FFN cover image.
Twenty Years Late is a crossover fanfic featuring Half-Life 2, XCOM: Enemy Unknown and XCOM 2 published on the Space Battles forum by author Drenched in Megalomania. The basic premise is that, days before the G-Man releases Dr. Freeman upon the unsuspecting post-7 Hour War Earth, the planet is invaded by the first probes of the Ethereals. Realizing that the Combine's grip challenges their own plans for Earth, the Ethereals begin preparing for war against the Combine, whilst the Resistance struggles to avoid being crushed in the fighting.
Each chapter is set in the perspective of one of the three major factions involved in the struggle; the Human Resistance (chapters of which are further divided between three protagonists: Barney Calhoun, Gordon Freeman, and Adrian Shephard), the Combine-controlled XCOM, and the ADVENT; a breakaway faction of the Resistance that has allied itself with the Ethereals.
It can be read here
on Space Battles and here on FanFiction.Net.
This fic contains examples of:
- And Your Little Dog, Too!: Not D0G specifically, but Breen gets Dr. Shen to cooperate on the MEC by threatening to destroy White Forest with Lily inside.
- Ascended Extra: Who would have thought that Odessa Cubbage would have the Gift? He serves as ADVENT's face and mind controls a strider on his first field deployment.
- Body Horror: It's made very clear throughout the fic that the Combine's "improvements" to people are acts of horrific mutilation.
- Conditioned to Accept Horror: Or perhaps Happiness in Slavery. The Vipers revere the Ethereals for having uplifted them into a starfaring race, and overlook the more morally questionable aspects of their rule.
- Creative Sterility: Just like in canon, the Combine has no capacity for innovation or invention — they simply steal anything that looks useful from subjugated races. Humanity's affinity for teleportation, and the Ethereals' use of speedy, reliable faster-than-light travel, are both major advantages that the Combine cannot inherently match.
- Empowered Badass Normal: Adrian Shephard is upgraded with psionic powers by vortigaunts, after it's learned that the Ethereals are already teaching psionics to the ADVENT.
- Even Evil Has Standards:
- The Ethereals regard the Combine with utter distaste and loathing for what they do.
- In a more comedic example, Jerkass scientist Dr. Magnusson is appalled by some members of the Resistance breaking away to ally themselves with a whole new faction of aliens, and verbally applauds Commander Bradford for rejecting the offer to join ADVENT.
- Face–Heel Turn: ADVENT, made up of members of the Resistance who, having met the Ethereals under diplomatic terms, chose to formally ally with them in order to gain the power to fight the Combine.
- Fish out of Temporal Water: Both Freeman and Adrian Shephard are shown to be wrestling with PTSD-like symptoms due to a combination of the shock of time travel and everything that went on in Black Mesa.
- Good Shepherd: Father Grigori is little changed from his canon incarnation, and even vouches for Adam's Heel–Face Turn despite knowing he is a "devil" in disguise.
- Heroic Mime: Freeman is as mute as he is the games, though it is mentioned that he does speak "off-screen". Shephard, however, receives a voice.
- Horde of Alien Locusts: As in canon, the Combine are basically a machine of flesh and metal that exists only to propagate itself, with no higher thought or consciousness beyond the insatiable urge to consume and multiply.
- Horrifying the Horror: In chapter 20, a sectoid probes the mind of Scythe 2, the prototype MEC who was upgraded from a former status as a Combine Elite. Once it connects to her mind, it starts screaming.
- Lady Looks Like a Dude: Thin Men, as in canon, are an Always Female One-Gender Race of Snake People who have been genetically resculpted to look more like human men. Barney boggles in disbelief when Adam casually mentions this in an interview.
- A Lighter Shade of Black: The Ethereals are an alien race that wants to conquer humanity in hopes they can be used to create/find a compatible host-race for racial Brain Uploading. They are still less monstrous and less of a threat to humanity's very existence than the Combine is.
- Mad Scientist: Vahlen is still the same person she is in Enemy Unknown, enthusiastically dissecting and interrogating aliens, though moderated by limited resources and Eli's influence. Tygan is also motivated by curiosity and "advancing" humanity, heedless that his experiments are removing the same humanity he is trying to save from extinction.
- My God, What Have I Done?: Combine augmentations have already stripped Overwatch troops of most of their humanity, but Shen is rightly horrified at the work he put into Scythe 2 to make them a MEC, especially because he knows Scythe 2 is a fellow Black Mesa survivor.
- My Life Flashed Before My Eyes: Scythe 2, mortally wounded during the alien's attack on City 14, sees their life flash before their eyes seconds before they die on the operating table in chapter 23, their body once again whole and revealing their identity as Gina Cross. However, the G-Man has something to say about that.
- Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: Shephard, a trained Marine spared from twenty years of undernourishment and crushing hopelessness, is literally and figuratively head and shoulders above the rest of the Resistance, even certified badasses like Bradford and Kelly.
- Shout-Out:
- X-COM member Dr. Tygan is a former researcher from Aperture Science.
- When Commander Bradford learns that the obviously PTSD-afflicted Adrian Shepherd has taken a rifle and is on the firing range, he thinks to himself that he wants to avoid something like the infamous scene from Full Metal Jacket where Gomer snaps and commits murder-suicide.
- When first training to use psionics under a vortigaunt teacher, Adrian admits that he mentally referred to the Gene Worm as Oscar the Grouch.
- The Stations of the Canon: Annette infiltrates City 17 to issue ADVENT's declaration of war in the same manner as Freeman does in "Point Insertion," though she only makes it to the rooftops before dropping a psionic bomb and killing a whole block of Civil Protection.
- Freeman himself was moved up in the timetable and effectively goes through the first half of Half-Life 2 in reverse, with his train stopped somewhere along Highway 17, fleeing through Ravenholm and eventually ending up at Black Mesa East, all without the HEV suit or a crowbar.
- Bradford raids a Combine compound to retrieve Adrian Shephard, but two resistance members, Anna Ramirez and Peter Osei, are run down by Hunters with Jane Kelly as the only other survivor.
- In the first chapter, Barney and three other officers are sent to investigate a neighborhood going dark in a recreation of Operation: Devil's Moon.
- Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Bradford, a member of the first wave of HECU deployed to Black Mesa, barely conceals his disgust of working with Freeman when the two meet. Adrian Shephard, however, is a bit more amicable, "one killing machine to another."
- Token Heroic Orc: Dr. Freeman's first ally is a Thin Man that calls itself "Adam", which helps him fight his way away from the train station when he is discovered and then through Ravenholm. When rescued by Barney and several other members of the Resistance, Freeman repays Adam for its help by standing up to Barney and refusing to let them just kill or taze the Thin Man and drag it back to the Resistance.
- Truly Single Parent: Vipers/Thin Men reproduce through parthenogenesis instead of being cloned like the Sectoids are.
- Uncanny Valley: In-Universe, it's noted that Thin Men do a pretty bad job of feigning humanity, simply because their fundamentally serpentine skeletal structure causes their movement ranges and body language to be all wrong. It varies from subtle miscues to such blatantly inhuman acts as trying to swallow a bowl of headcrab stew whole, slithering along on their bellies like a snake, or bending over impossibly at the waist instead of using their knees. Even their normal limb actions look more like a marionette than a human.
- Was Once a Man: Playing into the general Body Horror of the Combine's forces is how degrading their work has been to the humans under their thrall. XCOM protagonist Scythe 2, an upgraded Combine Elite trooper, initially can't remember what gender they were and tends to switch repeatedly between pronouns. In chapter 14, when first using her new psionic powers against the Combine, ADVENT protagonist Annette Durand is horrified at just how empty their minds are — even the alien Slave Races under the Ethereals have more individuality and self-awareness than the Combine's cyberized husks. It's even mentioned that certain telepathy-based psi-powers won't work on the Combine troops, because there just isn't enough individual thought left to be susceptible. Even Chrysalids can't make augmented soldiers into zombies as there isn't enough flesh left.
- When All You Have Is a Hammer…: Most Combine are immune to telepathy powers because of the severe mental conditioning that they undergo over time. Telekinesis, on the other hand, works just fine, so the Ethereals and their ADVENT focus instead of crushing the Combine with the power of their minds.
