Thread: The Disaster Zone

The first words you probably heard was some variation on, Clean up the Disaster Zone! Do new and interesting things. It was 2157 and in the Nova Humus Consilium--or New World Council--the gigantic bunch of people, ten thousand all told representing an equal fraction of humanity they came to an overwhelming decision. Something had to be done about the Disaster Zone situation. Only seven years ago the brave fight against mysterious monsters had been raging in pockets around the world, things that provided a terrible fight to the armies of the world government. Bullets were somehow merely ineffective. It did not matter if it was coming out a sweet plastic rifle, strong and capable in your hands. Flechettes, pellets, hollow point, full metal jacket, soft point, kevlar coated, even with explosive mercury nitrate tips seemed unable to do the trick. Enough bullets and you could kill anything, but emptying twelve or fifteen magazines into one of these monstrosities was too much, often depleting the load out of group of soldiers before they found themselves horribly dismembered, viscera lying like so much chaff before the wheat. The Disaster Zones would start with perhaps four or five monsters in a single urban area--that was the awful part, they seemed to propagate in areas with the highest population density--and soon spread to millions terrorized and displaced by horrible monsters that made short work of people, doing awful things to their bodies with fist and fang, tentacle and claw. At the highest level of the military apparatus heads rolled in successive attempts to find a solution while the public scrambled with a sudden world wide displaced population spilling over onto the rest of the populace. Crime certainly spiked, as did joblessness as the great hubs of businesses came under fire. Bombing runs were out of the question--valuable infrastructure needed to be preserved. Over the last seven years the Disaster Zones have been reclaimed, slowly, inch by bloody inch, with Jakarta, Sao Paolo, London and New York City and even Mumbai coming back into the grips of the people. Soldiers rolled into the area in the tens of thousands, their blood washing the area. Slowly a response formed, the Clean Up The Disaster Zone media campaign taking full force. Everyone was invited to find work renovating the Disaster Zones, injecting much needed work into the economy. It also gave people something to fight for, becoming wildly popular, as people signed up to join the federally controlled organization, getting the chance to travel around the world on the government's dime doing good. A highly regarded position, and they will accept nearly anyone and find a place for them, regardless of background or experience. Not necessarily fighting the monsters--construction and education were the two biggest sectors employed by the government as part of the campaign, though a new plan had been drafted in cooperation with the clandestine and military branches. They sought to form special teams, hand picked from the pool of applicants, as well as pulling strings in the world military to attract some skilled participants. In the end a crack team of fighters, exclusively female, some drawn from civilian and others from military backgrounds were selected. They were separated into different groups, often assembled ad-hoc based on mission parameters, and given generous salaries to match the risk that they faced. They went a surprisingly quick training regime, encompassing largely basic physical conditioning with training on how to use the new weapons and equipment XCITE--Xenomorph Counter-Intrusion Taskforce--had just developed in their sprawling and definitely zany RD department. The standard load out was the skin tight suit made of a nanoscale mesh, it fit so smooth it was like a second skin, as well as absorbing and redistributing most kinetic damage, to the ability of being able to take a .45 caliber bullet in the chest with no other armor and minimal bruising. That was the test to instill trust in the armor. The most common sidearm is the experimental KE pistol, a sleek silver gun, light with no recoil, that shot pure bolts of force at these monsters. KE guns kept a small supply of a very powerful tranquilizer so that once the monsters had been sufficiently damaged they could be dropped and captured alive. Capture and study was the number one priority of XCITE. Not many of the plethora of monsters had been captured, scientists somehow attempting to devise a way to get rid of them en masse. They seemed immune to most nervous gases, large scale explosions were out the question, it took a tranquilizer that would drop a whale to drop one of the monsters and then only when it had been beat on for a while. However the monsters seemed less keen to kill women for some reason and the advantages that the Mesh Suit, their armor, bequeathed upon them in the form of increased speed, strength and reaction time was a great advantage that could make someone without military training a top of the line soldier. The biggest Disaster Zone was the island of Honshu, formerly of Japan, which had eventually been all but completely taken over by Tokyo by 2120. It had until recently been home to over sixty-five million people, over seventy percent were displaced at one point, creating history's largest single Diasporia, even rivaling the slave trade for the rate of people displaced in a given time. Many of those were also killed, many of those who survived lost every last penny, and still others found themselves in strange places far from home, unable to be around friends and family due to economic and regional constraints. These Disaster Zones had caused a great strain on the world and it was the duty of XCITE to easy that. Tasha Niles, recently of the Army, and Amanda Sinclair were quickly debrief in a heavily armored hover tank. Their opportunity to get to know each other would come after they got out of the heavily armored hover vehicle as it skimmed seemingly on nothing three hundred feet in the air. A shadowed face with the epaulets of a high ranking military official in one of the anonymous charcoal gray uniforms of the Military Hierarchy gave slow, ordered instructions. Good afternoon, ladies. This will be a standard walk and scout. You are going to check a ten block area for xenomorph infestation we can not pinpoint with satellites. Nothing has thus far suggestions that you should find anything. However, you are going to be lead by MARA, and you should always be prepared. Do not make me have to write emotionally turbulent letters with over formal phrasing to your next of kin. Address all questions to MARA. With that the recording halted in the cramped interior of the hover tank. They were to set down in part of the Greater Tokyo Area, which was mostly of the Honshu island, to an eerily quiet landscape. Ivy crept through parts of the city, nature slowly taking back what was left by humans in the aftermath of first rampant exodus. Tall buildings and subway accesses surrounded them, the occasionally plastic bag printed with kanji and hiragana floated past, snapping in the wind. Signs still hung in the virtual reality that overlaid the city, though most of the paid advertising had disappeared at this point, old government warning messages left hanging in the air, unremarked upon and unheeded. It was still light out, for the next few hours, however the sun would set in about four hours at eight o'clock.