man i cant believe TCW dropped the ball so hard when they depicted Mandalore as being super white and also giving the clones european features instead of using Tem Morrison’s features as a model
After their fourth or fifth successful reconnaissance mission, the Jedi Council realized they may be onto something with Maelstrom Team. Every commando squad the members of the High Council had served with thus far had proved to be excellent soldiers, but these four seemed to interpret combat as a side effect of war, rather than their primary objective. Contrary to the suggestion of their name, they worked silently and almost entirely without casualty on both sides: scouting their target thoroughly before infiltrating, retrieving, and retreating, often without sounding an alarm. First, they had acquired a drive containing the locations of several droid foundries in the Outer Rim. Next, General Grievous’s personal protocol droid, followed by invaluable prototypes from a heavily-guarded Separatist weapons’ lab. The Council reasoned, why discipline their unorthodox methods? Why not encourage the unit to specialize further?
During the early months of the Clone Wars, Maelstrom Team ran many of these stealth missions together, all of them decisive Republic victories-- until a battle droid got off a lucky shot while they were infiltrating a Separatist Destroyer. The blaster bolt punched clean through Commando Alec’s armor, killing him instantly.
While Maelstrom Team grieved at awaited reassignment on Kamino, another commando squad was suffering heavy losses in the Battle of Mon Calamari. While hiding in Dac’s aquatic cave systems, Bravo Squad stumbled into the feeding grounds of one of the Mon Calamari’s most feared predators. Three of the squad’s members were eaten whole by the giant cephalopod-like creature, or killed trying to escape, and the fourth survived with heavy injuries by tricking it into devouring his armor instead, keeping only what basic life-support systems he could salvage.
Rather than face early retirement, the lone survivor insisted on proving he was still fit for active duty, and was reluctantly reassigned to fill the recent vacancy in Maelstrom Team, which now consists of these four:
CC-8808-15 "Commander Kettle" (he/him/his)
Kettle has long been Maelstrom Team’s mastermind. He’s a brilliant tactician with concentrated training in technical engineering & programming. He’s very analytical and critical, sometimes overly so, though he defends his cynicism as ‘pragmatism.’ He’s so named for his creeping temper that boils over on the regular like a simmering kettle. Those close to him trust him to keep a level head in the field, and know that when his armor comes off, it’s best to just let him blow off steam for a little and not take it personally.
Despite his abrasive nature, he cares deeply about his brothers, to the point of neurotically checking in on them constantly against their wishes. He butts heads a lot with Sketch on that front. Kettle is detail-oriented and meticulous: nothing gets past him, to the point where he can get a bit myopic about his goals. As a commander, he’s strict, but fair, and as a friend, he’s dependable as durasteel, and funny as hell (if you can understand his grim, deadpan sense of humor.)
Kettle wears his hair in a long braid that he keeps twisted up under his helmet, which is painted to resemble Nexu markings (in the team’s signature cobalt blue). He’s also got extensive facial scarification in the same patterns.
CC-4921 "Amber" (an/ans/ain or he/him/his pronouns)
One of Maelstrom Team’s first deployments was on a Mid-Rim planet where the dominant sentient species, for the most part, had no gender. Over the weeks they spent there, Amber made good friends with one of the locals, an overseer on the dock they were stacking out, and after several deep conversations about gender, an decided to adopt ain friend’s pronouns to remember ans by. The rest of the team (except Squid) are used to Amber’s pronouns, but outside the four of them, an defaults to he/him/his for ease of communication.
Amber doesn’t have any specialized training within the team, but an’s trained anself from childhood as a mechanic, tinkering with whatever ans can get ain hands on, and an’s very talented. An now operates as the team’s lockpicker and cat burglar, fitting into and finding access to places so secret or forgotten they’re scarcely on the map.
Amber’s very intuitive and level-headed, truly the chillest motherfucker. An has a tendency to mellow out anyone in ain vicinity and balance out extremes, although a big part of ain calming presence has to do with being constantly exhausted. The nightmares hit ans worse than most, and an usually copes with this by just... not sleeping. Kettle’s threatened to drug ain dinner on multiple occasions to get Amber to rest.
Of Maelstrom Team’s original members, Amber was closest to Alec, and an wears a small hunk of amber on a cord around ain neck that Alec gave an (Look what I found! Apparently it shares your name!). Amber has a shaved head, and a stylized solar flare tattoo on the back of ain skull that radiates around ain ears onto the edges of ain face. An’s missing three fingers on ain left hand from an accident an mostly blames anself for: an was tinkering with a fan belt in a carrier’s engine for easy practice, but forgot to turn off the main breaker before getting wrist-deep in it. The GAR’s standard-issue prostheses weren’t up to Amber’s standards, though, so an removed its ring & pinkie fingers and replaced them with a rudimentary scomp link that an can wire into ain armor for a direct link to ain helmet’s HUD feed. An etches geometric patterns on ain middle finger when an’s bored. Amber’s armor is painted with a fusion of the sunburst pattern on their head, and concentric hexagonal shapes that look like alien honeycombs.
CC-1264 "Sketch" (he/him/his)
Sketch is the team’s marksman and scout, an expert in surveillance and long-range munitions. He’s a bit shy, and enjoys all the time his job gives him alone with nothing but the view and his brothers’ radio chatter in his ear.
Sketch is stoic and reclusive, and values his privacy almost as much as his personal space, but he’s very loving and cares deeply about his brothers. When his life isn’t completely consumed with his duty as a commando, he spends as much time as he can writing and doodling, recording everything he can from sunsets on Kamino to the stories and marching songs of the other clones. He even sews extra pockets into all his clothes to hold the notebooks and pens he journals in (Kettle does his best to keep these well-stocked, as Sketch is a bit too paranoid to write his deepest stories on Republic-issued datapads.)
Despite his quiet nature, Sketch is quite the mother hen in his own way (damned bleeding heart, Alec would affectionately call him). He doesn’t demand personal updates and team bonding like Kettle, but he’s always a good listening ear, and if something’s meant to be a secret, he will keep it to the grave. Someday, he hopes to find a way to publish all the stories, history, poetry, and art his brothers have given him permission to share, because Force knows if he doesn’t, who will care about them after the war?
Sketch is very deliberate about keeping a record of his (and his team’s) life, and it shows in his many tattoos. Most of them aren’t even pictures or symbols, but words, small maps, etc that remind him of places he’s been, times they’ve shared together, interesting turns of phrase he’s encountered. He’s a literal walking dictionary, and is slowly running out of space. However, from the neck up he looks fairly ordinary: standard military haircut greying at the temples, no facial tattoos except for a line of upward facing arrows going from the bridge of his nose into his hairline. His armor is decorated symmetrically with that pattern.
CC-6765 "Squid" (he/him/his, formerly “Jackie”)
Squid is the last surviving commando of Bravo Squad, and even though it’s been months since he was granted a transfer to Maelstrom Team, he’s still very obviously the outlier among them. He has no experience as a thief, and his special talents lie in artillery and demolitions, which, while useful, is a bit louder than Maelstrom is used to operating.
In general, Squid is a bit louder than his new teammates. He’s got a friendly, easy-going personality and thrives off forming strong emotional connections, which has been difficult after losing his whole squad, and trying to earn his place in a new family with different protocols, one who is also still mourning the loss of one of their own. At first, they saw him as absent-minded and aloof, when a more accurate assessment would be that Squid flounders without being given clear expectations and firm leadership. Kettle provides the latter well, but without a specialized niche to fill, he’s a bit lost.
Still, Squid is a good man to have watching your back under pressure, and his new teammates know that he thinks well on his feet so they do their best to remain patient with him. He owns his mistakes and is fiercely committed to self-improvement, sometimes beyond what’s healthy for him. He’s got a bright, silly sense of humor that he uses as a coping mechanism rather than show weakness.
He never talks about it, but what happened at Mon Calamari deeply traumatized him. Aside from the physical trauma he sustained, Squid is a lot jumpier than he used to be. After escaping, he made a tourniquet out of wires from his comm link and didn’t move for hours till he was rescued for fear that it would smell his blood in the water and come back. He still panics at the sight of his own blood, but hides this well enough that no one’s noticed so far. He’s also a bit insecure about his scar tissue (long ribbons of serrated suction cup marks covering his face and upper body, and large chunks of his left ear and upper lip missing which make hearing difficult and speaking without a lisp near impossible). The prosthetic is fine, although it wasn’t able to fix the nerve damage extending up into his shoulder, but Amber has been helping him fine-tune the circuits to increase his range of motion and fine-motor control. Eventually, if he can talk Amber into it, he wants to hide an extra blaster in there...
Squid used to be named Jackie, but after the accident, he changed it to Squid because he knew he’d always be “the clone who survived the giant squid attack” and would rather own it than let it be an unwanted nickname. Most of his old tattoos were ruined by scar tissue, so he gave up on salvaging them, except for a small tribute tattoo with Bravo Squad’s insignia on his cheek. He scrubbed his armor clean, too, and re-painted it with crawling tentacles, and also started dying his short mohawk with Maelstrom’s cobalt blue. Since he’s also from a younger batch than the rest of Maelstrom Team, Squid’s approaching this transfer as if he’s a shiny all over again, fresh start and all that. He’s a tough guy, and he’s determined not to be a weak link, and to survive all this and more with what remains of his bright n’ sunny smile.
