The Long Rifles

The Long Rifles.
Affiliation: None official, though will maintain relations with many organizations. Slight pro-Resistance leanings.
Size: Very small. Likely consisting of the leader and 2-3 other survivors who followed him across the Plains. Open to new members, though does not actively recruit.

Description: The Long Rifles are a small band of Native American survivors that have wandered the American West in search of a new home.  Skilled trackers and marksmen, they tend to keep to themselves and live off the land, but will viciously defend what they consider important through daring acts of guerilla warfare.  Collectively, the Long Rifles are experienced scouts and guerrillas, skilled with hit-and-run tactics, long-range engagements and clandestine activities, sometimes in coordination with a larger conventional force. They are capable of communicating silently via "Plains Talk," a native form of sign language that has been repurposed for the post-nuclear world, and some of them speak the Cheyenne language.

Supply Level: Low-Medium. Much of their food is hunted/gathered, and the group would prefer to be as self-sufficient as possible. Everything they own can be carried on their backs or in a single vehicle. Despite this, they are otherwise willing traders, willing to provide meat, fur and scavenged supplies in exchange for necessities of an equal value. They also have between them a modest but practical arsenal that allows them to adequately defend themselves if provoked.

Roles: In the past they have tried to remain detached from factional affairs, and their leader would prefer to avoid the Resistance, but they are not ones to turn down jobs, and will work as needed as caravan guards, guides, and bounty hunters. For the most part, the Long Rifles affiliate themselves with smaller groups and families, the "underdogs" dotting the landscape, offering them limited protection in exchange for friendship and a fire to sit at. They may also rescue unlucky stragglers pursued by SkyNET and fellow humans, at great risk to themselves.

From their time with the Crow, Cheyenne and Lakota, the Long Rifles have retained the tradition of counting coup. This involves touching an enemy without killing them, vehicle theft, and destroying a machine through unconventional means, all of which have an assumed risk of death or injury.

The Long Rifles as a whole have no explicit mission, though Jim Lone-Elk hopes to become a War Chief by Cheyenne reckoning in the fight against SkyNET, which he could accomplish by leading a war party that counts its coups.

Attitudes: Despite the rise of more organized settlements, the patriarch of the group is hesitant to settle down inside of them. Having lived a perpetual life of violence among cannibals and raiders, he insists on a mostly nomadic lifestyle based on self-reliance. As such, the Long Rifles are small in number and very hard to gain entry to, but each scout is considerably skilled at their trade.

History: The group is the revival of another, one to which its cryptic leader James Lone-Elk belonged. Born a Couer D'Alene in Idaho, at a young age, his parents were slaughtered and he and his brother were enslaved by a biker gang that preyed on the weak and unfortunate in western Montana.  The two were eventually rescued by a band of Cheyenne and Crow nomads led by Tobias Lone-Elk, an aging Green Beret, former AIM activist, and war chief who raised the Couer D'Alene boys as his Cheyenne sons, teaching them relevant guerrilla tactics, survival and tracking skills as they wandered the highways and hills of the Plains.

While the group was affiliated by blood with the renegade Dog Society Cheyenne and took on Dog Soldier customs, the group avoided affiliating itself too heavily with the Cheyenne, Crow or Lakota during their travels, and instead maintained a more universal way of life that allowed competent Crow and Lakota to travel with them. While the group could hardly be said to be peaceful, the group also universally shunned the practice of scalping, which had been resurrected among the more militant Cheyenne and Lakota band along with the more general acts of "counting coup."

When the group visited the Cheyenne-Crow capital of Lame Deer, Jim's brother Tom and several Cheyenne were heavily influenced by the Ghost Dance movement, which was now being politicized to support the rapidly escalating military campaign in the Black Hills of Wyoming, against a united Wyoming force known as The Cavalry. The group split in two: those who wished to join the CCA forces aiding the Lakota; and those who felt it was not their fight, which included almost all of the Crow. The two could not reach an agreement, and the former joined the forces headed south. Tobias, Jim and the few Long Rifles that remained became effectively ostracized from Lame Deer for refusing the call for War Chiefs, and Tobias, who had hoped to become part of the Intertribal Government, took the remaining followers west, towards the neutral territories and away from both the Black Hills and SkyNET.

Still, a few years later, the war eventually found them, in the form of the marauding 7th Cavalry force, which made a habit of rounding up bands of Cheyenne whether they were hostile or not. The light armored reconnaissance force scalped Tobias and killed Jim's Crow wife and their infant child after a confrontation escalated into a firefight. The group scattered, and in a blind rage Jim attempted to take revenge, only to be grievously injured and left for dead in their burning encampment.

Jim was rescued by Mennonite farmers, who maintained some modicum of neutrality with both the Cavalry and the Cheyenne-Crow Alliance. Upon his recovery, instead of returning to Cheyenne land, he wandered west to seek redemption for his failures, spending some time with the neutral Wind River Arapaho, and then through small settlements in Utah and Arizona to the Navajo Nation, where he had his first encounters with machines in the Navajo's stalemate with SkyNET.

At present, the group is now a small band of survivors with a wide variety of backgrounds. Jim had encountered many people in his travels, and some opted to join him on his trek for a better life elsewhere, even if it was unclear where that may lie.  Finally, the new Long Rifles arrived in California, unsure of its place in this new war.