ADVENT: History

The Second Battle of the United States of America

Or

The Paris Massacre

"This was not a good day."

- The Commander of XCOM

After-Action Report

Operation: Holy Fire

Personnel

Dodger 1 (Squad Overseer): Templar Iosif Bronis

Status: Active

Kills: 0

Dodger 2: Templar Carmelita Alba

Status: Active

Kills: 2

Dodger 3: Templar Karen Dais

Status: Deceased

Kills: 1

Dodger 4: Engineer Nuan Kun

Status: GravelyWounded (Estimated 14-21 Days)

Kills: 6

Dodger 5: Sniper Cassandra Rivera

Status: Active

Kills: 28

Dodger 6: Sniper Esinam Afolabi

Status: Active

Kills: 22

Dodger 7: Infantry Antoni Jimenez

Status: Deceased

Kills: 4

Dodger 8: Infantry Aya Eisha

Status: Deceased

Kills: 12

Marlin 1 (Squad Overseer): Overseer Anius Creed

Status: Active

Kills: 18

Marlin 2: Psion Matthew Hawkins

Status: Active

Kills: 38

Marlin 3: Psion Allison Monder

Status: Active

Kills: 4

Marlin 4: Sniper Lesedi Iminathi

Status: Deceased

Kills: 16

Marlin 5: Infantry Oliver Ilari

Status: Active

Kills: 10

Marlin 6: Scout Shun Anwei

Status: Active

Kills: 5

Marlin 7: Rocketeer Nio Lim

Status: Deceased

Kills: 12

Marlin 8: Rocketeer Jose Losa

Status: Wounded (Estimated 4 Days)

Kills: 7

Marlin 9: MEC Pilot Gloria Page

Status: Online

Kills: 27

Rocky 1 (Squad Overseer): Psion Patricia Trask

Status: Active

Kills: Unknown Number of Psionically Induced Casualties

Rocky 2: Templar Chan Jin-Taek

Status: Active

Kills: 32

Rocky 3: Medic Blake Harkin

Status: Active

Kills: 12

Rocky 4: Scout Jamali Muhammad

Status: Active

Kills: 17

Rocky 5: Rocketeer Fakhr al Din

Status: Active

Kills: 15

Rocky 6: Scout Liliyane Stark

Status: Wounded (Estimated 3 Days)

Kills: 13

Rocky 7: Infantry Iida Keyoko

Status: Deceased

Kills: 22

Rocky 8: Medic Catherine Gosselin

Status: Active

Kills: 5

Rocky 9: MEC Pilot Franklin West

Status: Online

Kills: 62

Pilot 1: Jason Olgard – Call sign: "Big Sky"

Pilot 2: Patrick Nokia – Call sign: "Lightning Sky"

Pilot 3: Barney Kimon – Call sign: "Gray Sky"

Pilot 4: Riley Ignis – Call sign: "Burning Sky"

Artifacts Recovered:

Note: Numbers are subject to change as more corpses, artifacts and technology are recovered and negotiated over.

421x Assorted Alien Corpses (Exact counts to be determined)

- 1x Unidentified Alien Wreck

- 4x MELD Canisters

- 300+x Weapon Fragments (Numbers may change)

- 300+x Alien Alloys (Numbers may change)

- 1x Intact Gateway

- 1x Gateway Transport

"As strange as it may be to realize, after seeing Las Vegas destroyed, my initial response was 'Holy [Censored] that economy is doomed.' Not the overall economy, although every single economist worth their salt probably went into shock at the implications produced by destroying Las Vegas. I'd personally expected it to be slowly reduced to nothing after ADVENT ordered the city evacuated. You should have seen how furious some of the CEOs and businesses were."

"But this is a lot worse that anyone is really recognizing now. Yeah, it's [Censored] awful that Vegas is destroyed (Although some are probably happy), a great infamous American icon gone because some alien was jealous of the fancy buildings. Whatever, that isn't the point. The point is that Vegas made money."

"I'm talking billions of dollars here. The Nevada economy was so reliant upon the city it's not even close to funny. Hundreds of thousands of people are now out of jobs, and thousands more are suffering severely because Vegas was a primary source of income for them. [Censored], all those gambling addiction helpers are probably suffering now because Vegas is gone."

"Whatever alien decided to hit there was very, very smart. Take away the cultural significance. It was an economic powerhouse, and now it's shiny rubble. Yeah, you can say that California is a much bigger loss, but it's distributed, not all concentrated in one city. Vegas is different, and there is going to be immediate fallout because of that. The Chancellor can't just sweep it under the rug and tell people to move on."

"She's failing to protect crucial cities, and the longer that continues, the more her support is going to drop. As much as people may hate it, Vegas ultimately performed a good service besides making money. It helped cheer people up, it took their minds off the fact that the world as they knew it was ending. People are surprised that tourism was still high even after the aliens hit San Francisco and LA. I'm not. Far as I can tell these people just didn't want to deal with the world, and thought something like 'hey, the world is ending! Might as well do what I can!'"

"Now they can't really do that. So what are they going to turn to now? Either they're going to try and find a smaller venue for their vices, or they're going to take it out on the people in charge. Rightly or wrongly, the Chancellor is going to be dealing with a lot of resistance because of this. Hopefully she can handle it, because now there are even more people with nothing to lose."

- ADVENT Economist [Censored] to Independent Journalist Jessica Wong on the impact of the destruction of Las Vegas

"I guess I shouldn't have been surprised at getting word from Peacekeeper command that we should probably be expecting trouble. I'd really gotten used to it these past few weeks. People looking back think that there was surprisingly very little discontent with the people, that people were still waiting for Treduant and the Chancellor to get things resolved."

"It's all [Censored]. Seriously. Did you know that we had ADVENT [Censored] Intelligence working directly with us when all the news about Seattle and Vegas came in? I don't suppose you were reading any of the comments on news articles…"

"Oh, you were? Right, this is your [Censored] job after all. Anyway, then you saw the massive amount of hate, fear and vitriol that was being spouted. There were calls to do anything from Treduant's impeachment to negotiating a surrender to the aliens. Typical internet comments, but the thing was it was everywhere. Conservative, liberal, independent, people were quickly losing faith in ADVENT."

"So, you might ask, why didn't anything happen? It sounds like it was on the cusp of a revolt?"

"Well, I wouldn't say a 'revolt', but it was definitely on the cusp of riots. I'm talking about people storming the capital and trying to light the [Censored] White House on fire. But none of that ever happened, because ADVENT actually put people in charge who understood how the Internet works and that some of these people were actually dangerous."

"I wasn't in on the op as it happened, but I have a friend in Intelligence who was in on it. It wasn't classified, as they pretty much had everyone working on it at the time. Every single social media site had hundreds of agents watching, recording and analyzing. There were people who posed as similarly angry people and access to chatrooms and private servers where people were discussing tactics, plans. What places they were going to hit to show their discontent."

"Did they get all of them? I'd say all the ones who mattered. There were some they let go on because they were deliberately non-violent and gave people the impression of freedom. But that was the first part of the operation. Identification and analysis. The next step was action."

"That was where the Peacekeepers came in. The Chiefs were given locations and names. Some of them were houses of organizers where we arrested leaders of these groups in the middle of the night, plopped them down in a chair and interrogated them about everything they knew and were planning. Some talked and were scared into disbanding the groups and released."

"Others were prosecuted as inciting divisive and disruptive conduct, others for attempted terrorism. Most of the other Peacekeepers were sent to the places where these rallies and protests were taking place. We simply formed a line and watched from there. With their leaders gone, most of them walked away without doing anything. If someone tried to fire people up, they were confronted by an Officer who politely informed them that they weren't permitted to publically demonstrate without a permit, which they didn't have."

"I assume that particular responsibility was going to fall to the leaders of these groups, which was generally one person except for Antifa and similar groups, who had a somewhat disorganized hierarchy. Didn't matter, all the mayors and governors received orders to deny all permits to groups like that, aside from a select few. So with that, all was quiet and throughout most of America, people quietly contemplated in peace, undisturbed by protestors agitating their lives and just making things worse."

"It did get violent in some places. Some of the anarchist groups thought, quite stupidly, to bomb Peacekeeper vehicles or attack Peacekeepers. We'd already been appraised of them by ADVENT Intelligence and we beat them back without any trouble. All of them are probably working in the Prisons now, which I find quite fitting."

"And in case you were wondering, there were a large number of online accounts suspended and their IP addresses blocked from making new accounts, as well as dozens of chatrooms for extremist and anarchist groups taken down. Websites promoting division against ADVENT were purged or heavily monitored."

"Leave it to ADVENT to turn something like a defeat into a means to strike against people who are stupid enough to cause problems now of all times. Yeah, violates free speech, blah, blah, blah. Sorry, that doesn't excuse you from consequences of threatening to storm the White House. Good on ADVENT I say, and I'm glad they did it, and if anyone has a problem with it, [Censored] them all."

- Peacekeeper Chelsea Fasei, in an approved interview with Journalist Jessica Wong

My first thought when the sirens rang out was "Please don't be aliens."

Of course it was aliens.

None of us expected an attack here of all places. America, Japan, those make sense for them to attack. We all thought France was too safe, too far away for the aliens to realistically target us. Sure, they did have UFOs, but no one actually expected them to use them like that. In that instant all of us knew that we were, unequivocally, screwed.

ADVENT was giving their soldiers weapons way beyond ours, and we just had simple ballistics. Stuff that would do fine against an ordinary Human army, but didn't hold a candle to ADVENT, let alone the aliens. So it must have been seen by them as the equivalent of using sticks against swords. Sure, some of the aliens died, but a lot more of us died in the process.

It was a slaughter, make no mistake. If these aliens could laugh, I'm sure they would have at how utterly we were trounced. They were taking entire clips to put down one of them, and the bigger ones were shrugging off bullets altogether. If XCOM hadn't shown up, I'm fairly certain we'd all be dead right now.

If one thing was made abundantly clear from this, it's that the aliens can and will attack anywhere they fucking like, and if we don't join ADVENT we'll be easily wiped out. I'm wondering what would have happened if XCOM hadn't come, or ADVENT hadn't helped mop up the aliens. It wouldn't have been pretty, that's for sure.

Think change is coming for France. This was a wake-up call and I don't think the brass is going to accept us not joining ADVENT now. It's becoming a pretty clear choice between survival or annihilation, politics be damned.

- Journal of Absolon Fabbri, French Army Soldier