Slain by Elf

Death Cult Assassin Clorr has gone rogue. She's probably been dominated by Interrogator Thirl, but who can tell? Clorr's all over Brother Lucian, trying to stab him with her power stilettos, but on missing backflips away and turns her attention to me.

Oh yeah, time to melee. This is why I have my force sword. I swing and hit, Clorr failing to parry my blow. I already do good damage, boosted by my psy rating, but I can do more. It only requires a successful focus power test, and seeing as we already have one Daemon Prince summoned because of the perils of the warp I don't think I can make the situation much worse.

My focus power test succeeds, no psychic phenomenon suffered, but with no degrees of success. I need degrees of success to inflict my extra damage. This sounds like a good time to spend a fate point. I reroll, this time passing the test with two degrees of success. That's an extra 2D10 damage.

The 2D10 is rolled, getting a result of 3 and 1. It doesn't sound like much—indeed, greater fuss is made about how I used a fate point for 4 extra damage—but in this case it is just the ticket. Clorr drops from 5 points of critical damage, badly hurt and losing lots of blood, to 9 points of critical damage—cut in half and dead. Success!

Given that Interrogator Thirl is about to be squished by a Daemon Prince of Slaanesh, I wonder when the domination effect would have ended.

Still looking for a way off the Mortis Thule, we are heading towards the Eye of the Inquisition that Brother Lucius recognised on an internal scan of the hulk. As we work our way up the corridor, we feel we're being followed.

Rather than directly confront our stalker, we drop a couple of hopper mines and dip in to cover. Unfortunately, what we notice is not an explosion but a humanoid figure neatly avoiding the mines. But at least we see her clearly now.

'Who are you?'

'I am Death Cult Assassin Claw.'

'...could you be any more of a goth?'

'Clorr, not Claw.'

'Even so.' But Clorr is looking for Interrogator Thirl, apparently a rogue member of the Inquisition, who has escaped capture and sought refuge in the Mortis Thule, the unlikeliest of places. It seems we are heading in the same direction, and bringing a traitor to justice is a good use of Deathwatch marines.

Onwards, to where a disturbing and highly unusual ship sits inside the Mortis Thule. Despite trying to make sense of its shape and volume, there is a distinct geometry that doesn't look to work. It's rather unsettling.

Moving in to the ship doesn't get much better for our states of mind, but we are able to cope with the weirdness. Stepping in to one section of corridor, however, has it vibrating, and we get a sensation of moving upwards quickly.

When the corridor stops vibrating we are clearly in the same ship but a different section, as evidenced by the hordes of mutants around us, all bowed in reverence. In the middle of the room is a shaft of black light...

'Black light? I think that's called "shadow".'

...inside which is a man.

'How can you see something lit by "black light"?'

'Use your imagination.'

'I'm trying! It isn't easy.'

The man is Interrogator Thirl, and the hordes surrounding him rise and turn towards us. But hordes are easy when you have psychic fire and fully automatic bolter guns. Waves of mutants surge forwards, waves of mutants are cut down or horribly charred, until it is just us and Thirl left.

Interrogator Thirl has been using his own psychic powers. One beam of energy missed Brother Lucien, one struck Clorr. Now that his mutant hordes have been destroyed, he brings out of the big guns. He summons his psychic powers and, well, that's not all he summons.

The psychic power Thirl tried to instantiate fizzles. But the energy goes somewhere. A connection to the warp is made, it is intensified, and Thirl accidentally summons a Daemon Lord of Slaanesh. The Daemon Lord focusses on Thirl, its summoner, and will remain until either it or Thirl is destroyed.

'Well, that's convenient. Have we won?'

Screams resound through the corridor ahead of us. They sound human in origin, but we're not quite sure where they're coming from, as we're still having trouble using our auspexes in the space hulk Mortis Thule. A little frustrated, Brother Lucien flexes his tech-use skills and tries to fix his.

'Have you tried turning it off and on again?'

'Yeah, didn't do anything. I think the influence of the warp is having a strong effect.' So Lucien tries the, apparently, next-best thing: he bangs the auspex against a bulkhead a few times. 'Still nothing.'

We press on regardless, screams now stopped, but it seems that we wouldn't have been in time to save anyone. A couple of minutes further along our path brings us to a grisly scene, where several people have been brutally decapitated.

Brother Lucius moves in to take a look at the bodies, using his medicae skill to examine the bodies, as well as try to determine the cause of the wounds, whether by weapon or creature. 'Sadly, there is nothing I can do for any one them', he says.

'I'm disappointed', says Lucien.

'Brother, you couldn't even fix your auspex. I'm not going to feel bad about not being able to heal decapitation.'

Either asking questions about the red dragon of Goldrock or Gowan the Bone Harvester has garnered us some unwanted attention. Toogood and Farrel are trying to gather some information together in a market square when they are asked to 'make a spot check'.

Toogood is still looking for persimmon to make a fruit smoothie, but Farrel sees what's happening. 'Your sixth sense warns you that some of the elite dragon guards are closing in on you from different directions.'

'I could be wrong, but I think sight still qualifies as one of the five normal senses.'

The town of Goldrock has a dragon as its protector. Or so the story goes. Three hundred years ago a red dragon promised the town protection, on the condition that it was otherwise given its privacy.

The town agreed, because who wouldn't, and created a unit of elite guards to be stationed in three fortresses that guarded the entrance to the dragon's lair. Of course, no one would dare raid a village under the protection of a red dragon, but is there really a red dragon protecting the village?

One old man remembers his great-grandfather having seen the dragon, but his estimate of its size and the size of the lair don't quite match up. And despite patchy stories of people seeing the dragon fly at night, and the occasional puff of orange smoke coming out of the lair, the whole tale starts to smell a bit fishy.

'We should stay up', says Toogood, 'look for him at night, when the villagers say the dragon flies around. Maybe we can even provoke him to come out. What's the worst that could happen?'

'He could be provoked in to coming out.'

Gowan the Bone Harvester has become our only link to curious happenstances surrounding dragons and dragon-like abominations in the area. It would be good to question him about what he knows, so that we might uncover what's going on. However, Gowan was last seen heading with some haste out of the village, towards Goldrock.

We follow to Goldrock, but lag behind Gowan by about a week by the time we get there. Now we have to locate him. Farrel has an idea, 'We should check in to an inn, see if anyone has seen him. There are quite a few, though, as the town is fairly large, so we'll probably have to work through them. But we should find him eventually, as he's bound to have sought accommodation.'

'Can I just clarify,' says Toogood, 'that what you are suggesting is we go on a pub crawl?'

'...yes.'

In a bizarre coincidence, the bridge electronics flare up, despite a lack of power, and overloads. This surge of power and noise triggers safety mechanisms, slamming the bridge door shut and bringing down a blast shield, ensuring that anyone on the bridge has no way to escape, as a swelling of psychic energy manifests, threatening to overwhelm and kill us within a couple of minutes.

We have to improvise our way out of here. Brother Lucius has an idea, given that he apparently isn't skilled enough to stick a grenade to the door using melted wax, and whips out his plasma pistol.

'Okay, roll to use the plasma pistol as a welding torch.'

'Cutting torch, sir.'

'Right. Good, Lucius has a steady hand, and successfully welds a section of the bridge door.'

'Cuts! Cuts a section of the bridge door! Why are you trying to keep us in here, you monster?'

We reach the bridge of the imperial cruiser. Well, technically, we reach the door of the bridge, which stays resolutely closed when we approach it.

'I'm guessing they won't open automatically and we'll have to look for the manual override', says Lucien.

'Manual override?'

'Yes. Didn't we do this before, where we couldn't open a door and had to use some kind of manual override?'

'It is a future where we still have stairs. I'm supposing this 'manual override' is just a door handle.'

The Techpriest gives us directions to the bridge of the ship. He hasn't had any luck getting the sensors back on-line since they became incorporated in to the space hulk, but we'd like to give it a shot. His instructions are pretty simple, given that most corridors head in the same direction.

'I suppose if we leave the ship', says Lucien, understanding that we are inside a space hulk comprising thousands of ships, 'then we've gone too far.'

'But this ship broke in two when it was incorporated with the Mortis Thule', says Lucius.

'So if we leave the ship, keep on going?' I say.

'Yep! And if we leave the Mortis Thule, definitely keep on going.'

The space hulk shudders and subsonic vibrations are felt resonating through the entire structure. It seems the Mortis Thule is about to enter the warp again. We haven't been able to find a way off the hulk, but we have found a working Gellar field to help keep us safe whilst we are in warp.

But, as was the case previously, the Gellar field begins to take the toll of the warp creatures trying to breech it. It seems our strong presences are enough for the foul denizens of the warp to exert greater effort in to reaching us. This probably won't go down well with the ordinary crew who have been safe for so long.

Monsters smash at the edges of the Gellar field, some breaking through the longer and deeper we stay in warp. It is almost inevitable that the Gellar field finally fails and we succumb to an oppressive conscious feeling. The last we experience is a large gaping maw encompassing us.

After what seems like an eternity, our consciousnesses crash back, like a tidal wave hitting...

'Tidal waves are much more a continuous effect, quite distinctive from a crash.'

...except Brother Maynard doesn't quite recover consciousness as the xenos move in to ravage him.