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[I] French Foreign Legionnaires, present day. [/I]
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[B]TL;DR Summary:[/B][Indent]- Science Fiction Setting
- It starts out with modern technology and moves into more alien tech.
- Characters are mercenaries that signed onto a newly-formed PMC called Centurion Strategic Services; the client is assumed to be a foreign entity.
- Client is actually an alien species that needs someone who can fight the wars for them.
- Characters are various types of ground combat types, infantry, armor crew, commo, artillery, engineers and so forth.
- We're in Casual, and I'm cool with a paragraph, but I find formatting, grammar/spellcheck important. This includes paying attention to capitalization, spaces between paragraphs and basic formatting for readability. I am not a douche, I make typos like anyone else, but I do make an effort and I want everyone else to do the same.
- In the interests of moving the story along, we need to agree to not get overly technical on the military aspect, particularly as the technology and tactics will change appreciably as the storyline progresses.[/indent]
[B]In Character Info:[/B][indent][I] The Grathik race find themselves embattled on many different sides over a dispute regarding natural resource mining in a sector of space with more than one claimant to ownership; when they tried to use force to back up their claim, the injured party called in their allies-- it was the excuse they needed to start a war.

The war hasn't gone well for the Grathik, who are generally multi-armed gastropods of limited mobility in anything but murky water; their planet is primarily a marsh and swamp, terraformed that way through centuries of patient planetary engineering. At first, their physiological and psychological limitations didn't matter, their enemy, the Plashi and the L'thraa were also not terribly adept at fighting...for a time, the Grathik held the upper hand, despite the superior numbers and interstellar standing of their enemies, due to their superior scientific prowess, but now the tables have changed as the L'thraa hire a fourth race, the Salvesh, who are well known interstellar mercenaries, a race that has made a living as cannon fodder due to their breeding and strength.

They have tried many different options for fighting the war, but find that while they can manage space warfare in their own ships, they have difficulty fighting terrestrial engagements and boarding actions themselves; they tried robots, but found that the programming left something to be desired, particularly as the robots required a lot of supervision and the Grathik found themselves being outmaneuvered once more.

The Grathik, desperate for a solution, start to consider the various species that offer their services for sale, trying to figure out who would be the best defense against their enemies. That is when Jarlath Ilsalithi, the most brilliant of all the Grathik xenobiologists, suggests a true roll of the dice: a backward race, but renowned for the viciousness of their infighting and paradoxical ability to work together, their aggressiveness and their rugged adaptability. He makes a convincing argument after showing footage to the Council of Intelligentsia, meritocratic ruling body of their species, of humanity's wars with itself, detailing the rather rapid evolution of human warfare and demonstrating their most desirable attributes; adaptability and aggression.

Jarlath Ilsalithi's proposal was, at first, met with outrage and ethical concerns, but slowly gained traction as further studies bore him out and the other Grathik watched it unfold on humanity's own television broadcasts, particularly the History Channel. They were also for sale, relatively cheaply, compared to the interstellar would-be allies who wanted to swallow up the Grathik as a protectorate in their own empires.

And so they make slow, determined contact on Earth, finding the right sort of people to front an organization, to hire mercenaries...[/I][/indent]
[B]Out of Character Info:[/B][indent] Military sci-fi RP. Centurion is offering exorbitant amounts of money for the top talent; guys are taking early retirement, declining to re-enlist or are leaving their old companies in order to join Centurion; while Centurion is willing to train newcomers with the right physical talent, they are selective. Records are examined and people are psychologically screened. They turn down people in the weeding out process, a basic training modeled on some of the toughest types in the world, and then further turn down people who can't cut it through what amounts to the United States Army Ranger School, though many of the people joining the company have already attained an equivalent or better degree of training -- all the same, they are tested to make sure they aren't faking it. Those that don't make it are paid for their time and sent on their way, those that do make it are signed on with a permanent and very binding contract; they're in, for at least a decade.

The tech level starts out modern, with modern equipment and weaponry, and the characters are routed through French Guyana or a similar place (it has both a training ground and space launch facilities) and then are taken into space. Perhaps they are given hibernation drugs for their deployment and wake up to find themselves in space and preparing to fight the enemy...but not an alien species, not each other this time.

The plot, of course, thickens. [/indent]