alien tunnel network, two more shocktroopers, these ones perching positions on the top of the aliens claw, running down the thing to get away form where its about to smash through the wall of the pit.

>Make use of the lighter gravity. Throw your last anti-tank mine up towards where the massive alien claw is about to crush the insect tunnels.
>Torch the path between the chemically dug tunnels and you with the flamethrower after bringing Johannesburg's body down to Saulson’s position.
>Tell Kirchoff to cover you, while you swap over to trying to treat the wounded Saulson, cutting open his suit directly to treat the wounded area as quick as possible with some of the medical supplies you found earlier before covering it quick as possible.
>Pull out the Anti-tank rifle, and knock one of those shocktroopers off their elevated position.
>Quickly pull the body of Johannesburg downwards, towards Saulson and Kirchoff, and start looking through his body, cutting open the remains of his hazmat suit and looking for whatever the aliens were so interested in.
>Uncover the buried centrifuge quickly as possible by lodging a concussion grenade in the rubble and letting the low gravity assist .
>Quickly move to the center of the pit, and lodge your last frag grenade into the portal worm's eye.
>Write in.

>>4795422
>Quickly pull the body of Johannesburg downwards, towards Saulson and Kirchoff, and start looking through his body, cutting open the remains of his hazmat suit and looking for whatever the aliens were so interested in.

>>4795407
I can’t even tell what we’re fighting anymore. These latest updates have been so chaotic. I don’t if it’s information overload or what. It’s definitely thematically appropriate given the current situation, but I’m finding it very difficult to follow along.

>>4795641
>>4795641
Thanks for letting me know man, I'll try and keep the updates a bit more condensed from here on. I am kind of finding it awkward to write updates recently due to having twenty things happen per, so it might be about time to reduce the amount of things happening between choices, hopefully that will help out here and also speed things up as I promised I would for the summer. It's also probably because I've been a little deliberately vague about some of the new creature's that you guys've been fighting. I think I'm gonna start calling these augmened antlions what they are.

>>4795745
I had my suspicions, but that confirmed it, niiiice

>>4795641
Also, if you'd like I could quickly sum up the last few updates if they were hard to follow, just so you won't be confused from here on. Where'd you start getting lost?

>>4795766
I guess wherever you started being vague and all the aliens were just being called “creatures.” Plus a lot of the fighting is starting to blur together. The only thing I know for sure is that we’re getting tenderized. Like I said before, the disorientation makes sense thematically but it makes me feel like Gabby has to clear-cut this forest in order to make a tangible path forward appear.

The update will have to come a bit late today, got called into work unexpectedly, apologies.
>>4795938
The uncertainty was supposed to be deliberate to a degree, but I didn't intend it to be so strong that people are unable to participate. I'll try and rectify that in the coming updates so one can still understand what's happening on a moment to moment basis.

>>4797020
Thanks boss

>>4795485
>>4795641
This one still ended up a bit long, but I hope it feels a little more concise. Also, since it’s been a while since I put any real summation of recent happenings in the opening post, I think I'm gonna write one going back to when you guys first entered the test chamber, just to cover anything and cast a wide net. Let me know if things still feel confusing.

With the very laws of physics breaking down the closer you got to the epicenter of the resonance cascade, you knew that there had to have been an immeasurable source of residual power within the test chamber, and you found exactly that deep within. As Dr. Saulson described, the vortigaunts had contained the effects of the universe's most powerful source of energy- an unbalanced vacuum, and were slowly radiating it by warping time, preventing the build up of zero-point energy the prolonged resonance cascade created from boiling the planet.

While Poskanzer and Wells moved for the surface to contact the Central Intelligence Agency, you, Kirchoff, and Dr. Saulson devised a plan to burrow a wormhole into another universe with the destroyed components of the anti-mass spectrometer. In the process, you made a deal with a division of Xen’s invasion, giving them brief access to your mind for their assistance and nonaggression. Under cover of the Xen Controller’s immunity to projectiles, you moved into a pit created by the anti-gravity of the test chamber, and the collapse of the machine's main emitters. Within, your team filled a centrifuge with exotic matter, and got it to start spinning. As you fought off Race X, and the massive spacetime bending worm grown into this pit, you found yourself being tracked and watched by red eyed creatures in the darkness, augmented antlions with impossible to decipher motives.

By freezing the portal worm with liquid oxygen, you were able to find a moment’s peace, given you precious time to search through the rubble that, in the extreme cold, became superconductive, causing chunks to levitate. Searching through debris, you found a dead vortigaunt, while the other remained missing. The dead vortigaunt however died holding the remains of an unknown alien drone, off of which you found a flamethrower, a double edged sword in the now oxygen rich environment made by the boiling liquid oxygen.

In further search of the missing vortigaunt, you saw an anomalous repeat in time showing Johannesburg being pulled by an antlion. Partially due to your own inaction, the man was killed swiftly by a hydra, a blue spiked serpentine creature with the same biotics as the antlions. You burned the creature alive, and then fought across the entire pit for the possession of Johannesburg's body, while the portal worm began to reawaken. As you stole back the corpse of the physicist, the portal worm began to move the massive claws it had been using as only anchors just a moment ago, while bringing in more of Race X’s forces.
(cont.0)

>>4797837
(cont.0)
>Quickly pull the body of Johannesburg downwards, towards Saulson and Kirchoff, and start looking through his body, cutting open the remains of his hazmat suit and looking for whatever the aliens were so interested in.

With the antlions spilling out in all directions from the tunnel, the massive single claw of the portal worm rapidly approaches to crush it like one stomps on a swarm of cockroaches, you pick up the body of Johannesburg as though it were an unweighted test dummy, running down the side of the pit quickly, starting to bounce in the low gravity. Shots from the shocktroopers up above begin to rain down as you move towards Kirchoff and Saulson into cover, a few smacking against the corpse of Johannesburg, sending electrical pulses through your skin, shocking your nerves as you move, dropping the body before you slide into cover behind the mountain of rubble covering the centrifuge.

Shots fly overtop of you as you look over the burnt, melted mess of human remains and protective equipment. Much of his suit fused to cooked skin in the earlier fire, you start cutting away at pieces of leadlining and melted plastic with your knife, often cutting into the skin all the same. Peeling back the suit leaves you grateful for the gas mask as a plume of smoke and skin escape the oven that the suit created. A now hard leather belt holds what was clearly once a notepad now burnt to ash, alongside a small radio that’s melted into the skin. You continue cutting away at the suit, finding one thing thankfully intact, a charred and medkit, the tempered polymer casing only melted around the edges.

As you stow the medical kit, you look up towards the wall of the pit, seeing the pack of pit drones swarmed as biotic antlions, while others rapidly flee from the tunnels, the titanic claw of the portal worm now only feet away from the .pit edge. Before you, it rams into the wall of the pit like a drifting cargo ship, the metal seeming to scream alongside the antlions as tons of rubble and corroded alloy buckles and collapses, creating a plume of inky black dust.

“Jesus Christ!” You hear Kirchoff shout within the chaos, almost drowned out by a noise similar to skyscrapers crumbling after an artillery strike. A moment later, the claw pushes into massive tanks built within the machinery of the anti-mass spectrometer, only The entire pit shakes and rumbles as the claw is driven deep into the forward antlion nest. You expect at first to be immediately flooded by a tidal wave of dust, only to watch as it seems to hold, spreading out through the pit above you, eclipsing the light of the Dark Matter orb, leaving only the flickering light of residual fires along the walls still illuminating the pit.
(cont.)

>>4797840
(cont.)
In the warm light, you keep your head close down as you continue to search through the body of Johannesburg, cutting away more of his hazmat gear, turning the body over to search through. Perhaps once clipped to the back of the scientist's belt is what’s now a mess of melted thermoplastic, still hot enough to burn at the touch. With the alloy section of the suit’s arm, you scrape and wipe the liquefied plastic away, each move quick and stressful as wild shots fly overhead, and the sound of antlions and pit drones killing each other fills your ears. Underneath the red mess of plastic is more charred chunks of biomatter, random pieces of glowing dust, and catching your eye, a small metal cylinder, jet black with blue oxidization.

Small little slots run horizontally across one side of the cylinder’s rounded face, organized almost like a miniature circular tablet. Carefully, you reach in, pulling it out of the thermoplastic mess that almost seems to cling to the metal canister. Small amounts of burnt flesh and molten metal and plastic sit red hot against the metal, even as the canister feels almost room temperature. Your fingers dance around the casing of the cylinder, years of paranoid instinct treating it as if at any moment it could explode in your head, while at the same time the migraine pounds and protests. For all you know, you’re holding an alien grenade, which makes pushing in one of the tiny metal slots all the more stressful. The highest slot you press with your thumb gives for a fraction of an inch, just before you hear a gentle magnetic pulse.

“Get up!” You hear from Kirchoff, grunting as he continues chest compressions on Saulson. “Shit!” The sound of ball lightning shots raining down from the shocktroopers grows loud for a moment, before you hear the sound of a heavy gun being maneuvered. A few seconds later, a loud boom adds to the orchestra of alien war all around you. Suddenly looking away from the alienb object, you see the marine has rapidly set up his weapon, leaving Saulson barely conscious next to him as he fires a shot. Quickly and efficiently, the frustrated marine rechambers his m40.

Keeping your head down for now, you pull your thumb off the cylinder slights, ready to throw the object if need be. Instead, the slots pop out an inch away from the cylinder body, revealing stacks of petri dishes, the mere sight of which causes the migraine to screech and kick into your head, blurring your vision with an intense cutting pain. Every second of keeping your eyes open is a struggle only made possible by the diazepam preventing yet another seizure. Each transparent container is roughly a half inch tall, with a two inch radius, containing lumpy pale flesh folding in on itself, seemingly untouched by the intense heat the corpse experienced.
(cont.1)

>>4797842
(cont.1)
The thought brings down more pain from the migraine, but from what you can see, the container in your hands is holding small pieces of brain matter, for what purpose you don’t understand.

What you can see clearly looking around you is that the pit drones that have teleported in courtesy of the pit drone simply don’t have the numbers to prevent the antlion’s from fleeing the massive crushing claw of the pit drone. The creature’s are moving fast, or often alternatively burrowing out of the pit walls. Those that burrow out of the nearest walls, or hover themselves down towards the bottom of the pit now redivert their attention to you. The antlions encroach, moving with an inhuman haste, many of whom have locked their single red glowing eye on you, and the body of Johannesburg.

>Quickly administer the medkit to Saulson, getting the man up as quickly as possible.
>Make sure the alien conflict has no winners. Use the alien flamethrower to torch the pit drone and antlion brawl.
>Plant a concussion grenade in the rubble covering the centrifuge to blow the debris off while you try to give Saulson a shock of adrenaline through non-pharmaceutical measures.
>Try to confuse the antlions, abuse the low gravity by throwing the body of Johannesburg and see if they go after it.
>If this brainstack is what they wanted, let the antlions have it. Throw it at the pack of pit drones to exacerbate the conflict.
>Administer the medkit on yourself.
>Destroy the alien cylinder and the brain matter inside.
>Write in.

>>4797844
>Quickly administer the medkit to Saulson, getting the man up as quickly as possible.
>”KIRCHOFF! GRAB MY FLAMER AND TORCH ‘EM!”

>>4797844
>>4797862
What he said

Sorry I wasn't able to get an update out today guys, I had a long shift at work. I'm gonna try and gradually speed things up to multiple a day like it used to run this week.

>>4797862
>>4798929
>Quickly administer the medkit to Saulson, getting the man up as quickly as possible.
>”KIRCHOFF! GRAB MY FLAMER AND TORCH ‘EM!”

Quickly, you swing the flamethrower around your shoulder, shouting out “Kirchoff!” as you quickly pass it over to the marine. Still crouching by his elevated rifle, he twists his head to see you holding the flamethrower, staring at the thing for a fraction of a second before he recognizes your intentions. “Torch them!” You command, pointing around to the antlions closing in around you while he packs and slings his rifle.

“On it!” He responds, grabbing the weapon. With the flamethrower in Kirchoff’s hands, you stow the alien bank of brain tissue that these creatures are so damn intent on holding on to, before running past the marine and kneeling up next to the near unconscious Saulson. With simple morphine and chest compressions, Kirchoff was able to get the man awake, only rolling along the ground of the rubble.

“Saulson!” You shout, holding the physicist by the shoulders. “Can you hear me?”

The physicist lets out a weak groaning noise, what little words make it through his glass helmet are drowned out by a sudden loud fwoosh of of burning fuel flying through the air, coating the walls of the pit. A warm glow radiates over Saulson’s body, reflecting in the visor of his helmet as Kirchoff holds down the lever, washing fire over the creatures coming straight down from the ruined nest first.

Seeing Saulson’s still incapacitated on the ground, you pull the small IV out of the medkit, bringing the display to life with a harsh green glow. As the screen reads “awaiting patient,” you pick up Saulon’s wrist, piercing straight through the suit with the needle and injecting it into the skin. The screen on the system blinks, before suddenly displaying distorted text reading, “ELECTRICAL BURN DETECTED. ARRHYTHMIA DETECTED.” A second later, you see the words “ADMINISTERING ANTIARRHYTHMIC. ADMINISTERING BIOLOGICAL RESTORATIVE.”

The clear plastic tube connecting to the IV fills with a green, barely luminescent liquid flowing into the physicist. Meanwhile, as Kirchoff continues spitting bursts of hyperoxygenated fire at the antlion tunnels, cooking whatever’s inside. Smoke floods the air, and the sound of the aliens both antlion and pit drone wailing in the fire echoes throughout the pit. Even with the deadly spew of fire, he can’t point in every direction. Antlions begin to burrow up from the south, and he stops his bursts of flame to spin a hundred eighty degrees around, stepping forwards past you and Saulosn and basting the aliens just as they begin to jump up off the pit wall. Antlion bodies are suddenly hit with a plume of fire as they fling themselves through the air in the low gravity, immediately coated by the sticky burning fuel. The creature’s start flailing as inertia carries them through the air like artillery shells.
(cont.)

>>4801567
(cont.)
As one of the creatures just barely slips overhead, forcing you to duck as you’re blasted by the intense heat of the creature, while the other flaming antlion slams down into the ground next to Kirchoff, sliding across the rubble and knocking him to the ground, instantly catching his protective suit on fire. Still alive, swinging its legs wildly as chitin burns, Kirchoff quickly pulls the knife from his belt to stab the antlion before his own brain even realizes his skin is burning. The marine quickly scrambles away from the antlion’s corpse, screaming out in pain as the incredibly potent fire burns his right leg and chest. He slaps at the fire, and rolls along the ground in the hopes of suffocating it, futile in the hyperoxygenated environment.

Immediately, you drop the medkit, leaving it’s IV in the physicist’s arm as the screen then displays “ADMINISTERING ADRENAL SHOCK.” With the fire extinguisher you pulled from the emergency closet quickly in hand, you spray the burning marine with a jet of fire-foam, covering him in moments. The marine winces as the residual heat continues to burn deeper into his skin, thankfully dying quickly along with many nerve endings as the cold foam washes over him. Once the fire is dead, you quickly run over to him.

“Kirchoff!” You shout, kneeling next to him just as you did Saulson. “Kirchoff, can you stand?”

Fueled by adrenaline and years of service, the marine says nothing as he grabs your hand, and pulls himself to his feet while still holding the flamethrower. He nods, turning back to the walls of the pit where the surviving antlions, both workers and soldiers gather, occasionally spitting out blobs of glowing corrosive spit towards you, or into the walls. With a vengeance this time, he holds down the lever of the flamethrower. The burning fuel flies nearly in a straight line as the force of gravity decreases, every step now a hop as though you were on the moon.

“Wha- ahh... “ You hear Saulson mutter from behind you. “What happened, where…” The physicist says, beginning to stand up just before another ball of lightning zips past his head. “Scott!” He shouts out.

“Keep your head down.” You command to the physicist, pointing up to the cloud of dust up above. “They’re perched up there and firing at us.”
(cont.1)

>>4801578
(cont.1)
>”Kirchoff, give me the M40!” While Kirchoff continues with burning, start taking down the shocktroopers currently concealed in the dust up above.
>Tell Saulson to hand you the multispectrum goggles, and use the thermal setting to throw your last frag grenade at the Race X aliens firing from the smoke.
>"We need reinforcements, stay here." Abuse the low gravity to rapidly climb up the pit, through the dust clouds, and grab the attention of the vortigaunts or Xen controllers in the test chamber.
>”Saulson, calm down. Remember the wormhole plan? What do we need to do next?” While you ask this, throw a concussion grenade into the rubble covering the centrifuge to uncover it.
>Ask Saulson “Do you recognize this object? I found it on the body of one of your colleagues?” while holding up the brainstack.
>Write in.

>>4801584
>”Saulson, calm down. Remember the wormhole plan? What do we need to do next?” While you ask this, throw a concussion grenade into the rubble covering the centrifuge to uncover it.

>>4801584
>>”Saulson, calm down. Remember the wormhole plan? What do we need to do next?” While you ask this, throw a concussion grenade into the rubble covering the centrifuge to uncover it.
And if he’s coherent enough and doesn’t need the goggles:
>Tell Saulson to hand you the multispectrum goggles, and use the thermal setting to throw your last frag grenade at the Race X aliens firing from the smoke.

>>4801888
Wait those are different grenades, right?

>>4801584

>>”Saulson, calm down. Remember the wormhole plan? What do we need to do next?” While you ask this, throw a concussion grenade into the rubble covering the centrifuge to uncover it.

>>4803726
Yup. Frag grenades are designed to fling shrapnel, killing infantry, whereas a concussion grenade is designed to be nonlethal, knocking people out with the concussive force of the blast, although under certain circumstances it can kill, such as sending environmental shrapnel flying or when confined to a small space.

>>4801626
>>4801888
>>4803917
>”Saulson, calm down. Remember the wormhole plan? What do we need to do next?” While you ask this, throw a concussion grenade into the rubble covering the centrifuge to uncover it.

“Saulson!” You shout, grabbing the physicists attention as you leave Kirchoff to the flamethrower. “Saulson, are you alright? Remember the plan?”

“Wha-What?” The physicist stutters. “I- I- ughh…”

“The wormhole plan.” You shout as shots continue flinging just over head, pulling your legs further into cover while holding Saulson down as he tries to peek at the enemy. “We’ve filled the centrifuge, and got it spinning. You remember?” As you watch him pause for a moment, nodding a few seconds later, you reach onto your belt for one of the concussion grenade. “It’s buried. I’m gonna blast it free, will it survive?”

“Ehrm… with what?” Saulson asks.

You pull the grenade off your belt, holding up for a brief second, “Concussion bomb. Nonlethal.” As you bring it down you ask, “It fell, won’t be weakened right?

“No.” Saulson shouts, shaking his head. “Err… probably not. It has an alarm built in, we’d hear it. It’s still powered right?”

Without an answer to that question, the centrifuge and it’s many indicator lights still buried below a ton of burnt and destroyed rubble, your only response is “Probably,” as you quickly climb atop the pile of rubble where the centrifuge is buried. “Once it’s free what do we need to do next?”

“Arhh… when the gravity’s still low, we push it up into the test chamber.” He explains, as you scramble up the rubble, pulling away chunks of metal and machinery crushed and bent, each one only weighing a fraction of what it should, hanging in the air for whole seconds when you fling them away. Shots crack past your suit, a few bolts of cyan energy arcing into the plate metal, burning at your injured skin. “If it’s punctured before it enters the orb, it’ll probably kill us, but…” The physicist trails off, just as you make a big enough hole to blast the debris away.

“What is it?” You shout out, pulling the grenade off your belt and yanking the pin out. Laying prone over the hole, your pistol now in one hand while you hold down the lever with the other, you await Saulson’s response.

The physicist doesn’t respond for a moment, either unsure of himself or chocking on his words behind his visor. “... we can give ourselves a better chance of living if we just let the centrifuge drift into the orb… it’d- the antimatter inside would interact directly with dark energy… it could scatter the wormholes or… envelop the facility… bring another things through… I don’t know, but there’s no way it wouldn’t affect the process. All hell of unforeseen consequences.”
(cont.)

>>4804113
(cont.)
You just nod, even as the migraine kicks you in the side of the head for hearing those words. Pulling your fingers off the lever of the concussion grenade, which pings off into the air, flying unhindered by gravity before you toss it down the hole. “Kirchoff, in cover! Saulson!”

As the physicist turns to you, you grab him by the arm as you fling yourself off the pile of rubble, down the pit. He’s yanked along with you suddenly as you move towards cover, away from the soon to be frag grenade that’s become of the rubble pile. Trying as best you can to avoid the volleys of electrical energy being sent downwards from a growing force of shocktroopers. Just as you pull the physicist behind one of the two massive claws of the pitworm, the one stabbing through the pit at a forty-five degree angle above the creature’s eye, the concussion blows with a muffled pop, followed by tube sound of metal buckling and shrapnel cracking against the other side of the tree trunk sized claw, not even making the portal worm flinch as you hang against it in the near zero gravity.

Poking your head back out of cover, you first see the centrifuge, it’s many indicator lights now all solidly on, while the lowering force of gravity lets it bounce up a foot into the air, hanging there as it spins slightly. As it slowly rotates at a new angle, you see a port that could fit the charging wire you’re currently dead HEV suit uses. “It’s spun up.” The physicist shouts, equal parts terrified and excited. “We’ve gotta act. “

However the centrifuge suddenly loses your focus as the physicist trails off, you and him seeing Kirchoff only partially behind cover, holding himself in pain where a chunk of metal has stabbed through the suit, planted in his upper arm. Despite the warning he was given, he’s been hit through the arm by rubble sent flying by the concussion grenade.


Clearly through clenched teeth, the marine shouts out, “Thanks for taking my fuckin’ sidearm.” You’d imagine he’d have other concerns than shooting, but he’s right. All of his firearms are practically useless without two hands. Without something smaller, or some medical assistance, he’s unable to shoot.

The flamethrower is slung back around his shoulder, and without it’s constant stream of burning fuel, the antlions have begun to recover their thinning forces, occasional workers peeling themselves out of their hastily made tunnels, followed by small packs of soldiers, there red eyes glaring at you. Meanwhile, behind you the massive portal worm begins to bellow out loudly once again, it’s eye expanding wide while the exotitc orange dust swirls into blue in the air, the creature feeding once again to create more portals.
(cont.1)

>>4804114
(cont.1)
https://pastebin.com/Lte0sgmY
>Throw down a smoke grenade, and try your best to heal Kirchoff with the low grade medical supplies you recovered from the emergency closet, and the HEV’s morphine IV.
>Tell Kirchoff to come into cover, handing him a revolver while you and Saulson try to push the centrifuge up into the air.
>Tell Saulson to try and patch up Kirchoff best he can, while you try to kick the centrifuge upwards yourself, draining some of its energy for the HEV servos.
>Tell Saulson and Kirchoff to get out of the pit, out of the test chamber, handing the marine your revolver and taking the flamethrower back, while you push the centrifuge up the pit alone.
>Don’t let that damn portal worm feed. Take the flamer from Saulson, and coat it’s eye with napalm before doing anything else.
>Write in.

>>4804117
>>Don’t let that damn portal worm feed. Take the flamer from Saulson, and coat it’s eye with napalm before doing anything else.

>>4804117
I just realized I mixed up Saulson's name with Kirchoff in the last prompt, oops.

>>4804117
>Tell Kirchoff to come into cover, handing him a revolver while you try to push the centrifuge up into the air.
>Tell Saulson to use some of the exotic matter and the LIGA to interfere with the worm’s efforts.

Rolled 2 (1d2)

>>4804338 (1)
>Don’t let that damn portal worm feed. Take the flamer from Saulson, and coat it’s eye with napalm before doing anything else.
>>4804424 (2)
>Tell Kirchoff to come into cover, handing him a revolver while you try to push the centrifuge up into the air.
>Tell Saulson to use some of the exotic matter and the LIGA to interfere with the worm’s efforts.
Tiebreaker roll, but if anyone would like to vote to break the tie in the next hour or two, I'll take that first vote instead of the roll.

>>4804338
>>4804424
>>4805384
>Tell Kirchoff to come into cover, handing him a revolver while you try to push the centrifuge up into the air.
>Tell Saulson to use some of the exotic matter and the LIGA to interfere with the worm’s efforts.

“Saulson, any exotics that’ll disrupt that?” You shout to the physicist, pointing to the worms massive, distended eye, and pulling his attention away from the massive gash in Kirchoff’s arm. “Last stretch, use anything you got that’ll stop it.”

The physicist holds still for a moment, no doubt like a deer in headlights behind his visor. Wasting no time, you command Kirchoff “Kirchoff, move behind the centrifuge” as you pull the revolver off your hip. While the marine kicks himself out of cover, pulling along the rubble in zero gravity with his still good arm, blobs of alien acidic spit soar through zero gravity, only instead of firing at you, they continue on upwards, firing like rocket artillery up into the smoke, slowing the volleys of alien electrical shots as the creatures are no doubt forced into cover.

Kirchoff clambers around the centrifuge, while you push yourself closer, swirling the revolver in your hand, holding it by the barrel as you hand it over. Despite the marine’s pained arm, he grabs it quickly, visibly wincing even through the gas mask, grabbing with his bad arm what three fifty seven rounds remain in a simple civilian cardboard box.

“Keep a lookout, shout if anything moves on us.” You command, then shouting to Saulson once again, seeing the physicist still hesitating, “Move it doc! If you don’t have anything that will disrupt a portal than just make it hurt. Use the LIGA if you have to!”

Grabbing the physicists attention, you see him frantically nod back to you just before you slip yourself between the rubble and debris ground and the slowly rising centrifuge. With your back pressed up against the ground, you push with arms and legs, straining your burnt, bruised and bloodied muscles as you try to accelerate the immensely dense mass of the centrifuge, feeling something inside vibrate as it spins within near the speed of sound. Despite being hold down by only a sliver of gravity, the centrifuge barely budges at first, accelerating slowly as you continue to push.
(cont.)

>>4806868
(cont.)
Meanwhile, Saulson picks out canisters of glowing exotic matter, pushing down on the valve manually with an excessive force, until something in the canister breaks, and the white glowing gasses start to spray out with a distinct hiss. He chucks the canister of gravi-photonic gas wildly, leaving a trail of smokey light that pushes away chunks of already floating matter. Blinded already by the anti-tank mine, the creature doesn’t notice a thing until he pulls out his final remaining canister of inflaton matter. This time, when he breaks the valve open, he gives no time for it to hiss before he chucks it into the glowing cloud. Quickly, the physicist dives back to the centrifuge, keeping his head down out of fear for the aerosolized cocktail he just created.

For the first few seconds, one might not be at fault for noticing no change, however as the gasses mix, space itself seems to shift. While the walls of the pit around it remain unmoved, the center of the pit grows wider, simultaneously making the gas within even brighter, and eliciting loud, pained groans from the portal worm that shakes the rubble below you. Timespace buckles and bends in the localized area, even as the gas turns clear, letting you view the stretched reality as though you were looking into a reversed magnifying glass.

The eye of the portal worm is being visibly stretched, the torn iris distended and warped, while the cornea tears open even further. Alien blood and ocular fluids seep out from the eye as the creature’s entire head is torn open. The creature wriggles in pain as the eye opens, the sclera peeling open radially, revealing massive arteries and deep below. Still alive, the creature screeches and groans as it’s eye is held open. At the bottom of the massive gash is a glow of electrical sparks and exotic gasses, all running along or between folds of alien grey matter.

Thrashing in pain, the portal worms two massive claw arms begin to shift and sway, swinging around and shifting tons of rubble that floats in the air, massive chunks gathering in zero gravity just as you lose touch of the centrifuge. Alone, you only got it to the speed of a person briskly walking directly upwards. Kirchoff follows you, floating right next to the centrifuge without hanging on it or pushing it, every so often blasting an antlion on the pit wall.
(cont.1)

(cont.1)
Up above however, the massive dust ceiling formed in the chaos of crashing titanic claws is beginning to disperse, fanned by the movement of the very same claws, showing you the grim black face of the pulsating dark matter orb, partially eclipsed only by metal fragments floating in zero gravity. The shocktroopers above grip to the higher claw, and because of it they’re disoriented, unable to fire any clean shots. A few fling wild spore grenades instead that send distant chunks of metal flying, occasionally crashing into a stray antlion. At the base of the thrashing titanic claws, massive amounts of rubble is thrown into the air by the intense force. Seeing with disbelief that his quantum chemistry act worked without killing him, he quickly moves up towards the centrifuge. “That worked?! That worked!” you hear him shout, just as you realize that the biomechanical antlions have stopped giving you their attention, what few remain mostly focusing on the forces of Race X, although a few are still eyeing the body of Johannesburg down below, either unaware or uncaring of the fact that you took the brainstack.

>Tell Kirchoff to detonate his last concussion grenade underneath the centrifuge, hopefully kicking it up.
>”Saulson, we could use some more science, get this thing moving quicker.”
>Pull out your antimaterial rifle, and try to put a hole in the portal worms exposed brain.
>Plug yourself into the centrifuge, and drain some of its power for extra protection by charging your suit.
>Jump down off the centrifuge, and quickly grab Johannesburg's body, not letting the antlions look close
>Drop down from the centrifuge, and place an anti-tank mine near the base of one of the thrashing claws, hopefully blowing it up when it gets crushed.
>Leave Kirchoff to guard the centrifuge, while you kick yourself upwards with your shotgun in hand to blast at the shocktroopers while they’re shaken.
>Write in.

>>4806876
>”Saulson, we could use some more science, get this thing moving quicker.”
>Pull out your antimaterial rifle, and try to put a hole in the portal worms exposed brain.

>>4806961
>”Saulson, we could use some more science, get this thing moving quicker.”
>Pull out your antimaterial rifle, and try to put a hole in the portal worms exposed brain.

“Saulson, we could use some more of that.” You shout as you float alongside the centrifuge, reaching over your back to grab your massive anti-tank rifle. Just swinging the gun around your shoulder shifts your weight, pulling you a few inches away from the ascending cylinder. “Get this thing moving faster, running out of time.”

Not hesitating this time, the physicist grabs one of the canisters from his belt, breaking the valve of the glowing orange gas just as he did before, shouting “Keep away from it!”

Both you and Kirchoff push yourselves away from the centrifuge, catching your selves on chunks of floating metal kicked around by the portal worm’s thrashing as it was torn apart. As Saulson moves in, you push yourself from rubble chunk to rubble chunk, looking for a piece heavy and still with your massive rifle still in hand, occasionally getting grazed by flying chunks of metal, all while giving a wide berth to the swaying redwood sized claw. Quickly, you settle on a larger chunk of metal and concrete slowly floating through the air. At first unsure of how to shoot and hold it at the same time, you sling the arm on the gun barrel around the metal chunk.

Braced against the heavy chunk of rubble, your legs hang in the air above you as you align the gun sight almost straight downwards, struggling against the slight drift until the you pull the crosshair down over it, squeezing the crisp bolt action trigger down.

In zero gravity, the butt of the gun kicks you like a horse, spinning your entire body. In an instant, the shot zips through the air, punching straight through the intense warping of space, like a perfectly uniform concrete wall, crushing itself on the threshold. The partially ruined round continues through expanded space, crashing into the massive brain. The impulse shakes and vibrates fragile grey matter, causing it to bounce in on itself like jello, tearing apart millions of neural connections. The portal worm screeches with every undulation of it’s brain. More and more bright blue plasma begins to arc from the creature's brain.

The fifty calibre round booms like thunder, leaving your ears ringing while you flail through the air, trying to regain some sort of stability through the rubble. All around you the rubble is thrown and slammed by the hundred ton claws of the portal worm swinging around.
(cont.)

>>4809277
(cont.)
At the same time, Saulson was angling the canister of gravi photonic matter, the pressurized gas spewing out just below the centrifuge slowly moving upwards. The antigravity of the gas mixing with the air pushes the canister upwards, pushing against the centrifuge and catching against its many notches, the warping of space below accelerating the centrifuge slowly, like a sugar rocket pushing on a weightless truck. Yet despite the small force, it accelerates from little more than a drift to a swift glide, getting only faster as Saulson breaks another valve of the same chemical, letting it go only for it to be pushed away by the existing gravitic gas, flying off wildly.

As you struggle to regain your balance in the air, space around you begins to ring, blue wisps of light forming and pulsating outwards around you. As you spin once again, you see electricity from the dying brain of the portal worm spilling out from all ends, arcing into the sides of the pit, traveling up for a moment before the intense storm of exotic matter around you takes place. Even as you finally manage to stabilize yourself on one of the newly stilled claws, you feel as if space itself is shaking, and in random places, different creatures and objects materialize at random, some terrestrial, some xenian.

Down below, the antlions quickly move in, grabbing the dead body of johannesburg and yanking it away from the electrical arcs of the portal worm. At the same time, the centrifuge is quickly moving up towards the line of shocktroopers. The creatures begin firing at it as it moves up, electricity bursting leds along the chassis. Electricity arcs from the hull, and cracks open the nearly empty canister of exotic matter, giving the swiftly moving centrifuge one last strong kick as it breaks. The aliens throw spore grenades along with their volleys of, electricity, the blasts crashing against the hull of the massive device, rocking it off its course, and sending shrapnel crashing into it as it approaches the mouth of the pit.

>Don’t get close to the centrifuge, but throw a flashbang up near it to hold the creatures off while you move in behind them.
>Now that the dust has cleared out, throw a frag grenade up to the shocktroopers as best you can in the chaos.
>Telll Saulson to throw some of that inky black gas at the shocktroopers, you’ve heard it blinds.
>Quickly throw yourself up with a smoke grenade on your belt, creating a wall of smoke between the centrifuge and the shocktroopers.
>Don’t let the antlions take the body, burn it and them.
>To hell with it, reload the rifle, and put a hole in the centrifuge now and hope it’s close enough.
>Let the centrifuge take the shots, and start running now. (Roll 3d6.)
>Write in.

>>4809279
>Don’t get close to the centrifuge, but throw a flashbang up near it to hold the creatures off while you move in behind them.

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Apologies guys, I don't think I'm gonna be able to push out an update today. Insomnia's been killing my drive to write lately. Sorry I couldn't get the update rate above one a day like I hoped. Also, since I've had a bit of feedback about confusion lately, I'd love to hear any feedback you guys might have, especially about whether things are easier to follow or getting confusing again.

>>4810950
Much, much clearer now, but I can’t remember what we’re packin. I’m just going to assume we still have more weaponry than we know what to do with.
>>4797058
>>4801888
^These IDs are me, btw

>>4809279
>Don’t get close to the centrifuge, but throw a flashbang up near it to hold the creatures off while you move in behind them.
Pincering the fuckers should keep them occupied

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>>4813244
>>4813245
>>4813246
>>4813250
>>4813259

Since we're on page 10, and there's some major choices happening, and coming up, I posted the next update in a new thread.

>>4811601
All of the equipment is written down in the pastebin, which I will admit I do forget to change sometimes, so let me know if anything is confusing within. Since we're running on half life logic, a lot of characters have enough weapons on their back to supply a squad.
https://pastebin.com/Lte0sgmY