Chance Vice's Journal

[remidimeston]

Somewhere within the common area of the warehouse, you stumble upon an old hardback journal on a couch, all by its lonesome. You let curiosity get the better of you, and open the cover. A good bit of the pages were torn out, and other than intricately drawn maps, incomplete sketches of faces and diagrams of firearms, you find the meat and potatoes... Chance Vice's diary entries.

August 2019

If there is anything to discover in a wasteland such as Chernobyl, it's the beauty. I don't know why I keep coming here. It's been two or three times now where I just pack up and come straight back to see my Geiger counter click and buzz. But the excuse I might as well give to myself and any gun-toting fool who might be reading this is the beauty. The leaves change so smoothly here, you'd think you were watching one of those Discovery channel timescale shows, but maybe a little slower than that.

I stepped off at whatever you could call Krasnodar nowadays two months ago, wanting to make a trek over to Warsaw's outskirts and see if the city fell apart yet from the Combine. But I just did what my stubborn self does.

Gonna go see if my stash is still there.

(some pages are worn, and some pages are literally torn out.)

January 2021

The Caspian feels so strange. Never lived here, never rolled through here on patrol. But even as I sit in some scrap-metal shack by a airfield turned junkyard, the back of my mind thinks that there's more to this place than meets the eye. Maybe I was expecting the water. But instead, I get a front-row seat to watch this little camp in a crater go batshit.

Worksite Fourteen. Looks like the Combine made something here to punish folks, making them work in this heat. You look at the windows, and not even the officers get air conditioning. Only the... eldritch version of a police station. Wonder what alloy those metals are. If it's even an alloy.

February 2021

That camp was a teapot, and this sun was the stove. It was only a matter of time before it boiled over and shit went south real quick. The people at the site overthrew the officers. Helicopters, explosions, gunfire. Then a bunch of old Soviet jeeps rolled out with commanding barks and screams of terror. They fled into some mine nearby. Gonna reposition.

March 2021

So much has happened in the past few weeks that it's hard to write them all down, even when I have the time. The Heart has gotten to a lot of people here. A big fat alien mushroom with psychedelic effects on people, getting into their minds. Chica ain't herself anymore. Sometimes she's someone else. Sometimes... I really think about her too much. Through all her scars, I see Reyes as a woman with too much on her plate. Wish I could do more.

What the fuck am I writing down, this isn't me. When the fuck did I start to care about people. Last time I car

(The rest of the page is blank. You turn to the next page.)

Lucas Leavitt. The de facto leader of this gagglefuck. De facto. De. Facto.

When I met him, I couldn't take the bastard seriously. A young kid with responsibilities. Where have I seen that before?

He hasn't the slightest idea of what he's doing. I sat down with him after the little raid we did on the database. He looked stressed. He looked fucked up. He looked... like me. Like when I first took up Alpha, all those years ago. Though, the difference between me and him is that he isn't leading soldiers, who signed a piece of paper saying they know they're gonna die. My men knew their porn magazines and their extra underwear were going back to their mom, along with their next paycheck.

These are just people. Not so innocent now, admittedly, but people.

I want to guide him. But I don't wanna bust his ego, or God help me, he passes the torch to me. These people don't trust me like they do with him. It would be self-destruction.

For all I know, he'll just shrug off everything, continue to do what he feels is right instead of what is right. What is necessary.

He doesn't need me, and I don't need to stay. But it needs to happen, one way or another. Otherwise, these people won't ever see the end of this journey.

(The next section seems to be written days apart.)

I've ran into enough cops, and watched the light fade from their eyes just about as much to know that Nora was stringing us along. She was too calm during her capture. We were all too calm about it. Except for me. It all gnaws at me. Why the hell is Lucas being so buddy-buddy?

She was the one who fucked Sven's head up six ways from Sunday. What makes Lucas think she'll fix that? She warps the mind, she doesn't mend it. Maybe to her, it's all the same. Maybe Lucas needs to be a little more forward about what his goal is in all this.

Lucas wanted to take Sven and Nora for a walk along the river, while everyone else got ambushed on the opposite side of the bunker. Then, in the blink of an eye, Sven jumped on Lucas. Nora just stared on. Like this was just another day. That's when I knew.

He'll understand why I did it sooner or later.

 

[remidimeston]

it is completely up to you but i'm okay with this being taken IC, if you wish to have your character know this stuff

 

[remidimeston]

April 1st.

I lit a cigarette tonight.
Not because I needed the nicotine. I needed the ritual. Something slow. Something human. After what we lived through—what we survived—I needed to feel the ember burn, feel something normal press between my fingers.


I don’t know if we left that place whole.


The mission was supposed to be clean. Infiltrate the underground facility, torch the biomass, eliminate what Hive activity remained. Burn the rot before it spread to harm anyone else. But beneath that bunker wasn’t rot. It was a goddamn pantheon of nightmares—Xenian demigods whispering in tongues, gripping minds and lungs, breaking physics and bodies alike.


We breached the facility. Napalm-soaked halls. My lighter found its mark—cleansed the fungal corridor like holy fire. And yet... even as the room lit up, I felt the pit in my gut grow. Fire didn't scare these things. We were trespassers in their chapel.


The Dreamwalker, and his otherworldly comrades—They should belong to fairytales or cryptids. But we saw them. We bled for the proof. One of them nearly crushed my windpipe with a tentacle. I still taste rubber and panic through the filters of my mask. Lucas—pinned, helpless. Kong—dragged screaming into the ceiling. And yet, we kept going. Kept fighting.


God, the sounds. Wet screeches, reversed whispers, metal-on-meat echoes. I fired so many rounds my trigger finger locked up. There was a moment I dumped bullets through a wooden crate just to keep shooting—to feel like I had control. One of the fuckers caught the rounds midair. But not all of them. Some hit. I made sure of that.


Reyes got decked by a fucking engine block. McCammon tried to pull a Hail Mary with a propane tank. Thra'Ru got turned into a projectile. I kicked a box so hard I thought I’d broken all my toes, only to shred through it mid-air with 5.56 to confuse the creature behind it.


It was madness. But organized madness.
Everyone gave everything.


I saw what happens when mortals stand against monsters and refuse to blink.


And then, at the end of it all, after explosions, psychic screams, twisted physics, and one final enemy felled... we came home. I don’t remember walking back. I just remember the Inn. The cigarette. The silence.


Tuesday was hell. But we didn't die.


We fought gods in the dark...
...and I think they blinked first.