A quick look at the doors reveals that they open out into the hall. They're also quite large, twice as tall as Captain Carrigen--and really? Do office doors really need to be that big? Do they need those moulded skulls (you're pretty sure they're moulded; it's that or they're so old that any residual cursed energy has long since dissipated), or that big double-headed eagle? Does an office really need double doors to begin with?
...well. All right. This is the future. And you areon an alien planet. There might actually be actual aliens who are big enough to warrant having those doors, but the--
Is that a cyborg gun built into the wall? Why? Wha--two of them? One on either side of the door, well-disguised as part of the overwrought decor, and if you couldn't see their abbreviated cursed energy, you never would have noticed, but.
You want to turn to Elias and ask him what in the actual fuck, but something tells you that now is not the time. Satisfying your curiosity about wall mounted cyborg guns is slightly less important than finding out if the guy in charge of the entire planet had anything to do with the cursed portals. You think. Marginally.
The cyborgs bother you. Yes, this is the future, and everyone knows that the future has cyborgs, but there's just something wrong with them that you can't put your finger on, and the cyborg guns-- Yeah, that seems like a bad idea.
Nobody comments on your woolgathering, since it only takes a couple of seconds. For another second, you debate your approach, before shrugging, taking a bite of your sandwich, and use Blue to pull the doors open so you can just stroll on in.
The room is huge. Vaulted ceilings climb three stories high, with decorative buttresses, moulding, and murals. Objectively, the artists who crafted this monstrosity were very skilled; the moulding is full of elaborate detail, and the murals are reminiscent of the old (very old now; ancient, even) Italian masters... it's just that subjectively, it looks like the art direction was half handled by a teenage edgelord. It's more of the same character from the entrance halls, all glorious skulls and blah blah blah all it's missing is a--no, wait, there's the flaming skull. It's missing nothing--and that makes the other half of the art direction, Soviet Russia circa 1980, all the more jarring.
It is not a juxtaposition you would have chosen. It's not something anyone you have ever met in your entire like would have chosen.
The desk is somehow worse.
It's a good three metres wide, which is at least a metre wider than it needs to be, judging by the sparse contents of said desk--a vox unit, a fucking quill, and two small stacks of parchment.
Oh, and a projected holographic map of the planet, let's not forget that. The governor is rotating the map as you step in, and zooming in on... ah. It must have a live feed updating it, or something, from sattelites maybe, because he's frowning at a giant hole in the side of his planet. One that you recognise.
Whoops.
You swallow your sandwich bite. The desk is made of polished and gilded wood, with intricate inlays in the same damned skulls-and-eagles motif that haunts the rest of the place. At least it's thematically consistent?
"Good news, I solved your daemon problem," you inform him. "Bad news, I still don't know the source. You don't happen to know, do you?" You take another bite of your sandwich, and lean forward just a tiny bit.
The governor has a square face, bonier than you anticipated, seeing his kitchen. He looks at you, and the hole on his planet, and back to you, clearly connecting the dots. He looks at Elias… and answers.
"Reports indicate that it was a rogue psyker," he says. "The situation escalated before I could get my people to confirm."
"Mm~ That's not what I asked, though. It was a yes-or-no question," you point out, terribly mildly. And take another bite of your sandwich. The action gets the governor's attention, and his lips thin minutely.
"The situation is complex," the governor says, with another glance at Elias. "It's not a matter of 'yes' or 'no'." You just look at him in response to that, your best blank, dealing-with-dubiously-deserved-authority look, one that has made many a man and woman squirm, and it does the job here, too. He can't meet your gaze, though he tries, twice, before looking away, back to the projection of the hole in the planet.
(You suppress a pang of guilt at the sight of it. It's. It's bad. It's not a crater. It's a hole, one that goes straight down, deep into the planet's crust, with no sign here just how deep. You know how deep it was. You know that it did not, quite, punch through to the mantle, but it's a very near thing. You hope there weren't any vital satellites or space ships or anything in orbit above, because it went just as far up as it did down. )
"Yes," the governor sighs. "Obviously. I know as much about the situation as my people have reported--which reports are, of course, available to the Lord Inquisitor."
"And you may trust that I will avail myself of them," Elias speaks up. "But please do tell us of the situation as you understand it." His politeness is like a knife; you have known other people like that. It's not your style at all, but you can play off it easily enough.
"And hurry it up," you add. And take another bite of your sandwich. It's not a bad sandwich, for something you threw together from essentially alien food. The bread tastes a bit green (as well as being green), but the ham is exactly like any other ham you have ever eaten, and the maybe-mustard is a bit spicy, but otherwise inoffensive.
The governor starts to lay out the facts, eyes firmly on Elias as he does, describing the reports of a rogue psyker spreading plague, and becoming a portal, only to be quickly contained by the Arbites (local law enforcement? Militia? Something like that, you manage to glean from context)--until it wasn't. Some unknown factor made the portal spring open again, and made the incursion spread, and the situation grew, until it was a planet-wide problem, and then...
"And then I received your report, Lord Inquisitor, about your asset, and the closure of the portals," the governor concludes. "And the rest, you know."
Annoyingly, he seems perfectly honest, if rather obviously trying to cast himself and his people in the best possible light. As anyone would do, you suppose, but it's annoying because there are still problems, still holes in the story that don't make sense. It's the 'somehows' and the 'unknown factors' and the fact that you just plain don't know enough about what is considered normal here, now--
You keep your frustration well-contained, and to yourself; it wouldn't do for anyone to see you flustered.
"Soooo you really don't have any idea what was going on?" you ask. Your sandwich is long since gone, eaten while the governor explained his piece, but you kind of wish you had another. Or some mochi. Or senbei; some nice, crunchy senbei might be nice right now. The sweet kind, obviously.
"As I said before," the governor replies, with a brief glance at you. "I only know what is in my people's reports. I--"
"You didn't go to check any of it out yourself?" you press, just a little. "Not even at the beginning?"
"Why would I?" the governor asks, to all appearances genuinely baffled, and, yeah, okay, you actually almost believe him now. There's a difference between the kind of bluffing, false confusion that corrupt idiots like to throw up, and the genuine confusion that you so love to provoke.
"Okay," you say out loud. One last little push though... "I believe you. Elias, I think we're going to have to dig deeper if we want real answers. It's clear that this guy's just here to look fancy. Who's really got their thumb on the pulse of this world, huh?" you ask.
"There are a number of people we could ask," Elias allows. "However, I do not think we should dismiss the governor so swiftly. He may yet know more than he thinks he does."
"Or Gojo could be correct; the corruption on this planet must be deeper, if it spread so widely," Captain Carrigen, who has been silent this whole time, finally speaks up.
"There is ony one way to be certain the corruption has been removed from a planet," Elias says, his voice hard. The governor's eyes widen minutely, and he glances again at the hole you left in his world. At you. At Elias. "I do not believe that we have reached that point just yet, thanks to Gojo's swift intervention. But the circumstances may yet come to that."
"What he said," you say casually, jabbing a thumb at Elias. You're not sure exactly what he's talking about, but you're not an idiot. You can guess, from the way the governor looked at the hole you made in his planet that Elias' certain way to eliminate corruption probably involves widespread and thorough destruction, which. It would work, you guess, in that it's hard for cursed spirits--and daemons--to get any kind of foothold if everyone and everything is utterly destroyed.
Carrigen nods his agreement, a single inclination of his helmeted head.
"But we're not there yet. So," you continue, sitting yourself on the edge of his desk, and leaning in. "Are you sure you really don't know anything else?" He leans back, away from you. Not a lot, just a little, but the action makes you smile a sharp-edged, Reaper's scythe smile. He looks at you, tries very hard once again, to meet your eyes, and ends up looking away.
"I... I have been lax in enforcing purity in livestock," he admits, under the pressure of your gaze. "Lowered costs and higher efficiency mean more meat for the tithe... But surely, something like that cannot--"
"It most certainly can," Elias says, and you can hear the frown in his voice. "Any slip from the standards could lead to corruption, and any corruption could lead, easily, to what we have witnessed on this world."
"I can't speak to 'purity' or whatever, but farmers tend to be miserable when their livestock is miserable, right? Right." You think so, anyway. That one farmer on that one mission that one time had certainly complained miserably enough. That whole mission had been miserable; if it weren't for Infinity, you would have been covered in manure. As it was, Suguru had been covered in manure. You remember laughing at him, so hard. "And human misery directly contributes to a daemon problem, on any scale."
"It--does?" The governor sounds shocked. Surprised. A little baffled.
"Don't tell me you thought they came from nothing," you start, making yourself stop the incipient lecture when Elias interjects,
"Gojo."
"Yeah, yeah, not the time or place," you agree. Instead, you take a sheet of what you'd swear is fucking parchment from his desk, stick it in front of him, and tap it. "Time to start writing down everything you've ever done that could have contributed to a planet-wide daemon problem." You take one of his quills, and lay it over the parchment, and grin at him. "I'll be over here. Elias!"
You hop to your feet, sling an arm over his shoulders, and lead him to almost, but not quiteout of earshot. The governor should be straining, catching about every other word.
"So, what do we think?" you ask Elias quasi-conspiritorially. "He probably didn't have anything directly to do with it."
"No, but you are correct that his actions may have contributed to how widespread the situation became," Elias says, pitching his voice to match your tone. "What is the point of this exercise, though? I doubt he knows enough about daemons to even begin to comprehend which of his actions could have made an impact."
"That's true," you agree. "This is just to annoy him; he had an entire cake made while his fortress was under rationing. Not to mention the fancy bread and everything else in the larder. That kind of thing, when your troops are eating hardtack or whatever? That's bad for morale, and poor morale? Believe it or not, that can lead to daemons. The cake was delicious, by the way."
"You ATE my CAKE?!" the governor howls, suddenly on his feet. You hear the quill snap under his fingers, and the murderous glare--thereit is, that's what you've been looking for this whole time, the asshole under the mild-mannered facade. "How dare you, who do you think you are?!"
"I'm the man who saved your life," you remind him.
"I don't care," the man sneers. "You are nothing, and nobody, just some lackey of the Inquisitor, who can't even be bothered to do his own pathetic interrogation. You have no power, and no right, to come into my fortress, and steal my food, and parade around as though--"
"Enough," Carrigen interjects, his voice coming loud through the (you guess) vox equipment on his helmet.
"No, it is not enough," the governor continues ranting. "That man stole my food, and put a giant hole in one of the most profitable sectors of my planet--"
"You mean the Emperor's planet," Elias says, smooth and sharp once again. (You see in your mind's eye a golden throne, and a dessicated corpse of a man.) "Which you rule only at his pleasure." That actually makes the governor stop short.
"Of--of course that's what I mean," he says, paling just a little. "But Inquisitor—Lord Inquisitor—you surely cannot just expect me to take this kind of disrespect from a—a—" He sputters, looking you up and down, once again faling to meet your eyes for longer than a second. When he does, you see fear there, mingled with contempt. There's fear when he looks at Elias, too.
There's something off about him. Something about his temperemental outburst combined with the flip-flopping between outrage and obsequiousness, and the way his eyes have started darting rapidly—
Experience, training, and your own superior speed and instinct allows you to act first.
The governor is going for some part of his desk; likely a weapon of some sort.
Captain Carrigen is going for his gun; likely in response to the movements of the governor. You can tell that he's processing things faster than 'normal' people would.
Elias' cursed energy is moving in an unfamiliar technique; the shape of it says paralysis.
[] Stop the governor, but let Carrigen shoot him. A little. As a treat.
[] Stop the governor, and let Elias paralyse him, but prevent Carrigen from shooting him.
[] Elias has the governor; you should stop Carrigen before he kills your lead.
[] You can be in two places at once; stop the governor AND Carrigen.
[] Don't intervene this time; let the others act as they will.
[] Something else? (Write in.)