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Faculty of Engineering: A Cult Mechanicus Quest

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[X] "This panel recommends the loss of experiences"
[X] "This judge recommends the removal of armor now-sundered"
[X] Maxima 0-3-Δ
 
[X] "This panel recommends the removal of secrets"
[X] "This judge recommends the removal of armor now-sundered"
[X] Maxima 0-3-Δ
 
Adhoc vote count started by mouli on Nov 28, 2022 at 10:15 PM, finished with 27 posts and 26 votes.
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Leaving it open another day and then closing.
 
Ooh, Mouli has shown great aptitude with the Mechanicus in past works such as his Titan quest, so I'm intrigued.

[X] "This panel recommends the excision of memories"
[X] "This judge recommends the removal of heretical thought"
[X] Hestus
 
[X] "This panel recommends the removal of secrets"
[X] "This judge recommends the removal of armor now-sundered"
[X] Maxima 0-3-Δ
Now this shall be a fun quest, and nice to see you back
 
[X] "This panel recommends the removal of secrets"
[X] "This judge recommends the removal of armor now-sundered"
[X] Maxima 0-3-Δ

It's great to see you writing on SV again! You've always been one of my favourite authors here!

Do you have any plans to go back to any of your older works? This quest looks like it'll be great!
 
[X] "This panel recommends the excision of memories"
[X] "This judge recommends the removal of heretical thought"
[X] Hestus
 
[X] "This panel recommends the excision of memories"
[X] "This judge recommends the removal of heretical thought"
[X] Hestus
 
[X] "This panel recommends the removal of secrets"
[X] "This judge recommends the removal of heretical thought"
[X] Aleph Ø
 
[X] Maxima 0-3-Δ
[X] "This panel recommends the excision of memories"

Having everything that makes us a person removed and slowly regaining it could be a fun story thread.

Also it's nice to see you back.
 
Adhoc vote count started by mouli on Nov 30, 2022 at 12:48 PM, finished with 40 posts and 38 votes.
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Votes are closed.
 
[X] "This panel recommends the loss of experiences"
[X] "This judge recommends the removal of armor now-sundered"
[X] Gloria
 
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0.2: Baptism
  • Threadmarks
    • 0.2: Baptism​

    The new day dawns to find you in a secured holding cell, a comfortable one but a holding cell nevertheless. Your possessions are here, the ones that were deemed permissible. Presumably. It takes a long moment to fully wake, your head pounding a steady drumbeat of pain and your arms and torso sore - as sore as aug-surgery. The calendar tells you that the trial and sentencing was three weeks ago, and your memories - like probing an abscessed wound, all sore and painful in more ways than one - tell you that you lost a great deal of what made you who you are.

    Your mind scrabbles for your name for a moment again, searching for a limb that isn't there anymore. The irritation of not finding a treasured belonging, the pain of losing a dear one, the dull ache of knowledge that this is not getting better. You are not getting better. Who am I? you think to yourself, trying to remember, to know. You were-. You were [DATA EXPUNGED]. You-

    You freeze, and panic for a moment. Data Expunged.

    Who am I?

    You remember the hiss of dry amusement from the second judge, dubbing you Maxima Zero-Three-Delta. A skitarius' designation, a trooper of the line. Not a magos at all. You shake your head for a moment, staring at the ceiling and wondering what to do. Despair bleeds in, bleak and full of apathy, and the whir of autoinjectors rises for a moment as your augmentations stabilize your emotional state. Forcibly. Penal-legion augmentation, slapped onto you to make sure that the penance was done and not simply a death sentence.
    A mercy was what the old judge, the first among them, had said.

    You rise and mechanically dress, deep red robes edged with the black of penance and the gray of a combat-magos both familiar and heart wrenching, the latter dulled to a niggling presence by now thanks to the implanted medicae unit. Your room is as bare as they could make it, no more than a few standard-issue weapons in a rack with a small workbench near them, your books and dataslate atop it. Your cot, against the other wall and next to you. An attached bathroom. A camera, beady eyes staring at you from the corner opposite you. An icon of the Omnissiah above the bed, the skull and cog gazing down in judgment. The room is a soulless place where the Mechanicus keeps its more genteelly condemned. Like you. You wince for a moment as you look down at your body, pain stabbing through your torso. Bandages wrap all the way around your torso, what was once armored in shining steel wrought by your hand. The organs that you crafted and bought with secrets, blood and lore are gone and replaced with human-baseline cloned ones. Lungs, heart, all of it. You know this because they told you so, before a servo-skull administered the rites of anesthesia.
    Your body is gone, and replaced by a scarred, battered caricature of the one you left behind.

    "Maxima." You say it for a moment, tasting the name. Your voice is hoarse and scratchy, not the smooth, carefully engineered thing it once was. The name will have to do. Maxima Zero-Three-Delta, you think to yourself, carefully not trying once again to remember your name. Your implants stay quiescent, and your name remains forgotten.

    One hand to wrap around your hair, to find it gone - shaved clean, a bare buzzcut now. You trace the outline of your communication implants, useless right now and inert. Perhaps waiting for authorization. You were not denied the song of the Machine, the noosphere. That mercy they gave you.

    The mirror shows you a human, or almost. Your eyes are tired, and your robes hide the bandages and marks of recent augmetic removal. Old memories rise unbidden, reminding you of who and what you were before the red robes and the light of the Omnissiah. Before you were a skitarii commander, before you were a magos, you were [DATA EXPUNGED]. You bite your tongue involuntarily, shying away from that thought.
    Hubris. You kept your old name through the initiation, then. A twisted, thin smile in the mirror gazing at you in bleak amusement, scarred lips and scarred face and the steel and glass that was the mask you presented to the world now gone.

    You wash and clean mechanically, shying away from the past and your old self. Your communication and sensing implants were left to you, your eyes and noosphere implants and MIU. The potential coil and capacitors. For all that you can feel lungs that are short of breath and the ache of ribs that haven't healed yet, you haven't regressed completely.

    The regalia of a magos is armor against the reality of what was taken from you. Robes, the insignia of a magos errant, the staff of office of a Juris affiliate. It is yours, for now. It will not be by the time you leave. The jewelled, gilded warding necklace hangs loose, the bulk of armor and plate that filled you out now gone. A thin, whipcord-lean form gazes back as you look in the room's mirror, all scars and shuttered eyes.

    And thus it is that you begin to pray. The icon of the Omnissiah gazes down from above your cot as you kneel beside it to pray, reciting the canticles of awakening, of penance, of mercy and of discovery. You pray almost on autopilot, with your mind elsewhere. You know well enough not to think of some things and yet cannot help but wonder about others. Liaison to the Inquisition? A penal assignment, to get you killed and out of the way. Stripping you of one set of augmentation and not another? A statement of intent, that you have support and yet not enough.

    The blessings that you call for are not for the magos you once were. Perhaps at one point you had the rock-solid certainty of faith, of surety and purpose in the blessed steel clockwork of the Adeptus Mechanicus. Perhaps at one point you would have called for mercy on your foes and purpose to guide your blade, ambition's tide taking you ever-higher.

    That was then. This is now.

    You ask for mercy, that the Omnissiah look kindly upon those who you led to ruin on Castris III. You ask for awakening, that the body you are now left with still see the gifts of the Machine-God in time. You pray for discovery and recite the canticles for penance, seeking divine forgiveness in the Quest for Knowledge rather than the Treaty of Mars. The Inquisition is a death sentence, perhaps, but you will serve your god there and you will do it well. You ask this for Maxima Zero-Three-Delta, for you. It doesn't feel like you. The cog and skull above you is silent, and you cannot feel a spark of divine favor or the subtle sense of the world itself shifting. None of that, nothing save the distant roar of the spire's engines as Lathe's forges grind ever-onwards.

    You walk to the door slowly, but you go nevertheless. The weapons are left racked - to carry a weapon would see it taken from you and it would send the wrong message here. Your possessions are left behind - there is little in the assortment of old belongings atop the workbench that you want with you when the judgement is finalized, when your rank and your symbols are taken from you. Nothing at all, until something catches your eye. An old, old sheaf of paper, bound in leather and neatly written. Hand written, in a hand that seems achingly familiar. That writing is joined by another's handwriting, the looping cursive that you recognize as your first student's. Perhaps this was yours, once.

    It is so, so familiar. Yet the words are alien to you, the message something that your mind skips a beat when trying to attempt to read. A secret, now taken. You swallow. This was yours, once, Lore hard-won and bled for. Your student's lore, as much as yours.
    You tuck the book away in your robes - you know not who left it here but you will not chance it being stumbled upon by some cleaner or skitarius. Perhaps a measure of old lore will be yours once more.

    The hallways are bleak and cold, and a bubble of space almost seems to stay with you as you walk along them. Gossip spreads fast in an enclosed habitat on a sector forge world, and the presence of a senior Juris team on Lathe only makes it spread faster. Perhaps some of those augmetic gazes are of pity or of sympathy, but the silence means that you will never know. The walk is long, long enough that you're reminded of the fact that your conditioning has slipped back to what it was when you were a human. A simple, unaugmented human.

    You think back to the judgement and the judge, cold eyes and a voice more suited to a machine than a magos. The Machine-God, it said, does not reward failure.
    Choose One:
    []You Did Not Fail: Castris III fell to a Chaos cult that had long since planned to use the deaths that happened there. If it was not due to you, it was due to someone else. The magos you captured there had aided them in exchange for blasphemous knowledge, of abominable intelligence and the secrets of their binding. And yet he has seen no more than redemptory service while you have seen your very being bound away. No, you did not fail the Omnissiah, but his agents here failed you.
    []You Failed: You failed to work with the Inquisition, with the Guard and with the Governor when you were in the field. Perhaps there is some rot in the Mechanicus that needs rooting out, but that is not something that you can do alone. You will rise once more and this cabal that has seen Decimus of Mars be awarded no more than redemptory service will be unearthed - but that is not something that you will do alone. The Treaty of Mars runs both ways, and you can use that.
    []You Will Repent: You have been judged and found guilty, and as the insistent buzz of your penal-legionnaire augmetics remind you, that guilt has been lawfully judged. You are still a magos, and that is the Omnissiah's mercy. You will rise again and bring glory to the Omnissiah's name, but the story of [DATA EXPUNGED] is done.
    The judgement chamber is once more lined by skitarii, silent myrmidons standing at equal distances along its walls, but this time you are not among them. You are instead brought forward to stand before the three judges of earlier, to hear the last of their judgement and to have your sentence finalized in the eyes of the Omnissiah. Your works and your name have been taken from you, but now the rank and symbols that were once yours shall be taken in trust - and perhaps they will be yours again.
    You hope so at least.

    "You were once [Name]," says the eldest judge, old and wizened and half-cybernetic. The word that was once your name is now something that goes straight from your ears to your implants and commands you to listen as the old man speaks in his half-croak half-rasp. "You were once a magos and a scholar of Lathe, a delver into the secrets of the Dark Age of Technology. You are those things no longer. You are here as one of the penitent faithful, going forward to defend the works of the Omnissiah in the lands of the Imperium. You go to honor the obligations of the Adeptus Mechanicus in the Treaty of Mars. You go forth to risk body, soul and intellect in the service of humanity and all its works past and present. Come forward."

    You step forward, by one single step. Your staff with its force projector, its hardened armor-steel tip, its finely worked filigrees, taps the floor beside you as you do.

    [Name], says the second judge, preferring to once more speak in blank, cold binaric data-transmission, You were once [Name], a seeker on the Quest for Knowledge, once a shield of the faithful and a puissant guardian of the holy word of the Omnissiah. You are no longer those things. You are no longer [Name]. You are Maxima Zero-Three-Delta, a penitent priest and bearer of His word among the Imperial stars. Your staff.

    You drop it. The clatter is loud in the room, and you're fairly sure you saw one of the silent myrmidons twitch for a moment. What, do they think you're stupid enough to attack a Juris magos in his own judgement hall?
    Perish the thought - if you wanted to do that you wouldn't do it here.

    "[Name]," comes the last voice, the smooth honeyed voice of the Biologis of the three. There is, perhaps, a trace of pity in it - you're not sure, though. "You were once a maniple-commander of the Lathe Legion, a Magos Militant by rank and an esteemed leader of the Omnissiah's blades. You will be that no longer. Your rank and banners." You shrug, and the loose chain that held a force-shield clatters to the floor. You reach into your robes - conscious of the weapons trained on you - and withdraw a complex golden badge with its tiny noospheric transmitter. IFF and award, a banner in the datastreams and a bright star on your robes. It took a decade and more to earn, and that after you became a full magos in your own right.

    You drop it. You fancy it lands more loudly than the staff did.

    The eldest judge steps forward, sacred oils and unguents in a blessed jar and a mechadendrite unspooling from behind him to anoint you. You close your eyes, and the cold steel brushes across your forehead, leaving behind something wet and no doubt divine. You swallow for a moment, all too aware of what the ceremony is for. You don't feel that this is very divine, not right now you don't.
    Maybe you would have before, but Maxima Zero-Three-Delta is not who you were, before.

    "Be thou anointed with the sacred word of the Omnissiah," says the judge as he steps back.

    The second one steps forward for a moment, a sealed envelope in its hands. It pauses for a moment as if to survey what its words have wrought, to look at what it did to you, and then speaks again in the noospheric transmission that seems its favored mode of speech. Be thou entrusted with the sacred tasks of the Omnissiah, it says as it hands you your orders, and you tuck them away in your robes. The second judge steps back now, and the third steps forward. You are no longer what you were - magos, warrior, leader - and you have your task and baptism.

    The Magos Biologis steps forward slowly, and they pause - overly theatrical, perhaps. But this one's on your side, at least. Their eyes are shuttered as they speak, "You have your task and your ordainment, Maxima Zero-Three-Delta. You have surrendered who you once were, and you are reborn in the service of the Omnissiah. To your task and your baptism, I add the Omnissiah's mercy. A slim hand drops a single token into your palm, "The Token of Lethe, the second possible judgement that was withheld. You go to the gates of an Imperium besieged, to sally forth at the side of the Imperial Inquisition. You will see horrors beyond comprehension and blasphemies without number. And at the end of it all, if you are unable to go on, the Omnissiah offers an honorable rest from duty."

    An honorable respite. A mindwipe, a blanket-wipe. Lethe.
    You put the token away.
    []You resolve never to use it. To lose one's self and one's memories, to be wiped back to initiate's status and mind and be no more than an ordained menial - no, that is not for you. You will claw back who you were, come what may and come what blasphemies you have to endure to do it.
    []You put it away, carefully, and thank the magos for their mercy. It is a mercy, perhaps. You have seen much in your time and you know how easy it is to lose oneself in the Long War. You have already lost who you were in the past, you will not risk losing who you are now to what lies in the dark. Lethe is better than falling.

    As you walk through the halls of Lathe's central spire, robe now free of adornment and badges of rank, you're still surrounded by that same bubble of space that you had before. It isn't respect at all, and you know it. It's still flattering in a sense, though. That you merit this sort of distance. The mingled awe and pity, the whispers that wonder why you were judged and the flying rumors about what you did to be brought so low. Some of the rumors bring a flash of wry amusement, especially the one about you seducing the spire's senior Magos and attempting to use them to promote you.
    The menials have salacious imaginations indeed. You'd prefer your lovers a little less….wrinkled.

    Still, the thought of menials reminds you that things could always be worse. Worse than the dull metal hallways and the stamped cog-and-skull on the floor plates, worse than the surgical scars and the hollow ache in your mind where your name was. It could be the hazy half-remembered fragments of your life before the Omnissiah and the red robes, a life that you left the moment you could.

    The shuttle you're to board is, perhaps fittingly, blazoned with the seal of the Imperial Navy rather than the cog and skull of the Omnissiah. This is a bird meant to take enginseers and techpriests to the Guard and Navy, to consign the forge's chosen sacrifices to the Imperium and keep the best on the path of the Quest for Knowledge. You remember sneering at the ones that were chosen for this, and being all too proud of not having to go.
    The wheel turns, and this time the one going is you. You smile mirthlessly for a moment, and step from hallway to hangar and towards the shuttle with a servitor behind you carrying your bags. Your rank merits that much at least.

    "Identification?" The squad-commander recognizes you. He knows that you're here for penance, he knows who you were and he has a hotshot lasrifle pointed at you. You give him your ID codes, a noospheric burst that meets a familiar IFF tag, and the lasrifle lowers. "[Name]," he says, and this time nothing happens. No identifiers, no burst of alertness, no command.
    You shrug. You can't hear what he said.

    He shakes his head. It's been a long time since you've seen Lucius this way, a long, long time. Every bit as proudly mostly-biological, still with the basic augmentations and mechadendrites that you left behind. Still the same smooth bronzed skin, broad shoulders under armor and robes and the same knowing eyes. "It's been a while, old friend." His voice cracks a little as he takes in what was done to you, and in your heart of hearts you're glad that at least someone gave a shit. "We have our orders. This shuttle will drop you off at Sempronius Station, your contact will pick you up there. Should you need it, the local Mechanicus contingent will provide support." An awkward pause, then "Good luck, old friend."

    You nod, "My thanks." It's been far too long since you spoke, friends and more than friends that you once were. "Remind my students that they are not to slack while I'm gone." Your lips twist up in a smile at the familiar in-joke, and Lucius smiles as well.

    "That I will. Alana will do you proud, I'm sure. Trask and Aleph, well, they will try." A mechadendrite dips over Lucius' shoulder and hands you something, small and wrapped in tight leather. "A token of respect from the garrison, as one of ours goes forth to honor the Treaty of Mars. The apprentices and enginseers have their staves and their implants, and we will not leave one of our own without a parting gift." The tag on it is silvered iron, with his personal mark on it.

    You put it away in your robes, alongside the token of Lethe. A more welcome mercy, the knowledge that you still have friends. "Thank you," you say, and you wish you could say more. But now you are Maxima Zero-Three-Delta, and you have our orders.

    Lucius stands aside, and you board an old Navy shuttle that's seen maintenance and careful, careful upkeep to the exacting standards of the Imperial Navy. The golden aquila glaring into the passenger bay and the rows of plain seats that line each wall are a reminder that to the Navy you are a passenger. The state of the shuttle is a reminder that the Navy could do better maintenace, had it the means.
    You snort. You aren't who you were, and you won't be where you were. You'll be among the Imperium for a while from now. Best get used to it.
    Who were you?
    []The Assassins' Commander:     You led a clade of assassins, and you were their 'face'. The diplomat, the speaker, the one who interfaced with the Imperium and its local administration. You know well how to deal with them, and you were once well-armed enough to act alongside the assassins that followed in your wake. Now you are no longer a hidden blade of the Omnissiah or the leader of a proper clade, but you are still a formidable combatant even absent armor and strength augmentation. Fast, flexible and agile, with a blade in hand and pistols in your mechadendrites there are few mortals that would stand before you, and you are adept enough at disguising yourself among them to hide yourself until you strike.
    []The Secutor Captain: They called you a brute, a philistine, a hive-brat without proper appreciation of the elegance and function of the Omnissiah's creations. You understood such things in your own way, and so did your maniple. Fire, with its dancing tongues and ripples of heat so difficult to tame once unleashed, had its own fierce beauty. Plasma, the heat of a sun harnessed to the barrel of a gun, had its own elegant efficiency in destruction. Light, soft and illuminating and so emblematic of life, once focused was a terrible angel of death leaving burned-out corpses in its wake. You had your own way of seeing beauty and your hulking creations, your redundant weapons and your careful attention to tactical dispositions, all contributed to sowing that transitory beauty on the battlefield.
    []The Magos Militant: You were that rarest of things in the ranks of the magi of the Adeptus Mechanicus: A magos militant, a commander of armies who nevertheless remained a conventional seeker on the Quest for Knowledge. Not an augmented brute, not a slender, inhuman warform, not a surgically optimized diplomat - you were another among the red-robed ranks of the hierarchy, seconded to the Secutors and from there to the Juris. Your glory was in what you built and what your students used, in your influence among the faithful and your keen, ever-growing understanding of the glories of technologies past and present. Your secrets have been taken from you, your armor and augmentation stripped from you, your very name taken, but in your soul is the Quest for Knowledge, a seeker's zeal. And it will never, never fade.
     
  • Threadmarks
    • [X]You Did Not Fail: Castris III fell to a Chaos cult that had long since planned to use the deaths that happened there. If it was not due to you, it was due to someone else. The magos you captured there had aided them in exchange for blasphemous knowledge, of abominable intelligence and the secrets of their binding. And yet he has seen no more than redemptory service while you have seen your very being bound away. No, you did not fail the Omnissiah, but his agents here failed you.
    [X]You resolve never to use it. To lose one's self and one's memories, to be wiped back to initiate's status and mind and be no more than an ordained menial - no, that is not for you. You will claw back who you were, come what may and come what blasphemies you have to endure to do it.
    [X]The Magos Militant: You were that rarest of things in the ranks of the magi of the Adeptus Mechanicus: A magos militant, a commander of armies who nevertheless remained a conventional seeker on the Quest for Knowledge. Not an augmented brute, not a slender, inhuman warform, not a surgically optimized diplomat - you were another among the red-robed ranks of the hierarchy, seconded to the Secutors and from there to the Juris. Your glory was in what you built and what your students used, in your influence among the faithful and your keen, ever-growing understanding of the glories of technologies past and present. Your secrets have been taken from you, your armor and augmentation stripped from you, your very name taken, but in your soul is the Quest for Knowledge, a seeker's zeal. And it will never, never fade.
     
    [X]You Will Repent: You have been judged and found guilty, and as the insistent buzz of your penal-legionnaire augmetics remind you, that guilt has been lawfully judged. You are still a magos, and that is the Omnissiah's mercy. You will rise again and bring glory to the Omnissiah's name, but the story of [DATA EXPUNGED] is done.
    [X]You resolve never to use it. To lose one's self and one's memories, to be wiped back to initiate's status and mind and be no more than an ordained menial - no, that is not for you. You will claw back who you were, come what may and come what blasphemies you have to endure to do it.
    [X]The Magos Militant: You were that rarest of things in the ranks of the magi of the Adeptus Mechanicus: A magos militant, a commander of armies who nevertheless remained a conventional seeker on the Quest for Knowledge. Not an augmented brute, not a slender, inhuman warform, not a surgically optimized diplomat - you were another among the red-robed ranks of the hierarchy, seconded to the Secutors and from there to the Juris. Your glory was in what you built and what your students used, in your influence among the faithful and your keen, ever-growing understanding of the glories of technologies past and present. Your secrets have been taken from you, your armor and augmentation stripped from you, your very name taken, but in your soul is the Quest for Knowledge, a seeker's zeal. And it will never, never fade.
     
    [X]You Will Repent: You have been judged and found guilty, and as the insistent buzz of your penal-legionnaire augmetics remind you, that guilt has been lawfully judged. You are still a magos, and that is the Omnissiah's mercy. You will rise again and bring glory to the Omnissiah's name, but the story of [DATA EXPUNGED] is done.
    [X]You resolve never to use it. To lose one's self and one's memories, to be wiped back to initiate's status and mind and be no more than an ordained menial - no, that is not for you. You will claw back who you were, come what may and come what blasphemies you have to endure to do it.
    [X]The Magos Militant: You were that rarest of things in the ranks of the magi of the Adeptus Mechanicus: A magos militant, a commander of armies who nevertheless remained a conventional seeker on the Quest for Knowledge. Not an augmented brute, not a slender, inhuman warform, not a surgically optimized diplomat - you were another among the red-robed ranks of the hierarchy, seconded to the Secutors and from there to the Juris. Your glory was in what you built and what your students used, in your influence among the faithful and your keen, ever-growing understanding of the glories of technologies past and present. Your secrets have been taken from you, your armor and augmentation stripped from you, your very name taken, but in your soul is the Quest for Knowledge, a seeker's zeal. And it will never, never fade.
     
    [X]You Did Not Fail: Castris III fell to a Chaos cult that had long since planned to use the deaths that happened there. If it was not due to you, it was due to someone else. The magos you captured there had aided them in exchange for blasphemous knowledge, of abominable intelligence and the secrets of their binding. And yet he has seen no more than redemptory service while you have seen your very being bound away. No, you did not fail the Omnissiah, but his agents here failed you.
    [X]You resolve never to use it. To lose one's self and one's memories, to be wiped back to initiate's status and mind and be no more than an ordained menial - no, that is not for you. You will claw back who you were, come what may and come what blasphemies you have to endure to do it.
    [X]The Magos Militant: You were that rarest of things in the ranks of the magi of the Adeptus Mechanicus: A magos militant, a commander of armies who nevertheless remained a conventional seeker on the Quest for Knowledge. Not an augmented brute, not a slender, inhuman warform, not a surgically optimized diplomat - you were another among the red-robed ranks of the hierarchy, seconded to the Secutors and from there to the Juris. Your glory was in what you built and what your students used, in your influence among the faithful and your keen, ever-growing understanding of the glories of technologies past and present. Your secrets have been taken from you, your armor and augmentation stripped from you, your very name taken, but in your soul is the Quest for Knowledge, a seeker's zeal. And it will never, never fade.
     
    [X]You Did Not Fail: Castris III fell to a Chaos cult that had long since planned to use the deaths that happened there. If it was not due to you, it was due to someone else. The magos you captured there had aided them in exchange for blasphemous knowledge, of abominable intelligence and the secrets of their binding. And yet he has seen no more than redemptory service while you have seen your very being bound away. No, you did not fail the Omnissiah, but his agents here failed you.
    [X]You resolve never to use it. To lose one's self and one's memories, to be wiped back to initiate's status and mind and be no more than an ordained menial - no, that is not for you. You will claw back who you were, come what may and come what blasphemies you have to endure to do it.
    [X]The Magos Militant: You were that rarest of things in the ranks of the magi of the Adeptus Mechanicus: A magos militant, a commander of armies who nevertheless remained a conventional seeker on the Quest for Knowledge. Not an augmented brute, not a slender, inhuman warform, not a surgically optimized diplomat - you were another among the red-robed ranks of the hierarchy, seconded to the Secutors and from there to the Juris. Your glory was in what you built and what your students used, in your influence among the faithful and your keen, ever-growing understanding of the glories of technologies past and present. Your secrets have been taken from you, your armor and augmentation stripped from you, your very name taken, but in your soul is the Quest for Knowledge, a seeker's zeal. And it will never, never fade.
     
    [X] You Did Not Fail: Castris III fell to a Chaos cult that had long since planned to use the deaths that happened there. If it was not due to you, it was due to someone else. The magos you captured there had aided them in exchange for blasphemous knowledge, of abominable intelligence and the secrets of their binding. And yet he has seen no more than redemptory service while you have seen your very being bound away. No, you did not fail the Omnissiah, but his agents here failed you.

    [X] You resolve never to use it.     To lose one's self and one's memories, to be wiped back to initiate's status and mind and be no more than an ordained menial - no, that is not for you. You will claw back who you were, come what may and come what blasphemies you have to endure to do it.

    [X] The Magos Militant: You were that rarest of things in the ranks of the magi of the Adeptus Mechanicus: A magos militant, a commander of armies who nevertheless remained a conventional seeker on the Quest for Knowledge. Not an augmented brute, not a slender, inhuman warform, not a surgically optimized diplomat - you were another among the red-robed ranks of the hierarchy, seconded to the Secutors and from there to the Juris. Your glory was in what you built and what your students used, in your influence among the faithful and your keen, ever-growing understanding of the glories of technologies past and present. Your secrets have been taken from you, your armor and augmentation stripped from you, your very name taken, but in your soul is the Quest for Knowledge, a seeker's zeal. And it will never, never fade.
     
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