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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 5061047" data-attributes="member: 143">Interlude: Leave (July 9-14, 2008)Note: once again, these posts came from the players in the campaign, in response to the Garret e-mail below.An unexpected message from Director Garret arrived in the xPhone inboxes of Alpha Team. * * * "Leave! Yes!" Catalina punches the air as she reads the email.  "72 hours. That's 5 hours transfer, 12 hour flight, 3 hours in airport lounge, in both directions," she ticks off her fingers one bay one.  "Damn, once I've done the obligatory visit to Mom and Dad that's only one evening." "I need to spend some time in workshop three too."  She snorted, "Sod it, who's for pairing up and hitting the nearest bar?  Preferably someone who's handy with cards and can hold their own in a shots drinking contest."  Slowly a grin formed. "How far are we from Vegas, exactly?" * * * Jim was reviewing the last five sets of alien autopsy results when the buzzer in the medical lab went off.  The error tolerances on the med-kit chloroplasm transducer had been exceeded again.  He'd have to get one of the techs to fix this.  He groaned.  He still hadn't reviewed the research and manufacturing proposals floated by the various alpha team members.  "Too freakin' much to do.  I had more free time back when I worked the ER." Jim sent off an email to two of the techs about the tolerances, and went back to the autopsy reports.  If he didn't have time to weigh in on the manufacturing and research priorities, it wasn't the end of the world, the others in the group seemed to be making pretty good decisions.* * * No-one else had seemed in a hurry to take their leave off the base, and as he— like the British woman, apparently—had no-one to visit within a realistic distance, it made sense to take the same bus into the city while the rest of the team booked flights and made hopeful travel plans.  It was still close to the base, should trouble break out; and being a tourist city, Vasily had originally assumed there would be no problems finding a place to stay.  A country as tense as this one, he thought, was probably one that was staying at home.  Even if the threat they were facing was nameless and not generally known, there was enough fear in the air for everyone to feel the urge to keep their heads down. In that, he couldn't have been more wrong.  The streets of Vegas by day were eerily silent, but the hotels and casinos of the place were mostly full.  As those with families huddled in their houses, taking no chances, the desperate, the despairing, and the fatalistic had flocked to Vegas, gambling their way through the crisis.  To someone who knew what was going on, it all seemed a little sad, a little bleak.  The sight of it all cast Doctor Okwelume's reported idealism—that alien invasion could imbue humanity with a sense of purpose—into stark relief. Was it just the way the human race dealt with fear and worry, to push it aside?  Could it be that when the chips were down and things fell apart, was the only rule Every Man For Himself?  After so many wars, many of them global, was cynicism the order of the day now that the future of the human race as a whole might truthfully be at stake?  Or was the age of information-technology and the power of world media settling the weight of guilt so heavily onto people's consciences that the mere thought of conflict wearied them? He didn't know; but thoughts like that wearied him, he knew that.  And they weren't worth sharing, at least not on a time of brief holiday.  Besides, he would have been surprised if there was anyone in Alpha Team who hadn't had the same thoughts at some point.  He brought his mind back to the first three things on the agenda; getting enough loose change together to make a call to the Russian Embassy in Washington, and... "Keep eye out for Russian restaurant," he asked his travelling companion, as their bus ambled down Route 93.  "And hat shop.  I promise bring back a Vegas baseball cap for someone."* * * "Look, what do you want?  This rat hole, which is worse than the barracks, and only has one bed, or a big room with a comfy sofa if not two beds, and space so we won't have to sit on one another's laps?"  The atmosphere of anxiety in the city had taken Catalina by surprise.  She wasn't sure why she hadn't expected it. but she hadn't.  One of her earliest memories was of the strange elation her parents had exhibited when a great big wall had been knocked down.  It was much later before she connected the event, but even then she could only understand the relieved jubilation subjectively.  Life in post-Germanic unification Britain didn't exactly fit you to anticipate how a population under threat could act. Still, as was her nature, she intended to make the most of it.  Spending two nights in the seedy motel, heavily influenced by the Psycho period and looking like it hadn't been renovated since then either, wasn't going to cut it.  So Catalina suggested they con their way into the Honeymoon suite of one of the larger hotels.  Vasily hadn't liked the idea, so as they stood in the one dingy room they could find she gave it the hard sell.  "I'll take the sofa if I can at least have a shower I don't have to share with a family of cockroaches." It had perhaps been the unspecified rodent running along the curtain rail that convinced him, but Vasily agreed reluctantly.  "Just stay quiet and leave it to me," Catalina told him.The Russian stood silently in the lobby of the Luxor, while Catalina spoke to the frazzled-looking clerk at the front desk.  "It's the throat cancer operation, you know.  He really mustn't talk too much,” she said, radiating embarrassed tension, while she had the desk clerk triple check for a booking that had never existed. Tears started as she went on, "It's our honeymoon, you know, and the doctors..."  The combination, coming from a young woman with innocent blue eyes in a pretty sundress paid off with a far too inexperienced clerk and a harassed manager.  A luxurious, if rather kitsch, room was theirs. After unpacking her few belongings, purchasing a cheap, pre-paid mobile, and making a long call to a pre-arranged unlisted number, they tried a restaurant serving Russian cuisine on the recommendation of the desk clerk.  The food wasn't authentic enough for Vasily, but it was the waiters in full Cossack style dress that had the biggest impact on him.  Particularly when the friendly waitress queried his accent and discovered his origins.  This led to a series of vodka shots, downed in rapid succession, and hence to a contest conducted with three Stetson-wearing fellows in the Luxor bar, both sporting baseball caps and "I Love Vegas!" t-shirts they had acquired somewhere along the way. Afterwards neither were quite clear how, in their drunken stumbling and meandering, while singing a Russian folk song, they managed to make it back to the room.  It was a very bleary-eyed Catalina who opened her eyes early the next afternoon, stared up at the ceiling from a position upside down on an armchair with her legs hooked over the seat back, and uttered the traditional litany.  "Oh bugger, what did we do last night?" * * * [Note: Jane’s backstory involved the death of her husband Samuel and a threat to her brother Mark from a smuggling syndicate.]Mark, Rebecca, and Samantha were settling into their new home in the new WITSEC town with double duty protection by a few X-COM agents lurking in the wings cooperating through FBI sources. Once Vasily and Catalina staggered back into the base, looking somewhat the worse for wear for their trip, Jane used her 72 hour leave to visit them and they finally saw Shrek 4 and the latest Narnia movie as family.  They all had a good time together. There was an understood tension underneath it all, that something was going on that Jane couldn't talk about that was related to the recent attack on the family. They were all just glad to be alive and together for the short time that Jane had the 72 hour leave. The family knew to follow the WITSEC agents rules and the added security precautions that were in place on top of that. The rest of the leave was a lot of fun for the four of them, with stories of Samantha's exploits, and reminiscing about Mark and Jane as kids, to Mark and Rebecca when they first met. A brief reference of Samuel brought a few tears to everyone's eyes; but otherwise the topics were generally all very light and he rest of the 72 hours were all very pleasant until it was time for a Jane to go back. They told her to be careful with whatever it was that she was doing and to keep her head down; but, that they were proud of her no matter what. Jane returned to base with a smile on her face and a pair of CDs of the soundtracks from Shrek 4 and Narnia that she picked up from a local store that her brother had gotten her as gifts.</blockquote>

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