Grim Dark Tech Support: A Dark Mechanicum Quest

[Uniquelyequal]

You do not watch the departure of the Cruel Ravager yourself, though Ludmilla sends you a video transmission of the event after the fact. It goes, as far as you can tell, fairly smoothly: you assume that whoever is in charge of the vessel would not be extremely eager to take on the combined might of the Host's fleet, even if they had reason to suspect that the corpse they had been presented with had been produced in any way but the one the Host has conveyed to them.

You have done, without wishing to flatter yourself overly much, an admirable job in arranging the body. Ezardarial Varth looks ravaged: his internal organs have been scorched and peppered by Shrapnel, his pauldron has been cratered, and there are marks of chain weaponry upon his greaves and vambraces. A skilled autopsy would likely recognize that the marks in the flesh beneath have been caused to death flesh rather than living tissue, but you doubt any are going to scrutinize the corpse all that hard.

If there are any amongst the Apostles of Blasphemy motivated enough to have somebody with enough skill take a look at the deceased Emissary, they are likely going to have whatever findings they desire made up ahead of time.

Your burial arrangements should hopefully forestall such a thing.

Ezardarial Varth has been laid in state in a manner that might have been befitting for an ancient warrior king, and you find something oddly amusing about how much of this is a simple deception. The black and white armor of his slain foes has been piled up around him, their helmets and the remnants of their skull supplemented by a eight hundred skulls that have been taken more or less from killed insurgents, rusting autoguns and las guns pilled up in huge piles at Varth's feet next to the weaponry taken from the Space Marines. The body itself has been placed on a bed of skulls, hands folded over the haft of his mace, helmet and armor still in place. You hope that Skyraal is either blinded by the pomp and theater or at least appreciates a good lie.

In the end, only time will tell. In the meantime, you have some work to do.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

You do not trust the Hand of Transformation, and not solely because it is Tharc Raskoll's creation. The energies of the Warp are too volatile to allow the sort of independent operation it has been allowed here. Tharc Raskoll literally gave the freedom to strategize and make independent plans to the pseudo-sentient personification of betrayal: it is no wonder that this went wrong. Frankly, it's a miracle it took so long. The Empyrean, when utilized to power machines, must be tightly controlled, or else tightly observed, preferably from a safe distance.

And of course, for all his overcomplicated artifice, the purpose Tharc Raskoll envisioned for the Hand of Transformation was absolutely mediocre. All that craftsmanship, all that design, wasted on a better Kill Servitor doing unreliably what one could probably do with better controllable operatives using the same investment of resources and an only moderately more intensive investment of time.

All this, and he missed a far more obvious and far more useful feature of the piece of Warp Energy he managed to capture.

It is capable of separating within the material world while staying unified within the empyrean: a capability that holds, as far as preliminary experiments seem to indicate, no limit on distance within the material realm.

Communication is a tricky thing, for those that have strayed from the stricture of the Imperium and its at least semi-reliable Astropaths. There are as many methods of communication amongst the Renegades of the Imperium as there are Renegades, ranging from the relatively simple use of minor daemonic entities over sorcerous equivalents to astrotelepathies to the extremely esoteric, like the strange, fungal-based means of communication you have heard of the Death Guard occasionally utilizing. The Xenos, you are certain, use their own means, but humanity remains reliant on the Empyrean and its capability for transmitting both matter and information far faster than the speed of light.

A reliable means of communication is already highly valuable: for somebody trying to keep together a freshly conquered Empire, as Lady Czevene is, it is simply invaluable.

And you are constructing it for her for free.

Well, no, not for free: you are constructing it for her because she is a terrifying rogue Psyker powerful enough to influence every mind within a Hive City even before she was melded with the piece of machinery the allowed her to do this, and because she has a fleet in orbit that can stop you leaving without any issues whatsoever.

You are also doing it to show up Tharc Raskoll, which is a thought that cheers you up at least a little bit.

Your subordinates have used the intervening time to recuperate and repair themselves as best they can, though they are still battered from the ordeal they have gone through. Regicia has replaced her missing arm with a bundle of highly-articulating mechatendrils, their various tool tips whirring and vibrating as she regards you. It is a temporary solution, you figure: she is going to be to work creating an entirely new arm as soon as the Wilfull Eternity breaches the Warp. It works, for now. Theama-Nul is, of course, as unreadable as ever, though he has begun wheezing with every breath: still, in the past few days he has been electrocuted, battered, and possibly peppered with shrapnel, shot at, and stabbed. You yourself have had to replace parts of one of your kidneys, because it had apparently burst at some point or another. Magos Krainaima, of course, looks no more or less battered then usual, now that the blood has dried, though he does look a little bit more pleased with himself then he usually does.

Myges Talef, on the other hand, has clearly taken a beating and then found himself reconstructed by a madman: his cooling unit is working again, though some of the fan blades remain exposed and have been sharpened, and one of his arms has been rebuild in the utilitarian style of 8-Doxa, the muzzle of what appears to be a miniaturized Chem Cannon emerging from the sleeves of his robes.

"Doesn't have to be aimed", 8-Doxa tells you cheerfully, when he notices your gaze. Magos Talef seems to have emerged from the other side of his terror into a sort of stoic equanimity. "I will still endeavor to aim it as best I can", he promises you, which worries you somewhat, though a quick analysis of the chemical used calms your nerves a little: a fairly simple acidic solution, highly aggressive against organic materials, but mostly harmless when it comes to metal. If you go up against Necrons again, that might become an issue, but at least the damage he can do to you is limited.

In any case, he is here, and seems fairly eager to do something that holds a relatively low likelihood of being shot at.

In basic form, what you are trying to achieve is relatively simple: you are seeking to provide eight identical units to house the eight fragments of the Daemon, and to enable these units to transmit information. The interesting thing, the challenge, is in what you want these units to be capable of, and how you want that information to be transmitted.
[Unit Form Factor]
The form of the central array is a given, though the torso may end up quite removed from its original form given the modifications you intend to make to it. The very basic shapes of the end points, however, are very much up for debate.
[] Humanoid
You will be working with besouled parts for this project, that much is out of the question: making a daemonic possession work without some organic components for them to inhabit is possible, but outside of your normal skill range and also pointlessly more difficult. It would be a simple step, then, to simply take the basic components of the servitors, modify them minimally, and use them for the transmitter. There's downsides to this, of course: some of Lady Czevene's more squeamish allies might be disturbed by the display and the end result would end up a lot more fragile than the other result, not to mention the difficulties of modifying them too far from their original human form. Of course, the flipside is that things humans are expected to do, such as speaking, would absolutely be easier.
[] Cubic
You could, of course, put all the components into a simple box: easy to transport, easy to conceptualize, relatively neutral aesthetically, though there really isn't a way for a box containing the fragment of a Daemon to not look at least a little bit sinister. Of course, this basic form doesn't provide any particular advantages or disadvantages when it comes to the further augmentations: you can throw all of them on there in one way or another, but a cubic shape doesn't make it particularly easier or harder. The major downside is that the daemon might not particularly like being put into a boring box: it probably can't resist you, but it can at least make your life more difficult.
[] Bespoke
The last option is to throw any preconceived notion of form factor out the window, and go with a creation that is entirely fitted to the ultimate requirements: a custom-created daemonic engine made precisely as you need it. This will make fitting some of the weirder attachments easier, but its very bizarreness might stand in the way of the humanlike and mundane, at least in the sense that you might build a wholly custom piece of equipment where just using a human body part would have served a similar purpose.

[Locomotion]
[] None
The thing doesn't need to move, only to be moved. Put a couple of hooks onto them for a crane to latch on to, but that's the height of it.
[] Tracks
Capable of supporting a lot of weight, and to move over difficult positions: ideal if you want to move a heavy piece of equipment nearly everywhere an army might need to go.
[] Wheels
Simple, efficient, and capable of moving the unit quickly over the sort of territory it might need to move through to serve for basic administrative functions
[] Legs
Relatively slow and unstable, but with crucial advantages in buildings: this thing could actually move over stairs at reasonable speed, and follow whoever it is set to accompany basically wherever they want to go.
[Transmission]

[] Written
Give the things eyes, and arms with which it can write out whatever is dictated to it. Usually this would be highly inefficient, but the main unit already has an attachment point for arms, and ink isn't that expensive. The main issue here would be the input device, but that isn't too hard to do either. Not limited in what it could transmit either, as long as that transmission can fit onto a piece of parchment.
[] Typed
Alternatively, one could attach a typewriter, and simply have messages that go in on one side come out on the other. Pretty limited in what it could do, but also intuitive to use, and at least decently easy to implement
[] Spoken
In concept, this means of communication is fairly simple: somebody talks on one side, and the voice is transmitted to the other. In practice, this is significantly harder to implement than text: you need to figure out how to deal with several messages being transmitted all at once, for one thing, and how to patch hardware needed to speak into the central unit. Of course, the end result of that is being able to actually have a conversation with the person on the other end, which may prove invaluable.
[] Combination
Of course, if you are willing to take on the additional workload, you could simply combine two or more of these options in order to combine their advantages, at the cost of additional weight and added complexity.

[Security]
The communication concept you are creating is very secure and very insecure at the same time: it is secure because it cannot be intercepted by almost any mundane means, and at the very same time insecure because it might be vulnerable to empyrean forms of attack, relying, as it does, on a pseudo-intelligence that might be accessed externally. There are not very many people who could do such a thing, of course, but on the other hand you really don't want the people who can to get their hand on any more information than they already have.
[] None
Securing the device is not your business: it can be done by your employer, for all you care.
[] Material
Encrypting the data that is put in ahead of time will go a great length to securing it against extra-mundane means of interception. Of course, this makes it important that the only input the Daemon is capable of receiving is the encoded information, but that should at least theoretically be doable. Put in biometrical locks and the like as well: wouldn't do, after all, for your device to be defeated by somebody walking in and planting a listening device or grabbing a piece of paper.
[] Empyreal
There are means to prevent empyreal manners of interception. You're going to ask Theama-Nul to implement them. Also allow the daemon to eat people who try to gain unauthorized access: might as well go all out.
[] Both
Combine both methods of security, for added complexity and security.

 

[Uniquelyequal]

Bespoke
[Roll: 8-Doxa-Krainaima: Servitorisation: 3d6: 5,1,6: Success)
Legs
[Roll: Regicia Ko-Bea: Cybernetics: 4d6: 5,6,6,3: Critical Success)
Spoken
[Roll: Eta-Nu 9-35: Biological Engineering: 6,4,2,4]
Both
[Roll: Myges Talef: Cogitator Architecture: 4d6: 4,1,4,6: Success]
[Roll: Theama-Nul: Warpcraft: 3d6: 4,5,1: Partial Success]

Beauty has never much played a role in your considerations: yours is a world of pragmatic, brute-force functionality, with aesthetic considerations never playing into your plans even a little bit. And yet, still, as you regard the finished product of your labor, you are struck with the odd thought that it is not merely functional, but also, in its own odd way, beautiful. Eight cages stand on thin, spindly legs, the cogitators required for them to function hidden cunningly within their bases. Within them, pseudo-avian creatures sit upon circuitry made to look like metal branches, their legs connected directly to the wires that send the thing within their commands.

You did not grant them ears, or eyes, and even the feathers are only there at the insistence of Regicia: all they can do is trill, with no hope of recognizing what their trills represent.

That task falls to the Cogitator Myges Talef has built into the base of the cage, turning the output of the bird into recognizable language that can then be transmitted to an ordinary Vox Set.

What remains of the Hand of Transformation stands in the center of the eight cages, walking on bird-clawed legs as you go to turn over your creation. You have not given its back its arms, and its eyes and ears are gone, replaced by seals of Theama-Nul's creation. Instead of it's arms, you have given it a joke, six more cages attached to it, each corresponding to one of the cages that now skitter around it. It moves surprisingly fast, for all the weight placed on it: Regicia has once again outdone herself, the legs she has attached to the machines more than capable of keeping up and even outperforming any humans the cages might find themselves needing to follow.

"The only wrinkle is the security", you explain to Lady Czevene, who listens to what you have to say with a face that may as well be made of stone. "The encryption is state of the art, and will be incredibly difficult to crack, and my subordinate has applied wards to guard against warp-based interception, but, well…"

You look to Theama-Nul, for this is, after all, his mess.

The Magos does, to their credit, cut in smoothly: "It is extremely unlikely that any will be able to intercept the message, but the wards I applied are…less subtle then I would have hoped for. A sufficiently motivated opponent will be able to trace the messages, with some degree of accuracy. "

Lady Czevene nods, seemingly deep in thought. You do not complain when her next words are spoken directly into your mind. It is likely that she's not even noticing she is doing it, at this point. "A useful tool, even if it hinders secrecy", she tells you, trying a smile that's somewhat undercut by the flashes of the half-formed beak that show up behind her lips. "Your presence here has been quite the boon. The Host of Ninefold Revelation owes you a debt beyond the provisioning of your ships. I have, as such, a proposition for you."

She waves to Enos Stok, the pale Commissar, who comes forward wielding a data slate. "We are offering a permanent detachment of a part of the Host's forces, to accompany you on your continued journey under your command. I have taken the liberty to draw up a few options for you."

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

[] Sephion 99th
The Sephion 99th, Czevene's own old Regiment, offers to send you a pack of Tzaangors, under the command of Greev Featherbeak, a Shaman of not inconsiderable talent. They will likely work well with your already existing Beastman complement, but their loyalty is without question to Czevene first, and they might give others the impression that you are more in thrall to Czevene and Tzeentch then you are comfortable with being.
[] 342nd Cadian Shock Troops
A complement of Cadian Shock Troops under Borj Karplin, complete with Taurox Vehicles to facilitate rapid movement and assault. A fairly balanced option whom you have worked with before: not too outstanding in any one field, but fairly competent in all.
[] 81st Maccabian Janissaries
You have heard of the Maccabian Janissaries, and seen the handiwork of this particular group of them within the Hive itself: a group of religious fanatics who have replaced one false god with another, made even more merciless and unrelenting in their betrayal. The ones Stok is offering you belong to what is labeled as a Heavy Flamer Platoon, under one Captain Kilfyre, and you are guessing part of the reason they are being offered to you is the fact Stok would rather not have them on the planet. Still, they might be very useful indeed.
[] 27th Praediphian Paladins
The offering of the Prediphian Paladins consists of a single Malcador Assault Tank, commanded, apparently, by Sir Gauvain and run in concert with his squires. It is a fairly heavy tank: likely to be useful in any situation that calls for a tank, and useless pretty much every other time.
[] 117th Tallarn Armored
The Tallarn Armored offers a battle group of three Leman Russ tanks, commanded by one Isaac Bannan: a little bit more flexible then a Malcador, at the cost of being a little bit less individually resilient, and of course still not very useful for anything that doesn't need a tank.

Still, having a tank might be pretty useful.
[] 72nd Sulavid Volunteers
These are….strange: a brief scan of the names within the platoon offered to you suggests a half-dozen different origins, and their armament suggests a somewhat more elite formation then the official classification of 'Penal Regiment' Stok has helpefully added might suggest. Skimming the summary reveals why: the Volunteers are made up of those seeking to escape punishment for their crimes within their home sector, and undergo grueling training in exchange for the relatively small number of questions asked of them when they join up. These particular ones are led by one Marius Olbert: a small group, but marked as 'Veterans'.
[] 18th Conarian Rangers
The Conarian Rangers used to be a conscript force from the Agri World of Conaria, and what they offer is pretty straightforward: they are poorly equipped, but the complement that would be sent with you has more than twice the number of any other options on the list. They are also, so Stok assures you, highly motivated and enthusiastic, though you're unsure whether that is a selling point or a warning.
[] 36th Moribundian Cavalry
The Moribundian Cavalry is one of those oddball regiments within the guard that uses living creatures to ride into battle: large quadrupedal lizards in their case. They're going to need more food, of course, but on the other hand there are still quite a few problems that can be solved with a cavalry charge, and of course men already used to dealing with giant, murderous animals might suit your own preferences for dealing with issues perfectly.

[] 54th Yulrasian Assault Regiment
The 54th Yulrasian Assault Regiment is offering you an Assault Section: a complement of thirty heavily-armored and armed troopers, backed up by a squad of five Ogryn and supported by five Auxiliaries recruited from the local mutants. They're heavy infantry, well suited for breaking open an enemy line in a wide variety of circumstances though probably somewhat slow to deploy there. They're also led by one Captain Medelin Koply, and have apparently volunteered to join you: your previous cooperation with the YAR will likely help with coordination with them now.
[] Refuse
You can do quite well without a group of armed people of dubious loyalty, thank you very much.

___________________________________________________________________________

The food is delivered to the Wilful Eternity quickly, but of course such a vast amount of goods still takes a while to unload. You are not, you consider, ungrateful for this: it gives you time both to write your report and to plan out what you wish to do over your journey. The first consideration, of course, is what to write for your report.

[] Comprehensive
You will write everything and leave nothing out, including the things they told you explicitly not to do. What are they going to do, punish you?
[] Focused
You are going to focus on the job, and just the job: everything else is none of their business.
[] Minimal
Is simply writing 'Task fulfilled' a deliberate misunderstanding of the order to summarize more? Yes. Doesn't mean you're not going to do it.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
[Pick one for each]
[Socialize]
[] Regicia Ko-Bea
[] Theama Nul
[] 8-Doxa-Krainaima
[] Myges Talef

[Research]
[] Secrets of Necrodermis 1/12
[] Secrets of Blackstone 1/12
[] Secrets of the Gene Seed 0/4
-[] Include Assistants
Project will gain an additional die, but failure on that die will result in something going wrong.
[Project]
[] Make a Monster
Write-in for the exact creature and its enhancements, though I reserve the right to adjust these to be tone appropriate. Your extensive database means that you probably have something that at least resembles any animal currently alive on Earth, though skewing towards the aggressive and predatory.

[] Learn a new Skill, or improve an old one
Write-in for what you wish to learn: generally, you can acquire a new skill within one downtime and improve a Tier 1 skill with two. Higher Tier Skills require acquisition of significant knowledge to improve further.

[] Other (Write-in)
Again, I reserve the right to adapt any write-ins somewhat, and might chime in ahead of time to clarify such. Still, you know.
Go wild.
-[] Include Assistants (Projects)
Project will gain an additional die, but failure on that die will result in something going wrong.

[Bonus Opportunity]
Choose a skill, any skill, you wish to improve or learn, in addition to any you might have picked as a project. If you're wondering why I'm being so generous, don't worry about it
[] (Write in)

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

I tried my very best to count the vote, though I might have still managed to miscount. I hope the results are to everyone's satisfaction nonetheless. Well, lesson learned: vote by plan for this one, please.

And that ends the second Chapter, which, as might have been noticeable, became a bit difficult for me to get through towards the end. Still, thank you to everyone who's been sticking around this far: I have plans for the next part, and I am looking forward to putting them into motion. That'll probably take a while, however: I am going to be on vacation for the next two weeks, and don't know if I'll get to write. Of course, writers block meant that updates took that long anyways in the past, but this time it's planned, I promise.

I am taking this opportunity to officially ask for feedback: what do people like, what do they dislike, and what do they want to see?

 

[Uniquelyequal]

The Beacon of Blasphemy perched over the blackened surface of Magnicus Epsilon like a wolf over its prey, motionless relative to the movement of the world below. Once upon a time, ten millennia before, she had been the Emperor's Glory, seconded to the Luna Wolves to bring the Imperium and it's truth to the disparate remnants of humanity. She had been renamed twice: once when the Long War had begun, and she had become the Warmaster's Glory. The great Aquila on her bow had been struck down, the Eye of Horus put into its place, and the ship had gone from Istvaan III to Molech to Beta-Garmon to Terra. By the end, when Horus was struck down, the sea-green paint that had been painstakingly applied to it had been near scraped off, replaced by the craters and scorch marks of lance strikes and macrocannons.

It had been easy, then, to burn off its last remnants within the atmosphere of Fulgrum VI, when the Legion War had come to its climactic end and the First Black Crusade was just about to begin. The gold that trimmed her edges had come later, taken from the roofs of the Cathedrals of the Shrine World of Nekkon after they had been reduced to molten slag by strikes from her lances.

It was around that time she had earned her new name. It had never been changed consciously, to his awareness: at some point, the name spat out by the Transponders had simply changed, and none had dared to argue or reverse a change such as that.

At least that was what Skyraal had been able to piece together, from the oblique talk of the Veterans and the omophageal impressions he had gained from devouring the brain of his predecessor. He had not been born, then: would not be born for a several thousand years, and would don the black and gold for nearly two centuries more. To him, the Beacon of Blasphemy had always been the Beacon of Blasphemy.

He did not usually dwell on its history: how she had come to be what she was paled in relevance to what she was now.

He brushed his hand across the haft of his sword, letting the angry growling wash over his mind.

"You are being impatient, my Lord", Madwen Gult said, smiling within the depths of her hood. He looked at her, not bothering to hide his irritation, and she looked back with her single eye, unafraid and unblinking.

Madwen could see the day of her own death, or so she claimed. It made her almost impudently unafraid in situations she knew would not result in it.

It was, in a way, very calming. He would not hesitate to kill her, should she ever betray him, and she knew this very well. That she was so convinced that he had nothing to do with her death made her as trustworthy as anyone could be.

"What tidings", he asked, and her smile grew, the pale scarifications on her dark skin dancing with the motion. "The Court of the Hollow Idol has pledged its support", she said, "As have the Oracles of the Unbound Gauntlet and House Naramsina. The Thralls of Excess have not responded to any of our messages, but that is how they are."
Skyraal suppressed a growl, forcing his frustration deep into his core, once again brushing over the handle of his sword.

"Have the Sorrowful Martyrs responded yet?", he asked, and Madwen shook her head. "What of the Knights of the Bloodforged Blade? The Brazen Legion? The Coterie of the Blessed Lantern?" He could feel his voice rising, and found his hand had closed around the hilt of his sword, its own rage feeding into his own and trying to spurn him on into a murderous frenzy.

He spat out his breath in a prolonged his, forcing his hand away from his sword. "They will respond in time, my Lord", his Seeres assured him, entirely unperturbed in the face of his outburst.

"They have sworn their loyalty to me. They are bound by vow and obligation. I have held up my side of the bargain. How dare these wretches…"

Madwen chuckled, and the impudence of her gesture hit him like a splash of cold water. The Seeress grinned at him, and he felt his rage evaporate in an instant.

"More than a century of damnation, and still you cannot shake the habits of your ancestors, can you, Lord? They dare because they are feral hounds set loose upon a cornucopia of meat, unheeding of the sting of the whip or the call of their Master. They dare because they know, for all your might, that you can only strike in one direction at once, and that as long as they are not too late in their response they will not be punished too harshly. They dare, my Lord, because they wield the power of the Warp, or ride within mighty Knights, because they have made bargains with powerful daemons or hold the backing of the Court of Lorgar. They dare because, more often than not, they are dealing with issues of their own, because they have found themselves with Empires and little idea of how to rule them."

"Are you done?", he asked, when she paused for breath.

"Varagast Urkrak has sent words", she told him. "One of the Lights of Charov winked out of existence, so they had to drop out of the Warp and reorient themselves. They will be here within the next few days."

He stared at her in utter disbelief, and she stared back, the light of the warp that shone from his two eyes reflected in her singular one.

"You're imagining killing me again, aren't you, my Lord."

He tried, without success, to suppress his smile. He had, in fact, been doing just that. "One day, Madwen, your disrespect will lead to your demise."

She looked at him for a moment, her smile ceasing entirely.

"Perhaps it will, my lord", she told him, and then her grin returned, ceramite-white teeth on full display. "And when it does, you will avenge me."

Despite himself, he found all annoyance evaporating. Disrespectful and impudent as Gult was, there was a reason he preferred her to the rest of his advisors.

"I will not die before the Crows."

He had looked away for a moment, and for a moment he did not realize it was Madwen that had spoken. It was a sentence utterly unlike her, spoken with the cadence and inflection of prophecy. She did not, as a rule, go in for such dramatics. He turned to her, and her smile had returned, as though what she had said was simply another of her quips.

"What was that", he asked, and she frowned, her forehead creasing strangely around the nubs of horn that pierced it.

"What was what, my Lord?", Madwen Gult asked.

"I didn't say anything."

 

[Uniquelyequal]

It feels a little strange to be ready to travel before you know where you wish to go. You had directed the Wilful Eternity towards the Mandeville Point the second you could, reasoning that you could type up the report while you were going and hopefully have your next destination ready by the time you had completed your days-long journey to the edge of the system.

You were done in a day. Apparently, not including every single detail out of spite significantly speeds up the process, and the ship not being repaired and refitted speeds up the time it takes to depart significantly, even if Lady Czevene's generosity meant it took a while until all the provisions had been put into the hold. You turn in your report, and receive nothing back. You check that everything has been entered correctly, turning back the scroll of vellum that acts as the Machine's Medium, and find that you definitely have. You also find that, while you were gone, the machine has apparently been in use.

You cannot tell what most of the message says: the scroll has not been moved forward, and so the letters jumble into one another, forming a blot of ink pressed into the scroll with so much pressure it has almost broken through to the other side. The impressions you get are those of frantic, careless, desperate: there are no spaces, no evidence of capitalisation, no punctuation whatsoever. The only thing you can make out is two words, repeated again and again, printed over each other so often you can see traces of it carried over to the layer behind it.

ithurts, the message says, again and again and again, and you sigh, and scroll the vellum back into its neutral position before you miss something important to this strange malfunction.

No message arrives. You stare at it for five more minutes. Still no message.

You decide that at some point, they're probably going to start wondering what you're doing and ask about that. If they cannot order you around due to shoddy craftsmanship on their part, that is not your problem in any way whatsoever.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The wait, you find, is surprisingly tortuous. Within your laboratory, gene seed is prepared, waiting for your attention, and you dare not enter and begin the process of experimenting with it, for fear of being called away at some crucial moment to attend to the whims of your overlords. Neither are you really mentally prepared to deal with any of your subordinates right now: you've just spent several weeks in close cooperation with them, so a few days of rest are more than warranted. Instead, you pore over the reports Ludmilla has forwarded to you because she doesn't know what to do with them: one Captain Gaola, reporting for duty and then reporting that they have found accommodations to their liking and established what is termed as a 'productive line of communication' with the ship's pre-existing armsmen. "Urshgursh tried to establish dominance, so she headbutted him and now they drink together", Ludmilla explains to you, when you get bored enough to ask. "It helped that those Ogryns of theirs put nine of the Beastmen on their asses, I think. They commandeered one of the lower corridors for quarters and training, if you want to go meet them."

You demur, glad to have found limits to your boredom. You do not, it transpires, have any more reason to keep yourself occupied anyways. Nuton's Folly has responded. The message they have sent you contains mercifully little by way of instructions for behavior.

Proceed to Astropath Relay Station 213/666
Make contact with the Coterie of the Blessed Lantern
Repair the Beacon of Perfection​

You frown, at that, already formulating the necessary follow-up request. The Imperium is not exactly in the habit of revealing the location of their Astropathic Relay Stations to the public: they are both far too valuable and far too tempting prey for that.

Thankfully, a more detailed description of the path there does arrive shortly after.

You are deeply worried: you have heard of neither the Coterie of the Blessed Lantern nor the Beacon of Perfection, but if they have build whatever they have build inside an Astropathic Relay Station, that suggests empyrean nonsense, and if it is malfunctioning, that suggests the nonsense is out of control. That, you consider dourly, does not bode well.

Well, at least you are freed up to do other things now that you have a place that you are sent.

May as well get on with it.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

You do not remove the Gene Seed from it's Stasis Vault until you have safely made the translation into the Warp: you do not fancy losing your prize to some sort of freak warp anomaly, and if you know anything of the Wilful Eternity with any certainty, it is that warp anomalies are woefully common. Instead, you have assembled your assistants, and now they are assisting you in your research. One of the Glands will need to be sacrificed, unfortunately: it is only through its systematic dissection that you have any hope of unlocking the proper way of unraveling the others.

You sterilize one of the less rusty areas of your workshops, spare the glowing mutant that seems to have assumed command of your hirelings a passing glance, and then set to work.

You are left, when you are done, and have cleaned your scalpels and decrypted the results of your gene-sniffers, in utter awe of the Emperor's craft. You knew he was an exceptional gene-wright: that much was blatantly obvious: the Primarchs, for all their flaws, were obviously the pinnacle of such craft, and the Astartes in all their mass-producible glory a stroke of genius you continue to have to respect. Frequently, you are left stumped by how he has achieved a specific result, how the molecular chains left within the Gland before you unravel into the magnificent organs in evidence upon the Astartes. Still, you are decently sure that you can unwind one of these in the proper way now: tease forth the organs hidden within and perhaps even attempt an implantation into a youth of proper age. You can even make some rough predictions on the likely genetic profile necessary for such an implantation: a clue to the origin of your attackers, perhaps, and you file that away for potential future use.

It is the glowing mutant who finds her voice to dare to speak to you, and you are grateful that she does.

"Some of these cell lines seem to not be dead yet", she tells you, and as you look, you realize with a start that she is right.

If you work quickly, you may be able to secure cell lines which you could then use to make replicating one of these effects significantly easier. Unfortunately, you will only be able to save one of them.

[Organ]
[] Ossmodula
A small organ which will encourage bone growth, essentially creating a second layer of hardened armor within the body of the target in the long run
[] Omophagea
A strange one to be sure, this organ seems to enable to recipient to decode information from ingested organic material: something that would be unremarkable if you weren't reasonably sure that eating bits of brains would unlock glimpses of the memories of the target ... .somehow. You are not sure at all how that works, and that is in equal measures intriguing and terrifying. Anything you make will likely not quite rise to that level, but it might at least grand a highly efficient tool for analyzing your environment. Through putting things in the mouth, but it at least isn't going to be your mouth.

[] Betcher's Gland
A gland allowing the production and excretion of a wide variety of acids and poisons: nothing you could not create yourself, probably, but the Emperor has proven his remarkable talent for destructive genetics once more: the thing incorporates toxins ingested by the target, somehow, and is generally unbelievably efficient.

[Roll: Eta Nu 9 35: Biological Engineering: 4d6: 5, 6, 2, 1. Success]
[Assistant Roll: 1d6: 6. Success]
Overall Critical Success
Research: Geneseed: 2/4
Assistant Upgrade: 2/4
Further Geneseed Research Requirement: Suitable Subject for Implantation

You do remember to cant your approval at the glowing one. It is only several days later that it occurs to you you have not given her the implants or training to understand binaric.

Something to fix, that.

One of these days.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________


You have been engaged in combat situations a regrettable amount of times, now, and so you set about creating something that will even the scales.
Really, you are making two things: a drop pod, capable of enough steering to potentially maneuver even to the more difficult to get to areas of a world, and a reptilian monster capable of existing within its confines and rapidly striking at any and all threats.

That limits the size, and you are forced to design a significant amount of its internal anatomy to withstand the forces of entry. Still, the thing you create is one of lethal beauty: half a ton of pure muscle and rage, with silicate scales capable of both withstanding bullets and refracting las fire, a lower jaw replaced with a ripping chain sword, and claws crackling with the power fields built into it's powerful feet. It is only when you have set it into semi-stasis within the drop pod that it occurs to you that some more potent form of control then the cursory electro goads would probably have been good: as is, you do not want to drop this thing near anything you wish to keep. Still, it is quite a potent weapon of last resort to have.
[Roll: Eta Nu 9 35: Biological Engineering: 4d6: 5, 4, 5, 1.Partial Success]

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

When you imagined the lair of 8-Doxa-Krainaima, you imagined an abattoir: a place of abject slaughter and despair, littered with weaponry and skulls and the discarded corpses of failed experiments, coated with blood and core and stinking to the heavens.

Of course, reality does not at all match your expectations.

Reality is much worse.

8-Doxa-Krainaima holds the title of Magos Mactator, and that makes him a butcher in more than one way: a fighter on the frontlines, yes, but also a designer of weapons mundane and exotic, and a creator of servitors and cyborgs and tech thralls and all the other disposable instruments of war the Mechanicum requires to make war in its own proprietary manner. Cargo Hold Eight is a Servitor Workshop with none of the meager mercies such a thing would hold within the Imperium: it reeks of blood and desperation, not a little of the smell stemming from the cages that have been built into its walls, from top to bottom, a claw on a crane apparently the only means of access the Magos has deemed necessary. There are skeletons in some of these cages. Their flesh has been devoured cleanly enough to leave no trace of flesh or sinew or blood upon them. "Formides", 8-Doxa tells you, in what you have come to learn is cheer on his part: "there's other ways of cleaning of skulls, some of which are quicker, but if you want something reduced to sheer bones without putting in any work you just put in a hive of these."

He points to a pile of bones in the corner, crawling with segmented black bodies. You spot the mark of Khorne on some of their carapaces. The floor around their hive is polished clean, and you can see their paths within the gore that coats all of the workshop, now that you are looking.

It is, you have to admit, an impressive solution. "Have to be careful they don't pick my servitors clean, of course."

Something that is accomplished, you note, with a line of salt in the way of the huddle of flesh and metal that make up your subordinates growing crowd of Murder Servitors. Right before them stands a barrel that is, as far as you can tell, filled with offal.

8-Doxa notices your gaze, and shrugs. "It's a fairly easy way of pacification, while I work on it."

What it is becomes clear very quickly, as he pushes an arm through the rotting meat and retrieves the metallic, skull-like head that is buried within. The strange, diseased Necron, distinctly not in stasis, a scepter-like structure made of bone and cables attached at its neck.

"It has been infected by a virus by some ancient godlike thing they killed", 8-Doxa-Krainanima explains, his voice surprisingly soft. "It makes it crave blood, and flesh: to be coated by it, surrounded by it."

He holds up the skull, like a parody of a half-remembered play that was ancient even when you were young.

"Alas", says 8-Doxa-Krainanima, "poor Necrontyr, to win liberation from the flesh and crave it's weakness forever after."

There is a madness shining in his eyes: one that you cannot decipher the origin of.

"It does talk to me", 8-Doxa explains to you, quite matter-of-factly, "but do not worry. It is as close to worship of my god as its kind can get: the voices calling to coat my limbs and body in blood are nothing new."

He gestures to his workbench, where what appears to be a new mechadendrite appears to be slowly assembled.

"I am attempting to isolate the Virus", the Magos tells you. "If its spread can be controlled, it may make for powerful scrap code."

He will not be discouraged from this, and you do not feel like trying: not when he is still irregularly starting and stopping the Chord Claw, fine mists of organic vapor rising where they touch the gore that coats his workshop. Still, there are some things that you can, potentially, do.
[8-Doxas Experiments]
[] Distract
There are a lot of tasks to do around the ship, surely. Ask for weapons to be made for everyone who might possibly need one. Ask him to take a look at the Plasma Cannon. Ask him to do literally anything that might take him away from the skull and this insane plan
[] Disinterest
Take steps to ensure that any fuck-up does not spread beyond him, and then let him do his thing. Maybe it'll kill him, or a lot of bystanders, or the ship. Maybe it'll be useful. You don't rightly care.

[] Support
Put whatever materials he needs at his disposal: this is, potentially, a weapon of significant potency, if it can only be controlled. Myges Talef might be able to help, come to think of it: send him by to do so: he's used to working with 8-Doxa, by now, right?

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Dreams are a strange thing: the random firing of neurons as the body purges itself of built up toxins, interpreted by an organ conditioned to seek patterns, yes, and perhaps even an evolutionarily developed tool to grant catharsis for certain emotions, but also undeniably linked to the Warp, and in this way to that disgustingly ephemeral concept of the soul. Dreaming is important to the soul, in some way you have not discovered, and though you have largely done away with the habit of sleep, preferring to purge any built-up toxins in a more efficient manner, but still occasionally it takes you, voluntarily or not, and even rarer there are dreams.

You can tell that is what they are, usually. This one is, at any rate: the fact your open eyes simultaneously perceive the wall of the workshop is a dead giveaway for that.

Even so, you find yourself following along.

The fact that you are dreaming of the most perfect woman you have ever seen certainly helps.

She comes wearing the black robes of the True Mechanicum, as is good and proper: the bulk of her body is concealed beneath them, though the way they billow out in certain places teases at the mechadendrites that might be hidden beneath, and the tips of claws peek out beneath their hem. From her sleeves, the tips of claws peek: crude-looking instruments that seem, in fact, to be capable of high degrees of precision, that seem sharp enough to split skin and slice nerves and cut bone without causing any pain that is not entirely intended. Only her face is visible beneath the black hood: seemingly organic, but far too perfect for that: too symmetrical and well-formed to be anything but the most masterful of artifice, done so skillfully that you can detect no sign of it. The perfect woman smiles at you, and then she produces one of the Eldar, the corpse appearing on a slab of basalt that was not there before. Her claws slice through skin and flesh, and you catch tantalizing glimpses of xenos biology: utterly alien internal organs, blood and tissue and sinew all of subtly the wrong color. The perfect woman smiles at you, raising her claw and gesturing.

Corpses appear behind her, hanging on a rack: an infinite count of xenos, minor and major, hang from the rags like clothes in the wardrobe of a spendthrift noble, ready for your perusal and dissection. The woman knows these all, and intimately: she can show you all there is to know about their biology, if you are just willing to pay her price.

The first lesson is free, you grasp: a taste of what she has to offer, just enough to whet the appetite. Everything else is a matter of payment to be discussed later.

She smiles, an unspoken promise as she bids you forward to show you the anatomy of the thing that serves the function a kidney might for humans.

You lean in when you realize the lesson will be free. It is, after all, knowledge freely given.

You can still deny her price, though she assures you it will not be ruinous.

You do not quite notice waking, but then, you never do. When you do wake, you find your head filled with just enough knowledge to be tantalized.

Skill Progress: Xenobiology, 1/4

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

And we're back

 

[Uniquelyequal]

Xenos Technology is dangerous even when it's working as intended. The head of this Necron does decidedly not fall into that category: it is infected with some manner of xeno scrap code so hostile and dangerous even a species as famously well-versed in matters of the Materium as the Necron chose to quarantine it. 8-Doxa-Krainaima, for all that he is an exceedingly talented combatant and creator of weaponry, surely does not match the Necrons in either skill or caution. As such, you deem it best to keep him busy, until his urge to tinker with the head passes.

So you pile on the requests: challenging, interesting things to do, everything from fine-tuning the Plasma Gun that still hums largely untested to designing an entirely new suit of armaments for your complement of Yulrasians. They are all, you think, suitably interesting tasks, more than appropriate for a man of his talents and inclinations. He seems to agree, too: he agrees to all your requests, assuring you he will get to them when he can.

You do not think about it much, after that: you are busy with your own endeavors, testing the capability of the fascinating bone-stimulating organ you have managed to grow from the gene seed. For the remainder of the journey, you are deep in research, testing the various applications of the newly grown gland, from its implications for field medicine to its potential offensive use.
[Roll: Eta Nu 9 35: Social Manipulation: 1d6. 2: Failure]

It is only by its very end, when you find the Plasma Cannon about as tuned as it was before and the Yulrasians still very much wielding their old kit, that it occurs to you that 'when he gets to it' implies that he is applying his own priority to his tasks, and that he will probably give more priority to the one that he is currently obsessively preoccupied with.

He is not, when he enters the bridge on exit from the warp, wearing the thing's head mounted on a mechadendrite.

You count this as a tremendously small mercy.

On his shoulder, surrounded by a puckered surgical star, the anchor point of a Mechandendrite is freshly visible through his robes.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Astropathic Relay Stations are in a curious position: they are important and valuable, but also commonplace enough defending each of them all the time would split even the mighty fleets of the Imperium unacceptably thin. Instead, they rely on obscurity and on the precognitive abilities of their inhabitants.

It works, not every time, but often enough for them to remain viable and to allow them to continue their function, keeping enough redundancies ahead of raids and random attacks messages can continue to be delivered.

It is painfully obvious, as you translate into the space around Station 213/666, that whatever has befallen this station, it has led to its obscurity being decisively compromised. Myriad vessels crowd around it, though these are not the well-organized war fleet at the beck and call of the Host, or the eclectic assembly of raiders taking anchor above Zerom. These are Pilgrim Vessels and Grain Freighters, Pleasure Yachts and Troop Transports: enough of them, kept in proximity close enough to one another, that you initially think that what you are looking at is a Space Hulk that has engulfed the Station. The ships are lashed together haphazardly by chain and connector tube and haphazardly welded on walkway, kept apart just far enough to allow you sight of the gunmetal gray cylinder to which they seem to have attached themselves like barnacles.

"We're being hailed", Madame Kapriosa tells you, and then she frowns, and you quickly notice why. You are not, in fact, being hailed: not in the sort of systematic manner that word would imply. Instead, you are being bombarded by a jumble of Vox Messages, sent on what seems like every channel available. Every ship attached to the Relay Station appears to be sending it's own message.

"Not scrapcode", Talef tells you, preempting your question, "and I cannot detect any sort of unified message either. It appears to be…" He falls silent, hesitating: unable, it seems, to understand the data he is receiving, to parse it into any sort of logical conclusion. "It appears to be…audio-visual data? I cannot exclude some sort of memetic hazard triggered by patterns in these, but I can't detect any evidence for it either. Recommend…"

It is at this point that the Captain loses her patience, and simply has one of the messages put up on the screen.

You stare at it, for a while. So does Kapriosa. So does Talef. You feel a headache coming on. You don't know what you expected, but this certainly wasn't it.

A woman, dressed in what appears to be the sort of robes you would see on a million imperial worlds, seems to be explaining the basic concepts of knitting, wielding a pair of needles with what you find yourself admitting seems to be consummate skill. Ludmilla Kapriosa frowns, for a few moments, and then has something else put up on screen, then something else, switching from that same woman explaining the proper preparation of a grox roast, then to what seems, from the few seconds you watch it, like an actually extremely decent video on engraving, even if the tools used are of course extremely primitive. The Captain continues to switch through the messages, and you catch glimpses of a thousand other lessons in a thousand little skills, from the practical to the artistic, each of them taught engagingly and demonstrated masterfully.
"That seems…unlikely", Ludmilla murmurs, trying and failing to tear herself loose from a pictcast demonstrating the finer points of tattoo artistry in a particularly abstract style.

You tend to agree. The breadth of skill that is being demonstrated is, by your calculations, utterly incompatible with the perceptible age of the demonstrator, and the common capabilities of what appears to be an unmodified human woman. There is something odd, here: and as the pictcast ends, you can see the shape of what that might be.

"That's strange", Talef cants to you, and when you ask him what he means, he appends a copy of his mapping of Vox Channels. What had been a wide variety of signals is now rapidly converging: the same message played at the exact same time.

"Identical, not just very similar", Talef tells you, and you are inclined to believe him, even as you look at the pictcast that is still up on the screen. The woman, it seems, is exhorting the audience to learn more, to seek out further broadcasts and to continue learning.

Then the screen goes blank, and you are left to wonder what the point of all that was.

It is something, you suspect, that you are going to find out. Until then, you are left to plot a route an Arvus Lighter can take through the not exceedingly stable Labyrinth you see before you. The Wilful Eternity will need to dock on its outskirts, of course, but you'll be damned if you walk all that way.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

It is, at the end, surprisingly easy to maneuver through the labyrinth. The fact that you are broadcasting your credentials on all channels is, you suspect, helping: Icarus' Folly keeps screaming lock-on warnings at you as you pass by the wide variety of hulls on display, weaving through gaps just large enough for your lighter to pass comfortably. You are never quite moving in a straight line, though: more than once you circle back almost to the outskirts of the accumulation, in a manner that is either the work of an infuriating imbecile, random, ritualistic in some way, or a very deliberate and intended means of defense.

"Hard to take in one piece", 8-Doxa-Krainaima opines, and you are inclined to agree. Bombaring this construct from afar would likely yield catastrophic results, once the shields fail: a cascade of fusion bottles failing and unleashing their destruction. But by that same virtue, if one wanted to take the station intact one would have to pass through a gauntlet, either braving whatever defenses are locking on to you or braving what you figure is probably a nightmare of tight corridors and emplacements inside the ships themselves.

Or maybe these people are a bunch of warp-addled idiots that have welded together ships willy-nilly and scattered a few turrets throughout.

You suppose you will find out shortly.

"Interesting", Regicia murmur-cants, and it takes you a moment to recognize what she is referring to.

She has become a little withdrawn since Sephiron: the arm she lost is still replaced by the temporary tangle of Mechatendrils she attached back there. You figure that none of the replacements she has created so far were entirely to her liking, and if there is anything you know about Regicia it is that she is a perfectionist to a fault.

Now, though, she seems to have come out of her shell, and found something that has caught her interest. That something, you see, is the paint that has been applied to the hulls that surround you.

You had, in truth, been filtering them out without even consciously noticing: shifting the color perception of your visual sensors to mute their intensity and blur their lies. Nothing concrete has been painted, out there: instead, it is a swirl of colors and shapes, somehow at once deeply at odds with each other and without separation at all, devoid of any sign of deliberateness and yet deeply symbolic. It is a depiction of the Warp, you recognize: as close to one as human hands and human minds can make, within the boundaries of the materium. It is the sort of depiction that will, in and of itself, weaken the boundaries between the real and the half-real. It also makes it extremely hard to judge the distances to the hull, to see what is an empty space and what isn't: doubly so as some of the paints seem to simply absorb various spectra of light, which makes even navigating by Auspex tricky.

Ultimately, you have no choice but to follow a vox beacon that you suddenly acquire, flying through what your instruments are determinedly telling you is a crooked path even as you cannot be going anything but straight ahead towards a hangar: a black gap of reality in metal skin painted in colors utterly inimical to it.

You did not realize you had been holding the breath you let out, when the Lighter touches down within the confines of a mercifully normal Hangar. You do not even breathe as normal people do: holding your breath was nothing more then one of those vestigial human reflexes it is so very hard to excise completely.

You take a moment to center yourself, to focus. You consciously take in the Hangar: standard imperial construction with standard anti-imperial modifications: little more than a big cavern with all the equipment needed to refuel and effect the sorts of repairs that do not need specialized facilities. The usual mixture of lay-mechanics and servitors is hanging about, and you would be willing to bet that there is a minor member of your order somewhere around here, though he is probably going to be staying largely out of your way.

It is not the sorts of people who enjoy the company of their peers that seek out this sort of placement, not that anyone stuck in a backwater like this repairing whatever hulks drag themselves into this hangar could be considered your peer in any but the most technical of terms.

There is a welcoming committee awaiting you, you note: six people in total, two of them men, two women, and two falling somewhere on the spectrum in between. They are all dressed in robes of an interesting material: silk of some sort, if you are to guess, though it shimmers in all the colors of the rainbow as they move. None of them bear cybernetics, though they appear to be reasonably fit by unaugmented human standards. The glint of metal you spot in the navel of one of the women turns out to be nothing but some sort of decorative piece of jewelry, shaped, of course, to look akin to the mark of Slaanesh. You are glad your face remains unreadable to unaugmented mortals, and that they cannot spot the blurt of annoyed static you emit into the local noosphere.

Warp-addled, then. Well, it won't be the first, and it won't be the last. You can deal: you always have.

One of them, one of the ones of indeterminate gender, steps forward and bows deeply in greeting, before revealing improbably white teeth with their smile. "I am Adriel", they greet you, "and am gladdened to welcome you to the Beacon of Perfection."

They beckon you to follow with a fluid motion of their arm that sends the silk of their robes through all the colors of the light spectrum, motioning towards an entrance into the depth of the station that seems to have been formed of marble, and made up in mockery of temples on Terra that were ancient even before the Imperium was young. "You must be weary from your journey. Come, rest, share in our hospitality. Your work can wait until tomorrow."

They smile, once more flashing their exceedingly white teeth, and the gesture is mirrored by their compatriots in a manner even you recognize as mere mimicry. You are suddenly put in mind of the predators of the deep sea, dangling light to lure prey and concealing a needle-fanged maw within the darkness beyond their bait. It is, you decide after a moment, the way their smile creases the skin around their eyes while somehow still leaving them bar of any sort of spark: a perfect lie, ruined only by a deeper ruination within

"We were able to rest during the journey", Regicia lies, and you feel a profound sense of gratitude for her intervention despite yourself.

The rest of your subordinates seem just as uncomfortable as you are: there is a barely audible hum emitting from 8-Doxa's claw, and Talef's cooling unit has spun up in a manner you have come to associate with his nervousness. Regicia, of course, is all charm and smile, but she is a little too controlled in this: a little too tight around the edges for it to not be a deliberate performance.

Theama-Nul, you notice with a fresh start of worry, is gone.

The person that calls themselves Adriel does not waver in their smile: they merely nod, dipping their head low. Their hair has been shorn short, you note: runes in some variety of dark speech shine through, cut both into hair and scalp.

They seem to shift as you look at them, and you cling to the sense of annoyance this brings you, for not to do so would play into the growing sense of unease.

"Very well", Adriel says, and smiles, "then I shall take you to the beacon, so that you might appraise yourself of the situation."

Another gesture, towards the same marble portal.

There are metal inlays within it's columns, you note, glowing in a manner that cannot reasonably be explained by any natural means, forming more script that you cannot quite understand.

Again, you are reminded of a jaw. You shake aside these ridiculous fears: if they had wished to kill you, they could have done it a thousand times while you approached.

Still, you ready the hydraulics of your arm, readying your blade to spring forth. Who knows how these warp-addled fools will think.

They fall in around you, which does not exactly make you less suspicious, but you fight down your suspicions as you are led deeper into the station's interior.
Astropathic Stations, for all that they are mass produced, are laid out very carefully and precisely: they have to be, to enable optimal channeling of the warp by the Chorus in their midsts. You can recognize this very careful, geometrical layout at work, now: superstitious nonsense by any reasonable measure, but the sort of superstitious nonsense the superstitious masses have determined to work, and so it does. You can actually feel the currents of the warp moving around you, too: eddies of emotions that are alien to yourself, fear and joy and lust and hatred, some of it your own, some of it from the person you could have been, some of it from those around you. All of it goes by too fast to influence you, and you can stop absolutely none of it by adjusting your glands, no matter how hard you try.

The only thing that remains is a deep frustration, both in a deep yearning for that which has past you by that is at once alien and utterly familiar, and in the rage you feel at such a state of mind in yourself.

This is, you suspect, the result of the modifications that you can see to the original design: more of the strange, shifting, metallic script within the walls, creating a pattern that seems to beckon forward, that seems to draw you in and towards the very heart of the station.

Adriel is talking, explaining, but you are having trouble following, caught up in the turmoil of your own emotions.

"Of course, Magos Van Hex would be much better at explaining all this. We had hoped she would return, but I suppose a woman of her magnitude cannot be expected to attend to problems such as this"

You perk up, as does Regicia and, to your surprise, Talef. Zeta Van Hex is a little bit of a legend, mingling fame and infamy in the way all the legends of the Dark Mechanicum do. She is, first and foremost, an architect: infamous for the manner in which her creations channel the warp any which way she wishes it to, unsurpassed upon Nuton's Folly in her understanding of the Empyrean, unassailable in her authority. Four towers rise above the main forge complex of the world you have come to call home: four towers that draw in daemons as though they were flies drawn to honey (or the smell of blood, or that of a rotting corpse, as the case might be). It is there that the most prolific Warpsmiths of the forge smith their most legendary creations, and each of them has stepped through and ocean of blood to gain their place at their feet.

Zeta Van Hex is the woman who created those towers. She is the one who makes her home and forge within the very core of the forge complex that has sprung up around them, where the confluence of the Warp is strongest.

She does not make mistakes. She cannot make mistakes. That you have been sent to fix what is supposedly one of hers boggles the mind.

You frown. Next to you, Regicia chuckles. You take a moment to understand why.

"That's one way to get repeat customers", Regicia murmurs, and chuckles again as you emit a burst of annoyed static. You respect Van Hex: she is a woman that is, by all accounts, very good at her work. Good enough to have her creation amplify any admiration that might be felt towards her, it seems. You are impressed, despite yourself, and you reckon only some of that is down to the warp manipulation.

"So it's a bit like a Fish Trap", Talef states. "Energy flows in, nothing flows out. What are you using it for? Warp, nevermind that, what are you using to store all of that?"

Adriel smiles, again, and this time around it seems actually genuine, somehow. Why that is becomes momentarily apparent.

The little shit is being smug.

You round the corner, and find that the station has, in fact, been modified significantly.

Specifically, it has been hollowed out, a circle half a kilometer wide cut straight through its heart without any regard for what was in its way, reaching from what must be it's very tip to it's very bottom.

Within that space hangs a crystal of gigantic proportions, a pathway spiraling up and down, the very energy of the warp crackling in its core.

You do not look at it directly, by deeply ingrained instinct, no matter how much a voice inside your very soul seems to beg you. That way lies madness and oblivion: an eternity spent as a warp-addled fool, in service to some idiot false god.

You refuse. You steel your mind and lower your gaze, and focus on the way down, as Adriel leads on.

"So, all that energy…what do you use it for?"

"Perfection", Adriel responds, and you almost gut them before they continue. "The energy is filtered and sent out through the astropathic choir, which is where we're going right now. Some of it goes into scrap code that produces the pictcasts you've seen, which is how we gain new recruits and draw in raw material."

"Raw material for what", 8-Doxa asks, and you are surprised at the hunger in his voice. Adriel smiles, and this time it is not genuine: it is the smile of a salesperson, of the sort that takes more than your money or your material gain. "We are in the business of people. Bespoke personalities, with bodies to fit. Anything the heart desires, crafted to perfection. Assassin, spy, soldier, or…"

They never get to finish the sentence, a fact for which you are profoundly grateful.

You are less grateful for what has interrupted your host.

Fear hits you like a hammer: pure and overwhelming, stronger than anything you have felt so far. Your blade springs forth, and you raise it in defense, ready to strike out or run, even as Talef and Regicia collide trying to get to safety behind yourself and 8-Doxa, even as 8-Doxa strikes forward, Chord Claw screaming as it almost eviscerates Adriel. They twist out of the way at the last second, face no less stricken by panic, and then it is over, done as quickly as it began.

"Well", you say, taking care to look as dignified as you can as you withdraw your blade and straighten yourself to your full height, "I suppose that tells us what the issue is."
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

It has been, you are told, going on for a little more than two months now, and getting worse all the while. The issue is somewhere within the Astropathic Choir, cradled and chained by mind interface units to the very base of the crystal, where Van Hex's arcane circuitry translates all that has been collected in the capacitor crystal above. The fear seizes them, and propagates through all their minds in turn, until it is expelled in a big wave, racing outwards through the station before dissipating.

They have, to their credit, done some measurements, before they called for aid. The wave is doubling in reach each time: if their measurements hold, it will have reached halfway through their improvised labyrinth this time around, and will break it's edge the next time.

"Which would attract attention we do not want", Adriel tells you, quite unnecessarily. You know from hard-earned experience that there is nothing that draws a predator quite as much as fear.

"Very well", you say, looking at the sightless eyes of one of the Astropaths and considering what steps to take.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

[] Material
Whatever else this Beacon of Perfection is, it is clearly determined by it's physical architecture to a significant degree. You will check these physical components, starting with the arcane circuits and the astropaths strapped into them, and determine where the misalignment that causes the issue is. Once you have determined this, you can move to remedy whatever is causing this issue.
[] Spiritual
A circumspect method, but more direct than probing material components: Magos Van Hex will have built in diagnostic methods into her circuits, and you will be able to access them. You will interface with the machine spirit of what she has created, and through it gain knowledge of whatever flaw is plaguing it.
[] Empyrical
The Warp is at the center of whatever is going on here, and so you are going to utilize the methods you have at your disposal to measure it, understand the phenomenon that is going on, trace it back to its origins, and break it. It is the most straightforward way, but in that very straightforwardness lies risk: this will lead you to the heart of the matter, for good or for ill.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

You only notice you have fallen asleep when you begin to dream, hands and tools still going through their routine motions of unpacking the tools you require even as you do. The woman is back, offering you more knowledge, more insights into her library of alien anatomy.

She does not ask for much, in truth: only a minor memory, tinged in a strange mixture of emotions.

She is generous, in this, recognizing perhaps that you have more to give than most. She will let you choose yourself.
[Price]
[] Refuse
[] A Glimpse of the Emperor
Awe, Shame, and Disgust
[] Your First Kill
Terror, intermingled with triumph
[] Your Gene-Donor's Smile
Regret, Longing, and Hatred
[] Your Last Glimpse of Terra
Defeat, utterly and absolute

 

[Uniquelyequal]

Engagement Roll: 6,5,5

You are left, reasonably quickly, with only two of your subordinates: Theama-Nul fails to turn up again, and Ko-Bea demurs after a while, citing issues with her new arm and choosing to return to the Wilful Eternity.

You are left, ultimately, with Myges Talef and 8-Doxa-Krainaima, the former having apparently not quite processed the trauma of their last joint endeavor, the latter seemingly about as unsuited for working with delicate circuits as it is possible for somebody to be.

At the very least, Talef's fear seems to be focusing his attention on the matter at hand rather admirably, which you appreciate.

There is, it transpires, apparently at least somewhat regular shuttle flights throughout the labyrinth of hulks, but getting your equipment from the Wilful Eternity still occupies a tremendous amount of time, especially as the regular pictcasts jam up every frequency of local vox, preventing wireless communication with annoying regularity. You pay some attention to them, waiting for the Diagnostic Haemonculus to reach you at the heart of the station: there is, after all, not much else to do. Watching them in sequence, you are beginning to appreciate their purpose. The Protagonist of the video continues to demonstrate her skills, growing them to standards that rise far beyond the practical, becoming more and more unattainable. As they do, she changes as well: the richness of her robes increase, and jewelry and makeup begin to be featured more and more prominently.

Some who watch these pictcasts, you suspect, will be lost within this transformation. Others, however, will be taken in and ushered along. Slowly, surely, the tone will become more openly heretical, more critical of the orthodoxy preached by the Imperium. Before long, there will be a call: not for rebellion, you suspect, but to flight: veiled allusions to a promised land, ones that will result in shattered bodies and corpses for most who try to follow, but seem to be successful enough to also result in the amalgamation of vessels outside the station.

What they find there, you suspect, is significantly different to what they were promised.

It is also, you consider, not your problem.

Your problem, rather, lies within the tangled remains of what once was the astropathic choir at the heart of the relay station's purpose.

Astropaths are of incredible value: they, together with the Navigators, are what enables the Imperium to exert the semblance of control it still holds over it's far-flung realms. Forget the gene-wrought might of the Astartes, or the infinite reserves of the Imperial Guard: without marching orders and the means to reach their destination, neither of them would amount to anything at all. Yet to the ritualistic warp-crafters of the True Mechanicum, Astropaths hold a value beyond the pricelessness they possess as means of communications.

Each Astropath, after all, possesses a direct connection to the Emperor. They have been touched by the anathema: their sight taken and their soul altered by the burning brightness of His light.
To sacrifice one of their kind, then, in the un-logic of the warp, is to inflict a minor wound upon the Corpse upon the throne: to twist one to chaotic purposes is to twist some of the Emperor's own essence against the order he created and cherished.

At the very base of the crystal, cradled in what you initially thought were hyper-complicated circuits, six Astropaths fulfill both roles. They have been sacrificed, you consider: killed as surely as if a knife of obsidian had been used to rip out their still beating hearts. And yet, they are still living, the moment of their death prolonged into torturous eternity by Magos Van Hex's monstrous skills, their very suffering a mockery of the corpse upon the throne as well as the fulfillment of her design.

You were not wrong, when you identified the mesh that connects the Astropaths to the crystal as circuitry, but you did not grasp the totality of what had been done to them.

There are ordinary circuits within the web that connects the Astropaths to the cogitator bank at the bottom of the crystal: metallic and crystalline wires, snaking through the air in thick bundles.

These do not make up the majority of the connections, however. That task is reserved for the astropath's nerves.

To other, lesser Tech Priests, this would create an insurmountable issue: humanities technology does, of course, commonly blend the organic with the technical, but this is a step above what most of your peers are capable of dealing with: a machine made up mostly of the organical, with all the strange quirks and interactions that stem from that. Van Hex apparently didn't see it as a necessity to even enable interfacing: something that speaks of supreme confidence if nothing goes wrong, which makes you classify it as unwarranted arrogance in this case.

Myges Talef sighs, and looks expectantly to you, when you discover how the machine is constructed.

This is fair enough. What you see before you is very much within your area of expertise.

It is, you have to admit, a little funny to have to remove some of the more technical components of the Diagnostic Homunculus to hook it up properly.

That is, admittedly, undercut a little when you have to shut it down so it doesn't perish from shock, something that should not be possible.

It takes you a little while to figure out what Van Hex has done, though when you do it becomes utterly obvious in hindsight. The Beacon operates on pain: impulses sent through the exposed nerves form the basic impulses that rule it, which should be utterly ineffective and pointless yet somehow, presumably through the vagaries of the warp, manages to work out.

[Roll: Eta Nu 9-35: Biological Engineering: 4d6. 5, 6, 2, 2. Success]

Still, the impulses follow the basic rules of biology, and so you spend the next few hours mapping them out, providing a system to translate them to Talef and to translate queries to more understandable language. The Infofector seems fascinated, though in the sort of way a rotting piece of carrion or an open fracture fascinates: he is gazing at a piece of work in his field of specialization built on principles utterly orthogonal to those he himself follows.
[Roll: Myges Talef: Cogitator Intrusion: 3d6. 3,2,3. Failure]
A design, it seems, that he cannot quite seem to wrap his head around.

Your subordinate works for most of a day, and you can see him getting frustrated as he does.

"This is impossible", he cants to you, eventually, shame clear in his voice. "It is not equivalent to any Cogitators I have ever seen. There's a pattern to it, but it's almost like…" He falls silent, canting concepts to you in binaric that are difficult to translate: order characterized by complete, entropic chaos, disorder so profound it qualifies as systematic, recurring patterns occurring in systems of complete randomness.

It is, by any reasonable standard, complete nonsense.

Unfortunately, you are dealing with an engine that is clearly more than a little entangled in the Empyrean.

"Six days", Talef says, grimacing, "at best, if I do nothing else and nothing goes wrong. I can do it, but it is by no means guaranteed."

You consider for a moment, then you sigh. "Well", you say, "we do have the time. Get on that, tell us if you need any aid, and we shall see what we can do otherwise."

Talef nods, clearly miserable, and you go to catch some rest.

Sometimes, the only thing that can be done is wait.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The woman is back, inside your dreams: her face still as utterly beautiful as it was before, keeping its serenity even in the face of your rejection.

She is not angry, you understand, on an instinctual level. She asked for something you were not willing to give up, and those very principles make you interesting, make you worth courting.

She smiles, then, revealing teeth just a smidge too sharp for the mouth they claim to rest in. She gestures to the vast collection of lore, behind herself. She reminds you that such a collection is a rare thing indeed, that to acquire the skill you are seeking would require centuries of study in a myriad of libraries, many demanding prices far in excess of those she is asking for. She grants you a glimpse, tantalizingly vague, of the knowledge she would grant you becoming useful in your very near future: images of a crystalline dome, a xeno of some form unknown to you held within it by silver chains.

Then, she spreads her claws, and offers you a choice: several prices that may be of different value to you while they are of the same value to her, all of which you are free to choose between.

[Price]
[] A small memory
-[] A Glimpse of the Emperor
Awe, Shame, and Disgust
[] Your First Kill
Terror, intermingled with triumph
[] Your Gene-Donor's Smile
Regret, Longing, and Hatred
[] Your Last Glimpse of Terra
Defeat, utterly and absolute
[] A Favor
Nothing, she hastens to add, too odious or demanding: nothing you have not done before, nothing against things you value. You may, she adds, even refuse to do it, though she of course reserves the right to withdraw the thing you bought if you do

[] A Garden
This one is…strange: a request to construct a self-sufficient eco-systemyou would consider as beautiful entirely in your mind, for her to then harvest for indeterminate purposes. This would largely take time and dedicated effort, but it is something you are well-qualified to do

[] Lesson for Lesson
In exchange for all of Xenobiology, she will take some of the knowledge you hold: nothing that cannot be remedied with a bit of brushing up on your it, and she will let you choose which skill you wish to exchange for it
-[]Write-in Skill

[] Refuse
This has all the hallmarks of one of the predatory pseudo-intelligences of the warp, and deals with those rarely work out well. Tempting as the offer is, as real as the visions of future need felt, you will not let yourself sink to that level.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The woman smiles, far less sharply, leaving you, you recognize, time to decide.

"Not too much time, though", she tells you, "for they are coming."

You do not have the time to ask who, but it turns out that that is not an issue. She shows you without you asking, and you rather wish she hadn't. You see…

Lightning crackling. Curling, flayed skin. Void-black eyes set within a pale face, golden piercings sunk deep into sallow skin. The blades of turned off lightning claw, turned off and scraping against each other. A promise, whispered in a voice used to speaking threats.

"We come for you", it says, and bloodless lips curl to reveal a smile of sharpened teeth.

Then fear rushes into your system, stronger and more potent then should be proportional.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

There is no higher biological form you have ever dissected that has not exhibited fear, in some form or another, even if that fear is not always congruent with the way baseline humans tend to conceptualize it. Fear, in its most basic form, is simply the drive to survive, and to take whatever means necessary to achieve that aim. Of course, biological processes are not evolved according to some sort of plan, and so the fear response of baseline humans is always constructive. Just as fear is one of the fundamental markers of successful lifes, modifying it to remove those inefficiencies is one of the first and fundamental needs of all those that wish to send such forms of life to combat.

The Astartes, for all the propagandistic claims of knowing no fear, absolutely do: it is merely the impulse to flee or freeze that has been removed from them, replaced by a heightened instinct to fight and the mental capacity and reflexes to do so quickly and effectively.

In your case, it means that if somebody hits you with an empathic psychic attack to induce a fear response, you can simply manually release the necessary counter-agents and shut down your body's physical response to the mental impulse.

Your heart rate still spikes to incredible heights before you manage to do so, of course, but such is life.

What you are left with, as your heart rate normalizes again, is a strange, almost alien realization: waiting six days for a mere potential result might be too long.

You need options.

It is, to your immense surprise, 8-Doxa who supplies one.

"Whatever's going on, it probably involves their brains", he says, gesturing at one of the Astropaths with a cybernetic implant of some sort. "We sink this thing into it, hook it up, and read out the brain directly. You look closely. He is holding a fairly simply Mind Interface Unit.

"If that goes wrong, you might disrupt the entire machine", you tell him, and he shrugs.

"You wanted options", he says, and you cannot really argue with that.

You have, of course, asked Ludmilla Kapriosa if flight would be feasible. The response was not encouraging. "The light we used to navigate blinked out", she tells you. "It's happened before. Takes the Navigator a good long time to reacquire the next of those things."

You are, you reflect, eternally cursed by circumstances to stick out commitments nobody should be forced to stick out.

You sigh, and then you make a decision.

[]Talef's Plan
Whoever these people are, it will take them more than six days to get here, even if they arrive at the edge of the system right now. Talef has time to decode the system, and he will manage: for all his flaws, he is really good at his job

[] 8-Doxa's Plan
It is risky, and if it goes wrong you are going to be left with the immediate fallout of a delicate warp engine blowing up in your face. If it does work, you will instead directly interface with an organic machine consisting of people that are being actively tortured to an unbelivable extent.

On the other hand, it will probably yield results

[] Another Plan
You will not wait for Talef, or commit to 8-Doxa's extremely risky proposition: instead, you will retrace your steps, and check if you have missed some other means of access. There is bound to be something, you figure, but of course if it was obvious you would have found it already, and finding it and exploiting might take more time then you are entirely comfortable with.

 

[Uniquelyequal]

"This is madness", Talef cants, and isn't that just the height of hypocrisy from somebody worshiping the ideoform of virulent disease. 8-Doxa-Krainaima grins at the Magos Infofector. He is very good at grinning, is Magos Krainaima. The fact that so much of his lips is missing helps with it.

Watching him working is something of an experience.

8-Doxa-Krainaima's entire style of performing his work seems to be operating under two assumptions: the first being that none of his creations are going to survive the next 24 hours, and the next that if he does not work as quickly as he possibly can, he is not going to do that either.

This brings some advantages: one of the more obvious ones is that his equipment is very mobile and highly modular, and that he can modify it to, for instance, not lobotomize the subject while the Mind Interface Unit is being implanted.

It means that the Mind Interface Unit he has is apparently capable of bypassing the usual need of months of neural retraining and regrowth to interface directly, which is extremely impressive for a piece of technology even if it apparently comes at the cost of agony that normally requires a suppression of the brain's pain receptors.

It also means that you have to fight him to properly disinfect the MIU-Spike before he rams it through the subject's temple with his pneumatic applicator, because you don't want the Astropath to die of an infection six months down the line and he doesn't quite seem to care. Now, though, the applicator has been thoroughly sterilized and is applied to the correct, designated spot.

You did insist on double-checking 8-Doxa's theory and utilizing a medical auspex scan. 8-Doxa seems insistent on having organic eyes, though they are obviously heavily modified. You are beginning to suspect that this is motivated in unduly large part by a desire to roll them.

Your precautions were, of course, entirely reasonable. That he turned out to be entirely accurate does not make this any less true.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The spike pierces through skin and bone with ease, anchoring itself in neural tissue faster than any pain response can travel. It is unlikely, of course, that any additional pain would make any difference whatsoever to the Astropath, but you do not like to take chances when you are already taking so many of them.


For a moment, you think it's all gone wrong. The Astropath opens his eyes, staring sightlessly ahead as his jaws work against the sutures that are closing his lips. Rivulets of blood pour down his chin. Then he goes slack, and the lights within the new interface turn on, bathing the room in dim red. For a moment, you hesitate: an all-too human weakness you quickly squash. It is pointless, at this point, to step back, reevaluate, and question. The only path is forward.
With a quick twitch-impulse, you clear your internal storage of superfluous clutter, and then you interface, ready to shut off your pain receptors at a moment's notice should you threaten to be overwhelmed.

You do not notice you have passed out until it is far too late.

[Roll: Servitorisation: 8-Doxa-Krainaima: 3d6: 5,5,2: Partial Success]

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

A beautiful garden is a strange request, from one such as you. Beauty has never occupied much of your conscious mind: you have ever rated effectiveness of aesthetics, function over form.

"But that just makes this place so much more interesting", she tells you.

You are in your garden. You are naked, bar of your cybernetics. The air is laced with the smell of blood and spores and pheromones. You look around yourself, opening eyes you had not realized were even closed.

Jungle stretches all around you, untamed and wild. You are atop an observation platform: a thing of simple steel and glass, granting you a view of what is going on around you.

And that is..competition, harsh and merciless.

As you watch, you see an ape-like creature with sharp teeth pounce onto a brightly-colored avian, ripping it apart before dying itself, foaming at the mouth from whatever toxins it had just ingested. The corpse has barely hit the ground before it is being set upon on all sides, torn apart by scavengers in moments until not even the bones remain.

Everywhere you watch, similar scenes play out: predator and prey, locked in their eternal struggle, from vast felines to the vines that strangle the very trees they inhabit. For a moment, you become lost, studying the myriad adaptations to this environment. You can trace them back, you note, startled. You can actually name the specific impulse that led to each of them, can map out each particular evolutionary pressure at the root of the feature.

This, you realize, startled, is the garden you promised.

"Not what other people would call a garden", she says, and then you see her, for the first time.

You whirl around rapidly, and she laughs, appearing in the reflection behind you just as she did before. She has shed her disguise now, appearing in a form that seems much more natural: the thin, sinewy body covered by a soft robe tied loosely around her waist with a broad belt of the same material, the claws at the end of her digitigrade legs hidden inside slippers miming the form of some sort of verminous creature.

That is not, of course, what really draws the eyes. That honor goes to the emerald pools that form her eyes, to the unnatural pinkness of her skin, to the snake-like appendages in place of hair that writhe around her head, tied together by a ring shaped into a mark of Slaanesh. She has pincers: long, sharp claws, blasphemous script and symbols carved into their chitinous armor and inlaid in gold. She is beautiful. She is terrible. When she grins at you, barring rows of far to sharp teeth, you feel the dread of the prey in front of the predator.

You run, then. It is not a conscious decision, not really. It is the result of instinct already ingrained before man was man, older than the upright apes you stem from.

Flee!, your mind screams at you, and you do. Naked feet slap onto glass, and suddenly you realize just how weak you are, without the metal that shields and protects you.

She hunts you. Of course she does. The same instinct that is propelling you is part of the very essence of her being, part of her soul in a way more profound than even the instincts of your flesh. You flee, and she hunts, and there can only ever be one outcome.

Pincers caress your flesh and scythe through your bones as though they were made of water, and you feel nerves you have not had for decades sing with pain so profound it is barely recognizable as such.

"Such a nice parlor you made me, little fly", the Daemonette coos.

You are lying face down in a puddle of your own blood, staring at the ruin of your body in the reflection of the glass. Down below a herd of bovines is being set upon by predatory hounds, spines on their back of limited use against the attacks that harry them.

Even as you watch, the youngest of the herd is separated from the rest and ruthlessly brought down by the pack.

The Daemonette bends down over you, and her pincer moves over your scalp in the grotesque parody of a caress, leaving more bloody ruin in its wake.

"Such an interesting person you are, Eta Nu 9 35"

Your blood is on her teeth, her lips, her teeth, and for a moment, it transfixes you.

"All of your kind, really", she purrs, and her grin is the most hideous thing you have ever seen and you cannot look away from it, "so intent in pruning everything you perceive as weak, so eager to grow towards what you think of as perfection."

Her pincer clicks, and suddenly you are whole again: more than whole, as metal replaces the flesh she sliced away, and you stretch the limbs you have had for the vast majority of your life again.

You strike her, then. Needles tear through her robes and flesh. Hydraulic legs strike her with enough force that the glass of the platform splinters around you. You cut her to ribbons with your blade and tear her apart with your arms and dose her with half a dozen of the most toxic substances you can devise, until there is nothing left of her but bloody ruin, and her grin does not waver the entire time: if anything, it grows broader.

She laughs, and it is terrible, and when she stops it leaves a terrible, hollow absence.

When you look around, you realize you are on the ground of the forest. Around you, shards of bloodstained glass have fallen like terrible rain. The Vegetation where you are is dead, killed by the terrible toxins you released.

Below you, her carcass has gone.

She is standing besides you, as whole as she was before.

"But you are more interesting than your kindred, I think. Such an intriguing paradox." She grins, and walks away, sauntering in a way that somehow brings to mind both a predator and a dancer. You follow. You have no other choice. To remain where you are means death by a thousand predatory bites, big and small.

You know, of course. After all, they are all sprung up from your own mind.

"Tell me, Eta Nu", the Daemonette asks, suddenly walking backwards, looking at you intently, "what does it mean, for someone to deny the gods so fervently and yet to wish for ascension so deeply?"

It is a genuine question, you sense, and then clamp down on that emotion, choosing to fall to sullen silence instead. She is not a real person, you remind yourself: merely a reflection of humanity's base emotions, cast into a shape that mirrors what you expect to see.

She laughs, and again you wish for nothing more than for her to stop, and again you feel a strange yearning when she does.

She snaps her pincers, then, and suddenly you are in the glass tunnels again, risen high above the jungle. This is the heart of the garden, you sense: one of its hearts, at the very least. This is the center of the entire construct, the thing it is all grown from.

"A Garden is such a simple request", the Daemonette coos, "but there are such things hidden within it."

She sweeps her claws at the jungle around you. "What is beauty, for instance? What is perfection? What is paradise? Such a simple question to ask, and yet there is a different answer from everyone I query."

You see them, then: a thousand gardens made by a thousand people, some simple and unimaginative, other chaotic and ostentatious, some filled with nobody, others overflowing with men or women or animals in all sorts of different forms and configurations. She lingers, for a moment, on a place that seems to consist of rivers of honey, milk, and wine, nymphs bathing in each of the streams.

You note the disgust on her face. "And so many of them, my dear Eta Nu, are sooo boring."

She snaps her claw, and you are in the Jungle again. There is something perching in it's center, you notice, but you cannot see it.

"Not you, though, my dear. You walk the Path of Glory, and you do it in such a fascinating manner. Not the easy road for Eta Nu."

She smiles, and raises her pincers as though she was conducting a concerto, and suddenly whatever prevented you from seeing whatever perched at the center of the Garden fell away.

You see….yourself, not as you are right now, but as you might be. You see a vast, bloated spider, sitting at the center of a web of evolving perfection, encased in living, silver metal. You see yourself pull at one of the strings of the intricate map of predation and survival you have created, see the warp ripple as somewhere in your garden, a creature mutates, in a manner that will either help it survive and thrive or doom it's new-found species to utter extinction. You see yourself gorge on the knowledge you have gained, and another of your hands move to tug at another string that runs through time and space and genes.

You see…

"Evolution made manifest. A thousand thousand choices, an infinite number of permutations, and they could be yours to make."

The Daemonette grins again, then gets serious so abruptly it seems a light has gone out of the world. "Is this what you want?"

It is not, you realize, a question she knows the answer to. It is not a question you know the answer to. You have bared your soul to this creature, and at its heart there is a question you did not even know you were asking yourself.

Is this what you want?

[] Yes
[] No

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

She leaves you to sit and ponder this question for what seems like an eternity, but then you suddenly find yourself back in the glass walkway, observing your jungle. You are higher up, now, above the garden you have made. All around you, you can see the other gardens, the other places that your hostess has collected. Glittering pathways run between them, more of these strange platforms of glass and steel, and it takes you a moment to discover why they feel so familiar.

They look like the circuits you observed on the outside: the nerves of the astropaths, strung up between their sleeping, pain-wracked bodies to transmit whatever they meant to transmit.

It is no wonder Talef struggled so much to decipher the principles the device operated on.

You look up, and almost regret doing it. Above you, there is a swirl of dreams, uncurated and wild, taken from all across the galaxy.

"Van Hex and I came to a…mutually pleasing arrangement", the Daemonette tells you, and her grin makes the very idea sound so much more obscene then it could have possibly been. "I get to gorge on all these fools that step into my web, and in return I spit what I have chewed up into their empty shells in whatever form this Coterie desires."

She grins, whirls around in a dance that sets her robes flying. "They never want people with broad aspirations and dreams, or pity, or mercy. All they ever want is killers and saboteurs and puppets, and all the rest I can keep all to myself."

You see something of her true form, then: a gorged and happy parasite, sitting in her crystal like a fly in amber.

Something, though, gnaws at your mind. Something doesn't add up.

Daemons guard against captivity, against the limitations it imposes: even if you don't quite agree with such personalizing vocabulary, the sentiment that lies at it's foundation still holds true.

This is a cage for her, for it. By everything you know, it should be trying to weasel its way out.

And yet it doesn't.

Your thoughts are not quite private, anymore, but neither are its own, whatever passes for them anyhow. It grasps your suspicions, and instantly they are confirmed.

It is not simply here by its own choice. It is here because being away from here is worse, because there is something out there that is seeking to kill her.

She hisses, and you find your sudden bout of insight closed as she slams the doors to her mind closed, but it is more than enough.

"Whatever you are hiding from", you ask, "it has found you, hasn't it?"

The Daemon does not answer. It does not have to.

Something tries to ram it's way into the glittering pathways all around you, and suddenly the entire system is flooded by fear.

Not just the astropath's fear, you note, strangely detached even as it washes over you, even as you feel your heart rate rise to frankly dangerous levels.

It is the pseudo-intellects fear, something you hadn't even considered them capable of having. It is the fear of an immortal, timeless being in the face of annihilation.

You see the tip of a pincer much larger than hers worm it's way through a pathway that is dark and cast in shadow, and despite your fear you find that interesting. There is another way in, you note: a chink in what should be a closed shell, formed through some manner you do not understand.

Then it is gone, and the fear with it.

"Help me", the Daemonette hisses, and rage seems to intermix with genuine desperation. "Stop her", she begs, and suddenly you are flying backwards, through the glittering tunnels, through the red tunnel of 8-Doxa's creation, back into your own body.

You awake with a gasp, and nerves that are utterly aflame. Pain curses through your body and then recedes, with one worrying exception.

You run your hand across your scalp, where pinpricks of pain still persist, and find little stubbles of bone where none where before.

Mutation, you grasp: a gift, from your lovely hostess. A quick internal scan reveals nothing permanently harmful: merely the beginnings of long spines, akin to those of porcupines, that may in time grow to resemble hair.

Still, it is an imposition: one you would ordinarily not hesitate to rid yourself of.

When you look at the data that emanates from 8-Doxa and Talef, however, you suspect that there might be other issues that will shortly occupy your time.

"A Gladius-Class Frigate has entered the system", the Magos Mactator informs you, and you wish he wasn't quite so cheerful.

"Identified as the Skinpiercer."

"All they've transmitted so far was 'we have come for you'", Talef informs you. He seems a bit more scared, at least.

"How long was I out", you ask, and 8-Doxa exchanges a glance with Talef.

Four days. You were out four days, spent most of that time getting pointlessly tortured, and picked up a mutation along the way. "The Skinpiercer is about four days out, still", 8-Doxa informs you. "Defenses are being put up, and we're being asked to assist. What do you wish to do?"

He is itching to fight, you note.

Talef, as you expected, proves somewhat more restrained. "Did you find anything in there?", you ask, and you nod, grimly, telling you about the evidence for the backdoor into the system.

"Well", the Magos Infofector asks, "what do you want to do now."
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
[Priority]
One of the things on your plate will have to take priority, though you may still return to the others as soon as it is finished. But what might it be?

[] Take Care Of The Mutation
Something has been imposed upon you, and you will not have it. Before you do anything else, you will take care off the changes to your body that have been done.
[] Take Care Of The Backdoor
You are here to fulfill a task, and this does it. Whatever is intruding into the system, it should be stopped before it can do whatever it is it wishes to do.
[] Help with Defenses
Whatever the issue with the machine is, it can wait: repelling these assailant clearly takes priority, and the longer you can aid in shaping the defenses, the more effective they will be.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Any option but helping with the defenses will not take up the entirety of the time you have left, though how much time it does take is up to how well you roll. You may, as such, still have time to do other things. If you help with defenses it will be assumed that you are dedicating the entirety of your time to this.

 

[Uniquelyequal]

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

 

[Uniquelyequal]

Establishing any kind of noospheric link over any length of space inside the amalgam of ships around the Relay Station proves to be something of a hassle: the constant broad-spectrum vox messages act as a fairly effective jammer, swallowing up any signals that travel too far.

Talef solves this, ultimately, though it takes him most of a day, rushing frantically from ship to ship to manually rewire their Vox Arrays. What results is somewhat ramshackle, and you do not really appreciate the ten seconds of delay it gives you, but it is better than nothing.

It does also give Talef the opportunity to rewire the outer sensors of the Hulk, giving you a fairly clear view of the approaching Skinpiercer from your newly established command center.

The Coterie of the Blessed Lantern, it turns out, is not entirely without means of defending itself. While you were below, they mobilized these: more than a regiment worth of men in Cadian Battle Dress, what you surmise to be the mark of the Coterie impressed onto their breastplates and burned into their face.

"They are out latest order", Adriel tells you. They have donned a suit of carapace armor, gleaming in the light like Mother of Pearl, the mark of their strange coterie burned into the surface: the sweeping claw of the Mark of Slaanesh, the circle at its base transparent and burning with an inner fire. The Lantern, you presume, though a second circle at its care makes it look almost like an eye.

"intended for the Apostles of Blasphemy. Perfectly able soldiers, retaining all their training, but uncompromisingly loyal to their new masters."

You peer at one of them, who's purple eyes mark him out as a Cadian. They're not actually all from one Regiment, you note: they seem to have been drawn from a wide variety of worlds, before they were reshaped into what they are now. The Cadian looks back at you with blank, hollow eyes, and you find yourself doubting how much he can do on his own initiative.

Not, you suppose, what they are intended for, and they do seem to take orders well enough: when Adriel barks at the soldier to get into position, the Cadian moves, his back perfectly straight, his steps perfectly precise.

Not entirely useless, then. You leave the exact allocation of military resources entirely to the Coterie: they would not take your order and you are not a tactician besides. Instead, you focus on the noospheric transmission you are receiving from 8-Doxa, and on the data that is transmitted by the hodgepodge of sensors.

It is not, all told, of particularly high quality: none of the ships that brought the prey of the Beacon to its doorstep had much need for anything but the most rudimentary of sensors, and despite Talef's best effort, they keep overlapping and interfering with one another.

The result is that the Skinpiercer seems to flicker as Auspex Eddies play along her shields and skin. If you had not removed much of your capacity to feel nervous, surely now would be the time you would do so.

You ignore the way the spines that are even now painfully pushing out of the skin of your scalp are standing up. They mean nothing. You decide to focus on something else.

8-Doxa-Krainaima does not seem like a man prone to choosing a position in reserve, but obviously today he does not have much of a choice: though the semi-hulk of ships around the Relay Station is your biggest defensive asset, the biggest asset the Night Lords have right now is their ability to pick and choose their angle of attack. Your reserves can move through the ship quickly, of course, but they will still need time, and paradoxically staying farther away from the front means a quicker chance to get to the enemy.

The last thing you want is for Night Lords to breach your first line of defense and be set set loose inside the labyrinth that surrounds the beacon. You have seen them work before. That is the exact environment they tend to thrive in.

And so, 8-Doxa-Krainaima is cooped up inside a borrowed Drop Ship alongside the Murder Servitors and the complement of the Yulrasian Heavy Assault Infantry that you had honestly forgotten about until he requested them, ready to, in his own words, 'bring the fight to the enemy'.

The fact that he is willing enough to be in reserve does not, you gather, mean he enjoy it very much. You can see faint traces of the workings of his mind in the noosphere,alternately plotting and replotting routes of attack and screeching wordless 8-bit pleas for blood and skulls and glorious slaughter into the atmosphere.

It is grating, yes, but you do not ask him to stop. It is, for one, oddly reassuring, and for the other you do not want to be the focus of the Magos Mactators wrath, now or ever.

You keep his feed in the back of your awareness as you switch to the one monitoring the reptilian monstrosity, now encased in the specialized torpedo that will deliver it to its destination. You busy yourself fiddling with its hormone levels, for a moment, optimizing them to deliver the maximal degree of rage once the beast is delivered, then dialing them back down to avoid premature exhaustion, then picking a target trajectory that will deliver it where it should go.

You aim it right at the Frigate's bridge. With the shields up, that is of course a fool's errand, and you expect to retarget it at wherever a beach head ends up being established.

"The Skinpiercer has launched a spread of Macro Shells", Talef tells you, and that brings you, unfortunately, back to reality.

The ship is close now. It has, of course, been in effective attack range for days: if they had wanted to, the Night Lords could have launched an attack to destroy the station basically from the edge of the system.

It isn't like you can dodge.

That does indicate to you that they want to take the station intact, which is fortunate, because it means you are less likely to die in a superheated ball of expanding plasma. It is also unfortunate, because it increases your chances to be taken alive by Night Lords.

"Not the real attack", 8-Doxa cants, frantically enough to distort and double up in your vox, and you are inclined to agree. The Skinpiercer is too far out, for now: the shells are more likely than not intended to cause a rush forward of any reserves, ensuring them to be out of position when the real attack does occur.

You really wished there were guns pointed outwards, instead of just the turrets that make the labyrinth so lethal for the sort of small craft used to penetrate it.

The Hulk does not shake: it has too much mass to do this, of course, even as the shells impact the shields and they begin to fail. Still, it feels like it does through your interface: pinpricks of energy, massive enough to do serious damage to a city.

Void Warfare is mad, you consider. You have not, strictly speaking, been in any Void Battles yet: the desperate attempt to break through the encroaching vessels of the Ultramarines after Terra surely does not count. Still, as you watch the Skinpiercer maneuver and rush in a slow circle around the Relay Station, it is that precise experience that you are reminded of: plotting the vectors of shells you know are capable of destroying you if they hit in the wrong place, waiting always for the shot that will kill you.

The Skinpiercer, you realize, after long hours, is toying with you. A Gladius is a small ship, relatively speaking, but a maneuverable and fast one, and the Night Lords are putting it on full display.

It is getting close enough that the claws of their figure head seem to almost scrape the hull, arcs of lightning sparking off from it and dancing across the surface of your amalgam.

"Scrap Code", Talef cants out, suddenly, frantically, and then "contained. The daemonic entity again."

You do not have time to parse the implications. There is a spike of aggressiveness from 8-Doxa, and he is suddenly submitting a flight plan, plotting an intercept vector with the enemy frigate.

You begin to send an order to stand down. His current course of action is, on the face of it, insanity.

You also do not get around to finishing that order. A shrill warning rings across the noosphere.

Fusion Generators are things of incredible power: a miniature star, contained within the heart of a ship by powerful magnetic forces, their potential for destruction instead chained and carefully channeled into powering the ship.

It would, in theory, be possible to render one into a weapon, though at terrible cost to the ship that contains them. Your brethren in the blinkered Mechanicus are, of course, too hidebound and keen on tradition to ever do this. Your colleagues in the True Mechanicum usually have more potent weapons at their disposal. To tamper with the electromagnetic forces containing fusion reactions is an incredibly dangerous, foolhardy thing, especially if one has to rig it up to avoid damage to the rest of an entire amalgamation of other ships.

And yet, as the Skinpiercer skims past a ship called the 'Cornhauler', just this happens.

The entire process takes about eight seconds, which gives you just enough time to put into context that 8-Doxa spent several days traveling the outer ships to 'prepare defenses'.

Then a tongue of plasmic flame shoots out, engulfing the Skinpiercer like the fist of an angry deity.

[Roll: 8-Doxa-Krainaima: Weaponsmithing: 3d6: 3, 5, 3. Partial Success)
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

You are suffocating. You are a lump of meat, stuck in a shell of cold, inert metal. Your lungs are not expanding. Your heart is not beating. You taste metal in your mouth, and when you try to spit out whatever is within it, you realize it is your own jaw, and that you cannot move your tongue.


You try to scream, but have no mouth to do it with.

For a moment, you are back on Nuton's Folly, hurtling away from the expanding rubble of Nuton III in a dead shuttle.

This has all happened before. You know what it is. You are powerless to stop it.

In detonating the Plasma Reactor, 8-Doxa-Krainaima has set off a Haywire Field.


You do not know how much time has passed, when your implants start working again. Your internal chrono has gone with everything else, and you do not have any central time to synchronize it with.

It cannot, at least, have been very long. You woke up, after all.

A few seconds at most.

You are still standing: the improved arrangement of your legs has seen to that, where Talef has toppled over and is now heaving and breathing quite heavily.

"Sensors out", he cants to you. His cooling unit is trying and failing to start again, until you give it a whack and its fans spin into motion with a penetrating whine. "Trying to reestablish."

You nod. The monitors around you are still dead. For the moment, you are completely without information.

Then, the transmissions begin coming in. Every Vox Unit is out, right now, which means that any interference to noospheric transmission has gone as well. 8-Doxa is transmitting. There is, you consider, likely considerable lag in transmission. They are also utterly lacking in messaging discipline: a direct transmission of 8-Doxa's mind as he fights.

They are also the best you are likely to get, for the next moment.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

For a moment, you are utterly disoriented: the image seems to split half a hundred times.

The Murder Servitors, you realize, after a few seconds: your subordinate is splitting his attention across them, coordinating the input of several dozen pairs of sensors along his own senses.

That, you are forced to admit, is rather impressive: even receiving them is overwhelming. Beneath all of this, a constant chanting: rage and hatred, spun into code and flowing in a perfect cycle. You see the interior of the Drop Ship, and the Yulrasians in their gleaming armor. You see the course that is plotted. And you see…open void, the shape of a ship that has been battered, but is not broken, lightning arcing out into the void in broad arcs. A quick burst of the auspex confirms it: shields are still down. "Rebreathers", you wheeze out (8-Doxa wheezes out), and the Yulrasians recheck the masks they have donned five minutes ago. Their oxygen supply flashes on your internal display: they (and you) (and 8-Doxa) will be good, at least for the next hour or so. If you are still forced to fight, after the next hour, you are dead anyways.

The Drop Ship screams into a rent in the hull and sets down, and then you are off, clawed feet crashing into the surface of the deck. The Murder Servitors rush forward around you. You order one of them cut through a door, and brace as oxygen comes rushing out, carrying with it debris. Your Chord Claw cuts apart the corpse that was about to slam into you, and then you are inside the ship, and then you are amongst the enemy.

There is not a lot of light within the Skinpiercer. You can feel your eyes dilating, trying to catch as much light as they can. The human vermin that infests the lower reaches of the ship is used to these conditions, of course. Even now, they surge forward to meet your assault.

They are prepared for these conditions. They are not prepared for you.

The Murder Servitors do not need a specialized command to surge forward and begin the killing. That is your secret, to how you control so many of them at once. You are, by and large, not ordering them to kill. Rather, you are holding their leash, as you are holding your own.

And here, now, in the bowels of the enemy ship, you let go. You give up control, completely and utterly.

And in doing so, you find serenity.

The distinction between yourself and your constructs blends. You hack apart the Mutant that stands directly in front of you with a Chain Sword. Your Chord Claw obliterates a rating that is trying to rush you with a rusting cleaver. You step forward, on heavy clawed feet. You roll forward, on heavy treads. You stomp forward, on artificial limbs. You hurl yourself forward on organic legs that do not quite work like they are supposed to, anymore. You float forward, on devices inserted just below your neck.

And you kill. You kill with Chainsword and Claw. You kill with your inbuilt guns. You tear your enemies apart with servo arms and circular saws. Your Flamers roar and burn them.

You kill. You kill. You kill. You kill. None of the ones you kill are worthy of notice. None of these bodies will be useful for recovery. You grind their skulls under your clawed feet as you move forward. You notice, at the edge of your periphery, the pain as some of your servitors are torn down, killed in the inevitable attrition of lucky shots.

You are fine, for now. Within projections. You move forward, and you kill, and you leave the thinking up to your subordinates. Behind you, you vaguely notice the Yulrasians setting charges and generally doing their level best to keep the ship disabled.

They're doing well, you decide. Then you completely ignore them, again.

You cannot tell how much time has passed, when you finally hit your first real opposition. At some point, the crew of the Skinpiercer simply broke, and you began chasing them and killing them.

They are used to terror, but it is terror of a familiar shape, terror that comes to them in the dark and stalks them at night.

It is an entirely different kind of terror to be faced with a tide of walking corpses, fresh blood intermingling with the unguents on their claws and blades.

The Space Marine appears seemingly from nowhere. In one second, there is nothing, and then he is there, standing on the deck before you, Lightning Claw already rushing for your guts. He is fast, but you are in control. A Servitor reaches besides itself, head not even turning. You still almost die. The Claw sweep that cuts the Servo Arm now holding his wrist still almost kills you. It gets close enough you can feel the lightning claw sear the skin of your face. Then a Servo Skull impacts the Night Lord's head and detonates, and before the Space Marine can recover, a circular saw has been driven through his gorget.

You rip the half-severed head from its seat, and hold it over your head with a roar.

Then, the broken cultists come rushing back towards you, eyes wide with desperate fear, and you know what awaits you ahead.

You kill them. You kill every one of them that comes rushing at you. This time, they do not break. Right when they are gone, when you have expended every resource you could have possibly been made to expend on them, the true assault begins.

You are hit, and suddenly the tapestry of your vision begins unraveling, because you know it is not you. You are not on the ground, your chest obliterated by a Bolter Shell. You have not been torn apart by a Chain Sword. A Power Fist has not taken apart everything above your waist.

There are four of them. Just four. Still, they put up a resistance fiercer than anything their crew managed. For a few moments, nothing seems able to touch them. For a few moments, you see your casualty rates rise, see more and more of the sensory perceptions that make up the tapestry of your current existence disappear.

For a moment, your projections tell you that this is unsustainable, that with the current rate of exchange, you are going to lose.

Then the first of the Space Marines goes down, the blades that have replaced the arms of one Murder Servitor crashing through the lenses of his helmet, and it is as though a dam has broken.
The Night Lords are good at what they do. They are masters of fear, and of the shock assault, and that is what they have done now. For ten heartbeats, they have succeeded in this.

But they are not going up against beings that can be shocked, or broken.

They are going up against unfeeling, uncaring murder machines. For ten heartbeats, they outpace the response of the Murder Servitors through sheer speed, and then they get overwhelmed. A second goes down moments after the first, disappearing under skittering, spider-like constructs. A third has his arm ripped off by a servo claw and then continues fighting, attempting a withdrawal before a series of concentrated las shots bring it down in a stagger.

The Fourth….

You are lying on the ground, and your leg is gone. You are ripping apart a Space Marine, Bolter still smoking in his hand, still firing. You are bleeding. You are in pain.

You crawl forward, but then there are more heavy footsteps, and the Yulrasians are suddenly there, picking you up and carrying you away.

Then, everything goes dark.
[Roll:Combat: 8-Doxa-Krainaima: 4d6. 4, 2, 5, 1. Partial Success]

You shake your head, and remind yourself where you are, who you are. You are Eta Nu 9 35. You are in the control room of the station known as the Beacon of Perfection. All your limbs remain attached to your body.

"Sensors are back up", Talef tells you. "Turrets are back up. Unknown contact tracked within the Labyrinth…destroyed."

You check over the Sensors, letting Talef's reports watch over you. The Skinpiercer seems to be dead in space, you notice: smoke is pouring from several gashes in it's side, and something seems to have impacted it's bridge, just where you had intended the Reptilian Beast's drop pod to go.

Instinctively, you reach out for it, and notice that it is gone. Either losing connection to you caused a premature launch, or Madama Kapriosa interpreted her orders somewhat liberally. It doesn't matter either way. It seems to have been delivered. The lack of communications means you cannot check in, but you also would not want to be on that bridge right now.

"...reports of engagement in the sunward reaches", Talef cants to you, and you immediately snap back to attention.
The enemy, it seems, is not yet spent. "Seems to be contained, for now", Adriel tells you. You don't relax. You are fighting Space Marines. The situation can change at any moment.

Next to you, Talef lets loose a burst of angry binaric. "Scrap Code", he explains, and then he is rushing from cogitator to cogitator, frantically making adjustments.

You can see the issue. Talef too is transmitting to you. Something has snuck its way in, when the Haywire field was up and Talef was distracted, and now it is using the reactivating vox casters to move forward, jumping from device to device like a wildfire. It is, you note, making for the center of the station.

"Oh", Talef says, suddenly, and you see a smile spread over his face all of a sudden, "I know what they intend now."

He sends out bursts of scrap code of his own, and a ring of Vox Casters die, all at once, stopping the infection short of the crystal at the core of the station.

"It's a beacon", Talef says. "They intended to use the dread caused to home in on the beacon and bypass defenses via teleportation."

"You stopped this?", you ask, and Talef nods.

"Unless they can find another group of psykers that can emanate dread, they're done. And since they cannot, at this point of time, reach the core, they can't reach the astropaths."

"Would it be just Astropaths", Adriel asks, curious, "or Psykers in general."

You look to Talef, leaving the floor to him to respond, only when you look at him you realize he seems awfully, terribly afraid, and when you look at Adriel you realize the tone his voice had wasn't one of curiosity.

It was one of dread.

[Roll: Electronic Warfare: Myges Talef: 3d6: 4,3,5. Partial Success]

"They know where we are", Talef cants to you the moment after the realization hits.

For a moment, you know nothing but fear. For a moment, there is absolutely nothing you wish to do more than run.

You only make it halfway to the door.


Once upon a time, the things that burst from nothingness might have been called Assault Marines. Once they might have been known as Raptors, the name belying a certain amount of twistedness, but nothing of the things you are now seeing. Now, however, though there are many names they go by, one resonates the most.

Warp Talons.

The night blue of their armor has warped, turned to a swirl of hypnotic patterns, thorns of tarnished gold playing along the rims of their pauldrons and the twisted remnants of their jump packs. Their armor has twisted to be almost insect-like, their helmet resembling the shape of a praying mantis, their lightning claws the pincer of a crab…or a Daemonette. The lenses of their helmets are a deep, emerald green, and they scream as they fight, so loudly that within seconds you are forced to shut off your ears to avoid being rendered combat ineffective.

They come, and they kill. Adriel goes down within the first second, and the rest of the Coterie follows, sliced apart by the Lightning Claws before they can recover from the sudden appearance of the creatures.

Within less than a minute, everyone carrying a weapon within the Chamber is dead, with the exception of you..and Talef, who was already halfway out the door by the time they arrived.

[Roll: Combat: Myges Talef: 1d6: 5. Partial Success]

You barely escape the cloud of noxious chemicals that washes through the room, as Talef pushes his Chem Launcher back through the door and triggers it. The Warp Talons are not so lucky. The very worst chemical weapons a priest of the True Mechanicum specializing in dealing death could conceive wash over the room, and within seconds, everyone within it is dead, a fleshy soup leaking from the Warp Talon's twisted armor, the rest of the leadership of the Coterie of the Blessed Lantern reduced to blank skeletons upon the floor.

For a second, you allow yourself to breathe a sigh of relief. Then a power-armored hand grasps you from behind, and you feel the sting of Lightning Claws against your neck.

You freeze. Then, belatedly, you shut on your ears again, just in time to hear the end of a threat to your life, directed at your subordinate.

You give Talef some credit. He does not immediately obliterate you both.

That is probably more than you would've done

A quick auspex burst confirms a few things: a Space Marine in full Power Armor is standing behind you. Golden piercings are rammed into his skin, vicious hooks digging into nerves, and that just tells you everything you need to know about his religious conviction.

There is something odd about his Lightning Claws: a presence writhes within, and an eye seems to be staring, unblinking, from the back of his hand.

Daemon Weapon, you figure, and then you stop listening to him jabbering about being taken to the 'traitorous handmaiden'. You do not, you find, care particularly much, about the reason he is here.

You throw your head backwards, and your rapidly growing spines pierce both his eyes. He is blind and confused long enough to push away the Lightning Claws. You turn, and your arm blade jumps forward, piercing through

[Roll: Eta Nu 9-35. Uses Regicia's Cybernetics: 4d6. 2, 4, 6, 1. Full Success]


The Night Lord topples without a sound, too slow to react. Instead, it is your own hands that grasp his daemonic lightning claw and ram it into your stomach.

You note, with some faint amusement, seemed to be trying to pull away from your flesh.

Of course, the quite severe pain prevents you from considering what that might mean for very long.

Mercifully, you pass out quite quickly.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

You are, you notice, somewhat to your own chagrin, back in the garden, and you are not alone.

Next to you, skewered upon a broken tree like a butterfly in the collection of some mad god, is the Keeper of Secrets. She…it…seems smaller, somehow: diminished in presence as much as in size in a way you cannot quite explain.

There is a chuckle, from your left, and as you watch, the Daemonette is sauntering forward, closer and closer. Her robes have been replaced by a suit of gleaming, segmented armor, adhering impossibly closely to the contours of her body.

Within the armor, set just above the sternum, is an all too familiar eye, glaring at the world in desperate anger.

You recognize the eye, of course: it's twin is sitting in the face of the Keeper of Secret even know, glaring out into the world.

The Daemonette grins, revealing a mouth full of needle-sharp teeth. She steps past you, eyes fixed on the trapped Keeper, and for a moment you feel yourself filled with an incredible, profound yearning, intermixed with jealousy.

Unaccountably, irrationally, you wish to be the one her attentions is fixed on, even as she bends down and begins to devour her trapped sister.

She looks back to you, after what seems like an eternity, chin dripping with ichor. "I'll let you have what is left of her", she purrs.

"You did me a great service, Eta Nu 9 35. I think, in return, I shall let you leave this place."

She grins, and it is the quintessential grin of the predator before the prey. Already, she is changing, twisting, ascending.

Spines are pushing out from beneath her skin, close to those even know sprouting from your spine, though these do not stop at just the scalp: you see them growing from her neck and cascading down her back, until they might be confused, at a glance, with a long mane of hair. Poison drips from their tip, and you know that to taste it would be death, agonizing beyond measure.

She grins at you, and somehow her face grows more perfect and more beautiful, even as a second pair of eyes opens up beneath the first, all too familiar though their rage is gone.

She licks her lips, and suddenly the spell breaks, and the strange, enduring yearning is replaced by equally potent fear. You run, as fast as you can.

You are dreaming. You run, but you do not move. The Daemonette (is that what she is? Does that label even still apply?) laughs, and then she reaches out, and kills you.

There is, you realize, one difference to an ordinary nightmare.

You do not wake, upon dying, and the process is very slow, and very painful.

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________


You wake screaming, and what you see does not make you feel like stopping. The walls of the command center are shifting and twisting: even as you watch, metal is peeling back to reveal all too organic eyes. Laughter rings through the corridors, and it seems awfully familiar.

"Time to go", Myges Talef cants at you, somewhat frantically.

He has waited, you realize, somewhat stunned. Then you realize that there is no hole in your stomach: instead, a Lightning Claw hangs from your belt as though it had always been there, the eye that once blinked from its back now gouged out. Pain emanates from it, and despair: the presence within it is much diminished, but it is still potent.

The entire situation is a mess, but perhaps you have at least gotten something out of it.

Now you just have to get out.

___________________________________________________________________________

Escape:

[] Rapid
You will move as quickly as possible, hoping that rapid speed will keep you ahead of the twisting corridors. Of course, you might get lost, but with the way the Station seems to be twisting, that might happen anyways

[] Careful
You will make your way forward carefully, seeking to understand the station as it is shifting around you and maneuver around any threats that might appear. Of course, you run the risk of not being able to deal with a threat, but at least you're not going to get lost.

[] Destructive
You are going to go in a straight line. If walls stand in the way, they will have to go. Risky for all the reasons blowing holes into the walls of a Space Station that is rapidly undergoing warp-based transformation might be risky

[] Loot
Well, a lot of things are probably up for grabs right now, and you might as well be the one to grab them. Of course, this means a higher risk, but also a higher reward

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

A/N
The Yulrasian Heavy Assault Regiment was in the update as an option for the longest time. Then I seem to have accidentally deleted them, and not noticed until the plan was closed. As such, they've been put where I thought they made some sense, and not been subjected to any of the fates they might have been subjected to had you had any input.

Also, while I'm here: I'm aware that the vote is somewhat disproportionate to the length of the update. The next one is going to be a bit shorter, with a few more vote options. Mostly, I just wanted to get this one out.

 

[Uniquelyequal]

You look around the twisting, warping relay station, and make a decision.

You will be damned, if you leave this place empty-handed. You have been tortured, stabbed, had your dreams invaded and are sporting a brand-new mutation: you are owed some recompense.

Judging by their status as a puddle of fluid on the floor, the current leadership of the Coterie of the Blessed Lantern is not likely to object.

You can get out, surely. You're good enough to do so.

Talef objects, at least as first, but the prospect of being left alone makes him hurry along behind you fairly quickly.

You move at speed: though you have made the decision to linger and extract what value you can, there is still not much use in wasting time. The fact that the walls are beginning to bleed even as you walk past them only hurries your step.

More of the eyes are opening up, around you, metal eyelids peeling back from them with a horrifying screech. They follow you as you go, and though they sit in the wall entirely devoid of the context a human face would provide, you sense something like bemused surprise in them.

You move quickly, purposefully, using all that you know about how a station like this ought to be laid out.

Within six turns, you realize that you are utterly, hopelessly lost. The once unadorned steel of the intersection has been changed, twisted: gold has broken through its surface like a cancerous growth, forming patterns that could not have been devised by a human mind.

Your new hostess is redecorating, it seems. An amber liquid begins running slowly down the wall, and a quick auspex analysis reveals it to be honey.

For a moment, you hesitate, considering where best to go next, then you decide to pick whichever corridor seems the least mutated. You're not going to find loot, or escape, by walking into a warp rift and getting turned inside out.

Instead, you walk into Theama-Nul.

You almost shoot them, in the split second before they cant their identifier at you: an unrecognized, unknown person showing up out of nowhere tends to have that effect on you.

You do send them an angry burst of binaric informing them of such and demanding where in the name of the Empyrean they've been, and what they think they're doing here.

"I am here to get you", Theama-Nul tells you. "This entire station is in the process of turning into a Space Hulk and toppling into the Warp."

Well. It seems like you have a lot less time than you thought you did.

"We just have to find the Vault, and then we can get out of here", you tell your subordinate, and even despite the warp-enforced ambiguity, you can tell that he is throwing you an utterly incredulous look. "We are already possibly too late to make our way out of here. We have to go now, before the way back out closes up."

He turns around, gesturing through the door he just emerged from. Then he curses.

It is too late. The way back out has closed up.

Your way is barred by what appears to be a hexagramatically warded vault door, closed up by a fairly run of the mill gene lock. You turn, trying to find the way you yourself came, and find it closed by a similar door.

So is the way to your left, and to your right. As Theama-Nul reaches up and rips out the grate of an air vent, you are greeted by another vault door.

The Daemonette, it seems, has a sense of humor. You are going to get what you want after all.

Defeating the Gene Lock turns out to be no great feat: Magos Talef turn out to have all the genetic material you could ever need stuck in the profile of his boot

Compensation is something of a sticky topic, within the highly informal power structures of the forces of Chaos. Trading favors is frequent, but also frequently fraught with issues: everyone has good reason to distrust each other. Material Goods, as such, are frequently preferred. This comes, of course, with its own issues. What is seen as extremely valuable to one side is frequently worthless to the other. This can lead to extremely beneficial trades, but it can also lead to situations where establishing a worthwhile trade is extremely difficult.

What you see in the vault speaks to this: the Coterie, it seems, valued the trappings of luxury and comfort. You do not. For a moment, as you wade through a literal sea of gold that is worthless to you as anything but highly conductive material, hyperweave silk of no practical use whatsoever, and gemstones.

At first glance, coming here was a mistake.

"Is that what I think it is", Theama-Nul cants at you, and for once there is no concealing the awe in their voice.

You follow their gaze, and see something that immediately makes you forget all your misgivings. Propped up on a pedestal, given pride of place within the vault, is a single, oversized gauntlet, cast from a metal that has the shine and luster of gold but certainly isn't, at least going by auspex readings.

It's Auramite. Unless you are gravely mistaken, you have found the glove of a Custodian. Even the possibility of such is breathtaking. Recovering a single speck of genetical material might provide the single biggest acquisition of knowledge you have ever made.

The Glove disappears into your pack without second thought or comment. If Theama wishes to object, he does not show it. He wouldn't, though. All the sudden you become aware that you are now in possession of something you yourself definitely wouldn't hesitate killing for.

After all, who would ask questions about somebody dying in the depths of a warp phenomenon.

This makes rummaging through the rest of the vault a somewhat daunting experience, though neither Theama-Nul nor Talef seem to pay you much mind anymore as they begin to rummage through the leavings in the chamber.

There are a few more things of value or potential value you find, amongst all the displays of shallow wealth. Six doses of a hallucinogen that is exotic and powerful even by your standards. The Warp Eye of a Navigator, encased in amber. A small coil of platinum wire, engraved at a microscopic level with symbols useful for warding off daemons. You do, on a whim, pick up a small bolt of Nightweave Silk, just enough to make a robe from it. Though it is not for you, you think Regicia might enjoy it.

The station rumbles around you. It may be time to leave.

You look around for a way out, and instead spot a vaulted door, labeled, in gilded script and high gothic, as the 'Chamber of Cognition'.

You pause. You peer through the door. Despite the fact you have long replaced your lungs with far more efficient systems, you feel your breath catch in your throat.

Within the chamber, illuminated by gentle spotlights, you see four artifacts, each of incredible value.

The Daemonette laughs in your ear. "You are a strange one, Eta. So careful, except when it comes to acquiring. I like it, though. I am very much in favor of striving for more then what you have. Still, we wouldn't want to be too generous, would we? One! You get to pick one."
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
[Artifacts]

[] The Brain
It looks to be a standard-pattern Cerebral Preservation Tank, in good working order and with its stasis field intact: in other words, the preserved mind and knowledge of whoever is caught within, at your taking with just a bit of tinkering.
It is inscribed as containing 'Magos Varduvel Vettel'.

That name does ring a bell: one of the old monsters, a Magos Malefactor specializing in the construction of Daemon Engine Hulls, last seen when his ship was boarded by the Savage Pact in lieu of payment for the Daemon Engines he'd delivered to them. So that's where he's gotten off to.

[] The Stone
An egg-shaped, faceted crystal, about the size and weight of a human heart, psychic energy pulsing inside it. You know what this is, of course: no primer on Xenobiology held by a Daemonette would've held out on this particular detail. You are holding a Spirit Stone, containing the soul of a dead Eldar: useful as a source of energy or a bargaining chip, and perhaps even for the knowledge contained within, if it could be extracted.

Also, or so the back of your mind keeps insisting, delicious.

[] The Heart
The Heart is larger than a human heart would be, and fixed into a frame made of bone by what appears to be razor wire. This, too, your newly acquired knowledge helps you quickly identify: the heart of an Eldar, and probably of a Drukhari, given that it still appears to be beating. The modifications that have been made to it suggest that whoever it belonged was either one of their famed Haemonculi or at least in their care for an unusually long period of time: there is potential there, for trade or the acquisition of knowledge, if you are willing to grasp it.

[] The Machine
The Device is made up, as far as you can see, of iridium and platinum, and kept in a cage made of copper wire, but the more you look at it, the more you become certain that it can only be one thing: an artificial brain, created before the prohibition on such devices existed, presumably dormant but probably still possessing whatever intelligence it once held. Who knows what secrets lie hidden in its depth? Who knows what malice does?

_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

The Daemonette titters, at your choice. "Very interesting", she tells you.

"Oh", she says, suddenly thoughtful. "Really, I never introduced myself. I am Salaala, Salaala Gorgefeast."

She says the second name with relish, with satisfaction, as though it were a trophy freshly won.

"Well, Eta Nu 9 35, I believe that it is now time for you to go."

You can hear Salaala grin, even without seeing her, and then your Auspex is going wild, and around you, the vault begins disintegrating, walls made of solid adamantium dissolving as though they were ice in contact with fire.

You do not look at what is revealed behind them. It is nothing you haven't seen before, of course, but still, looking directly into the Empyrean is never good for your health.

You run. Theama-Nul and Myges Talef, devoid of any other options, run behind you.
Salaala did promise to let you leave. She is, it seems, good to her word: you see the hatch of an escape pod appear before you.

Devoid of any other option, you leap through it, your subordinates closely behind you, just getting in before the hatch closes with a resounding, mechanical clang.

Charges fire. The escape pod launches.

Very rapidly, you become aware that you are not in the backwater that housed the Astropathic Relay Station anymore. You have been transported rapidly through space.

Salaala was precise with her words. She let you leave.

She just omitted where you would be let out.

There is a planet in your path, but it is several hours off.

Theama-Nul uses the delay to fill you in, extremely briefly: 8-Doxa, you learn, is alive, extracted to the Wilful Eternity by the Yulrasians that fought alongside him, though heavily wounded. The Skinpiercer is destroyed: crippled by the boarding assault and then hit by the Eternity's plasma cannon to prevent a last-ditch effort to destroy the newly forming Hulk.

They cannot tell you more than that: after, they returned to the Hulk to aid in your extraction and subsequently lost contact with the ship.

"There is…something else", Theama-Nul tells you, and sends an image of a corridor that…appears to be entirely empty.

"We may have a problem."

You frown. There is nothing in the image. You check it again. Nothing. You disassemble it into a grid and go piece by piece.

Wall Plates, the rivets holding them together formed in a way that speaks to having been forged according to Mars-Pattern STCs. Rust, spreading across the walls, speaking of inferior alloying. There is a leak in what appears to be a sewage pipe. Nothing. Tread marks along the floor speak to heavy duty servitors being used to carry cargo.

You frown. You force your attention back. Nothing. You isolate the offending sector, disassembling it into smaller pieces. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

Theama-Nul looks at you attentively, and then directs your attention to a puddle of sewage-water on the floor: something is reflected within, if barely. You catch a glimpse of light green and silver.

"How did you even find this", you ask, and your subordinate shrugs. "You get used to looking for things your mind is telling you aren't there", they tell you.

You are halfway through telling them that that sounds pathological when your mind suddenly insists, impossibly, that you have never met the person in the pod with you in your life.

Well. Fair play, you are forced to admit. "So, any idea why?", you ask, and are met with a languid shrug. "None, yet. Seems unlikely for it to be the end of it, though."

You nod, then look through the tiny viewport of the Escape Pod.

it is not, you reflect somewhat dourly, as though you are going to be in any position to look into that, for the time being.

The planet has grown closer, by now, and for a moment you think it is a gas giant, and that you are to be the victim of a particularly mean joke on the part of Salaala. That, at least, is quickly dispelled: the world before you appears solid, but a cloud of dust surrounds it.

There is something strange, about that cloud: it is too evenly spread around the planet, it's particles of an odd size, of a strange color.

"Salt?", Talef asks, seeming to temporarily forget that he is currently not talking to you.

He is correct: it is a cloud of salt, interspersed with what seems like other materials, forming a strangely hypnotic pattern around whatever lies below.

"Ritualistic", Theama-Nul opines, and obviously it is at this point you get close enough to spot the skeletons: hundreds of them, interspersed with the swirling material in the clouds.

"Containing something?", you cant to your subordinate, and Theama-Nul shrugs eloquently.

"Your guess is as good as mind", they opine.

Whatever it is, it seems entirely unlikely that you aren't going to breach right through it.

"Sensor Lock", Talef tells you, and for a moment you are convinced you are about to die, that this is actually it, that the Daemonette has sent you to your doom after all. Then you breach the clouds, and one of the Skeletons shatters against the viewport of the pod.

For a moment, you cannot see at all: a shroud of particulates trails after you and then begins burning up in the atmosphere. It is only when the brilliant colors subside that you can see where you are going. Your own entry, along with the debris that trailed after you, seem to have punched holes into the cloud cover. Beams of sunlight are stabbing towards the ground, illuminating the ground below in what may be the first time in forever.

You are in an Escape Pod, with limited steering: just one quick burst in one direction or the other at best. That will, however, be just enough to make it to one of the three spots below.
_______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
[Landing Site]
[] The Ruined City
Somebody has gone to great length to destroy the city scape you see sprawling out below you: at a glance, you see the marks of at the very least atomic weaponry, added to by the warping of metal associated with Lance Fire and the general ash cover that tends to endure after viral bombardment. Somebody really wanted to destroy the city, though the limited glance you have tells you that a lot of the ruins seem surprisingly intact.

Whatever caused the containment of this world in the first place, you are likely to discover hints to it here. Of course, that also means there is likely to be dangers, both from remnants of the weapons used and from whatever they attempted to destroy in the first place.

[] The Glowing Forest
Not a forest in the first place, you note, at least not in the traditional sense: fluorescent fungi stretch out far beyond the edge of the limited sunlight, some of them reaching more then ten meters in height. It is, you grasp, an ecosystem not requiring sunlight. If there is intelligent life on the world below, it is likely to be there, and food and water will be more readily available than elsewhere.

But of course, such ecosystems are likely to be dangerous, and you will need to be careful not to become the prey instead

[] The Wreck
Upon a Glacier below lies a shipwreck, a hole burned through its flanks by what must have been an anti-orbital defense cannon, though surprisingly intact other than that. It is likely to be the best way off the planet. It also seems to have come to rest in an environment utterly inimical to life, and repairing it will be a task bordering on the impossible.