Marsdon Arceneaux

The legend of legends, it's impossible to tell fact from fiction with the man. The wildland campfire stories say he was born from lightning and can wield the heavens themselves as a weapon, and Organics hold him with equal parts contempt, fear, and even admiration. There are few who can claim such... universal fame, all while maintaing the image of a hero.

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As close to a first gen Ushabti as one can get without being a pile of barely functional synthetic nerves and flesh spun from metal fibers, Marsdon Arceneaux perhaps most clearly embodies the title of Ace in its original meaning. A term that was coined due to his actions, and spoke to the cause of Ushabti liberation and an aggressive attitude of resistance toward the megacorps and organics who seek to keep Ushabti as a slave class.   If you listen to the tales for points of commonality, it's often said that Marsdon was awakened somewhere in the Crownlands, likely around Blight. Of course, a simple Ushabti; newly awakened isn't anything of note, so there really are no corroberated stories about the first few decades of his new life, though everyone and their mother always has some feat of his to talk about, even if they were comparatively mundane when placed against his later accomplishments. Outsmarting a strawboss with impossible quotas, or outworking the machinery around him. The kind of folk tale with little to no consequence, but equally little backing.   About a century after his assumed awakening, Arceneaux's first appearance in documentation can be found, though it is in the worst of ways. His name and designation appear on a list of survivors of a raid on his village. No other Arceneauxs appear on that list. Even without that depressing fact, he is one of only fourteen names.   From there he disappears once more, fading into the background for another century, until his designation shows up on the payroll of some regional warlord in the Amerigos. While warlords aren't known for their record keeping, Arceneaux's name can be found on slips that date his service to be around seven years, give or take, before his name makes it onto the KIA rolls, alongside most of his division. A month later, the command structure of that warlord made it onto the same roll in its totality. After that, the name jumps north west, where his designation can be found on a plaque laid into the floor of an old world building that served, for a time, as the sheriff's office of a now defunct scavenging town. The founding of the town, according to the locals, took place about 60 years before the area dried up.   A few years ago I was in the area and asked some questions of a few local scavengers, and while they were prone to legend and superstition, they did have the commonality that they were all in agreement that the area was a lot safer while the town was in full swing, with few raiders, tribals, and tech-horrors abounding.   It seems that he then spent some time as a caravan guard, traveling from place to place, and even across the ocean a few times. He must have made quite the list of contacts during this time, because after a few years he shows up in the more direct way that he would become famous for in short order.   Hits on corporate banks and armories, a few assassinations attributed to his name, and various other gigs and runs, marked a stark turn around for the man. Whatever had happened to him to cause such an immediate break in his previous routines seemingly pushed him to greater and greater feats of skill and daring. In 2674, one of his previous targets (a minor biotechnical firm that cattered to high-end Organics), attempted to hunt him down. He brought it down, physically, in retalliation.   In 2813, Arceneaux would found a team of mercenaries called the 9 Crowns, and would complete several jobs with resounding success, making quite the splash in the mercenary scene. Their real ticket to fame, however, was a job that started simple. A small recon job out in the Belt, looking at anomalous blips that had been picked up by a handful of agencies. The Crowns didn't return, but the anomalies disappeared, so the interested parties considered the job complete.   Then the 9 Crowns appeared in the office of the President of Columbia, having not tripped a single point of security. According to the President himself, they looked haggard but healthy, and of course he had no idea who they were to begin with. Legend has it they copied pretty much every file on the Presidents terminal before presenting him with a data-card of their own bearing images of a series of alien ships hidden within the Belt, of a design unrecognizable. Then they activated a device which opened a portal in the room, it's strange radiations streaking the Presidents hair a snow white, and left their bizarre warning behind. Soon after, after a series of sightings from shipwrites, armorers, and gunsmiths, the 9 Crowns would drop off the face of the earth, yet to be seen again. Those ships would turn up in the nets of Belt salvage though, breaches blown in their hulls and crew scattered about in pieces.