Given there's apparently another psyker around that the Carrion call "the Doom," conservation of detail indicates it's probably not a daemon. Just a crazy telepath that we've been contracted to deal with. Like as not there will be nothing on the Gun deck, but we'll get back to find "the Doom" (can't take that title seriously) ambushed our guys while we weren't around to help.
Who knows though? Maybe "the DOOM!" (little better) has a grudge against Crane the same as we do, and is actually being honest. That'd be a treat, fuck over Crane and turn an enemy into ally in one blow.
Which means it's probably not going to happen that way.
Looks like it's time for Vincenzo and Sidhe to go on an exciting adventure together, crawling through a drifting hulk of an Inquisitorial prison ship in search of someone trying to control an army of lobotomised murder-cyborgs.
You have a real talent at taking circumstances that would otherwise sound alarming and reframing them in a way that makes them sound relaxing.
Problem: I play up taking things that are obviously meant sarcastically the wrong way.
Why this is problem for me: Because when I choose to act as though I have read you sincerely, it rather undercuts the fact that I would genuinely like a low-stakes slice-of-life quest QM'd by you.
A Maugan Ra quest with genuine good. clean. fun? Holy shit, I expect I'd enjoy a quest focused on the ups and downs of a bunch of children making sandcastles in a literal sandbox.
---
Your skill is undermining my frippery, and I don't know how to handle that.
A Maugan Ra quest with genuine good. clean. fun? Holy shit, I expect I'd enjoy a quest focused on the ups and downs of a bunch of children making sandcastles in a literal sandbox.
We'd get like five updates in before the protagonist was making a dramatic speech and starting a shonen battle against That Bitch Suzie That Stole the Red Trowel
"You are a terrible liar," Sidhe says flatly, one arm cocked before her in something approaching a defensive stance, "and none of your peers have had any such reaction."
"Only one of them is human, hardly a proper sample size," you point out, before pausing to consider whether or not Bore should count, "but in this case, yes, I lied. In truth, I think I know what Crane is up to. He's trying to seize control of the murder servitors."
"Crane?" Sidhe asks, and such is her honest bafflement that you can only blink in surprise, "The… bird?"
"The man," you say, a touch awkwardly, because… well you don't understand. Did he reserve his bile for you alone? "The Interrogator who, uh, took point."
"Oh," Sidhe blinks, then nods, "Him. Very well, let us intercept him. Do you know where?"
"The gun decks, but," you hesitate for a moment, "Are you… I confess, I was expecting some hesitation, or questions."
"The mon-keigh may detest and shun the warp-touched, but my people are not so foolish," Sidhe says primly, which you think might be an attempt at reassuring or validating you, its hard to tell beneath the level of almost reflexive contempt, "Without the guidance of a seer's visions, none of the Craftworlds would have endured beyond a handful of centuries."
Part of you wants to explain, to clarify the evident misunderstanding stemming from an entirely different paradigm of psykers and their place in society, but what would you even say? What value is there in highlighting that your insight comes from a strange voice whispering in your mind, rather than any kind of precognitive gift? It's easier to simply work with the assumptions of others, and to that end you grab one of the nearby Carrion, instruct it to pass on a message to the other members of your little band, and set off.
"The gun decks will be on the ship's flanks," Sidhe says confidently as you pass beyond the Carrion's perimeter guard, "as the engines are at the rear, and the bridge mounted atop and towards the aft. Your mon-keigh ship designers are so staid and unimaginative."
"You've fought human ships before, haven't you?" you say, because you cannot imagine a merely peaceful experience enough to say such things with confidence. Not when the speaker is an alien feared and distrusted even above most tales of xenos granted to the average citizen.
"I have," Sidhe admits without hesitation or shame, "The Crow Spirits - when I left my home to travel the stars, I joined the ranks of the anrathe, what your kind call corsairs. We fight as a fleet, a roaming band of ships and planetside raiders independent of any Craftworld, seeking to preserve the territory once held by our ancestors from any who would despoil it. More than any other, of late, that means vessels of your Imperium."
You are silent for a time, as past the lands of the Carrion the ship rapidly returns to its state of crumbling decay and that requires some concentration to navigate. As you shimmy around sharp crevices and scramble down ramps made by collapsed decks, you find yourself wondering just how independent these corsair bands truly are. Malfi is often blighted by bands of wasteland raiders and savage gangs in the lower levels of the great Hives, but you know from experience that turning over the right rocks will inevitably uncover the strings tying them to one or another of the great Houses. There is always a use for deniable agents and the ability to strike at someone via proxy, especially if the force would exist regardless of your intervention. Could the Aeldari operate on the same principle - hotheads like Sidhe leaving their homes to find adventure among the stars, but still serving their Craftworld and its interests indirectly?
"You referred to it as the territory of your ancestors," you say at last, though the comfortable silence was far from displeasing, "as distinct from that claimed by your people today."
"The Aeldari never truly claimed territory in the way of the younger races," Sidhe nods, running up and across a broken wall with ghost-light steps and then waiting patiently for you to awkwardly clamber over the broken ruins below it, "Our dominion was in zones of influence, scattered points of light united by the craft that allowed us to walk from one world to another at will. Even today, the Craftworlds in themselves have room enough for all our people."
Yeah, this isn't your first time listening to a once-great noble with some pretensions to their old status and glory. You doubt she'll say it outright, but you can read between the lines - Sidhe talks of her ancestors and heritage because the Aeldari of today have nothing worth boasting of. If you are right and she is young for her kind, that would make the Crow Spirits some manner of revanchist group, likely ruled by the old and spending the blood of the young in pursuit of an impossible dream.
"If you do not need the territory, why do you fight for it?" You say instead, trying to make sure your voice does not come across as too accusatory, "I could consult the archives of any family on Malfi, and find there records of some shipment or transport lost to the depredations of your anrathe. Why spend so much blood for a prize you do not truly need or desire?"
"The word is anrathe," Sidhe corrects you, though you cannot actually determine any difference in how she pronounced it compared to your own attempt, "and is it truly a cost, when we are not the ones who bleed? Beyond that, however - survival is not enough. If the Aeldari desired naught but to endure to the end of time, we would hide ourselves in pockets of the web, or lurk in the void between dead and unpopulated stars. Such would be a living death, unworthy of any capable of more."
Hmm. On one level you feel you should respect that, and certainly the bloody ambition to settle for nothing less than excellence in place of mediocrity is familiar from the virtues that Malfi teaches its children, but the fact that she expresses that drive and grandeur through murdering humans does complicate matters somewhat. Not that humans have any greater scruples about taking the lives of other humans, to be fair, but even so.
Left alone with your thoughts, you are only brought out of your introspection when Sidhe's route brings you to what is clearly one of the most damaged parts of the ship. Here the walls are twisted, the compartments gutted and left to fall away into ragged chasms, the air increasingly chill with the nameless hunger of the void. You know little of ships and their construction, but Hives are familiar to you, and what you are seeing now bears all the hallmarks of some great disaster. A power conduit breached, perhaps, or some stockpile of fuel or ammunition struck in the fighting, sparking a rolling series of detonations that tore the guts from the Inquisition's private prison. You doubt it was deliberate, but that's always the risk of fighting in a hive - there is so much danger and so much power all around you that the chaos of battle inevitably trips something that you would have been best served to leave undisturbed.
"The true gun decks will be above us," Sidhe says, halting at the edge of an enormous shaft. You think at first it might be more battle damage, for the cold wind howls through the cavernous space without cease, but after a moment you spot the heavy chains that run down the sides and the tightly clamped platforms that are attached to each. Some kind of loading mechanism, you would guess, or perhaps a lift to carry crew from the lower levels to their destination. "Though getting there might yet be a challenge."
You can hear the implied exception in her words, the barely veiled assumption that you will have difficulty here that she will not. And it is true, the Aeldari is more graceful by far than your own stumbling advance has shown you to be, but that was in tight confines and broken terrain. This open space, this vast gulf that runs across floors filled by nothing but the wind, is a different question entirely. With a smile, you reach for the power within your soul.
Invoking 'Shape Flesh' at Unbound level -5; 6; 3; 2; 6; 5; 5; 1; 1. Seven icons, success with critical.
The default pool for invoking psychic powers is Psychic Mastery + Willpower, as with any other skill. However, it is possible for a psyker to open the gates of soul wider for a burst of additional power, adding extra wrath dice for potentially greater success… or more dire consequences.
Bound is the default power level, with the base pool rolled without modification.
Unbound adds an additional wrath dice, capable of generating criticals or complications/perils as normal.
Transcendent adds (higher of rank or tier, plus one) wrath dice, currently three, but also inflicts an equal amount of shock as the power threatens to exhaust and overwhelm you.
The gates of the warp are slow to close, once opened. A psyker who invokes at unbound or transcendent level is locked to that level or higher for all additional powers in the same scene.
Since Vincenzo rolled a 6 on one of those Wrath dice, he triggers a critical, and gets to apply a potency upgrade to the power without the need for shifting dice. He opts for wings as his base effect, and hardening his own skin to provide additional protection (+4 resilience) for the critical upgrade.
The first lesson that the Menagerie teaches those that fall into their clutches is this - the world is a lie, the soul the only truth. Their ideology is toxic, scattered fragments of temptation and justification to draw the aspirant ever further in, but in this at least they spoke true. Your body is a vessel, nothing more, and with the right application of power it turns to liquid and reshapes itself beneath your command. Your bones grow slender and light, the excess mass shunted to your skin to harden it like armour, and from your back sprout great avian wings to bear you aloft upon the chilling currents.
On a whim, you shape your flesh in the manner of an angel, adding feathers of purest white and tinting your skin like marble. It is an impressive display, you have seen yourself in the mirror often enough to know that for sure, but Sidhe looks frankly disturbed by the whole process in a display of honest emotion you weren't sure the Aeldari could muster.
"You mon-keigh value your bodies so lightly," she says, taking a step back as though you might somehow lunge forward and devour her, "to shape and remould it so, to weave steel in place of your limbs and connect armour through cables as the astartes does. No Aeldari would let their self-image waver thus."
"You speak as though your fragile ego were a virtue," you say with a brief laugh, pausing to tweak the shape of your throat and remove the metallic timbre from your voice. At least the loss of your shirt provides some edge here, for the vest you wear now needs only the most minute adjustment to let your wings move freely. "But come, let us not linger here."
Sidhe nods, and hands you a slender cord that spools from her arm like a spider's silk. You take it in hand, marveling at the silken texture, then flex your new limbs and take flight. Air beneath your wings, the freedom of movement that flight brings with it, these things are the truest prize of your condition. You thought once to return to mortal life, to hide yourself away and deny to all that you were ever cursed with the psyker's gene, but once you took to the skies even once the possibility could no longer be born. Alas that this flight is not overly prolonged, for within half a minute you find yourself at the top of the shaft attaching the rope to an out-thrust gantry, to be joined a few heartbeats later as Sidhe ascends with the whispering murmur of some hidden motor in her armour.
The gun decks proper are in no better state than the carnage below, many of them saved from explosive decompression solely by the presence of immense corroded hatches across every port and entry. Great chasms rend the deck plates and sparking power conduits provide the only real light, while here and there you see piles of discarded ammunition and partially decayed macro-shells that rolled free of the great gun assemblies that punctuate the deck at frequent intervals. Naturally you choose to remain high, sweeping from one elevated perch to the next on silent wing while Sidhe follows behind you in her turn, the pair of you scouring the decks below in silent search for the threat that drew you hence. You see nothing, until at last you reach the prow, where lies a vast hollow tube of metal buckled and rent apart from within.
"A boarding torpedo," Sidhe murmurs, as the pair of you come to rest perched atop a creaking gantry in the highest reaches of the vaulted ceiling, "Your kind use such things when a ship must be captured intact, but is flighty enough to outrun conventional pursuit."
Peering down, it does not take you long to spot the deadly payload that the torpedo once carried. Murder servitors prowl the deck below with silent, predatory grace, their withered limbs twitching hungrily and their silent eyes combing the darkness in search of some unforeseen prey. You can well imagine the terrifying carnage that they must have wrecked when unleashed into an enemy vessel, the razor claws that tip their limbs swiftly stained with blood and gore. Many are broken and discarded, their immobile corpses stripped for parts by their still-active peers, and even the ones you can see moving sometimes shudder silently or wheel in circles as some internal process glitches and fails… but there are still dozens of them down there, hundreds perhaps in the darkness beyond, and you can only imagine the carnage they would wreck if mustered against the lightly armoured Carrion.
A moment later, you see others drawn here by the same imagined carnage. Far below you, picking their way across the uneven floor, is a half-squad of humans clad in light carapace armour, a tech-adept in crimson robes at their heart. Each bears the crossed I of the Inquisition on their pauldrons, and your fist clenches silently at the sight.
"Two hundred years adrift," Sidhe murmurs quietly to you, a strange fluted firearm resting in her hands, "and yet these ones carry weapons and move with training. Has our ship been found already?"
"No. These must be Crane's men," you whisper in turn, studying the group below as they navigate their way towards the boarding torpedo, "if we have been adrift all that time, they must have sealed themselves in stasis like their master… awaiting rescue, perhaps. But now we are free, and they are forced to attempt a reclamation of the ship or die in their sleep."
You fall silent then, because beneath you one of the prowling servitors appears to have caught the scent of the intruders. It begins prowling towards them with a lurching gait, claws raised and gleaming… and then the tech-adept raises its hands and blurts some kind of code or invocation at the monster, which sees it twitch and turn aside. The others do not relax, however, and you think you can see why - such a measure only temporarily dissuades a single hunter, and judging by their tense wariness it is not entirely reliable. The boarding torpedo must have some manner of booster or coordination network for the swarm, and if they can reach it they can extend that somewhat tenuous control over the entire complement.
Unless, of course, something were to go wrong.
Article:
How do you make sure that something goes wrong?
[ ] Death From Above. Half a dozen soldiers with light armour and small arms - manageable enough foes you think, especially with Sidhe to assist and the advantage of surprise. Cut them down and end this threat before it can truly begin.
[ ] Death by Proxy. Servitors such as these respond to noise and movement. Use that to bait a swarm of them into overrunning the small team, then pick off any survivors. There's a certain irony in killing them with the weapon they sought to wield against you.
[ ] Retreat and Regroup. Return to the other prisoners and the Carrion, bearing forewarning of what is to come. With prior preparation and proper coordination you can use the impending attack to eliminate the Inquisition and the servitors both.
[X] Death by Proxy. Servitors such as these respond to noise and movement. Use that to bait a swarm of them into overrunning the small team, then pick off any survivors. There's a certain irony in killing them with the weapon they sought to wield against you.
[X] Death by Proxy. Servitors such as these respond to noise and movement. Use that to bait a swarm of them into overrunning the small team, then pick off any survivors. There's a certain irony in killing them with the weapon they sought to wield against you.
"The mon-keigh may detest and shun the warp-touched, but my people are not so foolish," Sidhe says primly, which you think might be an attempt at reassuring or validating you, its hard to tell beneath the level of almost reflexive contempt, "Without the guidance of a seer's visions, none of the Craftworlds would have endured beyond a handful of centuries."
"You mon-keigh value your bodies so lightly," she says, taking a step back as though you might somehow lunge forward and devour her, "to shape and remould it so, to weave steel in place of your limbs and connect armour through cables as the astartes does. No Aeldari would let their self-image waver thus."
oh... Well, I guess we never see Eldar doing it, but I'm surprised the psyker race wouldn't be onboard with the Menagerie on the importance of soul compared to body.
[X] Death by Proxy. Servitors such as these respond to noise and movement. Use that to bait a swarm of them into overrunning the small team, then pick off any survivors. There's a certain irony in killing them with the weapon they sought to wield against you.
"You mon-keigh value your bodies so lightly," she says, taking a step back as though you might somehow lunge forward and devour her, "to shape and remould it so, to weave steel in place of your limbs and connect armour through cables as the astartes does. No Aeldari would let their self-image waver thus."
[X] Death by Proxy. Servitors such as these respond to noise and movement. Use that to bait a swarm of them into overrunning the small team, then pick off any survivors. There's a certain irony in killing them with the weapon they sought to wield against you.
[X] Death by Proxy. Servitors such as these respond to noise and movement. Use that to bait a swarm of them into overrunning the small team, then pick off any survivors. There's a certain irony in killing them with the weapon they sought to wield against you.
[X] Death by Proxy. Servitors such as these respond to noise and movement. Use that to bait a swarm of them into overrunning the small team, then pick off any survivors. There's a certain irony in killing them with the weapon they sought to wield against you.
[X] Death by Proxy. Servitors such as these respond to noise and movement. Use that to bait a swarm of them into overrunning the small team, then pick off any survivors. There's a certain irony in killing them with the weapon they sought to wield against you.
[X] Death by Proxy. Servitors such as these respond to noise and movement. Use that to bait a swarm of them into overrunning the small team, then pick off any survivors. There's a certain irony in killing them with the weapon they sought to wield against you.
[X] Death by Proxy. Servitors such as these respond to noise and movement. Use that to bait a swarm of them into overrunning the small team, then pick off any survivors. There's a certain irony in killing them with the weapon they sought to wield against you.
Honestly Sidhe is being remarkably communicative and cooperative for an eldar, we seem to have gotten really lucky with her.
[X] Death by Proxy. Servitors such as these respond to noise and movement. Use that to bait a swarm of them into overrunning the small team, then pick off any survivors. There's a certain irony in killing them with the weapon they sought to wield against you.
If so that's probably a good thing, at least we can be relatively certain that this party member is not a chaos worshiper and will not be actively trying to corrupt us. Honestly she's the party member we should try to get closer to.
[X] Death by Proxy. Servitors such as these respond to noise and movement. Use that to bait a swarm of them into overrunning the small team, then pick off any survivors. There's a certain irony in killing them with the weapon they sought to wield against you.
[X] Death From Above. Half a dozen soldiers with light armour and small arms - manageable enough foes you think, especially with Sidhe to assist and the advantage of surprise. Cut them down and end this threat before it can truly begin.
[x] Death by Proxy. Servitors such as these respond to noise and movement. Use that to bait a swarm of them into overrunning the small team, then pick off any survivors. There's a certain irony in killing them with the weapon they sought to wield against you.
[X] Death From Above. Half a dozen soldiers with light armour and small arms - manageable enough foes you think, especially with Sidhe to assist and the advantage of surprise. Cut them down and end this threat before it can truly begin.
