HeySeuss

Far Colony [Sci-Fi]

All web-based, no downloads.

Star Wars - Rancor Company

Short CS is short, and makes me feel bad. If anyone thinks I am abusing my power, I will write a Sample post.

Also don't worry, she won't appear till later. Just getting the sheet done now.

@Sep

Pretty inevitable. We have two force-sensitives and one of them is definitely on the radar for being actively using the force. The other, of course, has a family history.

Far Colony [Sci-Fi]

@HeySeuss

Then expect a sheet coming this week. LEt me ask again if it is okay to aspire for the position of Chief of Agronomy and Farming Operations

@Famigliolabuona

Awesome. There's no need to rush, but if people do provide me their e-mails privately, I can get them hooked up to the Trello board I have for this RP. It helps to create the lore and so forth.

Star Wars - Rancor Company

---

Outside the Briefing Room
_{aka. Jedi-wannabe ambush site}

---

"That's Captain Alpha-32 to you Commander or is that General?" invoking the Clone Wars-era title for padawans and knights respectively. It didn't take the Force to detect Besk's immediate antipathy for what the universe saw fit to fob off on him. Fett had a great draw, and his clones, particularly the ARC's and little Bob'ika inherited that and he was on the edge of getting that DL-44 out; it was in a fitted holster, designed to keep the weapon tightly wedged in there until pulled, but not too tightly so as to make the draw easy. Bantha-leather, softened up.

Of all the men on the ship to be sent to, Command saw fit to assign a would-be sabre-jockey to the command of the one man aboard the ship that'd killed a Jedi.

He'd come away minus a leg, but he'd carried out the mission that had been envisioned when Jango cloned them. That much was apparent; Jango killed Jedi. They cloned an army of men capable of the same, at their basis. And, in the case of the ARCs, then had that man train them. He was old, but cunning replaced age, and the reflexes hadn't gone that far from their sublime peak. Battles, bounties, battles. He'd lived the life as designed and imagined, even if he'd taken twists and turns to get there.

He took suspicion-slitted eyes off the woman, off the wrappings around the eyes, off the sabre, and down to the slate, which he scrolled over quickly, "No military experience, assigned to SpecForces. Not even drop camp." He had the accent still, the imprint of a clone's contact with their instructor and progenitor strong after all these years. Concord Dawn Mando boy. Fett meant 'farmer' but he'd never done a day of that in his life. She couldn't help but read him, he knew that much because he knew plenty about the Jedi. Too much. She probably was putting more than he would have liked together, but he wasn't of a mood to hide any of it from her.

"Hope you realize that you're going to have to earn your creds around here. So, do you know the old mind trick?"

---

SpecForces Ready Room
_{aka. a very small space packed with gear and a shady array of the universe's scummier denizens who are the good guys but certainly don't comport themselves like it}

---

The plan was multi-layered, and hinged on one of the leakiest vessels Besk could ever imagine, but he took anything in his desperation to save his detachment from annihilation from a superior force in a hangar. Getting that spike into a comp terminal was not a job he wanted to trust to an astromech droid or even to a squad of men, knowing that they'd have to somehow slip off and do the job. One of his men might be able to do it, but there was no guarantees and he was loathe to send anyone out on their own to do it by themselves, unless that someone was himself. He couldn't necessarily pull that off for obvious reasons.

He was used to tough choices, but in this situation the roles were reversed. The Jedi used the clones as a tool and most of them, particularly that Yoda, looked upon them as a convenience rather than a slave army. They were expendable. He wasn't necessarily giving the woman more of a job than she could do, but he assigned her a task that he didn't want to delegate to others. The entire Republic, then the Empire, used clones for all kinds of dirty details. He almost wound up as a medical experiment at the end of his career as cannon fodder. His world was a place of moral ambiguities and sacrifices, dark pacts and unpleasant loose ends.

Now the Jedi, or close enough to it, was a tool under his command. She was there, along with the rest of Chakaar in the ready room, the Venator's plans displayed. They were also uploaded to slates for the rest of them to study in greater detail. The detailed operations orders were there, the briefing was broad strokes. The finalized version would pass through the hands of what were, after all, primarily NCO's with experience who would add touches to the plan.

"As you know, the job is to grab an entire Venator. We insert by Laarty and create a diversion to slip the spike into the weapons system to disable them so the reinforcements can arrive. That is Specialist Tariim's job," word had already gotten around as to who she was in a tight-knit SpecForces community. It was specialists, death dealers and slicers, explosives gurus, sharpshooters, all around.

"We're using the pretext of selling Clone Wars era tech to the Moff. I will be doing much of the talking," a fan of the era wouldn't be able to pass up the chance to discourse with an ARC, they were only getting rarer as they were getting older.

"Our job is to keep the Moff going nice and calmly as long as possible but to take down the forces in the hangar and hold it until relieved. The longer we can keep up the charade of selling them the Laarties and some clankers we scraped up from the Admiral, the less time we spend under fire. Make no mistake, one of those can carry seven thousand troops. They say the complement is reduced and not Imperial, fringer types. Well, we're kriffing fringers and we know what that can be like and we have no idea what the numbers are. So we prepare to be outnumbered and outgunned."

The ARC's pointer moved around, illuminating elements of the plan as the data slates automatically followed the briefing, bringing up the pertinent technical data; Besk was essentially highlighting the most important poitns, the rest was outlining on the devises, "Once the weapons are down, the rest of Rancor moves in. We are playing it off as a delivery of a Juggernaut, but if they suspect at any time, we start firing from the Laarties; our techs are already modifying them for a quick-start so you should have only a few seconds until weapons are hot," He didn't add that he more or less, along with his Lieutenants, made it very clear to the Tech officer that they could replace the reactors on the Laarties afterward. It wasn't good for the lifespans of the power systems but Besk really didn't care.

"So that will help us to clear the hangar with the onboard weapons. Take them out fast, all costs, just don't do any structural damage."

A schematic of the hangar, its entrances and its control points were there for the men to envision the area they were going to fight in.

"Once we get the Keep docked and get the rest of Rancor on, our job will be to assist in taking the bridge and capturing high value targets. We have also secured disruptor weapons. You're welcome." That, of course, would make the Alderaanians uncomfortable, but disruptors were nasty at close range, or at long if optimized for it.

"Fast, hard, but don't damage the goods, especially the power plants. Limited explosives, for breaching. Use sonic grenades when you get the doors open. Unless it's an HVT with intel value, leave prisoners stunned for the infantry to pick up and keep moving."

Spiritum

@HeySeuss I asked on discord if you wanted Galahad and Gideon to kick butt, but idk if you're on the server. So uh, you wanna collab?

@vietmyke

I'm over on other parts of Discord. I tried to set up an alternate Discord so we wouldn't be swept up in inactivity purges of RP channels.

Nom De Guerre

French Field Hospital, Hanoi, French Indochina, June, 1949

---

Doctor Molineaux was one of the best surgeons in Indochina, and like many doctors of his age, a man that had seen far too much trauma surgery in his time. But it was that experience that took a country doctor that was mostly delivering the children of farmwives in Normandy and turned him into a tireless machine of a surgeon, gifted with the deft touch that saved so many lives-- like this one, an all too-young legionnaire who took a pair of shots that were lodged entirely too close to his heart; getting the rounds out had taken every scrap of skill he could muster, but he felt obligated to this legionnaire. His surgical orderly, a man named Marcel, was good enough to substitute for a nurse, and they had a rapport, so they were able to chatter, as other doctors did, over the shattered, maimed bodies of the young men they tried to save. It was a way to keep the enormity of what they did and the odds they faced at bay, the idle chatter to distract the mind while muscle memory worked, while trained skill guided the hand.

The doctor learned, through painful experience, to ideally look at his patients as muscle and organs, as the parts rather than the person, but his sense of detachment was jarred by the sight of a familiar sight on the man's right arm; Bellophoron astride Pegasus. It caused him to look closer; the lad was young, in his 20's still, with brown hair cut brutally short in the Legion's way. Strong features, tanned and a bit lined, a straight nose, with a good jaw and a brow, with deep set eyes. Then he saw the telltale scars; jagged, uneven things from hot metal fragments, on the tanned, lean muscle of the young man. Not hulking but not small, he was average in size, though he had strong features even in the repose of anesthesia, a face inclined toward ferocity, dark, ropy hair.

"See that tattoo? You'd expect to see a damned SS lightning bolt tattoo on most of these boys, but this one..." The doctor glanced down to indicate where to look, while working under the harsh light of the surgical lamp.

"I hadn't noticed it. What's so different about this one?" The orderly had seen a number of military tattoos in his time, many of them German. It was hard to track them all.

"Not German. British Para. Clamp," he broke the conversation for a moment to communicate the needs of the operation, before returning to the idle chatter, "I've seen it before, in St. Lo, they..."

"Funny, because when we were stripping him down for the operation, we had to take a star of David off with his dogtags. He doesn't really look like one a Jew, does he? I thought they all were punty with big noses, hein? Funny that a Jew would be in among all these Boche killers. But this one, he is up for the Croix de Guerre, they say. Tough one. His convoy came under ambush on Rt. Coloniale 4, and it was his assault on a communist machinegun that allowed the men that escaped to escape. Fucking slants," he added with a venom. It was easy to hate the other, even while maligning the Germans who did the same.

"Brave man. Strange coincidence," The doctor reflected, even as he finished the operation, and indicated for an actual nurse to close the man up, getting ready to move to the next patient, "I'm not sure what brought him to the Legion of all places, but this is one I can be proud of saving. Legionnaire..." he checked the chart for a name, "Fabian," he mused; it was obviously a nom de guerre, the false identities that most legionnaires had these days. Well, it was a strange place, the Legion, they all had their reasons to hide in France's expendable army.

"Well," the doctor ordered, snapping back to business, "Make sure he's ready for transportation to Bach Mai in Hanoi, antibiotics and rest. They'll need to watch him for a post-op infection."

He wiped his forehead with a piece of cloth, "Especially in this disgusting tropical muck."

Bach Mai Hospita, Hanoi, days later

---

The escape from Poland in a false compartment of a truck bed...Gordon barracks, the walnut of his rifle's stock cool against his cheek as he lined up his shot...the shock of the parachute opening over Sicily...Jamie dying in his arms in the night in Oosterbeek...the emaciated skeletons of Belsen...the first site of the shores of Palestine from Haifa...Sidi bel Abbes...

He'd never been put under before, but when he could clear his head enough to figure out where and when he was, he knew that his condition was serious by the dull throb of pain that radiated in his abdomen and torso, along with the feeling of binding from the bandages. His own perception was blurry as he came awake to consciousness bit by bit, the entire world fuzzed around him; he didn't realize he was speaking aloud, but in Polish interlaced with Yiddish, though as his head cleared, he realized that he was using profanity and buttoned it up; no one around here would likely recognize the words in Polska, though they might well note the language.

It came back to him, of course, how he'd arrived here. He could remember the crackle of a Soviet-made submachinegun and the explosion of pain ripping through him; he remembered the smell of the burning gasoline from the convoy truck that'd been blown up and caught on fire, and the smell of the blood and singed flesh and hair of the machinegun crew he'd just managed to kill with a grenade, an attempt to save his comrades. It wasn't that he'd done it out of a sense of heroism or glory as much as that those men would have probably died under the fire of that weapon and he'd had the opportunity to kill the men trying to kill his kameraden. It was ironic, he realized, that he thought of them in the German term. In the legion of 1949, German thinking prevailed. German terms were used in the ranks and German songs, like "Ich hatte einen Kameraden" were sung over the graves of the fallen.

He had no relatives left to sit shiva over his corpse if he went here. He'd just have a Boche military funeral song sung over his grave by some of the men that tried to exterminate his entire people. And in a strange way, it was fitting; Legio Patria Nostra; they were all countrymen in the Legion.

Laying on his bed in a strange room that he found himself alone in, a thing of whitewashed walls and a whining ceiling fan, with a shuttered window letting in some of the sunlight, he tried to call out for someone, anyone, but the sound that issued from the throat was in no way words; it was a rasp, but it wasn't hard to figure out that he probably was calling out for the morphine...

@SkullsandSlippers

Far Colony [Sci-Fi]

@HeySeuss

Any feedback on my previous comment?

@Famigliolabuona

I am generally in favor of the idea of a member of a religious sect coming along for the ride.

Nom De Guerre

Whoops, that was in the wrong spot!

We need to flesh out Bergfalk. I can play him, though, that's easy.

Far Colony [Sci-Fi]

It's good to see some ideas and people with very strong senses of direction for this. If you can get into the discord and throw me some e-mails, I'll get people logged onto Trello where we can start setting collaboration.

Star Wars - Rancor Company

Sounds like mahz is aware of the situation so we can expect stability. Phew.