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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 5026118" data-attributes="member: 143">If I recall correctly Vasily stuck with his autocannon by choice until fairly late in the campaign. With the way autofire works in the NWN d20 Modern system, it was often the best choice against very heavily armored aliens (like the snakemen), even when the lasers could do more damage with a hit. They really liked the lasers, though. I had to prod them later in the campaign to take up plasma weapons, but eventually they started facing things they could barely scratch. And anyone who's played X-COM knows that there are more than a few surprises to come. But we'll get around to that in good time. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f642.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":)" title="Smile    :)"  data-smilie="1"data-shortname=":)" />* * * * * Session 11 (June 23, 2008)Chapter 35There was a sizzling hiss, then a flash of light as the beam from Catalina’s laser bisected the alien’s skull and drew a black streak down the interior of the alien ship on the far side.  The alien stiffened and crumpled, and the members of Alpha moved forward, spreading out as they moved past the relatively narrow space of the entry gangway into a somewhat larger space beyond. The room was shaped like the ship itself, ovoid with a domed ceiling that rose to about nine feet high at its apex.  The walls curved down to form a number of recessed niches around the perimeter, and there was another of the segmented hatches visible on the far wall.  “What the hell is this?” Catalina said, warily approaching the nearest niche.  There was a waxy oblong there, some sort of cocoon, maybe four feet long, bulging slightly in the center.  “It’s moving,” she said, crouching beside it, and drawing her knife.  “Cover me,” she said, slicing a small opening in its substance. The material was heavy and waxy, but it gave before the blade.  The agent sliced open a gash long enough for her to probe inside.  “Oh my god!” she exclaimed. “What?” Buzz asked.“The children,” Catalina said, now ripping at the cocoon, drawing the enfolding material back to reveal the comatose form of a boy, his face pale and covered with traces of the alien material of the shroud.  James quickly knelt beside Catalina, and took some instruments out of his bag.  “Damn,” he said, his jaw clenched as he went to work. “Oh god, oh god,” Catalina repeated, as she drew back in horror. “Well, we know where the kids are, now,” Buzz said. Jane freed another of the children, cutting a girl free of her cocoon, laying the child out carefully on the floor, using the deflated substance as a pillow for her head.  “They’re in a coma,” James said.  Catalina tapped her communicator.  “Ken, we’ve kids here in a bad way.”  She picked up the child that Jane had freed, and started toward the exit. “There may be more, and we should disable the ship first,” Buzz suggested.  Jane had moved toward the far side of the room where several more cocoons were visible, but she hesitated as she passed the hatch, looking down at the motion sensor riding on her hip.  “Floater coming,” she said.  Vasily had stood trembling with rage during the encounter, but now he moved forward in a blur of motion.  He stepped up beside the hatch, his stun rod gripped tightly in his hand.  The others moved to block the children, but their weapons were unnecessary.  As soon as the hatch slid open, Vasily jabbed through it, the stun rod slamming into the alien’s torso hard enough to crack bone.  The alien crumpled, its limbs twitching as the powerful electrical charge sizzled through its nervous system.  Vasily jumped over it, smoothly swapping the rod for his rifle. The room beyond was about half the size of the first, with a curved pillar connecting floor to ceiling in its center.  The pillar supported some sort of medical station, its function made obvious by the limp child resting within, half-covered in the alien shrouding substance.  Long needles protruded from the mechanism into the child’s neck, and Vasily growled as he approached, letting out a stream of Russian curses under his breath.  He almost yanked them out, but thought better of it at the last minute, growling instead for James to come and help the child. There was another hatch, which Catalina and Jane had moved to cover.  It opened easily as Catalina brushed the controls, revealing the familiar outlines of an alien bridge.  The control systems looked similar to those on the smaller ships they’d explored, and Buzz quickly went to work scanning the systems.  Catalina pointed to another hatch, this one set into the curve where the wall met the floor, and which appeared to access a lower level of the ship.  She used both her scanners and her ears on the door, and held up two fingers to alert the others that more enemies lurked below. “They won’t be going anywhere,” Buzz said.  “I’ve turned off the engines, but the main power systems are somewhere below.”“Say when,” Catalina muttered, as Vasily and James came into the room.  At Vasily’s nod, Catalina operated the control, and the hatch parted.  The hatch opened onto a steep ramp that led down into the bowels of the ship.  The ceiling was much lower here, barely six feet, and much of the space was crowded with the ship’s power systems, including the massive bulk of its main engines.  But it was immediately evident that they were not alone, as a floater appeared behind a bank of machinery and took a shot at Vasily. The plasma bolt caught the Russian in the arm, drawing blood through his armor, but he ignored it, squeezing off a precise stream of automatic fire at the alien.  Several shots flashed as ricocheted off the machinery, but most hit the alien, which staggered back from the force of the impacts.  It somehow remained upright, and even lifted its plasma pistol to return fire, but Jane’s laser bored through its skull, and it fell. “Where’s the other one?” Catalina asked, dropping down to the bottom of the ramp beside Vasily, scanning the area with her pistol at the ready. Vasily started forward, the two women close behind.  As he came around the ponderous bulk of the first engine mount, he saw the last floater, standing next to an alcove filled with glittering power crystals.  Even as Vasily lifted his weapon, the alien pointed its pistol into the array and fired.  The explosion rocked the ship, which teetered for a brief moment, then settled back hard onto the blacktop in front of the school.</blockquote>

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