From orbit, she is beautiful.
From the surface, she is hell.
The world of Thedias Prime sat an uncomfortable distance from the roiling primary that shines her light across the blasted wreck that was the Thedian solar solar system. Heated by solar winds and turned to a furnace by the high pressure atmosphere shrouding her blasted surface, Thedias was named the Tricksters Jewel. From a distance, her glittering cerulean skies - streaked that color by the complex chemicals vomited forth from her stygian depths, seemed as blue and welcoming as memories of long ruined Terra.
The surface of Thedias was consigned in the year three of the sixth century of the thirty eighth millennium to be a colony of penal extraction by a joint agreement of the Administratum, whose scribes had noted the hiveification of the worlds of Le-Tast and Hondai both indicated a growing underclass that would need shipment and disposal, and by the Adeptus Mechanicus, whose long ranged scryprobes and theoclastic spectroscopic veraspix augeries had both revealed the vast mineral and chemical wealth waiting on the surface of Thedias prime. And so it was that three Universe class mass conveyor transports, in keeping with a Geller shrouded Pier-II orbital base, transported themselves from Le-Tast and to the orbit of Thedias.
There, they disgorged the first dropfall habitats. Vast pyramids of black, vomited from the bellies of ships that could have served as planetary cities. Held aloft by rocket plumes that melted craters into the blasted earth and lowered on suspensor fields powered by sacred plasma generatoria, these dropfalls settled into their places, now known by their prison given names.
Hellbreak.
Voidheart.
The Pits.
Skale's Demise.
Wrath Warren.
And, the worst of the lot: Golgotha.
Within each were ten thousand prisoners. And from them spread, like the fibrous mass of a cancer, humanity under the yoke. Drillshafts were sunk into tectonically active rift-valleys, and precious minerals were hewn forth with lascutters, with pickaxes, with bare hands. Launched into orbit on skytether servitors, they were hauled away by transports that, themselves, returned with yet more prisoners, yet more souls to consign to Thedias Prime's depths. The cerulean sky overhead took on the tone of hatred - blue became a cursed color, ocean reimagined into the pits of damnation. And the population swelled - for the Mechanicus had done their jobs
too exactingly. The dropfall habitats were sturdy, their placement in half-buried earth, their sloped sides, all of it worked to keep the people within alive and working.
And breeding.
And plotting.
The first escape attempt came in the year sixty two of the sixth century. Well, that's not fair.
The first escape attempt came in the year three. And the year four, and five, and six. For while the world of Thedias killed all life and all rationality, there was nothing in the human spirit more resilient than the grim hope that death in attempting the impossible was better than
this. Some escaped to deep tunnels, some simply tried to find work indoors rather than the mines. But it was not until the year sixty two that some prisoners managed to sneak aboard the skytether servitor and launch themselves into the air above the clouds. There, they discovered something shocking.
A
paradise.
Yes, they needed to wear breathers when they opened the hatches on the bobbing servitor, but the temperature was clement, and the servitor was able to remain aloft entirely because the atmosphere within it was lighter than the clouds upon which they drifted and bobbed. The bored crew of voidborn that came down on a shuttle to snag the bobbing drone were overcome by the nearly feral prisoners, and the standoff continued on for three weeks after they came back to the shuttle bay. With her clan-crew at risk, the chartist captain of the
Solitary Reward for Temperance refused to simply allow the Arbites to break in the doors and butcher everyone - while the prisoners negotiated, desperately. The siege dragged on, with different feints and methods being used to try and dislodge the prisoners without killing the thirteen families of captive voidborn clanners that were at risk.
People died.
But at last, a diminutive and quicksilver minded prisoner - the architect of the plan, in fact - got a line to the chartist captain directly and was able to make a
deal. Currently, ships had to hunt for weeks to find cargo bobbing on the surface of Thedias' clouds.
So, why not have prisoners collect it in one easily found place?
The agreement was struck - despite the Arbites glowering complaints - and within a year, three tethered skytehter servitors were tethered into a crude habitat called Trustworthy Compromise. The name, quite rapidly, became exceedingly ironic. As years became decades, then centuries, the prisoners that floated overhead began to divide themselves into families, then houses, then noble lines. Trustworthy Compromise budded off estates and noble cities, each floating above the prisoners who slaved and labored down below, and within a thousand years, Thedias had reached its modern state. Below, the prisoners mine, smelt, forge, and work themselves to death. Above, the prisoner-nobles manage, direct, and collet.
It is a commonly accepted truism throughout the sector that if one committed a terrible crime, they would be sent to Hell. But if one commited a terrible crime with the right blood, one would merely be sent to
manage Hell.
When, precisely, the Sisterhood of the Levithan arrived on Thedias Prime is a secret only the highest ranks of the cult knows. They came on a ship, of course, but was it a ship bringing tech-priests and supplies for the continued production of mined wealth and bounty? Or was it a prison ship, with several people hiding their long healed signs of being Kissed. Who can say.
But the cult did find itself on the world and began its slow, quiet work. They wormed deep into Trustworthy Compromise - which had, by now, become a vast, glittering skycity with a hundred thousand nobles and nearly five hundred thousand servants. The Sisterhood's outward face was that of a social club for the maintenance and advancement of mineral quotas and smelter futures offered to the women of several noble clans as a way for them to break out of the stultifying passivity that passed for pampered decadence in Thedias' noble circles. They had moved slowly. Carefully. Rather than offering the kiss to as many lowborn as possible, they instead took advantage of the isolation of Trustworthy Compromise and quietly secreted away their funds into a habitat that was on no map nor record - a long abandoned facility that the Machine Cult of Mars had constructed during the initial colonization and scouting of Thedias.
Here, they gathered.
Here, they found their purpose.
Here, they birthed the Child. SHe started as a cluster of cells no bigger than a human infant, but over the years, she grew and grew and grew, filling chamber with her bulk. A bioship, capable of flight, warp travel, and spawning tyranid bioforms. The reason behind the Hive Mind's alteration to the normal modus operandi of the cult - the reason behind the enigmatic demands of the Star Children, from the cult's perspective - was a mystery. A mystery that would have been answered.
Except.
***
Magus Trilla rolled a small orb of glass around on the table, her fingers planted against her, and rubbed her temple. "For the last time, I don't know."
"How can you not know!?" Magus Lilliand asked, springing to her feet. Her high crested collar fluttered around her slightly pointed ears like the wings of some great big bat. "You've led us up to the Day of Ascension - with the Star Children's words on your lips the whole time. We would protect the Child, and there would be the glorious day, and now...you don't know!?"
"Yes," Magus Trilla said, sighing loudly.
Her head hurt.
Everyone's head at the table hurt. The four Magi that served as the heart of the Sisterhood - each of them born to the offshoots of noble families and their trysts with a scant handful of inducted lowborn - sat around the plain metal table in the darkened chamber at the heart of one of the largest acid storms on Thedias' surface, the distant drumming sound of acid rain and howling winds barely audible through the meters upon meters of reinforced armoplast that made up the outer edge of the facility. They had woken up with two facts burning in their heads - something that had called them all together here, now, at this moment.
The first fact: The day had come and gone and nothing had happened.
The second: The voice of the Star Children was
gone.
It was as if the single guiding light in each of them had been snuffed out, as easily as a candle.
Not every Magus was taking it well. Lilliand had turned her fear into anger. Trilla, though, was looking like she was converting her fear into ennui, her eyes a bit deaded, unfocused. She gulped, slowly, then looked from Lilliand to Yolanda and Xandra. Yolanda was smiling brightly - she was the only Magi that had been born with hair. The fact she had never needed to wear a wig but instead could simply dye her naturally white hair the same color as her fellow nobles had always left her more...chipper than the rest, and Trilla had no idea why. That chipper attitude seemed more plastered on than normal at this moment. Xandra, meanwhile, was chewing her knuckles.
"M-Maybe we should..."
"What?" Trilla asked.
"...I dunno," Xandra said, shrugging. "Uh. We can just leave this place. We can stay low and quiet."
"There's an inquisitorial agent and a squadron of those awful brutes hanging around in orbit!" Lilliand snapped. "We can't just go 'oops, sorry, we didn't mean to try and destroy your fascist theocracy.'" She said, waggling her hands angrily. "And there's the Child!"
"Well, is it a
Child exactly?" Xandra asked. "I...I don't know anymore." She looked haunted.
"We all still have psyker powers," Yolanda said, nodding. "And our brothers and sisters."
"And you have your husband's money," Trilla muttered.
"He is a dear," Yolanda said, smiling brightly. "...should we infect him still?"
"Of course we-" Trilla stopped her voice from cracking. She put her hands on her face. "We need to face fact, Magi. The...the Star Children are gone. The better world they promised..." She hesitated. "...is
not."
The other Magi looked at her.
"They may not come down to us, but we have the Child," Trilla said, firmly. "We need to make plans for the future - we're on our own, that just means we need to be decisive. Xandra!" She snapped her fingers. "Give us the complete rundown of our threats right now." They had all grown a little lax on keeping up - since, well, why did it matter if the Star Children had been about to come and liberate the world for them? They simply needed to wait till the right moment, then strike. It had seemed very simple and easy...then. She sighed, then looked at Xandra, who flushed.
"Well," Xandra said, leaning back in her seat, her hand brushing along her dark pate. "We know there are the Arbites, the Tech Priests, the various prison gangs...and, of course, the three major noble houses, the Pierres, the Marks, and the Zavs" She hesitated. "A-And the Interrogator, Af-Baru, and her retiune." She paused. "A-And the, um..."
"Yes, yes, the psychopaths," Trilla said. "have we learned why there's a squad of Marines Malevolent in orbit?"
"Well!" Yolanda said, brightly, clapping her hands together. "in the last dinner party I had at the Zavs, Melinda Larque-Zav said that she had heard from Opaque Larque, her third cousin, that a tech-priest that worked on her breather augmetics said that
he had heard that the Angels of the False Emperor were here to retrieve one of their own from the Deathwatch."
"...well, they're going to need a big net for that," Trilla muttered, which jerked a snort out of Lilliand. Trilla felt her sense of creeping doom fade and a faint smile on her face. "Do we have any...details?"
Yolanda blushed. "Not really."
"How is the cult...internally working?" Trilla asked.
Xandra shook her head. "Bad. Everyone feels disconnected and scared. Our money is secure, but we have no Pure children, our arms stockpiles were confiscated en mass by the interrogator, and we've burned a few too many spies to be comfortable in anything we know anymore." She sighed. "...I was
really banking on not needing to work today, you know?"
"Quite," Trilla said.
---
A cult/planetary situation sheet will be up soon if you want to have everything laid out. All your dice are at max values, as it the first roll of a month. We shall refrain from having "do multiple things at once" for now until we're more comfortable with the mechanics, since that's more complicated. If you pick something and it has a BLANK, you need to write in what you're doing it on!
If it is a "vs" roll, the other two are what the targeted company rolls against you.
[ ] Attack BLANK (Might + Treasure VS Might + Territory)
[ ] Being Informed (Influence + Soverignty vs Diff 1)
[ ] Spying on BLANK (Influence + Treasury vs Influence + Territory)
[ ] Influence BLANK to do BLANK (Influence + Treasury vs Influence + Territory)
[ ] Increase your Sovereignty (Territory + Treasure vs Diff [Current Sovereignty])
[ ] Police BLANK (Might + Sovereignty vs Influence + Might)
[ ] Rise in Stature (Sovereignty + Treasure vs Diff [Current Influence]
[ ] Train and Levy Troops (Sovereignty + Territory vs Diff [Current Might]
[ ] Unconventional Warfare (write plan in)
TUTORIAL: So! Attacking means waging open war, the game shifts into a military focus, I get to break out the DIE MEN! mini-game, there's rolls, it's fun.
Being Informed means learning things about your own cult - learning the feelings of your people, knowledge some of them might have, and general world information - like, this is a good way to grab onto plot hooks and learn if your people hate how things are going (Sov 2 means the answer is...yes!)
Spying/Influencing BLANK means you can learn secrets about another company (say, how many guns they have), or you can convince them to do something else using your spies!
Increasing Sovereignty, Rise in stature and Train/Levy Troops are all the same move, you roll against a set difficulty and if you succeed, you add a permanent +1 to the stat you're buffing.
Police BLANK means you crackdown on a movement, organization or something in your purview. If some of your cultists get FUNNY IDEAS (like, say, corpse-worship), you can crack down on them this way.
Unconventional Warfare is the most mechanically complex, but it's how you assassinate people, steal shit, blow up factories, that kind of thing!
Now, to make the overview post. You don't know the statistics or any other company, but you do know they exist. 
