#devlin stone

Inner Sphere: Wait shit the Blakists are going to absolutely fuck us

Devlin Stone: But what if, and go with me on this journey, we enlisted the assistance of a bunch of extremely angry elite warriors in OmniMechs

Inner Sphere: But where would we get those?!

...say that the best ideas are never had just the once, but I'll articulate this one for my own. Everybody has some idea, it seems, of what would 'fix' BT's canon, and sure, there's what to critique. But I think the eras themselves are just fine- I would only change one* thing: swap places between Jihad and Dark Ages.

*(read, a lot more than one.)

Civil War finishes off. It's a whole new ball game in the Sphere. FedCom shattered, Reaving parts Wardens and Crusaders, Black Dragon crisis, Second Star League runs out of gas, ComStar-Word of Blake schism. But- this one's important -we keep the FWL intact.

What follows will come to be called the Dark Age- beginning with a Sphere-wide HPG crash on Grey Monday. (Both the Word and ComStar say the other did it.) We've basically reverted back to Third Succession War-level raiding and pillaging.

Comms? Limited. Relationships? Strained. Nobody trusts anyone, and nobody really has the inertia to do big-time fighting. Knife fight in a phone booth, no space to swing or dodge.

Now, into this feudal morass comes Thomas Marik. The real one, not a clone here. His son Joshua is dying. Not of shot or shell or laser, but of leukemia. At wit's end, despairing of treatment, he goes to the miracle workers- not just true believers but second-generation true believers -who his nation gave shelter to: the Word of Blake.

Thomas is a convert, and a fiery one. His pyre starts to suck the oxygen away from the actual leaders of the faith. The acolytes who preached to him are now gathering to hear him preach and lead the tech-vespers. (It's always the converts you have to watch out for, like certain Corsican Frenchmen, for instance.) But fast and scourge and pray as Thomas might- Joshua Marik dies.

The sin couldn't have been Joshua's, and Thomas is certain it was not his, give his all (body, soul, massive state coffers) to the Word as he did. So the holy sword is suddenly turned outwards, to scour the stain of the Sphere. This begins what is called the Jihad.

As Word-FWL forces (Thomas having signed over his nation as the beginning of the new heavenly kingdom) attack- well, everyone, pretty much, from Outreach to the Houses to that Simon Magus perched on Tukayyid, the fighting takes one notable hostage, which is to say, totally non-noteworthy: a man who calls himself, though no records can be found to confirm him as such, Devlin Stone.

Stone emerges from a prison camp breakout and rises meteorically. He's fishing the Fidelis out of their long exile. He's dealing with the Draconians. He's forging an alliance with the Clans. He's got Lyrans and Davions and mercenaries oh my, and when the rest of the FWL turn on Marik, the holy empire falls in one last, brutal campaign.

The Master is still not killed by enemy action in this, we're keeping the falling masonry thing.

In the aftermath, as the war storm parts and the fallen are buried, Stone claims Terra for his new Republic- though not for long; the sullen hunger that held sway over the Clans has been sated at last with all-you-can-eat Blakist, and a new generation of blooded, hardened Warriors (including one Alaric Wolf and Malvina Jade Falcon) are circling in on him.

Cue from their our familiar conclusions, although we do put in the part about Devlin dueling Alaric, because Stone should be as off-the-chain as possible.

...and sombre occasion- the funeral for a man who was not dead, and, indeed, was like as not to outlive all those present. But they carried it through anyway, sealing Devlin, this man who had grabbed history by the throat and shaken it, into cryogenic sleep, before filing out of the ward in perturbed murmuring.

...give Devlin Stone something resembling an actual backstory, which I object to in the first place, but if they did- I want it to be absolutely nothing. He's not the last scion of the Camerons, he's not a runaway heir, he's not an incognito mercenary ace. He was barely a PFC, he was like a shelf-stocker in some two-bit merc outfit, he was a straight-up space trucker with some experience in a HaulerMech who just happened to get snagged by ComStar.

I don't want a legendary origin. Beneath every secret he had absolutely nothing but an unbeatable poker face and a relentless drive to freak it on the entirety of the known galaxy. Nobody can find out anything about him because the last publicly available record of his existence was a picture with his high school marching band in a yearbook or something.