Editing Luca Sykewalsh (section)

== Background ==

Luca grew up in the lower hive of Tenebrous Kel Vega, a world that had been separated from most of the Imperial services and had a massive psyker population due to a lack of a Black Ship visiting for centuries. He grew up as a child of the typical drudges working to keep themselves out of the Underhive, that their child would visit occasionally. There was a thriving society of mutants, criminals, and a few minor xenos races trying to live there without drawing any attention from the Arbiters, exposing the young Luca to a whole mess of heretic thought. Things changed when a rogue Inquisitor gathered the more fanatical middle and upper hive members to burn down the evil in the world, which included several vital Imperial institutions. It turned hives into battlezones with eventually some opposing Inquisitors, local Imperial Guard, and Space Marine Chapters, including the Storm Giants.

The fact that Luca was able to survive this war, joining a Hiver Gang to fight back, doing everything from kludging together weaponry, running messages, and even fighting the invaders with some substandard weaponry. In the middle of a fire fight between the upper hive rebels and the space marines, Luca and his gang to take down the Spyrer captain with improvised explosives. Glad to have some pressure released from this level, ready to conscript the gang into an auxillary role for the loyalist forces. Luca responded to this by kicking a marine in the balls and getting punched out for the trouble.

For the next month he spent it cooling his heels in a cell until the fighting was over. Things might have ended there if the Storm Giants didn’t take several casualties and demanded some new recruits from the world they just saved, as is part of their Chapter Charter. The Kel Vegan nobility scraped together some of the toughest youths in the Hive City, including Luca who was a bit too old to undergo the process. Due to so few boys showed as much promise as him, the nobles hit him with a quick juveant treatment to give them an acceptable candidate. This proved to be a smart move as he was one of the few boys to get to the Initiate stage, mostly through tenacity, jury rigging, and keeping a slightly disturbingly positive attitude to this ordeal.

His time as a scout was rather difficult for a Fleet Based Chapter, mainly doing some ride along scanning on the Thunderhawk dropships. When he managed to go planet side for actual scouting missions, Luca did not do too well at the sneaking end of things, often ending up in firefights, running low on ammo, having to cutting down their enemies, and getting back to the evac point by the skin of their teeth. While Luca mostly blamed some of it on his basic Stryken pattern bolter he was saddled with, mainly with the genelock on it not recognizing him despite what the Tech Marine said was a perfectly functioning weapon. As was part of the training, this taught the Scouts some self reliance, causing him to spend a lot of time fixing up the old bolter into something much better than a standard issue piece of wargear.

When the chapter was called to help defend against a massive and eerily active space hulk, the newly brought in Battle Brother operated in some capacity as a door gunner, air lock guard, and several EVA missions heading to the orks trying expand their WAAAGH. Using some of the early information he had learned from some grulién traders about how the orks operate, to avoid direct assaults, but try and lure the green skins into some kill zones, or past airlocks to blow them out, then cut them open in vacuum. This managed to get the attention of the captain, that with his experience with xenos, though rarely in the proper end of a chainsword, he was an obvious candidate for seconding to the Deathwatch.