Print

Please login or register.

1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever

Login with username, password and session length

[Gargulec]

The place was purged in bath of flames after the fire bomb went off. You had nothing to look for here anymore, so you quickly left this Throne-forsaken place, hoping to never see it again.

Soon, you were back in your hab. The eldar you left in the cage did not notice you though. Apparently, she was too concerned with shivering and sobbing to do so. The reason? You did not know.

[Passionario]

As the cell hurried out of the condemned compound, Pass turned her head to look one last time at the flames that consumed the righteous and the heretical alike. If anyone could see her at that moment, they'd be surprised at the expression on her face. Her typical world-weary scowl was gone, replaced by a wistful and nostalgic smile.

By the time the group returned to the hab, however, the psyker was back to her familiar cynical self.

"See? Told you it would do just fine without my aid", - she pointed at the sobbing prisoner,- "Them xeno blighters could give underhive rats a lesson or two about survival".

She began to pace back and forth around the room.

"So, now that everyone's got their pent-up aggression out of their systems, let's look at our situation.  Good news: we're alive, and we've managed to put down a nest of Chaos cultists. Bad news: their senior partners in crime are still at large."

The psyker stopped and looked at the rest of the team:

"What do we know about said senior partners? Why, we know that they are very interested in acquiring "broken" Eldar prisoners for their schemes and rituals. And we also know that their primary supplier is no longer going to send them any. This unexpected setback is bound to make them desperate... maybe even desperate enough to walk into trap."

She turned towards the cowering prisoner and grinned:

"And I think we might just have the perfect bait".

[Silhar]

Before Pass pronounced any of those random ideas fuelled by nothing but sadism and keen intelect, Silharriel had been crouching at the cage already, trying to get a vague sense of reason - why his sister acts as if badly tormented in soul. It was quite unsettling to him, since woman had shown him once the will to survive he could not understand, mentioning her current position and situation.

"A moment, if you please.", the Eldar sneered to his comrades, leaning towards bars of the cage. His face was stone-dead, but eyes bore such marks of fear and sadness...

"Elirenn... Do you hear me ? What happened ?", he whispered in the language of the Old Race. He hoped that its sound would bring peace to the tormented girl in this cage. "Wake up, Khaine damn it !"

Hearing another wonderful concept of Pass's, the Outcast turned to her a bit, still crouching. His face was showing a bit of disgustment. He whispered, first with language of his mates, but after a split-second he realized and began again, this time in tongue-uncomfortable Low Gothic :

"Use me instead, for with those wounds and grazes I bear I look more like one unwilling to resist or escape. What is more, in her current state of mind any kind of sudden shock - and, mind you, a revelation of being surrounded by wicked half-flesh, half-metal beings is not something to be taken lightly for us, unfamiliar with such deviations - would knock her down for ever. They do not seek dead Eldar bodies, agreed ?"

[Xander Morhaime]

"I object," Halsted spoke up, his voice a bit more quiet and subdued than it had been before, "Not so much to the idea of a trap and bait, but to its effectiveness. This has been two cults fighting each other, but while the pawns have been swept away - by other pawns, I might add - I doubt the player behind them is so concerned as to leap at such an offering," he explained, laying out the various items they'd lifted from the compound and sorting through them, checking their condition.

"From what I've seen... they seemed quite happy to do their rituals with humans as well, so I would not place too much stock in xenos as bait. I'm actually far more inclined to think, judging from what our prisoner has told us, that it might have even been the same player behind both sets of pawns. I don't particularly want to guess at their motivations, but I don't think we should go in expecting them to desperately jump at every bone we toss them."

By this point, the guardsman had got to the various items he'd retrieved from the lockup in the compound. One particularly large package was shoved unceremoniously aside, tumbling open on the floor to show a suit of Eldar-made armour covered in a camouflage scheme, and seemingly made to fit a female figure.

[Silhar]

Both Eldar were chatting for a while, the woman getting more and more nervous. Silharriel passed her a water-canteen pulled out from behind his tatters, then turned and took a look at the boxes brought here by Halsted. He seemed slightly upset, but remained calm and cold.

"Said well enough. What are you looking forward to do, mon-keigh ?", he asked both the guardsman and the psyker, raising his head and sizing them up with his glare. "All this seems much too high above our heads, do not you agree ?"

"I wonder... Was the ritual of sacrifice made upon those poor workers a reason of those >>Machine Spirits<< overactivity... ? Or is there something else instead ? What should we do about now ?"

[Gargulec]

Meanwhile, the eldar in the cage started to act... oddly. She turned towards her equipment, and started talking aloud- apparently repeating the same word all over the time. It was not aimed at your eldar, probably. She was calling either Pass or Tobias. What for?

[Silhar]

Silharriel had his head risen, listened carefully and considered if he should have started translating...

"Soldier... soldier !", he added, in a formal tone.

[Xander Morhaime]

Halsted looked up from sorting through the spoils carried out from DuPont's compound. "What now?" he asked gruffly, glancing briefly at both Eldar before going back to his work. Another large, long package was moved carefully aside, as if he was handling something very fragile... or very dangerous. "What does she want?" he asked, sorting out all the various small items on a spare bunk.

"Hmm... we've got a bit of reading ahead of us," he muttered under his breath as he took out the dataslates they'd lifted out of the compound, only briefly skimming over their contents where possible before setting them aside for later inspection. "Anyway, I would recommend we eliminate DuPont's puppetmaster. He sounded like a noteworthy figure... and if they've decided who to give the big job with the fleet to, chances are they'll be having a celebration of one sort or another. It might be a good opportunity to strike, that," he explained. "This... Arch-Magos Albert, I believe he was called. Failing that, we could try to investigate where DuPont and his lot did their searching for that black stone, whatever it was."

[Silhar]

Silharriel turned to Elirenn and translated Halsted's question.

"I personally would see if we can find that black stone, leaving Albert to some greater power, someone above us. Puppetmasters tend to have walls of puppets around them, even at those >>special occasions<< you talk about. Eliminating such with a force of five without proper orbital bombardment or at least artillery support is nigh-on-impossible. No, assassination shall not make the grade neither, I suppose. Who knows what kind of armor shall his cursed body have beneath its skin ?...", he added after he had his task accomplished. "Their leaders walk armored and armed like one-man armies..."
"No. Let us stay with the idea of stone."

[Gargulec]

'Ask him, whether he found a small, steel lockbox among my belongings' said Elirenn to Silharriel. 'If he did, ask him if he could give it to me. There is nothing dangerous inside.'

[Xander Morhaime]

"If we had a lascannon, or even an autocannon handy to set up on a rooftop, perhaps..." Halsted mused with a sigh. "But you're probably right, heard the cog-heads can be as stubborn to die as green-skins... and I don't think anything in our current arsenal could do much but annoy them."

Once Silharriel had translated the question, the guardsman looked around at the loot he'd lait out. "That stuff? Should be here somewhere... Best not get too attached to it, no telling if there'll be anything of it to keep once we get back to the inquisitor," he muttered, finally digging out the lockbox that fitted the description, passing it to Silharriel. During the rummaging he also happened upon a cube of white material, and this he promptly passed straight to the eldar prisoner, as if keen to be rid of the wretched item as soon as possible.

[Silhar]

Silharriel shrugged and passed both items to Elirenn.
"Try not to kill yourself with it. I mean, do not take everything at once..."
He did not stand up right away. For a while it seemed like the Outcast was asleep. He opened his eyes after a minute, chatting with a prisoner a bit. Then, he finally stood up, sweaten, tired and looking unhealthy.

He sat on his bunk, pulling out a random data-slate - and started his search for any texts mentioning "The Black Stone".

[Passionario]

The psyker sighed with a tone of someone admitting defeat:

"Well, if you insist at grasping at straws instead of following a perfectly fine plan... then we might as well grasp at them properly."

She fished out her trusty deck of Emperor's Tarot and began to lay them out in a complicated 15-card spread.

[Xander Morhaime]

"The problem with your perfectly fine plan is that it might well rest on flawed assumptions. DuPont's backers withdrew their support for him, remember? Of course, it could be because they saw his position as lost and himself expendable, but I get the feeling that it could have simply been because they no longer had need of his services, and he was the last one to get the notice," Halsted pointed out calmly. "In addition, as we've already discussed, we might not have the firepower to go after a major Coghead."

[Passionario]

"If I recall correctly, we didn't have the firepower to take out a well-defended compound full of armed soldiers, either. And yet, by the grace of the Emperor, we're alive and they're not."