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Grim Dark Tech Support: A Dark Mechanicum Quest

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[X] No
[X] Take Care Of The Backdoor

I am not voting no out of some reflexive desire to avoid working with the Daemon, rather, as others have noted, the image she presents us with is one that is ultimately quite limited in its scope.
 
[X] No
[X] Take Care Of The Backdoor

Yeah no, we are not going to solve this, we were tasked to fix a problem, if they want more, they can call home and ask them to cut us new orders.
 
I..somewhat embarrassingy forgot to actually put in the deadline, but, also, I think it is reasonable at this point to call it anyways.
Scheduled vote count started by Uniquelyequal on Jun 28, 2024 at 2:25 PM, finished with 21 posts and 18 votes.
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I wonder, if the evolution thing isn't our ultimate desire, what is?

Edit: I quite like our demonette friend
 
Ultrackius said:
I wonder, if the evolution thing isn't our ultimate desire, what is?
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In m personal extremely subjective opinion, what Eta dreams of is to make Warp scientific and reasonable. He always gripes at symbolic nonsense involved in warpcraft, but acknowledges its usefulness nevertheless. He is fascinated by systems and self-correction, judging how he considered the heat-feeding ecology on our first planet a good work. To make the Warp an ecosystem in the material sense, with strict rules and organization that can be used to build a system for desired purpose - that would probably be his Holy Grail.
 
Ultrackius said:
I wonder, if the evolution thing isn't our ultimate desire, what is?

Edit: I quite like our demonette friend
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I think the demon touched on an aspect of the character's desire in the sense of wanting to continue to grow and evolve their craft until ascension, we just don't want it to be something defined by a demon (and ironically fairly limited in that sense)
 
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According to character creation his goal is Ascension.

What form his ascendancy beyond mortality and the boundaries of mere flesh and steel takes is an open question.
 
Ultrackius said:
I wonder, if the evolution thing isn't our ultimate desire, what is?

Edit: I quite like our demonette friend
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Our ambition is beyond the mere comprehension of a daemon we will continue to ascend and grow without limit until the gods themselves become test subjects.

Also for the demonette she is cool but we can simply never trust her. Best case scenario we get to keep her as a pet but that is unlikely since we are pretty certain she runs what we are trying to fix.
 
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Beacon's Shadow: Part 4
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    • You are here for a task, and you will fulfill it. That task is not to stand against the band of transhuman murderers that is barreling down towards you, though you get the uncomfortable feeling that you will not be able to avoid such. Still, it seems exceedingly unlikely that their arrival and the strange invasions into the Beacon have nothing to do with one another: stopping whatever it is that they are trying to achieve is probably prudent.

    That, of course, leaves you to figure out who exactly was smart enough to force their way into a device as unique and complex as this one. You cannot even begin to comprehend the technical knowledge and arcane mysteries it would take to gain entry to a construction as masterful as this one.

    That one, you reflect, is probably that inbuilt Van Hex aggrandizement talking, but nonetheless you are leaving this task up to Talef.

    He is, after all, the Cogitator person, and this seems closer to a Cogitator issue then anything else.

    You help, of course, but you figure you can keep an eye on the encroaching enemy. Getting a picture of the Space Marines that are even now coming for you might prove crucial in the time to come.

    Madama Kapriosa has, in a fit of foresight, sent you an image of the vessel that is coming for you, and it is this you now study.

    The Skinpiercer is, you find, without a doubt a vessel that flies for the Night Lords: everything from its midnight black colorations to flickers of lightning that keeps crackling across its skin.

    There are, of course, things that are different: the usual individualizing features of independent Warlords, present in one way or another with every Warband. In this case, this seems to be expressing itself by the addition of thorn-studded vines, laid out in gold along the midnight blue flanks of the ship, the blood frozen across them seeming disturbingly authentic.

    "Well, no mysteries who they're with", 8-Doxa murmurs, and you note that he is looking over your shoulder even though the image you are looking at is literally being projected directly onto your optic nerves.

    It is indeed no mystery who they're with, though you have to object to 8-Doxa's overly personalizing language. The mark of Slaanesh is prominent across the vessel, marked out in the curving of the vines across both of its flanks.

    There is, also, another mark of their allegiance, and one that catches your eyes far more. The Skinpiercer, you see, holds a figurehead: shaped in what you recognize, vaguely, as a Keeper of Secrets, its bovine features stretched forward and snarling, it's single breast exposed to the void. A pair of human arms grasp the bow of the ship, vines wrapping around it, while a second pair of arms, this one bearing a pair of long, sharp claws, stretch into the void, seeming to cut through the emptiness of space itself.

    It is, you notice, almost as an afterthought, missing an eye. Interesting as that is, though, there is another detail that catches your eye and keeps your attention.

    You recognize those claws. They have been rendered down to perfect detail, and you have seen them before: recently, even. These are the same claws that tried to force their way into the Beacon: you would be willing to bet on it.

    You cannot do anything with that revelation. Talef sends you a code blurt indicating that he has found the problem.

    You frown, and check your internal chrono, then run an error diagnostic and check it again.

    Ten minutes have passed. Talef's message sounded somewhat frustrated, and it takes you only a moment to figure out why.

    "That's it?", you cant at Talef, not even bothering to hide the frustration that creeps into your otherwise pure binaric. Talef does not respond, except by a simple shrug. Ten minutes have passed. You have both been staring at the same spot for the entirety of those. You can tell your subordinate is also upset by the whirring of his cooling unit becoming erratic.

    "That's it?", you repeat. You have repeated it 60 times in the last ten minutes, at a rate of approximately once every ten seconds. You realize you are caught in a loop, but it is very hard to break out of it.

    Before you, woven into one of the strands of the nerves that connect the dying astropaths, is a single piece of golden wire.

    It isn't even particularly thin wire.

    "So, I think whoever did this is using this wire to receive and insert commands", Talef tells you.

    "Could…we have just done that?", you cant back, somewhat acidly, and he shrugs.

    "It wouldn't have worked as well, probably"

    There is a whine behind you, and you turn around to see that 8-Doxa-Krainanima has activated his Chord Claw. "So, are we going to stand around and gawk some more or are we going to go and find out who did this", he asks, and you suppose you cannot argue with that.
    _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    Once you have detected it, following the golden thread is easy. It is, of course, insulated soon after it leaves the nerve circuitry, and after a while it disappears into one of the thick bundles of cables that run through maintenance shafts.

    The parts of the station you find yourself in are at once oddly familiar and utterly wretched: a realm of grease and rust, stripped bare of all the symbolical considerations and geometrical precision of the relay station above and replaced with the pure, simple-minded ritualistic functionalism of the blinkered Mechanicus.

    Such places exist everywhere, of course: the liminal layer inhabited by the least of your own kind, so necessary for keeping anything technological afloat, so overlooked by the great and powerful.

    It has been desecrated, of course, just as the rest of the station has: demonic faces have replaced the hybrid skulls at the center of the Cog Mechanicum, and both the eight-pointed star and the Symbol of Slaanesh have been carved into the walls with the sort of neatness and regularity that would usually indicated some sort of ongoing psychotic episode.

    The air stinks: your olfactory receptors cannot quite make out the exact chemical composition, but detect at the very least traces of putrescine and cadaverine, as well as acidic fumes of some sort and a relative lack of oxygen in the air. Somewhere, something is dripping: a coolant pipe, if you had to guess.

    Whoever is in charge of this place, they are clearly not taking very good care of it.


    As you round the corner, you come face to face with the reason for this.


    The laboratory is, you have to admit, not unimpressive, given that it was plainly created with whatever materials could be scrounged up from the rest of the stations. A tangle of pipe and vats takes up most of a room six meters in diameter, the smell of acid emanating from it far stronger then it did in the corridors leading to it. You can identify it now: a psychedelic drug, relatively primitive by the standards of a society that is made up in part of people chasing unfathomable excess, but potent nonetheless. A half-filled crate has been placed against the wall next to the exit, filled with glass syringes, and an auspex scan reveals they are filled both with the drug and with water that seems enriched with the energy of the empyrean. You find this curious, for a moment, until your gaze is drawn upwards, and you realize that the dripping had not been unintentional at all: a coolant pipe has been bored into, and there is a steady flow of water into the wider chymistry apparatus.

    There is, of course, no reason whatsoever that coolant water running in close proximity to an empyrean-based machine preoccupied with dreams would alter the hallucinogenic properties of a psychedelic at all. The water still has an unaltered chymical composition.

    You would not bet against it doing so, however.

    The golden thread, you find, runs to a cogitator on the other side of the room, and it is here that you find the person who must be responsible for the entire setup.

    It is an unspoken truth that there is a wide gradient, between the adherents of the Path of Knowledge: this is true for the members of the False Mechanicus, where the distance in knowledge, skill, and prestige between even a mere Magos and a lowly Engineseer can be utterly staggering.
    It is truer still for the True Mechanicum, where one end of the spectrum might contain mechanical abomination so steeped in the Empyrean that it is difficult to determine where their flesh ends and the swirling madness of the Warp begins, while the other might contain those basically indistinguishable from the ordinary Enginseer except for the color of their robes. Maintenance, after all, is a universal need, as much as the Powers the be occasionally neglect that fact.

    Of course, despite all the similarities, things are not really the same: the warp suffuses everything within your vicinity, and it seeps through the sort of flaws your lesser kind is sent to repair with some preference.

    The dark-robed figure that now stands before you is an example of this, in all its wretchedness. You cannot actually tell if its lower jaw has been replaced with the strange, articulating mandibles by its own mad whims or that of the Warp.

    The warp is definitely present, however: from the nose-like protrusions visible beneath the rim of its robes to the melanoma forming the eight-pointed star across its face. A Servo Arm hovers across its shoulders like the stinger of a Scorpion, and a Mechadendrite studded with the standard array of tools needed for maintenance is fidgeting behind its back. Red Lenses stare at you, the skin around them an inflamed red where the implant is being rejected by the flesh.

    It begins to demand your reason for entering its domain, though doesn't get very far, on account of 8-Doxa ripping one of its cybernetic arms out at the socket.

    That is perhaps a little bit harsher than you would have begun, but it does set the tone for the conversation nicely.

    The golden wire, it transpires, is indeed a way to tap into the astropathic chorus: a handmade solution to the issue of long-range communication.

    The wretch, it seems, used it primarily to arrange for sales of his hallucinogen, traded in turn largely for the materials to keep the station functioning.

    You have heard worse reasons for disrupting the work of a great master, you have to admit.

    That doesn't mean you don't shoot it through the head, when it is finished with his explanation.

    Talef has already broken into its cogitator, by the time the body hits the floor. There is a brief comical interlude as a miniature version of the wretch breaks free of the body and tries to make its way into the thicket of pipes, but 8-Doxa quickly puts an end to that, Chord Claw howling as the little homunculus is obliterated.

    "Definitely Warp Based", Talef murmurs, "fascinating thing, really. An empyrean entity is forcing the cogitator to send out an electrical signal that in turn triggers a fear response."

    He taps several keys, eyes racing across runes too arcane even for you to pick up.

    "Something calling itself the Bringer of Nightmares and Devourer of…"

    You wait for Talef to finish his translation, then send a burst of inquiries when he never does. "Devourer of what?", you ask, and Talef shrugs. "Doesn't say. It just stops there, in every instance I can find."

    You frown, and run your hand across your scalp. There is something strangely calming to the way the spines that are beginning to push through your head's skin push against the metal of the hand, an idea you push aside as quickly as it enters your head.

    You will deal with the mutation, in time. For now, however, there are more pressing matters. "Can you stop it from transmitting that signal", you ask, and Talef shrugs, reaches behind the cogitator with one hand, and unplugs the golden wire.

    You think it is to your credit that you do not get stuck in another cycle of incredulity again. A minute, you figure, barely counts.

    _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    You leave the laboratory setup to its own devices, the corpse of its own sprawled out on the floor where it fell. You figure it will, without attention and maintenance, disable itself without doing too much damage to the station as a whole before long.

    In the meantime, you have work to do.

    The relative simplicity at the root of the issue has meant that you have not lost too much time. Still, as you glance at the trajectory the Skinpiercer is taking towards the Relay Station, it is abundantly clear that you are not going to make it out without coming into engagement range of the Gladius, and you do not trust the Night Lords to not take the time out of their approach to board and then systematically flay a fleeing vessel.

    "I have taken the liberty", 8-Doxa tells you, "to draw up an overview of your assets and options."

    He pauses, for a moment, and when he speaks again, something almost like pleading has entered his voice. "Please let me fight them", he asks, as he hands you the datapad.

    You do not need to look to Talef to know how much he wants to do with that.

    _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    [Overall Goal]

    [] Escape
    A simple goal, and probably the simplest one to achieve: you will wait until the Night Lords are engaged, and then do the minimum necessary to disengage from the fighting, cut, and run. This on is probably the easiest to achieve, but obviously it is likely to lead to either the Beacon's destruction or else the Coterie of the Blessed Lantern being very displeased with you, which might have unknown consequences down the road.
    [] Drive Off
    You have not yet known a Night Lord who wasn't, at heart, deeply pragmatic. Some might call this cowardice, and perhaps they are right, but the truth of the matter is that if you can inflict sufficient damage onto the Night Lords, they are likely to disengage. Of course, that means having a band of transhuman killers somewhat angry at you personally out there, but on the other hand it is somewhat easier to achieve then killing them all.
    [] Eliminate
    Space Marines are famously resilient: killing them all is a big task. On the other hand, this will both ingratiate the Coterie of the Blessed Lantern to you and ensure that the Night Lords don't bother you again, not to mention whatever pieces of loot you might find in the wreckage their destruction leaves behind…
    _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

    [Assets]

    [Eta-Nu 9 35]
    [] Aggressive
    You will fight at the front, aggressively meeting the enemy with your toxins and gasses to achieve your goal
    [] Defensive
    You will stay on the defensive, deploying tricks and traps to inflict attrition on the enemy and slow them down.
    [] Reactive
    You will stay in reserve, ready to back up either the defenders or one of your subordinates as the need arises: this is a more flexible approach, but one that will by necessity risk delays and ceding the initiative to the enemy.
    [Myges Talef]
    [] Aggressive
    Talef is a master of electronic warfare, and he is to deploy that mastery in order to aggressively disrupt and overwhelm enemy communications and systems.
    [] Defensive
    The enemy clearly holds some expertise of their own, when it comes to scrap code: Talef is to counteract any attempt of theirs to attack the Machine Spirit of the Station.

    [8-Doxa-Krainanima]
    [] Aggressive
    8-Doxa-Krainanima is to throw his murder servitors, and himself, aggressively at the enemy, seeking to soak up as much fire and inflict as much damage as he can.
    [] Reactive
    8-Doxa-Krainanima is to form the core of a reaction force, aiming to counterattack towards any breaches in the line and react to any surprises.
    [Reptilian Beast]
    [] Aggressive
    You will find the place the Reptilian Beast can cause the most damage, and throw it there.
    [] Reactive
    You will wait until a problem that can be solved by throwing a Reptilian Beast at it presents itself, and throw the beast at it.

    [Wilful Eternity]
    [] Aggressive
    The Wilful Eternity has in its possession a Plasma Cannon that can, under the right circumstances, cause serious damage to the Gladius-Class Frigate that is now bearing down on it. It will lie in ambush and deploy it at the earliest opportunity.
    [] Defensive
    The Eternity's Plasma Cannon possesses a single effective shot: after it is spent, she is basically defenseless. You will tell Kapriosa to hold onto it, in order to use it should it be needed to prevent serious harm to yourself or the ship.
    _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
    Vote by plan, please
     
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    • [X] Plan Aggression

    - [X] Eliminate

    [Eta-Nu 9 35]
    - [X] Aggressive
    You will fight at the front, aggressively meeting the enemy with your toxins and gasses to achieve your goal

    [Myges Talef]
    - [X] Aggressive
    Talef is a master of electronic warfare, and he is to deploy that mastery in order to aggressively disrupt and overwhelm enemy communications and systems.

    [8-Doxa-Krainanima]
    - [X] Aggressive
    8-Doxa-Krainanima is to throw his murder servitors, and himself, aggressively at the enemy, seeking to soak up as much fire and inflict as much damage as he can.

    [Reptilian Beast]
    -[X] Aggressive
    You will find the place the Reptilian Beast can cause the most damage, and throw it there.

    [Wilful Eternity]
    - [X] Aggressive
    The Wilful Eternity has in its possession a Plasma Cannon that can, under the right circumstances, cause serious damage to the Gladius-Class Frigate that is now bearing down on it. It will lie in ambush and deploy it at the earliest opportunity.
     
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    [X] Plan: Most of Us are not Khornate
    -[X] Eliminate
    -[X][Eta-Nu 9 35] Reactive
    -[X][Myges Talef] Defensive
    -[X][8-Doxa-Krainanima] Aggressive
    -[X][Reptilian Beast] Aggressive
    -[X][Wilful Eternity] Defensive
     
    [X] Plan: Most of Us are not Khornate

    Personally, I'd rather just drive them off than trying to eliminate them wholesale. C'est la vie.
     
    Uniquelyequal said:
    "That's it?", you cant at Talef, not even bothering to hide the frustration that creeps into your otherwise pure binaric. Talef does not respond, except by a simple shrug. Ten minutes have passed. You have both been staring at the same spot for the entirety of those. You can tell your subordinate is also upset by the whirring of his cooling unit becoming erratic.

    "That's it?", you repeat. You have repeated it 60 times in the last ten minutes, at a rate of approximately once every ten seconds. You realize you are caught in a loop, but it is very hard to break out of it.
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    I've had days like that.
     
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