>>See, the thing about my mom? She's a very sweet and caring person.
>>The pagan I had for a girlfriend remarked that she was like one of
>>these sweet little old white witches that putter around in their
>>garden, making herbal medicines for the local villagers.
>>
>>HOWEVER...
>>
>>What few people ever suspect is the wild, fiery, and utterly
>>vindictive mean streak she possesses.
>
>Ah yes. Around White Rose Fleet headquarters, this is known as the
>Inazuma type. Sweet, pleasant, loveable, really just all-around
>delightful, and she will fucking cut you if she has to. :) (Or
>drydock you with a mini-torpedo, which I have to admit I occasionally
>consider as a way of showing a certain infernal duke to the Final
>Door. :)

With Mom, it's not so much "If she has to". It's more like, "Congratulations on finding this landmine, which will self-destruct in 3... 2... 1..."

Additionally, she has a fondness for badasses. She's very much like Wakaba in this sense. To whit, she used to participate in a community on the old AOL dial-up service called "Trekkers Around and Over 40", where her character's husband was a Romulan who had defected to the Federation.

Since I already went for "Hoffmanite-Kryptonian" for the Dad's side, and my character doesn't have green blood, we'll have to rule out the Romulan bit for now. ;)

>>These kids fucking FREAK OUT, because suddenly here comes this stout
>>woman, who looks very much Native American herself, and carrying
>>in-hand what, in the middle of the night, could only look like a
>>goddamn tomahawk.
>
>I submit that even if they didn't make the tomahawk association,
>"angry woman with an axe" is probably intimidating enough.

Amen to that! :D

>>These two would probably claim that it was the inherent
>>"Crazy" in his blood combined with the drugs that made them go around
>>the bend.)
>
>There's no actual evidence that a person's mental state has any
>bearing on the qualities of his or her blood? But you did just give
>me the mental image of a younger, wilder Azula—say, right out of
>college—sussing out a clubhopping vampire(ss) well before the Big
>Moment and deciding ahh, what the hell, you only live twice, chicks
>dig scars and glory lasts forever, let's see how this goes... only to
>end up in the unaccustomed position of being the adult supervision
>when all hell breaks loose. :)

<snip>

>... something like that. :)

Hah-hah! Nothing livens things up quite like a Fire Princess.

And this definitely sounds like one of the more "Memorable" events that these folks would be known for. A more "normal" occasion looks something like the New Years Eve parties from Berke Breathed's Bloom County.

Actual quote from said comics on said New Years Eve party:
"MR. KRUTINSKY! I DON'T KNOW HOW YOU GOT OLD MRS. GREENBLATT'S '57 RAMBLER ENGINE UP IN THE RAFTERS... BUT DROP IT AND BRING MRS. GREENBLATT BACK DOWN. AND HER RADIALS, TOO!"

But really, they're all pretty mellow when they're not partying it up. Probably because a Funkotronian married into the family at some point. Weirdly enough, Cannabis doesn't really go around much. Instead, everyone drinks Black Blood of the Universe. (A form of coffee made by a... device based on the Viennese Triple Cold Extraction apparatus and using a Turkish grind. Yes, this is a shout-out to Funranium Labs.)

You would think that with this much caffeine going around, everyone would be bouncing off the walls... But no. Some do - mostly people who have married into the family, but after a few months they simply become functional caffeine addicts. (It is a rite of passage, in fact, for the newcomer to the family to be tricked into drinking BBotU, and their following antics be recorded for posterity.) It's suspected that there is a very strong dominant trait for ADHD in the family's gene pool because of this. (Among other bits of anecdotal evidence...)

That said, I would say that it isn't so much the mental state, but rather the genetics combined with the absurd levels of caffeine in their blood.

Suffice to say, the crash a vampire would experience after getting a meal out of a Mad Lad would be something to behold.

>>(K-F drives in UF-verse, I'd imagine, would be regarded as quaint
>>things that only the most desperate or most eccentric would bother
>>with.
>
>I'm not sure the principle behind the K-F drive works in the UF
>universe, but even if it does, I suspect it would be one of those
>technological dead ends that nobody ever did anything with. Like,
>every civilization that ever invented it looked at the math and went,
>"No, fuck that, we're not building that" and waited for someone to
>come up with the hyperspace motivator. :)

Hee-hee. I did say that it would probably be the province of eccentrics and desperate people. Say that a society developed in a system where some of the unique materials needed for a hyperdrive motivator simply didn't exist. And warp drives this early on was a difficult proposition, what with needing antimatter and dylithium and all... And so they cook up this beast instead.

Have a minor diaspora happen, followed up by a short but intense series of wars, and then suddenly the Centauri or some other race shows up with either Metaspace, Warp Drive, or even just plain old Hyperdrive, and all the old Jumpships are quickly ditched and forgotten about.

One might turn one up by sheer chance on one of the larger junk planets, but they are considered to be so useless that even preserving one as a museum ship is seen as a needless expense.

The origins of the Mad Lad's Jumpship are quite extraordinary, though. It had been the ship of a privateer captain (read: pirate) that had somehow gotten stuck in a time loop. The original Mad Lads of the day somehow got into the loop and were subsequently attacked... But of course, that was a mistake on the pirate's part. The attack was repelled, their ships all captured, and the time loop broken. All in all, the pirates had been stuck in time for some three centuries and change.

The pirates were released into the care of local authorities as temporal displacees. (This would probably have been UF Golden Age, and one of the more weird things that happened during this period.) With the Jumpship being taken as a war prize, it was originally proposed to scrap it. However, there was one person from the pirates that stayed on with the Mad Lads, and that was the jumpship's chief engineer. After some pleading and cajoling, he got them to come around on the idea, swearing that he could make it work better using some of the various technologies and rare materials that his people never had access to before.

The rest, as they say, is history. :)

This brings us to the other defining trademark of the Mad Lad tribe: their utterly breathtaking engineering genius. If the Sterling clan is renown for being naturals in the pilot seat, then the Mad Lads are the Sterlings of starship engineering.

You wouldn't know it at first to see their ships. Patched all over the place with obvious looks-don't-matter-we're-fighting-a-war-here repair jobs, one might think that these ships are about to fly apart at their many, many seams.

But they don't.

Nobody knows what eldritch mechanical sorcery they do in the bowels of their Jumpship, but they somehow got an old warp drive out of 23rd Century Starfleet fuel tanker to reliably do Warp 7 at a cruise, Warp 8 at the maximum "safe" settings, and Warp 9 in an emergency. However, they have been clocked doing Warp 12 once before. The Mad Lads deny it, pointing out that there's no way it's physically possible, subspace distortions this, time dilation that, etcetera. But having seen other examples of "Holy Shit They Actually DID IT!" engineering from the Mad Lads, some engineers wonder about that. Rumor has it that the only one outside the Mad Lad tribe who might know for certain is Skuld Ravenhair, and only because their chief engineer has an Altar dedicated to her in the engine room. But she's staying quiet on the matter.

And this is to say nothing of what they've done with the K-F Drive, directly powering it off the reactor that fuels the warp drive and somehow making it the fastest charging K-F drive in recorded galactic history. (And also the only known functioning one, but that's beside the point.) Most people don't even want to think of it, no matter how interesting it may be, for fear of it being some kind of memetic hazard such as Science-Related Memetic Disorder.

That said, their K-F drive is still one thirsty bastard of a kludge job, so they only use it when they intend to get the drop(ship) on someone. ;)

>>After that, it was a lost cause trying to keep her out of the action.
>>Even the idea of trying to deny her the rightful war prize of her Zaku
>>left a bad taste in their mouths.
>>
>>Just to make the picture complete, have them be citizens of the
>>Confederate Freespacers.
>
>Well, it would have to be the Freespacers at that point, wouldn't it.
>:)

Oh, for certain. They're the only ones even remotely capable of handling that much crazy at once. I think it would go without saying that they're a Favorite of Aya Nakajima's whenever she wants to hit someone with a certain... je ne sais quoi that not even she is capable of. (Because, for all her efforts, she can't distill that much crazy in such a potent concentration. Even among the Freespacers.)

It's like I say to some people - "There is nothing quite like hitting an enemy with ten thousand raving, screaming lunatics." Even if they don't crack right away, they'll do untold havoc to the enemy. And this is pretty much the Mad Lad's shtick. Everyone's got their own flavor of mayhem they prefer. You'll see ships and mechas from all kinds of eras, races, makes and models, and all of them sporting features that are some degree of "ill-advised" on paper, but they somehow make it WORK.

Tactics... What tactics? Everyone does their own damn thing, just like the Texian volunteer army of old that so badly humiliated Santa Ana despite being the disorganized mess they were. And with so many people working at so many different angles, more than a few are going to have some degree of success or another, because there's always gonna be something the enemy never expected.

One guy's entire thing is, in a ground assault operation, to buzz enemy airspace in his heavy aerospace interceptor doing something to the tune of Mach 20. He calls it "The Rodan Trick" for obvious reasons.

Another uses a heavily modified Mad Cat where the entire loadout is long-range missiles. It launches multiple drones to act as its eyes. Once the drones are in place, he'll Scott Bernard his entire loadout, all at once. Madness? Oh no. Every single one of those missiles is specially addressed, and he's on a mission to make sure every missile gets there like Hiro Protagonist from Snow Crash. And deliver he does - the missiles are very hard to shake because they are guided not by an internal system, but by the earlier mentioned drones which can use any number of passive and active systems.

And like a maraschino cherry on top of an improbable looking sundae, their preferred Goldfish Warning song is Wipeout by the Surfaris. Hearing that wild, high cackle and the equally high pitched voice crying out "Wipeout!" lives on as a trigger for PTSD in the minds of many Very Bad Men That Got What Was Coming To Them. At least, the ones that manage to survive the encounter.

Oh, and I finally figured out what the Jumpship should be called.

The Cosmic Joke.

It's like Jim Henson's ethos - that you can't take yourself too seriously. And just like in the Muppet Show, on board The Cosmic Joke there's always someone nearby who is ready and willing to blow you up if you start taking yourself too seriously.

No, really.

Something commonly carried by Mad Lads are small pyrotechnic devices called "Reminders". They are harmless, producing only a loud bang and some incredibly sooty and sulfurous smelling smoke, leaving the victim covered in soot and smelling vaguely of rotten eggs. They are used to "Remind" someone that they aren't quite that special and need to loosen up.

Although, at times, use of Reminders can sometimes trigger some very rambunctious games of tag.