40K Dark Heresy: The Recondite War

[Block]

"Psykers... Ajax, get down here, NOW!" Scar ordered over the comm. Turning to the Arbiter he said, "Darien, go take his place, find me Kinge, he doesn't have to be in good shape when you bring him down here. In fact, it might be a bit better if he's not as sharp as can be. I want to know what went on down here." With that he began a detailed search of the room, including any crates laying around.

[White Haven]

Ajax swars under his breath -- not that that hides the oath from the subvocalized microbead network, as the urgent call rings out. He starts to sheath the now-clean sword, then thinks better of it and plunges down the stairs and into the basement with it drawn, just in case. You know. Of zombies. Or Leonard Nemoy rising from the grave. Which would be a zombie. "What is it?" he barks out as he leaves the door open behind him, glancing a cursory survey of the room to get his bearings.

[Block]

"You tell me. Mithras is hearing things down here, some sort of whisper. See if you can find out where it's coming from."

[NecronLord]

Regulator Krine came downstairs, hauling the man who seemed likely to be Kinge – if he wasn’t, she was thinking about taking him outside and shooting him for wasting time and being so damned cocky that he sneered openly at witch hunters when caught in a damn bordello – behind her, with the aid of one of her guards.

“That’ll take time!” she called back to Mercurius, “we’d need to find the guildhouse that sponsors this place…”

As Ajax stepped down into the basement once more, he could feel the combination of pain, dismay and horror once more, from straight ahead, just beyond the far wall. Clearly there was some chamber behind it, but there was no immediately accessible doorway visible on the wall.

[White Haven]

Ajax's eyes narrow, fixated on the otherwise unremarkable wall that, to his inner eye, bleeds pain. "I need," he grits out on the commbead channel, "Things that go bang, or crunch. I've got a wall down here, and I can't find an entrance before said things arrive, it's going to have to suffer a mischief." Clicking off the mic, he begins scouting the wall by the simple expedient of thrusting the monoedged rapier into the wall an inch or two, then slowly raking it across in a lazy pattern, stopping if he finds something tougher than the rest of the partition.

[Balrog]

Mithras pulled out his last remaining frag grenade and walked over to join Ajax. "Here, this might help, as long as it stops these damn voices..."

[White Haven]

Deleted: Oops. Recursive reality.

[NecronLord]

The tip of the sword sliced into the brick, but after a moment, was slowed as resistance against the rest of the blade became notable. However, with only a little force, Ajax was able to cut along the wall, through the bricks, until, suddenly, even as he spoke, it slipped along, the force required to push it, slicing effortlessly through an area of the wall. At the same moment, both Mithras and Ajax could feel something strange, the subliminal pressure of witchery.

A shotgun blast shot through the wall a few feet to Ajax’s right, punching a fist sized hole through it, and revealing that it was actually some form of wood, with light cast bricks on the outside…

[And. initiative again]

[White Haven]

"Save the grenade!" Ajax calls, taking another few vicious hacks at the 'wall' in an effort to give his compatriot a clear shot through it.

CompatriotS would sound a lot better right now, and accordingly he keys his commbead and calls into it, "Downstairs could use more people than two, immediately, if not sooner. Given that we're dealing with warpcraft, that may be literal."

[Block]

"Throw down your weapons and... ah fuck it. Prepare to die Witch," Scar shouted. Dropping to one knee he unloaded on full auto with his las-gun through the wall. "Mithras, see if you can stuff that grenade through the hole he made with his shotgun."

[Jaevric]

Darien moves up alongside the fake panel, trying to keep real brick between himself and the shooters -- and the grenade blast if Mithras follows Scar's instructions -- while looking for a means to get into the room even if it means trying to kick through a sufficiently-battered part of the "wall."

[NecronLord]

The lasgun demolished the wall, putting s neat group of seared holes in it. A moment later, a hand shot through the gap made by the shotgun blast, letting go of a small round, cylindrical object that looked awfully familiar…

The grenade bounced on the floor and sat there, looking ominous, in the midst of a room with only two ways out. The doorway into the compartment beyond was only a few feet from the long passageway to the back of the building.

[Free actions for those of you who've done something. Said free actions include... wetting yourself and panicking, but not jumping on the grenade or running away]

[Jaevric]

"Throne!" Darien swears loudly, taking one hand off the shotgun to grab the grenade as he lunges towards it, hoping whoever set the timer left it long enough to stuff back through one of the numerous holes in the wall.

[Zablorg]

"Whee!"

Crom jumped down the basement stairs.

After wondering for a while just what everyone was doing firing at a blank wall, he decided it would only be rude not to participate.

He fired a hail of bullets into the wall with all the shotgun holes.

"So like, the wall's a heretic? It might be a little hard to take him in, if he confesses."

[The Yosemite Bear]

Eli steadied looked amidst the mess, on the second floor, examining the guards and dead heretic for "Evidence" and "Clues" (looting)

[White Haven]

As the improvised device drops from the open grate high overhead to splash in the wide, dank sewer wipe, the grizzled-looking silver-haired man turns to his compatriot and, in slow motion, yells, "Boommmmb!"

...Not quite, but reality becomes pliable around the mind of a psyker sometimes, and Sean Connery is fucking cool. In any case, Ajax, seeing no better option, lunges for the wreckage his own sword, along with the guns of his comrades, have made of the false wall, trying to find safety in the room with the rogue psyker and at least one shotgun. Out of the Black Ship and onto Terra indeed...

[Zablorg]

Crom, finally noticing the fucking grenade lying on the floor that everyone seemed impartial to for some reason, made some brief conclusions.

-despite his insistance to the contrary, he was not a very important person in this arbitor cell.

-in the time it took for everyone to get over the whole grenade-exploding thing, the wall might have killed Ajax.



"Oh. Fuck." he muttered quickly.

He lunged towards the grenade and flopped his entire mass onto it, in a somehow angry fashion.

"I want a medal for this, you assholes! Go! Go!"

[Lancer]

Mercurius dodged to the side as Crom lunged past him down the flight of stairs, and subsequently heard rather than saw the commotion from his position at the head of the stairs. With some suprise, he noted a dull thunk that sounded oddly familiar before his mind resolved it with the sound that Scar's grenade had made earlier and his cranial circuitry automatically retrieved detailed schematics for the most commonly used antipersonnel devices. Mentally swearing, he yelled "TAKE COVER!" and hauled himself up and around the doorway of the stairwell.

[NecronLord]

As Crom landed on the grenade, it exploded. He felt like he’d been kicked in the stomach by a space marine.

---

And then there was a terrible scuttling feeling; all around, he could feel some kind of hard-carapaced exoskeletal creatures, each about the size of his thumb, scampering onto him, gnawing teeth chomping against his clothes and armour, seeking to scuttle under his clothes to get at his skin; then inside him, nibbling and muching. The enemy had expected him to do this, and the bugs all over him were some kind of special horror just for him, to bite and munch and gnaw right into the bowels…

Ajax’s sword slipped from his hands as they suddenly rotted away, engulfed by a pocket of something caustic in the walls, hissing spitting chemicals engulfing the flesh and burning, pustules forming in instants and then sloughing off, along with tissue underneath, leaving bones that fell apart and clattered to the floor.

Meanwhile, for Mithras and Scar, there was no such illusion as they saw their comrades wracked by, instead, they could only feel the pure and empowering light of the Emperor, lifting them above the petty cares of mortality giving them the ability to soar and cruise over their fellow men on brilliant pinions of light as the Emperor himself did in the Imperial Infantryman’s Uplifting Primer. It would be sacrilege to deny such a blessing, and both were filled with the urge to inspire those around them in this time of travails with their newfound blessings. Of course, neither could see that the other was so empowered.

For Darien, meanwhile, as he reached for the grenade, he saw that it was actually a flash grenade; they’d walked into a trap. His comrades were all reeling, only he could save them now, as every barrel in the room opened up to reveal a horrific beast-man with some weapon, be it a lasgun or an axe, roaring out blasphemies and charging towards his fellow acolytes.

---

Mercurius had cause to thank the machine god, as his respirator protected him from the effects of what his cranial circuitry revealed from the barest second’s glance as an expensive Hax-Grimdal Model Four hallucinogen grenade.


Upstairs, of course, aside from the probable screaming over the vox, Eli found nothing unusual – the corpses all bore a brand on the inner leg, as before, and, aside from their weapons, carried little of any interest; a few credit bonds here, or coins there, and pocket sashes of brown leaves, a few keys and other accoutrements.

[New Initiative]

[Block]

"For the Emperor men! Crush this heretic!" Scar shouted, driving his chainsword through the fake wall, attempting to cut through the psyker and make a hole big enough to squeeze through at the same time.

[White Haven]

Screaming. Quite an awful lot of it, in fact...not of horror, but of agony, as his own imagination declares war on his hands.
The imagination of a sanctioned psyker is rather more capable than most in its ability to supply stunning, gut-imploding, howling pain. Accordingly, Ajax begins slamming and raking his hands against the floor, bloodying the otherwise uninjured digits in a frantic attempt to scrape off the burning, acidic chemicals that are searing away his own flesh. His mind howls in conjunction with his voice, shrieking like a naked soul in the warp for any nearby with the 'ears' to hear it.

[Jaevric]

Darien rose to his feet, bringing his shotgun to his shoulder with a warning shout of "AMBUSH!" to his comrades before opening fire on the beastmen, Arbites-trained reflexes causing him to quickly prioritize targets with guns first, then the foes with melee weapons who were closest to the rest of the acolytes.

[The Yosemite Bear]

*Pockets keys, and reloads* the keys may lead to new mysteries, and besides with all this frenzy going on down stairs I might as well join my comrades, these are definatly the right traitors.

[Lancer]

"Crucible of Mars!" Mercurius made his way back down the stairs, using the stairwell for whatever cover he could as he blasted more holes into the false wall with his laspistol.

[NecronLord]

The gas slowly cleared on the shattered remnants of the false wall; a construction bolted carefully in place, not really a concealed door so much as a barrier; the room on the other side was a small rocky chamber. The floor of that chamber was now partially broken an excavated by the blast of Mithras’ frag grenade in a grenade trap on the other side of the room. This had wrenched circle of a heavy metal loose from the floor, allowing the group to see just past the dogged down hatch in the center of the meter wide room, peppered with bullet holes and las-craters.

At last, the various hallucinations disappeared in favour of reality; for Darien, just as the imaginary assailants were setting upon him with various improvised clubs, and for Ajax, well, reality was just what he expected – injured, scraped, bleeding, hands…

[New Initiative]