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Date & Time: A recent Saturday night, about 9pm
Location: The Stubby Toad
Who: Gordon & Barney
Summary: About Black Mesa...

"So... uh, Barney... you wanted to know what happened back at Black Mesa."

That's as graceful a seugue as Gordon can manage halfway into his third beer, but he realized well before this that he'd have to tell his buddy eventually.

But it's not something that he can talk about easily. Not because of trauma, but because he literally cannot articulate some of the shit he'd seen in there. The beer isn't helping his eloquence, but it IS making him care about it a hell of a lot less.

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"Yeah... I found the crowbar in a server farm that was under construction, and a pistol shortly after that. I was in loading and storage two levels above that, when the military showed up."

He takes a drink.

"...Came around the corner in a loading bay just in time to see one of 'em shoot down Richards in cold blood. Up until then I, I actually thought they were here to get us out of there too. Obviously I was wrong."

"It was weird how many weapons were lying around that place, even for a military research facility."

He matched Gordon's drink.

"Those HECU guys, though...MAN what a bunch of psychos."

Gordon refrains from mentioning that he actually got the gun off the corpse of one of the other security guards...

"--Bunch of jacked-up meatheads who didn't have a functioning forebrain among them." Wow, tell us how you really feel, Gordon. "Bastards gunned down anyone that came close to them and them complained that none of us were fighting back! Well..." Again, a smirk that really shouldn't be there. "I fought back."

"By the time I made it to the rocket test labs I'd already pissed them off so much they were calling me out, but they didn't follow me in; I found out why when I got to the test silo. Something had implanted itself into the floor through the heat-sink. Maybe you'd seen one like it; three huge green tentacles rooted to the ground that could slice a man in half if it got a good swing at it. Sound familiar at all?"

Barney looked impressed and a bit alarmed.

"You met three all at once? I've seen two of those on Earth in the whole times since the resonance cascade."

"So each one was a separate creature... Hm. Anyway, I got the test rocket working and made armored calamari out of all three of them. It wasn't as easy as it sounded, since the whole damn system was in emergency shutdown and I had to manually turn on the fuel lines and power to the system, which meant crawling around in the blast pit and using grenades to keep it occupied."

"...Them. Keep THEM occupied."

"That'd do it."

He took another pull of beer.

"So you spent the day running around Black Mesa dealing with aliens and jarheads. How did that end up with you skipping the next twenty years?"

He snorts a laugh, and drains his drink. "That's where it starts to get strange... Eventually I found my way to the Lambda reactor complex on the south end of the facility. As it turns out, they'd been sending scientists out to Xen to pick up samples for years. Samples like the very rock that caused the resonance cascade."

"I found out there that it wasn't just a wild rip in spacetime we were dealing with; something had found out about it, and was holding the portal open and sending troops through. Someone had to go in there again, only this time, to find it and kill it."

"...The thing's name was Nihilanth. And I hope to god no one has to see anything like it again."

Barney had been to Xen (briefly) himself, so that part of the tale was believable. But then it got weird.

"So this was some sorta superdimensional horror that was entirely different from the Combine?"

Oh right yeah, he should explain the distinction--

"Yeah. It was separate from the Combine, though I doubt we would have fared any better against it. I'd seen the troops they were incubating in vats. Each of 'em were about a tough as an antlion queen."

"Anyway, there's more. After destroying the crystals that the thing drew power from--coincidentally the very same that started this shit--and blasting it back to hell where it belonged, I was... picked up by someone."

He pauses, staring at the bar. "Have you... have you ever noticed when we were together, or hell, maybe he was watching you too... a gaunt man in a blue suit with a briefcase? Just standing somewhere he shouldn't be?"

Sounds like a non-sequitor but it's relevant here. Really. Also if Barney's EVER seen the guy, he'd know what Gordon was talking about; the coldly glowing eyes and the sense that the guy might at any moment crawl out of his skin for a breath of fresh air, are kind of hard to miss.

"Uh..."

He had, technically. Twenty years ago for a few seconds in passing while he had other things on his mind.

"Not that I can think of?"

"Consider yourself lucky."

He... should probably explain, somehow.

"I'd been shadowed by the guy the entire time I was down there. At first I didn't think much of it, thought he was just another contract negotiator for the DoD... but then he showed up after the resonance cascade, down there, with all those zombies and monsters, when he should've been killed hours ago."

"I came to with the guy staring me in the face, there on Xen. Turns out the whole goddamn thing was orchestrated by him, him and his employers. They wanted nihilanth out of the way. Brought the sample to the Lambda team so they could cause the cascade and weed out someone who could do that for them. Bastard told me he was impressed with my performance... and that they were going to keep me around for a little while."

Now that he thinks about it, the whole thing could have been a hallucination brought on by stress, pain, and opiates if he hadn't found himself in City 17 five minutes and an eternity later.

Edited 2013-05-06 17:59 (UTC)

Barney tried to work through this, and failed.

"I don't think I'm following you, Gordon. Who were this guy's employers? The Combine?"

Edited 2013-05-07 07:19 (UTC)

Yeah, he figured it'd be hard to parse. Hell, Gordon himself barely comprehends it.

"No, It's not the Combine. These guys didn't like nihilanth as a threat, and they didn't like the Combine either, but I can't tell you what their actual motive is. I've never actually seen any of 'em save for the guy in the suit; hell, I don't even know what to CALL them.

I do know one thing, though. They can't interfere directly; that's why they get their hands on guys like me."

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