Tales of the Mimetic Badarses - Nothing but a Hound Dog

Title: Tales of the Mimetic Badarses - Nothing but a Hound Dog
Series: Battletech/Mechwarrior
Originally Published: November 2012, Classic Battletech Forums

One of my objectives in my fic writing series was to tie everything together to a degree. The concept was to have two series running in parallel with a third that would follow on to them, but all being interconnected. However, that fell apart very quickly as I got distracted, ran out of ideas and moved on to other things.

Nothing but a Hound Dog was based around some of those earlier concepts. Characters featured in this fic made their actual debuts in You are saying Impudence to me (Yet to be republished) with a backstory that was alluded to but not actually described. A part of this fic is dedicated to expanding upon that, filling out details and also better explaining characters and their motivations.

The other main goal of this fic is to expand upon the Bad Guys in two ways. The first being to bring more life to the Word of Blake force that had become the adversaries to our heroes. The second is to introduce the titular Hounds, a collection of Mercenary units working for the Word.


Trivia:

As of the writing of this fic, nothing has been published about the world of Kannon in any official Battletech work. My assumptions on the planet's fate were based on the time of its disappearance from the maps and a few scraps of data from Handbook: Lyran Alliance. I will probably be proven wrong, and need to re-write the fic.

The enemy force on Kannon also changed a few times during planning, and flip-flopped even during the writing stage. Originally they were going to be explorers from Clan Wolf, looking for worlds suitable to recolonize as they did with Qualip/Kerensky's Vision, but I then realized that Kannon was too far outside the Wolf OZ for that to work

Many of the ideas for the ruins of Kannon and the hidden community still living there were inspired by the wastelands of the Command and Conquer series.

The exact identity of the force on Kannon and where they got two designs that post-dated the World's supposed destruction was never set in stone, largely so I could potentially use it in future.

Operation BAD BLOOD is a reference to the MechWarrior 2 module Bloodright.

Naturally, the Arc Words are present. Additionally, Ogel's ops in this chapter follow a naming theme established in Haven.