Alexander Black (Bert): Alexander Black was born a Belter on Metis in 3028. His parents were fugitives from the Capellan Confederation, but Alexander never knew why -- both his parents died before they told him why they left House Liao to come live in Sol, or why sometimes they would decide to move to a new asteroid, or even a new cluster, in the middle of the night. At 18, Alexander was discharged from the foster system he had spent the last two years in, and signed on with ComStar in 3046. He placed well enough in small arms combat to secure him a berth at the prestigious Sandhurst Military Academy on Terra, but once there proved himself even more adept as a MechWarrior. He graduate in 3050, and was attached to the 283rd Division of the 10th Army.
In 3052, the 283rd was pressed into service defending the cities of Brzo and Skupo against Clan Wolf at the Battle of Tukayyid. Alexander acquitted himself extremely well, managing to bring down a Clan Puma, earning him a Black Star on his campaign ribbon. Unfortunately, he was severely injured during his time there, and though a year in the hospital cured his most serious wounds, they left him badly scared where his face was pressed against the flash-heated control panel of his Crab as it came apart around him in the last minutes of the fight to keep the 10th Army from being encircled. He remained on medical leave until 3053. It was during the fighting on Tukayyid that Alexander first met David Cho.
In 3058, the commander of Alexander's Level II approached him to inform him that his unit was going over to the Word of Blake, and that he would like Alexander to come with him. Black refused, and a scuffle ensued, resulting in him being left alone in his house, as the last remaining element of his Level II. At the time, the ComGuard had serious reservations about the 283rd Division in general, and so wanted to make an example of Black as a particularly outstanding example of loyalty in the face of mass defection. He was transferred to he newly-created 472nd Division, the so-called Invader Galaxy, and issued a Black Hawk.
Invader Galaxy served primarily as the foil for ComGuard and Star League units training for combat against the Clans. As a result, Alexander spent almost his entire tour with Invader Galaxy fighting wargames, and the extreme amounts of experience he accumulated fighting some of the best units in the Inner Sphere over and over again forged him into an even better MechWarrior than he thought possible. In 3059, Invader Galaxy left the world of Defiance, and traveled to the Clan Homeworlds to participate in the Great Refusal. Although Alexander did not participate, he witnessed the breaking of the Clan threat against the Inner Sphere by Victor Steiner-Davion and the SLDF.
Invader Galaxy returned to Tukayyid and began formal training programs at the Focht War College. After a year and a half, Alexander found training's allure had waned, and wanted to be back on the front lines, so he put in for a transfer to a combat unit. He was attached to the 394th, at the time conducting peacekeeping operations in the Chaos March. The various meddlings of the Word of Blake and the Capellan Confederation in the Chaos March kept him busy, and word began to circulate of "The ComStar Clanner" piloting a ComStar-white Black Hawk, with two ER PPC's and uncanny aim. The 394th is operating on Hall at the start of the campaign.
David Cho (Henry) - David Cho was born Wei Zhang in 3029. His parents for worked for the logistics train the supported McCarron's Armored Calvary, and as such young Wei was moved from world to world with some regularity, and spent most of his childhood in fairly rough environments. He learned to blend and to adopt a certain combination of anonymous discretion and lightning-fast action when dealing with problems, undoubtedly picked up from the way the mercenaries around him dealt with issues. In 3047, he was granted admission to the Sarna Martial Academy, thanks largely to a letter of recommendation from a certain highly-placed member of MAC.
Wei Zhang proved himself extremely cagey and capable during his time at SMA, and found himself quickly shunted into the special forces end of the curriculum, where he excelled at infiltration and hand-to-hand combat. He graduated in four years, and stepped directly into the Maskirovka agent position everybody knew he was destined for.
He was immediately issued the identity of David Cho, and sent to Sian join ComStar, where he was to enlist in the new-created ComGuard. In-place Capellan agents paved his way, and soon he found himself in a berth as a combat pilot with the 283rd Division. Less than six months after he joined, he found himself fighting Clan Wolf at Tukayyid, where, among other people, he met Alexander Black for the first time.
After Tukayyid, Cho lead a very under-the-radar career with the 283rd. Over the remainder of his first tour with ComStar, the 283rd suffered from increased attrition from defections to the Word of Blake -- by 3057, the Division had one of the highest defection rates in ComStar. It was during this relative downtime that certain elements of both ComStar ROM and Word of Blake ROM recognized the skills in Cho that Maskirovka had originally bred into him, and saw him as an asset. He was quietly moved to more and more sensitive positions within ComStar, eventually becoming a personal bodyguard to Precentor Lisa Koenig-Cober shortly after the Word of Blake seized Terra in 3058. In 3059, he was assigned to a Special Forces unit and operated in the Chaos March for several years, effectively acting as a saboteur against Word of Blake assets trying to cement a hold there. In 3064, we was formally inducted into ComStar ROM as a agent.
Cho spent the next two years specializing in insertion and extraction operations for other ROM agents, and proved exceptionally good at his job. He was a competent pilot of most air vehicles, as well as a proficient driver. Sometime during this period, he was delisted from Maskirovka, although the fact that no team has been sent to terminate him indicates it was not under entirely unfavorable conditions. The exact nature of his departure from that organization is not known at this point.
Equally unknown is the reason for his sudden reassignment as a Black Moth pilot to the 394th Division in 3067. This very abrupt career change suggests a falling out with ROM, but while a capable helicopter pilot, Cho seems ill-suited to his current position. Even he doesn't know exactly why he was placed where he is, but he has faith that it will become clear why he was placed where he is soon.
Shin Magnusson (Morgan) - Other members of ComStar charitably describe Shin as being "something of a reactionary." Less charitably, he's so far into Sixth of June Land he came out the other side. Growing up on Hanover under the parentage of a career ComGuard pilot and an HPG technician indoctrinated Shin into the Blessed Order's mysteries at a young age, combining old-fashioned Combine discipline with the religious trappings ComStar had yet to lose.
Shin's parents envisioned for him a childhood full of learning the basics of Blake's teachings, followed by introduction into the Order the moment he hit the minimum age. The 5th Jaguar Regulars rudely interrupted this by conquering the planet in the middle of 3051, with Shin's mother's unit being pulled off the planet soon afterward to participate in the build-up for Tukkayid. His father attempted to continue Shin's schooling, although the Jaguar occupation badly disrupted life on the world and the ComStar detachment often found themselves in the midst of the chaos due to Jaguar resentment at their continued control over the HPG station.
3052 proved to be equally as poor a year for the boy. During Operation Scorpion the Clanner garrison chose to vent their grievances by flooding the compound with anaesthetic gas, going so far as to punch holes in the building walls with light weaponry to ensure the entire ComStar detachment would be disabled without risking damage to the valuable HPG equipment. Uncontrolled exposure to the anaesthetic resulted in mass casualties among ComStar personnel, with Shin's father among the dead. At his father's orders, Shin managed to seal himself and a number of other personnel away in one of the station's underground shelters, along with a large collection of ComStar historical documents and journals. When the vault opened in the aftermath of the Clan operation Jaguar forces, finding it was full of noncombatants, allowed them to leave after screening Shin's trove of documents for any information of value. Finding nothing, the boy was cast out on the streets with the other ComStar survivors.
News of his mother's death on Tukkayid as well as that of innumerable of ComGuard personnel, combined with the callous Jaguar treatment of the local populace, enraged Shin and his fellows, and after some minor difficulties escaping Hanover's capital without notice they linked up with other disgruntled planetary residents and began a half-decade guerilla campaign that only ended when Operation Bulldog came crashing down on top of the Jaguars. During this time Shin continued his study of ComStar doctrine, unaware of the schisms that had occurred in the wake of Operation Scorpion's failure and Myndo Waterly's execution. When the second Star League's forces freed Hanover, Shin gleefully contacted ComStar and joined the ComGuard, with his parents' sterling records and death in the line of duty greatly easing his passage into the ranks.
He initially attempted to become a Mechwarrior, like his mother had been, but training went... poorly. Shin's large frame combined with some odd neurological traits made it exceptionally difficult for him to pilot or aim a vehicle. While he eventually gained some minor skill, no sane officer would consider him capable of piloting a multi-million C-bill war machine. Crestfallen, Shin prepared himself for being shunted into a desk job when one of the trainers, on a hunch, put him through some battle armor simulation work. Having never considered the option prior to that point, Shin gave it his best go. The bulk that gave him so much trouble inside a 'Mech abruptly became a virtue, and Shin passed the entry requirements easily. The remainder of his training went smoothly, and at the age of 20 Shin entered the ComGuard battle armor ranks.
Unfortunately, his attitudes had begun to create some friction with his comrades. Shin still held to the oldest and most hard-line attitudes in ComStar, particularly the idea that ComStar should be the sole protector and holder of technological knowledge, and he was appalled at the state of the universe, especially the loss of Terra. Most of his comrades quietly expected him to disappear into the Blakist ranks any day, and he probably would have but for a quirk of upbringing. In a twist of Combine and ComStar ideology, his parents taught that loyalty to ComStar must be absolute, for to leave the ranks represented a rejection of one's faith in Blake's vision of the future. Such apostasy could never be the proper answer, even to apparent heresy from the uppermost ranks of the organization. It was instead the duty of any true acolyte to hold even tighter to the true ways, and by shining example show those who faltered the true path. The apostate, of course, could only be answered with death.
Despite Shin's fervency, skepticism abounded anyway, and upper ranks looked for places where he could do meaningful damage to the enemy without creating a huge security risk.
As a solution, Shin was placed in a small, experimental unit employing prototype mimetic armor suits. These troopers were inserted into worlds in the Chaos March where WoB interests dominated and ordered to perform acts of sabotage and mass-havoc. As ComStar saw it, if Shin did his job, then great. If he went over to them, then at most he was compromising a small team of soldiers wearing armor which was actually less advanced, in some ways, than the Word's own Purifier suits. Shin, for his part, threw himself into the work with wild abandon, seeing the Blakists as a band of cowards and faithless dogs whose failure to stay the course had lead ComStar to its present weakened, shattered state. He spent the majority of the 3060s on various assignments with his little, officially nonexistent unit of infiltrators, sowing havoc across WoB-dominated worlds near Terra and developing a wide array of skills helpful for guerrilla warfare.
In late 3067, to his confusion, he found himself detached from his unit and assigned to pilot a Firestarter FS9-S1 under the 394th Division's command. Why anyone could possibly want him to get back into a 'Mech is beyond him, but he has been called to duty and he will execute it to the best of his ability.
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