Since nobody can be expected to just sit and wait for XCOM 2 to come out, we’ll be having ourselves a little countdown for the 19 sundays left between us and salvation. Each week I’ll be showcasing another soldier living aboard the Avenger, who they are, and why exactly it is they fight for XCOM. When the game comes out, I’ll be creating all of these and release them as a content mod for your character pool. But for now, this’ll have to do.
Keep in my that this is all completely fanfiction-based and I am in no way affiliated with Firaxis. I just do this as a fun writing exercise, because I can.
An encounter with:
Maarten “Geus” Fortuyn, from the Netherlands:
His legs propped up on a table, Fortuyn is slouching in front of a computer display, seemingly at ease, playing Battleship.
“People always come to me for the story of how I lost the Zeemonster, and I’m more happy to tell it than I care to admit.”
He interrupts his game and sits upright in order to properly accompany his tale with flamboyant gestures.
“When the aliens made their intentions of world domination clear, I became captain of a nuclear submarine. It was state-of-the-art, cream of the crop, and our then-captain wanted to just go back home and give it to our new alien overlords. So I had myself a little mutiny, and I soon became the unseen dread of Indian Ocean. Yeah, sure, the ADVENT likes its flying saucers, but it also loves its but cargo boats, and those we hit like crazy. Guess I’ve always been resistance, it’s the only people I dealt with. When I had loot, I sold it to resistance groups, when I was short on crew, they enlisted from resistance groups, and when I needed a place to hide, resistance groups could always muster some hidden island in Indonesia or a frozen cove in Antarctica. I remember one time they were looking for us off the coast of Madagascar, and we were hidden in a huge underwater cave. One move out and we would have been sectoid food, and this went on for almost half a year. We were running low on supplies, and so the resistance regularly had fishing boats drop sealed boxes of food when no one was looking, and we could send divers to recover them.”
Shaking his head, he waves off the story.
“I’m digressing. The day I lost the Zeemonster, my that was scary. We had just hit another big ADVENT freighter, badly defended as far as those go, and that should have been reason enough to avoid it like the plague. We got weapons, clothes, spare parts and whatnot, too much to catalogue everything, even some vehicles were in there! So we stashed most of it in the seabed, but there were some sealed boxes I wanted to have an expert or two take a look over. Turns out they were full of chryssallids. Yep, real life, horrible crawler chryssalids of doom. Try fighting those in narrow corridors, kilometres underwater. The clamouring of their feet reverberated through the entire submarine. You could never know when they would pop around the corner, and later you could never know if the guy coming at you from down the corridor was injured or a zombie. Of course, I had Willem at my side to protect me, but that’s not all that saved me.”
He pats his bright orange shotgun on the back like it’s a pet.
“I don’t know exactly how I survived, but I do remember there was an explosion, and I believe I was the one who ordered it. No idea how, and it might seem impossible, but the next thing I remember is being adrift on an air mattress, lying there for days, my skin burning, my broken bones hurting. Finally, a whaler of all things found me a took me in. They were convinced the aliens would introduce huge sea creatures into the oceans, and wanted to be prepared. They brought me to a small guerilla group on Sri Lanka, and that’s how I ended up here. I fight for XCOM, because I owe it to the men and women who died aboard my pirate submarine.”
Who is Betty? 
Those darn chryssalids.