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:
Vasily “Grandfather” Vinogradov, from Russia:
Vinogradov is sitting in his tiny office, creating duty rosters, filing paperwork and listening to an audio-handbook on modern weapons technology at the same time.
“They never prepared me for any of this in the Spetsnaz, nor the KGB. When XCOM was first activated, I was already an old man. I had served my motherland since Union days. I was appointed Staff Colonel even before the Commander had been selected, and I was responsible for recruiting and managing soldiers, coordinating with medical and keeping the Commander up to date with the status of all his people, how long until they were ready for combat, all of those things. Only one day it turned out we were short on manpower, and we could not gather new recruits fast enough. So I went into the field and fought the aliens directly, and it turned out I still had it. I was as much a capable flag officer as I had been a staffer, and it was the thing that saved me. When the aliens hit HQ, I was in Chongqing, rescuing a VIP who had stolen a transponder from his triad bosses. We were under heavy fire when Central suddenly stopped responding. Big Sky had no idea what was happening, so instead of flying back to HQ we went to hide in the Himalayas. Despite us being armed soldiers suddenly landing in their garden, the monks took us in and even helped hide the skyranger from satellites. Markus “Guardian” Vogel, Eleonora “Bullet Rain” Romano, Norbu “Crater” Matsumoto, Tarcisio “Omega” Noronha, Janet “Glitch” Murray, Shaojie “Chilong” Zhang, Harry “Big Sky” Walters and I, we were the last of XCOM, and our mission was simple: find whoever was left and bring them together again.
He turns around a picture on his desk so that it’s visible. It shows him and Dr. Shen Senior, posing with a dead berserker.
“We did find Shen and some of his people in Canada, where they had been hiding with a man named Chevrier. Not a particularly friendly individual, but very capable at keeping people hidden. Shen said he could build something with the transponder, so we had him work on it. It was difficult, we had to move around constantly, and the Skyranger was left behind in in the Urals because it needed too much fuel. Finally, after a year, Shen was finished and we launched the last XCOM mission for many years to come: Operation Hornless Dragon. Our target was an alien ship we’d been tracking, and we struck when it was off the coast of New Orleans. The objective was to capture it and then get away so it could be retrofitted, but I never saw that happen. Instead, I was thrown out by the explosion of a cyberdisc’s grenade and fell from a hundred metres. I still remember feeling sad about how I’d never know if the mission was a success or not. As we can see around us, it was. Don’t ask how I survived, because I don’t know, but it is quite clear the aliens wanted me to.”
He scratches the back of his head, where Dr. Tygan removed the same alien device from him as he did from the commander.
“I fight for XCOM, because, whatever the reason the aliens kept me in stasis for twenty years, I will make them regret not killing me when they had the chance.”
Who is Betty? 