Chain 012: Battletech

Chain 012: Battletech
Location: Tortuga Prime, August 7, 3132 (Dark Age, National Capitol)
Identity: Drop-In
Drawbacks: [+300] Where Am I?, Inner Ear Defect
(Abilities: Savant, Durability, Regeneration, Brilliant, Robotics Genius, City Government To Run)
[50/1300]   Trained Technician: Jumpdrives
[100/1300]  Trained Technician: Fusion Reactors
[500/1300]  Xin Sheng
[700/1300]  Cyberpunk
[1300/1300] Ragnarok Proofing

"Where am I?"

"Tortuga Prime!"

"I have no idea where that is."

"The periphery!"

"Periphery of what?"

"...the Inner Sphere?"

"Why would I care about the interior of a ball?"

"You're not from around here, are you?"

"No."

"Damn. Was hoping you were some green mechjock I could get a few bills off of."

"Oh. No, I'm a wizard, Harry."

"You're a what?"

Cue electrokinesis from Infamous, since that's an inherent power and not one that can be toggled, and thus always on.

So in the space of about six months I conquered the entirety of the Tortuga Dominion with a show of raw force and an army of robots. I used the San Angeles b̶r̶a̶i̶n̶w̶a̶s̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ rehabilitation program to turn a ruthless pirate kingdom into a militaristic society that spent two years strip-mining their planets for resources and building a flotilla and that I promptly threw at the Clans because, quite simply, "fuck it". Turning pirates into the baddest of badasses seemed to be a good use of my time, and considering what the Clans did, they seemed a perfect target. The hilarity of uprooting their society to build the most rag-tag fleet that the Inner Sphere ever saw and launching en masse was quite immense - and the points I spent to know how to jury rig working fusion reactors and hyperdrives, and thus to teach my robots to do so, were very well spent indeed.

(Their battle hymn was "I wish I was an Oscar Meyer Weiner".)

They did shockingly well - aided by the Blackout reaching beyond the Periphery to the Clans, because... who knows why? My personal suspicion is that the HPGs that were still online were acting as repeaters for whatever was causing the problem. Regardless, the Clans weren't prepared for a half dozen star systems' worth of population to storm them, and they got to feel what it was like to be invaded by outsiders who do not always subscribe to your particular theories of combat and morals.

(The rumors that circulated around the Inner Sphere about the legions of makeshift ships that struck toward Home Clan space, meanwhile, made people wonder about the Minnesota Tribe. Because of course they did. The Clans wondered if they were the Wolverines back to haunt them, but the people they captured in their victories always tested negative for the genetic markers they were looking for.)

The Clans being who they were, some of them were more than willing to come under the conquerers' sway - it was their way of life, after all. Others... not so much. But that's what rehabilitation devices are for, and they were rehabilitated into happy soldiers that kept spilling out to other Clan worlds and bringing them to heel.

When things got darker and the Clans kept losing worlds over the course of the next few years, the Clans threw out their vaunted morals. Tactical nuclear missiles flew, orbital bombardment became a tool they used with little hesitation. This, of course, did not work in their favor - on the ground, they found out just how many of the invading troops looked human but were in truth machines. And few who were not in leadership approved of utterly throwing zellbrigen out the window, disregarding their way of life when the invaders were willing to abide by them for the most part.

It was absolutely hilarious, honestly, if in a grim sense - the Blackout came to an unexpected end, and the Home Clans begged the Inner Sphere Clans to help them, sending a brief video with his plea... of an army of endo-steel skeletons marching through nuclear flame and annihilating Home Clan 'mechs with weapons that should have been mounted on power armor, flanked by repainted Clan battle armor and protomechs.

The Inner Sphere Clans... well, they were torn. They wanted to keep (ahem) liberating the Inner Sphere, and those that did return did not expect to come back and see a unified population that covered the whole of the Kerensky Cluster, and that was able to fend off civilized attacks and otherwise also behave in a civilized way. After all, until that message had been sent off, they'd been cut off by those same Clans. Even less, they did not expect to see them all wearing identical livery, building up a truly massive force with the intention of unifying the Inner Sphere from the conflicts that had heretofore shattered it.

When my decade had come to an end, the pseudo-Terminator auxiliaries had been phased out in favor of Clan Elementals, but otherwise the society there seemed surprisingly stable - not everyone in the Clans needed brainwashing, just the more extreme elements, and it seemed to have hit the ground running and kept going pretty smoothly. Sure, not everything's perfect, but I had a decade of working with San Angeles in small scale. I was able to figure it out in the larger scale - it's all a matter of perspective. Black markets exist, they just have to be taken into account.

Oh, and I completely trashed the idiotic political structure that everyone had. Obviously. Planets should be largely self-sustaining, and part of the same nation, after all. At least for the most essential goods. Why the hell would civil unrest would happen otherwise, if you can't speed-dial the next planet over? Aside from possible invasion by idiots, anyway.

(Also: the warehouse is now full of technical readouts of Battletech-era technologies for me to recreate at my leisure, and a few examples, tools, and raw materials. Pity that the math on the K-F drive seems to be highly dependent on the local laws of physics, though.)