Xenos Technology is dangerous even when it's working as intended. The head of this Necron does decidedly not fall into that category: it is infected with some manner of xeno scrap code so hostile and dangerous even a species as famously well-versed in matters of the Materium as the Necron chose to quarantine it. 8-Doxa-Krainaima, for all that he is an exceedingly talented combatant and creator of weaponry, surely does not match the Necrons in either skill or caution. As such, you deem it best to keep him busy, until his urge to tinker with the head passes.
So you pile on the requests: challenging, interesting things to do, everything from fine-tuning the Plasma Gun that still hums largely untested to designing an entirely new suit of armaments for your complement of Yulrasians. They are all, you think, suitably interesting tasks, more than appropriate for a man of his talents and inclinations. He seems to agree, too: he agrees to all your requests, assuring you he will get to them when he can.
You do not think about it much, after that: you are busy with your own endeavors, testing the capability of the fascinating bone-stimulating organ you have managed to grow from the gene seed. For the remainder of the journey, you are deep in research, testing the various applications of the newly grown gland, from its implications for field medicine to its potential offensive use.
[Roll: Eta Nu 9 35: Social Manipulation: 1d6. 2: Failure]
It is only by its very end, when you find the Plasma Cannon about as tuned as it was before and the Yulrasians still very much wielding their old kit, that it occurs to you that 'when he gets to it' implies that he is applying his own priority to his tasks, and that he will probably give more priority to the one that he is currently obsessively preoccupied with.
He is not, when he enters the bridge on exit from the warp, wearing the thing's head mounted on a mechadendrite.
You count this as a tremendously small mercy.
On his shoulder, surrounded by a puckered surgical star, the anchor point of a Mechandendrite is freshly visible through his robes.
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Astropathic Relay Stations are in a curious position: they are important and valuable, but also commonplace enough defending each of them all the time would split even the mighty fleets of the Imperium unacceptably thin. Instead, they rely on obscurity and on the precognitive abilities of their inhabitants.
It works, not every time, but often enough for them to remain viable and to allow them to continue their function, keeping enough redundancies ahead of raids and random attacks messages can continue to be delivered.
It is painfully obvious, as you translate into the space around Station 213/666, that whatever has befallen this station, it has led to its obscurity being decisively compromised. Myriad vessels crowd around it, though these are not the well-organized war fleet at the beck and call of the Host, or the eclectic assembly of raiders taking anchor above Zerom. These are Pilgrim Vessels and Grain Freighters, Pleasure Yachts and Troop Transports: enough of them, kept in proximity close enough to one another, that you initially think that what you are looking at is a Space Hulk that has engulfed the Station. The ships are lashed together haphazardly by chain and connector tube and haphazardly welded on walkway, kept apart just far enough to allow you sight of the gunmetal gray cylinder to which they seem to have attached themselves like barnacles.
"We're being hailed", Madame Kapriosa tells you, and then she frowns, and you quickly notice why. You are not, in fact, being hailed: not in the sort of systematic manner that word would imply. Instead, you are being bombarded by a jumble of Vox Messages, sent on what seems like every channel available. Every ship attached to the Relay Station appears to be sending it's own message.
"Not scrapcode", Talef tells you, preempting your question, "and I cannot detect any sort of unified message either. It appears to be…" He falls silent, hesitating: unable, it seems, to understand the data he is receiving, to parse it into any sort of logical conclusion. "It appears to be…audio-visual data? I cannot exclude some sort of memetic hazard triggered by patterns in these, but I can't detect any evidence for it either. Recommend…"
It is at this point that the Captain loses her patience, and simply has one of the messages put up on the screen.
You stare at it, for a while. So does Kapriosa. So does Talef. You feel a headache coming on. You don't know what you expected, but this certainly wasn't it.
A woman, dressed in what appears to be the sort of robes you would see on a million imperial worlds, seems to be explaining the basic concepts of knitting, wielding a pair of needles with what you find yourself admitting seems to be consummate skill. Ludmilla Kapriosa frowns, for a few moments, and then has something else put up on screen, then something else, switching from that same woman explaining the proper preparation of a grox roast, then to what seems, from the few seconds you watch it, like an actually extremely decent video on engraving, even if the tools used are of course extremely primitive. The Captain continues to switch through the messages, and you catch glimpses of a thousand other lessons in a thousand little skills, from the practical to the artistic, each of them taught engagingly and demonstrated masterfully.
"That seems…unlikely", Ludmilla murmurs, trying and failing to tear herself loose from a pictcast demonstrating the finer points of tattoo artistry in a particularly abstract style.
You tend to agree. The breadth of skill that is being demonstrated is, by your calculations, utterly incompatible with the perceptible age of the demonstrator, and the common capabilities of what appears to be an unmodified human woman. There is something odd, here: and as the pictcast ends, you can see the shape of what that might be.
"That's strange", Talef cants to you, and when you ask him what he means, he appends a copy of his mapping of Vox Channels. What had been a wide variety of signals is now rapidly converging: the same message played at the exact same time.
"Identical, not just very similar", Talef tells you, and you are inclined to believe him, even as you look at the pictcast that is still up on the screen. The woman, it seems, is exhorting the audience to learn more, to seek out further broadcasts and to continue learning.
Then the screen goes blank, and you are left to wonder what the point of all that was.
It is something, you suspect, that you are going to find out. Until then, you are left to plot a route an Arvus Lighter can take through the not exceedingly stable Labyrinth you see before you. The Wilful Eternity will need to dock on its outskirts, of course, but you'll be damned if you walk all that way.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
It is, at the end, surprisingly easy to maneuver through the labyrinth. The fact that you are broadcasting your credentials on all channels is, you suspect, helping: Icarus' Folly keeps screaming lock-on warnings at you as you pass by the wide variety of hulls on display, weaving through gaps just large enough for your lighter to pass comfortably. You are never quite moving in a straight line, though: more than once you circle back almost to the outskirts of the accumulation, in a manner that is either the work of an infuriating imbecile, random, ritualistic in some way, or a very deliberate and intended means of defense.
"Hard to take in one piece", 8-Doxa-Krainaima opines, and you are inclined to agree. Bombaring this construct from afar would likely yield catastrophic results, once the shields fail: a cascade of fusion bottles failing and unleashing their destruction. But by that same virtue, if one wanted to take the station intact one would have to pass through a gauntlet, either braving whatever defenses are locking on to you or braving what you figure is probably a nightmare of tight corridors and emplacements inside the ships themselves.
Or maybe these people are a bunch of warp-addled idiots that have welded together ships willy-nilly and scattered a few turrets throughout.
You suppose you will find out shortly.
"Interesting", Regicia murmur-cants, and it takes you a moment to recognize what she is referring to.
She has become a little withdrawn since Sephiron: the arm she lost is still replaced by the temporary tangle of Mechatendrils she attached back there. You figure that none of the replacements she has created so far were entirely to her liking, and if there is anything you know about Regicia it is that she is a perfectionist to a fault.
Now, though, she seems to have come out of her shell, and found something that has caught her interest. That something, you see, is the paint that has been applied to the hulls that surround you.
You had, in truth, been filtering them out without even consciously noticing: shifting the color perception of your visual sensors to mute their intensity and blur their lies. Nothing concrete has been painted, out there: instead, it is a swirl of colors and shapes, somehow at once deeply at odds with each other and without separation at all, devoid of any sign of deliberateness and yet deeply symbolic. It is a depiction of the Warp, you recognize: as close to one as human hands and human minds can make, within the boundaries of the materium. It is the sort of depiction that will, in and of itself, weaken the boundaries between the real and the half-real. It also makes it extremely hard to judge the distances to the hull, to see what is an empty space and what isn't: doubly so as some of the paints seem to simply absorb various spectra of light, which makes even navigating by Auspex tricky.
Ultimately, you have no choice but to follow a vox beacon that you suddenly acquire, flying through what your instruments are determinedly telling you is a crooked path even as you cannot be going anything but straight ahead towards a hangar: a black gap of reality in metal skin painted in colors utterly inimical to it.
You did not realize you had been holding the breath you let out, when the Lighter touches down within the confines of a mercifully normal Hangar. You do not even breathe as normal people do: holding your breath was nothing more then one of those vestigial human reflexes it is so very hard to excise completely.
You take a moment to center yourself, to focus. You consciously take in the Hangar: standard imperial construction with standard anti-imperial modifications: little more than a big cavern with all the equipment needed to refuel and effect the sorts of repairs that do not need specialized facilities. The usual mixture of lay-mechanics and servitors is hanging about, and you would be willing to bet that there is a minor member of your order somewhere around here, though he is probably going to be staying largely out of your way.
It is not the sorts of people who enjoy the company of their peers that seek out this sort of placement, not that anyone stuck in a backwater like this repairing whatever hulks drag themselves into this hangar could be considered your peer in any but the most technical of terms.
There is a welcoming committee awaiting you, you note: six people in total, two of them men, two women, and two falling somewhere on the spectrum in between. They are all dressed in robes of an interesting material: silk of some sort, if you are to guess, though it shimmers in all the colors of the rainbow as they move. None of them bear cybernetics, though they appear to be reasonably fit by unaugmented human standards. The glint of metal you spot in the navel of one of the women turns out to be nothing but some sort of decorative piece of jewelry, shaped, of course, to look akin to the mark of Slaanesh. You are glad your face remains unreadable to unaugmented mortals, and that they cannot spot the blurt of annoyed static you emit into the local noosphere.
Warp-addled, then. Well, it won't be the first, and it won't be the last. You can deal: you always have.
One of them, one of the ones of indeterminate gender, steps forward and bows deeply in greeting, before revealing improbably white teeth with their smile. "I am Adriel", they greet you, "and am gladdened to welcome you to the Beacon of Perfection."
They beckon you to follow with a fluid motion of their arm that sends the silk of their robes through all the colors of the light spectrum, motioning towards an entrance into the depth of the station that seems to have been formed of marble, and made up in mockery of temples on Terra that were ancient even before the Imperium was young. "You must be weary from your journey. Come, rest, share in our hospitality. Your work can wait until tomorrow."
They smile, once more flashing their exceedingly white teeth, and the gesture is mirrored by their compatriots in a manner even you recognize as mere mimicry. You are suddenly put in mind of the predators of the deep sea, dangling light to lure prey and concealing a needle-fanged maw within the darkness beyond their bait. It is, you decide after a moment, the way their smile creases the skin around their eyes while somehow still leaving them bar of any sort of spark: a perfect lie, ruined only by a deeper ruination within
"We were able to rest during the journey", Regicia lies, and you feel a profound sense of gratitude for her intervention despite yourself.
The rest of your subordinates seem just as uncomfortable as you are: there is a barely audible hum emitting from 8-Doxa's claw, and Talef's cooling unit has spun up in a manner you have come to associate with his nervousness. Regicia, of course, is all charm and smile, but she is a little too controlled in this: a little too tight around the edges for it to not be a deliberate performance.
Theama-Nul, you notice with a fresh start of worry, is gone.
The person that calls themselves Adriel does not waver in their smile: they merely nod, dipping their head low. Their hair has been shorn short, you note: runes in some variety of dark speech shine through, cut both into hair and scalp.
They seem to shift as you look at them, and you cling to the sense of annoyance this brings you, for not to do so would play into the growing sense of unease.
"Very well", Adriel says, and smiles, "then I shall take you to the beacon, so that you might appraise yourself of the situation."
Another gesture, towards the same marble portal.
There are metal inlays within it's columns, you note, glowing in a manner that cannot reasonably be explained by any natural means, forming more script that you cannot quite understand.
Again, you are reminded of a jaw. You shake aside these ridiculous fears: if they had wished to kill you, they could have done it a thousand times while you approached.
Still, you ready the hydraulics of your arm, readying your blade to spring forth. Who knows how these warp-addled fools will think.
They fall in around you, which does not exactly make you less suspicious, but you fight down your suspicions as you are led deeper into the station's interior.
Astropathic Stations, for all that they are mass produced, are laid out very carefully and precisely: they have to be, to enable optimal channeling of the warp by the Chorus in their midsts. You can recognize this very careful, geometrical layout at work, now: superstitious nonsense by any reasonable measure, but the sort of superstitious nonsense the superstitious masses have determined to work, and so it does. You can actually feel the currents of the warp moving around you, too: eddies of emotions that are alien to yourself, fear and joy and lust and hatred, some of it your own, some of it from the person you could have been, some of it from those around you. All of it goes by too fast to influence you, and you can stop absolutely none of it by adjusting your glands, no matter how hard you try.
The only thing that remains is a deep frustration, both in a deep yearning for that which has past you by that is at once alien and utterly familiar, and in the rage you feel at such a state of mind in yourself.
This is, you suspect, the result of the modifications that you can see to the original design: more of the strange, shifting, metallic script within the walls, creating a pattern that seems to beckon forward, that seems to draw you in and towards the very heart of the station.
Adriel is talking, explaining, but you are having trouble following, caught up in the turmoil of your own emotions.
"Of course, Magos Van Hex would be much better at explaining all this. We had hoped she would return, but I suppose a woman of her magnitude cannot be expected to attend to problems such as this"
You perk up, as does Regicia and, to your surprise, Talef. Zeta Van Hex is a little bit of a legend, mingling fame and infamy in the way all the legends of the Dark Mechanicum do. She is, first and foremost, an architect: infamous for the manner in which her creations channel the warp any which way she wishes it to, unsurpassed upon Nuton's Folly in her understanding of the Empyrean, unassailable in her authority. Four towers rise above the main forge complex of the world you have come to call home: four towers that draw in daemons as though they were flies drawn to honey (or the smell of blood, or that of a rotting corpse, as the case might be). It is there that the most prolific Warpsmiths of the forge smith their most legendary creations, and each of them has stepped through and ocean of blood to gain their place at their feet.
Zeta Van Hex is the woman who created those towers. She is the one who makes her home and forge within the very core of the forge complex that has sprung up around them, where the confluence of the Warp is strongest.
She does not make mistakes. She cannot make mistakes. That you have been sent to fix what is supposedly one of hers boggles the mind.
You frown. Next to you, Regicia chuckles. You take a moment to understand why.
"That's one way to get repeat customers", Regicia murmurs, and chuckles again as you emit a burst of annoyed static. You respect Van Hex: she is a woman that is, by all accounts, very good at her work. Good enough to have her creation amplify any admiration that might be felt towards her, it seems. You are impressed, despite yourself, and you reckon only some of that is down to the warp manipulation.
"So it's a bit like a Fish Trap", Talef states. "Energy flows in, nothing flows out. What are you using it for? Warp, nevermind that, what are you using to store all of that?"
Adriel smiles, again, and this time around it seems actually genuine, somehow. Why that is becomes momentarily apparent.
The little shit is being smug.
You round the corner, and find that the station has, in fact, been modified significantly.
Specifically, it has been hollowed out, a circle half a kilometer wide cut straight through its heart without any regard for what was in its way, reaching from what must be it's very tip to it's very bottom.
Within that space hangs a crystal of gigantic proportions, a pathway spiraling up and down, the very energy of the warp crackling in its core.
You do not look at it directly, by deeply ingrained instinct, no matter how much a voice inside your very soul seems to beg you. That way lies madness and oblivion: an eternity spent as a warp-addled fool, in service to some idiot false god.
You refuse. You steel your mind and lower your gaze, and focus on the way down, as Adriel leads on.
"So, all that energy…what do you use it for?"
"Perfection", Adriel responds, and you almost gut them before they continue. "The energy is filtered and sent out through the astropathic choir, which is where we're going right now. Some of it goes into scrap code that produces the pictcasts you've seen, which is how we gain new recruits and draw in raw material."
"Raw material for what", 8-Doxa asks, and you are surprised at the hunger in his voice. Adriel smiles, and this time it is not genuine: it is the smile of a salesperson, of the sort that takes more than your money or your material gain. "We are in the business of people. Bespoke personalities, with bodies to fit. Anything the heart desires, crafted to perfection. Assassin, spy, soldier, or…"
They never get to finish the sentence, a fact for which you are profoundly grateful.
You are less grateful for what has interrupted your host.
Fear hits you like a hammer: pure and overwhelming, stronger than anything you have felt so far. Your blade springs forth, and you raise it in defense, ready to strike out or run, even as Talef and Regicia collide trying to get to safety behind yourself and 8-Doxa, even as 8-Doxa strikes forward, Chord Claw screaming as it almost eviscerates Adriel. They twist out of the way at the last second, face no less stricken by panic, and then it is over, done as quickly as it began.
"Well", you say, taking care to look as dignified as you can as you withdraw your blade and straighten yourself to your full height, "I suppose that tells us what the issue is."
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
It has been, you are told, going on for a little more than two months now, and getting worse all the while. The issue is somewhere within the Astropathic Choir, cradled and chained by mind interface units to the very base of the crystal, where Van Hex's arcane circuitry translates all that has been collected in the capacitor crystal above. The fear seizes them, and propagates through all their minds in turn, until it is expelled in a big wave, racing outwards through the station before dissipating.
They have, to their credit, done some measurements, before they called for aid. The wave is doubling in reach each time: if their measurements hold, it will have reached halfway through their improvised labyrinth this time around, and will break it's edge the next time.
"Which would attract attention we do not want", Adriel tells you, quite unnecessarily. You know from hard-earned experience that there is nothing that draws a predator quite as much as fear.
"Very well", you say, looking at the sightless eyes of one of the Astropaths and considering what steps to take.
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[] Material
Whatever else this Beacon of Perfection is, it is clearly determined by it's physical architecture to a significant degree. You will check these physical components, starting with the arcane circuits and the astropaths strapped into them, and determine where the misalignment that causes the issue is. Once you have determined this, you can move to remedy whatever is causing this issue.
[] Spiritual
A circumspect method, but more direct than probing material components: Magos Van Hex will have built in diagnostic methods into her circuits, and you will be able to access them. You will interface with the machine spirit of what she has created, and through it gain knowledge of whatever flaw is plaguing it.
[] Empyrical
The Warp is at the center of whatever is going on here, and so you are going to utilize the methods you have at your disposal to measure it, understand the phenomenon that is going on, trace it back to its origins, and break it. It is the most straightforward way, but in that very straightforwardness lies risk: this will lead you to the heart of the matter, for good or for ill.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
You only notice you have fallen asleep when you begin to dream, hands and tools still going through their routine motions of unpacking the tools you require even as you do. The woman is back, offering you more knowledge, more insights into her library of alien anatomy.
She does not ask for much, in truth: only a minor memory, tinged in a strange mixture of emotions.
She is generous, in this, recognizing perhaps that you have more to give than most. She will let you choose yourself.
[Price]
[] Refuse
[] A Glimpse of the Emperor
Awe, Shame, and Disgust
[] Your First Kill
Terror, intermingled with triumph
[] Your Gene-Donor's Smile
Regret, Longing, and Hatred
[] Your Last Glimpse of Terra
Defeat, utterly and absolute
