Crew Conversations

YANG: Heyya, Boss. Welcome to the Mech Bay—my own little piece of heaven right here on the ship.

Something I can help you with?

PLAYER: Tell me a little bit about yourself. How’d you wind up with this crew?

YANG: That’s a long story, Boss. Shortest version I can give you? I signed on after my term in the Third Succession War, fighting for the Capellan Confederation.

If you want to know more, you can ask whatever you want. Otherwise, let’s get back to talking shop.

PLAYER: Tell me about your time in the military. Who’d you serve with?

YANG: The 2nd St. Ives Lancers, 1st Battalion, under Major Ling. We saw more action than most.

The arm is a souvenir of my time in the service. I lost the original back in 3010, on St. Loris.

YANG: Y’know, when we first arrived at St. Loris, I loved the place. It’s an agricultural world… sort of a breadbasket for the neighboring systems. Green fields, rolling hills, you get the picture. We’d walked out of hell on Kittery—the FedRats drove us out in ‘05 with our tails between our legs. So it looked like paradise to us.

I remember kicking back in the Mech Bay, my feet propped up on an engine block, sipping on a snifter of Ambergrist vermouth. Not a bad way to spend a sunny afternoon.

YANG: Anyway. Turned out, the Federated Suns weren’t done with us yet. We were barely a month into our deployment when they sent the Ceti Hussars to burn us out.

I’m sure that there were sound strategic reasons for House Davion to want St. Loris, but it sure felt personal to me.

YANG: Long story short, one of their scouts managed to slip through our perimeter and hit my Mech Bay. I was tinkering around in a Centurion’s custom-made rumble seat at the time… being surrounded by all that armor is the only reason I made it out alive.

Still, I didn’t make it out unscathed. I lost two of my favorite assistants and my own right arm, and I’ve got this ugly thing grafted onto me as a reminder.

YANG: …And yet, here I am, doing mercenary work for a living.

Some people never learn, huh?

PLAYER: Why’d you leave the Capellan Confederation?

YANG: After my tour of duty was up, you mean? I dunno, it was just… time for a change.

Besides, the place wasn’t for me anymore. In a way, it never really was.

YANG: I learned a lot from my time in the service. Got a first-hand view of the elitist bullshit that saturates Capellan culture, how it rewards highborn idiots at the common people’s expense.

Speaking as a thoroughly common man, that didn’t sit right with me. When my tour was over, I packed up my things and made a beeline for the Periphery. Seemed like as good a place as any to find a new beginning.

PLAYER: You’ll never really get away from the aristocracy, Yang. Hell, I was born a noble.

YANG: Yeah, but you’re a competent noble, and you aren’t afraid to get your hands dirty. At the end of the day, that’s all I really care about.

I wonder how many times I watched talented engineers get passed over for promotion so some idiot with a title could advance? Too many to count.

—”Yang DropShip Conversations,” BattleTech

SUMIRE: Hey, Commander. Something I can do for you?

PLAYER: I’m collecting stories about the crew. Tell me something about yourself.

SUMIRE: Well… I’m from a noble family, like you. We’re old money—made our fortune out in Rasalhague, then repatriated to the Taurian Concordat. That’s where I grew up.

I’m not sure if this is the kind of stuff you were hoping to hear, but we can talk about whatever. I’m not shy.

PLAYER: Where’d you learn to pilot a Leopard, anyway?

SUMIRE: The Taurian Naval Institute, on New Vandenburg. Well, among other places—it’s a big campus. The low-gravity training station orbiting Lompoc was my second home for a time.

TNI flight training isn’t usually open to civilians, but my parents had good credit back then, and they could name-drop Protector Calderon. That’ll get you pretty far in the Concordat… for a while, anyway.

SUMIRE: The other cadets in my class weren’t especially happy to be sharing air with a civvy, but they couldn’t say much. I was nobility and they weren’t.

Everyone sort of kept me at arm’s length, so I had plenty of time to concentrate on my studies.

SUMIRE: I got my certification in both DropShip and JumpShip operation in four years. I even tried working on a commercial jump crew for a while, once upon a time.

The people were fun, but it wasn’t for me. The ratio of flying to violent jump sickness skewed hard in the wrong direction.

—”Sumire DropShip Conversations,” BattleTech