#wolf's dragoons

[is-the-battlemech-cool-or-not]

[ross-hollander]

How it didn't happen.

But just imagine if it did.

The MRB office was like most of the other buildings on this world: a metal box suspiciously akin to a whitewashed cargo container with windows cut into it. The heat outside hit like a metal bar swung hard; the sunlight seemed to shine down with a personal grudge. Even inside this one-room crate, the shadows had wilted in the heat. Puddles of dusty dimness that offered no relief, no cool. Mercenaries from across this system and possibly the next few were crowded in, looking for shade that barely existed. The room stank of sweat and cheap food, and none of it helped Jaime as he looked down at the offending line on the form. PRINT FULL NAME.

"Just put your name on the form, c'mon." An oh so helpful voice from the merc behind him in the queue. A voice like a hand idling on the sheathe of a combat knife- more specifically, one doing so when the person being addressed had no knife of their own. "What, you don't know who you are?"

For one of those moments that combat literature (practically the only kind there had ever been to read) tends to say lasts forever, but in practice really felt just as short as it was, Jaime thought. Who was he? He could be anyone. Lightyears from Khan and Clan. He could be anyone.

"Buddy, you got a nasty look there. Mom's packed lunch didn't go down too good?"

"As a matter of fact, no..." With a whiplash turn he was in the man's face and snapping, "...which is why I prefer your father's cooking!"

The dull, hushed hubbub of whisper and counter-whisper in the dismal shack was silenced. The merc grappled for his retort, and stammered out, "Exactly where did you say you were from?"

"Me?" Jaime tugged his collar into disarray with a smooth flick, purposefully plucked a button open on his shirt. "I come from the Periphery. Out there, beyond the House rules. Past the type of place you need paperwork to kill a man. The deep Periphery."

He slapped the papers down on the counter, stalking a circle through the mercenaries, who looked on with the faces of people caught under the spotlight without a script. Nobody here knew what to expect next. Jaime barely knew what to expect next. The words spilled out faster than he was thinking. The mouth was flying solo.

"Yeah, you heard right, tr-" trothkin was not a word here, "-ooper. The place I come from, we kill a man before breakfast, just to work up an appetite.

"Then we seize his resources," Jaime snagged a bandolier from a hook-rack marked 'Lost & Fund', draping it over himself, half pleased to note it whiffed of stale drink, "then we bar his kin from seeking redress by combat, then we terminate his name lineage, and then," he threw off the cover of his holdout pistol to dangle in rakish, challenging style, gunmetal gleaming, "we annihilate his entire genetic legacy."

One listener paused with cup halfway to lips, spellbound by the tirade, repeating: "You annihilate his...genetics?"

"That is what I said!" he barked. The mercenary voice came easily now. Talk like you were dehydrated, annoyed and unused to interactions which did not end in violence: in these circumstances, a cinch. "Hell, I seen things make any Warrior lose control of his glandular functions. You spend three days locked inside your cockpit living off your bailout med-pack's tranfusion bag, you come out a changed man. Yeah."

He snatched up a deck abandoned by gaping gamblers, and turned what was meant to be a slick riffle into a fountain of flying cards, but didn't slow down. Every eye was locked on him. "Playing five aces in the deck, I see, gents. Just the way I like it."

Stalking back to the counter, Jaime brushed past the one who'd first opened his mouth, drawing himself up so he would have to lean down to look the mercenary in the eye. "So, no, my honorless sellsword su...wer-rat friend, I am not from around these parts. You might say I-am-" he staggered on the inane contraction, "-from every place there are fortunes to be made and hell waiting to be raised."

He scrawled off on the papers and handing them to a clerk, who shuffled them square like a gunslinger making a quickdraw. Jaime leaned back on the counter. He had them. He had never stood so grand and absurd in his life, and yet here he was, everyone in the room looking at him like he was the first mercenary they had ever met.

He bit into the syllable this time like a mouthful of the crispest fruit. "You might say I'm what hell's already raised up. Name's...Wolf."

[alphamecha-mkii]

Wilhelmina Korsht of Wolf's Dragoons Gamma Regiment by Tan Ho Sim

[verdigrhys]

Wasp Beta Regiment, Wolf's Dragoons

Making little patches of terrain is too much fun

[cal-1maf]

One of Wolf's Dragoons' few working GLT-4Ls, assigned to Gamma Regiment.

[doolallymagpie]

okay, so:

wolf's dragoons: clan advance scouts that went rogue

black widow company: a wolf's dragoons company, led by natasha kerensky, that went rogue against the dragoons by not going rogue against the clans

snord's irregulars: offshoot of the original dragoons force whose general philosophy is "what if indiana jones had a 'mech"

[karagin22]

wilkorsht-madii

[swedebeast]

Painted a Wolf's Dragoon Cyclops as part of a community activity. Emblem was a paint, but overall this was a very fun and easy paint scheme, partly because there was a lot of examples of it to take inspiration from in camospec, but also because it is not super strict and there’s a lot of personal touches you can make.