Turn 4 (2-300, M42) Part 1 (Fluff)
Spartakrod
Judeo-Spartacist Bolshevik-Kabbalist
- Location
- Sanctum Arcanorum
- Pronouns
- Fae/Faer/Faers/Faerself
Turn 4, Year 2-300 of M42
Xiang slouched further back in his chair as he finished typing onto his mechanical keyboard. He was at best half dressed, having not bothered to dress himself in more than a t-shirt and shorts while he worked in his office. By the Imperial Calendar, another century had passed, though of course time was a rather difficult to pin down thing at a cosmic scale with the oddities of warp travel and relativity at play. Decades separated him from the experiences of the Moradash war, and right now he was more worried with the endless pages of text on the screen in front of him than military campaigns.
"COMRADE ZHU, FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION"
However fast he was, there always seemed to be another report asking for his direct attention. He could go through a hundred in a moment, and there would be ten thousand more.
He didn't need to go through all of them, but he had a dearth of better things to do at the moment and he had to maintain a quota of actual work done in order to not slip into a habit of turning into a lounge lizard.
He spun around in his wheeled chair for a bit of relief, stopping before hitting reply on the latest message he had finished writing his response for.
He was a scholar, but even he could succumb to tedium after dealing with a nation's worth of requests, forms, and solicitations. Though he did find some amusement in reading through the odder requests like asking him for romantic advice since like most dragons he had gone through a great many lovers and maintained one of "healthy complexity" to the present.
He ate from his plate of Vurdani rice, vegetable, and poultry curry at a temperature that would have scalded the interior of the mouths of a human and burned in a non-spicy way all the way down to the oesophagus, taking from a plate that would have been able to feed an entire party. His tongue tilted the spoon in his mouth while tabbed over to some more pleasure oriented browsing, nodding his head to some music he had playing.
Life had settled into a sense of normalcy, and he did appreciate the fact that he could spend much of his day just...not doing a whole lot of productive value. The right to just be lazy sometimes was crucial, and he did enjoy the days when he could sit back and catch up on some of his favourite comics, though he was irked to see an advertisement for a manhua clearly based on him and his sister whose cover art gave him strong siscon vibes.
They were free to make such things, but it never failed to make him feel awkward to know there were people who thought of him and his twin in such a...vulgar way. She was beautiful, talented, and possessed of a splendid personality; the thought of being romantically involved with her also made him want to throw up, especially as he knew all the little things about her that needled him right in the quick of the claw as only a twin brother could; and so she of him.
For one thing, her habit of just letting out a burp after downing a carbonated drink had annoyed him ever since they had hatched. At the same time, she considered his obsession with geometrically perfect interior decorating to be outright maddening, especially when he moved half the furniture every week when they shared a room. Not to mention that her body, no matter what form she took, did absolutely nothing for him. The two simply could not see each other that way.
When she entered, in basic shorts and a tanktop, he didn't even give her form a second glance, just a quick bit of eye contact before she helped herself to his personal space to look at his screen and scrutinise the manhua he was reading.
"He dies in the next chapter." She said, pointing to a major rival character and drawing a scandalised expression out of Xiang and a yelp of not inconsiderable outrage while she cackled like a demon.
"You really are evil!" He protested while she flicked his forehead and got a light chop to her nose from his other hand in response, a little slap coming to his arm followed by a halfhearted smack to her shoulder before they entered an outright slapfight with the energy and power of kindergarteners arguing over who would get the first scoop of chocolate ice cream.
One of the Vermillion Dragon Guard entered the room, their armoured frame illuminated by holoposters and standing out amidst the decorations while the guandao in their hands was tapped against the ground to signal that they were standing at attention.
The two's hands stopped moving as they looked towards the guard.
"Comrades Zhu, if you would please dress quickly, you have business from Asahikyo awaiting you. Comrades Taiyoko and Tsukito ar-" The guard said before the two dragons shot the man a glance.
"If it's Taiyoko and Tsukito tell them to come in! I haven't used the baths yet and it'd be great to catch up with them!" Xinyi said, a grin from ear to ear.
"Well...it is always nice to catch up with good company, and Taiyako and Tsukito are company at the Onsen I'd never turn down.." He said while the Guard let out a sharp exhale.
"Is this necessary?"
"Yes." They said in unison.
...
Yamamoto Tsukito and Taiyoko were dragons much like Xinyi and Xiang, and much like them, tended to spend most of their time in human form simply for the greater convenience of being smaller and also for using infrastructure generally meant for more humanoid body plans than the serpentine Celestial Dragon or the winged Infernal Dragon body types. All of their bodies trended towards lean but highly physically fit, the bodies of athletes and warriors, not models or bodybuilders, agile and toned rather than bulky or curvy.
As their names entailed, Tsukito was a man of the moon, Taiyoko a lady of the sun. Taiyoko's hair was shorter than Xinyi's, Tsukito's was longer than Xiang's. Tsukito's hair was Purple with white streaks and flecks of harvest moon yellow, and Taiyoko's was yellow with black streaks like sunspots and flecks of coronal purple. While everyone at the onsen was fully nude, for dragons, appearance, as something that was entirely up to the specific dragon's tastes, was merely part of a package. Not to mention that the atmosphere was far too casual and friendly for it to have any real erotic flair, though that could change at a moment's notice.
"You certainly have put a great deal of effort into trying to impress, haven't you?" Taiyoko said with an impish smirk before sipping from a goblet.
"Kin are kin. It'd reflect poorly on us if we didn't have something ready for fellow dragons." Xiang replied, briefly flicking through something on a tablet before Xinyi pushed the device gently out o fhis hands and onto the floor behind him.
"We have guests, ge ge.[1]" She said with a finger wag to her brother who let out a sigh, a roll of his eyes, and a pronounced huff.
"Terrible." He murmured while Tsukito let out a belly laugh.
"Siblings born of the same clutch are your greatest friend and worst enemy no matter the clan." Tsukito chuckled while he helped himself to a moon cake offered by one of the automata, munching with his mouth open until Taiyoko flicked his nose with her middle finger to make him close it.
"Well, what brings you from the Domain of Sun and Moon?" Xinyi said, her tone switching from that of a gremlin sister to a refined diplomat as if someone had flicked a light switch.
"Does everything have to be a state visit Xin-xin?" Tsukito folded his arms and made a mock huff. "Can't we just say hello sometimes? What happened to you being the fun sibling?"
"You indicated to the guard that you had important business, so please try to get that out of the way first before we engage in horseplay." Xiang said folding his hands atop his lap beneath the water.
"Why can't you be more like that Tsuki?" Taiyoko teased, getting a breathed out "bite me" in response before he cleared his throat.
"We were wondering if and when you could expand horizons beyond your current enclaves in Vay-gir There are several things we could do if we committed to some joint operations. What the Imperials call Hive Armada Baphomet, or Tsuchigomo to us, threatens both of our peoples." He said, relaxing himself and settling into a more serious form of conversation.
"Right now, we are only allocated advisory positions over four territories. However, we have plans to deal with the black legion presence in this galaxy to cement the transfer of command." Xinyi replied, her chin in her hand while her eyes scrutinised the other's face.
"Araghast's minions have been mostly focused on the Imperium of Man, and quite frankly I don't see much of a reason to not let the close-minded occidental barbarian bigots rip each other to shreds." Taiyoko sneered, nose crinkly at the thought of lending a hand to the savages of the Imperium.
"The Terran humans have the culture of a fencepost, the brains of rocks, and coal mines for hearts. Quite frankly, we should just let them weaken each other and finish off the winner and then uplift their civilians from their barbarism. The Imperium would do the same to us, so why give them mercy we would never get from them?" Taiyoko finished.
"It is true that they are a loudmouthed bunch of xenophobic savages and backwards-looking bigots indoctrinated into death cults, but we should consider practicality here." Xiang said, folding his own arms over his chest while Xinyi internally cringed at his choice of words.
"Chaos cannot be coexisted with, it seeks the ruination of the collective until the individual's all-consuming id leads to his own destruction. And to ensure its containment, we must give people solidarity in their homes and work, a wealth to their commons, and a security in their future." Xiang mused, casually waxing philosophical between sips of wine.
"If we can force the imperium's outposts here into a dependent relation with a debt owed to the harmonious peoples, we can innoculate the region against chaos, and steer its suffering people away from the teachings of their tinpot Terran tyrants and their primitive religious teachings and towards righteousness." He said, Xinyi and Tsukito outright grimacing at this point.
"Well...we should at least keep options open. Besides, these talks aren't formal anyway. So don't get too committed to the ideas we're throwing around here." Xinyi harrumphed, trying to rerail this conversation back away from...whatever this was.
"The necrons are also drastically increasing their activities. One of the minor satellites of Vay-Giir has been entirely overrun by the Marakesh dynasty, and from what the shinobi can report, the dynasty's rulers have no interest in negotiating for what they deem to be rightly theirs." Tsukito added, using a bit of illusion magic to highlight confirmed Marakesh dynasty territories across the Bentsui cluster.
"Stopping the Necrons is something never done without great cost. We are shadows of what we once were, while the dynasties have preserved great portions of their might...campaigns against them would require immense resources." Xiang pointed out, in the time he had fought the reawakened Necrons, he had seen entire squadrons of ships have to die to simply inflicting meaningful damage on a single one of the souless ones' vessels of the same weight class.
"But if the necrons are allowed to amass in strength, it might be too late to stop them when the Marakesh turn their eyes elsewhere." Tsukito countered.
"We aren't exactly well positioned to do anything about them however, and as dreadful as they are on the battlefield, they aren't impossible to reason with." Xinyi sighed, stretching with one arm raised high and another folded to help keep it affixed in a straightened position.
"Xinyi does have a point, our resources are great, not infinite, and we should prioritise problems that need our attentions straight away, rather than problems for later." Taiyako's finger flicked to her counterpart before being raised to the ceiling, to indicate local space.
"Though speaking of corpses, the Unliving are sallying forth against our realm." Xinyi added, pursing her lips and having herself a think about the consequences of the current direction of things. "And where the undead rain, they will eventually pour, unless stamped out soon enough." She continued.
"We are in the time of a Dark Omen, the Undead will be restless from one end of the universe to the other. But do you think you can handle everything on your own?" Tsukito asked.
"The corpse-spawn fear the sun, if we act decisively enough we should cut the beast off at the head and let the body fall back to the grave from whence it came." Taiyako of course, had quite little to fear from the unliving, being such a blazing conduit of Hysh as she was.
"Attacking first would disrupt their momentum, especially if we can cull the necromancers in sufficient numbers. Allowing a war of attrition would be of course, a mistake just as much as it would be with the Taotie or the Greenskins."
"Ah, there you are!" Another voice called out, another dragon, the Gojingukese accent making Xinyi whip her head around fast enough to produce a snapping sound.
"...the Tae twins?" Xiang murmured before an orange, gunmetal, and green haired young man cannonballed straight into the water, spraying the four other dragons flinching in response, while the sister followed suit, synchronizing her cannonball to make the largest possible splash.
Xiang blinked and frowed while he quickly became the centre of everyone's teasing laughter, dripping wet and clearly not happy about it while Xinyi remained bone dry, the water simply flowing away from her like the red sea from the staff of Moses.
"...Yu-Jun and Young-Mi...delightful." He said before yet more of his kind helped themselves into their section of the springs, what had once been a rather secluded and private place now an outright roost for dozens of dragons both Infernal and Celestial.
"Well...it seems that negotiations are over for the moment." Xinyi beamed.
...
Rogue Trader
"Where is Lady Elizabeth?" Ambassador Li Rong asked, folding her hands on the desk while looking at the fresh faced Imperial Youth in front of her, a young man who carried himself with the age he seemed to be instead of with the experience that one can expect from someone who had been on rejuvenants for a while.
"Back at our primary Estate Station to deal with succession issues. You know how it is." He said, blond hair catching in the light while the black haired Ambassador quirked a brow beneath her AR spectacles.
"This is a republic." She said simply.
"...Haven't you got an Emperor and an Empress and your dragon nobility?" He asked before she narrowed her gaze even further and drew her lips into a fine line.
"Those are mistranslations. Power is invested in the populace through the Jianyi. But enough of that particular diversion." She said, rotating the physical display screen over to him, eyes briefly flicking over to a secondary monitor as she typed up some commands into the cogitator and made a few clicks to bring up what she wanted.
Blue eyes looked over a pile of information regarding distant threats.
"Eh..why are you showing me all the basics?"
"You are new here, it's just a courtesy so that you aren't in the dark." She said, gloved hands popping some of her knuckles while he had himself a cursory look.
"Anyway, my name is..."
"Jacen." She finished.
"Right, up and coming scion of the House of York." He flashed a nervous grin.
"You don't strike me as a crazed monodominant so I'm expecting this conversation to be somewhat productive." She said with calculated casualness, expecting the Rogue Trader to be neck deep in noble etiquette and unused to being spoken to by a foreigner as just a person.
"Were you...like this with gran?" He asked.
"Often. We're on a rather casual basis."
"Throne, Cog, and Keep I'm not ready..." He muttered, making the aquila on his chest.
"Excepting that...uhh..." He stammered as he reached for a dataslate handed to him by a servoskull that Rong looked at like she was staring at a partial-birth abortion's aftermath.
"...At least it's not a Cherub..." She murmured, grateful that the abominable things were outright forbidden from entering this building for "sanitary reasons".
"What's wrong with it? Has it got dirt on it?"
"No, it's because it's a human skull following you around like a necromancer's familiar." She replied.
"By Terra's former seas I'd never cavort with bloody necromancers. On the honour of this household we have kept the living dead at bay wherever we find them for a thousand generations!" He huffed.
The fact that he had to specify that Terra only once had seas for his exclamation made her endeavour never to visit Domain Solaria in her lifetime lest she get a whiff of air rumoured by the Cosmonet to be more chemically toxic to breathe for unaugmented human lungs unfiltered than Pre-terraformation Venus'. And that planet apparently used to be mostly Carbon Dioxide and Sulphuric Acid by atmospheric content.
Of course, what she didn't know is that Terra wasn't quite that polluted. Sure it had bloated into a megastructure of ecumenopoli shells built atop each other in a nested series of layers around what had once been a normal planet, sure it contained more humans than many galaxies did in their entirety, and sure it was a sprawling mess of habitats, hydroponics, military garrisons, recycling facilities, religious infrastructure, esoteric structures, manufacturing facilities, and administrative offices, but the air was technically breathable without a respirator thanks to a lengthy pollution standards campaign started after one of the high lords of terra was melted into sludge by superacidic rain.
And it only took the deaths of a number of labourers best expressed in scientific notation from poor working conditions and the summary execution of about ten trillion officials on Terra alone.
"What I am at liberty as per the Governing Council's mandate, to share with you is that the Imperium is preparing a major troop surge into the Cluster to secure it against the forces of the archenemy and other myriad foes. A crusade has been called, and we would like for you to at the very least, remain neutral towards it as it is not in either of our interests to engage in a war between our two great empires." He said, letting her flick through the tablet to get her eyes on all the information she deemed relevant.
"We would also like a guarantee of the protection of those of our faith within your territory to quash rumours that our faithful are being pressured into conversion by those of pagan or sceptical persuasions within the Celestial Realm." He said, once again making the Aquilla in reverence to the Emperor, the Empress, and the Omnissiah.
"So long as a faith does not repeatedly commit to the sponsoring of terrorism or sectionalism at an organisational level, they have nothing to fear from the Security Commissariat." She replied, looking up without tilting her head away from the tablet.
"Be that as it may, we both know that the status of the Triune Creed, the Cult Mechanicus, and the Imperial Truth within Harmonic space are subject to political convenience and that charismatic preachers are often cited in your propaganda as dangerous extremists."
"What else would you call preachers calling for violence?"
"Don't you advocate for revolution?"
"In the abstract, that if the gains of the people are threatened by violence, that it be responded to with defensive violence in return, but not with specific calls of liquidation of specific groups of people who have yet to engage in anti-social criminality." She replied flatly.
"Anti-Social criminality is a term defined by the society." Jacen retorted.
"True but meaningless. What are you offering in exchange?" She said, making it clear that if this conversation was to get anywhere it would have to be a two way street.
"We are prepared to offer joint operations against some of our mutual enemies as had happened in the Ork War. And a further increase in the flow of trade between our two nations through the appropriate channels." He said, getting her to tap her stylus on her desk in thought.
"That's a start, at least."
...
A Dark Omen
The dead do not rest, for they do not tire.
Under the auspices of Ahkenaten and the other great Mortarchs sworn to Nagash, the Dark Omen has fallen upon the stars and the legions of death spill forth in numbers to darken every sun in every sky. The skeletal hosts move with witchfire in their empty eyesockets, while the necromancers wind their unliving tissue tight with Nagash's teachings to let them dance the danse macabre.
The undead are as feared as Chaos by those who know of them, for as the saying in high gothic goes "Mors vincit omnia", death conquers all, mortals try to run from it, the Imperial nobility sinks vast fortunes into delaying their final appointment with it, many creatures think themselves above it, cultures have defined vast sections of their life to coping with it. But with enough time, with enough years, everything dies. Even Black Holes have a finite lifespan, though it is a span beyond human comprehension. Even things that exist as purely social constructs; religions, nations, culture, societies, languages, even fashion trends or slang parlance; they also die one day.
So Nagash calls himself the God of Everything, the Deus Deorum Omnia, for in his teachings, everything passes into his domain sooner or later. He cannot be avoided, he cannot be denied, not forever, and he cannot be defeated, only kept at bay until time crushes all things material beneath its trod and leaves only dust and ghosts. And his presence gnaws at the afterlives of all life, a gaping maw within the warp into which all souls seek to fall one day, whether it is as part of the natural cycle, or when he annexes the afterlives of those lesser death gods who can no longer keep the great Pharaoh from collecting his toll.
He is a whisper in the back of all minds, a fear in every heart, a chill down every spine. If you believe his sacraments as the greatest portion of the cults of undeath do. The One who will bring peace to the living by bringing it in harmony with death at last, who will subsume all nations, all castes, and all creeds into one truth that will eliminate all divisions of class, faith, and race beneath the One True God. There will be many and they will all be One and it shall be good.
But Nagash was not the sole master of the undead, no matter how much he wished it so. The unliving of Shardarat held to the doctrine advanced by the Republican Conspiracy of Academics. A term that belied how truly sinister it was, undead who advocated for dominance by magical and knowledge power alone, not by bloodline and lineage, not by religion or cult. A nation of death by the masters of death who build the necropolis with their own mastery, to advance a nation of death by the practitioners of the invincible truth that all die and those who control death control all.
This was the creed declared by the invasion of Shyalarad by forces from Shardarat. Ships bedecked in gargoyles and cursed icons dedicated to the ideal of Necrorepublicanism, the commonwealth of Magocrats who would rule a nation of the masters of dark magic for the masters of dark masters. Space Hulks would anchor their sinister fleet, sent as a probing force to see if the dead could make a conquest here, and the skies of countless worlds darkened with the shape of landing shuttles and drop pods.
Void Fortresses would open up with staccato brackets of fire, while defensive patrol monitors turned their gaze towards the sinister fleets shrouded in balefire mist and the winds of shyish, and the Relay nodes soon broadcasted their signals across the realm's outposts to warn the command councils of the incoming threat.
The fleets of the undead focused on both large ships bedecked in the means to spread magic as well as swarms of fodder craft, though the Academic Republic's craft also included plenty of cruisers that were the host to many necrocrats who would command both the machine spirits of the ships themselves and their rather literal skeleton crew. Heavy long range bombardment would erupt from countless prow mounted weapons and a field of stars would emerge from the carriers and missile boats sliding through the void.
Stars that upon close examination, were flocks of strike craft and missiles racing into the teeth of interceptors scrambled in short order to meet them and walls of flak and CIWS fire. Surface to Void weapons trained upwards, fixating on the signals they detected and splitting the heavens with massive gamma-ray laser pulses or titanic mass driver rounds, silos opening up to release long-distance missiles in titanic numbers until the clouds were as contrails and assembly points filled with soldiers ready to defend their homes away from home.
With the undead weight of numbers, many still closed to land on planets en masse, waves of rotting flesh and bone shambling and marching forwards while ghosts shrieked in the heavens above, swarming in patterns like locust plagues while making their unearthly death wails. Drop pods full of densely packed together bone would slam into the ground whenever they weren't shot down first, necro-crystals humming to life and stirring the charnelhouse with animus that made the bones assemble into skeletons that grabbed their equipment from bottom hatch compartments and then march out in that odd, synchronised stepping pattern.
Fossils and things that once contained fossils or the bones of the dead ripped free from the ground in an army of tainted earth and stone, shambling towards the drop pods containing weapons to arm the "fresh recruits" even while being bombarded by enough artillery to make the ground heave and liquefy. Even when alchemobaric warheads exploded in their midst from rocket launcher batteries to disintegrate all traces of a body to leave nothing to animate, the dead did not increase their pace.
Haunted tanks rolled forward, ghost light emanating from even the smallest of crevices cannons barking as they shot at everything in sight without hesitation. Sponson guns erupted to life, and stabbing lances of retaliatory fire would strike at shielding, armour, or points of penetrability. The dead did not care, the Republic would progress forwards under the sight of its haunted knights and trundling supervehicles, the skies darkening with aircraft and winged beasts as well as the flaming wreckage of those taken down by anti-air fire.
Tracers danced out in patterns thick enough that one could imagine getting out of their plane and simply walking all the way down to the ground on them. Sigils started to glow, trying to keep the haunted incorporeal monsters at a distance while those who could even retaliate against ethereal horror were mobilised. The streets became quiet, once bustling with life and people just going about their day whether for work or pleasure. The Citizens had been moved to shelter complexes while the Celestial People's Liberation Army commandeered their facilities for war, and the speakers of the harmonious path and the shrine spirits made their offerings and prayers to ward from evil.
...
[h1][/h1]
Commissariat of Research and Development
Jiang Xiao looked through his notes on the screen, adjusting the light robes of office he wore to indicate his position as a scientist. Somewhere between labcoat and scholar's robes, his outfit was white for the same reason that labcoats were generally white, and he was feverishly reviewing the data his team had recorded on another screen.
"These materials demonstrate a wonderful potential in enhancing the capabilities of our armour and building materials. Even lower grades can allow for rapid construction of vital civilian infrastructure in huge quantities." He typed into his notes, transcribing the data onto the other document with a few flicks of the hologram and taking a moment to adjust anything the Construct Mind said that he felt wasn't what the report needed.
"For example, from tests conducted, we can conclude that while in its standard form, the psychoreactive materials will offer an advantage to our psykers and sorcerers, integrating it into building materials will allow for greater resonance with geometric semiotics and engraved characters to amplify their effect." He continued, briefly confirming the choice of words with Ling Ying who gave it a once over before offering him a nod.
"Comrade, I would also make note that this does serve as an important stepping stone into other psychoactive forms of research. For example, the lost wisdom of semiotic alchemy may be rediscovered through this." Zhang Yun cut in, the younger researcher stepping a bit closer to Xiao as he was speaking to Ying.
"Semiotic Alchemy is a bold claim to make, comrade Yun, do you have evidence?" He asked, hopeful but guarded.
"Of course, I would not wish to make an ass of myself or this team. But perhaps you will find these files of interest?" He transferred data from his personal cogitator to the mainframe, the Construct Mind in charge going over the information before its feminine avatar appeared and gave a nod.
"This report is within an acceptable degree of deviation from my own observations of comrade Yun's activities for me to consider it truthful within a one-in-a-trillion range of confidence." Kongxi said, her frame dressed sharply in modern, trendy clothes in her holographic avatar, with a small face and youthful pigtails to give a "research team's little sister" vibe.
"And your subteam is confident we can expand on this into deeper breakthroughs soon?" Ying asked, tapping her augmented reality spectacles with the end of her stylus to relieve a sense of building restlessness in her fingers.
"Indeed, while I do not think we will be able to catch up to the Eldar's wraithbone and psychoplastic particularly soon, if we expand on this, we could achieve a major step on the road to reclaiming our old glories in the art of thaumaturgic engineering." He said, offering a small bow to his seniors.
"Militarily, this work also holds significant promise for not merely armour and construction, but the construction of better projectiles and melee weapons. Of course, such applications will be more the work of the engineering departments than our own." Kongxi added with a chipper voice as she ran a number of models through her digitised mind, not perfect as this involved an element of warpcraft, but enough to give a good idea of where she was going with her train of thought.
"...Interesting...give us some time to go over all the results before we publish them within the internal network." Xiao said, mind aflame with possibilities.
...
Schoolyard Days
As one could expect from what was often called the Academic Socialist Republic by some, the Celestial People's Realm put a tremendous amount of emphasis on education. Even on backwater planets schools were given a tremendous deal of resources for their construction and staffing, with both adult and child education being considered of paramount importance. On the Drae Nang capital world, Tylanius; renamed Zhujian by the vote of the planet's populace in honour of Xiang and Xinyi; there were academic complexes that were as cities unto themselves, where people could live and work as well as learn.These grounds had once surrounded a Cathedral of the Cult Mechanicus, the property up to the very limits of the Mechanicus' grounds bearing a massive estate devoted to the House Ferrozaitus which owned the Calybean Industrial Concern, one of the largest corporations within the territory. Though the Mechanicus Cathedral remained, house Ferrozaitus' estate had been largely demolished and replaced save for places of historical value or interest such as the estate "chapel" (more a cathedral of the Triune Creed in its own right) to make room for the Zhuyuan Secondary School.
Where there was once an opulent monument to a corporate dynasty able to outright buy a title of nobility, there was now a great and sprawling campus building, with statues of magical beasts as well as flagpoles bearing the red banner of the People's Celestial Realm flapping in the breeze. Most of what had once been an Imperial Hive had been replaced with a multi-use arcology that had ample green spaces to allow docile flora and fauna to mingle with the populace, such as some of the planet's feathered pterosaur-like fliers roosting atop alcoves, bringing food to squawking chicks while more avian like animals swooped through the twists and turns, chasing down arthropods.
The fact that this was once a centre of pollution was a distant memory, with blue sky gleaming clearly above through opened panels after determining that the outside environment was pleasant enough to not need to button up. Most of the old architecture had been torn down and replaced entirely over the past few centuries due to not meeting safety and health standards, Hip-and-gable Xieshan style roofs and Pagodas had replaced most of the old spires and steeples, while guardian animal statuary had supplanted the prior gargoyles.
Servitors had been banished entirely, with truly menial labour entirely managed by fully mechanical constructs, and the once omnipresent purity seals and devotional monuments were largely crowded out by idols for good fortune, talismans, shrines to incorporeal spirits invited to live amidst the populace, and odds and ends brought by a thousand, thousand different nations. Whether it was Ogor elemental cooking halls, Eldar Groves, Dawi ancestor hearths, Asahikijin Jinja, Vudrani Mandira, Epsilon Advent shuls, Sarhuadin Tidehomes, Q'Orl Gods' Nests, Sigmarite Churches, Kadeshani Masjids, or one of any number of other religions; the omnipresence of the Triune Creed, Cult Mechanicus, and Imperial Truth were distant memories.
Though the eclectic mixture of beliefs often called the Xiandao, the way of the immortals; a tradition born of the teachings of the Tian Shenxian and a great many philosophers both native and foreign to the Tian'Chao; had become the majority spiritual belief, the People's Celestial Realm was open to all faiths that would acclimate to the path of harmony. So long as they did not use it to organise problems, there was no issue with the Cult Mechanicus or the Ancestor Gods, but monodominant Triune Rabblerousers were only slightly less unwelcome than the Cults of Chaos or Nagash by the sole virtue of having less immediate supernatural danger behind them. That being said, Triunists who were willing to take advantage of the loose nature of the Ecclesiastic faith to integrate rather than agitate were also welcome.
Into this cosmopolitan nexus born from an edifice to imperial cartel greed we find our heroine of the hour on her way to Zhuyuan's campus, riding in a train with headphones over her ears to listen to some music from Asahikyo while scrolling through posts on her hand-cogitator , hastily writing out a 20 character dunk when she saw some exceptional tomfoolery.
Mao Qingling, first-year secondary student, ninth-generation resident of Zhujian, stood up from her seat as she felt the train come to a stop walked from the train station that was built into the Campus with rather casual clothes. The rigid uniform system of the Imperium of Man's decentralised educational system was a distant memory, and children largely wore what they wanted. And whereas once even the abhumans were largely segregated, multiple species now mingled together, at least where similar maturation rates and physiological needs permitted. Her skirt flowed with her movements, long socks covering up most of the skin not hidden by the skirt while her boots lacked onto the ground.
Her blouse was kept closed, adjusting a bowtie on her neck while she dragged a wheeled rucksack behind her, carrying things she couldn't fit into her backpack or the totebag she also carried slung over her shoulder as if to advertise to the entire world that she was the sort of person who didn't like to travel light, even with a pair of helper automatons, one flying, one walking, carrying some more of her things with her.
"Mao! Mao! Wait up!" Long Li said, the boy waving over to her as he quickly stepped off the train and caught his breath.
"Oh you're actually coming today?" She asked as Li straightened himself, ignoring the Ratling who flipped him off for cutting in front of him to catch up to Mao.
"...I don't take that many remote lessons." Li frowned visibly at her words while she smirked, the two passing by an old Aquila statue, with a plaque simply noting it as "one of the rare Aquilla icons that survived the Khornate occupation before the liberation war, preserved as a memorandum of an earlier age" As the Imperial era increasingly passed from public memory, the Jianyi's stewardship towards the relics of that imperial era had shifted to mostly considering it an interesting quirk of the place's past rather than a lived experience.
But it didn't stop some people from claiming some of that past for clout.
"You know, my ancestors fought alongside Xiang and Xinyi! Even took a shot at Gartak that helped them win" Li said, raising a finger in triumph while Qingling's purple eyes scrutinised him for bullshit.
"You're still saying that even in front of the statue, huh?" She teased, smirking visibly with mischievous intent.
"Because it's true Qi-qi!" He insisted, though her doubt raised even further by his use of a pet nickname, his optional to wear school uniform fully buttoned up like some kind of dork that made him stand out amidst more casually dressed students.
The two passed by a statue of Xiang and Xinyi in dragon form, driving a sword and a guandao through a writhing dragon ogor at their feet, marking the spot where Gartak had died centuries ago. More than ten generations ago in fact...ancient history.
"See that's the deathmark from the shot my tenth grandfather Long Zhou took!" He said, gesturing at a discolouration of Gartak's ruined body in metallic form.
"...He was roasted inside out and bashed apart! How would one gunshot matter?" She argued, her ponytail blowing in the wind while they approached the doors of the academy, students scuttling around from one room to the next, many stopping at one of the myriad eateries to request something to eat. The two of them were arguing all the way to a table where she ordered grox ramen and he got a plate of an assortment of Jianbinng; crepe style dishes with myriad fillings.
Janice Aytara pulled herself a seat, sitting down with her blonde hair moved to the side to prevent herself from sitting on it. She was an imperial, descended from Meredith Aytara. Blue eyes couldn't help but stare at the two as she tried to piece together the context of their prior conversation.
Meanwhile, they couldn't help but stare at her plate of lightly salted rice omlette and sausage with the faintest dusting of pepper as if she'd brought in a dead body.
"Eating all that without any seasoning or sauce?" Qingling asked, crinkling her nose.
"I put on some pepper." She said sheepishly while Li shook his head.
"You eat like you're depressed Janice." He said, passing her some ketchup to at least experiment a little.
"Oh pishposh I'm fine." She huffed, taking a bit and chewing thoroughly while pulling out a portable cogitator to go through some assignments.
Pointing to one set of files, she looked at Qinngling in a somewhat pleading way to get across her intentions without speaking, prompting her to lead in and have a look.
"That project isn't expected for review in a month, we haven't even had the workshop about how to do it." She said, a scolding glare present in her eyes while Janice frowned.
"...Really? Is that i-oh throne I've read the date wrong." Colour tinged her cheeks while she realised all at once that she'd played herself for a fool, a belly laugh coming out of Li in response.
The remainder of their breakfast and homeroom passed largely uneventfully, mostly a notice that someone important would be visiting the school which got some idle speculation going.
"It's probably an idol." Takeda Izumi proposed, smug enough to have a proud smirk at the clear genius of his suggestion. "I bet it's Akane, she's supposed to be visiting the planet for a tour right? Who's to say she wouldn't be coming here?"
"What for? To see the idol club? Come on be realistic, it's probably a local councillor or some scientist." Gao Peng responded with a dismissive laugh.
"Could be some Rogue Trader asked to speak?" Janice suggested before being met with even more disbelieving looks.
"They'd never let an imperial agent here, come on." Li dismissed with a wave of his hand.
"Maybe they'll be well-behaved?" She said.
"Oh sure and the Zhu twins will offer a history lecture." Izumi snorted, prompting an argument that was stopped by Qingling's shoulder shake to both Li and Izumi.
She noted that the Epsilon Advent professor'; Tevye Gurion; gaze, though never easy to tell impossible to tell the exact direction of through their one way visor, did seem to be fixated on them for the moment.
"As much as lively discussion is encouraged in this facility, you should best prepare to move to your next period." The suit-clad abhuman said with a mysterious echo to their voice, black gloves steepling their fingers together in a scholarly manner.
"And Mao...six cases is entirely too much things for one person to carry." He said, looking at her robotic luggage helpers and her multitude of cases.
"You should prioritise what you actually need." He added before the chime sounded and he dismissed them with a wave.
The history lecture though, did provide rather more excitement, as the usual teaching team head; Jiang Shenhe stepped to the side to allow someone else take the main podium as everyone gathered at one work desk or the other, crowding into their usual groups.
Devices were plugged in, team assistants conferred briefly with the white haired madame Jiang, and a quick run of the stock of reading material was done for those students who preferred physical texts at designated shelves in the octagonal room. Material for activities was handed out, with students quickly taking a look at the physical curios and the programs being distributed, including the curious addition of learn through play software onto their cogitators, whispers going through the rather cozy, warmly lit room.
The wings, the blue hair, the square AR glasses, the purple tinges to the suit he wore...
Whispers were already going through the class' students, speculations...could it be?
"Good day comrades, I am Chen Haoyu-" The screeching and squealing of excitement made his next words die in his throat as he closed his eyes and maintained a smile, small wings coming from his temples to cover up his ears. He may have been a legendary hero who could stare down a Great One, but a bunch of twelve year olds shouting at once was a bit beyond his comfort zone. Leaving it up to Shenhe to calm everyone down with a murmured "thank you" from the Fenghuan.
"I'm here to introduce you to some of the history of this territory as someone who participated in it. Especially the work we did building the Wu Jin magistra-" He said before one student, Yi Han, raised her hand, quickly getting a "yes?" from the bird.
"What about the liberation wars?" She asked, Haoyu's smile growing a bit more nervous as he made a small, awkward chuckle.
"Look, military history is not really important for children to learn outside of civil defence courses unless you've taken it as an elective." He said, trying to let her down gently.
All youth in the Realm were required to take civil defence as a course every year to teach them up to a reservist level of military readiness by the time of adulthood, with many going on further to take commander courses. Such helped ensure a lack of divide between the military and civilian spheres, and also ensured that mass mobilisation could be done quickly. Qingling herself had gotten high praise for her marksmanship and creative thinking in these courses, but to hear one of the Xian Shenren say not to stress about it when he had the military record he did…
"Comrade Chen!" Qingling blurted out, though she didn't signal a desire to speak, Haoyu allowed it.
"Yes?" He said, letting his glasses confirm things. "Comrade Qingling, your question?" He continued.
"How can expect us to not ask about the battles you fought? Are you naive?" She said, Janice's eyes growing wide while Li barely stifled a laugh.
"While that's a fair point, I can't exactly be a regular at this facility, and I wanted to show how we got from this." He said, pulling up an image of what had once been Nodnol hive, a shockingly dirty layer cake arcology with a life expectancy below retirement age, to the city of Zhujing.
"Xiang really hated the proposal to rename the city to Zhujing you know?" Haoyu chuckled as he pointed to the changed characters.
"Said it felt embarrassing, though you'd never hear him say that in public." He said, Qinglinng's eyes briefly darting to Peng furiously typing something into her BL fic document in response, tongue slightly sticking out while Qingling tried her best not to giggle.
Shenhe tapped his shoulder and he cleared his throat. "Oh right, sorry, time that's…anyway…if you open the arcology simulator programs on your cogitators and set them to the late Nodnol time period, can any of you list some reasons why people didn't live very long?" He said, trying to outpace the barrage of questions he was sensing coming his way.
Qingling clicked and brought up the program, eyes scanning through its GUI, looking through statistics that read out all sorts of health concerns and samples of the average resident.
"People lived like this?" Izumi asked, a frown on his small face as he leaned in.
"Lots of them still do, in the Imperium." Li responded.
"They have the resources for a palace like that? These labourers' bedrooms are too small to stand in!" Peng said when she tried to play around with settings to deal with the listed common complaint of poor sleep quality among the working class.
Qingling looked at the statistics for the healthcare system and felt her ramen trying to jump out of her stomach when she saw that many of the poorest had to try and distill their water from the actual sewage system.
She pinged the lead lecturer's desk before one of the assistants could have a look at their table.
"Because all their resources go into luxury and power for people who don't do anything while the workers live in filth!" She said after Haoyu gave an approving nod.
"They work fourteen hours a day for five days straight to make nice things for the rich but half of them are eating food paste and powdered nutrient drink mix! It's disgusting!" She exclaimed.
"That is what we call exploitation. The Imperial citizens were very hard workers who used great machines to produce massive amounts of goods. But this group of people." Haoyu said, opening up the program to highlight the owner classes, cartel families, hugely wealthy ecclesiarchs, rogue trader dynasties, administratum overlords, nobility; sectioned off into rentiers and proprietors and into hereditary and non-hereditary.
"Are what we call the ruling class, who do not do much labour, but draw the majority of the value of production anyway because the law says they are entitled to it without the say of any Jianyi." He said, he didn't have to explain the role of the Jianyi or the Factory Committees and other elements of common planning and organisation, those were taken for granted at this age.
Qingling made another ping, and got another affirmation.
"So they…just let these people get all this luxury and did nothing? They just accepted drinking sewage while these people had their own airships and castles?" She asked, not comprehending it all, surely they would have just shot the people making them suffer like this.
"Well, that's where false consciousness comes in, making them believe this is just and natural and giving just enough of them hope that they could have it better, and that anyone who tried to change it was dangerous." Haoyu frowned grimly as he prepared for a barrage of questions.
…
Rats!
Across a front many thousands of lightyears across, the ramshackle ships of the Under-Imperium emerged from the underway to hit both Imperial and Celestial space. The Skaven were as unwilling to fight without numerical superiority in space as they were on land, and so by habit preferred to concentrate their fleets in larger formations rather than spread them out to deal with weaker targets of opportunity.
Their admiralty sought to achieve rapid dominance following the failure of their Eshin mercenaries to spark conflict between the two, invading into the territories of Iladrani and Taradranar from the Skaven strongholds of Veektok with a horde of sinister fascist rodents.
The Skaven always liked to keep some distance if they could help it, fighting with the usage of long range plague-rails, warp lightning casters, jezzail cannons, missiles, and more belched out from the more sophisticated craft produced by clan skyre while moulder void beasts and slaveships would take point, testing the batteries of defences prepared for them.
Stealthcraft designed to the standards of Clan Eshin would do their best to slip aboard stations and ships, releasing trained agents to sneak their way through obstacles and strike at points of vulnerability or importance. Turrets shut down or redirected, officers assassinated, power supplies sabotaged, munitions set ablaze. But it wasn't fool proof, many of them were caught and gunned down by defences both automated and manned. The Celestial Automata and the Astartes were not easily fooled and fortresses were designed with the intent of repelling secretive infiltration as much as overt attack.
Furthermore, in a large battle, there was only so much work special forces could do truly unnoticed, they could decide engagements and tip the balance of firefights, but not decide battles, not wars.
Furthermore, the Skaven didn't intend to rely solely on their elites, with Clanrats pouring into boarding engagement or raining upon planets in reinforced lander cities. As the name entailed, they would descend towards the planet to smash into the surface and dig in, allowing the skaven to access underground passages and establish their centres of production straight away. It was a tactic they had copied from the Ogors and the Orks, and one that while prone to causing quite a few Skaven deaths, served well to allow for rapid deployment of overwhelming numbers.
The Ratmen loved their trenches, digging them wherever they went to allow them to take cover and set up heavy weapons in safety as well as quickly reach their preferred underground spaces. And with how proficient they were at digging, this crawling trench warfare hardly slowed down their advance, anchored by the mass death of their slaves whose lives would fuel dreadful rituals and pressed by clanking machines and howling monstrosities.
The rats took disproportionate losses to be sure, but the daemons of the horned god would walk the materium in response to the slaughter of the slaves and the rituals cast by the lords of rodents. And there were always more of the ratspawn to take the places of those who fell, driven by gas mask fulls of chemicals to fill them with the musks of aggression to push past their cowardly instincts. While they did not rule the skies due to their disdain for one man fliers, they had amassed more than enough anti-air and the swirling vortices of air denial spells to help reduce their weakness in this regard.
Yet another century, yet another war.
…
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