The awesome artist of the thumbnail and one of the coolest depictions of the black marauder ever was done by tychorianDraws. The guy makes really cool artwork revolving around mechs, surrealist imagery and horror stuff. Go check him out on X at: x.com/tychorion1

Mechwarrior: "That mech is haunted! Ghosts of past pilots linger in it!" Titan Princeps: "That's a feature."

"That can only be attributed to ghost, or spirits, or something more evil." ComStar. It's just ComStar.

I think the most wholesome part of the concept behind 13, is that a LOT of mechs in the IS get passed down through families. So the idea of my Warhammer frying the cockpit of a poor unfortunate Capellan drone with generations of my family cheering me on like WWF fans makes me smile

What's great about the 'supernatural' in BattleTech: "There's no more Supernatural in BattleTech, than there is in reality" Been alive long enough to agree with this, wholeheartidly.

Imagine the Black Marauder and Gaffas Ghost meeting because the later wants to protect his descended from the Black Marauder.

One of my favorite ghost possessions in Battletech has got to be Terry Ford's Charger: Number Seven. Suffice it to say Terry was the luckiest mechwarrior in the Inner Sphere up until the 4th Succession War; Terry was crazy enough to try a Highlander Burial on an enemy mech, then face planted due to a bad gyro. His mech would be refitted by Sorensen's Sabers but would not work for any other pilot than Terry. Then one day, it mysteriously vanished from the dropship that it was in during a routine drop drill. Ultimately, only Terry understood how to used that old CGR-1A1 that he maintained all by himself, and Number Seven didn't want any other pilot than Terry Ford.

I got a BM story, this comes from a friend who did a semi homebrewed RP set in BT universe in the years after tukayyid. The PC mercs along with some others and reborn star league forces were involved in a series of batchalls vs combined JF/Jaguar/Shark forces (tho the latter were still severly weakened and even down to using IS mechs) on nameless planet that got depopulated during the succession wars. During some of the early battles clanners started raising hell about a violation of the terms of the batchall and "cowardly attacks outside the agreed parameters " , some other claims were alarming for them like claiming that IS used chemical weapons, this actually caused the fighting to be paused in order to investigate the locations where the claims were made. Well the joint groups doing that started getting attacked and as usual both sides blamed the other for interfering and soon the battles kept going. Here i have to add that according to my friend who was the DM that the players were newbies to the setting and thus while he did drop hints they likely didn't know of the mythical status of this beast. So he actually had a an old mechwarrior sort of drop a distorted campfire tail of the discovery of the black marauder and its first pilot. But yeah that pilot would soon get killed and attacks by a mysterious machine intensified but what was strange was that reports kept coming in about this unknown attacker specifically targeting marauders and its succesors and variants like MII oh and mad cats. In fact the few times the groups it attacked managed to react and get a solid lock to return fire they noticed teh attacker ignored all of them seemingly focusing on said machines. It only got creepier after this as isolated lances started just getting wiped out with one common element being that they all were heavier ones and had atleast one marauder. To make it weirder in some situations the data recovered from battle computers made it seem almost like the marauder suddenly attacked its lancemates, while in others there was no marauder to be found but there were what appeared to be marks of the marauders being dragged off like it was pulled by somethings. At this point everyone even the clanners were getting spooked and/or tired of this shit and a truce was called to combine forces and hunt this attacker down using the mechs it seemed to focus on as bait. It worked except what attacked the task force was something else, 8 marauders , pitch black in color except they were not just simple marauders. They were frankenmarauders combining the torso of marauder with various components from related mechs. For example one of them had 8 standard marauder arms with two at teh side and 4 in the usual position just parted. Another one carried and AC20 instead of one of its arms with other being a mad cat arm and a clan gauss set above its cockpit. The combat was insane with the combined clan/IS task force losing 52 mechs out of 60 and countless other assets as well to put down those 8 marauders which were insanely durable and their performance was far above any marauder their wrecks needing to be blasted apart for them to stop trying to attack. Once it was over IT appeared on a ridge and what could only be described as a "maniacal laughter " could be heard seeming coming straight trough the PCs neural helms.

The black Marauder is an absolute horror. Hands down the most terrifying thing in the whole of the lore.

You also have deep periphery folklore about aliens in jump space, the Aquila-class "Philadelphia" jumpship, genecaste, greenghosts, Minnesota Tribe (Clan Wolverine survivors ) and Wobbie planets hidden with in jumpspace too.

I love how an advert interrupted the bag pipes LITERALLY a second after they started.

You know... when some abomination of the warp in 40k wipes out some incalculable quantity of life in some atrocity against reality, it doesn't really mean anything. When a mechwarrior asks the astechs where the bagpipes were coming from, there is a certain awe.

I think I encountered a pair of pilotless mechs in HBS's battle tech once. They engaged me in combat like normal but nether took any pilot damage from knockdowns, torso breaks/ammo blowouts or cockpit hits. Over all it was kinda weird just a pair of Green painted Orion Heavy mechs that interrupted a fight I was in with pirates. I also happen to use a green and white paint scheme so it was a bit odd to see similarly painted mechs shooting at both me and the opfor and their faction symbol was just a question mark. Oh and there was a Double heat sink in the loot pool after the battle. It might have been a bugged fight or I might have got jumped by Star League ghost mechs. Ether way I got a double heat sink from it.

That's horrifying, but given the kinds of stories we share IRL, I feel this not only doesn't break the setting... it makes it feel more Human.

The story of the black Marauder sticks out to me because this kind of reminds me of something in the lore concerning the Casper drone warships the star league couldn't jump the stone warship between systems because every time they kept going rogue

Definitely some kind of extradimensional noneuclidian entity, possessing a Marauder mech. Nobody really understands jumpspace or what is in it. Perhaps, at some point, some where, a group of Star League scientists plunged too far and too deep and found something dark staring back at them from the abyss. Drums, drums in the deep... The shadow moves in the darkness.

One of the cooler things about the Battletech setting, which is tied into the horror stories, is that it is part of a multiverse. Jumpships create a drive field about themselves and the drop ships they carry, the jump is kind of a temporary wormhole between two points. If everything goes well no one notices a thing although many insist they feel the jump. Now the weird part is every now and then someone has a psychotic break during a jump and starts insisting they are in the wrong universe/reality that where they are isn't where they are from and something is wrong, usually this is just tossed up to the stress of living and traveling in the Innersphere got to someone and they live the rest of their life in a psych ward until they adjust to reality. Sometimes they have artifacts with them, usually minor such as oddities in paperwork, identification, computer code or equipment serial numbers. Star League, Comstar, and NAIS researchers feel that it might be possible to jump to similar but alternate realities under certain conditions, but to the best of their knowledge have never been able to deliberately do so under controlled research cobditions, except for the rumors that the Star League and Terran Hegemony were successful but deemed such research to dangerous to continue. The theory is that its much easier to end up in a neighboring reality that is very similar to your own, so similar you might not even notice (one digit in one number in one computer file in one storage device somewhere being different), than somewhere drastically different, like where the Black Marauder is from. This theory is actually hinted at throughout official lore, although rarely stated fully. For a wargame with such a detailed history, with detailed unit lists and markings, it's an excuse for players to do their own thing. You and your game group can play a long running campaign game that completely alters the time line... in your own reality, without changing the official history of the official realities time line. Very convinient, also if an author writes a really good short story that wouldn't fit but they decide to publish anyway, well an alternate reality anthology would be a posdibility, or if someone writes a story about a missjump in the deep periphery that finds a planet inhabited by bird people its impossible to know for sure which reality that happened in. It allows players to do whatever they want (including silly cross overs) in their table top games whether role-playing or war game. It allows an excuse if a developer or author makes a decision they later decide to retcon. It also allows for really fun in universe horror stories that even in universe some people believe and some just toss up to drunkards tall tales.

The scariest thing about Necromo Nightmare isn't the Broken. It's the fact that the story features an honest to god zombie plague that ended the world, and like Sci said, the story is canon... God, Kerensky, anyone save us...

These haunted mechs sounds like a great idea for a lance of mechs

The Black Marauder is what happens when a Chaos Knight from 40k winds up in Battletech somehow. *JEEZUS*

Black Marauder sure feels like a guest from another famous tabletop universe. More like... I dunno... Something, an entity rather than a person, an object or a glitch. I mean, it practically turns your jumps into Warp-travel with entailing shenanigans: fear, anxiety and an unhealthy dose of insanity. It doesn't need to have claws and tentacles to have: "DEMON" written on its side in big red letters.

I played a Mechwarrior TTRPG session at a Con once that involved the Dark One. Set back during the Star League era, the one surviving member of the group ran a Leopord containing the thing into an astroid in a stop over system. All the rest of us had been taken out by the thing. The setting was a SL research station investigation possible AI application with the entire station drawing power from an experimental power plant that drew energy from a modified KF jump drive that kept the "space" open. Basically a 40K Warp/Cthulhu-esque nightmare of a bad idea. 'Something' got into the AI programming. The GM swore he had a legal sheet for the monstrosity, but even 4 of us, in 2 heavies a medium and an assault just got straight bodied by it.

Funny enough, if this last story had been 40k, it wouldn't really have been scary. But in Batteltech? Oh, hell no!

yeah that last image of the black marauder is some very nice nightmare fuel thank you for that i really didnt want to sleep at all

Please, please make a video on the broken. Only just learned about from this video but we are incredibly intrigued and we like your video style

Black Marauder. Battletech meets WH40K Chaos demon

Thanks for this you managed to combine two of my favorite things big stompy robots and creepy ghost stories worthy of any camp fire well done!

For some reason, with how mechanical and "real" the whole BT setting is, there is something very interestingly appropriate in all of these stories, as well as in stories like Patrick Kell's ghost mech incident in the duel and other unnatural stuff like that. My guess is that these unnatural spiritual legend-like stories are not just unnatural in their meaning (since they are clearly meant to be unnatural and creepy), but also just unnatural for this mechanical and logically rigid setting. Stuff like that not only shouldn't be happening because it's creepy ghost stories, this shouldn't be happening in BT universe in a first place, so these stories of ghost mechs manage to feel uncanny on two separate levels. To think of it, BT universe can potentially actually give birth to very strong horror game/movie/story, because if you can make a viewer/listener/player get genuinely scared of something while he is sitting in a gigantic war machine with weapons the size of truck - it will be certainly an interesting experience to the viewer. And there are some really unexplored parts of this setting, like an alien extraterrestrial fauna and flora, because if something like a poisonous Nova Cat can exist, nothing tells us than an even scarier beast could not exist somewhere. A beast that is so large and strong that some local government dispatched a whole lance of mechs to hunt it down. And who's to tell that the beast will not put up a fight? Or will be easy to take down with no problems? Imagine a situation like this: you and your lancemates march through the night dark jungle, flashlights lighting very narrow angles in front of you, and suddenly your radar pick up a brief signal pf incoming missile. And then sensors randomly signal you that a *hostile* *assault* *mech* just powered up in front of you, and then jumped to the left at about 100 kph and disappeared in foilage. And this erratic, randomly appearing signal haunts your whole group while you search for a creature that is supposed to be just a big animal that was disturbing your local civillians. And when you finally catch a glimpse of a visual on this weird signal, you realise that this alien animal is reproducing the radar trace of a large mech when scared. And then suddenly one of your lancemates get jumped on by this thing, looking like a big blob of slimy or wet skin in the darkness of jungle and weak light of your searchlight, and his entire mech just starts glitching: arms pointing in random directions, weapons firing at random, legs move in a way that no mechwarrior would ever command them to move, before the whole mech just shuts down and falls over. You command your lance to move back, but suddenly a second lancemate starts exhibiting similar sympthoms. Your first lancemate reports that he has managed to power up the mech, but internals are seem to be scrambled by something similar to very powerful ECM suite or EMP device. Turns out creature that you were supposed to hunt down was a predator that found a way to hunt the whole mechs with natural electromagnetic pulse organ that it inherited from something similar to the terrestrial mantas. And then you briefly remember a discussion with your higher commander about an old ComStar exploration group getting lost on this planet, way before the colony you are serving for was organized. And then you realise that you or the ComStar explorers might have not been first people to encounter these weird predators - they could potentially huntdown and eat one exploration group after another, with mech-armed hunting forces being percepted by them simply as a snack given by larger group of people (your command) in order to soften them up and keep them satiated and away from the colony. I'd love to see more of such not supernatural but still creepy and unexplored (unseen even) parts of setting getting some attention. Because no one said that there's no match for humans in the universe, even when they are sitting in giant battlemechs.

I do like how MW keeps the horid ghosts to a minimum. Most are just the poilots defending a point like the mad basterds they are just beyond the grave

If you wanted a scary AI piloted mech, the Marauder is the one to go with.

I've been asking about that particular black mech for years from various content creators. Thanks for the rest, who didn't even have a Sarna page as far as I could find.

a "Monster Mech" sounds like a cool idea for a Mechwarrior Online halloween event. i would pay to have a black marauder "boss" fight.

i was just talking about the black marauder to friends, this is very well timed

There is a KZfaq channel I frequent and he did a whole hours worth of story on this particular nightmare, fueled rage, monster, black marauder, and if I remember correctly, it was a nightmare science experiment gone horribly wrong, where they tried to actually merge and artificial intelligence into the Mech and the subjects that they had used because this was like at the beginning of understanding, neural helmets and using them everyone of the subjects clinically insane to me because I may somewhat big fan of creepy pastas. This is like the version of creepy, the nightmare that you tell me Warriors in the dead of night at a campfire to scare the pits out of them.

Just... one? Only? I may cry! Such miserly gifts!

20:06 hung, not hanged. Another infraction like that and you'll be demoted to regular nerd

I just assumed all of this was due to tech, like the Phantom Mech incidents was because the Kells were using lostech ECM on the downlow, or that howling AI thing in the HBS Battletech game that the locals thought was some kind of revenant, but really was just a rampant lostech AI.

Unlucky 13 vs Lucky Number 7 😎 That would be a pretty rad match ❤

the best part about the depictions of the Black Marauder getting more twisted over time is that because all the accounts are from lone survivors its impossible to tell if its actually getting more monstrous or if the legend is just getting more embellished with each new addition to it, or maybe a bit of both. it makes it feel like a *real* ghost story, and that makes it that much more terrifying.

I like the ghost stories like this. I also love the inverse, where pilots become/are the mech. Despite the fantastical nature of it, it's still grounded in reality. There are drivers and pilots that talk about similar feelings they have when doing their thing. Some people anthropomorphize their crafts as well, such as sailors would and do. It makes for some enjoyable writing, when done well.

>There's about as much magic in it as in real life >He doesn't know

Salvage crew: "Oh sweet, a free Marauder!" Black Marauder: "FEED ME A STRAY CAT"

Good story telling and art flowed with it throughout. You should be proud of this one.

The Black Marauder is, in my opinion, the pinnacle of mech themed horror I've seen.

Awesome Video really gave me a nice Idea and have an imaginary Navigator Repeatedly Yelling "It is not here!" as he goes insane in my head

If I was going to troll people as a ghost, I'd use an Urbie painted bright chrome.

In the terms of BT universe a lot of these stories are literally In universe ghost stories passed from merc to merc bar to bar with unreliable narration and exaggeration. Though there is some grains of truth in the tales. Take the MAD-3R Dark one (Black marauder) as a example. While the monstrous appearance can be chopped up to embellished storytelling. Its heavily implied that it might of been a mech fitted with a DNI system and later accounts imply it was retrofitted with some SLDF remote drone lostech allowing it appear to move autonomously. Which explains alot in context of the stories, such as the cursed pilot going insane. The one documented user of the Dark mirage project was Burke Kale and he went insane using the DNI system in the Solaris arena resulting in him going on a rampage.

The Black Marauder sounds like something straight out of Event Horizon/Warhammer 40k in terms of possessed machinery going _absolutely demonic._ Especially after jumping out of the system it was found in caused a crewman to commit suicide-by-airlock.

So first one clearly had something left from all the pilots that died in it, including the sister of that pilot, and whats better then an ghost keeping your back clear - or rather alot of ghosts in that case because there was now a link. Second one is litterly a Ghost lol Third one ... well i guess Chaos finds a way in every Universe.

You know what is spooky? You being Amaris and hearing bagpipes.

Okay that Marauder Made Monster is something that I should be wandering about. Where the heck did you get it?

My favorite BT ghost story is from Shrapnel Issue 2 in the short story "Devil Take the Hindmost". It is the story of the Phantom. On Solaris VII, there is an arena called the Coliseum and the guy in charge of it was renovating the stadium using the new technologies discovered from the helm memory core. He received a letter from the "Angel of Battle" stating that if he wanted great success in his future endeavors, he needed to follow these exact instructions: Box 5 and Mech Bay Five were to be left for the Angel's use and a monthly fee sent. Box 5 is usually empty but in mech bay 5, is a pitch black Atlas concealed in darkness with a white head. The rules set were not to be broken and no one should cross or disrespect the Phantom. There was an instance where a new manager sold Box 5 to a noble and during a prep show, missile turrets fired at box 5 when the noble was there. No one died but it send a clear message not to sell Box 5. A Capellan mechwarrior wanted his backers in Box five and dared the Phantom to fight him. They found his body dangling from the cockpit his Stalker which was so shot up that they barely recognize it as a Stalker. A tech went down to Bay 5 and saw the Atlas still there, undamaged, with a piece of the Stalker's cockpit in its fist. Anyone who mocked the Phantom's existence would be struck with misfortune, no matter what stadium they were in. The legend goes that if you challenge the Phantom and win, it will grant you a wish. In the short story, the protagonist Daniel wanted to challenge the Atlas for the funding needed to get his mech fixed because his mech was badly damaged, and he had a match in a week and it would take a month for the parts to come in. If he lost, he would do whatever the phantom asked "and devil take the hindmost". The bay was pitch black except for a small light. It flickered off then back on, indicating the challenge was accepted. Daniel fought the Atlas with a Grasshopper mech. When he saw the Atlas, he noticed that the right half of the head was missing and it had no pilot. The Atlas also had a gauss rifle instead of the AC20 or AC10. Long story short, Daniel won the fight but barely and he passed out from the heat of the Grasshopper. When he woke up, everyone told him that the Atlas was still there in Bay 5. He went down to the bay and saw that it was still there, with no battle damage from their duel. The head of the Atlas turned on its own, showing a laser burn on its head that gave it the look of a twisted grin. Later when David got his promised reward for winning, he saw the curtains on Box 5 shift then go still.

i know nothing of battletech but as a mech junkie and horror lover i absolutely loved the stories.

Oh shit, I am so tempted to make horror stories of locust pilot meeting this, or mech that has personality and slowly overtakes pilot

Lucky number seven may or may not be worth bringing up. A charger seemingly tied to the spirit of its former, eccentric pilot.

Hell's coming and it is bringing the Black Marauder with it.😢

The first video I watched was good. Good enough to watch another. This was great, worth a sub and watching more for the rest of my shift.

(non-canon, a fun thing) "D2j" Following the massacre, any foreign aerospace assets planetside, would suffer, strange occurrences where their RWR's would inexplicably light up as if something was targeting them from the ground, it did not matter if they where on CAP or delivering strike packages, sometimes even. lone fighters, isolated would be found later, their wrecks riddled with autocannon rounds, despite how much intel a force had on known enemy AA and troop movements, these instances never happened to allied or loyal armies who also fielded aerospace craft as if the murdered manifested their desire to be left alone.

Maybe SCI should use the bagpipes on the Black Marauder outside his apartment. It will scare it off because it can’t handle the Scottish fury! lol

Been binge watching your content and must say your content delivery is very entertaining. Your "colorful" descriptions and sense of humor resonate with me. 🏆👍

Well one man in BT history that developed a pathological fear of Scottish ghosts playing bagpipes was Stephan Amaris...

Well I know have several new encounters for my players to face in their upcoming weekly games. Thanks for the ideas and background so I didn't have to make it up. 🙂

Did ya read the Halloween story from last year OniKuma that was GOOD. Darn good Video too, never heard of 13 or Gaffa, and of course heard of The Black Marauder. :D

I like the Black Marauder. Its brutal, it knows it, and its proud of it.

I don't know if they're canon, but the Genecaste are pretty freaky: basically they were once clanners, but got separated/isolated and went nuts with the genetic engineering, basically becoming the Battletech version of Reavers.

Prety nice! I would have mentioned "Number Seven" since even if that mech wasn't a monster or a ghost (maybe) but still something was off on it.

I knew I liked The Marauder, didn't know I'd like it more after this lol.

I always enjoyes the supernatal parts of battletech. What culture doesn't have it's ghosts and spirits? I'll argue it adds realism.

Gaffas ghost sounds like the SABTON cover of Camouflage. Its intro guitar riff sounds bagpipe like.

Can you please do more ghost next stories I really enjoyed this one I learned about two Mechs I didn't know about.

I'd LOVE to hear more about this "The Broken" and "The Monster" bettlemechs?

The machine spirit is strong with these, but that one is an abominable intelligence and must be destroyed.

Should have saved this for Halloween.

Black mauader is a mech that gets the creepypasta vibes down pat

okay, going to be stupid here, what mech is that at 10:27 with the 2 big bore guns over the 2 rotary auto cannons and the big over the shoulder pods?

Necromo Nightmare is easily one of the craziest horror stories in B-Tech, simply because the idea of science being able to create bioweapons that can ultimately create the monsters in that scenario has alot of potential. I agree that the Black Marauder is certainly one of the creepiest by far. Another good one that is fan-made but still great is a fan short called "Hellbringer." If you've not seen that yet I urge you to look it up. Its very well done.

The black marauder is just a funny guy. He smiles :D

I love how you deliver the lore/stories of Battletech. It's approachable and humorous. As a fairly new fan myself, the amount of lore can be very...intimidating... Keep up the great videos sir. Looking forward to more Battlestar Galactica stuff also. Your content has inspired me to try out even more franchises. :)

I think ghost stories get a lot more fun when you introduce the "truth is stranger than fiction" narrative to it and start pointing out all of the universe-ending tech that is just floating around somewhere in the 'verse. It would more or less be indistinguishable from magic, especially to a technologically regressed society with few records of its past achievements

More. MORE! DAMN IT, boy, I need MMMOOOAAARRR!!! Good stuff, can't wait to hear more of these.

I want to do a Homeworld's beast in the Battletech setting RPG campaign.

Should talk about the planet Necromo

Battletech Cryptids are by far the most interesting aspect of the lore. Big battles are cool and all, but ghost mech stories are the stuff of nightmares

Another awesome video man thanks

amazing vid! Thank you for talking about the creepy and spooky stuff.

Always loved the idea of people leaving parts of their soul inside a machine. Even better when it's your ancestors and all their experience helping you along.

Enjoyed this one all around

Now I really want to make some of these as “character” mechs.

imagine the enemy being like "Wha....what are you?" and general gappa be like "IM SCOTTISH!" before killing them XD

I like the Faster Than Light music in the background!

Love this stuff Battletech is a fantastic universe So much depth

Dropped in for the surprise Battletech lore, got pulled in by the FTL soundtrack.

An absolutely great video. Thank you for covering a fun subject.

I like it too much 😮😂you have more please

This was a good video. Think ill stick around and subscribe.

Not a ghost story but my fav mechwarrior/battletech story ever is the story of a clan pilot being brought out on his first mission or training and after being told not to disable the automatic shutoff and fire all of his weapons he did just that in a fight and the last anyone saw of him was his flaming skull inside his shattered cockpit as he killed his opponent and died at the same time

You said Highlander... gave bagpipes... then said you get one. THERE CAN BE ONLY ONE!

spooky nice it's rare we hear about supernatural stuff in battletech

I dunno if it's a thing you want on your channel, but I had Connor MacDougal's Haunted Thunderbolt. He was a Black Watch pilot, and he had recently had his ride fitted with an advanced Neurohelmet that let him mesh even deeper into his machine. But it was causing him problems sleeping. So one night, he went out to the hangar, warmed up the systems, and just let it idle, hanging in the service cradle. But putting the band around his head finally let him rest. Just when he was finally able to relax, and was starting to doze off, an Amaris operative put a bullet down through the top of his head, just seconds after Stefan popped Richard Cameron's royal block off. A week or so later, Connor woke up again. He wasn't sure how, because he wasn't... Physically there. But there was a Rimworlder in _his_ seat, laughing as he took potshots at fleeing civilian cars. Somehow, Connor melted the man's brain. And as his grey matter broke apart, Connor slipped back into the circuits of the neurohelmet link. Weeks later, he awoke again. A different pilot, a different atrocity. This time, Connor backfed the heat sinks and cooked the monster in the cockpit, and stored the neurohelmet echo of the pilot cooking alive to the one whose brain had melted out his nose. Over and over, some despot, some wannabe warlord would claim the abandoned TDR-5Sb as their own, ride out to commit some atrocity, and die horribly to some cockpit malfunction when the ghost of Connor MacDougal woke up and decided to put an end to their crimes. And then he'd tuck that digital ghost of their torment into his collection, just before he'd fall back asleep himself. Somehow, that Thunderbolt ended up out on Willunga at the edge of Lyran space, abandoned in a cave out in the mountains, cloaked in a legend of an ancient Scottish ghost that would murder any pilot that tried to misuse it. So Connor was quite shocked to awaken to find a terrified young girl named Anneliese in the seat, clutching the band to her head and begging for help. It was 3072, and not only had the Blakists lured pirates to the planet in their chaotic crusade, but a few of them had shown up in person as well, and were moving toward her little hamlet. Anneliese was in a full panic, all she wanted was help, to keep her friends and family and her little town safe, and she would give the ghost _anything_ in exchange. In the end, what he took was the opportunity. To finally, _finally_ do something honourable, to live up to the name of the Black Watch. So he asked Anneliese permission. Let him into her head, fully. Let him run the show, as it were. And that night, the char-black Thunderbolt with the glowing red cockpit slit did impossible, _impossible_ things. And by sunrise, Anneliese stumbled back down the mountain, to her pristine, untouched hamlet, ringed by three dozen smouldering wrecks that used to be all manner of menacing mechs, burnt to the ground or torn apart. And the young germanic girl smiled, and in a thick scots brogue, asked for a shot of proper Scotch Whiskey to celebrate her new friend's success. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

One of the things I'll always miss from the collapse of FASA is the death of the vaugely supported fan theories that Earthdawn, Shadowrun, and Battletech were all the same timeline on different turns of there respective "worlds" and that Battletech was just on the low magic end of the cycle but could have spooled up and things like the Black Maurader could have just been early hints at what The Horrors would have been like in Battletech when the cycle swung back.