Chapter One – Arrival

This is set in the Half-Life universe, one hundred years after the first Half-Life event, the Resonance Cascade.

Today: September 21st, 2109.

Exactly one hundred years after the great Resonance Cascade event.

Black Mesa is no longer the vibrant underground lab it used to be. A place where huge and amazing discoveries where taking place. It’s now an abandoned place. A place where only insects and other creatures of darkness dwell.

Everything is in the state it was left one hundred years ago, covered in a blanket of dust and cobwebs. Most of it was still intact, but there was a lot of debris and rublle left from the war. In one split second one huge dimensional portal opened, the Combine invaded and the earth as we knew it was no more.

Years of a gruesome resistance eventually lead to a victory and the human race succeeded in evicting the alien invaders to their own universe. This facility is all that is left from that era, a reminder of the dangerous experiments that took place and that eventually lead to the invasion. One man was key to the human victory; Gordon Freeman.
He had help from an alien race, the Vortigaunt, themselves slaves to the combine. The combine brought the Vortigaunts as unwilling soldiers to aid in the invasion of earth. Still, some say that an unknowf figure, often referred to as, the G-Man had a vital role in either aiding Gordon Freeman or the Aliens. What is trully known as a fact is that after the war, Gordon Freeman disappeared and was never seen again.

The Black Mesa Research Facility construction began back in the early 1950s as a secret laboratory which focused primarily on alien life and devices. The labs where expanded through time until late 2000. Most, if not all of the scientists where not aware of the full extent of the research going on in the facility. It was a huge undergournd city with everything you can find on a normal city except regular sunlight, that was provided by huge UV lamps carefully spread out the monstrous cavern in which the entire facility was built. The only entrances where located in Black Mesa, New Mexico, however the facilities occupied an area that reached Arizona. One of the first things to be built was an internal tram system, composed of mag-lev trains which where a thing of the future back then.

Back in the train station only the sound of critters and a soft wind coming from the tunnels that lead outside could be heard. No train has arrived or left in decades, until today.
The rocking sound of the wheels passing in the gaps between rails, almost clockwork. The hissing sound of the brakes echoes in the big station. As the train reaches a full stop the air brakes bring up a cloud of dust that hasn’t been disturbed for ages in the platform.

Arya presses the buttons on the door mechanism and it opens up slowly. With the rifle in hand she peaks out scaning both sides switfly. Sure, the place is empty, all reports say that it is, but one can never be too careful. The train will be her base while she explores the place, a sort of, safe harbou to return to at the end of each exploartion day. But first she has to find the facility reactors which, according the the blueprint she found in her grandfather’s office, should be very close to the station.

Stepping outside of the train she felt a chill down her spine – “Someone just stepped over my grave” – she thought. The train platform was the last one of twenty, located at the far left of the station, and the reactor room should be at the end of a corridor on the other side of the station. “Damn it. It’s dark in here”. Her footsteps echoed on the big cavern, near the rails she spotted the glowing mushrooms and looked at them intrigued, wondering if they were eddible, there seemed to be a lot of them around. But first things first, she needed to turn the power back on.

The reactor room as a 200m wide by 600m long rectangle with an arched reinforced concrete ceiling, housing two electrical generators connected to the grid by a general transformer, and two nuclear reactors each capable of producing up to 1000 MW of electric power providing energy and heat to the entire facility. All of this machinery was controled remotely by a small command room located on the left side of the room. Arya cleaned the dust from an old chair, sat and opened her grandad’s journal on top of the big console.

Reading throught the pages she found detailed instructions on how to reactivate the reactors without causing a meltdown. It took her a bit over an hour to complete the entire procedure, but it paid off; the room came alive. Fans started spining, air started to circulate bringing up a cloud of dust which began to clear as soon as the air recycling system started working at full capacity. The lights came on, some exploded due to the sudden power surge but the majority of them survived and where quite enough to bring the entire facility back to life. Water began circulating on mostly the entire system, gas, electricity, heat, everything was coming back like a big giant awakening from a long sleep.

After a few minutes gazing in awe at the size of the reactor room and it’s big machines, Arya returned her attention to the console with all it’s blinking lights, meters, gauges and buttons. Everything was working perfectly, no major alarms or warnings, no danger signs. It looks like it will be safe to leave the reactors running for now. It was time now to return to the train and prepare the base, establish a perimeter and set up defenses, just in case.