Editing Nobledark Imperium Writing (section)

= The Adventures of Legi and Draco =

==Chase==

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The stripped down land speeder whipped around another hairpin bend in the webway depths, Hell and damnation in the form a of what once might have been eldar not too far behind them. The walls were curved her and sticky enough with something not unlike gravity that rather than being dashed against the side they merely continued their mad dash along what she had until a moment ago been considering a ceiling. Today was going to be another “explanations” day if they made it back and that was for damn sure and the only thing that would buy them leniency was the semi-crystalline Necroteuch stolen from a curious temple dedicated to both Tzneetch and Slaanesh. That there were still copies of the foul tome in circulation and new cooperation between the gods were both equally disturbing.

But not immediately as disturbing as the driving skills of one Inquisitor Jaq Draco who was pushing the “pimp-speeder” as fast as it’s custom engine would go down extra dimensional tunnels that man was never meant to know of.

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“You sure you know where we are going?” Legienstrausse asked through the comm.-bead she had embedded in her skull earlier that day. “Not as sure as I was fifteen minuets ago.” The mad inquisitor replied turning to face her with a manic grin showing far too many teeth. Without warning the Speeder spun around on it’s frictionless anti-grav sheath just as the chariot pulled by two Steeds of Slaanesh rounded the last corner and gaining on them. The damned creature in contraption, shimmering and beautiful and terrible locked its baleful dark eyes with the Inquisitor. Beguiling and inhumanly lovely and opening wider in shock as the Mad Dog Draco raised his ultra-violet laser pistol and winked.

The creature, fast as it was, couldn’t dodge the invisible spectrum light as it punched through it’s head right between the eyes and flash fried it’s diseased brain. The serpentine mounts startled and tried to bolt in opposite directions resulting in what could best be described as a fucked up mess as another half dozen or so pursuers collided with them. The carnage was obscured as the speeder violently lurched back into pointing in the direction of travel just in time to swerve around another tight corner and land on what had originally been the ground or at least a surface that seemed like one.

Legienstrausse could only lament the poorly judged decisions that had lead her to this point in her life. Once upon a time, a lifetime ago if truth be told, she had been waiting tables in an eating establishment in the Daisy Chain. It wasn’t a glamorous life but she had her own apartment, was making enough to live off of and a little more to send home to her mother and father in the Lagrange Point Sprawl. But that wasn’t enough for her and she had volunteered for drug trials. That had quite paid well, serious risks were minimal, as by the time they tested it on people most of the kinks had been ironed out. A few days of blinding headaches, an upset stomach, a bit of dizziness and on one embarrassing occasion lactation were a small price to pay she had thought. But she had gotten greedy and gotten in for more extreme trials for greater financial rewards. Eventually she had volunteered for something to seriously help the Imperium, to be a test subject to make a better type of super soldier. Of the ten thousand by luck she had been the only success. The fates of the failures ranged from unfortunate to sorrowful.

It wasn’t until the Inquisition kicked her door down that she knew anything actually illegal had been going on.

The speeder upended without warning and disappeared into a long shaft in the ceiling and the gravity reversed so that they were in fact falling. Faster than falling as the Necroteuch slipped out of her hands and flew “upwards” at mere freefall.

Her long clawed arms almost made longer in reflex action almost closed on it’s irregular dodecahedron form just as the sinewy hands of another being snatched it out of the air. They had closed on them, the forsaken and wretched. With a predatory grin the once-eldar lunged at her with murderous intent, it’s jaws closing deep into her shoulder as claws punched deep into her abdomen. Through the ringing of red hot and depthless pain she heard Draco swear as a pained sound half scream and half whimper escaped her lips, but no help would come from the Inquisitor as he fought off another creature with his knives and steering the speeder with his left foot.

The creature pushed her down into the upholstery of the back seat of the vehicle, a snakelike tongue licking it’s lips and extending to her bloodshot eyes as it leaned in close to drink deep of the scent of her agony. The pained noise without words continued to peel out of her mouth, tears running freely from her eyes. There was a brief moment of confusion for the kneeler before foul gods as it realized that the scent was all wrong and it’s hand was in fact stuck and being held tight in the wetness of her ruined gut. The croneworlder had enough time for a momentary expression of panic as the gut wound grew teeth and a jawbone and accompanying musculature and clamped down hard enough to meet in the middle, Legienstrausse’s face split neatly down the middle as she head butted the once-eldar and caught his head in her own and crushed in a shark like bite. It was over then but for the twitching as the body was pitched over the side, the Necroteuch retrieved from the corpse with a long boneless limb that she habitually would still have called an arm.

“What did that one taste like?” Asked the Mad Jaq against the gale as the body of his own assailant disappeared upwards into freefall, headless and presumably dead.

“Chicken and sex” Replied Legienstrausse as her skull crunched and knitted itself back into a human shape. Jaq flipped the craft ninety degrees to flat as the upside-down pit came to an abrupt end, bottoming out the vehicle that then sprang and lurched forwards along a much broader tunnel not long later two mangled corpses landed where they had been.

There were still shapes following them, more distant now, on what looked like long limbed spider-squids. They were wary, not one of them would want to make the first move but neither would they willing return to their foul land without their strange and terrible book.

Options presented themselves fleetingly in the manic mind of the mad inquisitor. They could lure them to Ganymede of Titan, but one was meant to be secret and the other would probably get them shot by grumpy space marines, they could lure them all the way to Saim-Hann or the Hubworlds but that would mean taking the straight and broad roads and the others were faster on the open, there was a Silver Skulls checkpoint somewhere around here but he couldn’t remember exactly where. All he knew was where he was and in the beating of his heart and the saruthi-smell where everything else was for a given value of “here” and “there”. Today was, he felt, another good day. A fun day and as the hordes of damnation followed his streaming checkerboard coat he couldn’t help but laugh.

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==Happy New Year==

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The drinks had been plentiful and that wasn’t the problem unless it was. Everyone seemed to be having a good time, a fun time. Music and drunken flailing charitably called dancing, the people from different sites and Vaults and even off-worlders and outsiders come to visit (after being extensively checked of course). The main hall of Admin-Site Prime had never been so alive. And away from the heart of it all sat Legienstrausse in her own little bubble of self-generating, alcohol fuelled, misery. Nobody had asked her to dance, nobody had commented on her pretty dress, barely anybody had even said hello to her.

She saw them, they though that she couldn’t see them but even with only two eyes she had extremely good peripheral vision. A new face, an outsider or someone new enough not to know what she was would approach her only to be carefully intercepted by one of her jailers who would whisper into their ear. Over the happy, happy music she couldn’t hear what it was exactly they were whispering. They would not be told the truth, not the whole truth.

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The alcohol helped. It wasn’t making her happier but it was making the misery feel more distant. She was through nearly eight bottles of Rakia and the night was still young. After a fashion. Ganymede was tidally locked to Jupiter with an orbit of a hundred and seventy two hours and if she could remember that then it was time to start on another bottle. Which she did. Or at least intended to. A hand grasped her own firmly but not ungentle. She could have sworn that she saw no one approach, and she would have. But then he did have a knack for moving in unexpected directions.

The hairless done of his head gleamed like a twisted halo in the lights and his stupid clown coat, horizontal stripes on the inside, vertical on the outside and both in badly matching colours, hanging from his coat hanger and deckchairs body like the wings of a badly assembled angel. Was there genuine concern in those eyes? It was hard to tell. He was either a man who could hide and mimic emotions well or bounced around far more than a man should and still be capable of doing the job he did.

What was he? It irked her something fierce that all knew exactly what she was, knew enough certainly to be frightened at any rate, but nobody ever stopped to ask what the ever loving fuck he was. He ran the place, or at least the day to day running of part of it. Gods know he answered to people, strange shadowy people that she did not know of and probably never would, and whom she suspected probably didn’t know about each other. But who and what was he? He was insane, clearly he was insane and she had seen far too much to believe otherwise, but he held a job that required a level professionalism and competence well above what the teeming masses were typically capable of.

She looked up into those dark grey eyes and saw nothing reflected back. Not a lack of anything to reflect but a nothingness so complete that it fell away to some unseen terrible horizon and she didn’t know if those were his eyes or her eyes reflected in them.

“Legi, you shouldn’t do this to yourself.” He said concern etched in every line framing those fathomless eyes.

“I shouldn’t a lot of things, but here we are.” She replied up ending the bottle and managing to suck down half it’s contents before he more firmly pulled it away from her.

Slipping himself under half-heartedly resisting arm she carefully guided her out of the main hall, though not before she managed to split her other arm into four grasping tentacles and each grab more bottles from the table on the way out.

“What was all that about Legi?” His voice was not unkind, but when she felt less than kind she couldn’t believe that it was anything but an act. He didn’t give a damn, he wouldn’t be her jailer if he did. But maybe he did and that was more terrifying to her, maybe he did and she was pushing away the only person mad enough to care about her.

“Nobody wanted to dance” She slurred, the alcohol, several times terminal levels for a normal human, was finally starting to kick in. “Not one person, I put on my prettiest dress and not one person wanted to dance.” In truth she was technically naked, the dress was her own skin reshaped and pigmented into looking like what was in fashion in the Jovian Orbitals; Pale blue and light grey, hugging on the torso and sleeves but loose and flowing from the waist down. Broad belts with big buckles were in fashion again this year. The colours in the dress were starting to run together and blur as she lost concentration.

“I’ve seen you try to dance Legi, you may have dodged a bullet on this one”

“Fuck you old man, you can’t talk”

“Yes, dear, I absolutely can. I have danced with Harlequins and they take that shit seriously.” She was starting to stumble more now and although he wouldn’t mention it to her she was a lot heavier than she looked.

“I just wanted one dance. Would you dance with me?” She mumbled through half closed eyes “I could try and take it as seriously as you like”

“No” The Inquisitor replied as they staggered around down the corridors that became tunnels. Mad as he was the idea of trying to waltz with an inebriated organic weapon of mass destruction was not something even he, Mad Dog Draco, was crazy enough to attempt.

She would be sober in the mourning; thankfully her unique properties seemed to minimize hangovers. Hopefully she wouldn’t remember much of tonight. He though an invitation to a new years party would have made her feel batter. It was not one of his better ideas. Next year maybe they could curl up on a couch with some chocolates and watch a film or something. Or maybe he could try and find another method of escaping their jailers for another little adventure.

He would have to be careful, he knew, his sponsors and superiors were getting more adept at finding and shutting down his escape tunnels. If it carried on like this in a few hundred years they would have trapped him here with all the other dangerous curiosities.

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== A Little Trip Out ==

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It had seemed like such a good idea at the time. Most of his ideas did somehow. Maybe it was the ability to talk fast, maybe it was the ever so wide and enthusiastic smile or maybe it was the way they were typically delivered in a hail of incoming fire when other alternatives were few and grim. But this time, this time was something special. Not good special either, oh no. This was a “has to be kept away from matches” type of special. The type of special that the Mechanicus usually scooped up to make use of the savant ability. Brilliant but utterly stupid.

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The “Pimp Speeder” was doing speeds when translated to real-space locations that would be extreme violations of relativity known only to Necron Crypteks. The Navigator on the front passenger seat she could still smell and feel the body warmth of even as he screamed and she knew the Inquisitor himself was sitting in the seat next to him almost certainly one hand on the wheel, one had hanging over the side of the door and foot pressed to the floor.
 
As for herself, Legienstrasse was trying with some success to crawl into the upholstery of the back seat. She had already digested her own eyes as a precaution.
 
The Chaos loonies of Rhanda were doing putting forth their best efforts to flesh-forge a “perfect” body and at the moment the fossil light of The Opening of the Eye passed over their world install in it their patron; The Sapphire King. Such a being, if half the claims about the body were true, would be to deamon-hosts what Fenrisian Ale was to shandy. Astartes parts stolen from ritual sacrifices taken in battles wrapped around a cybernetic frame made of tortured Martian Priests, infused with the Oblitorator Virus and gods alone knew what else. And maybe even they didn’t know what else. Sadly the information was obtained in an alley behind a seedy drinking establishment in the warrens of Luna. There was no way that they could get from Luna to Rhanda in less than a few weeks let alone a matter of hours.
 
The grin Inquisitor Draco had at that moment was something that would haunt her already decidedly unhappy dreams. Driving a stripped down land-speeder into a testing warp engine with a commandeered and terrified navigator holding the dashboard hard enough to leave finger marks in the paint is not for the faint of hearted. Or the sensible.
 
Once more Legienstrasse debated the wisdom of getting out of bed today. She could hear the things that were following them. She could feel the unlight and the heat of a god being born as it assaulted her skin. As it assaulted her soul and made her feel dirty. They were surfing the birth of Slaanesh, the bow wave of damnation. She knew what was following them, second hand hunger of a god reaching forward to claim them in the memory of birth.
 
In theory they could surf the wave right to Rhanda and, with navigator sight and Jaq’s psyker talents, travel the disturbance the ritual was causing and materialize right at the epicentre. In theory. Nobody in ten thousand years of Imperial history had ever tried anything this stupid to her knowledge.
 
Jaq Draco, Inquisitor of the most glorious Imperium, was having an eventful day. It had started with some toast with banana slices, it had involved following a lead he’d taken from a dead mans pocket to a planned meeting in a delightfully colourful public meeting house which resulted in beating someone to death with a large spanner behind said establishment and now he was driving very fast to an uncertain destination in a place he should not be. It was all so damn splendid and spoiled only by the whimpering of Legienstrasse behind him who had assumed the form of an amorphous blob in an attempt to hid under the seat and the screaming of the young navigator next to him.
 
His only concern was the bitching he was going to have to endure when they dragged him back to Ganymede, he did feel kind of bad for lying to Legi about this being a sanctioned investigation. She did seem like she needed another trip out and maybe she’s thank him when she calmed down, maybe not.

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