Saturday March 25th, 2084

Aliens have attacked the Bosch Institute. Again.

While Marcus's squad held the northern corner hallway and Alissa's squad explored the central fountain area, the rest of the operatives watched the southeastern hallway with its access to the maintenance tunnels and the central hallway. Anthropods soon came out to engage that group, and were taken down one by one as they paused to aim.

Entering the lift chamber, Alissa's squad encountered a couple brainsuckers and a spitter. Hal and Alissa shot the brainsuckers right out of the air and took care of the spitter a moment later. Taina's squad, armed primarily for close quarter fighting, advanced down the hallway to support Alissa's squad if necessary, covered by John and by Kevin's squad.

As Taina's squad was about to move into position, a popper and a multiworm moved into view. The popper immediately turned back and the multiworm around a corner, and as poppers and multiworms are not things you want to run into around corners, squads 2 and 3 ran back down the nearby hallways to get more distance to fire.

Apparently, there were skeletoids here as well. Toxin A worked very well against them and the brainsuckers they launched at Taina. Unfortunately, there was no real opportunity to stun them.

Sarah, having moved into a room cornering the lift chamber, detected no aliens within range of her motion sensor, so Taina's and Alissa's squads moved back in to search for the remaining aliens. Unfortunately, the motion sensor does not have much vertical range, as a skeletoid was spotted a few floors up almost as soon as Taina's squad started moving forward. Hal was the only one with stun grapples in his backpack, so he bravely moved forward into position to hit the skeletoid from behind as it left the lift, while Taina's squad held position to draw the skeletoid in the correct direction. Unfortunately, it took more hits than Hal could land on it before it flew up and out of range. Even more unfortunately, it had a friend. Taina canceled her hold fire orders, and her squad was able to kill one of the skeletoids, but not before she was badly injured herself. The other skeletoid backed off, and this time was stun grappled into unconsciousness by Hal. It got up a moment later, but was put down again hard by Hal. The remaining poppers charged Hal a few moments later and were stunned, while Megan spotted the remaining spitter and multiworm, charged them, and killed the spitter with her disruptor while stunning the multiworm with a combination of a stun grenade and several disruptor shots.

Toxin A was more effective than anticipated against skeletoids, and we now have a live skeletoid to study. We've also captured enough devastator cannons in the last two missions to arm almost everyone with them once we've finished researching them.