Post by Insano-Man on Sept 20, 2018 2:12:47 GMT -5
SAMSKI GNOMEWOOD (Specialist Operator)
Aliases: Samuel Willinger, Patches, Shortski Stinkwood
Affiliation: Mercenary, Russkiye Guny Contracting LLC
Species: Human? (Male)
Birthplace: Unknown
Birthdate: Unknown
Height: 5'10" (1.78m)
Weight: 190lb - 210lb (86kg - 95kg)
SUMMARY
There's a terror out there, near the Chopping Blocks. Samski Gnomewood is just one part of it. He is the bump in the night. He is the voice on the wind. He is so disgustingly bad at what he does that the sheer idea of working alongside him is what keeps good mercs up at night. If there's a job you absolutely, positively do not want finished, this is the man you hire. Never once seen without his brother-in-law Matchwad, never once seen accepting pay for a successful contract - Gnomewood is the face of low-budget goons all across Set.
APPEARANCE
It's hard to get it across as to just how bland this man is. He's a boring 5'10" with the body profile of just about every human male on the planet. His face has absolutely no defining features; short hair in dark brown, a blank chin, blue eyes, and not a single scar. Not a single strand of hair can be found elsewhere. Every once in a while, his left eye forgets what it's supposed to be doing and wanders off. He's an awkward mirror image of his brother-in-law - which only makes him that much easier to forget.
Samski's gear defines him - which is to say it's just as generic as he is. A useless desert camouflage pattern swallows up a uniform that's just one size too big. Little spots of gear hang from his belt and a harness - why, no one's ever found out. He's never used them. Protecting his head is a dirt-cheap steel helmet in the same tan as his pants and jacket. Underneath, a black ski mask with the same two eye holes you'd expect from a bandit or bank robber. Some days, he's wearing an eyepatch over it. Others, he hands it off to his brother-in-law. Heavy combat boots and clumsy gloves cap off his limbs in black. A simple, tan-hued combat vest covers up his chest, but nobody knows what it's for. It certainly doesn't stop bullets.
That's the end of anything distinct in his arsenal. He's never used the same weapon twice. He's never been seen with any kind of tablet, cellphone, PDA, or anything else. His only piece of electronic equipment is a bulky, blocky, handheld radio that never seems to work. No one knows where he sources his equipment. No one knows where he gets his clothes. No one's even sure he's human. He's always been seen in that same, disposable look, so forgettable he'd be better off not existing.
BEHAVIOR
On most days, Samski likes to think he's in charge. He likes to think he's got some sort of pride to live up to, that he's a man of prestige. He's unnervingly calm and stoic - up until you tell him something with more than three syllables in any given word. The man's dumb as a sack of hammers. There's just no getting around it. When he's not stone-faced stupid, he's stone-cold drunk. That same proud, unshakeable disguise clings on like a sweat stain, twice as useless and ten times as floppy.
If you value your life, you'll stay away from Gnomewood. It's not for the right reasons. Many mercenaries in the blocks have made the mistake of believing him to be a potential ally or a useful distraction. He is neither of these things. Samski couldn't hit the broad side of the planet if someone else was pulling the trigger for him. He's shot people in the back on accident - while aiming in the opposite direction. His hand-to-hand prowess is the stuff of legend; he's knocked himself out at least a dozen times in the past. He has no skills. He has no merit. It's not clear how he's still alive, really.
Samski's voice comes across with a Russian accent, so fake and forced people have shot him just to shut him up. What his real voice sounds like, nobody knows. Why he talks like that, nobody knows. Where he came from, what kind of social norms and cultural customs he was brought up on, nobody knows. No one thinks he's actually sentient. Some people even say he's a glass siren that's started going senile. Some people say he's a crab in a suit. Legends have formed around what terrible thing hides behind that ski mask. The truth is that he's really just that dumb.
GOALS
RELATIONSHIPS
HISTORY
Around 1303, so the story goes, something bubbled up from a pool of slime in the Chopping Blocks. It took the first fifteen letters it could find as its name, stole some poor corpse's clothes, and tried to find a job. Everything went downhill from there. The only bit of the story that's verifiable truth is that Samski was first sighted in 1303, alongside Fischya Matchwad. No one knows where he came from, how he showed up, or what his early years were like. People out in the blocks are actually curious about how his childhood shaped up. It'd be a lesson to learn for future generations.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
When Gnomewood showed up in the blocks, he was supposedly on a reconnaissance contract for "Russkiye Guny Contracting LLC", supposedly based in Cloneston. It took him on the back of a merchant caravan to the towns of Rekjavi, New Gunderson, and Shalestadt. Every time he set his foot off the caravan, he found a new way cause trouble. In Rekjavi, he trapped a town guard in a corner with some kind of lecture that went on for an hour. In New Gunderson, he walked straight into an electric fence and shorted out the town's electrical grid. In Shalestadt, someone broke his nose - why, no one's ever stopped to ask.
Everywhere he went, Samski was asking for information on the local mercenary trade. What he was supposed to be scouting for, no one knew. He never stopped to ask. Somewhere along the way, he forgot. Once that hurdle was cleared, he went on to finding work around the blocks. His first forays were surprisingly successful. People looked at him, saw he had the gear and confidence of a veteran mercenary, and figured him for a castaway from a larger company. No one saw the warning signs - the cheap price tag, the fake accent, the lack of depth perception. He got his contract. Things went downhill from there.
His first job was with a town militia, supposedly Bingham's Bluff out west. It was nothing special; a nest of biscuit crabs were causing trouble for salvage teams. All Samski's squad needed to do was find their burrow, chuck a few smoke grenades into it, and hose the crabs down as they came out. Gnomewood wasn't even there for any of the real work. He was just there as insurance in case any of the crabs broke past the shooting gallery. Not two minutes past the town's gate, he found a way to botch it. He stumbled on a piece of rebar, panicked, and started shooting. He didn't hit anyone on his side, but all the noise pulled in the crabs. Everyone but Samski went home with snipped tendons and bloody noses.
Things kept up about the same for a couple of years. Gnomewood went from town to town, flopping contracts and getting the boot every time. Word spread slow. Most figured that, by the time he was out of sight of their guards, he'd have been eaten by lobsters and horrors. Somehow, against all conceivable odds, Samski survived. Matchwad followed alongside, still just as fighty as ever. On occasion, the two dragged monsters to towns just by yelling at eachother. Rumors and legends are the only things anyone has to go on to explain how the two didn't starve to death.
THE TRASH MAN
In 1305, Samski hit the big leagues - on complete accident. He was mistaken for a senior officer of the then-defunct Mendit Marauders, a half-spacer outfit mostly specializing in reconnaissance. Camp Lugner Loonies tracked him down for a special assignment. He and a couple Looney patrolmen were tasked with scouting out a few garbage hauler facilities, to help gauge Space Looney traffic in the area. Part of the mission involved getting in close and planting a few spy gadgets; remote cameras, motion sensors, and the like. Samski accepted. The stage was set.
Things went well early on. The team split up into two pairs, with Gnomewood and Matchwad on the same team. The other duo kept watch for Space Looney security and staged distractions as necessary. The brothers-in-law made it to their first objective in short order. They broke into the processing facility, eluded its defenses, and navigated to its power plant. They made it out just in the nick of time as the power core overloaded and collapsed the whole facility in a catastrophic explosion. Silently, the two teams slipped away together. The Space Loonies were agape at what had just happened.
The Loonies were agape, too. The objective was never to destroy the facility. They weren't even at the right processing center. The brothers had completely destroyed a random trash pile - and one that was just a few strokes too close to Camp Lugner. In the weeks to come, Space Loonies started to scour the area for Looney patrols. Lugner was forced to pull back all of its personnel and cancel surface operations for at least two months. By the time they'd realized just who was to blame, the brothers had already left.
Camp Lugner put their names on the MASTER network in around September of 1305. It was a warning to the rest of the Loonies in the blocks. Bunkers everywhere were advised to avoid any and all contact with Gnomewood and Matchwad. The cavemen got the message quick - once they were done having a guilty laugh at Lugner's expense. The spacers, on the other hand, didn't quite take the hint. Space Loonies eavesdropped on transmissions going around the MASTER network. They misinterpreted every letter of it.
COBRA'S ROOST
At the time, the Space Loonies mistook it as some kind of joke or hoax. Some said it was just an attempt to put a smoke screen up in front of the truth. They started hunting for Gnomewood. Around the middle of 1306, they found him - in the middle of another operation he and his brother found a way to botch. The spacers swooped in, pulled the brothers out, and stole them away to orbit. They told it to Gnomewood straight; the two were going to work for them or take the scenic route back down to the planet.
Samski had nothing but arrogance, bluster, and defiance - all of it so hollow it made Lebedrovez look like a solid cube of lead. It was Gnomewood's classic act. The Space Loonies still didn't catch on. No one's exactly sure how, but the brothers went on contract soon after. Their goal was to shut down and scuttle an old planetary defense battery from the days of the Pioneer Network. It was somewhere in the Knobbled Cutters, on the Jaskovicz mountain range near the northeast. Far enough from the brothers' ordinary territory that they didn't have to worry about old loyalties, close enough that it was relevant to the fleet.
The defense battery, codenamed Cobra's Roost, was a hard target. It was made to take the kind of beating a spaceship could reliably sling at a planet without cracking the crust. Likewise, it was still online and searching for targets, meaning a shot in its direction was going to mean a few dozen more back at the shooter. Slinging a derelict bomb at it or firing off a planet-cracking salvo was sure to kill off every person for miles around. Even if there weren't any dirt-farming nobodies in the immediate area, Loonies in eyeshot of the site were sure to take it as an attack.
All that meant getting into the control center and shutting it down in person. Under most conditions, it would've been simple; a few technicians with a light security detail to keep the crabs at bay. Unfortunately for the Space Loonies, it wasn't. Every gun in the battery was a base of operations for a highland cult of tech raiders. Space Looney records name them as the "Uprisen", but no one's exactly sure if that was their actual name. Either which way, they weren't going to just let someone walk into their homes, rip out the interesting parts, and leave. For the Space Loonies, it was the classic setup for a combat drop.
Samski and Fischya went down with them. They hit the ground running - and screaming. They were such a distraction for both sides that the operation took an hour longer than was expected. When they weren't jumping in front of crosshairs or drawing fire onto the Space Loonies, they were spraying shots at anything and everything. At least five of the eight-man unit reported shield failures to friendly fire from the brothers. Six suffered suit breaches from fumbled grenades and panic shots. Repeated attempts were made to pull them out before they could make the situation worse. None of them were successful.
Fighting took an upturn indoors. The squad's leader kept the brothers away from the bulk of the fighting, placing them on flanks with a scarcity of targets. At first, it was a solid decision. The team's rate of progress doubled in just the first few minutes. Not long after, Gnomewood and Matchwad disappeared. No one paid it much mind - if they'd found a way to get themselves killed, none of the team were going to argue about it. Instead, the brothers survived. What they did in the background was nothing short of a miracle.
FINEST HOUR
It just wasn't the good kind of miracle, as far as the Space Loonies were concerned. In all the fighting and maneuvering, Samski had restarted the entire command-and-control network. Fischya had synchronized, re-armed, and targeted the battery. In about twenty minutes, the two had accomplished what would've taken a team of experienced engineers several hours to perform. By the time the marines broke into the fire control center of the battery, the guns were already firing. No one had any idea what was happening.
The battery wasn't firing at empty space. The LCV Finest Hour was completely destroyed in orbit during an attempt to dock with Unity Station. At least thirty of its crew were killed or injured, along with several dozen more on Unity Station itself. The ship had absolutely nothing to do with the operation. It wasn't even part of the fleet that had planned it. The Space Loonies behind the raid didn't find out until a week later, when news trickled back to them from J-COM. By that time, they'd already cut the brothers loose. No one could believe what had just happened.
The immediate reaction was a manhunt for Gnomewood and Matchwad. The Space Loonies thought they'd just been slapped by a pair of top-level Looney saboteurs. As time wore on, the sting wore off, and news from the Chopping Blocks set in. They realized what was really going on - who they'd really hired. Humiliated and horrified, they followed after the precedent set by their planetside cousins. They sent word across the Green Angel Array back to J-COM. Other fleets were warned. The people who'd hired them quietly retired to waste management positions on their home ships.
BACK ON THE BLOCK
Vengeance, on the other hand, wasn't forthcoming. The Space Loonies backed off entirely. Instead, they let the brothers off the hook with one reason in mind. If they were that bad, that grossly incompetent, maybe someone else would hire them. Maybe someone who deserved that kind of fate would end up penning a Gnomewood contract. The brothers were spared the spectre of plasma-slinging kill-teams and left to terrorize the blocks. Without any of the major players hiring or hunting them, things started to take a turn for the normal for the two.
They've kept up that game for about five years, pulling jobs for dimwitted traders and fresh faces in the blocks. On occasion, the Loonies or Space Loonies hire them - just to send them as far away from their home base as possible. People out in the rubble watch them as some kind of sick spectator sport. Against every possible expectation, Gnomewood persists. Matchwad endures. Scores of dead mercenaries litter their trail - most of them shot in the back on accident. Countless contracts and operations lie in their history - all monumental failures. Legends have formed about what terrible things hide behind those masks. The truth is that they're really just that dumb.
Aliases: Samuel Willinger, Patches, Shortski Stinkwood
Affiliation: Mercenary, Russkiye Guny Contracting LLC
Species: Human? (Male)
Birthplace: Unknown
Birthdate: Unknown
Height: 5'10" (1.78m)
Weight: 190lb - 210lb (86kg - 95kg)
SUMMARY
There's a terror out there, near the Chopping Blocks. Samski Gnomewood is just one part of it. He is the bump in the night. He is the voice on the wind. He is so disgustingly bad at what he does that the sheer idea of working alongside him is what keeps good mercs up at night. If there's a job you absolutely, positively do not want finished, this is the man you hire. Never once seen without his brother-in-law Matchwad, never once seen accepting pay for a successful contract - Gnomewood is the face of low-budget goons all across Set.
APPEARANCE
It's hard to get it across as to just how bland this man is. He's a boring 5'10" with the body profile of just about every human male on the planet. His face has absolutely no defining features; short hair in dark brown, a blank chin, blue eyes, and not a single scar. Not a single strand of hair can be found elsewhere. Every once in a while, his left eye forgets what it's supposed to be doing and wanders off. He's an awkward mirror image of his brother-in-law - which only makes him that much easier to forget.
Samski's gear defines him - which is to say it's just as generic as he is. A useless desert camouflage pattern swallows up a uniform that's just one size too big. Little spots of gear hang from his belt and a harness - why, no one's ever found out. He's never used them. Protecting his head is a dirt-cheap steel helmet in the same tan as his pants and jacket. Underneath, a black ski mask with the same two eye holes you'd expect from a bandit or bank robber. Some days, he's wearing an eyepatch over it. Others, he hands it off to his brother-in-law. Heavy combat boots and clumsy gloves cap off his limbs in black. A simple, tan-hued combat vest covers up his chest, but nobody knows what it's for. It certainly doesn't stop bullets.
That's the end of anything distinct in his arsenal. He's never used the same weapon twice. He's never been seen with any kind of tablet, cellphone, PDA, or anything else. His only piece of electronic equipment is a bulky, blocky, handheld radio that never seems to work. No one knows where he sources his equipment. No one knows where he gets his clothes. No one's even sure he's human. He's always been seen in that same, disposable look, so forgettable he'd be better off not existing.
BEHAVIOR
On most days, Samski likes to think he's in charge. He likes to think he's got some sort of pride to live up to, that he's a man of prestige. He's unnervingly calm and stoic - up until you tell him something with more than three syllables in any given word. The man's dumb as a sack of hammers. There's just no getting around it. When he's not stone-faced stupid, he's stone-cold drunk. That same proud, unshakeable disguise clings on like a sweat stain, twice as useless and ten times as floppy.
If you value your life, you'll stay away from Gnomewood. It's not for the right reasons. Many mercenaries in the blocks have made the mistake of believing him to be a potential ally or a useful distraction. He is neither of these things. Samski couldn't hit the broad side of the planet if someone else was pulling the trigger for him. He's shot people in the back on accident - while aiming in the opposite direction. His hand-to-hand prowess is the stuff of legend; he's knocked himself out at least a dozen times in the past. He has no skills. He has no merit. It's not clear how he's still alive, really.
Samski's voice comes across with a Russian accent, so fake and forced people have shot him just to shut him up. What his real voice sounds like, nobody knows. Why he talks like that, nobody knows. Where he came from, what kind of social norms and cultural customs he was brought up on, nobody knows. No one thinks he's actually sentient. Some people even say he's a glass siren that's started going senile. Some people say he's a crab in a suit. Legends have formed around what terrible thing hides behind that ski mask. The truth is that he's really just that dumb.
GOALS
- Fame, fortune, money, and power. Samski's a complete tool, but he knows what he wants. He's probably not going to get it.
- Gnomewood wants to...destroy the Loonies? Conquer them? Something. It's not friendly, but he's not in much a position to do anything about it. He's never tried, either.
- Samski's out for Space Looney blood, too. Sort of. It's only happened on accident before. Ask for his reasons, he'll say something about weapons of mass destruction, unjustified power - something.
- Gnomewood wants to kill the Old Man of the Mountain in Forby Munti. Something about insulting him, or stealing his brother-in-law. It makes about as much sense as his reasoning on the Loonies. It is not going to end well.
- Ronald Schwarzwalder, too. Something something mercenary rivalry something something there can be only one. Ronnie hasn't even met the guy. None of it makes sense.
- Should Gnomewood ever find Colonel Dennis Morris, the Duke of Sausage, he will kill him - provided the Duke doesn't rip him in half. Gnomewood's elaboration on the subject is something about absolute power corrupting absolutely and life demanding an end for all. The last time someone asked him, they had a stroke just trying to figure out what he was saying.
- The expert heister Raki'Sakazzah is on Samski's list of people to kill. Somehow, despite faking his death, laying low for two years, and going deeper into hiding during the Cross-Cloneston Crackdown, Gnomewood knew he was alive. Something's not right about this.
- Samski wants the head of Jon Wolfgang Henschel. There is absolutely no reason he should be aware of Henschel's existence, but it's the truth. There isn't a shred of sense or explanation to it.
- Gnomewood wants to kill Detlef Mullane, for...reasons. As per Samski's standard, it's a complicated lecture on ecological preservation and emphasizing mankind's role in nature. How he knows he exists, nobody knows.
- To kill Finnigan Waterpipe and dismantle his old gang - for reasons that are the most vile word stew anyone on the planet has cooked up. Water rationing, fuel budgeting, radiation suppression, barbershop ethics - no one has any idea what he's talking about.
- To destroy Cloneston, Unity Station, and many other places - why? Why? Not a single person on the planet knows. He's talked nukes before. What's a little worrying is that Gnomewood is the kind of person who's daft enough to try, if he's got the chance.
- He's also looking for a computer expert, an AI module, and about three tons of repair supplies that'd only make sense on a space station. Ask him why, he'll forget what he was talking about. It's the one thing that almost sounds sensical. There's just no explanation for it.
RELATIONSHIPS
- As far as family goes, Gnomewood's always been seen with his brother-in-law Matchwad, but that's about it. No one knows who married who. No one knows who could be desperate enough to marry either. Everything else is a complete mystery.
- The Loonies hired Samski once. Once. They're not going to make the same mistake twice. Gnomewood's opinion is some complicated, pseudo-philosophical tripe on competing mercenary companies draining the global economy - or something. It's better not to ask him, in all honesty.
- The Space Loonies hired Samski once. Once. It ended when Gnomewood shot down the frigate Finest Hour. How? Nobody knows. Samski's take on the Space Loonies is something about how interstellar commerce devalues the human factor of society - or something. Sense isn't there to be found.
- The Cult of Meat knew better the first time. They didn't hire him. They don't plan on it. The Loonies actually tried to sneak in a Gnomewood contract as part of a sabotage operation. It didn't work, but credit's due for creativity. On the Cult, Samski has an hour-long speech on the value of life waiting in his arsenal. At least twice, he's fallen asleep in the middle of it. No one actually knows what he's trying to say.
- On the subject of other species, Samski is a special one. He maintains that redworlders don't exist - despite working alongside them several times in the past. He's driven to some kind of existential horror by the sight of sorassan or unionites. For the Zaschia, he's professed a deep admiration for their "articulate simplicity" - and hasn't ever explained what he means. Boglanders scare the Hell out of him. Paleworlders and all others push the man to rambling, faux-intellectual gibberish - even if they're clawing for his throat.
- People in the Chopping Blocks don't know how Samski's still alive. It's like some kind of spectator sport whenever he's found work. People line up in little camper convoys, following after his blundering attempts at stealth. Somehow, despite being so resoundingly incompetent at everything he does, he's provided a kind of livelihood to a niche subset of merchants. How Gnomewood finds work is simple and sinister. Fresh faces with a bone to pick see his rock-bottom price. They figure they've got nothing to lose. They wise up soon after - if Samski hasn't killed them on accident.
- People outside the Chopping Blocks don't know about Gnomewood - except for Cloneston. He's a famous face in the big city. Samski and his brother-in-law have been the headlining goons in just about every action movie for the past decade. They've died by the thousands in video games. The most disturbing part about it is that just about every portrayal makes more sense than the real thing. When Samski dies on the big screen, he stays dead. Out in the real world, he just keeps coming back. Gnomewood doesn't even acknowledge it.
- Samski's relationship with Fischya Matchwad is complicated, to say the least. Nobody knows how they're in-laws. Nobody knows why they look alike. No one knows who married who. Legend has it that Matchwad married a glass siren - somehow. It goes on that one of its relatives stole his face and grew into Gnomewood. Either which way, the two are always arguing about who's in charge. They're never apart, which makes it all the more difficult. It's never been established if the two are even fully conscious of eachother's existence.
HISTORY
Around 1303, so the story goes, something bubbled up from a pool of slime in the Chopping Blocks. It took the first fifteen letters it could find as its name, stole some poor corpse's clothes, and tried to find a job. Everything went downhill from there. The only bit of the story that's verifiable truth is that Samski was first sighted in 1303, alongside Fischya Matchwad. No one knows where he came from, how he showed up, or what his early years were like. People out in the blocks are actually curious about how his childhood shaped up. It'd be a lesson to learn for future generations.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
When Gnomewood showed up in the blocks, he was supposedly on a reconnaissance contract for "Russkiye Guny Contracting LLC", supposedly based in Cloneston. It took him on the back of a merchant caravan to the towns of Rekjavi, New Gunderson, and Shalestadt. Every time he set his foot off the caravan, he found a new way cause trouble. In Rekjavi, he trapped a town guard in a corner with some kind of lecture that went on for an hour. In New Gunderson, he walked straight into an electric fence and shorted out the town's electrical grid. In Shalestadt, someone broke his nose - why, no one's ever stopped to ask.
Everywhere he went, Samski was asking for information on the local mercenary trade. What he was supposed to be scouting for, no one knew. He never stopped to ask. Somewhere along the way, he forgot. Once that hurdle was cleared, he went on to finding work around the blocks. His first forays were surprisingly successful. People looked at him, saw he had the gear and confidence of a veteran mercenary, and figured him for a castaway from a larger company. No one saw the warning signs - the cheap price tag, the fake accent, the lack of depth perception. He got his contract. Things went downhill from there.
His first job was with a town militia, supposedly Bingham's Bluff out west. It was nothing special; a nest of biscuit crabs were causing trouble for salvage teams. All Samski's squad needed to do was find their burrow, chuck a few smoke grenades into it, and hose the crabs down as they came out. Gnomewood wasn't even there for any of the real work. He was just there as insurance in case any of the crabs broke past the shooting gallery. Not two minutes past the town's gate, he found a way to botch it. He stumbled on a piece of rebar, panicked, and started shooting. He didn't hit anyone on his side, but all the noise pulled in the crabs. Everyone but Samski went home with snipped tendons and bloody noses.
Things kept up about the same for a couple of years. Gnomewood went from town to town, flopping contracts and getting the boot every time. Word spread slow. Most figured that, by the time he was out of sight of their guards, he'd have been eaten by lobsters and horrors. Somehow, against all conceivable odds, Samski survived. Matchwad followed alongside, still just as fighty as ever. On occasion, the two dragged monsters to towns just by yelling at eachother. Rumors and legends are the only things anyone has to go on to explain how the two didn't starve to death.
THE TRASH MAN
In 1305, Samski hit the big leagues - on complete accident. He was mistaken for a senior officer of the then-defunct Mendit Marauders, a half-spacer outfit mostly specializing in reconnaissance. Camp Lugner Loonies tracked him down for a special assignment. He and a couple Looney patrolmen were tasked with scouting out a few garbage hauler facilities, to help gauge Space Looney traffic in the area. Part of the mission involved getting in close and planting a few spy gadgets; remote cameras, motion sensors, and the like. Samski accepted. The stage was set.
Things went well early on. The team split up into two pairs, with Gnomewood and Matchwad on the same team. The other duo kept watch for Space Looney security and staged distractions as necessary. The brothers-in-law made it to their first objective in short order. They broke into the processing facility, eluded its defenses, and navigated to its power plant. They made it out just in the nick of time as the power core overloaded and collapsed the whole facility in a catastrophic explosion. Silently, the two teams slipped away together. The Space Loonies were agape at what had just happened.
The Loonies were agape, too. The objective was never to destroy the facility. They weren't even at the right processing center. The brothers had completely destroyed a random trash pile - and one that was just a few strokes too close to Camp Lugner. In the weeks to come, Space Loonies started to scour the area for Looney patrols. Lugner was forced to pull back all of its personnel and cancel surface operations for at least two months. By the time they'd realized just who was to blame, the brothers had already left.
Camp Lugner put their names on the MASTER network in around September of 1305. It was a warning to the rest of the Loonies in the blocks. Bunkers everywhere were advised to avoid any and all contact with Gnomewood and Matchwad. The cavemen got the message quick - once they were done having a guilty laugh at Lugner's expense. The spacers, on the other hand, didn't quite take the hint. Space Loonies eavesdropped on transmissions going around the MASTER network. They misinterpreted every letter of it.
COBRA'S ROOST
At the time, the Space Loonies mistook it as some kind of joke or hoax. Some said it was just an attempt to put a smoke screen up in front of the truth. They started hunting for Gnomewood. Around the middle of 1306, they found him - in the middle of another operation he and his brother found a way to botch. The spacers swooped in, pulled the brothers out, and stole them away to orbit. They told it to Gnomewood straight; the two were going to work for them or take the scenic route back down to the planet.
Samski had nothing but arrogance, bluster, and defiance - all of it so hollow it made Lebedrovez look like a solid cube of lead. It was Gnomewood's classic act. The Space Loonies still didn't catch on. No one's exactly sure how, but the brothers went on contract soon after. Their goal was to shut down and scuttle an old planetary defense battery from the days of the Pioneer Network. It was somewhere in the Knobbled Cutters, on the Jaskovicz mountain range near the northeast. Far enough from the brothers' ordinary territory that they didn't have to worry about old loyalties, close enough that it was relevant to the fleet.
The defense battery, codenamed Cobra's Roost, was a hard target. It was made to take the kind of beating a spaceship could reliably sling at a planet without cracking the crust. Likewise, it was still online and searching for targets, meaning a shot in its direction was going to mean a few dozen more back at the shooter. Slinging a derelict bomb at it or firing off a planet-cracking salvo was sure to kill off every person for miles around. Even if there weren't any dirt-farming nobodies in the immediate area, Loonies in eyeshot of the site were sure to take it as an attack.
All that meant getting into the control center and shutting it down in person. Under most conditions, it would've been simple; a few technicians with a light security detail to keep the crabs at bay. Unfortunately for the Space Loonies, it wasn't. Every gun in the battery was a base of operations for a highland cult of tech raiders. Space Looney records name them as the "Uprisen", but no one's exactly sure if that was their actual name. Either which way, they weren't going to just let someone walk into their homes, rip out the interesting parts, and leave. For the Space Loonies, it was the classic setup for a combat drop.
Samski and Fischya went down with them. They hit the ground running - and screaming. They were such a distraction for both sides that the operation took an hour longer than was expected. When they weren't jumping in front of crosshairs or drawing fire onto the Space Loonies, they were spraying shots at anything and everything. At least five of the eight-man unit reported shield failures to friendly fire from the brothers. Six suffered suit breaches from fumbled grenades and panic shots. Repeated attempts were made to pull them out before they could make the situation worse. None of them were successful.
Fighting took an upturn indoors. The squad's leader kept the brothers away from the bulk of the fighting, placing them on flanks with a scarcity of targets. At first, it was a solid decision. The team's rate of progress doubled in just the first few minutes. Not long after, Gnomewood and Matchwad disappeared. No one paid it much mind - if they'd found a way to get themselves killed, none of the team were going to argue about it. Instead, the brothers survived. What they did in the background was nothing short of a miracle.
FINEST HOUR
It just wasn't the good kind of miracle, as far as the Space Loonies were concerned. In all the fighting and maneuvering, Samski had restarted the entire command-and-control network. Fischya had synchronized, re-armed, and targeted the battery. In about twenty minutes, the two had accomplished what would've taken a team of experienced engineers several hours to perform. By the time the marines broke into the fire control center of the battery, the guns were already firing. No one had any idea what was happening.
The battery wasn't firing at empty space. The LCV Finest Hour was completely destroyed in orbit during an attempt to dock with Unity Station. At least thirty of its crew were killed or injured, along with several dozen more on Unity Station itself. The ship had absolutely nothing to do with the operation. It wasn't even part of the fleet that had planned it. The Space Loonies behind the raid didn't find out until a week later, when news trickled back to them from J-COM. By that time, they'd already cut the brothers loose. No one could believe what had just happened.
The immediate reaction was a manhunt for Gnomewood and Matchwad. The Space Loonies thought they'd just been slapped by a pair of top-level Looney saboteurs. As time wore on, the sting wore off, and news from the Chopping Blocks set in. They realized what was really going on - who they'd really hired. Humiliated and horrified, they followed after the precedent set by their planetside cousins. They sent word across the Green Angel Array back to J-COM. Other fleets were warned. The people who'd hired them quietly retired to waste management positions on their home ships.
BACK ON THE BLOCK
Vengeance, on the other hand, wasn't forthcoming. The Space Loonies backed off entirely. Instead, they let the brothers off the hook with one reason in mind. If they were that bad, that grossly incompetent, maybe someone else would hire them. Maybe someone who deserved that kind of fate would end up penning a Gnomewood contract. The brothers were spared the spectre of plasma-slinging kill-teams and left to terrorize the blocks. Without any of the major players hiring or hunting them, things started to take a turn for the normal for the two.
They've kept up that game for about five years, pulling jobs for dimwitted traders and fresh faces in the blocks. On occasion, the Loonies or Space Loonies hire them - just to send them as far away from their home base as possible. People out in the rubble watch them as some kind of sick spectator sport. Against every possible expectation, Gnomewood persists. Matchwad endures. Scores of dead mercenaries litter their trail - most of them shot in the back on accident. Countless contracts and operations lie in their history - all monumental failures. Legends have formed about what terrible things hide behind those masks. The truth is that they're really just that dumb.
