As Shexia rose on a skylift servitor, Trilla and Liliand dropped in a shaft-elevator. The soft whirr and thump of the elevator traveling down and down, deeper into the old mine levels, sang through the elevator as Trilla crossed her arms over her chest and Liliand kept her eyes closed, her palms pressed together.
The discussion as to which of the Magi should go to speak to the Pure had been rough - but Xandra was still recovering and Yolanda was, quite simply, too nice for what might become something very dangerous.
The elevator came to the bottom - to where the air was thick and humid. The rattling cage of it opened, revealing the glistening biomiracle that spread from the Pure and their brood-station. The genestealer was an endlessly adaptable creature, and for all that the Imperium tried endlessly to catalogue specific niches and holes, specific life cycles and patterns, they were as always grasping at smoke, assuming that everything had to be as...s
trict as they were. The Sisterhood had their own ways, just as every cult across the galaxy had their own ways.
But we all have the same end. Don't we? Trilla thought, gulping as she looked at Liliand. The other Magus smiled at her.
"I'll keep the door," she said, softly.
Trilla nodded, then turned and strode into the darkness. She stepped on something soft and wet and welcoming - then hesitated as she felt the prickling awareness of the Pure in their multitude. She slid her fingers to the collar of her robes and started to undo it in the darkness. Her eyes adjusted, throwing everything into the blue haze of her quasi-night vision. She could see herself in the way her skin glistened with beads of sweat, shining in the blue-on-black darkness of the tunnel system. Her feet, bare and clawed, sank into the biomiracle as a warm line of slime dripped from the ceiling, splattering along her back and her shoulders. She shivered as it tingled along her skin, the connection fierce and primal. The taste of memories and strange, alien passions. She let those guide her, walking forward, naked into the labyrinth.
She hesitated at a corner, stroked a nodule there, and heard a soft hiss to carry her on, deeper and deeper. As she wound in further, her body became anointed by the blessings of her Pure brothers - a rustling touch here, a gently dripping here. She felt reborn when she fully arrived at the center of the tunnel network, coming to a room lit by the dimmest purple glow from polyps and other complex biomechanica that wormed along the walls in nautaloid flukes and whorls. She stood before a massive, muscular Pure that she had seen and felt within her many times. The Patriarch of the Cult, the eldest/youngest of the breed, birthed from a blessed mother only three years before. His mother was now a teacher - she had been the one to choose Ophelia, who was now a bright star in the future cult's plans.
The Patriarch was a glorious specimen. His broad upper arms reclined on a throne of bone and flesh, while his lower limbs were caressing the arm rests that had grown from the biomiracle of the floor, and his chitinous body glistened with the moisture of the place. He looked as if he tasted sweet, but the bright fire in his eyes seemed dimmed. Distracted. The normal radiant presence of his thoughts was muted and muffled. It was...
Oh Star Children, Trillia thought, in a moment of raw, religious terror.
It's like looking upon the Golden Throne, isn't it?
The lack of a mind, the lack of the deep radiant bliss, became more and more appalling the more it was constricted against his otherwise pristine form.
He spoke, but did not speak.
"I...came to speak with you...and I think you know why," Trilla said, while the other Pure lurked around her, their eyes glittering from the darkness. Had they always seemed so restive? So animalistic. Trilla, remembering the grainy pict-graphs of the Pure on other worlds ripping their fellow cultists apart, hearing their shrieks, forced herself to remain calm. She looked right into the Patriarch's eyes. "What...has happened to you?"
The Patriarch cocked his head.
And he spoke, but he did not use words. He never did.
The images were terrible and vast. Trilla floated in an infinite sea of stars. But they were not stars. They were galaxies. Each as large as her own, twirling in their infinite glittering splendor. Then, as she watched, there was...something hazy. Something spanning betwixt the galaxies - a shape not of matter and energy, not of metal and stone, but of the shape of space itself. Immense lenses, carved out of reality by the mass of lambent galaxies and their sombre counterparts, focused upon points of space chosen by an arcane presence that defied conceptualization. Immense hands, reaching across the superstructure and substructure of the universe - the kind of touch that could only be rivaled by the recursive, fractal insanity of Chaos. The goal? Impossible to grasp.
The means...
She stumbled, falling to one knee, gasping and panting. "...you're...a tool..." She gasped, trembling.
The Patriarch shook his head - a simply gesture of negation. Trilla closed her eyes, trying to grasp onto the images she had seen. But they were already fraying apart. Her language had no words for it - merely approximations. Clocks and gears. Lenses and focal points. Even had she been the most savant of the brotherhood of the cog she could have only had words to grasp at what was being communicated:
Vacuum energy superstates and
metastability coefficients and
true vacuum collapse. But even those were not quite it.
She rubbed her temple, breathing slowly. "What if," she said, her voice gathering strength. "Something needed to be done. Something...too big to ever be done by one person, or even one species, or even ten. What if it needed to be accomplished across scales of space and time that spanned galaxies. You'd...design a tool to do it. But the tool itself has tools - and...and if we're talking about divinity, then...you are to the Lensmakers as...as the heads up display on a space marine's helmet is to the Emperor?"
The Patriarch hissed softly. But approval filled her.
Trilla shook her head. She tried to imagine what she would need to be - if her simplest tool was still sophisticated enough to love.
The Magus Trilla, mistress of the Sisterhood of the Levithan, very badly wanted to be sick. She put her hand to her mouth. "What was to become of us, then!?" She asked.
The Patriarch cocked his head the other way.
The image of a pristine world. The image of a hive world. A callous depth of indifference.
You were the grass to be plowed, the earth to be dug, the iron to be smelted. Does the forge care that an impurity had a life? Of course it doesn't.
Trilla frowned, her knees drawing up under her. She reclined somewhat on the ground - like a damsel in some fainting fit. But she looked up at the dragon on his throne, her eyes narrowed. "But they found a weakness in the tool and they broke it."
The image of a single tree falling - spreading its acorns wide across the forest. They burrowed and bloomed.
Trilla snorted. "You're taking from old memories - I only barely know what that is." She said, quietly, the concept of
tree and
bloom only understandable thanks to Yolanda and her visits to Trustworthy Compromise. She frowned, then. "Wait...are you saying that...the destruction of the hive fleet...doesn't change us?"
This image was no metaphor. It was a memory. A voidborn, tall and spindly, her back arching in the throws of passion as a rather gorgeous looking cultist that Trilla knew - his face now wrinkled and wizened, his smile full of empty teeth, but his charm still plentiful. The voidborn cried out in a musical tongue, her fingers digging into the pillow as her body trembled. Giggling, giddy, she spoke in her strange, lilting version of Low Gothic.
I think you...broke my hip... and a flickering flash of a symbol - the voidship's crest.
Trilla frowned. "Ah. Well. That's Von Valancius' problem then," she said. "But your image is still wrong. We're a tree, yes. We've fallen. But we're only dead when we say we are." She smirked. "The galaxy is still in the way of the Lensbuilders - the rest of their tools are still at work. But we? We are still
free." She crawled forward, moving on her hands and knees...not as a gesture of submission, no. It was the body language of a genestealer. She moved with a predatory grace, ignoring the faint twinge of an all too human spine being used this way. She was not the biokinetic of her sisters, so she couldn't even shift herself to better suit it. She had to use her simple monkey body...to sing the song of the swarm. She nuzzled against one of the Patriarch's knee, then bit his chitinous shin, her eyes flashing. She growled.
He looked down at her, and his claw caressed her head.
The image of an empty lighthouse. The fire gone, the keeper dead. The wind swept breach was crashed into by waves again and again - and in the blink of an eye, and the length of a lifetime, the lighthouse crumbled.
Trilla snorted. "Then we set a new fire." She crawled up, onto his lap. She ground her cunt against the bulge of his groin - where he was quite well equipped for implantation and exchange of genetics. Her voice was a quiet, feral growl. "We are not gods. But we are a purpose. And would you rather die in a
pit or try for something new?" Her eyes flashed and she touched the vast mind of the Patriarch with her own. There was a reciprocal flash - tingling and buzzing between the pair of them.
The image of a human being - not as a person, but as a collection of resources. Measured, counted, found...wanting. The addition of new components. Gleaming augmetics, glistening xenoform organics, the mind bending unreality of Chaos mutations, the glittering black-green of something unliving and yet, known to the intellect of the Patriarch, all of them whizzed in and out of the human, until there was...
Something.
"Yessss..." Trilla purred.
The Patriarch's member glided against her, sliding between her thighs, up between the meaty cleft of her buttocks. His arousal was a mechanical thing - merely a process that the cult had started to wed the basic, simple biologies of homo sapiens to something grander and more purposeful. But without the greater whole to fall back on, the Patriarch's programming - more complex than a starship, and more reactive than a machine spirit - caught on threads, twining them into something that might, one day...assist with the Lensmaker's plans. After all.
Who could say what ten, twenty thousand years of guided evolution might produce?
His grin was feral.
I think it will be very interesting, he spoke, for the first time, directly into her mind.
To see what your granddaughters have wrought.
"Granddaughters!" Trilla laughed huskily, reaching down and taking hold of his cock. SHe shifted her hips up, biting her lip as she felt the vast potentiality of the future...butting up against the fact he was the size of a small horse and she was merely human. She smirked at him.
Mostly human, at least. Her voice grew soft. "I plan to see it...to..." She grunted, pushing down, gasping as the ridges of him sent warm, electric sparks of pleasure along her spine. She arched her back, throwing her head back as his hands caressed her bald head, gently. "Through to...the end!" She gasped and shoved down, her hips and his meeting.
The Patriarch rumbled with pleasure.
These primitive feedback reward systems have a certain...elegance...He said, starting to buck his hips, his eyes lazily watching as Trilla - not the most generously endowed member of the Magi, but definitely far from a twi - bounce upon his lap.
I may live down reprocessing it into my own mind.
"Ah, humans are just irresistible," Trilla groaned, huskily. "Better than Eldar."
That, we will have to determine.
Trilla gasped as his clawed hand snaked around her back, drawing her in, and he slid his tongue against her lip, then down her throat for a kiss.
And it was, for once, merely a kiss.
When Trilla emerged from the darkness of the labyernth, walking bow-leggedly, thick glistening alien spunk dripping down her thighs, splashed across her breasts, and leaking from around her lips, she came into the light of Liliand, who cocked her head.
"Did it go well?" she asked.
Trilla looked at her - faux glower plastered as thickly as genestealer cum on her face.
Lilliand let out a very Yolanda-esque giggle.
***
Getting Captain Helgastram into her office had taken Shexia sixteen different vox calls, and she was quite irritated when he did arrive. The fact that this delay meant she had no chance to speak to Yolanda again left her even more cranky. However, the fact she was currently infested with xenoheresy and fairly certain that she was addicted to Yolanda's touch - the taste of her sweat, the feeling of her cunt around her fingers, the pressure of her nipple on her tongue as she sucked on her teat, the soft sighs of her voice as Shexia worked like a newly swooning teener to impress her new lover - had very little bearing on how Shexia handled the next fifteen minuets of conversation.
She would have done the same thing three weeks ago.
"In our research, we've determined that one of the noble houses has been consorting with the Ruinous Powers," Shexia said.
"Aren't you the Ordo Xenos?" Helgastram asked, his voice bitter and annoyed. "I was under the impression that your job was to find xenos to hunt, not witches to burn."
"As both tend to establish and manage cults, you might be able to see, through a very basic stretching of your imagination how hunting for one finds the other sometimes," Shexia said.
"It sounds more like you want to dictate what we, a sovereign member of the Adeptus Astartes do, as you've done to the Deathwatch. I note that when the Deathwatch dispatched their squad to aid you, there were twelve members. And now there are...two." Helgastram leaned forward, and actually planted a huge, armored gauntlet onto her desk. His glower was intense, even through his helmet. "The Imperium does not expend resources like the Astartes frivolously."
"In what possibly understanding of Imperial strategy might the use of two fireteams of Deathwatch be next to the destruction of an
entire hive fleet," Shexia growled.
"We Astartes take the long view, it may be difficult for a mortal like you to understand," Helgastram said, airly.
"Like hell it is!" Shexia sprang to her feet, glaring at him. "You just want to shirk your responsibilities so you can conquer this planet."
Helgastram snorted. "If I wanted to conquer this pissant planet, I would want every pretext you could give me. No, what I am concerned about is that you will give me orders that will hamstring my responses and leave my marines open to being caught out in traps, enfiladed, and destroyed by vermin. I am worried that you will have a soft heart and not do what needs to be done. I am worried that you are an incompetent - because in terms of actual value, you've lost much to save little." He gestured around himself. "This planet is a prison world, everyone on it deserves what they get. That includes Tyranids."
"The Tyranids use biomass to create more warrior-forms, to then attack more planets, you nitwit," Shexia growled.
"Then destroy the habitats and leave them an acid choked rock, lure them between the Typhon and Shelia warpstorms and destroy them at Brisgo Gap - a realspace passage of approximately three AU in width that is required to navigate the area."
"They don't
use the Warp, they use gravitional lensing technology-"
"Which is impaired and funneled by the realspace/warpspace interactions in warp storms, which we could have agitated!" Helgastram shot back. "A vortex torpedo in the right junction points, or a detonated warp core."
"I..." Shexia frowned.
The worst thing was the plan was not exactly terrible. Had the Magos' - now Machine Saint Thepselion - plan failed, then that...would have been a
reasonable course of action, mining the Gap and filling it with enough warships to stem the approaching tide of the Tyrannids, where their numbers would count for only how many shells each ship would fire. Fill them with plasbroadsides and even that became merely a battlefield endurance, a lens strength issue. She leaned back in her seat, and twinged inwardly at the mental image of the glorious, beautiful Star Children filing into that crossfire. Then she shook her head, forcing the image to a new, proper shape, a shape she knew the Magi saw as well: Voracious Tyranic hiveships, blasted apart...
SHe sighed. "That's all a great deal of possibilities and could haves, in exchange for a plan we
know worked because we are here, right now, discussing the aftermath and not currently being ripped apart by Termagaunts."
"True," Helgastram said, with the grinding irritation of someone infuriated he had to admit anything of the sort.
Shexia frowned. "What is your plan for dealing with House Mark, if you are going to listen to reason at last."
"I don't need to tell you that," Helgastram said. "You've asked, I will-"
He grunted as Shexia focused and his mind became frozen as her telepathic fingers thrust into his pain and motor-centers.
"I have been...quite patient so far,
Marine," Shexia said, her voice soft and crooning. "But I am no planetary governor or chartist captain you can bully around. I...am an Interrogator of his Majesty's Holy Inquisition - and right now, I could burst every blood vessel in your brain and the only reproof I'd get is a mild note of irritation from my master once he gets wind of it." She leaned forward, clasping her hands together as the marine slowly turned to face her - forcing himself to move. Shexia herself was using every iota of her raw will to keep herself from showing the strain of keeping the pressure on Helgastram. "You will be
gentle. You will avoid needless civilian casualties. ANd you will keep in contact with me about your mission. Am I understood."
"W...Witch...bitch..." Helgastram hissed.
"Am I. Understood." Shexia focused, and spiked a flare of pain into his head. The Marine dropped to one knee.
"Yes." He grated the words out between clenched teeth.
Shexia relaxed, letting him go.
"Good," she said, her voice a soft purr.
The Marine stood, then turned, then stalked from the room.
Shexia sighed.
And did the first thing that she would have done differently, before she had been infested.
She reached out with her mind and whispered to Yolanda.
It's done. You?
Trilla has...news!
Shexia frowned.
Good news or bad?
Well, a mix, a lot of it kind of went over my head - but the Pure are on our side. Which means that the Sister who kissed you is quite eager to-
Shexia, her cheeks burning, hastily sent the mental message.
One moment, my aide is coming in.
She blushed, hard, as she stood up and hurried to get a very cold shower. After all.
There was still a long day coming.
---
A fight is about to begin, between the Marines Malevolent and House Mark - poor, unsuspecting House Mark...now, the way fights work (as a reminder) is each roll is one day, but you can choose at any point during the day to throw in plans, schemes, and other things! Since you are "helping" both sides, the way it is going to work is you provide write ins to support one side or the other, with Shexia providing you up to date asset information!
So, currently as standing, the MM have a dice pool of 5d+MD, and can sustain 3 days of fighting before needing to rest and refit. House Mark has a dice pool...of 3d and can sustain 2 day of fighting before they can't roll any dice. So, unless you do something, the MM are going to succeed twice, take out their 1 might and 1 treasure (they have 2 territory, but the Marines are 100% focusing on looting), and then get +2 to two of their stats because House Mark's main advantages are its influence and sovereignty (you can tell it's either a Tzneetch or Slaanesh cult, huh?)
I know you currently have car bombs written in, but...people seem unsure about that, so, this is a chance to get a new one! Also, for once, you may want to write in BAD plans and BAD ideas, because remember...you can get DICE PENALTIES for bad plans - so, if you want the MM to lose, give em a bad idea. But be careful: Too bad and they might think Shexia is fucking with them.
MM
[ ] Roll straight, let the dice where they fall may!
[ ] Write in Plan
HM
[ ] Roll straight, let the dice where they fall may!
[ ] Write in plan
