Ralph-303

Ralph Ericson, formerly Ralph-033 and Ralph Williams, was a SPARTAN-II commando of the UNSC Navy, and eventual mercenary . Born on  in 2511, Ralph was kidnapped by the UNSC at age 6 and became a SPARTAN-II trainee. In 2525, after his augmentations, Ralph, along with four other SPARTANs, escaped from Reach. After he returned home, he found a flash clone had been put in his place. Finding out the clone was deathly ill, Ralph killed his doppelganger in an act of what he later came to call a mercy killing.

Coming back to Reach to the only family he could go back to, Ralph was quickly dismissed from the program due to his damaged psyche, and was eventually adopted by the Ericson family on. Still suffering from a damaged psyche, Ralph eventually started to take out his problems on weaker children as a bully.

As he became an adult, Ralph's psychological problems began to slowly disappear, and he eventually became a member of the UNSC Marine Corps, fighting on Jericho VII, and eventually becoming a mercenary.

Childhood
Born in 2511 on New Harmony, Ralph Williams lived a fairly regular life. However, he was noted to sometimes lord his somewhat superior physical and mental abilities over other children. In 2517, Ralph was noted by Doctor as a candidate for the SPARTAN-II Program, and later that year, he was kidnapped by ONI agents while he slept, and was transferred to Reach, replaced with a flash clone.

Early Stages
On Reach, Ralph was informed that he was not going to be allowed to return to his family. In his first act of defiance, Ralph attempted to stand up and leave, but was quickly shoved back down by his UNSC Navy fatigue clad instructor. The next day, as his training began, Ralph was issued a pair of fatigues with his new last name, a number, 033.

As the 75 children were ordered around, Ralph continued to look for a way to escape from the UNSC. For the first two weeks, he continued to look, but, after the failed attempts of and, he became discouraged from doing so, and gave up, deciding to simply go along with the training he was going through.

Further Training and Friendships
As the brutal training regimen continued, Ralph was placed into Orange Team with and. The three managed through the training well, and became best friends after Ralph and Daisy saved Joseph from a squad of Marines from out to severely wound Joseph after they captured him during a training exercise. During the operation, Daisy provided a distraction while Ralph dashed out to grab the wounded Joseph, neutralizing the Marines moving in on him, before helping carry the wounded 122 back to the extraction point.

Augmentation
In 2525, the 75 SPARTAN trainees were prepared for augmentation. However, Ralph's body, much like Serin Osman's, took the chemical augmentations, before beginning to reject the skeletal ones, forcing them to halt the augmentations, Having seen so many of his comrades die in vain or be permanently crippled, Ralph's discontent with being a SPARTAN rose up again, and he, Daisy, Joseph, and two new accomplices, Ilich-073, and Michael-099, planned to escape and return home to their families.

Escape
Taking a few of their instructors hostage, the five issued an ultimatum to Doctor Halsey, to either give them freedom, or they would kill their instructors. Halsey relented, and allowed them to escape. However, soon after, Joseph was recaptured, leaving the other four to continue running. Evading UNSC patrols, Ralph eventually made it back to his homeworld of New Harmony, and returned home. However, when he made it home, Ralph found his clone, suffering from multiple debilitating diseases, in his place. Killing his clone, Ralph later described it to be a mercy killing due to the multiple diseases his clone had.

Return and Discharge
Voluntarily giving himself up and returning to Reach, hoping to return to his second family that was the SPARTAN Program, Ralph was quickly discharged after a session with an ONI psychiatrist revealed he was no longer fit for duty after his psychological break, as well as his augmentation failure. Reassigned the number 303 to section him off from the main crop of SPARATN-IIs, Ralph was put up for adoption, and was taken in by the Ericson family on.

Civilian Life
As he began to live a civilian life on Actium, Ralph began looking for an outlet for his problems that stemmed from his psychological breakdown. Finding one, Ralph became an infamous bully at his school. His adoptive parents, not understanding what he had gone through beforehand, viewed his actions as a part of his maturing, not as a result of his psychological problems.

UNSC Marine Corps
As he matured, he felt that he still needed to serve humanity through the UNSC with the advent of the Covenant menace. Enlisting in the UNSC Marine Corps, Ralph's exemplary performance during training puzzled his commanders, however, when they reported it, thinking it was a result of him taking illegal substances, they were told to ignore it and continue training him, due to the fact the UNSC did not want the SPARTAN-II Program to become public.

After his basic training and School of Infantry advanced training, Ralph was deployed to the colony of as part of a reserve force waiting to be used as reinforcements for beleaguered UNSC troops against the Covenant.

Harvest
Despite Ralph being stationed on Jericho VII, he was seen by his fellow SPARTAN Daisy-023 during the Harvest Campaign. However, Ralph was never there, in fact, his appearance to Daisy was a result of her psychologically broken mind, exacerbated by the horrors of the campaign, seeing a UNSC Marine who bore a superficial resemblance to her former comrade as being Ralph, while he was never there in actuality.

Jericho VII
However, the Covenant came to Jericho VII in 2535, and Ralph was immediately called up to help fight them off. Attached to a Marine Corps armored unit, Ralph took part in an offensive against Covenant forces. Despite early successes, the Covenant quickly began to drive the UNSC forces back. Helping try to hold the line, Ralph and his squad were too eventually forced to retreat from the Covenant onslaught.

While retreating to the makeshift defenses the Marines had set up as a fallback position, Ralph was hit with multiple plasma bolts, sustaining burns all across his body. Calling for an evacuation Pelican, the Marines loaded Ralph and the rest of the disabled casualties aboard to be taken up to a UNSC Navy ship for medical treatment.

As he watched the planet become glassed by the Covenant, and eventually found out his entire unit had been massacred by the aliens, Ralph fell into another deep depression, before coming out of it with a fiery rage. However, he was medically discharged from the Marine Corps due to his heavy wounds sustained on the colony.

Mercenary
With his discharge from the Marine Corps, Ralph began looking for work regarding combat, it being the only thing he was ever trained for since he was six years old. Eventually, he came upon a Private Military Company led by an enigmatic man who went only by "Ulysses". Applying to become a part of it, Ulysses quickly accepted the former SPARTAN into his ranks after a display of his skills in a simulated combat exercise.

Mamore
In 2536, Ralph was sent on his first contract, against the Freedom and Liberation Party on Mamore. The UNSC, after the heavy hit the FLP had taken at the hands of Elijah Cavorel, wanted the entire terrorist organization wiped from Mamore. Asad, seeing this as an opportunity for Ralph to prove himself, sent him in to destroy the last FLP bastion along with four other mercenaries.

Infiltrating the bastion, Ralph took command, and began ordering the mercenaries as they engaged in a firefight with the insurgents. The mercenaries, although initially hesitant at following a new mercenary's orders, began to defer to him as he showed he knew what he was doing. Continuing through the complex, Ralph and his mercenaries continued to eliminate insurgent after insurgent, as well as capturing valuable intelligence.

Once the base had been thoroughly cleared out, Ralph and his comrades set up C-12 detpacks to destroy the base. Once they made it to a safe distance, they detonated the charges, leaving only rubble of the base. Impressed with Ralph's actions during the contract, "Ulysses", made him a full fledged mercenary of the PMC.

Kholo
After two more years of contracts, Ralph had finally proved himself as an exceptional mercenary, and in 2539, was sent to Kholo in order to infiltrate and destroy another rebel stronghold that had been a particular thorn in the UNSC's side, this time hidden deep inside a cave on the planet.

However, soon after he landed on the planet and began to prepare for the assault with the rest of the mercenaries, the Covenant attacked the planet. Forced to divert his attention to the Covenant invaders. Leading his team of mercenaries against the aliens, Ralph held the Covenant off long enough for the UNSC to get some civilians into the shelters.

As the Covenant began to withdraw their troops from Kholo and their ships took up stationary positions above the planet, Ralph became suspicious. Fearing a glassing, he ordered his team into a cave that extended deep below the surface. His fears proved correct as the Covenant began to glass Kholo. After about a week, the team began wandering aboveground, looking for any signs of life. In one last act of desperation, the team sent out a distress signal, hoping anyone human, UNSC or otherwise, would hear it. Luckily, a UNSC scout team had been sent to Kholo after reports that some of the populace had escaped the glassing, and were still alive.

Eventually finding the source of the transmission, the UNSC picked up the battered mercenaries, and evacuated them from the planet. Ulysses, extremely impressed by the team's survival against the Covenant, made them a permanent team together, led by Ralph.

Miridem
Five years after Kholo, Ralph and his team's next major contract was thedissolution of a crime syndicate on the planet of. After observing the syndicate for almost two months, the unit moved in for the kill. Using intelligence they had gathered, the mercenaries were easily able to neutralize or bypass altogether the gang's security measures. With the criminals' black market equipment no match for the mercenaries' military grade equipment, those who did attempt to fight off the unit were easily killed. However, one gang member managed to get the drop on Ralph, and charge at him with a knife. For the first time, Ralph experienced what would later be dubbed "SPARTAN Time" by, and easily overpowered the gang member, breaking his arm, before disarming him of the knife and stabbing him in the chest with it. Once they had neutralized most of the gang members, the mercenaries set fire to the hideout, leaving no trace of their attack there.

About two days after their raid on the gang hideout, the mercenaries had been paid and were preparing to leave the planet when the Covenant attacked. Now having no way off the planet due to Covenant forces in the city, the mercenaries began roaming, trying to force their way through the alien lines to the spaceport where evacuations were taking place. During their journey, Ralph came across and her bodyguard,. Recognizing Sheila as one of his former classmates, Ralph and his mercenaries supported her in protecting the Doctor. As they continued towards the spaceport, appeared and attacked Sheila. Despite her best efforts, she was killed by the Sangheili, before it was driven off by rifle fire from the mercs. As Ralph mourned the death of his comrade, one of his mercenaries got him out of his fit of mourning, and got him up to continue fighting.

Continuing to escort Dr. Halsey, the mercenaries got her to her extraction craft, before making it themselves to an evacuation ship at the spaceport. As the ship began its long trek further towards the Inner Colonies, Ralph became antisocial, responding with fits of anger anytime someone tried to initiate a conversation with him, preferring to be alone with his thoughts.

Reach
With his psychological condition worsening, Ralph was placed by Ulysses in a noncombatant role, as security at the company's headquarters on the planet of, where he had once been trained. For eight years, Ralph kept unwanted individuals away from the company HQ, as well as taking part in business as a tactician for Ulysses. As the eight years dragged on, Ralph slowly recovered from witnessing the death of Sheila, and by 2552, he had recovered enough that he was able to fight again.

However, in 2552, just before Ralph was going to be sent on another contract, the Covenant attacked Reach, and he was called up yet again to fight. Placed back with his team, Ralph took a Pelican, and the seven mercs acted in a commando role, attacking behind Covenant lines, neutralizing Sangheili field commanders, slowing Covenant advances with hit and run attacks, and all manner of combat, intending to slow down the Covenant as much as possible.

However, during an operation in the city of, Ralph was heavily burned by plasma, forcing his comrades to evacuate him to UNSC lines. Brought to the by UNSC forces, alongside other casualties of all kinds, paramilitary militia, civilian, and military, Ralph's heavy wounds were tended to for a year as he recovered from the burns. By the time he had finally recovered, the Human-Covenant War was over.

Post War
As he saw the post war world, Ralph wondered about his fellow SPARTAN-IIs. Looking up Sheila-065, he saw that she was designated "Missing In Action". Many of the other SPARTAN-IIs he knew were also listed as such. As far as he knew the Covenant did not take prisoners, and so Ralph deduced that his comrades, or at least those marked MIA, were actually dead. He also discovered that the rest of the mercenaries he had worked with were also dead, killed either during the Fall of Reach or the Battle of Earth.

"Playing Both Sides"
"I'm an instrument of war, no more, no less. War is my lifeblood. And so, I may as well keep the war going.  I cannot be a civilian, not after all I've been trained for is to kill, kill, kill.  So, I keep the war economy going.  The more I do for both sides, the better my employment"

- Ralph, on fighting on both sides of the post war conflict

With the destruction of the mercenary corporation he once worked for, Ralph was now on his own. Seeing the chaos in the post war situation, Ralph decided it would be a lucrative business for mercs, both for the UNSC and the Insurrection. Assuming yet another pseudonym, this time "Caesar", only when working with the Insurrection, Ralph took contracts with both the Insurrection and UNSC in order to keep the war going, and therefore ensure more work for himself. Ralph worked on many of the Insurrection hotspots to keep the war going, such as the rebel stronghold of, as well as , and.