I believe the 'standard sinon mock' requires that the actual thing be loaded first.

I don't want to have to load it - this is just a simple mock that follows the pattern provided by every other gaia app that I've worked on for how to build them.  If you have a suggestion (like w/ actual code) I'm more than happy to entertain it, but for something as minor as the Mock in the test suite, I don't want to spend a bunch of time on research when there are still actual problems to fix in the code.