You are Eta Nu 9-35. Once upon a time, you held the title of Magos Biologis, or Genetor. Yours is a craft of flesh and blood and bone, and all the manners in which these may be manipulated and twisted. It is a strange vocation, within an organization that has come to regard the flesh as weak, but you never cleaved to that belief, at least not in its entirety. What is an organism, if not an apparatus carved by the random whims of nature? If one carves away the more erroneous amongst those whims and refines what remains with blessed machinery, what remains is greater and holier than the sum of its parts: this was what you believed, what guided you as you took on your role within the Mechanicum.
Then the Horus Heresy broke out, and Mars burned, then choked beneath Dorn's blockade. For a time, a long time, bitter necessity replaced all considerations of progress or the quest for truth. For long, bitter years, your vats produced sorely needed protein and fiber, as Mars grew increasingly warped around you. It was deeply frustrating, especially as all around you, the other Magi were delving into entirely undiscovered fields of knowledge.
When Horus arrived and lifted the Siege, that all changed. By then, you had long discarded the red robes of the Mechanicum and donned the black: even the little bit of knowledge that you gleaned of the Primordial Truth had enthralled you utterly. When you were freed from the obligations that had restrained you up until then, you were quick to do so. As the Siege of Terra went on, your knowledge and ability expanded quicker than they had ever before. You saw horrors and daemons, in those months, and all the myriad ways in which the Warp could twist flesh. To the already horrifying maelstrom of terror that swirled across the surface of Terror you added your own little eddy, unleashing creatures of your own creation for whoever gave you the most beneficial trade for it, or simply for your own sake. It was liberating. It was intoxicating.
You may have gone a little far, in hindsight.
When the Siege came to its catastrophic conclusion, you had shed the moniker of Magos Biologis for good, and taken on a new moniker, and a new calling: Magos Abominus, Maker of Monsters.
You had a lot of time to plan, on the flight from Terra. You did not look at Mars as it passed you by for what was likely to be the last time: the vessel you fled on did not have an oculus for you to look through, and besides, you did not think you'd bear it. The path through the warp was long and turbulent, though not as long as it turned out to be within Realspace. For you,years passed, spent creating and unmaking creatures from the scraps of flesh and material left for you: everything to keep you sharp, and to retain what sanity you had left.
When you limped into orbit over Nuton's Folly, you were…disappointed, for lack of a better word. You always would have been, truth be told. Nothing at all in the Galaxy could ever be quite like Mars at its height. It took you a while to figure out just how much time had passed: the residents of the Dark Forge were not exactly forthcoming with information, and of course time itself is a somewhat fraught concept within the Eye of Terror. It didn't really matter, by the time you had figured it out. Ten years or ten thousand, the outcome would have been the same. After you fed the first Magos who tried to force you into a contract that may as well have been slavery to the warp-twisted bilge rats you had experimented on in the last year of your journey, you were largely left alone. They even let you keep his laboratory space.
You did not garner any special reputation, back during the Siege of Terror: that war was one of Demigods and Monsters that far outstripped any creation you could have made. Still, some people remembered you: enough to pay for your services, enough to allow you to expand your Laboratory and garner a more up to date reputation.
You achieved reasonable success, in your time upon the world. You rose: not as fast as some, but faster than most. Your reputation increased, and with that increase came further work, further space to work in, and further tools to use in your experiment. You approached every task before you with the same single-minded obsession, and it served you well, most of the time.
Damanos Sius picking you of all people to make his Hounds was something of a surprise, but a welcome one. The Space Marine had something of a reputation as a picky customer: he had, before he came to you, employed one of the Acolytes of Fabius Bile until some sort of unspecified falling out. The reward he offered you was spectacular: access to a database of organisms unlike any other you had ever seen, collating over ten millennia of cruel hunts.
His requirements were stringent, but you had expected as much: he was, after all, a Slaaneshi, and one with famously refined tastes in that regard. What he wished for was beasts of keen senses and incredible speed, capable of seriously hurting and slowing down even heavily armored opponents. Further, he wanted to be able to tap into their senses as they did it, to experience the taste of blood in their mouth and the strange sensations of sensory organs unknown to him.
It took you six attempts to please him for even a moment. Six grueling cycles of growing, culling, refining and modifying. Five specimens, each of which you would individually regard as masterworks, none of them good enough for the Lord of the Thralls of Excess.
When you had finally managed to create the sixth specimen, you had not had a proper rest circle in almost a month: every one of your waking hours had been spent in the laboratory, refining and refining and refining further. On some level you were aware that your obsession was getting the best of you: that what you were doing was dangerously unsafe, that you were treading ground best left untrodden.
You did not care. You had never stopped walking any path you had set your feet on before, and you weren't about to start now.
And technically, you keep telling yourself, even as the ship that has been assigned to you comes into view, it did work.
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The Willful Eternity is a ship with history dating back to the Great Crusade and the Horus Heresy, where she served first as a grain freighter, then as a third-rate troop transport delivering Beastmen to Terra. From this time, she has retained her smell, the damage she sustained when a mine utterly obliterated the ship next to her, and the last entrance in her maintenance log, a scrawled line written in what does not appear to be ink at all looking suspiciously like 'Don't worry about it' written in extremely corrupted High Gothic. Her Captain is Ludmilla Kapriosa, a name you are fairly sure she has just made up to fuck with you. Her Navigator is so mutated you are not entirely sure it isn't a Chaos Spawn. Her Gunnery Officer is what Madame Kapriosa insists is some rare species of Xenos and what you are pretty sure is just some sort of monkey she found funny. A small one, too, not, as you had for a brief moment dared to hope, one of the mystical Jo'Kaero. That isn't that important anyways: the guns, such as they are, consist of two macro-cannons that look like they might detonate if you stared at them for too long. This is just as well. You prefer not to look.
A brief investigation concludes that the Reactor has become possessed by a lesser Daemon of Tzeentch called Flibwurb the Uncouth. You cannot get a straight answer out of anyone on whether this was on purpose or not. You suspect, at any rate, that it is the only reason the engines are even still running at all, because common sense and the laws of physics suggest they should not be. The Gellar Field Generators are in a state of flawless condition you are immediately and paranoidly suspicious about. Exactly 6,789% of the ship's hallways have turned to meat, specifically muscles equivalent to those one would find in a snake's gullet. There is enough condensation in the air that entire microclimates exist in nearly every room. One of the large freight silos has turned into a self-contained ecosystem akin to a jungle, which at least provides more than enough oxygen for the entire vessel even if it also means animals that are a cross between scorpions and snakes are loose in the ventilation system. The mutation rate amongst the crew is, somehow, unaccountably, 120%, which the Master of Port explained is not because they count people again if they get mutated twice and then refused to elaborate on.
The Quarters assigned to you are larger and better appointed than any you have ever had on the Dark Forge.
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The Court of Eight, in its infinite and exceedingly weird magnificence, has seen fit to grant you leave to deposit your personal possessions and whatever of your workshop equipment you can fit into it into one of the Silos of the Wilful Eternity. Of course not doing that would be the equivalent to just shooting you, so you can see why they gave you permission. Your growth vats and specimen cages take up much of the space not dominated by the surgical theater, of course, and of the space that remains a majority is taken up by your library of gene records, so recently added to by the generous reimbursement of Damanos Sius.
Still, you have a surprising amount of leeway to impart some of your own preferences. How do you do this?
Your [Quarters and Laboratory] are:
[] …pristine and spartan- every surface polished to a mirror sheen, nothing out of its proper place, nothing without its necessary function. Getting that sort of shine on a ship like this is difficult, but you manage it.
[] ...ostentatious and richly decorated- with decorations of many origins and styles in every place that can support them, and every amenity you could get your hand on present. There are silk sheets on your bed, not because you have used a bed more than once within the last decade, but because you want them and so you have them. There is a marble bust of you gifted to you by one of the Emperor's Children, which only sometimes looks like it follows you with your eyes. They are not yet what they could be, but you are confident they can become even richer and more beautiful.
[] …left almost as you had found it- with your tools installed as quickly and efficiently as they could be, and your research notes scattered around haphazardly between the rust and the trailing cables. None but you are likely to understand the systems you use to organize yourself and find what you need, and that is the way you like it, and the rust simply adds to the ambience.
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Regicia Ko-Bea sweeps into the room in a swirl of tailored black robes, and none of the in-loaded information you consumed about her has in any way prepared you. She has made herself into what you can only describe as a work of art, every sweep and curve of her body an idealization and perfection of the human form.
She seems made of glass, though the material that has replaced much of her skin is far too flexible and far too sturdy to actually be glass. Still, you find your eyes linger on her bare arms, and the cybernetics on display within: exotic alloys are on proud display: not the hydraulic systems so commonly used, but a faithful recreation of the arm's muscles, the exotic alloys of its tensors and flexors gleaming. You marvel for a moment at the interface with her remaining muscles, at the flawless mesh of its artificial nerves with what organic matter remains.
With a start, you realize that it is not in fact a faithful recreation of the human form: it is an improvement, a thousand little adjustments increasing efficiency in a million little ways. The muscles are partly vat-grown too, you notice, as you increase the magnification of your eyes to regard them on a microscopic level: their fibers are too uniform to be anything else. This is not the work of some backvent butcher brewing muscle to crank up murder servitors willy-nilly, though: these are hand-crafted and made to purpose, meshing with her cybernetic parts beautifully. You drag your eyes away, almost forcefully, and find them captured again by her eyes: eight of them, arranged in two rows across her face.
Her eyes are multifaceted and silvery, and you can see the trails of the wires that integrate them with their optical nerves beneath a face and skull that has also been replaced with glass. Beneath and behind her eyes, you can see her brain, and if you had not removed your salivary glands it would probably make your mouth water. Wires and interfaces trail the curves of her mind, organized and coordinated beautifully, and you can see it all.
Processors whirr away plugged into her mind to mysterious purpose, and mechadendrites fall from the back of her heads and shoulders, whatever tools tip them hidden behind covers of gleaming bronze. In her chest, hinted at by a tantalizing opening of her robes, beats a heart that seems the pinnacle of her craft, mechanical and biological both: a perfect organ combining the functions of a generator and a human heart, providing for both the old and new components of her body.
She notices your gaze and smirks, and the play of muscles and wires that move the glass simulacrum of her lips fire synapses that would make your heart beat faster, if you hadn't removed that functionality from your brain entirely.
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You do, of course, have your own cybernetics, carefully acquired and curated to your own specifications over the years. Amongst them are a Medicae Mechadendrites, Gene Samplers, and fine manipulators, alongside a broad assortment of injectors filled with all sorts of mutagenic substances.
Overall, your [cybernetics] are….
[] …simple and workmanlike- dominated by brushed steel and hydraulic systems, mimicking the human form through efficiency and simple workmanship. Your voice box is replaced with a simple, variable-volume vox synthesizer, giving your voice the vigor and strength of the blessed machine.
[] …artful-like those displayed by Regicia, though in an entirely different way. Exotic alloys coat the surface of an idealized human body, every muscle artfully modeled, and your voice box has been replaced with a cunning arrangement of pipes, giving your voice an almost musical lilt when you bother to use it.
[] …inhuman- even by the standards of the Dark Mechanicum, with your legs replaced with an arachnid apparatus, most of your inner organs surrounded by a metal carapace. Your voice is a growling, hissing thing thrown from a speaker in your chest, though you only rarely bother with it.
[] …less visible-in contrast to other members of the Mechanicum, your cybernetics largely invisible beneath your (occasionally admittedly somewhat baggy) robes. Your artificial eyes are hidden behind dark lenses, and your voice is your own, coming from scarred, but intact lips, though it is creaky and dry from long disuse.
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8-Doxa-Krainaima is, objectively speaking, terrifying. He stalks forward like a wild animal being herded into a cage, hydraulic legs hissing with every step. Blood cakes them, only the joints polished by movement. The Chord Claw that replaces one of his hands twitches and moves constantly, occasionally letting loose a transonic burst that rattles your remaining organic parts and makes you slightly nauseous.
A chainsword hands by his side, blood caking it almost in its entirety. There's a tooth stuck in there, you note. Mechadendrites float over your new subordinate's shoulders like a scorpion's tail, and these at least bear the usual assortment of tools, though you note that not a few of them are also caked in blood. Eight Servoskulls float around him, each inscribed with encoded techno-lingua boasting of where and how they were taken, and get lost in the details anyways. You dismiss them as irrelevant when the first begins talking about the exact angle at which the spine was severed.
8-Doxa notices your short look and grins at you, drawing back scarred and half-atrophied lips to reveal two rows of polished metal teeth. No blood cakes these ones, at least. His eyes are also still organic, though certainly not natural: they are canine and yellow, possibly a mutation or a vat-grown replacement, and they shine with a level of bloodlust and hatred that almost makes you take a step back and draw a weapon to defend yourself.
He stalks past you, making noises that sound like a chain revving, and it takes you a few moments to understand that he is laughing.
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Weaponry is a necessity for survival on Nuton's Folly, and within your years of rising amongst the Hive World, you have acquired your own arsenal, becoming quite adept in its usage.
Your preferred [weaponry] consists of…
[] …a twisted Omnissian Axe and Phosphor Serpenta- the same weaponry one might find with a Tech Priest of the Loyalist Mechanicus, though modified to your own preferences further than theirs could ever be.
[] …a Chain Glaive, wielded alongside a Bolt Pistol- You revel in the blood you spill with each kill, mowing your enemies down with disdain.
[] …part of your cybernetics- beginning with a swirling cloud of Mechatendrils and including a series of Mechadendrite-mounted Las Pistols, all of which you can wield independently and at the speed of thought.
[] …a pair of transonic blades and a sonic gun- capable of liquifying your enemies in a cavalcade of gut-wrenching noise.
[]...a pair of Inferno Pistols and a Heavy Flamer- allowing you to bathe your foes in a sea of flames at range and obliterate any of them that might make it through them at close range.
[] …a Needler and Gas Dispensers- capable of delivering a wide array of pathogens and toxins against your foes, many of them of your own devising. You are, of course, immune to at least most of them.
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Myges Talef does not waste a single moment when he comes aboard. He is not, you must admit, what you expected at all of the worshiper of Nurgle his file claims him to be. His file said that he was a Magos Infofector, one of the Magi specializing in cajoling and coercing Machine Spirits through the use of Scrap Code. That in itself is unusual. The worshippers of Nurgle tend to be drawn to the ranks of the Magi Abominus, creating monstrosities or plagues in the name of their infectious father, or else they build or wage war in his name. The infection of mechanical systems with scrap code struck you as slightly too divorced from the doctrine of growth followers of the Plague Fathers tend to follow.
You don't know what you had expected, in truth: perhaps the stereotypical jolly Plaguemeister, bloated with disease and spewing noxious fumes, or else some sort of skeletal figure born down by misery and sickness.
Instead, the figure that comes aboard is a person of average height and strange form, carrying upon his back a vast, humming cooling unit, which nonetheless appears to be almost glowing with heat. He rattles as you walk, and you note that his robe is covered from top to bottom in tokens of something that looks like copper, each of them marked with the ugliest little creatures you could possibly imagine.
"I see you have seen my Token", Magos Talef cants at you, in lieu of greetings, and you cant back an instinctive marker of inquiry, which you immediately regret doing. Binaric is an excessively expressive and fast-paced language, but the sheer volume of information you suddenly receive still requires you several seconds to parse. It's bad form to transmit this fast and much, and evidence of either ulterior motives or an astonishing degree of enthusiasm.
You run a scan of your internal processors, fully cognisant of the fact that a skilled enoug Infofector could probably sneak something past your security systems regardless. Only then do you disentangle his explanation.
Then you cant another signifier of confusion. "So you…run these calculations", you ask, carefully. "Nurgle's Talley", Talef agrees, nodding enthusiastically. "And it takes up a significant amount of a Cogitator's processing power", you continue, receiving another nod and affirmation. "They feed Nurglings", he offers by way of explanation. You feel vaguely like the ape subject of a Magos Abominus overjoyed that it is proving able to perform basic maintenance tasks. "And in return for these calculations, you receive these…Tokens", you continue, carefully.
Talef looks at you, and there is a surprising amount of enthusiasm in his eyes for the fact they are entirely artificial.
"What are these Tokens good for?", you ask, and you can tell from the way his posture shifts that he does not understand the question.
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Within the Eye of Terror, the Gods of Chaos are an undeniable fact of life, but how one engages with them is a question with almost as many answers as there are people within what has now become the Great Rift. Your [faith] might be described as
[] orthodox- holding to the interpretation most common on Nuton's Folly, and widespread within the wider Dark Mechanicum: the Omnissiah and Chaos are one and the same, the Four expressions of the underlying Forces that make up the God of Machines.
[] fearful- holding to the interpretation more common amongst the masses of the Eye of Terror: the Gods are powerful beings to be appeased and cajoled, their wrath and eyes avoided wherever such is practical.
[]fanatical- convinced by the preachings of the Prophet Lorgar: the Gods on their own are the true and just rulers of the Universe, and their will is to be brought about at any cost.
[]skeptical- viewing the Gods less as Gods as lesser beings might understand them and more as outgrowths of the Warp of questionable sentience: mere amplified, twisted reflections of the emotional spectrum of humanity, forces of natures to be corralled and controlled rather then worshiped and obeyed.
[]cynical- keeping to a more transactional view, leaving theology up to the madmen. Whatever else the Gods are, they also grant access to a myriad of gifts and advantages if one is careful and clever.
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Theama-Nul wanders aboard last, and you almost miss as they enter. This is not because of some particular skill at stealth or cloaking devices. They simply walk aboard, wave at you slightly, and almost make it past you before you realize who they are and stop them.
Theama-Nul is going to be a problem. You do not recognize them. There were pictures in their file. The pictures, you are decently sure, match the person before you. A quick overlay of the pictures in their file confirm that they are a match. You could not pick them out in a crowd. You could not pick them out in a lineup. You could not name a single distinguishing feature they have. Focusing on their form helps, a bit. You can make out individual parts of their form. The second you put them together, they stop making sense. They do not look like they belong to a single person.
You put their picture next to them in their internal vision. Your brain tells you that it can't be sure that these are the same person. Almost as if to console you, it tells you that it also can't be sure these aren't the same person.
Theama-Nul smiles at you and gives a slight nod. "The Changer of Ways grants those that follow it many useful gifts", he says, and there is absolutely nothing of note about their voice.
"Can you turn that off", you cant at them in binaric, feeling a headache strengthening the longer you focus on that maddeningly non-defined form.
"Yes", Theama-Nul says, perfectly serene.
"Are you going to?"
"No"
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It is the Changer of Ways that controls fate, and as such it is no surprise that its path can be so full of twists and turns. Once upon a time, before you blew up Nuton III, you thought you knew where you were going: you had an ambition, and it ran deep. Fate, of course, had other plans, but your [ambition] remains. You wish to…
[] conquer- Nuton's Folly is ruled by overweening idiots, almost completely unable to wield any but the most crude of authority and overapplying that to boot. You could do much better, ruling the planet. You could do much better ruling many planets, actually.
[] ascend- The limited potential of the mortal realm holds little interest to you: you wish to ascend further, to rise above the petty limitations of even flesh and metal, to assume a form of divine potency and resilience and revel in its power for all eternity. Whether you achieve this through worship, technology, or some other means is entirely unimportant to you.
[] be left alone- you enjoy researching, pushing the bounds of technology and biology, to be able to pursue the projects you want at the pace you want. It is, perhaps, not the most ambitious of aims, but for a man of your talents it is still a tall order.
[] Legacy- to create something that will ensure you are remembered, to ensure that your name is whispered in fear and awe at your genius for millenia to come, like that of Arkhan Land, the famous techno-archeologist.
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Your new subordinates spread across the ship, barely acknowledging you as they set up their own laboratory space. This suits you pretty well, for it gives you time to supervise the delivery of the last, critical piece of equipment.
It does not look like much, in truth: merely an utterly archaic printing press, leaden letters standing ready to be pressed down on vellum unspooled from a roll. At the side, a simple keyboard enables inputs, although it does not seem to be connected to any other part of the device. The whole thing almost hums with daemonic energy, although something about it is off: the apparatus emits a clear aura of loss. You know better than to probe too deeply into it, though: messing with daemonic devices one does not entirely understand is a surefire way to condemn one's soul to an eternity of torture.
It does not give you the time to do so, either way. Even before the Servitors that have carried it in fasten the final screw onto the deck, the lead letters start to move, pressing themselves down onto the vellum scroll to form a message to you. It reads as follows.
'Request For Servitorization Denied.
Proceed To Zeron 9
Contact the Court of the Hollow Idol
Repair The Precogitator
Report In Full'
Then the strange device falls silent, safe for the humming of wheels that sounds like mournful sobbing.
You suppress a burst of annoyed static, and go to find a map that will show you where in the hells Zeron 9 is.
