Setting:Cloudburst/Vasari's Cruelty
| System | ||
|---|---|---|
| Galactic Position | Cloudburst Sector, Cognomen Subsector | |
| World Type, Name | Warp Storm: Vasari's Cruelty | |
Description
No Warp Storm is safe, as any Navigator could explain in detail. The largest Warp Storms have names that strike fear into the hearts of starfarers the galaxy over, like The Emperor’s Wrath and The Eye of Terror. Vasari’s Cruelty is less well-known than those, but it is as dangerous up close. The Cruelty is a roughly spherical region of space nine lightyears in width, charged with massive energy potential by a black hole on its northern edge. The Storm is spinning like a Kerr Hole, and occasionally throws waves of Aetheric energy outwards to ravage nearby systems. The nearest and hardest hit is AGR424, which is a dead system of radioactive rocks and gas. The second nearest is the human colony of Lordarine, which routinely suffers under assaults from the Warp energy.
Vasari’s Cruelty is named after a Rogue Trader, Herman Vasari, who was hardly the first person to know of it, but was the first to reach its physical edge and return sane. Perhaps hoping to throw terror into the hearts of his enemies, the upstart Rogue Trader named the Storm after himself. His house died out mere months later, which has led many young Navigators to question precisely who this Vasari character was, and why he was so cruel.
The Warp Storm that spins at the heart of the region is a violently tumultuous one, entirely impassible by any means known to the Imperium. As Navigators and Astropaths draw near, they can hear sounds on the edges of their minds like distant screams. The closer they draw, the more people join the chorus of screams, though they grow no louder. It is only after entering the storm that the volume starts to increase, the extent that it can drive an unprepared mind to insanity in minutes. The Warp Storm whips at incredible speeds around a single empty point at the physical center of the storm’s core, like a spherical hurricane, and the speed of the objects trapped in the Storm suggest that the physics-defying nature of the Warp is spilling into the area. Ships trapped in the Storm seem to be moving faster than light, which shouldn’t be detectible by Imperial ship sensors.
Vasari’s Cruelty periodically lashes out with tendrils of Warp Energy, but also emits staggering amounts of heat for a spatial object, even given the gas-rich environment of the Cognomen Subsector. The Free Chartist ship Subach once performed a detailed sensor scan of the Storm for the Astrocartigraphicae, and determined that at least some of the space the Storm presently occupies used to contain a red supergiant star of extremely varied core composition, perhaps the remnants of a primordial nova. Every so often, the Storm fires metallic asteroids out of its teeming surface moving at a high fraction of the speed of light, some of which may pose a navigational hazard to vessels within a light year of the edge of the Storm.