The art for this post is called Bar Fly, created by Tano Bonfanti. His style is <chef’s kiss">, and you should click the links, buy his art, and display it proudly on your wall. Or face. Or baculum. Do what you want.

In this post: killer fiction, BattleTech: Destiny cards for three Falcon Variants, Nabor’s Bandersnatch Bella, and terrifying Schrack trained animal units per the BattleTech: Beyond Electrodrome Spectacle rules.

The Last Third

BattleTech: Beyond Electrodrome.

From Electrodrome Nights: Nabor and Bella

Jack had always revered the men who donated to this bar. He remembered the greenish tinge of jealousy hidden in the raucous hues of The Reliquary’s neon signage. The place was a sort of Mecca for the lost souls of the Electrodrome, haunted by the living and the dead. It had the sort of blood-christened religious weight of a fallen soldier's knife. Yes, it was a drinking establishment with a reputation for wild nights and wild fights, for loose women and dangerous men. But this bar was more than a bar.

The Reliquary, as its name would suggest, was a sacred place. The posts, the walls, the very bar top itself, were covered in metallic scales, armor fragments and shell casings harvested in the countless Electrodrome bouts. Each scrap of metal signified a warrior's life lost out in the Sprawl, men and women obliterated by lances of barely visible light, roasted alive in their cockpits, run down and butchered by gangers and angry locals after ejecting, never to be seen again.

Jack's contributions made him feel sick to his stomach, to his soul, poisoned. A cloud of volatilized black blood swelled in his chest, in his mind, pressurizing him with murderous hatred. This pressure rose and fell like the tides of a deathly ocean, and when it slackened, when his malice abandoned him, he was left with despair, a thick, viscous slime that clung to his limbs and his guts and dragged them down, deeper, into the darkness, towards the bottle and the pistol to the temple and the release.

Seamus died first. Nabor blew Hraesvelg's head to pieces with his twin scatterguns. Jack still shuddered at the memory of those yawning barrels sweeping past his own little ‘mech, bursts of flame and kinetic death tearing into his armor like it was papier mâché and punching into the sick and dying buildings behind him.

Jack had been moving fast, harassing Bella from the shadows of the concrete jungle. He jinked away from the guns' killing gaze, HEAP and cluster rounds murdering his afterimage. The shots missed by ever-narrower margins until he was concealed in the long shadows of concrete towers.

All three of them, the Triplets, the Jaktfalk, piloted heavily modified Falcons, salvaged from the bad old days of the SLDF. The armor was thin, but their mobility obviated hardened defenses. Who needs armor if they can’t hit you? Its a cute notion until you get hit.

Seamus botched his landing, ruined his ankle and took a knee right in the middle of the open concrete, bowing before Bella’s deadly scorn. Suddenly the one thing keeping him in the fight was gone. The best he could get himself was flat-footed, slashing away with his medium pulse laser, before he was dismantled by the torrent of LB-X fire sweeping down the street. Seamus became as smoke in a sandstorm.

They had to take him out of his ruined cockpit with buckets and sponges.

Jack was gritting his teeth now, thumbing two small patches of StarGuard that had been fused to the bar surface with the laser-etched words Seamus O'Neill: Hraesvelg, and Eric O'Neill: Habrok. He snatched his glass and tossed the contents back. The synthetic tequila stung, acrid and clear, like the tears that still burned behind his eyes, holding his reputation as a killer hostage, threatening to break free every time the scenes replayed.

Nabor took Eric too.

Eric was his younger brother. The runt. “Cutie” as they used to call him tauntingly. Eric grew up fast though. He, in his cherished Habrok, had been squatting on the roof of Michigan Heights. They had lived there as children. He remembered how the sun always found ways through the greasy clouds and dirty windows to wake them from childhood naps. He perched there, tormenting Bella with lasers and SRM’s, even as Seamus vanished from the world.

Jack could hear Eric roaring over the comms, cursing Nabor, thin trails of vapor connecting his launch tubes to the ruptured wreckage of one of Bella’s massive autocannons. There was a cheer of exaltation, not just from the fans, but from Jack himself as the brothers loosed volleys of missiles to drive the killing nails flush. Panic in his heart faded slightly, and the metallic scent of vengeance rose on a blood-tinged mist.

As the brothers’ fury swelled, it seemed to find seed in the world, to coalesce in the air above Habrok, thickening into a shimmering, wheeling funnel of darkness as Nabor’s remaining cannon, untouched, apocalyptic, swung in slow motion to seek its mark. Before the gun could fire, chaos rained, and a screaming black cloud, filled with beaks and talons and feathers, swallowed Habrok whole, obliterating it in parts from sight.

It was Xemya, that fuck. May the Devil split him from crown to cock. They had all grown up together. Ran in the streets together. Fought together. Chased girls together. But they had diverged after the halcyon days. The O’Neill’s had chosen the path of the ‘Drome, while Xemya chose the path of his father. Xemya chose the “poultry business”.

Schrack. Like eagles, but bigger. Nastier. Smarter. Monsters. Monsters that would carry you into the sky and drop you to make you an easier meal. Monsters that would tear a hole in the roof of your groundcar to find your brains. Monsters that would chop off your arm with their beak and swallow it whole just as soon as scream at you. They were the pride of Xemya’s family, and their commands were the first words he had ever spoken.

Last they had heard, Xemya had taken over his father’s aerie after he passed and was making a literal killing in the Zveryuga, where animals and men went to bathe in glory and bloodshed. Word was he had gotten involved with some nasty characters, had gotten ambitious and stepped on the wrong toes. Xemya, never the coward, stepped again and stepped harder. Word was urchins with strong stomachs could find anything from platinum rings and luxury watches to gold teeth in the guano heaps left by “Xemya’s Children”.

It was Xemya’s Children that swarmed Eric. Those beaks never could have punched through a cockpit, but the devils had been trained well, trained to seek out the gaps between armor plates: beaks went in, guts came out. They tore the meat and nerves out at Habrok’s right shoulder and the arm went limp.

Eric panicked. He swatting at the creatures with his left arm instead of immediately punching his jump jets. He flailed, completely unmanned, as Bella plodded patiently backwards to crush her thin rear armor into a dilapidated building, hiding it from Jack’s stinging salvos. It was only after Eric had smeared one of the huge birds across his canopy that he finally realized his mistake and triggered his super-charged PRS’s. Too late, Nabor had him dead to rights.

Habrok rose with painful slowness, careening towards the side of the neighboring building, breaking away with destination as a distant afterthought. Jack watched a clump of schrack disengage, whirl, and scream in fury while the rest of the flock stuck with the kill, hard beaks and talons digging greedily into the small openings they had found. Their dopamine-soaked brains kept them in the cuts, ripping and tearing and pulling away mechanical components, caring little for the shuddering of their quarry as it rose in a languid arc.

Bella spoke.

Six words tore forth in quick succession, a string of sharp concussions, curses, breaking apart the world, peeling gouts of dust from the ground and the surrounding city, crushing the air and all before her. The armor piercing shrapnel punched through schrack and armor plating with equal ease, reached inside of Habrok, and found sleeping ordinance.

The first fist of the ensuing explosion must have crushed the reactor shielding and ruptured it, for there was a microsecond flash as the plasma vented in a blade of blinding white fire, slashing into the side of the building, so celestially bright that it was seared into Jack’s vision. Then there was a sharp detonation and fire bloomed. Misguided missiles fizzled and exploded at the ends of drunken coils of smoke as glittering pieces Falcon were flung in every direction, loose trash scattered.

A single spike of smoke and light rose true, arcing upwards from the conflagration as the black hand of despair squeezing Jack’s heart relaxed in millimeters. Eric’s ejector seat had carried him to safety, thank God. They’d drink-

The butchery of schrack that had broken free, had hovered nearby, had watched with wrath-filled eyes as their siblings disappeared in the deadly light, was moving. Upwards. They had seen the strange object rising. They had noticed the single piece of order escaping the ruinous chaos. They had seen orange parachutes billow and snap taut. Their cries for vengeance sang forth as they rushed up, deadly arrows loosed, converging on a single point: a man in a chair, floating in the sky.

Jack felt his soul drop into a cold black ocean, felt the chill of the lifeless waters gulping his native warmth, pulling him deeper, down, darker, darker, darker, as the form on the ejector seat, so distant, so small, seemed to thrash, the seat swayed like a toy, the parachutes crumpled, the nightmarish things seemed to lower their prize to a nearby roof, to huddle over it, heads darting down and then tearing back, away, apart…

Jack O’Neill. Jackie-Boy. Vedfolnir. Storm Pale. The Wind Bleached. The Wind-Witherer. Last of the Jaktfalk. Last of the O’Neill’s. His brothers were little more than armored postage stamps welded to a bar now, two little scales on the flank of a serpent covered in thousands more, just like them. Lost in the panoply. Laughed and joked over, covered in cheap beer and cigarette tar and fry grease and vomit.

Jack pounded his fist, wrapped around the thick glass tumbler, onto the patchwork-armored bar. It bounced off of his brothers’ placard, nearly flying free, ejecting the last drops of synthetic tequila in a leaping, glittering comet. Goddamn. God-fucking-DAMN that fucking Nabor.

His brothers blood called for vengeance. Their savaged eidolons demanded it. But there was little chance Nabor would lower himself to the Bug Leagues, where a solo light like Vedfolnir would be confined. Even if challenged directly, Nabor’s sense of humor was bigger than his sense if pride. If Jack was going to kill Nabor, he would need a team.

"Hey, Rubio”, he grated. “Who do you know would want to help me take down Nabor?"

"Depends”, said Rubio. “We talking for money or for vengeance?"

"Both".

Rubio leaned back, drying a glass by hand, chewing his lip thoughtfully. "With vengeance doing the talkin', there's no shortage. Nabor’s fucked up more ‘Dromers than stimms and streetwalkers combined. Quantity is always there. Hectar Hex, Lizzie Lizard-Lips, Big-Top Bobby, Mylo ‘N Otis, The Cube, The Tangerine Dream…"

"Meat for the meat grinder".

"But money…thats where the quality is gonna lie. There’s plenty of hired guns that would be happy to lend a killing hand. Question is what you can afford and who’s willing to take the risk of toeing it with Bella."

“Pull some strings for me, would ya?”

“Sure thing, but listen Jackie, Nabor and Bella, they've torn through the last three-”

“HE FED MY GODDAMNED BROTHER TO BIRDS!” Jack roared, flecks of spit and tequila dotting the bar. The room’s volume waned a moment before waxing, amused.

Rubio broke eye contact, the lancing torrent of hate-flame that blazed forth from Jack's eyes melting his normally granite demeanor. He looked down, nodding slowly, sagely.

“Sure thing, Jackie. I'll see who I can find.”

“Good, Rubio”, Jack said through gritted teeth. “I really appreciate that.” he said, as he swept cubed pieces of his tempered-glass tumbler off of his brothers’ remains.

It was going to take time, a few days maybe, and that was fine. Jack had a few errands to take care of. He wondered what brought Xemya’s schrack to the Sprawl that day, f he had been paid to participate in the bout, unaware of the combatants, or if he had sought it out, as a sort of fond farewell to friends forgotten. Jack was going to have to pay Xemya a visit. See if he could extract a bitter apology.

And maybe he’d bring a falcon of his own to help his childhood friend find the right words.

I calculated pilot value as +20% for improving Gunnery skill from baseline 4 to 3 and as 2x(+10%) for improving Piloting skill from baseline 5 to 3.

I took a look at the various forums and there seemed to be a consensus that +20% is about spot-on for improving gunnery skill by 1 point, but that +15% per point of piloting improvement was just too damn much, so I sawed it off at the knees and gave it a +10% cost.

Any comments on the calculation there? I’m more of a 30,000ft thinker, and so don’t tend to dive eagerly into “deets” such as these.

Also, if we’re talking about BattleTech: Destiny, let me axe you this: do we have a satisfactory system for calculating Battle Value that includes the secondary skills (Tactics, Guts, and Leadership)?

BattleTech: Destiny + *BattleTech: Beyond Electrodrome’s* Spectacle Rules

I finally played a little BattleTech: Destiny the other week and as you may have noticed, I’ve been bitten by the bug. I’m in. So I think I’m going to be generating content more in line with DFA’s BT:D rules than previous BattleTech: Total Warfare rules. I love the old school, I need the old school, but the way of the future is Destiny, baby.

And if I’m wrong…

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Ciao, baby.