OBT Forum

Well, I have it in three separate Word docs...the unit overview, the bios, and the miscellaneous info. The first and third I could post as an attachment, but the bio doc at this point is too big to fit as an attachment. I am, however, in the final stages of putting together an up-to-date MekHQ file for the unit/campaign...would it suit your purposes if I posted that as an attachment?

In-System Burn
Monarch-class DropShip Cœur d’Orléans
Bonneau, Federated Suns
15 December 3060

An object slides through space. A miniscule thing, a metal seed streaking toward the blue-white pearl that hangs in the black, the black of jeweler’s velvet.

The seed is honeycombed with staterooms, some luxurious, some spartan. Jean lies in one of the latter, curled in sleep. Occasionally, he moans and shifts. The ship burns forward, and the force of acceleration holds its passengers in a grip like that of a world’s surface. He is pinned in his bunk by relentless gravity.

Jean is going home. He has been on a faraway world for four years, learning to become a soldier. Point Barrow is a whetstone, and it is sharpening him into a weapon, an instrument of war. There is a flint in his eyes now. He has learned to move, to think with precision. He looks in the mirror and sees what he saw in his father’s face for all those years.

It haunts him.

In his dreams, Jean wanders through the long halls of his family estate. The sounds of his family, his mother and brother and sisters, echo through oaken corridors and down ancient staircases. He is a boy again, and he feels the pull of memory. He has had this dream before. He twists in the thin blanket wrapped around him. Sweat slicks his brow.

Jean is standing before his father’s office now. He is frozen at the threshold, dreading what comes next. The odor that until then he had always associated with his father, a musk of sweat and pipe tobacco, has been replaced with something else. Something acrid. It tastes like metal in his mouth.

His father, like every patriarch of the Graves clan, had been a soldier. He had gone off to war when Jean was only three, and he had come back two years later a different man. On the outside he looked the same, but it was as though he’d aged a hundred years. He would hear the adults speak about the war in hushed tones, behind closed doors. It was not a suitable subject for children, his mother would tell him. But Jean knew what was wrong with his father. The boys at school told the same stories of their own fathers, with their vacant stares and their dulled voices. It was the war that had done it. They had Seen Too Much. Jean didn’t know what that meant, really. He just knew it was the fire that was slowly eating his father alive, the spark that would turn his mood from taciturn to an incandescent rage without warning.

Now that awful stench pulls him toward the thing he cannot unsee, no matter how desperately he recoils from this memory. The image before him is burned into his mind’s eye like a brand. His father is slumped back in his chair. A heavy revolver droops from his lifeless right hand, the old family keepsake passed down through the generations, its sandalwood grip resting on the enormous mahogany desk that is the centerpiece of the room. Tendrils of smoke drift his nostrils, from his gaping mouth. From the hole in the back of his head.

Jean tries to scream, but all he can get out is a strangled whimper. He cannot turn away; the dream has locked his gaze upon his father’s ruined face. This is the worst moment of his life. Every cell of his body is flooded with the sheer horror of it. It is the last memory he has of his father, and it will haunt him for the rest of his days.

Slowly, horribly, his father sits up, his shattered visage sloughing bits of skull as he tilts his head forward. His eyes roll toward Jean’s, and they meet. “Son,” his father says, “you don’t look so good.”

Hoarse screaming reels Jean back to the waking world. It takes him a moment before he realizes they are coming from his own throat.

Jean reaches under the cot and withdraws the well-worn flask that has been his sole company on this journey. The whiskey is sweet and warm in his belly. The numbness it brings is a welcome solace. He sits in the dark and sips at the flask. And he thinks about his family, about his little brother and his kid sisters. About his mother, still raising his young siblings and helping them to find their way through the world. About home.

Every hour, Jean thinks, all over the Human Sphere, an infinite number of memories disappear, whole glowing atlases dragged into graves. But during that same hour children are moving about, surveying territory that seems to them entirely new. They push back the darkness; they scatter memories behind them like bread crumbs. The world is remade.

In the five days Jean will be home; his sisters will learn to say "rocks," "heavy," and "snowman." They'll learn the different smells of snow and the slick feel of a plastic sled as their brother drags them up the hill behind the orchard. They will never know the pain he feels. He will never let it touch them, as long as he lives.

We return to the places we're from; we trample faded corners and pencil in new lines. "You've grown up so fast," Jean's mother tells him at breakfast, at dinner. "Look at you." But she's wrong, thinks Jean. You bury your childhood here and there. It waits for you, all your life, to come and dig it back up.