Seeing as the Countdown Calendar for XCOM 2 was such a massive success, I decided to use some discarded character concepts and a couple new ones for what is essentially season 2 of the project. For those of you who don’t know: Every Tuesday until the day WotC is released, I will reveal a new soldier on the Avenger, so you can get a small dose of XCOM to bridge the gap.
Quick reminder: I am in no way affiliated with Firaxis, and all this content is fanfiction/headcanon/whatever term you prefer.
An encounter with:
Seamus “Raven” McLoughlin, from Ireland:
Immersed in his work at the small section of Engineering he has requisitioned for himself, McLoughlin takes the occasional sip of Guinness as he tinkers away with dangerous explosives and makeshift contraptions.
“I’d wager to say that we Irishmen know a thing or two about guerilla warfare. It’s in our blood, if you will.”
He has a sheepish grin on his face.
“What a surprise that was, when the aliens dropped in. My father always said that the IRA was almost completely dead at the time of the invasion, splintered into a thousand factions, generally despised by the public. Ironic, how things change, eh? Yes, my father was a Sinn Féin politician, even held office for a while in our small town. He wanted to unite with Northern Ireland and gain as much independence from Britain as possible. But he didn’t hate the English. He would never have picked up a rifle against them. Now with ADVENT that was a whole different situation…”
Smiling, he screws tight a contraption he’s been working on and arms it. He drops a cube of orange gel on a hair-thin wire, and a crossbow bolt darts forward from the apparatus and expands inside the cube, which has the same consistency as human flesh.
“Strength is completely adaptable, depending on where the enemy crosses. We don’t even need a tripwire, a laser will do. Imagine loading this with explosives and sending it into an ADVENT-Officer’s thigh. Fucking beautiful. So yeah, I was raised into it, essentially. We moved around a lot, going from hideout to hideout. I lived with some family and then another so I could get an education, and we also had some teachers giving classes for hideout kids. My mother didn’t approve. For the sake of my own future, I was supposed to go to a state institution for lost children. An orphanage, if you will. I could get an education there, and then come back to the IRA if I wanted to. My father and I both knew that they would only brainwash me though, and that they’d use me as leverage if they found out who I was. God bless my mum, she always tried to shelter me from the evils of this world, but I always knew. I’m still grateful she took matters into her own hands, though. She put me up in this home, and I stayed there for a whole year, soaking in ADVENT propaganda, trying to fit in so that I wouldn’t be singled out. I learned a lot that year. How to be invisible, how to be independent, how to keep secrets. When my dad rescued me, a whole bunch of the boys left with me. We eventually became one of the most effective guerilla squads in the whole IRA, and Bradford took notice. It was only a matter of time until we were shattered though, ran into an ambush. I’d prefer not to talk about it, if you don’t mind. Half my brothers were killed that day.”
He shivers.
“We disbanded to improve the whole of the IRA instead of trying to repair our squad. It would never have been even a shadow of its former self. That’s how I ended up here, eventually. I fight for XCOM, because I’ve practically never done anything else.”
Who is Betty? 