Fabricated Chapter 20

 The UFO has gone down in the backwoods off the road; PC, fitted with the protojacks, Espeon on his heels, creeps through the trees toward the flickering fire light of the wreck, despite every instinct telling him to turn tail and run.

It’s the fire, mostly- all Awakened fear it, it’s one of the few things that can spell destruction for their kind. And being in such a flammable environment isn’t helping his nerves. 

He glances back behind him. Through the brush he can just make out the shape of the car, where the humans have parked it besides the road. He can hear Tulip a few paces away as she makes her way through the forest, deliberately stepping on twigs and generally making a racket. 

PC and Espeon reach the small clearing like area where the UFO went down first, crouching in the dark on the edge of where the Elerium powered force field ‘walls’ spill out a low light across the grass that mingles with orange of the small fires around the craft. Soon enough he sees Tulip emerge from the woods, the human shouting and waving her phone around. 

Something in the underbrush rustles. Espeon, at PC’s feet, darts to crouch near a rock a pace away, her felt gem glowing. She fires off a Psybeam moments later, and a Sectoid cries into the dark. 

Espeon flicks her tail toward where the death kneel came. “Aliens are such easy prey,” she says to PC as he moves up, ducking behind a lone tree near her. 

“That’s just because they’re fodder,” he whispers back. “Mutons arent easy. Neither are sectopods.”

Espeon flicks her tail again, at him this time. “Of course not,” she says. “That’s when we run away and let the humans, who preferably have guns in this hypothetical, do the work.”

PC steps from behind the tree, low to the ground, and closes the gap between him and where the wall of UFO becomes metal. He presses against it, listening so intently that he starts slightly when Espeon runs over to join him. 

He peers into the force field; they’ve approached from the ship’s back, so he gets a nice view of the Elerium core of the ship- sparking, green electricity crackling up and down its length. A lone Sectoid is nearby, holding a small tablet, which it looks at periodically as it inspects the core. The alien seems shaken, which PC guesses is a given, since it just survived its ship crashing. 

No sign of the Outsider, though. 

“Don’t you have to make it show up?” asks Espeon, quiet, quiet. “Like, step into its eyesight?” 

“You queue up a psybeam behind me, ok?” 

She winks. “You got it.”

He swallows, looks toward Tulip; the girl is actually taking photos with her phone now, but pauses when she catches his gaze. He mouths ‘I’m going in’.

‘Gotcha covered,’ she mouths back, before taking a long breath, and practically screaming, “Holy fuck, is that a alien?”

The Sectoid inside the ship scrambles away from the core, dropping its tablet and darting into the woods. As PC steps through the force field, Espeon taking his place behind the metal, the air near the controls ripples—

“Here we go,” he says to himself, and with one hand sparks one of the protojacks; the other he spools up a burst of Psionic energy and lobs at the Outsider as it coalesces its form. 

He dives out of the way as it returns fire. Behind him, he hears Espeon swear, fears the worst, but only until she flings out Psybeam with “Yo, fuck you, Crystal Gem knock off dickhead fucker man!”

He jumps to his feet, lunges up at the Outsider with both protojacks going off now. The alien makes a bellowing sound, that makes him cringe and flinch, but he manages to make contact and get the prongs of the protojacks around the gem. He hangs desperately onto the alien that way, kicking hard at where its hands should be, narrowly succeeding in knocking its gun out of its grasp and across the floor. 

Espeon lets out what he can only classify as a war cry and comes running into the ship’s interior, launching what he thinks is the Pokémon equivalent to his Psionic balls at the Outsider- it whirls purples and pinks and glows, and when it hits the Outsider, the golden light of the being flashes white. 

“Tulip!” PC yells. 

The girl comes barreling into the ship with no hesitation, snatching up the gun, and after a small pause of consideration, firing it at the Outsider.

The alien bellows again, PC tightens the prongs’ grip, and then is blown across the ship to hit the metal wall as the Outsider explodes, leaving nothing but the honey colored shard that he still clings to as he sits up, shaking his head.

Tulip gazes around the ship, looks toward the Elerium core.

“Is that supposed to be sparking and smoking like that?” she asks.

“No,” PC says as he gets to his feet. “Run.”

They just manage to clear the area before the core goes off; it’s like a opening flower, bursting green and orange and gray, flinging metal and other bits that rain down onto the pair through the branches. Tulip keeps her grip tight on the plasma pistol, and PC on the Outsider Shard.

They meet a panicked Alex and Davey when they come panting out of the woods, the former demeaning to know what happened, what was that explosion, holy shit is that a alien gun? 

“I think the engineers will want to see this,” says Tulip, tucking the gun away with the protojacks. PC gently sets the Outsider shard into the case as well, finally daring to take a deep breath.

“That could of gone a lot worse,” he says as Davey pulls the car back onto the road. 

“Did you see?” says Espeon, jumping down from his shoulder into his lap. “Did you see? I did a ball attack like you!”

“I did, I did,” he says. “Good job.”

“Hehe, balls,” says Tulip; Espeon snickers. Alice shuts her eyes and shakes her head from where she is held in Alex’s lap next to him.

They spend the rest of the car ride back to the engineers telling Alex, Davey, and Alice exactly what happened; the two humans play a good audience and oooohing and aaaahing at all the right parts. 

Alice sighs upon the story’s completion. “You could have gotten shot, hanging onto it like that,” she says.

“But he didn’t,” says Espeon.

“Still,” says Alice, crossing her tiny arms as much as she can, “that was very dangerous, all of this was, and I’m appalled.”

“But Mom—“ begins Tulip. 

“And your use of that weapon when you had no idea how it would behave! I am—“ She takes a breath. “I am very glad you are all alright, and am forbidding you to do anything like this again.”

“Alice, this is real XCOM hours, you have to let us fight aliens,” Espeon says. 

She sighs again. “I suppose.”

A cheer goes up from Alex, Tulip, and Espeon; Davey and Alice groan. 

PC just leans back in his seat and smiles.