April Fools

Things continued to develop slowly. Laboratory and engineers did their best to extract any useful information out of the dissected bodies of our "new-found friends" and pieces of equipment that was salvageable, but too many days went uneventful. The greater plan to build more uplinks and satellites proved to be more strenuous than first expected and that only added up to the urgency. According to the recent developments, or rather lack of, something terrible was going on beyond the burning skies.

The only combat event for this long stretch was to stop abductions in Paris, France, where Harmony Lad all but bought it by ending up in the firing line of a stray floater. Fortunately Sureshot was with the team on site, so the sniper did not end up toe-tagged. This mission also saw the baptism of fire for young rookie Pontus "Broden" Svensson, who had an immediate impact and got promoted into assault role.

Another week passed by and April was already almost three weeks through. Engineers made a breakthrough on weapons and could already manufacture two laser rifles! Our satellite in China caught an unwanted, unclassified object on the sky and Interceptor was launched in hopes to at least fend it off. It was tougher than the previous one, but still it went down hard and heavy. Due to Harmony Lad's extended recovery from his near-fatal wounds, Broden's mission streak continued. Also Snake Catcher caught some extended action, and the mission was successful. The laser rifles seemed to pack more punch to conventional assault rifles and this was welcome news as the opposition was steadily becoming harder to handle.

In the meantime, "scientists" had been interrogating the captured floater. It was seething with rage and extracting neuroelectrical patterns from its brain was not an easy task. Finally, Harmony Lad got to witness the results from the screen by his hospital bed. The first image was very blurry, but its silhouette could not be mistaken. It was a sectoid, and therefore uninteresting. The second image was, however, much more terrifying. X-Com Central suggested equally blurry figure on it to be of similar kind to the terror that had bagged Mad Marl earlier in Germany. Getting one of those alive could as well be the next piece in the puzzle. What a great piece of news for Proxy, who was already returning from burning Chinese countryside with his men...