User talk:The Captain Vance

• Eli powers up the slide projector. A white image flashes of his room, where he has hung up a white sheet.

ELI: Let's see mow...where does this start?

The following images appear as he speaks:

• Areal view of Black Mesa
• Inbound train
• Test Chamber'

ELI: Black Mesa. Lets not dwell on that. Nobody's blaming you. We all have to accept some responsibility...what matters is what we do next. I'll get to that. After the disaster, well...lets just say, the ripples kept spreading.

The next few scenes have the feel of Norman Rockwell in hell:

• Headcrabs leaping onto shoppers from supermarket shelves.
• Bullsquids chasing a family from a suburban house; pack of houndeyes roaming down Elm Street
• Gargantua overturning a tractor as a farmer flees across a Nebraska field
• Ichthyosaur materializing in a public pool, right under a nose-pinching kid who just jumped off the high-dive

ELI: The countryside, the suburbs all those hard-to-patrol places, got pretty much uninhabitable. People started crowding into cities for protection.

• People clustered at a cyclone fence topped with razor wire, city skyline rising behind; cops stand tensely on guard towers, blasting away at headcrab zombies outside the perimeter.

ELI: There was an illusion of safety, for a time. And then the Citadels appeared. It happened in a split second, all over the world. A chunk would disappear from the center of a city., to be replaced an instant later by one of these headquarters for the Combine. Invasion Central.

• City-center completely cored, buildings sheared off, an enormous pit appearing out of nowhere, and people falling into it.
• The same view, with a Citadel now towering at the center of all

MISSING PAGE(S?) ELI: Say hello to your new masters.

• Creamators, striders, Combine machines pouring out of the Citadel into the city. Combine dropships tearing through the air.

ELI: Oh, we resisted.

• Tanks, soldiers, human army advancing on the Citadel
• The same troops reuced to ashes, completely obliterated.

ELI: Earth put up a fight that lasted all of seven hours.

• A smoldering Pentagon-shaped pile of ashes

ELI: And then, one man who had seized about all the power a man can seize in a crisis, used that power to arrange our surrender.

• The Consul, at the foot of the Radio Tower, wearing a headset, hands raised high to the dropships as he proclaims Earth's surrender

ELI: The call him the Consul now. It worked out fine for him., He speaks for the Combine; he shares in their power. As for the rest of us....

• Views of City 17, citizens slouching
• Air Exchange belching black fumes
• Drained seabed with beached ships, whale bones

ELI: Well you've seen the state of things. They're replacing the air with something we can hardly breathe. They're draining the ocean. We don't know if they're preparing the planet for new residents, or just stripping it of every possible resource. All we do know is that we have to stop them. And that's where you come in Mr.Freeman. It's up to you to....

• The projector goes dark.