There is only war. The Empire clashes with the enigmatic the forces of Chaos over thousands of planets. Imperial Outpost 31415 is under siege by a horde of demons, and the last remaining batallion is holding its ground until reinforcements drop from orbit. Unbeknownst to them, but knownst to us, the battle over this frozen outpost will make history...
°°°
“Incoming!” Sergeant Willis ducked behind the sandbags when screaming balls of blue fire flew overhead, smashing against the concrete bunker behind him. One of the lascannons stopped firing. “Goddammit, where is our air support?”
Daemons ran over the icy fields, closing in on the third and only unbreached line before the outpost itself would be hit. Gun barrels rattled and sizzled from overuse; the only thing keeping them running where the subzero temperatures that kept the barrels from melting at the spot.
“Van Kook, keep that gatling firing! Piercon, check what's taking Tangent so long—we need that ammo! Cyggis, radio those marines and tell them to get their friggin' asses down here! Their first wave barely made it to the ground before they got their nuts ripped off!”
“Can I quote you on that, sarge?”
“Pretty please with frakking sugar on top.”
“Sarge, ammo's coming in!”
Willis kept his head down while seeing Tangent, a skinny man with a will to live, narrowly dodge the barrage of demonic fire raining from the sky and running at him. The private dove behind the sandbags, panting heavily with wide-open eyes. He needed some time to compute what was happening, time he was not getting anytime soon.
“Tangent,” Willis shouted. “Where the hell is my ammo?”
“The outpost is gone, sarge,” Tangent replied.
“What? How did they get past us?”
“No, I mean, it's gone, sarge. It's just not there anymore.”
“Are you pulling my leg, soldier?” Still, Willis snatched his binoculars from his belt and scanned the horizon behind him. And what he saw, he did not like. “Well, I'll be damned. It frakking did disappear into thin air.”
°°°
“Under my very nose.”
Rensat wasn't normally a woman to get excited easily. Having a more artistic view on affairs, she managed to put most situations in a calming perspective. Unfortunately for her, people were doing everything in their power to cram the most unnerving perspectives down her throat.
Hellebron, on the other hand, was calm as a daisy, sitting comfortably in the chair she was provided in Rensat's office. Being the de facto leader of the Temple of Khaine, Hellebron enjoyed a charismatic aura that commanded respecting fear, but she was more or less among equals here. After all, Rensat was an emissary from the Witch King himself, and slighting the king's emissary meant slighting the king.
“Calm yourself, Rensat,” she suggested. “Much like everything, this ridiculing in court will blow over, and you'll be able to set your mind on more important matters.”
“Calm myself?” Rensat snipped at her, staring out the window giving out on the plaza below. “He threw his smug grin right in my face with his successful destruction of a heretic shrine in the Wastes. A single battalion! Ploughed through the Wastes, burned the shrine to a crisp, and returned a hero, while I couldn't even settle a trade with humans—lord knows how many times he pointed that out in court.” She sighed and swung her hand with a hint of drama. “I will not be taken seriously before the new year.”
“Perhaps you should upstage him?” Hellebron's tone carried a lack of enthousiasm. She was not in the mood to hear rants and moans about how unfair life was.
“I have every intention of doing so,” Rensat explained, her voice calmed. “Our coven has long since taken note of a powerful artifact enshrined and entombed deep in the Chaos Wastes. I intend to seize it, take it here, and annihilate it with as much showmanships as I possibly can.”
Hellebron snorted once. It took no genius to guess the next step, and instantly her own presence was explained. “And you expect me to send the Temple's finest in a quest to satisfy your ego? Explain to me why I would possibly do that.”
“I know what you want, Hellebron. It's no secret: you want that cauldron of hers.” Rensat set her fingers on her desk, leaning on it while pulling herself closer to Hellebron. “And I don't need to tell you that, as emissary to the king, I'm in a position to suggest our queen learn to share.”
Hellebron's eyes opened at the offer—finally her interest was piqued. She knew Morathi spited her at every corner, at every turn she made for the cauldron to give her eternal youth; the prospect of having another shot at it invoked her interest.
Rensat stressed every word, tapping her finger on the desk she leant on. “Get me that artifact.”
°°°
A cold, dry wind blew from the north. Frozen breaths hung in the air while people huddled deeper in their warm cloaks, hoping to shield them from the sharp wind. Why anyone would volunteer to travel to these inhospitable Wastes, no-one could tell. Then again, rumour went only one elf in the expedition volunteered.
This was an ark, a Black Ark to be precise. It was a huge, fortified construction with just enough floatability not to sink to the bottom of the ocean. Sailors ran left and right, manning the sails and carrying out other duties to help the ship going in the proper direction. Orders were barked left and right from naval officers walking over the deck, like dogs herding a flock of sheep.
“Sir,” Anleth greeted Tarbo when she stood next to him on deck, looking out over the great ocean. She had never been to the Chaos Wastes. So few people had. “Any idea what we should expect? Out there?”
Tarbo cocked his head, keeping his eyes on the horizon. “Ice, snow, the occasional five-legged lizard and, hopefully, a whole lot of nothing.”
“Five-legged lizards, sir?”
“Long story.” He waved the topic off with a slight smile. “Shouldn't you be in the meeting room with all the Temple's finests?”
“The Temple's finests have agreed on how I would best serve them,” Anleth explained. “Three coffees, an espresso, and some bagels.”
Tarbo chuckled, shaking his head with an amused smile while leaning precariously over the bannister, staring the long, long way down in the eye for a moment. A vessel of this size displaced an enormous amount of water, putting a lot of strain on the materials keeping the ark together. Then again, the dimensions were needed to house all the people that were sent along on the expedition.
“Shouldn't you be in there, sir?”
“Probably.”
Anleth waited for an explanation, keeping her eyes on the man who insisted to test his balance and push his luck with gravity. She wasn't sure whether he would make her ask, but she was in no mood to ask, anyway.
“I already got the heads-up on our mission.”
“Truly?”
“Yep. We're looking for a magical rock.”
“A rock, sir?”
“A magical rock.”
Anleth rolled her eyes to the sea. “Does that sound familiar to you?”
“Does what?”
“All this. Out on an ark, us on deck, hunting for magical artifacts across the globe...”
Tarbo held momentarily, hands sloughed in his pockets, thinking. Ultimately, he shook his head. “Not offhand, no. Should it?”
“...I suppose not, sir.”
°°°
“Man the sails, you dogs!” Darts bellowed while sailors ran over the deck in haphazard directions, each one tending to some task, the whole keeping everything in working order. “Just because we're flying doesn't mean you can sit on your hinds!”
Anleth was doing what Tarbo had been doing some time ago: staring deep, deep down over the bannister. But she was not looking at ocean. She was looking at a forest. And that alarmed her.
“Fascinating, isn't it?”
Mioralynthia, or Lynthia for short, was about as close to an official city sorceress as one was likely to get. Unfortunately for her, her role was more that of a city secretary, a distinction that irked her to no end. At any rate, her sea sickness had passed, and now she was on deck without hanging over.
Anleth nodded in agreement, her eyes rolling over the landscape passing underneath her feet. She had never, ever been airborne in her entire life. She barely ever set foot on a ship. She was a land rat born and raised. “I had no idea a sorceress coven could do this. I'm aware there are many wondrous things sorceresses can do, but this boggles the imagination.”
“It wasn't my idea.” Mioralynthia's tone suggested she wouldn't have suggested it, either, even if she had thought of it. “We are attracting too much attention.”
Again, Anleth nodded in agreement. “I imagine a flying fortress does draw eyes onto itself.”
“I'm not speaking of visual attention, captain, I speak of magical attention. To keep a construction of this size flying, a massive amount of energy is required; energy that draws attention.”
“I trust Captain Darts knows what he is doing.”
“It was not his idea, either.”
“kewl l33t hax r0X0rz!one1!”
Both Mioralynthia as Anleth widened their eyes in surprise at the nonsense rising from their left. An elf, fully plated in off-colour armour stared motionlessly over the edge.
“Wild guess,” Mioralynthia almost sneered, eyes burning on the singular elf. “Haksor is the expedition's only volunteer.”
“He does seem thrilled to be flying. And he mentioned something about...” Anleth frowned, trying to recall the exact wording. “Quest points?”
“...I see. Not playing with a full deck, is he?”
“You could say that.”
°°°
Captain Darts peeked at his compass while keeping most of his attention on the steering wheel. Captaining an airborne ark was surprisingly similar to captaining a seaborne one. Still, he seemed much more stressed now than he was when his boat (or vessel, nautical term) was still touching the ocean's waters.
“Are we still on course?” Mioralynthia asked him, judging that Darts was looking at his compass uncomfortably often while adjusting his steering. It almost looked as if he were lost.
“So says the compass, lass,” Darts replied, barely moving his lips. “As much as its north is repeatedly attempting to escape my notice.”
“...Pardon my confusion,” Anleth raised a question, “but how can north try to escape notice?”
With a nimbleness revealing decades of experience, Darts lobbed the compass into Anleth's hands, wordlessly offering her a look for herself. And when she looked—and Tarbo and Mioralynthia peeked along over her shoulders—she noticed that the needle was indeed having some trouble making up its mind. “Can you... navigate on landmarks? Mountains and such?”
“Landmarks without a marked land are like captains without a ship: meaningless, restless, and hopelessly depressing.” Darts threw a brief look over his shoulder when he did not receive a reply of any sort, and simply found several blank stares on him. “We need a map,” he whispered, raising his upper lip but not his teeth.
“We don't have a map?” Anleth asked curiously.
“It's the Chaos Wastes,” Tarbo explained. “It's not exactly a high-traffic area.”
°°°
The sky was a clear blue, with the sun shining clearly but shedding little warmth. A white tuft passed slowly overhead, a distant cloud rolling gently and missing the sun by miles. It was peaceful and calming. But it was also cold, bitingly cold, especially around the arms, legs, and back.
A tug on her left arm. Mioralynthia frowned and blinked her eyes, pulling her head out of the snow—much to her own surprise; she hadn't noticed she was lying sprawled in the icy fields. She did notice Anleth having taken a hold of her arm, her lips moving but making no sound. She looked terrible, covered in dust and ash, a few specks of blood scattered over her body, hair in wild disarray.
“Anleth, are you alright? Speak up, I don't hear a word of what you're saying.”
When she cast her eyes past the woman holding her arm, startlement overtook her. The ark she had previously been standing on had almost entirely crumbled, bits and pieces lying scattered around the broken hull as if the construct had lost a chicken race with the planet. A fiery blaze sailed from the rear quarters, and she spotted people running back and forth in complete disarray. Here and there, haphazard officers stood as beacons of leadership, pointing wildly. Slowly, some sound was starting to make it to her ears.
“Mistress, how many fingers do you see?”
Mioralynthia snapped her attention back to Anleth with a bewildered look. What on earth was going on here? “What just happened? Why is our ark in shambles?”
“Can she stand?” Tarbo asked, pacing towards the two of them. “Nothing broken?”
“She might have taken a hit to the head,” Anleth replied. “She does not remember what happened.”
“In short: we were attacked, we fell, we crashed. We can fill in the details later.” Tarbo took Mioralynthia's other arm and nodded to Anleth to help the sorceress onto her feet.
“Are there still daemons about, sir?”
“No, it seems we've got the last of them. And hu!”
Mioralynthia shook her head, her balance restored once she stood on her feet. Memories of screams and explosions sifted through her mind as if searching for a spot of thought to hang onto. Images of blood and daemons flashed back, and the sudden crash when the ark hit the ground full on.
“Let's round up the survivors, check our status.”
°°°
Piles of stone and rubble marked the ground in and around the ark as if it were a ruin that had withstood the mark of time only barely. Entire floors and decks had disappeared into eachother, rooms and quarters reduced to a pale shadow of their former glory. The sun was setting by the time all the survivors and bodies had been cleared from the wreckage, and now only a blood red hue shone over the horizon.
This was the coven chamber, where the fight broke out in all its violence: scraps of flesh, armour, and blood were tastelessly decorating floor, walls and ceiling where they hadn't been covered by debris. The attack had been swift and brutal, taking the life of several sorceresses, the focus of others, and thus breaking the levitation spell.
“We've rallied the survivors and inventoried our remaining stock,” Kevlamin reported while navigating past the debris. He wasn't sure he wanted to stay around for long; it looked like the entire structure could come down at moment's notice. “How about you? Found anything?”
“Possibly,” Tarbo replied, hunched in the chamber. He held up a remarkably unremarkable amulet, and waited for Kevlamin to take it. “See if Lynthia can figure out what this is.”
“It's an amulet,” Kevlamin commented. “You'd expect something like this in a coven. Sorceresses wear amulets.”
“Nobody was wearing this. It was just lying here, unharmed.” Tarbo stood again, stretching his neck. “It could be crud, it could be a clue as to what happened here and, more importantly, how.”
“How do you mean? We already know how: daemons appearing out of thin air in the middle of the coven chamber. The rest is kind of straightforward.”
Tarbo shook his head. “Maybe. But I reckon this chamber was heavily warded.”
“Perhaps not heavily enough,” Kevlamin reasoned. “These are the Chaos Wastes. Lots of raw magic about.”
“Or perhaps someone left the backdoor open.”
°°°
You wipe the sweat off your forehead, sweat that had been building from clearing debris and rescuing survivors. Others are resting here as well, called for some kind of meeting. A fire has been started to keep you warm in the arduously cold night, and you welcome the comforting warmth it gives you. In your mind, you recount the recent events.
The expedition you are part of was sent to recover an artifact of incredible power from the Chaos Wastes, so that it could be dissected and, if found dangerous to keep, destroyed. This expedition had attracted the eyes of many Houses and other organisations, and even led to the requisitioning of a Black Ark.
Events become ever less credible from there on: rather than docking somewhere and continuing on with a long march through the Wastes, the entire ark was lifted into the air, levitated, and effectively flew over the Wastes. As sensational as the experience was, it came to an abrupt end when the coven doing the levitating was attacked and subsequently slaughtered. Combat broke out between crew and the daemons that somehow appeared in the coven chamber, and while the fight was ultimately won, the ark crashed spectacularly, wiping out over half the expedition.
Now, you are all grounded and left with little of the resources you set out with. In a sense, you're happy you survived; you've heard that, if you die in the Chaos Wastes, your soul is irrevokably sucked into the Warp. You're not sure what it exactly entails, but it sounds like a thoroughly unpleasant experience.
Footsteps mark someone's approach. Mioralynthia sits down near the campfire, her walk and stature graceful despite the recent events. She does not look particularly thrilled but, then again, not a lot of you do, and those that do are still on an adrenaline rush from narrowly escaping death.
“Goodevening,” she greets you with necessary politeness. You're not entirely sure of her social status, but her demeanor suggests that whichever station she occupies, it is above yours on the foodchain. “Thank you for hearing the summons. I will be brief.
“You no doubt have heard that we were looking into the nature of this incident. After some deliberation with the remaining officials, we've concluded that we have been sabotaged.”
Sabotaged? Some people look surprised, some appalled, others already suspected that such spectacular failure needed some sentient guidance. Before the obvious question rises, namely why they suspect sabotage, the sorceress holds up an amulet between her fingers.
“This is a single-charge portal amulet found within the coven chamber. Despite its simple appearance, it is no lesser artifact: it serves not only as a homing beacon, but can summon a veritable portal merely when invoked from miles away. It is depleted, so we believe this was the daemons' way into our ark.”
You look about yourself. For those of you with no particular expertise in magic, this meeting seems a little awkward. Are you expected to aid the investigation and find the culprits? If so, how?
“You were summoned here because you are the most likely suspects. Or pardon my inaccuracy, the most likely suspects left on the list after eliminating all the casualties we've suffered.”
“Beg our pardon, mistress,” one of you asks, “but how do we know that the culprits have not already perished? As you say, there have been many casualties, possibly themselves as well.”
“That is a good point you raise, but mere moments before this meeting was called, what we managed to save of our records after the crash was suddenly found aflame, leaving us, after dousing the fires, with nothing but scraps and fragments to piece together. So we suspect at least some of the culprits to still be around.”
And this begs the obvious question: how will this investigation proceed? Are you all ad hoc arrested?
“As it happens, we find ourselves in a dilemma. Just about all of our leaders were huddled in one chamber, which was visited by a rather unruly horde of daemons shortly after the fight broke out. If we are to continue this expedition, we will require more leaders than we can spare. So congratulations,” Mioralynthia sighs. “You were all promoted to Officer ad interim.”
Mentally, you match your name with the new title: Officer. Not a bad match, not bad at all. But back to business.
“We cannot run an investigation and the expedition at the same time, and we cannot afford to simply detain everyone and torture out the details. So we've decided that you, collectively, will single out people for the captain to...” She pauses for a moment, trying her hand at a euphemism. “...extract the details from.”
“As for me,” she finishes with a sigh while taking a collections of books and scrolls to hand. “I will be making sure these decisions are carried out, that no-one finds himself accidentally riddled with blades during the meeting and, casually, will attempt to devise a way to keep this expedition from going any more to the hells than it already has. To degrees possible.”
So... you guess that opens the meeting... around a campfire, in the pitch of night.
________________________
- Players
- Soupman
- LordAnubis
- Drainial Shadowheart
- Belial.
- lordofthenight
- Ashnari Doomsong
- Demendred
- Khelmor
- Draknir Reaverblade
- Aleraen
- Has Neledak
- beastmaster kurlan
- Aenarin
- Katash
- Shadow Dark
- 51la5
- SleekDD
With 17 players, 9 constitute a majority.
It is now Day. The activity deadline is set on Saturday, 18h00 GMT. The final deadline is hovering around Monday, 18h00 GMT; I'll get back to you on it when the activity deadline expires.
Now it's all in your hands. Go get them.