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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lazybones" data-source="post: 5221841" data-attributes="member: 143">Actually, while the mutons did have DR5 vs. regular piercing attacks (i.e., normal guns), they didn't have any special resistance to laser or plasma. What they did have was a lot of hit points. * * * * * Session 23 (September 29, 2008)Chapter 100“Go… to… hell!” Vasily managed, fighting for each breath as he spat defiance at the alien crushing him in a deadly bearhug. He caught a flicker of movement out of the corner of his eye, but he didn’t see Hadrian charge up right behind the muton, and jam the barrel of his rifle into the small of its back.  The Marine triggered the weapon, which punched a hole in the green suit, a bright flare of plasma surging out around the barrel.  The alien jerked, and Hadrian fired again, slamming the gun deeper into the opening he’d bored.  The muton tossed Vasily aside like a discarded toy, and whirled on Hadrian, sweeping with one powerful arm.  The Marine ducked under the blow and side-stepped, matching the alien’s rotation, and keeping the blackened opening in its back in clear view.  The alien tried to match him but could not, and as Hadrian fired one last shot the monstrious thing fell, its insides bored out by the white-hot plasma.  It fell at almost the exact moment as the other muton.  Half-blinded by Jane’s earlier shot to its face, it unleashed an almost random barrage of plasma bolts at anything moving.  It missed Jane, who was still secure in her shielded position, even if the hull of the alien ship around her was starting to resemble a hunk of Swiss cheese.  It nearly perforated James as the doctor came back up the ramp, and he nearly slid down it again as he dove for cover.  But that gave Jane a chance for one more carefully aimed shot, and even as Hadrian felled his opponent she finished it with a second shot that vaporized one eye and send a stream of plasma into what served it for a brain.  The alien settled to the floor with a thud, its heavy cannon clattering at its feet. In the end, no one was killed, although it was a close thing.  Catalina was unconscious but alive, and she responded to the injection of a medikit from James, although it was clear that it hurt her every time she moved.  Vasily’s shoulder had been dislocated; he opened up his armor just long enough for Hadrian to help him pop it back into its socket, then he strapped himself back in.  The range of motion of his right arm was limited, the joint damaged by the beating the muton had put on him, but he could still move and shoot.“You know how to build them, Grace,” he said to himself.  His visor was more or less kaput, though, and after a few useless attempts to reboot his VDU he finally yanked the whole thing off and tossed it into a corner.  “We need to keep moving,” he told the others.  “Ship has more than two aliens on it.”“Christ, Vas, we’re beat all to hell,” James said, as he helped Mary apply a medikit to her own wounds.  Jane and Hadrian kept watch, while Catalina looked down at the corpse of one of the mutons.  “We still have job,” the Russian returned. “These are what got Beta, then?” Catalina asked, shuddering as she looked down at the monstrous thing.  Even dead it looked imposing, almost completely intact except for the hole in its back.  “My laser barely scratched it.”“Big green gorilla,” Vasily said.  “They fit description.  But plasma do for them all the same.  They can be killed.”“Not easily,” James muttered, glancing back at the fallen creatures one last time as Vasily led them toward the exit that the first muton had been guarding.  Hadrian scrounged the partially-depleted energy cell from its cannon, and fell in behind Vasily and Jane, moving deeper into the alien battleship. * * * “Well, I think they know we’re here, now,” Catalina said dryly, as she rubbed at a black streak that a plasma bolt had burned into the armor covering her hip.  She grimaced as bits of metal flaked off, the aramid fabric underneath it in hardly better condition. The others moved through the room, checking the bodies of the nearly dozen sectoids that were scattered about the place.  Their VDUs had identified most of the aliens as technicians, although there was a soldier near the door, wisps of smoke still rising from the wreckage of its face, and a medic near the bank of machinery in the back.  That one had almost caught Catalina by surprise, but Jane had killed it with a shot to the neck before it could incapacitate her with the small launcher it carried.  “How big is this ship?” Jane asked, as she looked over one of the control panels.  They had already traversed three levels and at over a dozen rooms, most of them filled with heavy machinery that they did not recognize.  The interior of the ship was like a maze, with corridors that bent back on themselves, isolated chambers that dead-ended in blank walls, and lifts that rose or descended in an almost random arrangement.  Resistance had been heavy, although most of the aliens had been sectoids, with a few cyberdiscs sifted through for flavor.  There had thankfully been no more mutons, and none of the aliens had been able to do more than slow down Alpha Team.  Hadrian glanced through a doorway on the far side of the room.  “Another lift up through here,” he reported.“We must be nearing top,” Vasily said.   “I can hear the little buggers,” Catalina said, turning her head back and forth.  She suddenly spun around, staring wide-eyed at a blank wall.  “Thought I saw… something…” she muttered.Suddenly, Mary clutched at her head and wailed.  The others whirled in surprise and alarm.  The Indian doctor stumbled to the side of the room, shaking off the hand of support that James tried to offer her.  “I want to go home!” she screamed.  “I want to go home!”“What the hell?” Vasily asked, as Jane and James tried to calm her.  Mary recoiled from them, huddling in a corner of the room.  “Please, I don’t belong here.  Please!”  James got past her as Jane grabbed onto her arms, the doctor applying a hypo to her throat.  “Something’s doing this,” he said to the others. “It’s here, I know it is,” Catalina muttered, moving along the wall.  Hadrian spun suddenly, bringing up his rifle as he scanned the room with the lift.  There was nothing there; the room was empty.  While James worked on Mary, and Hadrian and Catalina jumped at shadows, Jane drew back into the center of the room.  She turned, slowly, an odd look on her face.  Vasily was watching James and Mary, and didn’t notice what was wrong until it was too late.  Jane suddenly spun around, yelled, and fired her rifle.  Not at Vasily, but at Catalina, who turned at the noise, and took the full force of the plasma bolt to the chest, right below her neck.  The bolt exploded in a geyser of hot flame, and Catalina fell to the ground, blood spurting from the blasted wreckage of her throat.  “Wha the—” Vasily said, unable to do anything more but watch as Catalina fell.  “Dammit, no!” he yelled, lashing out, knocking the gun from Jane’s suddenly limp hands.  James ran over to the fallen Brit, whose legs twitched as blood continued to pool from her throat, and spurted from her lips as a strangled hiss.  By the time the doctor fell to his knees next to her, both the movement and the sound had ceased.  He grabbed a medikit and stabbed it into her as close to the wound as he could, then attached a medical probes to her chest and skull, fixing the readout where he could see it. “Catalina?” Mary sobbed from the corner.  “Catalina?”Hadrian had come back in, but Vasily pointed to Jane.  “Watch her!” he ordered, coming forward until he was standing over James and Catalina.  “Doctor?”James looked at the monitor, his hands covered in blood.  “She’s dead,” he said, without looking up.</blockquote>

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