When making plans, it is best to first consider what your objectives are. If I wanted to, I could become the most incredible Mek that ever lived, serving under a powerful warboss in order to receive an near endless supply of materials and workers to create powerful weapons that defied all logic. But I didn’t want that. I wanted independence. Freedom. The ability to make my own decisions about where to go, what to make, and who to fight. And yes, I intend to fight. If I were my previous self, I probably would have wanted a peaceful job. But now? Now I craved the violence. Not nearly as much as my other Ork compatriots, nor was I as confident of my chances of survival, but I wouldn’t be able to stand a peaceful life. Not anymore.

So, I wanted to be able to make choices about where to go and who to fight. That meant being a boss. Then I wanted to survive. That meant being clever, having good gear, and loyal minions. I could handle the first two, but what of the third? Orks are usually too wild, too independent, too stubborn, to be relied upon, let alone trained. But the Stormboyz were different. Able to follow orders, and with a powerful compulsion to mimic their leader's mannerisms, they were quite the promising specimens. Hell, I’d seen several polishing their boots. They didn’t have a Grot do it either, but were doing it themselves.

It was pretty much a miracle that I’d stumbled my way into their midst, what with the sudden ability to design and create Rokkets. Convenient. Almost too convenient... But I digress.

Thus, with my current power and motivations, my goal was relatively simple. Create a loyal following of (semi)-disciplined warriors, loyal enough to listen to unusual orders like, "Don't suicide charge that gun line.", or, "Use smoke grenades to cover the advance."

Though the plan was promising, the product… well… the Orks were doing their best?

“No, yah git! Throw the stikk, not dah pin!” I screamed, striking a Stormboy with my Beat Stikk. Standing in a trench, the practicing Stormboy held a crude flash grenade in one hand, eagerly watching the grenade’s pin as it arced through the air. With a flash, the grenade exploded in his hand, the improvised flash grenade shredding his palm, and taking two fingers with it.

Small arms fire soon began to pepper the surrounding stone and earth, pinging off metal armor, and only rarely finding exposed flesh. Rather than cry out in pain from his injury, the Stormboy stared mutely at his hand, then turned to me, a look of confusion on his face. A few seconds passed before understanding flashed across his blocky features. Nodding, he grabbed another stikk grenade, pulling the pin, and tossing the grenade part up and out of the trench, towards a small fortified bunker where three dozen Grots wielded handguns, and the occasional emplaced light machine gun. The grenade missed by several yards, but it had the intended effect, causing the Grots to take cover. Smiling, the Stormboy made to rush up the earthen trench, before pausing sheepishly, giving me an awkward look.

I nodded to him as he began to count down on his fingers. On the count of two, the grenade exploded, and the Ork rushed up the trench. The Ork opened up on the bunker, a fast-firing Shoota again sending the cowardly Grots into cover, and allowing the Ork to approach almost unopposed. Whooping with delight, the Ork reached the bunker, and a small metal table beside it. The table was heaped with greasy squigs, all covered in a thin layer of steel and bolted to the table. A dozen hungry Grots stood on the table, desperately clawing at the squigs, managing to pull small bits of meat out from the few holes in the metal. The Grots grudgingly fled as the Ork approached, watching in envy as the Stormboy ripped a squig off the table, and chomped down on it, metal and all, before running back to the safety of the trench, an angry barrage following in his wake.

If I have learned anything in my time as an Ork, it is that food is one of the biggest motivators for Ork and goblin-kind alike. Offer a Grot a nice roast squig, and he’ll do practically anything. This then allowed for a rather fun bit of Pavlovian psychology. Like a monkey with a bell and a food dispenser, I could get the goblins to do practically anything, if I conditioned them properly. Even feral goblins could be manipulated and trained, gitz who’d never even seen me before, let alone those that knew me, and the rewards that came with serving me.

Thus, it was easy to convince massive amounts of Grots to serve as live training for my Boyz, in exchange for some sweet, sweet squig meat. The solution had been simple. Have the Boyz fight for the food. Give the Grots just enough weaponry and numbers to be a threat, and have them guard a pile of food. Then, teach the Boyz how to get to said food, using tactics I hoped to have them perform in real battles. Grenades and suppression fire, it was as simple as you could get. But even that was a challenge for some Orks.

I watched in amusement as another Ork made his way down into the trench, yelling and jeering at the watching crowd, eager to try his hand and earn himself a squig. With only one hundred rounds and two grenades, the Ork would have to be careful with his supply, in case he ran out, and could no longer force the cowardly Grots to hide behind cover. There were loads of Grots in the bunker, and if he tried to approach without forcing them to hide, he would be dead before he made it to the table.

It was perfect. The challenge and promise of food was more than enough to have nearly every Stormboy eager to prove himself. And the Grots didn’t mind the losses, which were relatively low, thanks to the ample cover the bunker provided, and the low-power, high-fire rate weapons the Orks were given. A win-win. The only difficulty had been finding a way to limit how quickly the Grots could themselves consume the squigs, and with how to make sure they actually put up a fight.

Thus, the metal plating, and the band of loyal Grots, who kept the defending Grots locked in the bunker. The Grots, switching between who fought, and who got to eat, were incentivized to protect the food, so there would still be some left when their turn to feast came. The metal plating kept the Grots from just downing all the squigs, but the Orks were tough enough to bite through the metal just fine.

And so, I had myself a training ground, with minimal maintenance required. There were only three bunkers, as I was needed to supervise, to keep the Boyz from cheating, and rushing all together to steal the squigs. Still, it wasn’t too distracting, so I was able to do some tinkering. Specifically, in regards to harnesses.

I had spent a good deal of time considering how to get Grots and Orks to work together in any meaningful way. The former were cowardly, while the latter were stupid. It was together that the true power of the Orks could be seen. And it was likely that it had once been common for the two to work in tandem, back in the good old days, when they had first been bio-engineered to wage war on a galactic scale. Alas, that had been some forty million years ago, and a LOT of things change in that amount of time. Now, the Grots were just simpering slaves and tasty treats. Too scared to do anything but serve, and often sent at the enemy en-masse, with flamethrower-wielding Orks behind them, driving them forward.

That was going to change. I had already started the first steps, giving the Grots some confidence by arming them better than their peers, seeing to many victories in their endless squabbles. Now, they needed to see that a fight against a bigger foe wasn’t necessarily impossible, if they used numbers. Even now, as they went about serving the watching Orks, they got to see Ork after Ork forced back, unable to take quite as much food as he’d like. Two even died, taking too many shots, and collapsing within line of sight of the bunker, allowing the goblins to kill them with the sheer weight of fire.

Next, would be getting the two to work together. Stormboyz loved their uniforms, and loved emulating their bosses. So I was busy creating some fancy armor for the leader Orks, a near full-body covering of metal, and embellished with all sorts of fancy bitz. But most importantly were the pauldrons. Each boasted a half seat on them, which a Grot could stand on, head and gun poking out over the back of the shoulder, from where they could provide fire support, or reload their Ork's weapon. With the current training regime, the plan was to replace the Ork’s guns with Grots, forcing them to rely on the Grot to provide fire support, while they practiced throwing the grenades. Though the Grots were better shots, they simply lacked the upper body strength to throw a large grenade far enough for it to be of use.

So, with my plan in place, I only had to wait. Let the Orks learn a bit, then start them on working together with the Grots. Until then, there was still plenty to do, and after I finished with the uniforms, I would finally be able to do some testing to figure out if any of my rational, functional inventions actually performed better than pure Orky Tek. If I knew my Orky lore, I might be able to do something amazing by fusing the two sciences. Or, if I was wrong, all of my human-like innovations were pointless, being less powerful than standard Orky Tek, and ten times harder to make. So, yah, kind of important to test that. Only, the results could throw my entire set of plans into the dumpster. So I’d put it off. But not any more. It was time to see just how good of a Mek I could become.