Cheesemaker Stables: Ready for the 3128 season!

[Liam's Ghost]

Cheesemaker Stables
Established: 3125

Stablemaster: Robert Lee
Affiliation: Independent
Colors/Badge: Black/white/red, Stylized image of a two masted schooner at sea on a circular field
Mechs: 12
Mechwarriors: 16
Standard Contract: 20%/2000 Cbills/month
Stable Experience/Rating: Veteran/C

  Cheesemaker Stables is a newcomer to the Game World, established only two years ago, but it has already made something of a splash through the inherent mystery around it and its corporate backer. Both seemed to appear out of nowhere, and immediately made a splash when the land they purchased in Equatus' Tangerine desert turned out to be home to a small Star League era bunker complex. Though the Stablemaster claims that the facility had been stripped of anything of value long ago, the mech workshop Tillamook Innovations seemed to spring up overnight at the site, and expended truly fat stacks of capital to likewise establish a base and training field for their own Solaris stable.
  Though Cheesemaker Stables made an excellent showing with the SLIS during the 3125 season, and has won an impressive string of victories in the class 2-5 circuits over the last year, they have yet to make it into the big leagues of the Solaris Arenas. None of their warriors have secured an Open Class license, nor has the stable brought any big names into their talent pool, despite offering some of the best standard contract terms on Solaris VII. This may be by design. The stable practices invitation only recruiting, seems to deliberately target relative unknowns exclusively, and even then only rarely brings in outside recruits. The one or two mechwarriors in the stable who have made something of a name for themselves and have attracted outside interest have likewise rebuffed recruiters at every turn, expressing no interest in leaving the stable.
  Instead of seeking the glitz and glamour of the Open Class and the Grand Tournament, Cheesemaker Stables seems to serve primarily as a marketing tool for their parent company of Tillamook Innovations, which is the stable's exclusive supplier of battlemechs and produces a small range of machines for order (in the hand-built and heavily customized manner common of the workshops of Solaris). While this strategy has allowed the company to make several sales and has provided additional word of mouth advertising, it only creates more questions, as the amount of money being brought in by these sales does not seem to be enough to keep TI running at its current level, much less also supporting an entire mid-sized stable of mechwarriors and their machines at their present level of activity. This doesn't even take into account projects underway which don't seem to contribute to the company's bottom line at all, such as the remote operated Sparkhound mech or the ongoing project to reverse engineer the Word of Blake's superheavy mech technology. Tillamook Innovations seems to be less a profit seeking company and more of a think tank running a mechwarrior stable as a sideline, and anybody watching keeps wondering when the money is going to run out, or is flabbergasted that it hasn't run out yet.

Personnel:

  One of the halmarks of Cheesemaker Stables and its parent company is that almost none of its founders seem to have any history whatsoever. Stablemaster Robert Lee is no exception. Those who have interacted with him say his demeanor suggests someone with extensive military experience, as well as a perverse and irreverent sense of humor. The name Cheesemaker Stables appears to have been his choice, specifically to run contrary to the typical big named stables, and he seems to either discourage his own fighters from engaging in the sort of performative bombast common among arena mechwarriors, or alternately encourages them to push this behavior beyond all logical extremes, as his mood dictates. All in all, he seems to treat the Solaris Games as... well... a game, and most of the few rivalries his stable has fostered seem to be based entirely on his refusal to take the whole thing seriously.
  Lee's chief administrative assistant, Nikki (just Nikki), is almost always seen as the stablemaster's side in public, and her choice of attire, her blue hair, and her relative youth makes it easy to mistake her for a typical mechbunny hanger-on. In truth, she is not only remarkably skilled at keeping her boss on task, but also keeping an eye on him and directing his security detail. Some reporters who have earned her ire even claim that recording devices and other electronics tend to fail abruptly in her presence, but this seems to be a purely spurious rumor.
  Uniquely, all of the Stable's initial pool of mechwarriors was female, with male warriors joining the stable only through outside recruitment. The most skilled of the stable's warriors, and their unofficial leader, is Lilly Adams. Like the stablemaster, Lilly seems to come from an unspecified military background and seems to have the discipline and raw skill to back it up. What she lacks is the stablemaster's ability to enjoy the aspects of the games which don't revolve around actual combat between mechs. A media darling she isn't, and she tends to be cold and curt when it comes time to interact with the press or the public. The only times reporters have managed to get her truly animated in an interview has been by bringing up the Clans, whose very existence she seems to take as a personal affront. This has already led to a few brawls and official and unofficial grudge matches with Zellbrigen Stables and other clan affiliated groups on Solaris, though as a rule Lilly tends to give better than she gets in these exchanges.
  One of the first recruits made by Tillamook Innovations was Fergus O'Leary, a formerly freelance mech engineer sometimes described as a mad genius, or just mad. This eccentric engineer has been responsible for many of the mech designs developed by Tillamook Innovations, as well as their many speculative projects. Easy to mistake for an alcoholic homeless elemental, Fergus is by all accounts a manic-depressive gentle giant who wouldn't hurt a fly, but might disappear into a depressive fugue state or go days completely re-engineering a battlemech from the skeleton out simply on a whim. As a consequence of his erratic behavior, he has a full time assistant assigned to keep him on task, stable, and to ensure he's keeping up with his medications. Despite the common trope of the mad scientists and the wonders they create, most who knew him in the past are happy that he's getting the help he actually needs, while still doing the work he loves.
   
Tactics and Style:

  Though the stable's warriors endeavor to master a wide and flexible variety of battle tactics, they seem to particularly enjoy ambushes, surprise, and other forms of what they call "ungentlemanly warfare". Wide open arenas where they have room to maneuver, plan, and catch an opponent off guard are especially favored, as are pre-match modifications meant to deceive an opponent about what they might actually be facing.   


Bonus content: here's a link to a pdf containing every mech Tillamook Innovantions presently builds, has built, or would like to build if they can work out the bugs. Use it as you will.

[Liam's Ghost]

Obligatory AI generated images of some of the named characters

(produced by Nemu's Waifu Bot)

[Liam's Ghost]

And the boys

[Liam's Ghost]

A Challenger Appears: Myth Association Stables

  Myth Association would normally be just another of the many small stables scratching out a living and trying not to go under if not for their own special hook. Their performance in the arenas has been fair but competent, certainly nothing to be ashamed of, but at the same time, the stable's small pool of mechwarriors hardly sets the game world on fire with their piloting skills. The key to the stable's popularity lies in the side gigs of its personnel. Each of the five mechwarriors in the stable is also a professional Idol Singer, under contract from an entertainment studio based on New Kyoto. Their music has proven to have surprisingly broad appeal across Solaris, and their live concerts, sometimes incorporating intricate battlemech choreography, always draws large crowds of particularly loyal fans. The extra income from merchandizing, performances, and music distribution has allowed the stable to field an impressive collection of heavily customized battlemechs as well as a comfortable and well appointed base of operations in the Silesia district, though many serious aficionados of the Solaris Games still regard the stable as nothing more than a gimmick rather than a legitimate contender.
  The particular hook of the stable tends to generate an outsized amount of discussion relative to the actual impact Myth Association has on the Game World. Some followers of the games consider these "pretty faces playing at combat" are an affront to the spirit of the games and a sign of how corporate entities are slowly killing the spirit of Solaris. Others point to the antics of many of their more rabid fans as signs of the toxic parasocial relationships that have formed around the stable. Conservative groups within the Kobe district have even gone so far as to describe Myth Association as a deliberate attack on Combine culture. All this buzz, however, just seems to increase Myth Association's media exposure, and does nothing to deter the stable's fans. In fact, it probably only encourages them. Myth Association will probably never have a Grand Tournament champion in their ranks, but they seem well established in their own particular niche.

Bonus Content: The mechs of Myth Association, as of the 3128 season

[Liam's Ghost]

A Challenger waits patiently for you to approach: The Urban Nation

  While it is maligned by many and seen as little more than a mascot mech by the rest, the humble Urbanmech is a surprisingly competitive machine in traditional dueling in the class two arenas. Heavily armed and reasonably well protected, it can stand toe to toe with most opponents in its weight and technology class on an equal footing, and while urbanmechs are painfully slow and unmaneverable, this does not terribly hinder them in many duels, because the enemy still has to come into firing range to try to kill them. Many a new duelist has seen a promising career cut short when their "superior machine" was brought down by an urbanmech that simply didn't have to do anything fancier than shoot back. 
  At the same time, though, Urbanmechs don't really fit the feel of the class two circuit, for the very reasons that make it so effective in straight dueling. The audience for these matches usually want to see maneuver, strategy, and a test of skills between their light and quick combatants, but matches involving urbanmechs most often devolve either into the sort of straight slugging match more common in the class four and five circuits, or into one mech cautiously dancing around his nearly unmoving opponent, trying to pick away at a machine that might as well be stationary.
  The problems with balancing Urbanmechs for betting purposes and the smaller crowds traditional duels featuring the Urbanmech tended to draw led to the Solaris Gaming Commission to broadly discourage its use in regular play. New competitive guidelines in the class two circuit strongly favored the sort of fast moving maneuver warfare the crowds wanted to see and pushed slow lights like the Urbanmech to the side, while media campaigns regularly branded the mech as entirely unsuited to the Gaming World. The Urbie still has her adherents however, and the Great Urbanmech Uprising of 3122 clearly showed just how numerous and loyal those fans could be.
  The Urban Nation stable formed in the aftermath of the Great Urbanmech Uprising, and has presently secured its place on Solaris as the pre-eminent stable focused entirely on the Urbanmech. The stable's complement of battlemechs is composed entirely of Urbanmechs in a wide variety of variants both common and obscure, numbering more than three dozen such machines. The stable still struggles to be competitive in the more restrictive class two circuit, but they've achieved a fair following in independent and exhibition matches, and are a powerful draw during special events tailored around their particular makeup. Even years after the Great Urbanmech Uprising, fans of the plucky underdog of the battlefield continue to turn out in droves.

[monbvol]

Now I'm having a bad idea for Myth Association for five of their mechs.  It has been a while so I might need to do some research.