Editing Nobledark Imperium Notes (section)

==Cherys==

After the Dark Wedding the Dark Eldar were not the only ones who made an exodus from Commorragh. Before the Dark Wedding Commorragh, specifically Null City, was a mecca for all sorts of ne’er-do-wells unwelcome in the Imperium for their criminal behavior yet with enough common sense to avoid buying into the brain-rotting madness of Chaos, ranging from enterprising Slaugth to human pirates to rogue non-Dark Eldar corsairs to Sslyth mercenaries. Those who were satisfied with “mundane” crimes like piracy, slavery, and trading in illicit goods and doing whatever they wanted rather than the insane fanaticism and cultish behavior of Chaos, much like the Dark Eldar (who do commit depravities for depravity’s sake, but because they want to rather than to impress some gods). Null City is still home to significant populations of xenos pirates and mercenaries, but quite a few of those that could leave jumped ship or tried to find a new place to ply their wares having seen Vect’s marriage to Malys as a portent of things to come. In the immediate aftermath of the Dark Wedding in addition to the Dark Eldar refugees who thought it better to throw themselves on the mercy of the Craftworlders than let Malys drag them into hell the Imperium also had to deal with a sudden influx of pirates and vagabonds trying to carve out their own little hideaways in the galaxy now that their old port of call was no longer “safe”. 

One such case was the world of Cherys. Cherys was a world that was cut off from the rest of the galaxy for nearly 500 years by bad warp storms. Only the really old humans and some of the eldar even remember when they were actually part of the Imperium. System is not that bad, plenty of mineral wealth on the moons and asteroids. By some quirk there are no solid planets as such, just 8 gas giants ranging in size from one of them being a brown dwarf and the smallest about the size of Neptune. Imperium was going to colonize the shit out of the place because there are a dozen moons about the size of Earth with lots of water ice. Therefore great for colonizing. Set the place up as an industrial and bread basket hub and use it to send out hundreds of on-site built colony ships into the rest of the unclaimed sector, in the following 1,000 years they were hoping to set up hundreds of colonies and eventually have it become an entirely new sector (uplifting and/or offering the hand of friendship to any civilized being that the encounter in the process).

They got as far as building a Ramilies-class Starfort with the great distinction of it actually having been designed by Architect-Supreme Ramilies of the Ad-Mech. Then the warp went funny. Not funny enough to actually break through into real space but it was close and it kept ships away for 500 years.

A few years ago the weather improved and people started to say things like "remember that starfort we built? I wonder if it's still intact?"

Starfort is intact, it's also still inhabited. If it had been managed properly the whole system would be a small legitimate civilization all abustle with activity, industry and getting shit done. As it is it's a starfort that's kind of only half inhabitable and a few outposts on the moons an asteroids that support it, barely.
Law and order broke down more or less immediately once it was isolated because the commander was stricken with a terminal case of what the medicae would call “idiocy” and nobody since has been able to get the gangs to work together or even just stop shooting at each other for more than a few hours at a time.


Then a band of Sslyth arrive from Commorragh pretty much as soon as the warp was safe to travel, they didn't risk taking the webway as they didn't leave the City of Sins on good terms. The original plan of just enslaving them all and forcing their way to power go out the window when it turns out the station has been horribly mismanaged and the residents are desperate for somebody with an actual brain take charge. The Sslyth manage to take over the last pockets of resistance about three months before an Imperial expeditionary fleet slid up along side it with proper military escort. They are going to salvage the original plan of pushing back the border and for that they need the station up and running. The scribes are all over the place talking to the locals about the last half a millennium and the Sslyth are freaking the fuck out because they are pretty sure that they saw a Battle Barge with the heraldry of the War Hounds on it and they are pretty sure they are on the "shoot on sight" category.

The Administratum adepts do eventually find them. They congratulate them on getting the place into some semblance of order, tell them that they will push the paperwork through to have them be the official civilian governing body for the system and ask them to give their regards to the rest of the Diasporex next time they come round this way. Sslyth end up slightly more confused than ever but nobody is shooting them and this is a deal they can live with.

The Sslyth are better rulers than you'd expect from Commorrites, but "better behaviour than the Dark City" is a pretty low bar to set, and this is on the fringes of the Imperium in the first place, so it's not exactly in the spotlight. Even official Imperial posts can be shady as fuck sometimes, just as long as it's within the Imperium's tolerance levels (no Chaos, no blood-sacrifices, keep your criminality deniable, ect.) and this would be on the lower end of that- on the surface. The Ssylth are still absolutely reprehensible by modern moral standards, but to the Imperium they're practically upstanding citizens, especially considering their past and current circumstances. There's still gang wars over territory, gun-trafficking, and all sorts of bad stuff going on in the station, it's just that it's basically "normal" crimes for the Imperium, rather than the balls-to-the-wall edgy shit of Commorragh.

To put it another way- the port is (unofficially) open to pirate vessels, but it is also open to Imperial vessels. Including Imperial warships that may happen to be in the area on anti-piracy patrols. In which case they're not going to leave their buddies out in the cold, they might not be able to save their ship and the poor sods still on it, but they'll cover for the crew who were still on station and put them up until the next ship comes along. Just need to get you putting on a show for the inspectors doing this little job over here, we'll even set you up for pay to make it convincing... and then two months later that crew has fallen into the exact same trap of getting comfortable with having regular meals, cleaning facilities, and an actual bed and the ones who haven't fallen for it and would cause trouble for the rest have wound up in one of the back-corridors of the station where the power isn't consistent with several stab-wounds in the back. And of course, if the Imperial officials happen to ask where any pirate vessels may have been headed when they stopped in...

Basically, they're in what feels like a mini-Commorragh, only with Inquisition and Imperial Navy instead of Vect and pirates instead of the various Dark-Eldar factions. The biggest difference is now they've actually got money in their pockets and reliable resources to use and sometimes the residents thank them and smile in ways that give them funny feelings in their chests that they don't understand.


It should be noted, this is not some grand master-plan of theirs. They've always been regarded as a bit of a doofus-crew by their compatriots, and have spent this entire time feeling like they're in way over their heads and just reacting to the latest "OH SHIT FUCK AHHH" thing that's landed on their doorstep. They're not stupid by any means, and they wouldn't have made it this long or been this successful if they were- if nothing else, they're excellent at problem-solving on the fly. It's just that they've got almost Ciaphas Cain-tier luck and a bad habit of being unwilling to give up whatever they've managed to get. 

Case in point, their stance on slaving. These Ssylth don't engage in the slave trade and tend to crack down on it harshly and bloodily. It's not a matter of approval, they started out in the Dark City after all, it's their possessiveness kicking in. Any slave-trade on the station is dealing with Station-dwellers, and the station-dwellers belong to THEM, so taking them as slaves is basically stealing the Ssylth's shit. And no self-respecting Commorrite is going to tolerate anybody stealing their shit. Of course, this gets misinterpreted as them having a moralistic line they won't cross, so once again the whole situation is screwing them over.

When it comes down to it, they always side with the Imperium over their fellow pirates, but that's less loyalty and more a combination of "the Imperium's the one making this so profitable" and "[[Dakka|Oh fuck they have so many guns we are not picking that fight]]." They are still pirates at heart at least that's what they keep telling themselves.


For that matter, the starport itself isn't the luckiest of places; aside from the whole "getting lost due to warp shenanigans," there's how everything collapsed because somehow an idiot was running the show when things went to hell, plus how things kept going wrong during construction with corridors not lining up correctly and prefabbed pieces somehow completely failing to fit together right. Nothing Warp-tainted, thankfully (the Imperium checked- thoroughly- when these issues kept popping up) but the end result of basically kitbashing stuff together and twisting corridor connections to get stuff to fit together meant that the general construction of the place, while static and thus given clearly-marked maps, is still an absolute nightmare to try and navigate through, especially for people who are used to the more organized overflow of most human constructions, where they started out orderly and then became a mess because of the bloat of too much stuff. This station was built messy from the start due to stuff just going wrong in the most annoying way possible.

There's rumors of a shrine to Murphy on the station. Nobody knows where or if it was there from the start, or got erected by somebody asking for mercy during construction or the period when the station was lost. They just know that attempting to get rid of it ends badly, and praying/making offerings is just asking for trouble.

Whether the shrine actually exists or not is ambiguous, but ultimately it does not matter whether it is real. It is equally as plausible that the shrine doesn't exist, but that people on the station are willing to believe it does because it would give an explanation for why things keep going sideways at Cherys. Then there's the possibility of it being a chicken-and-egg scenario; is the prevalence of things going wrong a result of the shrine, or is the shrine a result of all the bad luck that manifests on the station? Ultimately it's all academic, because the takeaway is always that the station seems to be a magnet for mishaps. 

The more interesting case for the existence of the shrine is that, while the station is a magnet for mishaps, it's not necessarily a magnet for misfortune. Your plan is going to crumble to pieces, but there always seems to be opportunity mixed in. The Ssylth's plight is the perfect example of this; from their viewpoint, things have been going wrong and stayed going wrong ever since they arrived- or before, since they only found the station in the first place because their navigation got shot to hell while fleeing the Dark City and forced them to make a blind jump into the void. Despite that, they're better off than when they arrived, with steady income, positions of power, followers who would die for them, and even friends and allies. And all of this was not because they sought it out, but because every time things went FUBAR the solution to the problems would end up giving them good things on top of the even bigger problems it came with.

There's at least a couple of the Ssylth who are so adamant about still being mercenaries and bad people because they're terrified that if they admit what they've become and try to actually pursue their new purpose, the effect will reverse and they'll end up actually having to go back to being pirates.


Life on the port is... interesting. The Murphy-effect doesn't just affect the sneks, though they certainly seem to have gotten hit by it harder than most.
At this point, it's somewhat normal for the residents, who don't really see anything too weird about it, and an outsider looking in wouldn't notice anything too glaring at first. Then they get to one of the station's worksites and find people with five different wrong types of connector that the workers go through until one of them inexplicably fits, backup tools are stashed in every crevice, and a normally-minor discrepancy with the power intake leading to everybody leaving the floor, seconds before the power-surge the discrepancy heralded wreaks havoc on the floor.

In other words, they've grown very good at anticipating unexpected dangers and working with the wrong materials. When they're off the station and out in the rest of the Imperium, this can come off as paranoia and obsessive-compulsive behavior, but on-station it's all completely justified.

As for Rogue Traders, of course they stop by, and several of them leave with hulls full of riches or powerful new crew-members or the like. This is because to them, the station is basically like a casino; Try your luck and see if you make it big! There's potential for profit here, a land of opportunity, but only if you're lucky enough!
Some of them find that fortune in ways that basically screw them out of being Rogue Traders, others just get screwed, but they keep coming because they hear about the ones who came out better for it, and ignore the bit about how customer satisfaction is universally shit.


The station is a lot cleaner than you'd expect something getting run by the Ssylth to be. There's a number of reasons for this: First and foremost, the Imperium is not stupid and has ambitions for the area, so if the Ssylth had acted like typical Ssylth, they'd have gotten Blammed and replaced by either a Space Marine chapter or somebody more official. This band of Ssylth are well aware of this, and considering they're a bunch of dregs from barely-relevant houses, they'd be mincemeat against a Space Marine squad. Thus, they are very eager to not give the big bad Imperium a reason to come after them. This doesn't mean they avoid their standard shady shit, but they let it come to them rather than seeking it out, and keep it as quiet as they possibly can.

To give perspective, the main source of income, and the only thing they really had in place when the Imperium showed up, was the legitimate resource-harvesting the station was built for. True, they'd originally been intending the resources for building ships for themselves, but they've given up on that thanks to the dollar-signs the Imperium pays for it.

This pretty much characterizes the struggle these Ssylth have been going through; they set out to do something properly Ssylth-y, and then something screws it up so hard they end up looking like the good guys. Big pirate captain stops in to sell his booty? An argument springs up that ends with your blade in his neck right as an Imperial warfleet shows up, and you end up getting praised and collecting the bounty on his head. Slavers show up with fresh labor? Somehow you getting lost in the corridors with them gets interpreted as a liberation attempt, with one of the slaves happens to be a somewhat important person whose associates pay a good sum and offer a trade deal in thanks for his return.

Basically, they're villains going through a mid-life crisis of suddenly having 401ks and a business to run and suddenly being responsible adults rather than the freebooting teenagers they used to be.  The scary part (for them) is that they've actually gotten comfortable with their new situation, even if they'll never admit it. They're still ready and eager for fights, and their first question on running into a problem is "can we stab it away?," but the number of times where they decide the answer is "yes" has been declining.

Some in the Imperium, particularly the Inquisition, have figured out the truth behind the Sslyth on Cherys. The general reaction to said discovery is apathy. The Imperium doesn't care who is running the planet as long as the population is revolting, they aren't Chaos/genestealer corrupted, and they pay the tithe. Indeed for the Imperium, it's something of a social experiment; eventually the point is going to come where the Ssylth have an opportunity and either take it and resort back to their old ways- in which case there's a contingent of War Hounds within the galactic area, cleaning up the mess will be relatively easy - or stick to their guns and continue on the course they're going down, in which case it will be an example of why the civilized Imperial method is the correct approach to the world, or something like that. Basically proof that redemption is possible if you choose to pursue it.


The rulers of Cherys are known as Aesymnetes. The Aesymnetes are elected tyrants as decided by the voters, though only certain people are allowed the right to vote. The members of the gangs that sided with the Sslyth in their hostile takeover all were given the privilege and many have earned it since. If you want to be able to vote you have to do something to benefit the station (and therefore the Sslyth). Those that can vote feel that their voices actually mean something and they have a stake in the station and it's well being, a stake that they will fight for. The non-voters typically also wish that they could vote and the ones with some get up and go will get up and earn it with service to the station, those that won't don't deserve it and probably aren't worth worrying about. The system is also completely rigged and there's a glass ceiling non-Sslyth can't get past. Sslyth didn't escape one master to becomes servants to someone else. They only have the vote because it makes people the illusion that their leaders rule with the consent of the masses as there aren’t enough Sslyth to forcibly impose law.

Three Sslyth in particular are currently in charge. Not coincidentally, these were the three Sslyth who managed to organize the ragtag bunch of people who originally decided to set out from Commorragh. Laerhi is smart and quick-thinking, having the most common sense and good at figuring out risk management- namely, how to avoid risks when possible and saddle somebody else with them when not. M'hoh is practically a savant when it came to planning and keeping complicated systems running- with the downside of being prone to overly-elaborate plans that nobody else could keep up with. Caer-Li is the "muscle" of the leaders, but while dumb by comparison, was charismatic enough to get others to go along with him, and thus was the one they tended to need to get their fractured band to cooperate with their latest escapade. 



The Dark Eldar attempted to raid Cherys once. Emphasis on attempted. The Kabal was one the Sslyth knew, either having once worked for them or having fought them as mercenaries for another Kabal at some point. The Sneks worked for these "people" for a very long time. Knowing how they think and predicting their behaviour was a survival trait. The Dark Eldar come in expecting to encounter a lower end PDF. They leave the system with substantial losses and nothing to show for those losses, they return to their homes humiliated. The real kicker? They never even knew that the Ssylth were there. The outpost they went after had one Ssylth who never left any survivors to report back what they had seen.

This wasn't the first time that the Dark Eldar had gone on easy raids to Cherys in the 500 years of isolation. The place was practically a free range human farm crossed with a pick-and-mix. They haven't been back since as their reckoning of profit to loss no longer stack up favourably and there are softer targets elsewhere.

The Sslyth were still praised for it. If it wasn't for their take over security would have consisted of poorly trained gangs running protection rackets. Since moving in the Ssylth broke the gangs up, gave some of them some degree of training who then trained others, formed them up into mixed squads, shored up defences and generally got them to take their jobs seriously. When the Imperium came calling they provided them with new las-rifles to replace or augment the supplies of 500 year old hand me downs and improvised home made shit and gave them some flack jackets and other really basic gear.

None of this would have happened if the Ssylth hadn't arrived, beaten everyone into shape and eaten the worst objectors.

Also Sekropss was especially well praised or leading the defences and turning the raid inside out. Sekropss is an extremely clever bastard. That wasn't even his real job, he was just keeping the seat warm for someone who was moulting, his actual job is trying to create a judiciary and the rules for a constabulary system from whole cloth.