Eric Palond (Glare) finds himself still alive after the explosion.    He feels numb.  He sees strange shapes floating in the air, shapes that remind him of microorganisms floating in liquid.  He tries to walk, and soars effortlessly not only through the walls, but through the fires and rescue personal.   Glare thinks himself dead and a ghost.   But there is no body.  Odd.
   
          He floats through the Black Mesa, trying to figure out what exactly happened to him.  He interacts with a few of the pale silvery things floating about.   He finds that once in a while, one of them interacts with him.  Odd.

          He watches the CHESS clean up crew put out the fires. He tries to call them, but they can’t hear him.   He tries to grab them, but he can not.   He flies up, due to a strange pull.  In the sky above Utah, he sees a light, and he feels peaceful as he floats towards it.                            

          Glare is attacked by a small alien spectral life form.  He easily swats it away, and sees a small boy.   The boy whisks away, and Glare follows.    After a cat a mouse chase, the boy says that he thought he was his friend Blue.

            The boy says he is Malcolm and he comes here to play with his friend Blue.  Blue looks like that guy from Friends, Joey.    Glare, confused, keeps asking him about Blue.
  The boy shows him around and he peeps in the girl’s locker room.  Glare lectures him about this, and Malcolm gets scared that Glare will tell his mother.    Malcolm warns Glare to not touch the slivery snakes that they both see radiating towards them from deep in the mesa, that they are bad.    Glare dodges it and Malcolm leaves.
 
            A few hours later Malcolm comes back and introduces Glare to Blue.   True to form, he looks like Joey from friends.   Glare asks him if he is the Blue Blood, the mysterious leader of the Octagon.   Blue laughs and says yes, and attacks.    It seems that Blue is the only thing that can harm Glare while he is transphased.

          A ferocious hand to hand spirit battle takes place, and Blue flees.   Glare notices that Malcolm is also gone.  He reaches out and touches one of those sliver snakes and finds that it is the astral manifestation of Nexus’ mental probes.    Joe Turner, Nexus, is then able to communicate with Glare.   They spend the next few days looking for the Blue Blood, too no avail, while the Octopus works on a way to restore Glare to normal phasing.

          The Octopus finishes Glare’s machine, using the old blue prints of a Tillinghast Resonator.  The machine works and Glare is resynched to the normal phase state.  Unfortunately he suffered burns over 90% of his body, and if that is not enough, he has unknown aliments that forces him to live with a constant life support unit.   His Glare armor will help him survive; it is both his life support and his prison.

           CHESS finds that Malcolm is an autistic child that “spaces out” for hours at a time.  It is during this time that he found the means to release his spirit form.  He found Blue, whom he has no clue who he really is and Blue used him as a spy.   Glare found out that the Blue Blood is someone in CHESS and stationed in the Black Mesa.     At least one security hole has been plugged.