"It's not that all mutants are evil, it's just that many mutations are signs of the secret taint of Chaos infestation, and the only way to be sure humanity is safe in 40k is to destroy mutants for looking too different!"
Been thinking about that whole "twisted in flesh means twisted in soul" thing. How about allowing that it's true, but dropping the part where there's an objectively correct standard soul-shape? I think there was even a thing in the fiction at some point where that was part of a gotcha clause - somebody promising "of equal value," implying "equal or greater," but then getting screwed because strictly speaking no two souls in all the universe are
exactly equal.
Anyway, shrine worlds as a warp-route terraforming program. Navigators and Farseers get together, go over progress reports. "There's been some off-axis wobble in that turbulent vortex coming from the plum blossom monastery on the southern peninsula. Not immediately critical, but if we want certification for a safe route all the way to Ixaniad, have to sort that out somehow within the next decade or three. Seems like what's needed is someone with ego-syntonic asymmetric self-image."
So they send out recruiters, bringing in disabled veterans who are justifiably proud of having lost an arm or leg doing something heroic, folks who look in the mirror and think "this eyepatch makes me look badass," many variations. Plum blossom monastery's internal culture shifts in subtle but precisely measurable ways with each addition, the Warp churns accordingly, models are refined.
"We've gotten closer," says the planning committee, "but pride and injury are adding the wrong kind of turbulence. Keystone will have to be someone with saintly wisdom and patience, one arm twice the size of the other, a third ear, no broken bones or bionics, and who considers all that
completely normal, unremarkable." So they send scouts to various polluted post-industrial hellholes.
"Of course I'd be glad to serve the wider Imperium," says the underhive gang leader equivalent of Fred Rogers, toting an enormous chainsaw-axe while handing out bowls of soup to orphans with his other, much smaller arm, "but can't you see I'm already doing important work here? If I left, who would take care of my people?"
"We're prepared to offer you twelve million thrones per year for fifty years, plus juvenat treatments, background checks and other support for hiring offworld experts, as well as general legal advocacy. You could buy a lot of soup with that, or just about anything else they might need. If even one starship arrives safely which, but for your involvement, would have been lost, we'll still come out ahead on the deal."
Lopsided Fred asks some follow-up questions, discovers that their second-best candidate is statistically expected to lose three more ships over the relevant period, so he haggles up to twenty million per year for thirty years with a renewal option. Crew of long-suffering but adequately paid tech-priests shuttles in to build a community vegetable garden and small, highly eccentric palace, all to the lumpy orphan kids' precise specifications.
