[X] Interlude: Ceathya.
[X] I'll take some time to practice gunplay, specifically with heavier weapons at close range.
[X] The Muton has been stewing for long enough. Let's see what we can get out of it.
[X] It's time to unlock the healing tree of Psionics, and seed a bountiful harvest of opportunity for myself and all future Psionic soldiers.
The Skyranger landed, and the soldiers shuffled out. No corpses were likely to be recovered by the local military to send their way, but there was always a chance they'd get lucky. With Agent Smith backing them up, it was always a distinct possibility.
Bradford frowned, watching the transport from the side. He hadn't considered luck to be the thing that would mean the difference between victory and defeat, not when he'd been hired for this job. Maybe, maybe the strange man convincing everyone he was from a different Earth could help them do win, or maybe it could come down the equipment he'd brought along and given up when they'd asked him to, maybe that would make up the difference. But luck? Luck alone was a sucker's bet.
In gambling, relying on luck only ensured that the House would win in the long run. And he knew damn well that XCOM, that Earth, wasn't the one holding all the chips.
Still, they had the Commander, confirmed by multiple sources (including Agent Smith) to be one of the best. That was good enough for him.
Bradford confirmed that more than half of Alpha Team had injuries, even Agent Smith himself; they were helping to carry one another to the stretchers waiting for their team. Bradford nodded in approval. Anything that helped the team to come together like a family was good in his book.
Strike 2 was favoring his left leg, barely. After getting clipped by the same Hunter Chryssalid that had nearly caved Strike 4's chest in, Bradford didn't blame him, even if he was surprised the "supernaturally lucky man" had somehow gotten hurt in the first place. Lucky? That was proven by the Science team. Invincible? He guessed not. But that wasn't why he was here.
Ceathya got off the Skyranger last, with Agent Smith just before her. Strike 2 wasn't moving like a man who expected to be shot in the back, Bradford noted. That was a mark in Strike 1's favor.
With how she'd acted on the previous mission, she was going to need all the help she could get.
I was still wide awake after we'd ordered the whale to be blown to pieces. Some small part of me wondered if we'd have been able to take down the rest of the Chryssalids one by one, or by the truckload, to get at all those corpses left behind… but then I always came back to the Snakeman. To the three figures in the little house, and to the Sectoids.
Against Chryssalids alone, it would have been a slaughter. If only.
Vasiliev was helping Support Teasdale and Jamball walk down the ramp; the latter had complained of being beyond tired when they'd finally arrived. Olson offered to help Silva, but she waved him off. I offered a hand to Ceathya myself, but she just shook her head. While everybody else stumbled forward, I stayed back a second while she got out of her seat.
"You gonna be alright?" I asked.
She gave me a tight smile and shook her head.
"I'm sorry."
She sighed.
I followed after the others, ready to jump forward if anybody looked like they might fall, and heard Ceathya coming out behind us. I hoped she'd be alright, even after all that had happened.
Soldiers came up to help everyone out of their weapons and armor, or at least the stuff we could take off without plasma holding it to our sides; Jamball, Silva and Teasdale were rushed off almost as soon as they were able to lay down on the stretchers.
I dropped the massive bullet backpack down, rolling my shoulders as soon as it was off. For all the firepower the thing provided, it was awkward as all get-out to deal with. With a short burst of Psionics, I took the rest of my equipment all at once, laying it in a neat pile for the others to deal with.
Maybe I could find time to train with the heavy gun soon, especially at close range, or at the very least I'd need to ensure I could handle everything else a little more effectively…
"Strike 2, join the others in the infirmary," Bradford startled me, coming in from one of the nearby walls. There were more soldiers standing guard around the perimeter, probably to help with the next batch of soldiers when they came in.
"Of course, Sir," I responded offhand, thinking.
I realized with a grimace that they might have been there in case somebody came in with an uninvited guest delivered at point blank by-
"Oh, shit!" I swore, staring after the others. "Teasdale!"
I took off at a dead sprint, knowing full well that even if he hadn't been hit with an egg, there was every risk he'd been poisoned.
Agent America took off like somebody lit his ass on fire. Shouting something completely off the wall like it explained the nature of the universe and running off without explaining anything, who did that kind of crap in real life?
God's gift to bimbos everywhere was the last man off the Skyranger, and with him gone, it was just her and the MPs.
Well, her, the MPs, and Central Officer John Bradford.
Ceathya glanced at the soldiers on the wall, all of them staring at her. She counted four ways to escape the base alive, maybe more if she could take the Central Officer hostage.
"Strike 1, please remain still while your equipment is removed," her direct superior ordered.
Three ways.
She lifted her arms up, ignoring how the skin pulled at the broken fingers on her hands. She didn't bother grunting in pain, but quietly noted that she only really had two ways out with her hands as they were. The weapons were taken from her while she quietly, and very seriously, considered whether it would be appropriate to fight back or not.
Too late, now. The soldiers had taken all the weapons they knew about, and one pulled a knife from a hidden pocket under her shirt. She had more, but they didn't need to know that.
The Central Officer merely nodded to her, then gestured to the doorway. "After you, Strike 1. You know the way."
She did, too. Briefing room 3, adjacent to the Central Officer's quarters.
If it didn't have an unofficial name yet, it was only because the other soldiers were still trying to come up with something sinister-sounding enough. More than one prospective soldier had been ordered to leave the base in that room. It was the same one she'd gone into for a personal debriefing after Operation Devil's Moon.
She'd been in rooms like it before. If she'd spent more time in real schools, it would have been the Principal's office. As it was, it was almost always interrogation rooms or over the desks of her commanding officers. It even usually went the same way. Go in, get a slap on the wrist, get told she's too valuable to fire, get sent back out to do her job.
One short walk later, and there it was. She stepped to the side to let the most recent of her superiors to open the door, then walked in first when he waved her inside. It figured she'd have to walk in first.
No extra ways in or out. No visible cameras, oddly enough, though those could be small enough to be invisible anyway. She only slowed down for a moment on seeing that both sides of the simple table had the same kind of barely-comfortable chair, new ones since last she'd been here, and without hesitating, she took the one opposite the door. She ignored the thin file folder sitting in the middle of the table with a pen set atop it, only briefly wondering why it wasn't an inch thick.
Officer Bradford left the door open as he joined her, and then they waited. After a minute or two, he picked up the thin file and started looking it over, writing in it like it was a mad-lib or something. Personal notes on his perspective of her, perhaps? If he was trying to intimidate her, he was wasting both of their time. Even her injured hands weren't really bothering her after they'd gone a bit numb in the Skyranger.
A few minutes of silence later, which she spent quietly glancing at corners whenever the Officer was writing in his folder, and somebody came in through the open door. It was a nurse or doctor, had to be a doctor based on the outfit, wheeling along a trauma cart.
She stayed silent while her hands were looked over and the doctor went through the motions of a physical. Look into the eyes with a light to check for a concussion, run his fingers over her looking for injuries they might miss otherwise, the works. The Officer didn't spend much time looking at her, and had kept the pages of his little folder out of her sight throughout. Her hands were eventually re-bandaged, and she was told by the doctor to stop by the med-bay for some painkillers after she was free.
She might not bother with them. As annoying as pain was, it happened for a reason.
"Close the door behind you," Central ordered the doctor on his way out, and then it was just him, her, and the lights hanging overhead.
Ceathya leaned back in her chair, wondering if she could get away with taking a nap.
The file folder was finally closed, set on the desk, and pushed across the table to her.
Might as well find out how they planned to mess with her this time. She pulled the folder closer with her good hand, flipped it open, and started going over it.
She paused, then started again, really reading it this time.
"As you can see," the Officer spoke clearly, "I'm trying to understand why you signed up for the XCOM project. I'd say you graduated top of your class, but you didn't graduate at all. Parents dead at a young age, adopted by a Commandant of the French Legion shortly after, and being sent on black operations by fourteen. Dozens of confirmed kills before you came of age, and dozens more after. Numerous successful operations, right up until the accident."
Ceathya glared at Central, feeling the little curve of her upper lip trying to pull back into a snarl. She forced it down. She'd stared down tougher men with knives stuck in her joints.
"You were quietly shuffled out of active duty, and were dishonorably discharged four months later," Bradford stared right back. He didn't flinch or back down, either. "You joined a Private Military Company for only six months, then left for 'unspecified reasons.'"
He gave her a look, one that told her he was fully aware of those reasons.
"Finally, you drifted along until you ended up in Germany, where you were adopted into the German Armed Forces on the recommendation of a Lieutenant Colonel, whose name was not recorded. Have I missed anything so far?"
She remained silent. It was the appropriate move to make.
"There, you hit your stride, working your way up the ranks with what I'll pretend were peacekeeping operations, right up until you were promoted into the Fernspählehrkompanie 200." He pronounced it perfectly, despite Ceathya's belief that he'd never learned to speak German. "You served with distinction there until a little more than two weeks ago, when your squad was drafted into service under the Extraterrestrial Combat Unit. Your mission, you no doubt recall, was to look into the disappearance of another German Recon unit, after the unidentified contacts there were suspected of being alien in nature.
"What followed was XCOM's first, worst mission."
Ceathya continued to remain silent. The edges of her vision blurred slightly, as all her attention and focus was placed directly on the man in front of her. Central Officer John Bradford.
"I'm not going to dredge up the past for much longer," he conceded, tone still flat, even. "Just long enough to ask you, directly: why did you choose to stay with the XCOM project after Operation Devil's Moon?"
Silence. For a good thirty seconds. Then she spoke.
"The XCOM Project is the world's best offense against the Aliens," she said simply.
Bradford shook his head, not turning his eyes away from her. "That's not the reason you stayed."
She didn't volunteer anything else.
Eventually, he waved a hand at the file folder.
"You've looked that over?"
She nodded, setting it back on the table. "Transfer papers. You're transferring me out of XCOM."
"You didn't read the whole thing."
She glared at him, but reluctantly picked the folder, expertly flipping past the first few pages with one hand. She blinked, then blurted out, "Mandatory therapy?!"
The Officer nodded. "It's not both, it's one or the other. You attend therapy, or we send you to another military organization that would be happy to have you as you are now. If that happens, I suspect you won't get the help you need."
"I don't need that kind of help," she growled through gritted teeth.
"Should we send you back out into the field with broken fingers, too?" he asked, gesturing at her hands. "Therapy is healing for the mind. You've been shot, stabbed, knocked around- you've been in enough fights to know that a physical wound requires aid from a doctor to heal right. Your mind needs a doctor from all you've faced the same as you'd need surgery if you were shot. It's like any other combat injury, it just requires a different approach to recover from."
Ceathya took a few deep breaths, centering herself. No matter what the asshole Officer told her, she wasn't crazy. Worse, she had a terrible feeling she knew what kind of doctor she was going to have to face, the only expert she knew of on minds.
"What'll it be, soldier?" Bradford cut into her thoughts. "Are you going to shape up, or are you going to have to be shipped out?"
She took one final breath and grit her teeth. "Am I going to be Agent Smith's guinea pig while he puts me back together, then?"
Bradford's head jerked back, and his mouth slightly open while he tried to form words. She'd caught him off guard, she could tell, which wasn't the reaction she'd been expecting.
"No," the Officer said forcefully. "We've got trained medical professionals who have spent their lives studying these kinds of conditions, who are going to be starting regular check-ups on all our soldiers already. We're not going to force you to go through the same experiences that made this an issue in the first place in the hopes that it'll bypass the recovery period."
She thought it over while the Officer shook his head, thinking about what she'd said. Unfortunately, there was another problem she had to deal with, and she didn't hesitate to ask, "How long is it going to be before you'll let me fight again, if I stay?"
He looked at her for a moment, then looked down at her hands, then back up at her. "Assuming you put in extra hours working with our Psychologists, you may be cleared by the time your hands are healed up. Even if that happens to be the case, you'll still be required to attend mandatory sessions at least once a week, in addition to one session after every combat mission until you're declared perfectly healthy. Given the aftereffects soldiers face from PTSD the world around, I don't think that'll be any time soon, if at all."
She looked at the folder in her hands, then turned back to the first page again, just for a moment, considering the option to leave. She already knew she wasn't going to, she couldn't. This was too important a fight to walk away from, and she wasn't in the habit of quitting because things were too difficult. If an Officer ordered her to take mandatory therapy, she'd treat it like all the times she had to clean the barracks with a toothbrush or run extra drills.
Orders were orders, no matter how much she disagreed with them.
"I'll stay, Sir," she told him coldly.
He shook his head. "I don't want you just paying lip service to me and then going off and pretending to participate in this," he disagreed. "If you're in this, you're in it all the way. Not just therapy, but the bits and pieces that go along with it. Bonding with the other soldiers, getting to know whatever team you're a part of, all of it. The next time you find yourself dealing with this sort of thing on the battlefield, knowing the soldiers at your back have your back may mean the difference between walking out alive, and being carried out in a bag. Is that clear?"
She nodded, this time not bothering to add any insult, implied or otherwise.
"I'm glad you're still with us, soldier," he nodded back. "Unfortunately, that just leaves us with the parts you've shown in the past don't matter to you so much."
She tilted her head slightly and raised an eyebrow.
"Corporal Ceathya, for your actions in the field, you are hereby stripped of rank, effective immediately." She sighed as he went through the motions, but as he'd said, she didn't really care. "You are demoted to Lance Corporal, and will received reduced pay and benefits accordingly. Until such a time as you are once more declared fit for active duty, you will report for assignments on base only, and will not leave it under any circumstances. Should your behavior fail to improve, you will either be removed from the XCOM project, or in extreme cases, executed for treason. Do you understand?"
"Yes, Sir."
"Report to medical immediately. If you're going to fight for us, then you're going to need to get back on your feet. Hop to it, soldier."
"Sir."
I had actually caught up with Teasdale before they'd managed to finish arriving at the Medbay, and the soldiers and staff carting him along had rushed him to the front of the pack when I'd voiced my suspicions that he might have been poisoned. After half a dozen blood tests, the verdict came down: whatever he'd been hit with hadn't been delivered in a sufficient dose to threaten his life, but the staff would keep an eye on him regardless. There also weren't signs of him having any eggs in his system, but then I'd more or less confirmed that when I'd Mind Merged him in the field.
I was then unceremoniously dumped into a bed of my own and ordered to sit tight while everybody else was run through triage protocols, to ensure that no other potential injuries might get past the doctors. After a few minutes, Jamball was moved to another room for surgery. She'd somehow skipped past Teasdale, which wasn't a good sign.
With nothing to do but sit around and wait, or mess up the doctor's work by trying to heal everybody by diving into their minds, I fell back on my old standby: practicing Psionics. The issue I quickly ran into was a simple one, but a pain in the ass nonetheless.
I couldn't Mind Merge myself.
Obvious when you think about it, but the implications were staggering. Some kinds of aliens were proven to be capable of regeneration (or at least, they were in other realities like this one), and not all of it came from their genetics. In a lot of cases, Psionics were expected to bridge that gap. If that was the case, then QED, Psionics could be used by a soldier to heal themselves and others. So there I was, once more trying to reinvent the wheel, looking to discover the different methods by which Psionic energy could be introduced to wounds, when Dr. Vahlen came by to visit me, datapad firmly in hand.
"Ah, Agent Smith," she looked me over with a warm (by her standards) smile. "I'm glad you managed to come out of the fight relatively unharmed. How is your leg?"
"If I manage to figure this new technique out, it'll be healed up before anybody has a chance to look me over," I joked. "How's everybody else? Is Jamball going to be OK?"
Dr. Vahlen poked at her handheld connection to all things XCOM, then nodded once. "While her burns are worse than originally suspected, the Nano-fiber vest and Carapace armor were both instrumental in preventing worse harm from occurring." Her expression became a little more stern. "You're working on another Psionic technique?"
I held my hands up in surrender. "I was just poking at the boundaries of it. We already know I can Mind Merge people to heal them, right? From what I heard and read about before getting my powers, it's possible to heal people without jumping into their heads. I don't know what the difference is exactly, but if all I'm doing otherwise is just sitting here…"
She accepted that. "Just so long as we are able to see and record your talents in person, and to prepare for the other students you insist will be made apparent one day, yes, it makes sense to keep pushing at the boundaries of your abilities when you can." She gave me a considerably less warm smile. "Should we assign a scribe to follow you around and to handle the paperwork you inevitably forget to turn in on the subject?"
I didn't answer all at once. On the one hand, that was about as obvious a trap as I could stumble into. On the other… "What would I be giving up if such a thing were possible?"
She frowned. "I expect a full report on all the theories you have on this new branch of study by this time tomorrow."
Just a trap then. Wonderful. "Did you want to bring in all the monitoring equipment today, then?" I changed the subject a little bit. At her nod, I sighed. "Should I wait for them to get here, or keep trying to figure out the basics while they're on the way."
The lovely lady smirked. "I suppose it wouldn't hurt if you kept working on the problem. It would be your luck to discover the secrets right as the others arrived, would it not?"
"If luck is the right word for it," I muttered, but she had already started typing on her pad.
"Agent Smith is attempting to design and test a new Psionic ability," she spoke clearly to her pad. "Please bring the new monitoring equipment to the medical bay as soon as possible." She turned back to me. "I wish you good fortune in discovering this new technique. Have you informed Bradford of your attempts yet?"
I shook my head. I had the strangest sensation of actually being aware of my subconscious quietly categorizing different possible methods of manipulating the energies I could wield into regeneration of damage done inside a person's body. It was a really, really weird thing to grasp at, like a half-remembered dream. I ignored it as best I could, it and the feeling of two minds working in tandem, both of them my own, and instead just told Vahlen, "No, not yet."
She pursed her lips and made a note on her pad. At least, I think it was a note.
"He has been notified. I hope you do not mind my observation while we wait for the others?"
I waved her off, then focused my attention inwards.
Everything I did felt different, even when it was similar. For most of the abilities I worked with, it was like the difference between drawing with a pencil, holding a video game controller, typing on a keyboard, playing on a piano… all done with the hands, all based on movements of the fingers and hands, and yet all distinct and different; even if I became a master of one, I still might have had to start almost from scratch on any of the others. It all relied on something like hand-eye coordination, and yet… it was all separate, using different connections in my mind.
The Mind Merge technique felt like a mix between flipping a knife and catching it by the handle, and of something like the scales I might have played on a piano, and entirely unlike both. I focused on the latter, less obvious bits of the sensation, on how the energies might be turned around carefully to merge with a person, to enhance their own healing capabilities even as it provided the energy to do so…
Somebody started pulling at my arm, and I opened my eyes.
Alice, the kind old lady doctor, was holding up the medical head-diaper I'd worn the last time I'd practiced Psionics for the Science team. I sighed, then leaned forward to let her put it on me.
After I had wires, cameras and the kitchen sink set up on and around me, my psionic amplifier was brought forward to test the beginnings of the idea I had. Some of the other soldiers laying in their beds, recovering or awaiting treatment, watched as I got set-up and my pants were removed. Again, no embarrassment from me sitting around in my undies; they weren't really my legs, just ones built for me by the Captain America package and some body sculptor back at the Organization.
The beeping sounds of the equipment monitoring my heart rate, breathing and the like were a little annoying, but apparently they were all part of the testing procedure, and they weren't going to turn off the noises unless they had to.
My leg had a seriously nasty bruise forming, albeit one that only bothered me when I poked it. As I was the only guy I could confidently say I wasn't capable of using Mind Merge on, I had to be my own guinea pig for the testing process. Success or failure wouldn't matter on this first attempt, because no matter what happened, I was still capable of just using Mind Merge on the other soldiers, and on the engineer who had accidentally stabbed his thumb with a screwdriver.
The energies finished coming together in my mind, and I took a deep breath.
"Alright, I'm ready," I informed the small crowd, and they quieted down as I held out my hand to be given my Psi-amp. It was handed off, and I brought it up to my head and started the energy-gathering process.
Bruises were broken blood vessels in my body, leaking red blood cells instead of sending them to bring energy in the form of oxygen into my system...
Variable DC, roll d100
ROLL d100: 87+25 (Charmed Life)+40 (Mind Merge training)= 152
Fantastic Result
I cast the energy into my leg, all at once, and everything started to burn like I'd poured acid on my insides. I grit my teeth as the pain shifted to a soothing sensation, and gasped for air as the bruising receded in moments. I felt a cold sweat from the stress I'd put into my body, learning the new techniques that I'd just realized and understood. It was all so simple! The Mind Merge focused on the bare minimum of wellness because, by regular design, it wasn't supposed to be focused on healing alone!
"Smith?"
The energy signatures used by it were tweaked, focusing on mental wellness through the eyes of the Psionic user, rather than from the perspective of the body it was trying to put back together! That was part of why the Sectoids were more able to Mind Merge one another, why destroying the mind and body of the donor, by killing the Mind Merger, you could cause feedback through the connection to its perceived other self, because all Sectoids were little more than genetic clones made of the Ethereals, or genetic clones of some minor species they'd met along the way.
"Agent Smith!" Something was beeping.
Meanwhile, most species weren't even capable of learning Psionics in the same way because their perspectives were off, at least when trying to learn the way that the Ethereals did. That must have been why the guys back at F.I.X.F.I.C. had told me I'd need to learn how to do some things for myself! Because at the end of the day, no matter how many things I put together based on the works of others, it would have to be me learning and memorizing the techniques in my own way. If and when I taught the soldiers here on the base, I'd have to weigh the different scales between teaching them exactly as I'd learned myself, stunting their growth at least in the short term (which was probably needed, given the war), or pointing them in the right directions and helping them figure out the details themselves. And that didn't even take into account the easier method of what I'd just done, causing a slower regeneration effect rather than building up energies like a capacitor and-
"Agent Smith! Jon!" Bradford was yelling at me, and my eyes flew open to see the doctors and scientists scrambling around me, the machines beeping rapidly and sounding alarms, and I realized that somebody had put an oxygen mask on me. I sat up from where I'd fallen back on the bed, then clutched my head and groaned.
"Damn, that was a rush. Remind me not to test this stuff on myself in the future," I moaned. "Seriously."
The clamor around me slowly lessened as the machines' incessant beeping lessened back to something droning, rather than constantly screeching. I rubbed the sweat off my brow and looked around, hunched a bit in on myself.
Dr. Vahlen was looking somewhere between concerned and pissed, and I wasn't sure about what emotion it was supposed to convey. "Based on our previous studies, I suspect that your use of the Psionic Amplifier in your testing phase was what overloaded the systems, and what may have caused the overload in you."
She pointed to the amp sitting on a table a little away from the group, and I saw that it was still twitching a little randomly with energy spikes, still connected to me across the room. With an effort of will, I closed the connection, and the little device flickered out and died. I hadn't precisely meant to shut it all the way off, but it felt appropriate to do.
"I think you're right," I huffed, heart still beating a little faster than I might have liked. "But on the plus side, it made it easier to pull off the trick the way I'd meant for it to work."
"Seeing as it caused your heart rate to reach over two hundred beats per minute, causing us to believe you were experiencing a heart attack," Dr. Vahlen said in a snippy tone, "I would like to know what you were risking your health for."
I cleared my throat. "Sorry about that," I offered, feeling a little sheepish. I went to scratch my nose, but the oxygen mask was in the way. "Yeah, I overdid it. I know what went wrong, though, and it's the kind of thing that tells me why the Aliens kill themselves when they Mind Merge, and why they suck at healing anything but themselves at the highest levels."
"Enlighten us," she ordered.
"Perspective, and empathy," I confided. Then I frowned. "Or is it sympathy?" I thought about it, looking down for a moment. "The one where you get a better idea of what other people are feeling instead of thinking they're just like you."
"That is empathy," Dr. Vahlen informed me, still frowning. "While I'm sure you take great pleasure from sounding mystical, perhaps you could explain in a way that we can quantify?"
"Right, right," I looked around, pulling the oxygen mask off.
I took a few minutes and explained everything I'd just come up with to all the people listening, trying to describe things using less obtuse metaphors than I'd come up with myself. According to the medical professionals, who occasionally chimed in with "cellular regeneration" and "matter manipulation," I wasn't breaking any physical laws, but I was skirting the edges quite a bit with what I'd done. Regardless of how you sliced it, the technique would be useful, just as soon as they could replicate it in people that weren't me.
"Can somebody grab my pants?" I asked. "If there are any volunteers, I can show off the less drastic version of what I did, without using the Psi-amp, on somebody else who got hurt."
"The technique you just used to give yourself a heart attack?" Bradford asked dubiously. I shook my head as I was handed my pants, stood up and put them on.
"The technique I figured out, based loosely on the technique that almost gave me a heart attack." I paused, then turned back to him. "The safe version. If it helps, I can cut my arm a little bit and let everyone see the results of using it on myself before I do it on anybody else."
There was a short conference between the different members of the groups as I waited, stretching my legs. Whatever damage the Hunter Chryssalid had done to me was pretty much gone, even if my leg was still pretty sore. The battery-acid pain I'd felt happened because I'd been trying to dump raw, unprepared energy into my leg. I was relying on, now that I realized it, pretty much sheer dumb luck (as much as I had of it) to ensure it would heal me rather than just turn itself into ATP energy or something else, however the Psionics meshed with human bodies. Thinking on it, maybe I'd eventually be able to force off exhaustion and other things using a similar, refined method...
The bottom line was, I was glad I hadn't screwed that up more than I had, even if I figured I'd be sore for a couple days.
"Alright Agent," Bradford finally turned back to me. "We may not get a better chance for you to practice this new technique before the next time you'll be sent into combat, so the medical staff have agreed to allow you to assist in helping our soldiers to recover. Be aware that you'll only be allowed to help volunteers, and we'll specify those willing before you begin on anyone."
I accepted that. Before too long, every injured member of my team had agreed to let themselves be practiced on, and the guy with the screwdriver injury had agreed as well. He'd stabbed himself through his thumbnail, and as the least injured person, he was approved to go first.
They'd put a cloth helmet full of wires on his head, just like mine. I guess they wanted to be sure I was capable of healing people without the side effects.
With the beeping equipment being wheeled up behind me, I gave the engineer, Henry, my best smile. I pointed to his injured hand. "Mind if I help that along?"
"Be my guest. Hope you don't mind if I don't watch," he told me, then pointedly looked away.
The wrapping and gauze around his thumb was removed, showing me that he'd carved a chunk out of his thumb. With a nod from the others, I held my hands a little away from the wound, then closed my eyes to visualize the regeneration technique. Restore the thumb to how it was before by giving energy to the cells dividing to rebuild the injured area, ensuring they'd finish copying their DNA and replicating their cell structures before splitting once more, and so on…
I opened my eyes, pushed the energy forward, and watched as it suffused his hand as the engineer kept looking in the other direction. He tensed up a bit as the flesh spread and knitted back together, and then relaxed as the nail overgrew past his thumb until the red and blackened bits were out past the small appendage. With a little nail clipping, his thumb was good as new, and the process hadn't taken more than a minute, start to finish.
I smiled grandly at the room around me and gave them a thumbs up, then told the guy I was done.
"That easy?" he asked, looking back. He held up his hand to look at it, flicking and scratching at the excess nail with his other hand. "With how much you were freaking out, I thought it was going to hurt."
I shrugged. "The first time was the worst, but mostly just because I messed up using it on myself," I admitted. "Should be better pretty much every time from now on. Just clean up the edges, and you should be good."
"Our recordings of the event are complete," Dr. Vahlen was looking at her pad again. "The Psionic energy that Smith uses did not reach up past Mr. Martin's forearm. As far as we can see, you've healed him without significantly altering his brain activity."
"Can we call that a complete success?" I asked cheerfully.
"Perhaps after we've run several more tests to verify the findings."
Several tests later, and I'd helped reduce the damage the squad had received by a significant margin before the alert had come down.
"Medical staff," a voice called out over the intercom, and I looked up from where I'd been working to help regrow Jamball's burned skin alongside some of the grafts. "Strike Team Beta is coming in with injuries. Please prepare the emergency rooms."
The doctors who had been helping to explain how they'd treated each patient (with the patient's permission, of course) were quick to run back to scrub up and prepare for the next batch of patients.
"Should I help out with that?" I asked Dr. Stevens, but got no answer.
The headache was bothering me a bit, after all I'd done today, but if it got soldiers back on their feet, or saved their lives where modern medicine might fail…
Heal the wounded soldiers?
[ ] Yes, as many as I'm allowed to help out with. I'll heal, they might not.
[ ] Yes, but only until the headache gets worse.
-[ ] Serious pain.
-[ ] Distracting pain.
-[ ] Any pain.
[ ] Yes, but only the minimum to prevent anyone from dying.
[ ] No, I'm not a doctor and I don't want to risk whatever the headaches mean for potentially overusing Psionics.
I took a day to sleep off everything that had happened. The only distraction I'd had was Dr. Vahlen stopping by my cot in the Labs to inform me that they were on the cusp of a breakthrough with Psionics, though it was waiting tantalizingly just out of reach. Nothing came through over the radio while I was recovering, and alien activity as a whole was supposedly down across the world. I didn't like it. They were planning something, or preparing for something big, just like they always were in the games, I could feel it.
I needed to be ready.
After I'd rested up, I stopped by the shooting range and asked for the biggest guns anybody might be expected to handle on the base. They'd hooked me back up to the minigun and backpack I'd used on the bug hunt, and before I loaded it with ammo, I took the time to practice moving the massive gun around.
Variable DC, roll d100
ROLL d100: 14+25 (Charmed Life)= 39
Poor Result
It was about as unwieldy as I remembered it being. The range was practically empty, so nobody complained when I let them all know I was going to be moving around with the empty gun, trying to imagine and move between targets as I went. I eventually realized I could better move my gun around using my telekinesis, but quickly discarded the idea; the big gun was something I had a bit of trouble using on the move, but I wanted to mainly focus on using my combat TK on my other equipment, rather than on trying to turn my mobile turret.
It wasn't easy to do, but I felt a little more confident in handling the gun in close quarters. After that, I took the time to put a lot of bullets down the range, taking advantage of the mostly empty room to use three lanes at once, using my TK to move the targets forward and back to simulate enemy movement. It wasn't a perfect system, but it worked for a bit of training.
After I was done there, I took a shower and found myself wandering the base a bit, back to thinking about the aliens and what they might be up to. Part of me wanted to do more training, but that wasn't going to help in the grand scheme of things, in figuring out what the enemy was going to do next.
For all the headaches I had gotten around the Newfoundland mission and from healing and whatnot, I hadn't spontaneously generated precognitive powers or anything that might tell me how the aliens of this reality really tended to think.
Wondering what went on in their heads eventually led me down to XCOM's little jail.
The real Alien Containment cells were still at least a day or two away, though Dr. Vahlen had let me know the breakthrough she hoped to find might mean they'd be able to start holding whatever we brought in before too much longer.
The Thin Man was pacing his (her?) cell, and eyed me as I came down. It stood still when it saw me watching it, and watched me carefully in turn. It, at least, was capable of moving around.
The Muton wasn't so lucky.
The great beast was still chained to the wall, and I saw that something had been done to the apparatus around its mouth; somebody had carved it open somehow, almost tearing into the metal and flesh to leave a circular opening. I stared at it, trying to figure out why we'd needed to cut into the beast.
After considering it for a moment, I got it. Food, water, those kinds of things. The cell had a toilet, but the Muton could only get at it from where it was chained to the wall, and that had been smashed to pieces besides. How did they keep it clean when it went to the bathroom? Did it even still function that way, under all the genetic changes it had been forced through over its lifetime?
It was watching me, pulling at the reinforced chains steadily, leaning against its binds.
"What are you thinking? Why do you fight?" I finally asked it. I even added a little Psionic suggestion to the attempt, trying to get the beast to do something, anything that might tell me what was on its mind.
Variable DC, roll d100
ROLL d100: 27+25 (Charmed Life)+10 (Low Will)= 62
Failure
The Muton only roared at me again, then started pulling harder on the chains that kept it bound. I sighed, considering the problem. On the one hand, I might be able to dive into the thing's mind, pulling out anything useful as I figured out what I was doing, but on the other, I knew Vahlen might be a better choice for digging images out of the aliens' brains at that moment. On the other, maybe it was a question of putting more time into the effort. I considered the problem as the Muton glared at me, then finally shook my head.
Those headaches from before must have been worse than I thought. Maybe it would be best if I just put the creature to sleep so the good Dr. Vahlen could pull whatever useful information she could from its mind during a standard vivisection.
I thought it over. I knew they had camaras down here, but I was going to talk to the others to let them know what I was up to regardless of what I was going to do. Eventually, I decided-
[ ] F.I.X.F.I.C. said they'd reward me if I could free these aliens from the Ethereals' control. If I could start that process now, it would be worth taking however long it took to get the Muton to, at the very least, try communicate with me. I would stop when interrupted, or when I succeeded.
[ ] I was going to to take a couple hours poking and prodding at the Muton using my mind. It wasn't very strong willed, so I might be able to find something Vahlen might miss. Win or lose, once I was done-
-[ ] The Muton would be taken apart and studied. We needed to make progress.
-[ ] The others could decide what to do with the alien.
-[ ] I'd ask the others to keep the Muton alive so we could try for more later.
[ ] I wasn't ready for this kind of Psionic work.
-[ ] I'd ask Dr. Vahlen if her mind probing equipment was ready, and if it was, I would help placate the Muton for the procedure.
-[ ] It could wait. I left the beast to its cage, to try again later. (Write In a different activity to pursue on the base).
