I wrote something for myself before i found this thread, sadly it's under an interview format and i'm not even sure it's acceptable but here you go.
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"Voice of the Periphery"
Interview with Neon "Jinx" Saida
Neil Forsaw: Hello, i'm Neil Forsaw and welcome to "The Voice of the Periphery", the only audio-only, subscription-based, holovid sent monthly to all citizens in the Periphery via HPG! Please support our galaxyfunding efforts to continue getting the freshest and most unbiased interviews this side rimward of the Inner Sphere! Today we have a very special guest in our studio here on the dusty plains of Aquagea. We're happy to have with us Neon Saida, a woman famousely, or infamousely depending on who you ask, known as Jinx, the leader slash mechwarrior ace of Rimward Highlanders. Say hello to our listeners Jinx!
Neon "Jinx" Saida: Good afternoon.
Neil: Rimward Highlanders, for those living under a rock in the Deep reaches of the Periphery, are a battlemech mercenary group that have been a staple of politics and battlefields around this neck of the woods for years now...
Jinx: ... eight years, almost nine now.
Neil: Right. They've been at this for quite a while dear listeners, and fought on many, many, worlds out here in the Periphery, it's quite very possible they've even fought on yours!
Jinx: Not all of them, no, but we've been around.
Neil: Right you have. Just a few days ago you've helped our government fight back a League push into our planet, didn't you? The Free World League didn't like that very much it seems. Can you tell us how many vehicles did you personally destroy?
Jinx: Without sounding too dire, each of the... equipment... we removed from use today was manned by people with families. The men and women there had a job, we had a job, and be it for money or house we were put at odds. That's the nature of the work. We came out on top, but it just as well could be me sending out a message to one of my mechwarrior's families telling them, at the very least, on what backwater dustbowl planet their son or daughter took a direct shot to the cockpit on... no offense to the residents of Aquagea.
Neil: None taken. Didn't mean to sound insensitive there. So, switching gears, let's roll back a bit here, how did you end up leading the Highlanders? I mean, i know the outfit was named something differently before... Markham's.. Raiders or..
Jinx: Marauders. Markham's Marauders. Yeah. It was more of a case of wrong place, wrong time kind of deal. I was on Coromodir when house Arano was ousted out of power and..
Neil: Oh wow, you were there? I mean, it makes sense, given how fiercely you are now engaged in Lady Kamea Arano's war efforts.
Jinx: Yeah, i was. So to cut it short, Markham's Marauders were also stationed there and plucked me to safety mid-coup. They took a fair bit of hits themselves, including the old man. He never got off-planet. Never got to know him, but in the weeks after the incident, hell, about up 'till when we started deploying off the Argo and i had to move everything out of the old office, i kept running into his stuff.
Neil: Family photos, letters, that kind of deal?
Jinx: Yeah, i mean, you expect those, but things, like a small blue rubbery ball. I mean, none of the crew knew what it was, and i kept fidgeting with it, knocking it off the walls and such, taking it as cockpit hanger good luck token in my cockpit. You know?
Neil: Yeah, to bounce off some stress, if you'll allow me the pun.
Jinx: Right, so i was having a drink on some planet or another, and the barkeep noticed it. Apparently he was from the same home planet as Markham himself, and that ball was some sort of funeral rite memento. The crew told me that the old man had a sister that died at one point, when she was young, some rare disease or another. They have this tradition where they think the souls of their dead ones move into these mementos after they pass. And apparently this rubber ball i kept futzing around with was hers, from her funeral. Markham carried it around with him after he left.
Neil: Wow. Talk about a blast from the past. Glad to see her memory wasn't lost with him but sorry to hear that nonetherless.
Jinx: Thanks. As said, i never met him and all i heard were stories, but i did stop throwing the ball against the wall from that point onward in any case.
Neil: Let's talk about something else, how did you end up leading the company? I mean, you had some experience before, i've read you ran with another group back in the wide-open plains of the Inner-Sphere's bosom, but were you just thrust up to leadership? Hah, maybe you had a ritual combat to prove your worth in an arena or something with your battlemech?
Jinx: Haha, nothing so holovid-worthy, no. I was a pilot with his own mech, that had experience before in --- i mean, it wasn't a big group, my old merc company, Barrett's Fusiliers --- but i was unofficially a petty officer there, in short, handled some of the day-ins, and day-outs. Got out after a messy business on Skandia and ended up here with an old friend's help from my noble days. In any case, it seems old man Markham was the wheeler and dealer for the outfit. Without him, Darius' efforts be blessed, it was on shaky ground and given that they had more or less saved my life, i thought i could handle some of the paperwork and legwork. The banks had us by the short and curlies, and fees have no soul.
Neil: Indeed they don't, i'm still downpaying the lease on this studio and it seems there's no end in sight! In any case, when i was doing the research for this interview i struck on something odd. While the more recent bits are well documented: company-tier battlemech firepower and personel, a relic of a weird dropship that you patched up to spaceworth..
Jinx: ... plus our well-worn Leopard.
Neil: Plus one well-worn Leopard... past those, i could find scarce resources regarding your early days after you turned the company's fortunes around.
Jinx: I won't lie. Those were hard days. After i got unceremoniously put in charge, a.k.a. i started telling people what to do and they listened, we had a lance of light mechs to our name, scarce contracts, travel restrictions put in by the banks on our jumpship passage which were hampering more than helping, and, thankfully, a fair bit of pirate problems to be solved on neighbouring worlds. For two or three years we jumped between Detroid, Bellerophon and Alloway, as oppourtunities sprang up. They were sparse, and we were taking more time travelling than actually fighting, but they helped the bottom line. Today we wouldn't even cover the costs of the drop with the compensation we would get for those missions back then.
Neil: But you hanged on there for dear life?
Jinx: I'm not saying Markham's Marauders didn't cut their teeth on mercenary work before i took over, but given the strings of bad luck we were taking, it was a much harder job after that. We worked closely and often with a lot of official and unofficial contacts back then. Let's just say the connections we forged with the local governments way back when are part of why we've stayed in the Periphery. It's home. They trusted us with money and contracts when some of the bigger house contracts were snuffing their nose at us.
Neil: Aww shucks, you're getting me teary-eyed... --- Action! We need some spice in this interview. Tell us what was the closest call you had. You've had a long and varied career as a mechwarrior, i'm sure you have more than a few stories for us.
Jinx: Hum, each battle is its own story of high points and teeth-gritting moments, but, now that you mention it, i guess one in particular springs to mind. We were deployed --- the old squad, me, Dekker, Medusa and Behemoth -- to take out an mixed force mech lance. Back then i was more a mechwarrior than the command center jockey i am now; i had to be there for each and every encounter.
Neil: Leading from the front. I like that.
Jinx: Hell, back then there was no other way, we didn't have the manpower and one of us mechwarriors us sent to the medbay for two months meant the next few contracts may have gotten fielded with an understrenght lance.
Neil: Nothing you'd ever want i assume?
Jinx: Take it from me Neil, a piece of advice for every merc company out there, rest the meat and rep the steel, or you end up hosing cockpits of pilots and having to figure out where to get spare arms for your mechs. Coming back to it, we got dropped, i was in my old Centurion --- a medium mech for your listeners -- Frontliner we called him, with a huge bore AC/20 autocannon on its left arm and a rack of short ranged dumb-fire missiles on its torso. My lancemates were in --- my god, that was so long ago --- i think a Shadowcat, two Kintaros and... a Firestarter. Yeah, a Firestarter. A decent force of medium mechs and a scout.
Neil: Doesn't mean much to me but that sounds like some serious firepower. What stood up to that?
Jinx: You know how i said we were sent in to take out a lance of enemy mechs?
Neil: Yeah.
Jinx: There were two.
Neil: Oh.
Jinx: And they were fielding top of the line medium mechs: Trebuchets and Wolverines and such. Not that we were preparing to go on a milkrun, an easy mission--
Neil: Yeah, yeah.
Jinx: But this was bad. Well, in retrospect, it started out as much by-the-book as you'd expect. First contact we nailed one of their mediums, flanked around a bit but things happen during combat. Not long into the engagement i ended up across a river with a full lance of mechs ahead of me, Kintaros taking fire from a nearby forest from across the river, able to provide just missile support.
Neil: And the --- what was it--- Firestarter?
Jinx: I think we needed to replace its jumpjets, the things that allow mechs to achieve vertica---
Neil: To fly?
Jinx: Right, fly. Well, Dekker --- he was in the Firestarter --- bobbed and weaved in that thing, till the things almost melted. Didn't help that that chasis of mech itself is built around throwing napalm, burning mechs, buildings and men alike.
Neil: Gruesome things, these battlemechs.
Jinx: Mhm. So that's where we were. I realised soon enough, as enemy blips started appearing on sensors, that i'll need to hold the line to allow the Kintaros time to wear them down while staying out of the line of fire, as they were already pretty battered. My Centurion was relatively well armored but everytime you hear about a heroic stand-off, you only hear of it because the hero dies.
Neil: Ain't that the truth. So let me guess you holed up somewhere and took fire off the rest of your lance? Come on, don't leave us hanging.
Jinx: It's an easy thing to say, but i had to keep both fire and attention. If the enemy thought it could go around me or worse, ignore me, my lance would have been done for. So i had to keep my AC/20 firing and also keep myself a juicy target. I don't remember how many hits i took in that battle --- nor some of the days after, when i sat for two weeks in the medbay. That battle was a constant battery of missile fire, armor buckling, alarms blaring and lasers sizzling. Hm... You know how you can smell the ozone after a laser fires and it outright singes the air?
Neil: Can't say i can --- and i'm happy for that between you and me ---, not many of us get to see one of your hulking behemoths strutting its stuff.
Jinx: Well, that day, after it was all said and done, our salvaging team reported the smell of ozone permeated the air for hours after the battle. And it wasn't just the ozone that got to them, it was the pockmarked ground that they saw in a part of a destroyed forrested outcropping. At the epicenter of that razed bit of forest, were two large holes, stamped, not dug, a meter embedded in the ground. They belonged to the feet of my Centurion. That's where i made the stand.
Neil: That's.. very visual. And outstanding. You just got dug in from all the incoming fire?
Jinx: Yep, almost down to the knee actuators. If Yang --- that's my chief tech --- didn't have enough to worry about replacing armor and internal structure on it after the battle, he also got to degunk caked mud off individual myomer strands and had to rinse the entire leg structure. He was a champ about it, though whenever i come back with a roughed-up battlemech still hear him saying "at least it ain't as bad as that one time you brought Frontliner in". I don't know where we'd be without him.
Neil: He sounds like a damned good mechtech. But coming back around to the battle, how did it go, were there any close calls?
Jinx: The entire thing was a close call. We had to switch fire very often as the situation was changing moment to moment, that one PPC on a mech's arm that you're worried about becomes a non-issue the moment you see an SRM carrier on the field. You never want sixty missile tubes ever aimed at you, let alone fired. But the entire engagement was like that. I think it was one of the few moments where i ran out of ammo. Straight up ran out of ammo. The last round of my autocannon had to be force-loaded; i had to physically hit my autocannon arm on my mech's torso to get it to load, just because i never really got that deep into my ammo bins before and the mechanism was full of grime at the bottom there.
Neil: Technical problems happen to the best of us. I have no end of problems with my gear around the studio, you have no idea. You should drag down, what was it, Yank--
Jinx: Yang.
Neil: Yeah, you should drag him down once to help see if he can help me with some of this comms equipment, it's probably older than my grandma and i almost missed my last transmission last month because of them.
Jinx: Uh-huh, right, i'll see what i can do.
Neil: Either way, that was an enthralling story, thank you for sharing. An exciting life this one of a mech pilot... But we were talking about your company earlier, you got out of some bad moments way back when, and now you pledged fealty to house Aran---
Jinx: Rimward Highlanders are helping lady Arano with military support in her claim to restore the Aurigan Reach, yes... She is a generous benefactor, and a friend.
Neil: That sounds relatively cold, but i guess it's not a block you'd set your company's head on.
Jinx: As much as i have a close relation with the head of the Arano house and have had our paths mutually intertwined over the years, i have people depending on me, the people on the Argo, people i've bled with, bled on, bled for and bled thanks-to sometimes. You know who you are, Medusa. --- Causes and old-time-friends dropping in for help are all great things to strive for and work for but you have to protect your family in the end. That said, i'm reasonably certain that there isn't anything that can happen that will stop our company from seeing this contract to its end, a restored Aurigan Coalition.
Neil: I'm not sure if our Aurigan Directorate listeners are too happy about that but this it the Periphery, if they wanted relative safety, they'd move up somewhere more coreward, right? Haha. In any case, what are your goals now, where do you see the Highlanders heading after this war ends and you end up without a reliable contract?
Jinx: We've never been in more of a position to impose our will on our way of life. We're buying up personel and equipment in every system we sail to and have been thriving on our own for a fair while now and i don't see that changing. Rimward Highlanders are gearing to be a major player in the Periphery and will soon start taking bigger ticket contracts from Inner Sphere benefactors, whom we'll charge a premium, for our early --- miscommunications. In short, all good things.
Neil: Does that also extend to Neon Saida, the person behind the Jinx moniker? What does the future have in place for you?
Jinx: We've always had an 'AC20 to the cockpit' procedure. At any point, were i to bite it on the battlefield or decide to pack it up and open a bar on Alloway, i know that i'll always be leaving the Highlanders in good hands. My XO has an entire thirty page document on what needs to be done. But for the near future, i'll be rolling with the Highlanders both on and off-field, finding us work and wealth, and hopefully climbing those merc rankings.
Neil: Well Jinx, it's been a pleasure to have you here, thank you for taking time out of --- what now sounds to be a very busy schedule --- to talk to our listeners and to share a bit about your company and youself.
Jinx: Has been a pleasure, thank you for hosting me. Just in the nick of time too it seems, my pilot will be here to pick me up in a few, apparently we've got a reply on a lead we've been chasing.
Neil: That sounds juicy, anything you can share?
Jinx: Let's just say the Highlanders will be a lot more deadly after this mission. Goodbye Neil.
Neil: Goodbye. --- Well listeners, that was Jinx, the leader of the Rimward Highlanders, probably the best battlemech mercenary company in the Periphery. I don't know where they're headed now, but i'm certain they'll cause a ruckus. As per usual, please support our galaxyfunding efforts to allows us to continue to make this great show for you. Next time we'll have an old friend of mine, lord Alexander Madeira, to talk to us about the recent developments in the Arano-Directorate war as well as his startling youth as a young man bewitching lovely princesses everywhere. But until then, this has been Neil Forsaw, and i'll catch you next time on your local HPG broadcast packet!
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