Chapter One: It Came From The Sky
"We are at war - and not the one we were expecting. Our combined military forces have been routed. The comms have gone dark. The red phone will not be ringing. We now face an opponent from beyond our world. They have technology decades beyond what we possess. We must make it our own. Their weapons will become our weapons, and when they do, we shall annihilate them. I give you new orders. Survive. Adapt. Win."
Myron Faulke's speech to the Bureau of Operations and Command
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Annette Durand, December 21st, 2012
Annette Durand stands over the purple ball that hovers over an alien device, pulsing with psionic energy. She clenches her head, seeing visions of the Temple Ship turning into a fucking black hole, consuming the Earth.
She sees the future, and she knows what to do.
"Annette?!" Shaojie "Chilong" Zhang yells, clenching a plasma rifle tightly while stiffly turning around in his black Psi Armor. "We need to go!"
Zhang, Sid "Godfather" Meier, Ken "Big Daddy" Levine, Otto "Unbreakable" Zander, and Joe "Archangel" Kelly turn to face her with confused looks.
"GO!" she screams as she lets out a burst of psionic energy that pushes her comrades through the door, which she then closes with her telekinesis.
Annette feels the weight of her power armor as she watches her team look dazed and shocked by her actions. She knows they will be upset by her sacrifice, but they'll get over it.
After all, everyone who joins XCOM squads knows not to get too attached to their squadmates. So many have died during the invasion to the point where every squad has lost someone at some point. Whether it be to an Ethereal who mind-controlled them to blow their brains out or a Thin Men (fucking snake people) who sniped them from afar with their plasma rifles. All to give XCOM time to reverse engineer the enemies' shit, build up their forces, and utterly wipe out the enemy. All to save the human race.
Not that Annette gives a fuck about the human race, given what EXALT did to her and the Furies. But this is the ultimate middle finger to both EXALT and the Ethereals, so why the hell would she not want to blow their shitty mothership up?
Annette uses her psionic powers to force the door to close, permanently separating herself from her squad. The explosives her squad is carrying are too weak to penetrate the door, and they didn't bring the heavy ordinance needed to complete the job.
Annette then turns around, walking towards the Ethereal device, ignoring the shouting of the Commander, Bradford, Vahlen, and Shen. She holds her hands out on each end of the swirling black orb, causing her to have another psychic vision of Earth's destruction.
Annette grits her teeth as she sees everything and everyone being consumed, trying to wake herself up to reality.
When she finally does so, Annette focuses on moving the Temple Ship with all her might.
It feels off, integrating with the Temple Ship. As if her mind knew every function and part of the ship like the back of her hand and was suddenly able to control it like her own body. Nonetheless, she persists. She closes her eyes, changing the ship's gravity so that it will fly out of the atmosphere and into space.
"So, this is how I die," Annette muses to herself as she raises her hands. Her thoughts, usually a tumultuous swirl of defiance and indifference, now found a strange equilibrium in the face of imminent sacrifice.
Annette was never one for sentimentality or altruistic ideals. Humanity's plight often took a backseat in her mind, eclipsed by her brash demeanor and a life marred by loss and disdain. Her family's absence had left a void within, a void she had tried to fill with grit, a cavalier attitude toward life, and a bloodthirsty desire to kill every alien she could get her hands on.
Yet, in this moment, as she faced the prospect of her demise, a peculiar calmness settled within her. Death, once a menacing shadow she had dared to taunt, now seemed like an old acquaintance. Annette had lived a life teetering on the edge, embracing danger with a reckless abandon that mirrored her disdain for the world's woes.
Her thoughts wandered, not toward lofty ideals or the betterment of mankind, but toward a bitter realization. She had little left to lose. Her family had departed, leaving behind a desolate emptiness that muted her attachment to the world. She accepted her fate not with resignation but with a cynical resolve borne of a life colored by cynicism and hardship.
To be honest, her looming demise felt less like a tragedy and more like the conclusion to a tumultuous narrative she had long grown weary of. Annette had danced with danger, spat in the face of adversity, and now, she would embrace the ultimate reckoning with a grim determination.
In her final moments, her thoughts didn't dwell on the legacy she'd leave or the future of humanity. Instead, they meandered through the fragments of her past, the echoes of a life marked by defiance and self-preservation.
As she readied herself to detonate the cataclysmic force within, her final thoughts were not of regret or longing. They were a quiet acceptance, a sense of closure that whispered, "There's nothing left to lose." With a nod to her tumultuous existence, Annette Durand embraced her fate, calmly welcoming the embrace of the inevitable, ready to depart from a world that had little claim on her rebellious spirit.
Suddenly, she feels her body... shift. Warp. She feels her soul, her molecules be disassembled to be moved to another time, another place.
She tries to scream, to fight whatever is doing such a thing to her, but it's too late.
The last thing she sees before losing consciousness is a bright light.
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Author's Notes: Annette Durand comes from my other XCOM fic, The Rising Phoenix. Her psionic powers are highly versatile and potent as a result.