Title: How Gina Sanchez Earned Her Nickname
Fandom: XCOM 2
Rating: General
Length: 600
Content notes: Player characters on an earth ruled by aliens. Part of a series of drabbles and short fics based on some of my favourite randomly-supplied XCOM soldiers, in this case for the Long War 2 mod version.
Summary: Gina's the only one on her squad without a nickname. Not that it bothers her...



Gina held her breath as the patrol passed her by. They were so close she could smell the viper's poison; a bitter cloud clogging her nostrils.

Slipping out of the alleyway she continued towards her target. The workstation was in the van parked up at the end of the street, and the way was clear; not a single hostile in sight.

She might be the newest squad member on the Avenger, and the only one who hadn't earned a nickname yet, but getting into the van took only a moment, and hacking the workstation wasn't much tougher. There was no sign of any alarms triggered, though wait-- no, that was just an Advent Burger wrapper blowing down the street.

The evac wasn't far away, she could probably make it in one quick sprint. Better to be cautious though. She stepped out of the van, and froze. Only a few steps from the door were one, two three... shit no, at least seven troopers hovering like moths around a lamppost, a pack of vipers not much further away, and was that a sectoid hovering in the back of the pack? Oh no, it was at least two of them.

She waited for the sirens to blare and guns to be drawn, but the vipers just shimmied and hissed at each other, and the troopers shuffled their feet, evidently more than a little bored.

Gina let her heart rate slow again before picking her way carefully between the groups of aliens. There was no real cover, she had to rely on blending into the background and making as little sound as possible.

The wind whipped at a peeling poster on the wall, and one of the vipers turned its head in her direction. Gina almost made a run for it, but she kept her nerve, and the snake looked away with a disdainful tongue flick at the flapping paper.

The evac zone had never seemed so far away, but she made it eventually. She considered tossing a grenade as a parting shot, but nobody had managed a full stealth run in ages, and it came with certain bragging rights, not to mention a few beers. And after all, she had the intel she came for.

'Get me out of here," she breathed in the end, and leapt for the evac line.




It took her a while to get back to the locker room that evening, but she'd known it would. Moose and Spitfire had pressed drink after drink on her, and the story would be all around the base by morning.

"Good job, Gina," her squad leader had said before leaving the troops to their celebration, and she'd had more than a few "Congrats, Gina," and "Holy crap, Gina, that was close," type comments from those who'd been watching and listening from the Skyranger.

She wasn't sure what she had to do to earn a nickname around here, but she'd keep going out there until they thought she deserved one. She didn't care if it took another dozen missions like that one.

Stripping off her vest, she threw it into her open locker and pulled out her t-shirt and jeans. She slammed it shut, and was about to head back to her dorm when she realised someone had been at her dark blue locker with white spray paint.

There was a weird little doodle that looked like it might be a stick man hiding under a sheet, and she didn't know what the hell that was all about. But underneath--

Gina's breath caught.

Underneath the doodle it said, in large, fuzzy, spray-painted white letters:

'GHOST'.