Hop To It
Who the fuck designed this place, anyway?! A canal whose only bridge is a little easily-busted catwalk way up high, and then a freight conveyor set over a large pit with no walkway around for if someone might need to check something out on the line? If I'm stuck on this Earth after all this shit is done, you can bet that OSHA's gonna be hearing a thing or two.
(I also know what you meant about water and electricity, now. Busted conduits falling out of ceilings, though, I can handle as not a retarded design flaw.)
--Grif
Grif kicked out the vent cover, his guns out, eyeing the blips on his motion tracker. He hadn't much liked all of the duct-crawling he'd had to do recently, but:
"Shit!"
Grif launched himself out of the duct, hitting the floor just as the turret's barrel motor had reached the speed at which it was ready to fire. He interposed himself between the gun and the scientist, the air around him becoming iridescent yellow as bullets ricocheted off of his shields. A double-tap with the Glock put the headcrab down quickly, and a flurry of additional shots aimed to take the turret out of commission while the scientist finished taking cover in the room behind them, where he'd been running to anyway.
MJOLNIR Mk.VI's shield strength was formidable, but apparently Black Mesa hadn't spared any expense on the turrets mounted this deep into the compound, as it had a truly prodigious rate of fire, and Grif couldn't really go anywhere without abandoning the man he was protecting. The shield finally gave out, and the warning tone joined the cordite chorus. The automated weapon finally yielded, black smoke billowing up. In the silence that followed, Grif could feel the pain creeping in as his adrenaline level dropped, the plates of his armor still intact but the bullets' impacts still felt on the flesh within.
"Ow." He slumped slightly, then turned his head to the doorway behind him. "Hey! You okay in there?"
From the other room, the scientist's voice was shaken. "Y...yes, I'm fine."
"Good." Grif's head swiveled back. He could feel his armor's life-support systems providing some assistance, but there was still a fairly sizeable amount of pain. On the opposite wall, under the gun turret and on the level with a raised platform with no apparent way up, he saw a health station. How anyone of a normal physique was expected to get up there, he couldn't begin to guess. "I'll be back in a moment."
"Uh. O-okay."
Grif crossed the room, his armor able to give his jump up the extra boost which his legs didn't themselves feel up to under the circumstances. He stumbled a bit on the landing, though, and crawled the rest of the way to the health station. He figured out how to get his armor plugged in, and the relief that flooded through his body as the extra medicines and painkillers hit him was such that he didn't even care about the strange noises that apparently accompanied the station's operation.
It didn't take nearly as much as he felt it did for him to reach as close to the peak of health as he could get, given his pre-existing condition. Thus revitalized, he hopped down and crossed the room again, going through the doorway and facing the scientist. A quick glance showed that the room they were in had shelving. While Grif perused the shelves, the scientist said to him, "I suspected this could happen, but the Administrator just would not listen!"
"Is that so?" There were a couple of additional magazines for the Glock, and... a shotgun! "Awww-haw-haw yeaaaah. Come to papa. I suddenly feel like Sarge." He held it up, affecting an exaggerated gravelly voice and Southern American accent as he aimed at the opposite wall. "'Listen up, dirtbags! We're here to kill some aliens and drink some piña coladas... And we're all out of colada!'"
"Um, excuse me?" The scientist no longer looked certain whether or not he should be afraid of the larger armored man.
Grif coughed, slinging the shotgun over his shoulder on its strap and putting the spare ammo in his belt. In his normal voice again, he said, "Sorry. Uh, I don't know how much you've heard, but my name is Grif, and I'm your emergency backup guy in orange armor for the day. Come on, I'll bring you back to where a couple of your buddies are hanging out, and you can wait there for the evacuation."
The scientist eyed him very warily. "I certainly hope you know what you're doing."
"Yeah, so do I."
He'd made it through the next level above that, sometimes on his own, sometimes with a guard that happened to be handy. He encountered Vortigaunts in force, a cafeteria where headcrab zombies had chowed down on hapless scientists, and had to skate around in a freezer. (Well, not literally skate, but between the ice on the floor and the mild slickness produced by his shield -- even as thin as it can be made to be on the soles of the boots -- the motions were approximately the same, and required that he familiarize himself accordingly.) As he went, he directed people down to where their colleagues had gathered, sometimes leaving them with the guard he'd just been working with to escort them before finding another guard.
Ascending the next level, he noticed that there was a door to the right. According to his map, would be the entrance to a balcony area overlooking the cafeteria he'd just gone through. It didn't really seem to be the way forward, but he looked through the door's inset window, anyway. He was greeted with the sight of that man in the blue business suit, who stepped back from the balcony, and walked up to the door to look at him in return.
"Hey! You!" Grif called to him through the door, but the man didn't seem to really be concerned with starting a conversation.
The guard that was with Grif, however, asked, "What're you lookin' at, man?"
Grif moved to the side, so that the guard could see through the window as well. "There! You see that guy?" But by then, the man had already turned around and walked away, rounding a corner out of sight.
"Nope. You sure you're okay there, big guy?"
"Yeah, skip it. Let's go."
Shit. One of the worst parts of this, I think, is the occasional guy who dies because I just can't get to him fast enough. Like this one guy who'd been dangling from the ladder on an elevator car, but couldn't hold on. His scream as he plummeted down the elevator shaft? Yeah, I'm gonna be drinking to forget that for a while. Son of a bitch.
--Grif
The elevator car wouldn't budge, but it was already on a floor, so its door readily opened, admitting him into a scene of pandemonium. Ahead and to the left, a panicked scientist ran from a sealed set of very large red doors, marked "SILO D", banging on the windows of a security station.
"For God's sake, open the silo doors! They're coming for us, it's our only way out! Oh my God, we're doomed!"
The guard in the station, however, wasn't in a position to take requests; he was busy unsuccessfully fighting off the zombie that was dragging him into an air duct. The scientist was completely parted from rationality, and it was all Grif could do to pull him back from running headlong into what looked like it might be a laser-based tripmine. He finally had to pop one of the tranquilizer-filled sniper rifle darts out of one of the magazines he'd loaded for taking down Omega, and inject its contents into the man by hand. Having finally settled him down into a bit of a nap, Grif laid him down, next to the silo doors, and marked the location on his map.
It was fortunate that he'd done so, as the next thing after the tripmine were laser tripwires that activated a tripod-mounted gun turret, and that was a dance that Grif had gotten sick of the first time. Shooting at the turret from behind the triplines gave him enough of a headstart on its automated defense that it couldn't do him any real damage before falling over. His prize, after mopping up some headcrabs that teleported in, was apparently some model of assault rifle, taken from the corpse of a fallen soldier. Given what he'd been told about what the military had been there to do, he suspected that they were the ones who set up the turret and the mine, and thus didn't feel too bad about looting the body this time.
"Man. If it weren't for the straps on these guns, I'd be screwed for carrying all this crap. Wonder why we stopped using them back home."
As he finished ransacking the area for any other ammunition to be found, the PA system sounded an alert, and that badly synthesized voice called out.
"Attention. Black Mesa. Announcement. System. Now under. Military. Command."
"Yup. Here it comes," Grif said to himself. He pushed on, dodging more tripmines, Vortigaunts, and especially more laser-activated turret tripods. Scientists -- living ones, anyway -- were few and far between as he progressed through the storage areas, but not entirely absent, and he did for them what he could. His armor's radio picked up snippets of conversation that was obviously military in nature.
He spotted the man in the blue suit again, as he entered Storage Area 2. He was crossing a bridge, up and some distance away, so Grif didn't put much effort into trying to talk to him this time. Instead, he followed after, climbing ladders to reach the bridge and making his way across. As he entered the next room, he saw a scientist running down the stairs towards a soldier stationed at an elevator.
"Rescued at last! Thank God you're here!"
If Grif hadn't already known what the military was really up to here, the fact that the soldier was raising his weapon and taking aim without even a word of comment spoke volumes. He hadn't seen Grif, though, so it came as something of a surprise to him when a hail of gunfire cut him down before he could pull the trigger.
The scientist looked up at him, his face full of fear. "You... you killed him! Who... what are you?! Are you going to kill me too?"
"Great. All I need. Dude. Chill out, okay? I'm not gonna hurt you. In fact, I killed him because he was going to kill you. Now, go back up that way until you meet up with a couple of your buds, okay? They'll explain everything."
"Oh...O-okay." He seemed glad more for being allowed to run away than for actually being rescued. That was, however, good enough for Grif for now, as he signaled for the elevator.
It took another half-hour of running, gunning, and (not always successfully) trying to prevent scientists from putting themselves out in the open to get shot down by soldiers. Looking back on it, he wasn't entirely proud of himself. For all that he presented himself as a laid-back slacker, he nonetheless had a temper sometimes, and the cavalier and sometimes even gleeful attitude of the Marines towards their task of killing innocent civilians angered him. In his wrath, he would occasionally switch to the crowbar for no better reason than to beat them to a pulp, secure in the knowledge that they could not touch him.
Finally, Grif reached the last elevator, the one that would get him to the surface. Chaos, apparently, was written in the weather forecast for the day. Outside of the hangar where the elevator emptied out, there were couple of squads of Marines, and more inside a helicopter which circled the area. On top of that was an ongoing air strike that felt like God pounding on the roof. The hangar was sturdy, though, which allowed him to stay inside to weather the air strike while he mopped up the soldiers as they approached. He didn't know why the chopper didn't drop more guys in, but figured that maybe only those guys were crazy enough to risk running into the air strike zone.
He consulted his map, as best he could with everything shaking around as it was. He was ringed in, fencing all around his area with guard towers. Crates were scattered about, but with the air strike, he couldn't count on them for cover. Finally, in the middle, he saw a tiny bunker, just large enough to house a ladder going back down and it was that which he aimed himself for as he ran out into the open. To say that he made it was only somewhat true; the final push that got him in actually came from the shockwave of a hit from the air strike, flat-lining his shields and knocking him into the ladder, his nerves lit up with pain. He slid more than climbed down, then turned around and found that, according to the sign, he was headed towards the access shaft for central ventilation.
He was pleased to find a health station next to the door for vent access, which, again, allowed him to bolster his armor's built-in medical facilities before heading into the shaft. This, apparently, was what all those soldiers had been held on the helicopter for. He fought them as he hopped from level to level down to where the shaft opened into yet more ductwork, which he followed until he finally arrived... back at the Silo D security station. The scientist he'd left there was awake, but calm, and thankful for having been kept from being killed by his own lack of nerves, even by someone as unexpected as Grif.
"With the transit system out," the scientist said, after being told that Grif already knew about Lambda Complex and their part in ending the catastrophe, "I couldn't tell you how to get there, but there's an old decommissioned rail system somewhere through here beyond the silo complex. If you can make it through the rocket test labs, you might be able to worm your way through the old tunnels to track down whatever's left of the Lambda team. You can trust them. You can trust all of us."
With that, Grif hit the button on the security console that opened the silo doors, and continued on.
To whoever's in charge of the US Government on this Earth:
Your military is a giant pack of cockbites. Please reel them all the fuck back in, before I have to kill any more of them. I know you've got your secrets and all that shit, but I shouldn't be hearing these guys bitching about the civilians they're killing not fighting back, like it was some kind of sport.
(On which note, squeezing myself back into the air duct was a bit of a challenge, but it was worth it for the look of surprise on that asshole's face when I split the duct open and fed him and his buddy a face full of shotgun.)
--Pvt. Dexter Grif, UNSC
(I also know what you meant about water and electricity, now. Busted conduits falling out of ceilings, though, I can handle as not a retarded design flaw.)
--Grif
Grif kicked out the vent cover, his guns out, eyeing the blips on his motion tracker. He hadn't much liked all of the duct-crawling he'd had to do recently, but:
- the doors in the office complex area all seemed to open in one direction,
- it was always the opposite direction from where he needed to go, and
- when he tried to force them, the door handle would come off in his hand instead.
"Shit!"
Grif launched himself out of the duct, hitting the floor just as the turret's barrel motor had reached the speed at which it was ready to fire. He interposed himself between the gun and the scientist, the air around him becoming iridescent yellow as bullets ricocheted off of his shields. A double-tap with the Glock put the headcrab down quickly, and a flurry of additional shots aimed to take the turret out of commission while the scientist finished taking cover in the room behind them, where he'd been running to anyway.
MJOLNIR Mk.VI's shield strength was formidable, but apparently Black Mesa hadn't spared any expense on the turrets mounted this deep into the compound, as it had a truly prodigious rate of fire, and Grif couldn't really go anywhere without abandoning the man he was protecting. The shield finally gave out, and the warning tone joined the cordite chorus. The automated weapon finally yielded, black smoke billowing up. In the silence that followed, Grif could feel the pain creeping in as his adrenaline level dropped, the plates of his armor still intact but the bullets' impacts still felt on the flesh within.
"Ow." He slumped slightly, then turned his head to the doorway behind him. "Hey! You okay in there?"
From the other room, the scientist's voice was shaken. "Y...yes, I'm fine."
"Good." Grif's head swiveled back. He could feel his armor's life-support systems providing some assistance, but there was still a fairly sizeable amount of pain. On the opposite wall, under the gun turret and on the level with a raised platform with no apparent way up, he saw a health station. How anyone of a normal physique was expected to get up there, he couldn't begin to guess. "I'll be back in a moment."
"Uh. O-okay."
Grif crossed the room, his armor able to give his jump up the extra boost which his legs didn't themselves feel up to under the circumstances. He stumbled a bit on the landing, though, and crawled the rest of the way to the health station. He figured out how to get his armor plugged in, and the relief that flooded through his body as the extra medicines and painkillers hit him was such that he didn't even care about the strange noises that apparently accompanied the station's operation.
It didn't take nearly as much as he felt it did for him to reach as close to the peak of health as he could get, given his pre-existing condition. Thus revitalized, he hopped down and crossed the room again, going through the doorway and facing the scientist. A quick glance showed that the room they were in had shelving. While Grif perused the shelves, the scientist said to him, "I suspected this could happen, but the Administrator just would not listen!"
"Is that so?" There were a couple of additional magazines for the Glock, and... a shotgun! "Awww-haw-haw yeaaaah. Come to papa. I suddenly feel like Sarge." He held it up, affecting an exaggerated gravelly voice and Southern American accent as he aimed at the opposite wall. "'Listen up, dirtbags! We're here to kill some aliens and drink some piña coladas... And we're all out of colada!'"
"Um, excuse me?" The scientist no longer looked certain whether or not he should be afraid of the larger armored man.
Grif coughed, slinging the shotgun over his shoulder on its strap and putting the spare ammo in his belt. In his normal voice again, he said, "Sorry. Uh, I don't know how much you've heard, but my name is Grif, and I'm your emergency backup guy in orange armor for the day. Come on, I'll bring you back to where a couple of your buddies are hanging out, and you can wait there for the evacuation."
The scientist eyed him very warily. "I certainly hope you know what you're doing."
"Yeah, so do I."
He'd made it through the next level above that, sometimes on his own, sometimes with a guard that happened to be handy. He encountered Vortigaunts in force, a cafeteria where headcrab zombies had chowed down on hapless scientists, and had to skate around in a freezer. (Well, not literally skate, but between the ice on the floor and the mild slickness produced by his shield -- even as thin as it can be made to be on the soles of the boots -- the motions were approximately the same, and required that he familiarize himself accordingly.) As he went, he directed people down to where their colleagues had gathered, sometimes leaving them with the guard he'd just been working with to escort them before finding another guard.
Ascending the next level, he noticed that there was a door to the right. According to his map, would be the entrance to a balcony area overlooking the cafeteria he'd just gone through. It didn't really seem to be the way forward, but he looked through the door's inset window, anyway. He was greeted with the sight of that man in the blue business suit, who stepped back from the balcony, and walked up to the door to look at him in return.
"Hey! You!" Grif called to him through the door, but the man didn't seem to really be concerned with starting a conversation.
The guard that was with Grif, however, asked, "What're you lookin' at, man?"
Grif moved to the side, so that the guard could see through the window as well. "There! You see that guy?" But by then, the man had already turned around and walked away, rounding a corner out of sight.
"Nope. You sure you're okay there, big guy?"
"Yeah, skip it. Let's go."
Shit. One of the worst parts of this, I think, is the occasional guy who dies because I just can't get to him fast enough. Like this one guy who'd been dangling from the ladder on an elevator car, but couldn't hold on. His scream as he plummeted down the elevator shaft? Yeah, I'm gonna be drinking to forget that for a while. Son of a bitch.
--Grif
The elevator car wouldn't budge, but it was already on a floor, so its door readily opened, admitting him into a scene of pandemonium. Ahead and to the left, a panicked scientist ran from a sealed set of very large red doors, marked "SILO D", banging on the windows of a security station.
"For God's sake, open the silo doors! They're coming for us, it's our only way out! Oh my God, we're doomed!"
The guard in the station, however, wasn't in a position to take requests; he was busy unsuccessfully fighting off the zombie that was dragging him into an air duct. The scientist was completely parted from rationality, and it was all Grif could do to pull him back from running headlong into what looked like it might be a laser-based tripmine. He finally had to pop one of the tranquilizer-filled sniper rifle darts out of one of the magazines he'd loaded for taking down Omega, and inject its contents into the man by hand. Having finally settled him down into a bit of a nap, Grif laid him down, next to the silo doors, and marked the location on his map.
It was fortunate that he'd done so, as the next thing after the tripmine were laser tripwires that activated a tripod-mounted gun turret, and that was a dance that Grif had gotten sick of the first time. Shooting at the turret from behind the triplines gave him enough of a headstart on its automated defense that it couldn't do him any real damage before falling over. His prize, after mopping up some headcrabs that teleported in, was apparently some model of assault rifle, taken from the corpse of a fallen soldier. Given what he'd been told about what the military had been there to do, he suspected that they were the ones who set up the turret and the mine, and thus didn't feel too bad about looting the body this time.
"Man. If it weren't for the straps on these guns, I'd be screwed for carrying all this crap. Wonder why we stopped using them back home."
As he finished ransacking the area for any other ammunition to be found, the PA system sounded an alert, and that badly synthesized voice called out.
"Attention. Black Mesa. Announcement. System. Now under. Military. Command."
"Yup. Here it comes," Grif said to himself. He pushed on, dodging more tripmines, Vortigaunts, and especially more laser-activated turret tripods. Scientists -- living ones, anyway -- were few and far between as he progressed through the storage areas, but not entirely absent, and he did for them what he could. His armor's radio picked up snippets of conversation that was obviously military in nature.
He spotted the man in the blue suit again, as he entered Storage Area 2. He was crossing a bridge, up and some distance away, so Grif didn't put much effort into trying to talk to him this time. Instead, he followed after, climbing ladders to reach the bridge and making his way across. As he entered the next room, he saw a scientist running down the stairs towards a soldier stationed at an elevator.
"Rescued at last! Thank God you're here!"
If Grif hadn't already known what the military was really up to here, the fact that the soldier was raising his weapon and taking aim without even a word of comment spoke volumes. He hadn't seen Grif, though, so it came as something of a surprise to him when a hail of gunfire cut him down before he could pull the trigger.
The scientist looked up at him, his face full of fear. "You... you killed him! Who... what are you?! Are you going to kill me too?"
"Great. All I need. Dude. Chill out, okay? I'm not gonna hurt you. In fact, I killed him because he was going to kill you. Now, go back up that way until you meet up with a couple of your buds, okay? They'll explain everything."
"Oh...O-okay." He seemed glad more for being allowed to run away than for actually being rescued. That was, however, good enough for Grif for now, as he signaled for the elevator.
It took another half-hour of running, gunning, and (not always successfully) trying to prevent scientists from putting themselves out in the open to get shot down by soldiers. Looking back on it, he wasn't entirely proud of himself. For all that he presented himself as a laid-back slacker, he nonetheless had a temper sometimes, and the cavalier and sometimes even gleeful attitude of the Marines towards their task of killing innocent civilians angered him. In his wrath, he would occasionally switch to the crowbar for no better reason than to beat them to a pulp, secure in the knowledge that they could not touch him.
Finally, Grif reached the last elevator, the one that would get him to the surface. Chaos, apparently, was written in the weather forecast for the day. Outside of the hangar where the elevator emptied out, there were couple of squads of Marines, and more inside a helicopter which circled the area. On top of that was an ongoing air strike that felt like God pounding on the roof. The hangar was sturdy, though, which allowed him to stay inside to weather the air strike while he mopped up the soldiers as they approached. He didn't know why the chopper didn't drop more guys in, but figured that maybe only those guys were crazy enough to risk running into the air strike zone.
He consulted his map, as best he could with everything shaking around as it was. He was ringed in, fencing all around his area with guard towers. Crates were scattered about, but with the air strike, he couldn't count on them for cover. Finally, in the middle, he saw a tiny bunker, just large enough to house a ladder going back down and it was that which he aimed himself for as he ran out into the open. To say that he made it was only somewhat true; the final push that got him in actually came from the shockwave of a hit from the air strike, flat-lining his shields and knocking him into the ladder, his nerves lit up with pain. He slid more than climbed down, then turned around and found that, according to the sign, he was headed towards the access shaft for central ventilation.
He was pleased to find a health station next to the door for vent access, which, again, allowed him to bolster his armor's built-in medical facilities before heading into the shaft. This, apparently, was what all those soldiers had been held on the helicopter for. He fought them as he hopped from level to level down to where the shaft opened into yet more ductwork, which he followed until he finally arrived... back at the Silo D security station. The scientist he'd left there was awake, but calm, and thankful for having been kept from being killed by his own lack of nerves, even by someone as unexpected as Grif.
"With the transit system out," the scientist said, after being told that Grif already knew about Lambda Complex and their part in ending the catastrophe, "I couldn't tell you how to get there, but there's an old decommissioned rail system somewhere through here beyond the silo complex. If you can make it through the rocket test labs, you might be able to worm your way through the old tunnels to track down whatever's left of the Lambda team. You can trust them. You can trust all of us."
With that, Grif hit the button on the security console that opened the silo doors, and continued on.
To whoever's in charge of the US Government on this Earth:
Your military is a giant pack of cockbites. Please reel them all the fuck back in, before I have to kill any more of them. I know you've got your secrets and all that shit, but I shouldn't be hearing these guys bitching about the civilians they're killing not fighting back, like it was some kind of sport.
(On which note, squeezing myself back into the air duct was a bit of a challenge, but it was worth it for the look of surprise on that asshole's face when I split the duct open and fed him and his buddy a face full of shotgun.)
--Pvt. Dexter Grif, UNSC