Order of the Phoenix
| Motto | “From Heaven, we fall. Through Fire, we are cleansed. |
|---|---|
| Parent Faction | Starlit Court |
| Type | Knightly Order |
| Leader | Grandmaster Syr Darcey Cohen Poe |
| Homeworld | Sihi |
| Colors | Gold, Orange, Red |
The Order of the Phoenix is one of the twelve original founding Knightly Orders of the Starlit Court. It focuses on dropping elite troops behind enemy lines to soften them up for the main assault. Their mechs and pilots are dropped from low orbit all at once so that, upon landing, they can immediately engage the enemy. Their main focus evoking shock and awe as they disrupt enemy defenses and infrastructure, delaying retaliatory action for as long as possible. They sometimes double as advanced scouts for orbital bombardments and artillery strikes. Their mechs are light to medium in size and weight to allow for speed, but balanced with staying power to combat infantry and the occasional mech division.
Origin
Since the founding of the court and the creation of the orders, this order has been a mainstay and has not changed its name. Grandmaster Gaheris, The Phoenix Lord, was the one who formed the order and taught it the ways of how to break an enemy using the element of surprise paired with intimidation to evoke fear. He curated this specific technique from his experiences throughout the civil war that resulted in the coronation of the High King.
After the loss and mysterious disappearance of the High King, Grandmaster Gaheris went into a depressive rage. He had to be held within a cell for several days to keep himself from causing any harm to others, Sihi, or himself. Eventually, he broke himself out of the cell and launched himself from Sihi in a drop pod containing his personal mech. It took days for the search parties to find him, and when they did, they discovered his shocking actions. He landed on a small, lush moon and spent days burning and destroying his forested surroundings.
When he was located, his fury had run out. He was crouched, tears rolling down his face, weeping over the loss of their home world, the king, and his failure to be there to die at the defense of the High King. His body was caked in that of the ash of the burning forest. On that day, the order scribed its motto, by which the individuals guide their actions.
Having released his mighty anger, he returned to Sihi with a new purpose and ideas for what needed to be done, as well as plans for how his legacy would live on.
Purpose
OUT ON THE FLEET
They use light ships to cause chaos amongst the enemy fleet and break their formations. They are usually the first to try to board enemy ships; if unsuccessful, they strike at the most critical points to ensure that communications and cohesion in an enemy fleet are destroyed or strained.
IN COMBAT
Following the tenant of ‘first in last out,’ they strike from above, landing in either their mechs, which have been modified to survive being dropped from orbit, or landing in drop pods. They are fast mobile troops that take to capturing and holding onto strategic points and disrupting planetary communications amongst defenders. They drop in and cause chaos until the main force arrives. Because they usually land behind enemy lines, these men are elite soldiers and act very independently in combat.
Flagship
The main ship of their fleet is the “Smoldering Pyre,” a ship boasting light anti-ship weaponry that can defend it from any fighter craft that dares to get too close. The Smoldering Pyre is equipped with a heavy amount of drop pods, capable of dropping either thirty medium-sized mechs or over 300 smaller mechs or powered armored troops. The smaller mechs can be layered and stacked in the space that a single medium-sized mech would occupy to maximize carrier capabilities.
Notable members==
'Syr Darcey Cohen Poe ‘The Phoenix’s Fists’
The current grandmaster of the order and the latest in the unbroken line of the founding grandmaster's bloodline. Many speculate that he is the greatest of the Phoenix grandmasters in terms of power since the founder himself. In a particularly intense fight, his mech was disabled. He hopped out, lifted the mech’s arm with its gun intact, and started firing back at the enemy, taking down the enemy mech that was approaching to finish the kill. His arms were badly burnt, but that didn't stop him from fighting on and winning the engagement. Many witnessed his hands burning with crackling flames, but the inferno did not seem to bother the grandmaster. He gained his honorific and won reputation, but his actions necessitated the replacement of his arms with cybernetics.
Syr Duncan Fox “Fire Fox”
The Second in command is a very hot-headed person, and his temper is not tempered by his use of a heavy flamethrower. Along with this, he tends to get teased a lot for his height, being of small stature, about 5’7.” He often gets into lots of fights with those who make fun of his height. The only person that seems to get away with such jokes is the grandmaster, and that’s only because Duncan is smart enough to know that he wouldn't win.
Lady Rosa O'Connor “Firefly”
She is a well-respected member of the Order of the Phoenix based on her battle skills within her mech, which has been modified to boost its speed. She is a fearsome sight, zooming around the battlefield, drenching the land in flame. Out of the mech, she is often considered one of the beauties of the knightly orders, if not in the top twenties for most eligible bachelorettes.
RECRUITMENT
Recruitment begins at the examination of possible aspirants from all over Sihi’s education system. The Order of the Phoenix searches for those with a high amount of daring and that eagerness to push themselves to their limits. Most of their more promising recruits are both adrenaline junkies and very athletic, given that their conditioning will necessitate that they have the muscle mass and stamina to withstand the grueling training.
Once the recruit is picked and taken to the phoenix orders headquarters on Sihi. they will go through about a year of training before they can be made a squire of the order. The first few weeks will be an extreme bout of training to not only break them down but ensure that their bodies and mind will withstand the hardship to come as well as just how crazy things will get during training and after. After these first few weeks most will have seen an increase in both muscle mass and speed.
When the recruit's body has been built to handle the training to come, the first part of the true training begins. Their first trial will be learning how to survive in the wild on any planet and environment for as long as possible. They must navigate it with limited data, time, a partial map and a compass. At the end of this, back on Sihi, they will have a special assignment in which the group of aspirants will be taken early in the morning and loaded up into a shuttle craft then flown out and over the nearby forest. This area is a part of the Poe family estates, and it is where the next stage of their training takes place. The recruits will all be given small pieces of a map that they will have to piece together like a puzzle, along with randomly being given a single extra item: a compass, a knife, or rations. They will be told to reach the order’s headquarters by sunrise.
The students are informed that they will be dropped from the low-flying ship at any moment. Without warning, their seats fall out from below them, and they are deposited into the forest with enough time for them to hopefully slow their descent. Many of the unprepared or unlucky end up very badly hurt crashing down. Many end up hurt either with a broken leg or arms more often than not, but no deaths have been reported during this training segment.
After landing, the recruits move on to their next step in training that will last for a few months, one of the longer portions of their training. They will start practicing halo-dropping with trained knights to ensure that the recruits will know what to do when falling through orbit and atmosphere. Some lucky few even get to ride along in a mech to experience just a bit of what it will be like to fall inside their own mechs. Each aspiring recruit will need to experience at least 35 jumps, with at least 15 of those jumps inserting the aspirant into simulated combat zones. After the 5-6 months that this part of the training entails, aspirants are introduced to the fae, and are then split into squires and men at arms. Phoenix men at arms have to have similar training to their knight counterparts.
After this, the newly-forged squires will move on to a more-relaxed setting at the end of their training. They learn the schematics of their mechs with help from the forges, which provide members to help teach the squires on how to maintain and repair their mechs, as well as how to improvise parts. Their final test of this training section is to take a pile of parts and create an emergency beacon device or an equivalently difficult piece of machinery, depending on the instructor. An example of an alternate test is building a functional weapons system for replacement of damaged mech equipment.
For the final few months of their training, the squires are allowed to give themselves a choice of a direction in terms of weapons and specialty, whether that is guns, flame-throwing weapons, or even melee weapons. They receive some demolitions training so that they can disarm or arm bombs. Additionally, squires take an extensive course on guerrilla tactics.
When their training is completed successfully, knights choose from the ranks of the squires to take them under their wings. The acceptance ceremony consists of a large bonfire, where the graduating squire will take the training uniform they had worn over the past year and toss it into the fire. They are then presented with their dress uniform in with the order colors: dark blue, orange, and black as an accenting color. This symbolizes the death of their old identity and the birth of a new knight, one who has passed through hell, now reborn as a full member of the order.
Men-At-Arms Attached Regiment
501st infantry Airborne regiment “Hell jumpers”
This regiment received much of the same training as the order knights, even after being allocated to the men at arms unit. They are dropped alongside their knights in special pods which are able to hold fire teams in each one. Many of their members are taken from the knightly training regiment, aspirants that obtained low scores or underperformed, not meeting the high standards of the knights. There are also those who did well in the training, but were not chosen by a fae.
They are still warriors of great ability, a group of crazed adrenaline junkies, happily yeeting themselves out of perfectly good space ships. They are known as “Hell Jumpers” due to the fact that you'd have to be mad as hell to attempt the things they do on the regular.