Grim Dark Tech Support: A Dark Mechanicum Quest

A Bolter injury, even one caused by an indirect, is a horrific thing to treat. This is by design: the Emperor, for all his pretensions at humanitarianism and enlightenment and reason, was not a very merciful man. Bolters are made not only to disable their target, not only to kill them, but to do so in a spectacularly brutal way, to inflict as much damage on the target and as much terror on those that witness the kill as is possible. It is no coincidence that the Bolter is a favored weapon of the Commissar: its secondary purpose is without question to intimidate.

Three of Lady Czevene's ribs have been fractured by the impact. Her left kidney and small intestines have been perforated. There are, according to your medical auspex, fragments of indeterminate genesis stuck in three places in her spine, in her liver, and uncomfortably close to her vena cava inferior, along with a total of forty-six additional objects stuck throughout her body. She has lost an indeterminate, but large amount of blood.

It is a freak occurrence that she has survived until now: if shock didn't claim her, toxic shock should have. You revise up your estimate of the skill of the Medicae at her disposal as you regard their work: they have done an admirable job at stabilizing her and minimizing the chance of her dying.

A Bolter Injury is a terrible thing to treat, but hers is as close to an ideal case as you could think of, safe perhaps for a glancing shot that failed to detonate for some reason or the other. It is still a monstrous medical crisis, requiring specialized skill and equipment to resolve properly, but you have both at your beck and call.

Very quickly, as you cauterize her wounds and do what you can to patch up the damage to her internal organs, you find that these mundane wounds are the very least of her worries.

She is mutating as you are treating her, occasionally in ways that seem to actively resist your attempts at treating her injuries. Her spine actively twists and fuses when you attempt to retrieve the splinters logged into it. The piece of crystal lodged below her heart is being rapidly engulfed by what seems like the vitreous body of a strange eye, something further born out by the nervous tissue spreading from it and the spine. Her lower pair of arms is actively shifting inside her body, their joints moving further onto their back, their fingers elongating, their muscles shifting. Soon, you are fairly certain, they will sprout feathers.

You wonder, briefly, if they will look like the wings of a Raven, and then you banish that thought. The warp is in the air, here: strange flights of fancy are both to be expected and to be controlled tightly.

The longer you work on the woman, the more one thing becomes apparent: the Bolter Injury, lethal as it would be to an ordinary woman, is the least of Lady Czevene's worries.

The fallen Primaris Psyker is connected to a psychic engine that is now malfunctioning, and the energies of the Empyrean are continuously coursing through her flesh.

Her connection to this engine consists of nine neural interface plugs: two at the base of both of her skulls, one at the intersection of her dublicated cervical vertebrae, and six more running evenly spaced down her spine.


Usually, your first step would be to remove her from this source of mutagenic energy: unfortunately, however, her interface jacks seem to have melted and fused with the ports, and Tarc Raskoll has for some reason you find utterly unfathomable decided to sink them into the spine in such a way they cannot be removed without also severing the spinal column. For all your skill, that has a low probability of a non-lethal outcome.

The next best thing of simply severing the cables shortly above the spine also fails: the second your saw blade makes contact, Czevene reaches into your mind and delivers a burst of pain so tremendously strong it nearly makes you pass out. The machine, you grasp, is now near irrevocably a part of her: had you returned earlier it may not have been, though who knows what other damage the Hand of Transformation could have caused with that additional bit of time.

Loath as you are to admit it, you cannot fix the throne: Tharc Raskoll has created a mess of interlocking organo-crystal arrays and runic circuitry, their workings as much determined by the annoyingly symbolical manner of empyrean engineering as much as by the laws of the Materium.

That leaves the other end of the equation: the Psyker who has lost control over her powers.

The very first thing you try is sedation, but it does not take: the energies coursing through her body seem to burn away whatever you pump into her veins

She is, you are rapidly realizing, losing her connection to her physical form: she is becoming a creature of the Empyrean, what the benighted, warp-addled worshippers of the pseudo-intelligences dwelling within it would call a Daemon Prince: simply a random expression of one of the ideo-forms of the Warp wearing a caricatured imprint of her personality.

It is death by another name, and so you set out to stop it.

This, luckily, turns out to be simpler than expected: a scan of her two heads reveals a tumor-like growth, though there is a bit too much deliberateness in there for you to be entirely comfortable labeling it as such. Whatever it is, it is exerting pressure on the regions of the brain surrounding it. You activate your surgical drill and curse as an error message pops up. The biopsy needle will have to do, then. You check the medical auspex one last time, and then you thrust the needle through her skull and into her brain.

You try not to pass through anything important on the way to the affected area. She has redundancies anyways, you figure, and nobody needs all their prefrontal cortex anyways.

In the end, it is a simple matter to synthesize a toxin keyed to the cells that are growing within Lady Czevene's skull. Whatever it was that was growing within her, it screams as it dies.

Your biopsy needle is beginning to develop a bony growth as you withdraw it from Lady Czevenes' skull, and you discard it rapidly before the mutation can spread.

There is much potential, in the warp's potential to meld flesh and machine, but you generally do not desire to run those experiments on yourself in an uncontrolled fashion.

[Roll: Eta Nu 9-35: Medicae: 3d6: 3, 3, 4, Partial Success.]

That does, unfortunately, seem to have been the fate of Lady Czevene. You've saved her from her transformation, from death in all but name, but it has come at a cost.

She has been fused to the throne thoroughly, her spine fused into the back of the chair, her legs literally sunk into the metal of the throne. An eye has begun to form on her sternum, half-finished but recognizable enough to express pain. Parts of her hair have turned to feathers, and the beginning of feathers are beginning to spread over what the half-formed wings her lower pair of arms has turned into. Parts of her teeth have fused, you note: if you had to guess, this was a prelude of them becoming a beak. You step back, exhausted. You have done what you can. Everything else will require extensive cybernetic reconstructive work, and even then you would be surprised if she could ever walk on her own two feet again. You turn, and see Magos Ko-Bea unloading her tools and a strange assortment of materials.

"Stellar work, darling", she says, smiling at you, "if you don't mind, I'll take it from here?"

You cant your assent. This is her area of expertise, and the political favor she wants to gather. She can also do the work.

Lady Czevene has regained consciousness again, by the time Ko-Bea goes to work. By the screams that begin shortly afterwards, she rapidly awakens afterwards.

The Commissar, Enos Stok, does stop you when you go to try to collect the corpses of the Space Marines.

"We need the heads", he says, and you do not have the energy to argue with him: their brains are interesting, and the alterations to their optical nerves are fascinating, but much of the actual substantive work occurs in the body. The most valuable thing of all, of course, is the Progenoid Glands.

You remove them right away, within the throne room, your saw breaking through the Space Marine's Sternum without much of an issue. You do not have the canopic jars used by the specialists the Space Marines have, but your sample containers will have to do.

Only when you are done with this does it occur to you that the request for the heads is somewhat strange. It wouldn't be, for any other Chaos Warband: to claim trophies from what they have killed is common practice, after all. The Host, and Enos Stok in particular, somehow doesn't strike you as the type.

So you ask, more out of wishing to fill your time until Magos Ko-Bea is finished with her work then out of any thirst for knowledge.

You somewhat regret it, of course, when you are told the actual reason.

Ezadarial Varth seems even more irate in death then he was in life: a hole has been melted through the middle of his chest, caused, you note, by what looks like the impact of several hundred las shots. "He was assaulted by one of Czevene's guards that had been possessed by the Hand of Transformation", Enos Stok explains to you, regarding the body impassively. "When communications went down, he chose to take that as part of a larger plot on his life, and decided to go for the throat himself."

A completely foolish thing to do, of course: a single Space Marine, no matter how formidable, could not hope to breach the defenses that surrounded Czevene except for extraordinary circumstances. Of course, you grasp, the ability to realistically appraise his own situation is not what landed Emissary Varth in this situation. "He was a sacrificial pawn", you opine, and Enos Stok nods, a somewhat sour look on his face. "Astra Militarum Politics could get cut throat", he opines, "but, well, no, this does seem like something some of the aristocratic regiments might do."

He sighs, looking at the corpse with something like disgust. "He genuinely thought himself favored, I think."

You grasp the shape of Enos Stok's plan, then. The Apostles of Blasphemy sent an Emissary entirely unsuited to the task, in order to present demands entirely unacceptable to the Host. To kill Varth has rid this Skyraal of an annoyance, while also granting him an excuse to subjugate the Host of Ninefold Revelation by military means. Probably his grasp on his Warband is not as firm as it could be: a man whose will goes unquestioned does not, as a rule, need to justify his wars.

Regardless, the presence of Space Marines allows Czevene and Stok to muddy the water: if it was they who killed the Emissary, that is a different enemy for the Apostles to focus on, especially if the matter is framed well.

"The Cruel Ravager has already contacted us, inquiring about the whereabouts of their Master. We have managed to stall for now, but they're getting impatient."

He gestures to the collected skulls. "We intend to send him back with all honors we can grant him, the skulls of the enemies he has personally slain piled up around him."

You cant a thoughtful affirmation, before realizing that Stok cannot understand you. He seems to have gotten the gist, though, because he nods in return. "I am telling you all this", Enos Stok says, "because we could really use your help. You are far more immersed in politics in…this sphere."

He makes a vague gesture which would probably be insulting if you didn't share the implied opinions about the general self-destructive idiocy that riddle the Forces of Chaos. Fortunately for Stok, you share these opinions. Even more fortunately for Stok, he follows his request up by some magical words. "We'll make it worth your while"

Well. Isn't that something worth considering.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
[] Refuse to Help
As much as an offer to help seems tempting, it does not seem worth the potential result of making an enemy of what seems to be one of the myriad sub-warbands of the Black Legion: that's the sort of thing that sees a Magos dead, if pushed to far

[] Offer Slight Help
You can help arrange the letter to strike the right balance between groveling and seeming self-assured, and help pick out the arrangement of skulls and helmets to be sufficiently impressive to the Black Legion. This is far from a guarantee of success, but you can at least claim that you tried. Also arrange the damage to Varth's armor to be less obviously caused by Las Guns.

[] Offer Significant Help
Give up the Power Armor and weaponry that Enos Stok has already granted you: they present a not small boon for any Warband, and will increase both the odds of success of the offering as well as your own standing in the eyes of Enos Stok. You do not know precisely what Enos Stok intends to offer you, but if you give up something of your own, he strikes you as likely to compensate you for this.

[] Offer Massive Help
Adding the Progenoid Glands you have taken, lovingly preserved, to the tribute offered to the Apostles of Blasphemy will probably seal the deal right away: it is an offer of alliance against a common foe, accompanied by the means to replace the annoyance lost five times over. Of course, this will also significantly reduce the utility of the Space Marine Corpses, but the commensurate increase in relation with the Host of Ninefold Revelation and the likely reward might well be worth that trade. You can probably kill some more Space Marines some other day, right?
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Regicia Ko-Bea is not done, by the time you are, though very quickly something else that demands your attention occurs: 8-Doxa Krainanima comes limping out of the deep Hive, literally dragging the battered form of Myges Talef behind himself. The Magos Mactator is also somewhat worse for wear, though somehow he wears the coating of fresh blood and the bullet gouges in both his cybernetic limbs and what remains of his flesh as though they were metals. There are new Servo Skulls following him, you notice: ones that seem to have been freshly stripped of their flesh, and the inscriptions present on his other Servo Skulls are not yet present.

"Reporting success", he cants, without even really slowing. "Insurgency decapitated. Predicted decrease of efficiency of 73%."

He catches your curious gaze towards the prone form of Talef, who seems to have been, if the rents and gouges in his cooling unit are anything to go by, hit by about three hundred bullets and fifty swords. He is still alive, though seems to be in something of a traumatic shutdown. "Decent tracker", 8-Doxa cants, "terrible in a fight."

He looks down at his unlikely companion with a fondness that is met with sheer horror in turn. "I will make him a weapon", 8-Doxa declares, and with that unsettlingly ambiguous statement he disappears into the depths of Lady Czevene's court.

You decide following up on this would be foolish, given the mood he is apparently in.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Lady herself emerges after 54 hours of intensive surgery. You have very little input into the whole affair, much to your chagrin: Regicia Ko-Bea had apparently given strict orders not to be disturbed, and though you could have probably gotten past the bodyguard of Tzaangors that stood watch over the repurposed throne room, that would have run rather counter to all the effort you put in to make a good impression.

There are some things you can grasp about her intent by the hasty orders she cants out over the noosphere: requests for gold, surgical steel, copper, and silver, as well as for the esoteric, like an ever-increasing amount of enervated feathers, or 81 meters of wire spun from the inner lining of a warp-drive core.

It is a testament to the sort of week you have been having that it only mildly surprises you when Theama-Nul both has that wire available and is readily willing to part with it.

"There is no resentment, then", you ask him, "over the foiling of some sort of great, cosmic plan?"

The amusement that tinges his response is, as ever, deeply unsettling.

"You think the plan has been foiled?"

The issue with these peddlers of conspiracy, you consider, is that every new development gets neatly slotted into the theory.

If the plan did not work out, it was because it was planned not to.

You decided to go for a walk instead of engaging with this deeply obnoxious twist of ideology.


The Hive is much calmer now, you consider: in the manner of a scared, beaten beast waiting for the next blow to fall, perhaps, but calmer nonetheless. It is as though the entire Hive is waiting with bated breath, tense and anticipating whether to lunge or to relax.

Then, suddenly and all at once, the tension abates. You are gripped by a deep and abiding sense that all is well, and all shall be well: a certainty that seems to begin in the pit of your stomach and run through your entire body, relaxing your muscles and filling you with a deep, comfortable, unaccountable warmth.

It takes you a moment to remember that you do not possess a stomach anymore, and so you hurry back towards the Throne Room, where the Tzaangors standing guard have formed an improvised cordon, discipline warring with clear excitement.
They trill like birds, you note, which says things about their internal anatomy you would love to look into on any other day.

That will have to wait, however. The doors to the throne room swing open, and from them, Lady Czevene steps forth, Regicia Ko-Bea by her side.

[Roll: Regicia Ko-Bea: Cybernetics: 4d6: 1, 6, 4, 6. Critical Success]

She is, in a word, magnificent. Regicia Ko-Bea is a masterful cyberneticist, and in the restoration of Lady Czevene, she has truly surpassed herself.

When you left the Psyker, she was akin to the result of a Chrysalis half-finished: halfway between one state and another, and wretchedly half-formed because of it. Regicia has taken what the warp has begun and brought it to completion: has studded the half-formed wings with magnificent, shimmering feathers, has replaced the wretched half-formed eye in her sternum with a cybernetic with the glimmering crystal as its nucleus. There are a dozen of tiny and magnificent details you notice and some you undoubtedly do not, from the circuitry beneath her skin to the subtle reinforcements around the half-beaks within her mouths, which will, if you read it right, both greatly raise it's crushing power as well as prevent her from accidentally biting off her own tongue.

All this, however, pales in comparison to what Regicia has done with her legs.

You had written off Lady Czevene as unable to walk on her own legs ever again, for a multitude of reasons: the fusing of her vertebrae might in theory have been solvable, but the added weight of the psychic engine that still rests upon her back would still put spent to any such attempts.

You were right. But where you would have solved such a problem by simply removing the entire lower body and replacing it with a more suitable modus of operation, Regicia has instead opted to keep the legs intact, and by the way they are moving, she has even managed to return at least some sensation to them.

What they do not do, however, is bear the main brunt of Lady Czevene and the engine fused to her back. That falls to the four spider-limbs attached to her lower back, cables spliced into the lowest of the Psychic Engines ports running to the ring that mounts the legs. She can pivot them along these, you note: spread them apart to provide higher stability, or fold them backwards and out of sight. It is the sort of mobility setup that would ordinarily impose to high a burden on the on so augmented, requiring additional cogitators to use, but of course Lady Czevene has an entire second brain, doesn't she? From the way she is moving forward, she has mastered the use of her new legs exceedingly well already.

Silk swishes around these legs, and only when she comes to a halt do you recognise its purpose: it acts as a concealing screen of sorts, hiding her prosthetics below an object of clothing probably best compared to a hoop skirt. She looks like a lady at court, when she stands still: besides, of course, the unblinking, metal and crystal eye in her chest, the dual heads crowned with a mixture of black feathers and golden hair, the wings sprouting from her back glowing in the impossibly colors of the warp, the impossible glow of the crystals of the psychic engine melded to her spine, or the force stave she holds in her hand, crackling with force ready to be unleashed.

Nine golden wings have been embroidered in the dark blue fabric of the dress, surrounding the eye that marks her sternum, and it seems to look right past your flesh and into the deepest depth of her soul.

You do not raise objections when she reaches out and none-too-gently rips the details of your endeavors out of your brain.


The woman has detonated the brain of a Space Marine with her mind, and generally does not seem in a conciliatory mood. You're proud, but there is a limit to your pride. Right now, you're akin to an egg placed in a vice: deadly averse to somebody starting to screw around.

Then she begins laughing, and when your brain remains uncooked, you allow yourself to relax somewhat. The fact the laughter between her two heads is a slight bit dissonant is worrying, but also hopefully not going to be your problem. "I had", Lady Czevene tells you, "devised an elaborate and bulletproof text to use as the basis for the Hand's objectives. I would be interested to find out when exactly in the process these instructions got pared down to nine words."

Leave it to Tharc Raskoll, you consider, to compress and simplify instructions given to a Daemon.

"We will have words", the Psyker states, never once raising her voice, "with Magos Raskoll"

You let out a burst of amused binaric. You cannot help it. You have waited for Raskoll to be in trouble for decades, now, and also had a sub-routine in the back of your neural implants chant a prayer for it for the entirety of your time on-world.

"But the weapon, for all its flaws, has potential. You have stopped it's destructive rampage, and brought it back, though far from in one piece."

She stares at you with all five of her eyes.

"What manner of usage for what you have brought me back would you recommend?"

You will be, you grasp at once, expected to carry out whatever course of action you recommend.

You do not think it would be wise to disappoint at this juncture.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

[] Destroy
The Hand of Transformation is a fundamentally shoddy piece of craftsmanship, created by the hand of a charlatan. It can never be trusted, and so should be decommissioned for good.
[] Restore
You have the means to restore the Hand of Transformation to it's original purpose: that of a saboteur, infiltrator, and Agent Provocateur. You, and your subordinates, are more then capable of surpassing Tharc Raskoll's original vision. You shall beat him at his own game.
[] Repurpose
The Hand of Transformation provides opportunities for communication and battlefield coordination Tharc Raskoll was entirely blind of: you can rebuild it to make full use of this apparent potential to communicate instantly across any distance, granting the Host of Ninefold Revelations an unprecedented amount of ability to coordinate across the worlds they control: something that is surely far more valuable than just another assassin.
[] Magnify
The Torso of the Hand of Transformation is, in essence, a self-contained control unit: one that could, if it's unique capabilities were made use of, exercise incredibly fine control over a wide variety of weapon systems, as well as strike terror into the hearts of enemy formation through targeted possession. Creating an entirely new daemon engine to function around a piece that was not originally intended for it would surely be a challenge, but it would grant the Host of Ninefold Revelation a capability it does not already possess, and allow you and your team to create something undeniably your own to boot.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________