"XCOM: War Interminable" - How It Began

In every alien invasion movie, the aliens always attack a major city like New York, London, Los Angeles, or even Johannesburg.

Somehow, Mexico City got overlooked.

By the time XCOM's Contact response team got to the scene, it was too late.  The aliens had already gotten what they had come for - their inscrutable quota of human beings.  Contact was able to eliminate a small team of the aliens that remained and secured the area, but they lost a man in the process.  In addition to the aliens' bodies and what remained of their weapons, Contact also brought back a few canisters of a substance that defied examination - presumably what the aliens were protecting.

XCOM's base, located somewhere in the Midwestern United States but administrated by the Canadian Special Operations Regiment, was in disarray when Contact returned.  It was still being set up, as the activation order had only been given hours before, and a few of the senior staff still had not arrived yet.

Central Officer Bradford, in charge of XCOM's air and ground operations and who commanded the mission in Mexico City, was the only one present at the time, although the head of the Engineering department, Dr. Shen,

and his counterpart from the Research department, Dr. Vahlen, arrived soon afterward.

Finally, the Commander arrived, and XCOM got to work repelling the extraterrestrial threat.  Contact was retasked as Strike One, XCOM's air wing shot down the first UFO detected by the satellite detection network (at the time, it only covered Canada) within the first month, and the months afterward saw several missions in response to alien abductions, and UFO landings and crashes.

In late March, a large UFO (we suspect it was a supply barge) landed in northern British Columbia, and although sorely ill-equipped for such a mission, the Commander couldn't let the opportunity to attack a large UFO while it was vulnerable slip out of his grasp, and so Strike One was sent in to secure it.

Operation Empty Moon was a success, but at great cost.  Although we recovered a large UFO and its cargo intact, and eliminated its crew and passengers in the process, three of our best - our leading scout Corporal Renata "Stacker" Popova, rocketeer Specialist Koharu Hashimoto, and gunner Specialist Johan Blomqvist - were killed in the final battle against the UFO's Outsider navigation crew.

At the very least, we learned that the firepower we currently possess is insufficient against Chryssalids, Outsiders, and Floaters, and that our early experiments with alien technology lead Dr. Vahlen to believe that practical beam laser small arms are only a breakthrough away.  Given that we have the brightest scientific minds of 16 nations at our disposal, I suspect that it will not take long before we have the firepower that we require.

However, the aliens have every possible technological advantage over us, and the resources at their disposal are seemingly limitless.  This is going to be a long, perhaps even interminable, war.