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Gordon's been out by the lake since sundown, doing his best to walk or run himself into a state of exhaustion advanced enough to let him sleep for once. It didn't really take, so he's come inside, a bit damp from the usual Scottish weather. It's not all that different from the weather he used to slog through at home, a fact which may have inspired an idea or two. He migrates over to the Bar and says, "Excuse me. Do you have back issues of the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in stock?"

A napkin materializes with one word on it: Yes.

"Good. May I please have an issue from..." He drums his fingers on the bartop a moment, thinking. "The first week of September. 1982. I- oh."

After riffling through the Local News section he adds, much more quietly, "Any chance of the WSU alumni newsletter and a pair of scissors?"

That, too, seems to have worked. He looks for a moment as if he might ask for something else; then he goes silent and heads in search of a place to sit. His guns can wait. For now, this is more important.

[Tinytag: Gordon Freeman, Wilbur Whateley, Alyx Vance. Open until it scrolls off the front page.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

*He's slowly realizing the implications of Gordon's collection of family pictures.*

*This is all that's left.*

So this 'Combine'.

What's their deal?

"Officially they call themselves the Universal Union," Gordon says bitterly. "They're a race of dimensional raiders who move from one universe to another via dimensional portals. They conquer the worlds they reach and start modifying the native lifeforms into appropriate cyber-modded tools for whatever campaigns they might happen to have in mind. Synths, they call them- different species, different capabilities, but it's all the same. When they got to Earth they imposed some kind of energy field that stopped the human reproductive cycle and turned off our reproductive urges so that there wouldn't be any more humans born until they'd decided whether we were worth adding to the arsenal, or should just be allowed to go extinct. It's been sixteen years since a human child was born, and everywhere you go, there's Combine Overwatch soldiers with more chips in their head than a damn Pringles factory."

*Andrew's mouth is hanging slightly open through most of this; finally he swallows, and his lips press tight.*

Frell. I --

I don't have the words. I just ... that's horrific.

"The only mercy we have is that they can't teleport within a universe. They don't have the technology for that," Gordon says. "Once they're on a world, they have to work with what they've got, and it doesn't look as if they have space travel, either. But that's about it."

"Fun part? Everyone I've met who wasn't a Combine collaborator seems to be under the impression that because of what I did at Black Mesa, I'm going to be able to fight the Combine down and put it all right somehow..."

Twenty years and they still remember what you did, *he murmurs.*

"Yeah." Gordon slides a hand under his glasses and pinches the bridge of his nose. "There was a race of aliens- I told you about the different species at Black Mesa, right? The hunched over greenish-brown ones, with the red eyes and the ability to throw lightning? They call themselves Vortigaunts. They'd been enslaved for millennia and lost everything as a species. When I killed the thing that was supposed to end the resonance cascade, it didn't- but it set the Vortigaunts free. They're our allies now."

( Your song we sing and shall sing for eternity, no matter the consequences of this struggle. You have brought us grief and jubilation beyond measure. )

"They remember it even more than the humans do."

Edited 2008-09-21 06:05 (UTC)

Allies. Against the Combine. So there's a, a resistance?

*Of course there's a resistance. There's always a resistance.*

"Such as it is. I don't know what it's like anywhere but City 17," Gordon says. "Alyx and I were trying to bust her father out of the Combine's clutches when we got teleported here. Her father was one of my colleagues back at Black Mesa. Resistance leader now."

*He sits up straighter.* And the Combine's got him?

Are you gonna need help?

"Alyx and I have a lot of volunteers already," Gordon says. "As soon as the door opens, we're rounding up people- we don't even know if we'll be returning straight to City 17, or if it'll dump us back in Nova Prospekt, so we're preparing for the worst."

Nova Prospekt. How far away's that?

"Hours of driving under the best of circumstances," Gordon says. "Where 'best' is defined as 'minimal antlion interference and all the Combine installations along the way've been swept clean already, and no gunships'."

Damn. *He shakes his head at the futility of the word.*

Gordon's mouth twitches fractionally; it's not enough to be called a smile. "Yeah," he says. "Made it through by myself once. Making it back's going to be ugly if we have to go on foot. We'll have to fight our way out of Nova Prospekt just to start with."

After a moment he adds, "Fun part? We'll be going up against what used to be humans. Either way. I don't think anyone's ever actually seen the Combine themselves outside of the Citadel. Just their slave races."

... used to be humans.

*The horror factor just keeps ramping up, doesn't it.*

Is it -- are they permanently taken over, or is there a way to, to bring them out of it?

"I meant what I said about the chips, Andrew. I've blown a lot of Overwatch heads open. Most of the grey matter's gone. There's a stem and a cerebellum, and a couple of the connecting anatomical features're left, but most of what's inside a Combine soldier's cranial vault is what's been put there by the Combine. There's not a whole lot of factory original equipment left in the abdomen and pelvic bowl either. Throw in the part where memory replacement is the first step to promotion in the ranks, and I doubt you could get one back."

*He's nodding slowly, his forehead creased slightly with sympathetic pain.*

They're pretty much dead, then. Like vampires. With the bodies being used by something else.

"You'd know vampires better than I." Anybody would, really. "But, yeah. Humaniform synths, now."

Basically a vampire's a demon animating a human corpse, only it keeps the human's memory and sense of identity.

This sounds like there's even less of the person left.

"Frankly? I think you'd have a better chance of getting a headcrab zombie back."

*He shakes his head slowly, not in response to that specific suggestion but in general reaction to the whole scenario.*

Bastards.

Gordon nods, once. After a while, a thought occurs to him.

"Question. It's been years since I last read Dune. Am I right in remembering 'Kwisatz Haderach' means 'opener of the way'? It's relevant."

Oh, um. Something like that? Not that exactly. Uhh --

*He taps a fidgety tattoo on the tabletop for a couple of seconds, and then abruptly snaps his fingers.*

The Shortening of the Way. It's from Arabic.

*Beat.*

Why?

"I seem to have acquired that particular designation in the years between Black Mesa and now," Gordon says dryly. "Opener of the Way, I mean. Not the other thing. Among others."

And frankly, it creeps him right the hell out.

*Blink.*

Wait, what?