Steve the Headcrab
Chapter 2
The experience of interplanetary teleportation via Resonance Cascade was not one Steve could ever have been prepared for.
After a flash of light, Steve found himself trapped within a strange glass cylinder. Panicked, he slammed himself against the glass over and over again, but to no avail. You've got to be kidding me, Steve thought, all those months of military training, wasted!
Had the humans set a trap for him? Was he set up by his superiors to be captured? Or was he just in the wrong place at the wrong time? All these thoughts swirling around in Steve's head were cut short as he suddenly noticed an orange blur fly past him. He barely managed to catch a glimpse of an orange-clad human jumping around and flying through the room at breakneck speed before it vanished.
["Fascinating… Would you look at that?"]
Steve saw another human, this one walking towards him, speaking an unknown human language.
["What an interesting anterior. I wonder where its stomach is."] The human leaned in closer to examine Steve further.
"H-hey pal, get away from me!" Steve yelled. "I'm a great jumper! When I get out of here, it'll be all over for you!"
["Ooh, you certainly want out, don't you?"]
This was starting to get on Steve's nerves. Ugh, great. They never taught us how to speak human in our training. What do I do now…? Steve was absorbed in his own thoughts and tried to ignore the human ogling him.
["My, you're a cute little thing, aren't you? I'd almost hate to have to dissect one of these."]
As Steve began to formulate escape plans, another human entered the room, and the two began to argue while pointing at him. After some time, the first human approached Steve once again, and began adjusting the glass cylinder. Steve had a brief moment of hope until he realized that the human was inserting a tube into it. Although he was worried that the human was about to poison him with some strange Earth chemical, Steve considered that it may be a better option than being kept in captivity.
A strange gas began to flow into Steve's glass prison, and he began to accept his fate. However, Steve noticed that he wasn't feeling very dead - he was actually feeling rather sleepy. In his last moments of lucidity, Steve heard the humans arguing once more:
["Hurry up with that thing, Izzy! We need to get out of here!"]
As his vision began to fade, Steve felt himself being moved around.
And then, everything went dark.
Happy Holidays, everyone!
You may be wondering why I came back to this after 8 years, and honestly, I am too. With the release of Xen in Black Mesa, some weird part of me felt compelled to dredge this back up from the depths of the internet and work on it a little bit more. If we're lucky, maybe Chapter 3 won't take 8 more years to write!
If you're curious what I've been up to all these years, I have since updated my profile with links to my Youtube and Twitter, where you can see more frequent content and updates.
Thank you for reading and stay tuned for Chapter 3 in the not-too-distant future!