It is the tail end of the fortieth millennium, and the imperium of man is at war. The forces of chaos set out on yet another crusade, heretics grow in the dark and xenos beset the great empire on all sides. Brave men, women and children die by the billions to stave off mankind's demise.
To the people of Matar, a hive world near the core of segmentum solar, that is a distant problem. Once, many millennia ago before the dark age of technology and the era of wonders that preceded it, it was a beautiful paradise world with lush greenery and great blue oceans, but that past is long-since buried beneath towering spires and columns of smoke. Its many inhabitants know nothing about their greater past, struggling to make ends meet in a harsh and unforgiving world.
Deep beneath the surface layers of one of the world's four hive-cities, in parts long-since forgotten, two stalwart men of the adeptus arbites pursue one such inhabitant. His crimes are many, ranging from ruthless theft to the most abhorrent jaywalking, and his punishment is death. Their steps echo in the unfamiliar architecture, every movement rousing stale air and long-dormant dust.
It's unsettlingly dark and quiet. Nothing works this far down, where only the mad and the desperate go to die. There is no telltale hum of air conditioning; no flickering glare of lights or whine of poorly-oiled machinery. Only the pitter-patter of feet, the slight rustling of their armor and the desperate breathing of their doomed quarry.
All three of them are exhausted - the arbites have been in pursuit of their slippery foe for hours, at times following tracks, at others hot on their heels. By all rights the criminal should have faced the emperor's justice already, but he's clever and slippery, evading capture by a hair's breadth again and again.
Unfortunately for him, there is nowhere left to run. The path the criminal is on leads him deeper, but one can only go so deep into a hive before reaching the bottom. With the arbites approaching rapidly, the desperate hive-worlder is forced to confront his pursuers one way or another.
The chamber he finds himself in is a small, desolate refinery riddled with ancient machinery long-since rusted into uselessness. Carts of unrefined ore hang on a steel wire overhead, beneath which conveyor belts lay still and silent on the factory floor. A clever and quick-thinking man, the criminal scans the area, soon finding the ancient machine that once propelled the suspended ore carts. These would be his weapon.
Not far behind, the two arbites pursue him into the ruins, catching sight of him by the far end of the smeltery. The larger and more foolhardy arbites of the pair rushes forward with a shout in the emperor's name, shortly followed by his compatriot. Smiling to himself, the crook smashes an ancient, rustes wire - and the ore overhead falls.
It impacts the factory floor with a great clunk, reverberating throughout the area - and then, shattered by the impact, the ground cracks beneath their feet. None have a chance to escape, and so all of them plummet into the depths.
Silence descends as the dust settles. None of them survived the fifty-meter fall. It is not until nearly two months later that a desperate scavenger, armed with only a torch, finds the tracks in the dust. Hoping to find another unfortunate soul ripe for looting, she follows them - and eventually reaches the pit. There, far beneath, lay the corpses of three unfortunate souls, but that is not what draws her attention.
Far below, buried beneath ancient rubble, is another shape. Humanoid and nearly forty meters tall, it can be only one thing: a titan. Only, it's not quite the usual fare. Unadorned by the usual skulls and acquilas, the great construct is-
[][Titan] Blue, gray and angular
—An intuitive user interface makes the titan easily usable by pretty much anyone. Emphasis on conventional weaponry. Insufficient security clearance restricts access to many of its more advanced features.
[][Titan] Red, brown and spiky
—Provides direct neural interfacing, allowing for unparallelled fine control and direct mental cyberwarfare for those with the right implants. Emphasis on laser and EMP weaponry. Fragments of an abominable intelligence linger within the machine.
[][Titan] White, green and smooth
—Utilizes waysteel, a silvery, psychically reactive wraithbone-analogue particularly resistant to the ravages of the warp. Emphasis on energy and esoteric weaponry. Has an unusually active machine spirit, and requires a psyker pilot.
-rather than the steel and gold of imperial designs. No great wealth of firepower bristles from its back, for its head stands tall upon its shoulders, looking out at the world with four slit-like eyes. It is a relic of a bygone era, a fragment of an infinite war long since forgotten, but to the scavenger it is only one thing: her ticket out of a life of misery.
She heads upwards, as far up as one of her kind is allowed to go, and attempts to spread the news. Few believe her - but one figure, a minor administratum official down on his luck, takes a chance. She leads him into the depths, to the resting place of the ancient titan, and shows him what she found.
Eager for a chance to turn his luck around, the official buys the scavenger's silence with a bribe rich enough to propel her into the middle class. He himself claims the honor of discovery, and brings word to the higher officials of the world. The promise of newfound knowledge and relics draws in the mechanicus like moths to a flame.
In the time that follows, the great titan is painstakingly extracted from its tomb. A path suitable for its bulk is slowly carved through the underhive over the course of years. It is repainted in imperial colors, skulls and emblems emblazoned in all the right places. Its archaic yet unfamiliar technologies, so far removed from ordinary titans, puzzle many who try to study them - for like any titan it only responds to the chosen few.
Even with the aid of cogitator-scans gathered from the titan's authorization scanner, the search for such an individual can take decades, even centuries. Nonetheless, it is well-known that when a titan is found, the family that can pilot it can sometimes be found on the same world - or not one too far away. Through a stroke of cosmic fortune, one such individual is found after only a few years. They are-
[][Pilot] A nameless ganger in Matar's criminal underworld.
[][Pilot] A young orphan from the nearby agri-world of Capella IV.
[][Pilot] A veteran of the local planetary defense force who never quite made the cut for the imperial guard.
[][Pilot] The bastard child of a local noble.
[][Pilot] Write-in.
