Time to take a detour from our boy Axton and shine some light on a certain… villain.

Mayor Stebbs was not at all in a good mood. You see, he had been given a mission by his boss, or to be more precise, the programmers who created him and his goons had sold Stebbs and the entire colony to a certain individual who, by their own reckoning, should have been the one to get Axton’s pod. But, while that little turn of events had been most unwelcome for a certain Mr. Blythe, it was positively a godsend for Stebbs.

This was because Stebbs and Mr. Blythe were both avid collectors of things. In Stebbs’ case, such things were old War Suits. Unfortunately, Donovan Blythe had set aside a considerable bit of money to get these Suits from Stebbs, the reason for which was because he thought that they would be fun to pilot, if not simply display as a show of his power.

There was, of course, a catch.

These vintage, antique War Suits were never intended to be usable. They were, essentially, solely intended to be set pieces for battles taking place in and around Museums and the like, which meant that despite being hyped up in the in-game lore as being amazing, they were essentially nothing more than empty husks of metal devoid of any internal workings.

As one might imagine, Donovan Blythe did not know this, but Stebbs certainly did. He was half scared out of his wits that Axton’s boss would show up and demand his ancient pieces of tech, only to discover that they were just empty husks with nothing inside. This was one of the big reasons why Stebbs had given Axton such a sentence; he needed the money to have the Suits retrofitted and did not have any normal way to come up with said funds.

But, much to his chagrin, Axton was refusing to ‘pay for his crimes’, and that left Stebbs and company up shit creek without a paddle. That was until they found out through backroom channels that a certain band of ruffians had managed to gain a sizable fortune. Wouldn’t it be justified if Stebbs, as the Mayor of this little Podunk colony, was given said fortune? I mean, he was the Mayor, after all, and the colony could not exist without him! They would gladly give him what he needed/ wanted, and if not then he could simply arrest them and take it anyway.

Now imagine Stebbs’ shock and anger when the gang had not even a pair of credits to rub together. He was convinced that the Orphans hid their riches somewhere and decided to take several members as hostages. If the Orphans didn’t allow Stebbs’ men to monitor them constantly, then the hostages would be killed, but even that wasn’t enough to get what Stebbs wanted from their leader.

Instead, Stebbs was left with more mouths to feed and more men he needed to pay a salary for. And, for a man as miserly as Stebbs, that was a nightmare unlike almost any other. Let me, the Author, be perfectly clear; Stebbs had more than enough personal wealth to retrofit the Suits that Mr. Blythe wanted working around eighty times over. Even if Stebbs paid the absolute maximum he could to have each Suit made perfectly functional, he still would have only downed his total net wealth by around 28.4%.

Stebbs, however, was not just a pervert, a deviant, a bigot, a misogynist, and a slaver. He was also incredibly cheap, as well. So cheap, in fact, that his goons carried weapons that were so old and out of date that, in Earth terms, they may well have been trying to control a large village from the 1870s while wielding arquebuses. Sure, they had energy weapons, but these were big, bulky, and quite useless things that even a modern militia would view as impotent and useless.

After all, what use is a blaster gun if it can only kill an unarmored, unaugmented, stationary infantryman at around 40 feet or so? They were essentially carrying around backpack-fed RPG7-size handguns, but Stebbs refused to pay the money needed to up their arsenal. Likewise, even if Stebbs had gotten ahold of that elusive fortune, he likely would have kept it for himself and not spoken a word to anyone about it.

The tl;dr is that Stebbs was wealthy AF, but also more of a miser than a certain Mr. Scrooge. This led to a series of choices that would, unfortunately for him, come back to bite him in his oversized arse. For, you see, Stebbs had, just moments before Axton removed his bindings, finally managed to find a group of people to finish the retrofitting of those Suits.

Now, I can hear you ask, “Finish the retrofitting? Didn’t he not have a single hour of work put into them?”

But that’s where you are wrong, kiddo. Stebbs did indeed have people working on the Suits prior to that moment, but the process was beyond slow and had many, many industrial accidents. After all, what can you expect when you abduct kids aged between 4 and 15 years old with no engineering or mechanical knowledge to speak of and have them try to retrofit War Suits that were never designed for combat?

Stebbs didn’t care that the ‘unpaid interns’ were dying daily. He didn’t care that the oil and grease that lubricated some of the parts had a Child’s Blood content of around 20-60%. He didn’t care that kids were getting offed left right and center as he pushed them harder and harder to do ‘their job’ ad he didn’t care how many of them got tetanus and died horribly after scrounging around in the scrap yard.

All he cared about was spending as little as possible, but as the Final Release of Heavy Metal Dawn drew closer, Stebbs began to feel the crunch. That was why he had just gotten off the Comms with Discount Dan’s Definitely Not Illegal War Suit Assembly Crew, and that was why he was just about to send some people to find out what the hell their prisoner was up to. Stebbs needed parts and he needed credits, and Axton needed to do his damn job and give them to him.

Then the ‘Prisoner Escaping’ alarm resounded. Stebbs checked the program that showed him all of those whom he had in cuffs, and to his shock and horror, his big moneymaker (not that Axton had ever pulled in any revenue for Stebbs himself) was now unbound. If Mr. Blythe found out…

Stebbs got on the comms and barked his orders to all of his goons.

“Abandon the orphans! Find that Outworlder!”