WARHAMMER 40,000: ROGUE TRADER: THE CITADEL OF SKULLS (Roleplaying on the Farthest Frontiers)

You have to admit, you were eating corvid.

You hadn't been sure that given the responsibility of restocking and refitting the fleet for sailing would be the same as being grounded - but Em, more experienced in the direct action of fitting ships for sailing, had seen to the truth of it. You had needed to quash your worries that Junie would either think she had gotten out of her punishment, or that she might (worse) mess things up. After all, this was a big deal...you were preparing to set sail for the pirate port of Inequity, a place that was so wracked with horrible stories and hideous rumors that you didn't want to even think about it if you couldn't help it. But, as the days wore on and you and Em met with artisans and Ryia met her old dealing contacts under her new guise - carefully approaching them so as to not connect herself back to Iluryia Twice Scorned, you got regular updates from Von Struass as to what Junie was up to.

And, well, your daughter was throwing herself to task. The reports tend to look like this.

MS. MA-KO ENGAGES WITH MR. L AT PORT SANLOW WIGHTWORKS AT 09:25 (FORENOON WATCH)
NEGOTIATIONS CONTINUE FOR 98.82 K OF MARS PATTERN PLASMA SHUNTING CABLING & SUNDRIES
NEGOTIATIONS CONTINUE DESPITE MS. MA-KO DISCOVERING HULLGHAST CHEWING UPON ABOVE W/ ASSORTED DAMAGE INDICATING LONG USE
NEGOTIATIONS CONTINUE DESPITE MR. L CURRENT VERTICLE POSITION VISA VI NEARBY BALCONY
NEOGTIATIONS CONCLUDE, 10:15 (FORENOON WATCH), W/ 112.12 K OF THULE PATTERN PLASMA SHUNTING CABLING & SUNDRIES, PAYMENT PENDING TO SCINTILLA PARTNERS

And considering the cheating, swindling, cut throat back dealing lying pernicious jackanapes that seemed to spring between every fetid bulkhead of this cantankerous collection of creaking stone and rotting wood, you had to admire your daughter's restraint at merely dangling some chiseling whoreson out a balcony. Not that you were grumpy or anything, but you were currently looking at the corroded end of an optics stigmata that was thrusting from the back end of what this particular augmeticist - one Mx. Surleny - claimed to be a Thetis-B 88.1 integrated auspex array.

"A Thetis, you say?" you say, while Em tries to not look queasy eying some of the organs in jars that line the circular antechamber of the augmeticist shop - which is situated in the snarl of habitation clusters that makes up the nadir of the Footfall settlement. The shop itself stinks heavily of embalming fluid, dried blood, and periodically, of ozone. Each puff of ozone comes with a bright, actinic white flash that comes from under the heavy beaded curtains that cover the back entrance to the operation theater of the shop. "Curious, this looks like an Alphine connector port, spot welded to a mash between a Mars pattern and a piece of scrap!" You hold up the augmetic, waggling it at Mx. Surleny, who intersects their blade tines like fingers, stepping back and trying to not knock their turban off their pallid, bald head.

"I-I-"

"Are you trying to sell this to a Rogue Trader? Do you think this is my first augmetic?" you ask, scowling at them. "This would short out my prefrontal optic nerve in less than a day - and completely imbalance the black bile!"

"It's the best we have!" they exclaim - and sadly, after perusing their wares for the next hour, you find you have to admit that they're right.

"And they were the best augmeticist in port," you say, shaking your head and grumbling under your breath. "Suggested by Mr. Moross himself..."

"I wonder if the fact we are throwing around so much cash is making merchants rather desperate to secure sales," Em says, shaking his head as you step into the wide corridor, hissing steam pouring from one of the actuators connecting this corridor section to the next. THe glass pane looks out on the port - and you wince as you see that a fire has broken out on the dorsal ridge of the a heavy, wallowing transport that has been docked to the longshores. You can see figures, antlike at this distance, swarming along the sides of the ship, and gouts of streaming atmosphere escaping into space. From a distance, the disaster is queerly hard to focus upon. "Still, we have managed to secure most of what we need...Mrs. Agincornt has said that the final touches are being put upon her brace of exoskeletons and she needs to merely clad them."

"Ah, good!" you say - finding a set of five suits of powered armor - hand crated by Mrs. Agincornt great great great great grandmother for the Angevin Crusade in the year 345 on the expectation that the war would drag such that the nobles who had purchased it would get it by the time they had arrived to take part in the action, only for them to arrive in sixty years later to find the war two decades done, completed with unusual alacrity and skill by Saint Drusus and had to pawn the armor off as they lacked the funds to finance them. They'd then knocked around for a few centuries in the service of 'interested parties' and 'gentlemen of leisure' which you and Em had quietly agreed could only mean Inquisitorial agents - if only because gentlemen of leisure had better things to spend their funds upon than massive uncomfortable hunks of ceremite that were considered the height of unfashionable in the spinward sector of the Segmentum Obscurus (which, Em was eager to point out, was a stark distinction from Segmentum Pacificus, a fact that had been repeatedly drilled into his head over a three year voyage with a fellow officer who had brought the self same anecdote out at every meal precisely as clockwork.)

After that, Mrs. Agincornt couldn't provide much in the way of detail as to the history of the armor set until the year 5 of the 41st millennium, where they had appeared at auction on the Voss trifecta as part of a fund raising commission to pay ransom for a captive Tech Priest. After the funds had been acquired, then delivered, then the Skitarri had butchered the damnfool pirates that had actually thought the Adeptus Mechanicus would pay a ransom of all things, then the funds had been returned to the nobles that had offered and the armor had then been lost in the shuffling of paper and shuttles and attempts to keep the whole embarrassing incident under wraps.

There, at last, the suits had been found once more by an archivest-archeologist working in the scribe-vaults of Omnicron 71-DX in the year 112 who had found the suits tucked away in a corner being used as support struts for a scaffolding that was for repairs for a cogitator that had been malfunctioning since the year 6 and was caught up in some kind of religious dispute as to whether or not the cogitator could be repaired without insult to some such and such facet of the Omnnisah and the debates had dragged on, been shelved, brought out again, shelved after nothing coming of it, and finally the whole thing had been put off when the Waaggh Toorfkill had smashed into that region of space for a few short months before being driven off and by then, either those who had cared were dead, or thoes who were alive didn't care anymore.

The suits had been replaced with proper struts, put up for an actual auction, and been purchased by Mrs. Agincornt's mother, Hellen Agincornt, who at the time had taken a oath of colonization and set out on the pilgrim-colony barge New Horizons, which had made it through the Passage and into the Expanse with her mainsail torn away and half the crew decks depressurized. The then Liege of Footfall had lashed the New Horizon into the stations super structure, wedded her into the hab lock, then Hellen Aigncornt had set up shop as an armorwight for the peoples of Footfall and, until now, had never had anyone who could even think to afford her armor suits and was just overjoyed with the chance to get them out of her house.

Arriving at Mrs. Agincornt's rather pleasant abode just in time to see the burning transport being put out and the repair crews beginning to work, you take the spindly old woman's hand, shaking it as she gives you a huge beaming smile. "Come in, Lord and Lady Scourge," she says, gesturing you into the fitting room where her five children are busy at work polishing the first of the five suits. They're Lenoide pattern civilian suits - properly fitted for folks without whatever sorcery makes the Adeptus Astartes twelve feet tall and covered in eyes. The armor has even been painted in Scourge colors, with...ah!

"Is that my crest!?" you ask, excitedly, sweeping forward, and Mrs. Agincornt laughs.

"You come to Agincornt Armory for specialized skill," she says, her voice wry as you see the hat-pin with the twin feathers. It's not the Scourge crest, it's the crest you use for your own personal lettering, emblazoned across the chest, with the proper Scourge crest on the right pauldron and the Revenge painted on the left - the whole thing is done in a party per cross fashion, giving the entire suit of armor a delightful checkerboard starkness. You clap your hands together, beaming, as you see that Em's armor - a smidge taller than yours, and without the, ah...chest enhancements - has a Chaussé pattern, and rather than having the family crest on his chest, it's the winged insignia of the Navy, with the family crest on the right pauldron and the Revenge on the left. "AHHHHHHHH!" You start to bounce excitedly.

"How are their specifications?" Em asks. "You mentioned, with their age..."

"Ah, well, the servo-enhancements for strength are functioning as is - the ceremite plating required some replacement, but I've fashioned them properly," Mrs. Agincornt gestures to her eldest child - a sturdy looking thitysomethig with a wedding band and a rather unfortunate mustache. He draws a laspistol from a lacquered box, then shows it to you two, before putting three sizzling bright bolts into the chest armor of Em's armor. The bolts strike without a noise - instead, there's just the muffled crack of the air oxidizing, and when Mrs. Agincornt gestures you forward, you put your palm to the spots, then laugh.

"It's not even warm!" you say.

"The armor's fusion-cores are repaired and fully functional - rated for top performance for the next three thousand years," Mrs. Agincornt says, walking around the armor. "Now, as for the specialized components..."

---
What do we have here? Choose 3!
[ ] "In addition, we have the auto-senses. Full pyresense, augmented hearing in the 98th percentile with sound filtering and Vatarian pattern target-point calibration matrix. In short, with this, hitting the head is as easy as hitting the toe which is as easy as hitting the broad side of a bar."
[ ] "An osmotic gill life sustainer - complete environmental sealing, reprocessing system - yes, that includes water and solid waste, allowing for essential perpetual wear for up to two weeks before the replication and recycling systems fail."
[ ] "A total pict and vox linkage system, bringing with it total biomantic feedback to any monitoring ship or station. Recording capacity of approximately thirty six hours of continual audio-visual datums via either the pict captor on the head, or any pict-cam on the weapon sights or scanning systems. This feedback is threaded through narrowbeam, twice encrypted datum streams...to anyone without the cipher, it sounds like static."
[ ] "Fully magnetized hand and footholds, allowing for total mobility in null-G environments and for an easier grip on weapons and such - hard to disarm someone who has a gun mag-locked to their palm, eh?"
[ ] "I've fully enhanced the armor plating - it's significantly sturdier than most civilian patterns. After all, you did pay for the best! Hurmph."

SURPRISE!: There's SEX in this chapter! As usual, it's spoilered.


Mrs. Agincornt began, placing her palm upon the side of the helmet. "In addition, we have the auto-senses. Full pyresense, augmented hearing in the 98th percentile with sound filtering and Vatarian pattern target-point calibration matrix. In short, with this, hitting the head is as easy as hitting the toe which is as easy as hitting the broad side of a bar." She gave a thin, thin smile, then walked to the backpack, touching several vented tubes and ornate crystaline spheres that were sheathed within extensive armored baffling. "An osmotic gill life sustainer - complete environmental sealing, reprocessing system - yes, that includes water and solid waste, allowing for essential perpetual wear for up to two weeks before the replication and recycling systems fail."

She walked to the front again, gesturing from head to toe, her finger tapping the side of the helmet, the fingers, then the wrists, as she spoke. "And, lastly, a total pict and vox linkage system, bringing with it total biomantic feedback to any monitoring ship or station. Recording capacity of approximately thirty six hours of continual audio-visual datums via either the pict captor on the head, or any pict-cam on the weapon sights or scanning systems. This feedback is threaded through narrowbeam, twice encrypted datum streams...to anyone without the cipher, it sounds like static."

You beam.

"I like it!"


Afterwards, once the goodbyes were said, and the redline approached, you walked Ryia alone to the seal-lock heading for the shuttle. She was to take the lander off to the Colossus - to both keep an eye on the hellions (as she said) and to help guide the ship. The Colossus was to be the wayfinder of the fleet. With her Miloslav engines, she would be devilishly fast, and with her brand new warpsbane hull, she'd be able to see off the worst of the Warp before it came to the rest of the fleet. It just meant you wouldn't be seeing your sister for nearly two months - enough to make anyone weepy.

"You will be sure to write every day?" you ask as the two of you break a circuit around the outer edges of the brand new medicae deck, which has caused an immense amount of grumbling from the hands while also bringing a great deal of cheer to the hands. The hands, the poor dears, hated and loved two things above all. The thing they hated was a change in routine - even if that routine was bad, as Em had once told you of a near mutiny caused by the cessation of regular whippings on a ship he had had the displeasure to serve on as a midshipman.

(Though, Em did point out, it had more to do with the fact that the worst abused now could recuperate, plan, and take their revenge...but it still made for an amusing anecdote.)

But the thing that the hands loved most of all was being physicked.

Dr. Ventris made no bones at all about the new medicae bay.

"HEY!"

"Yes, of course," Ryia says before Dr. Ventris comes up and out of the bay and to the walkway that rings around the massive, sunken, white-washed space. She is looking bedraggled and hasseled and entirely put out, her fingers stained with inks and her shoulders hunched. She points her finger directly at you.

"This was your idea, wasn't it?" she glowers.

"Yes, actually!" you say, cheerfully. "We're going-"

"How dare you!" Dr. Ventris snaps, which provokes an angry growl from Ryia, which gets Ryia gently bonked on the head by a data-slate by Dr. Ventris, who is busy prodding your chest. "How dare you saddle me with five hundred new people to manage without so much as a by your leave!" She thrusts the slate she had bonked Ryia with at you. "A hundred and twenty seven chirgeons, half of them civilian practitioners pinched off that frigate who set her whole poop deck afire!" She shakes her head, looking at the chats. "I have twelve members of the Emperor be damned Hospitaliers here. Now, I have to keep twelve Sororitas from brawling with Dr. Finch, have I told you about Dr. Finch, he's an navy man who was drummed out for making obscura out of fucking paint thinner!"

"Did he manage it?" Ryia asks, curiously.

"No!" Ventris snaps. "I have him sharpening saws and Sister Beneficent has offered to break his fingers for me." She shakes her head. "Then there's the support staff. I have nurses now! I never needed nurses before."

"You had nurses!" you exclaim.

"A few hundred loblolly hands aren't the same thing as nurses! Nurses have to be paid!" Ventris scowls even harder now. "I'm not a bloody chirgeon anymore, I'm a...a...a..."

"An administrator?" you say.

"Exactly!" She throws her hands up into the air in frustration.

"You know, we can ask Von Strauss to get a scribe for you..." you say, smiling.

Dr. Ventris grumbles even more. "Great, another underling."

A tall, broad shouldered woman with a heavily scarred face, white hair, and a pair of Fleur-de-lys tattooed onto her cheeks steps up to the ladder leading up to the gantry and hollers up with an incredibly thick Shriner accent. "Doctor! Doctor! The ungents are leaking again!"

"Then...I...argh, I'll be there in a second!" Dr. Ventris shoots a glare at you, then hurries back down the ladder. You hear her saying. "Well, then, we'll have to fucking tighten them again!"

"Oui, oui!"

"Stick to Low Gothic, please!"

"Oui, Doctor. Er, yes, doctor."

You smile at Ryia. "She likes it," you say.

"I don't think she likes it," Ryia says, dryly.

"I've served with Dr. Ventris longer than you," you say. "She's happy as a bug-"

CRASH!

"Emperor DAMN it!"

"Doctor, you must watch your tongue!"

"-in a rug!" you finish.

You and Ryia come to the seal lock and your sister hugs you tightly. You squeeze her back, drawing away and giving her a little smile. "...so, you know, if you do meet a handsome pilot-"

"Tine!" she exclaims.

"Hey, just write ahead, Em will give you the go-ahead!" She puts her obsidian hand on your face, shoving you back as you laugh and giggle. She draws her hand back, shaking her head.

"I'm the bloody pirate, I should be the one suggesting such things..." she grumbles.

"I prefer to watch," you say, cheerfully.

"I..." Ryia rubs her temple. "Stay safe, Tine." She kisses your cheek, steps into the seal lock, and is gone to the Colossus.

An hour later, you break into the Warp.


The first week of the voyage is a quiet time with you and Em, discussing plans and possibilities. The dataum you recovered from Skar's little hideaway left a lot of gaping holes as to Karrad Vall's defenses, but suggested stealth was advisable. You and Em wargamed out several strategies, but it all felt so...lose and unconfirmed. In the evenings, you laid with him, soaked in sweat, and wrote letters to your sister and your children, knowing they'd arrive as soon as you sent them now, thanks to the kilometers long teathers attaching ships, wedding their geller fields into one harmonious, shimmering whole.

On the third day, an alert came from the Tachyon's Demise that a minor fire in her crew quarters had struck, but been beaten down before the quarters had been lost or damaged. The crews had lost many men and women and been badly shaken - but the medicae decks that might have saved so many were too far away for even quick shuttling to work. That fact gnawed at you fiercely...until you got something to distract you.

On the beginning of the second week, you were woken by a statuette flying off the shelf next to your bed and smashing into the wall. Something giggled. You sat up, while Em groaned and said, blearily. "Zeph, no, daddy can't play right-" he blinked, looking around the room, while you wished you could have a real auspex...but...

No, you couldn't see anything with your bionic enhancements.

But you felt it with your senses.

A crawling, skittering, malevolently spiteful creature was in your quarters. You scrambled from your bed, and with a snickery hee hee hee, something yanked the rug out from under your feet. Your rump, ample as it was, did not cushion your pride.

"Tine!" Em exclaims.

"Em," you say, your voice murderous. "Get my flamer."

"...you don't have a flamer, Tine," he says, slowly.

"I know what I said," you growl.

A bottle of shampoo flies from your bathroom, pings off the wall, and splats onto your head, soaking your shoulders in white froth.

"The bloody things are across the crew quarters," Jessie explains to Em, while you walk alongside them, dressed in what you managed to salvage from three different ruined outfits. Em, meanwhile, has his great coat drawn over himself to conceal that most of his uniforms are in tatters and he's dressed primarily in layered nightclothes until he was at least somewhat presentable. Jessie herself looks like someone has dunked paint along her bronzed body, and one of her arms is sparking. "They woke me up with a bucket of-"

"Paint, yes," Em says, quietly.

"We've got reports of them across the Demise, but the Colossus is fine," Jessie continues.

"I know what to do about this," you say, furiously.

"What?" Jessie asks.

"We set them on fucking fire!"

"Honestly, not a bad idea," Jessie says, chuckling.

"Maybe holy water first?" Em says. "Fire, ah, has a bit of a problem in an enclosed-" The door ahead of him pings free of its restraining bolt and slams on his outstretched foot. Em's face goes purple and he yanks his foot back and starts jumping. "Okay!" He says, through clenched teeth. "Fire it is!"

You take malicious pleasure in leading a twenty man strong team - using your...special senses to feel out where the creatures are. The men, coached on you in how to ignore their antics and focus entirely upon their stolid reserve, form a solid cordon and your anger turns to absolute glee as your psyniscence feels out the little buggers - getting first mocking, then furious, then resentful at being forced away from the children they were tormenting by animating dolls and from the old women they were frightening by shattering crockery and towards a prepared area that Em had set aside. The store room had been for odds and bobs needed by the crew in a hurry, but now, those odds and bobs were stowed away in some other room, leaving a bare, metal chamber that the little squeaking, nearly invisible things were herded into. Then your men leveled the flamers and doused the entire room in blazing promethium.

No fair! No fun! No fair! No fun! the little squeakers wailed at you with psy-voices that sounded more annoyed than in pain. Then with ugly sqorpt noises, they began to pop, one by one.

Once that was done, you voxed to the Tachyon how to deal with them...

And settled in for the next few weeks - ready for worse...

And instead, you were on the bridge, about twenty days in, when an alert came from the navigator's spire. The Colossus was signaling to...

"Ware! Ware!" Em called out. "Damp signals, shut auspex down, and prepare for breaching in hostile space!"

"What's happening?" You whisper as the bridge crew ran hither and thon - but before Em could even begin to explain, there was a roaring rushing sound...and then the vista-plates were removed and you could see.

A boiling bright corona of swirling matter, like a vast pulsating eyelid, surrounding an orb of absolute pitch darkness. Tumbling asteroids in the foreground, the ruined remains of vast planets that had been ripped to shreds. In the vast distance, an oblong egg-shaped gas giant that was being slowly distorted by its proximity to the cold, grasping hand of a black hole. Over the voxes, you could hear the whispering, screaming sounds of false voices - the sound of hard radiation along your radial fanes. The whole ship felt as if it was creaking faintly in the gusting winds of neutron flux and your augmetics tingled throughout your body as you clutched your recaff to your chest.

You had arrived in the Dioskouri system/

You had arrived in Inequity...

To the very doorstep of Karrad Vall, the Faceless Lord himself.

---
CHAPTER TWO...

COMPLETE
Objective: Prepare for the Expedition (25 AP)
Objective: Survive the Expedition (50 AP)

CALCULATING BONUS AP...
Objective Theme: Exploration
Bonus AP From Talents: 0 AP
Bonus AP From Components: 550 AP

TOTAL AP: 1,340/1,200 AP

EXPERINCE REWARDS
500 XP - Participation
500 XP - Good Roleplaying
100 XP - Surviving the Trip
100 XP - Banked




Author's Note: This chapter's length was kinda based on how long it'd take to get there, and you guys did kinda luck out on a lot of your rolls! see the alternate timeline in the rolls spoiler for how things MIGHT have gone!

The rational behind the bonus AP is that the Colossus' vast shuttle fleet assisted in the "getting supplied" part - allowing you to very quickly, very cheaply prep your ships for travel, thus, adding to eventual profits. And once we level up, we shall begin chapter 3...

THE CAGE AND THE MAW!

...gotta level with you guys, the Citadel of Skulls is real fucking thin, I am padding it a bit and hopefully doing a good job of it!