Post by Nepty on Sept 1, 2015 13:45:01 GMT
If space is an ocean, time is a world
In the annals of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, “Psychic Phenomena” has never truly been explained.
That’s because the Warp doesn’t need to be explained. Because it can’t be. Because it’s not insane, it has no concept of sanity or order at all. There’s very little science in the warp, after all…
But there can be a shadow in it.
February, 1943, 4 AM
Kharkov, Russia
Mikhail was dying slowly, and he knew it.
He gasped once more, sucking in another breath of frigid air. Snowflakes fell all around him, and alighted in his hair and eyelashes, where they melted. His stark white clothing was already caked in it, save where the blood had melted it.
He let the breath go with a gasp of pain as he gripped his leg harder, trying to stem the bright red stream of blood that trickled from the bullet hole in his thigh and soaked his cloths before freezing hard. He gritted his teeth and tried to muffle his scream by biting his own collar.
Mikhail Merovich, of the 66th Army, a sub-branch of the Soviet Union’s Red Army was proped up against the sides of a shell crater in the outskirts of Kharkov. He had been shot by a marksman a mere twenty minutes before, and despite his best efforts, he was bleeding out, and very close to death. He was also in considerable pain.
And for the next several minutes this went on. He would work his hardest to staunch the flow, being careful to not raise his head above the pit, lest a sniper’s bullet carry him on into whatever awaited on the other side. He would grunt and muffle his screams, as the blood trickled out and warmed his thighs, lifting the sweet numbness of the cold and leaving only the searing hot agony of a bullet wound and shattered bone.
So, as life ebbed from him, he did what all men do in times of great need. Despite his atheistic politics –Mikhail was a party man through and through. His father had fought in the Glorious Revolution. Long live comrade Stalin!- he prayed. On the offchance that a God existed –any god- he would take whatever was offered to lift the pain, and, maybe, just maybe, to live.
As he begged the silent sky for relief, the first shots rang out. Men shouted in the distance. There was a very distant grinding as gears turned, and the crunch of booted feet running.
Mikhails vision was dimming, but he thought he heard something over those screams and the beat of gunfire. Voices were answering his unspoken pleas for mercy.
Though he knew it to be the deranged hallucinations of a brain deprived of oxygen-rich blood –he had been a hospital orderly for a time before the war- he grasped onto that tiny sliver of light, hoping it might at least ease his passage.
And so he lay there, listening to his hallucinations as they grew louder and louder in his mind, almost chanting. His vision dimmed, his pain grew distant, and he grew warm and sleepy. And so voices rose in his head to an almost pleasing crescendo, and Mikhal Merovich watched the edge of his crater as faceless men in a white coats sprinted by. One stopped and looked down into the pit. He said something that Mikhail either didn’t understand or couldn’t hear over the voices. The man raised the rieel –so he was german then- pointed it at Mikhail, and fired. For Mikhail, everything went black.
As the unfortunate German private would learn, shooting a latent psyker is what can be called a "Bad Idea". Particularly when his mind is so close to the warp.
So, in the chaos of the 3rd battle of Kharkov, 2 units, one soviet, one german, disappeared with a great big flash. Both were determined lost in action, or utterly decimated to the point of near total casualties.
Unfortunately, as it happened, both units, their equipment and vehicles had been embroiled in a small but highly concentrated warp storm. A millisecond long at most, the death of a powerful latent psyker who had almost been immersed in the Warp as it was, had made the pooled energy of the empyrean that had been soaking into him go, for want of a better word, boom. The unfortunate Germans and Russians were rendered temporarily unconscious from the shock of course. It’s just as well that they hadn’t seen the horrors around them as they flew through the warp. In retrospect, they were lucky. Compared to the horrific Warp of the 41st millennium, the Warp during the close of the 1st millennium was almost tranquil. Of course it was still a sea of piss and blood, a reservoir of hatred, evil and the most disgusting rape fantasies ever dreamed up by sentient minds, helped along no doubt by the horror and violence of the 2nd world war. It was just as well that a shadow in the warp flung them out when it did, otherwise they might have gone well and truly insane, if they were lucky.
M30, Imperial Army Report.
“6th Company, Alpha Legion 2 years overdue. Their ship, “Hydra” has been discovered derelict in deep space. No crew or Astartes aboard. 6th Company officially declared Lost to the Warp. The Bell of Lost Souls will be tolled once for each of those brave Astartes, who died in service of Mankind. Ave Imperator”
M41, Fire Caste Third Sphere Expansion Front Command Report
“Hunter Cadre 56, T’olku Sept, missing in action. Last seen moving to assault stronghold of Ork Psyker. Entire unit declared destroyed, along with local ork force during subsequent psychic explosion.”
M401, imperial guard report
“Vostroyan 855th Armored Brigade element lost after Gellar fields failed. Entire ship declared derelict. All crew and passengers presumed lost to daemons.”
M40.5, Imperial Navy Report
“4685th Bomber Wing, 13894th Navy Fighter Wing, 3791st Tank Hunter Wing destroyed. Chaos forces vortex shells struck airfield and succeeded in completely removing all equipment and personnel from existence. Requesting replacements.”
M41, Imperial Guard Report
“Yavis IX enveloped in warp storm. 18th Catachan en route to combat Tyranid Hive Fleet Typhon struck by aforesaid storm. All hands presumed lost in the Warp. No further details available. Requesting Exterminatus of Yavis IX, lest the Warp overtake it.”
M41, Hive Mind Memory
“Supporting tendril unfortunately lost to phenomena. Contact with hive-mind lost. Increase production to replace missing bioforms.”
//Praetor Systems Records\\
//Overlord Korsarovehk…portion of populace…escaped destruction of target world via untargeted teleportation++Status unknown.\\
Trevor
If there’s one thing that really seems nice, it’s driving along a completely silent road at 6:30 AM. At least, that’s according to Trevor.
Trevor didn’t know why he liked it. He just did. That time just before the dawn, when the sun is still below the horizon and everything seems real quiet and peaceful was a wonderful time for serene contemplation…and sleep, if you’re stupid enough to put on the whispering voice radio stations, or whatever they’re called.
Trevor checked his mirror absentmindedly. He’d been roughly jostled awake by his dozy girlfriend this morning and bullied into going to get Frontline for Loki, her dog, while she slept in. Normally, he kenw, he would have ignored her and gone back to sleep, but he’d had an early night, and this was a rare opportunity to enjoy the world when it was all his, with no one else on the roads.
Trevor couldn’t really explain why, but he just felt happy this morning. Sure, he was barley making enough money to scrape by, and the house needed a few repairs, but things were going alright.
He pulled into the drugstore and stepped in, leaving the car running, picked up a couple of boxes of Frontline and checked them out with the bleary eyed ginger at the counter. Then he got back into his car. As he sat down, he heard something thump on the floor. Trevor’s brows knitted and he reached down to find out whatever it was he’d knocked down.
The incredibly grumpy visage of Gregor Eisenhorn stared back at him.
He regarded the figure frozen in the act of striding purposefully across the cover of the book for a couple more moments, then put on in the passenger seat. Eisenhorn was a pretty good read. Once more, Trevor contemplated that he might play the game, were it not for the fact that it was ridiculously expensive. The thought slowly floated out of his mind as he drove out of the lot and onto Colesville Road. He wasn’t heading straight back, cause Nicole wanted him to borrow Griffin’s camera. She wanted pictures of the dogs or something to send to her parents or whatever. He’d swing by Griffin’s now and pick it up.
A crash of thunder interrupted him. He looked up just in time to behold the fleet of black clouds as they started pouring into the murky grey sky. It looked like some god had dumped an inkwell in the proverbial water jar of the heavens. He slowed down as he watched. There was a haze in the air too.. Almost a tinge of sickly red. It was getting hot.
When the clouds covered the sky for as far as the eye could see, a flash of lightning and a crack of thunder tore them open, and the ocean tried to reclaim the land via air-drop. Trevor pulled over, not willing to risk driving in such torrential rain. It looked to him like you’d need gills to be out in that. He wouldn’t have been surprised to have seen a fish swim by. There couldn’t be more than a centimeter of air between every drop. He watched as the rain poured, and lightning spiderwebbed across the sky and the thunder roared and crashed and rattled the old toyota’s windows. Trevor’s head felt heavy, like a great shadow was pressing down on him. He almost felt like going to sleep...
He rubbed his eyes, intent on staying awake.
When he took his hands away, the storm had abated. The black clouds were withdrawing, the sun was rising once more, and the soaked streets began to steam under the hot summer sun.
“Fucking weird” he muttered, and drove on to Griffin’s house.
Nicole
The harsh beeping of an alarm was never a good way to wake up. So she groaned, rolled over and slapped the off button, bypassing snooze entirely and went back to sleep.
(Nicole is in the main bedroom, asleep. Door is closed. Trevor is out of the house for now)
All your troops begin after having been flung through the Warp were mercifully rendered unconscious, if biologically possible and are just now waking up.
In the annals of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, “Psychic Phenomena” has never truly been explained.
That’s because the Warp doesn’t need to be explained. Because it can’t be. Because it’s not insane, it has no concept of sanity or order at all. There’s very little science in the warp, after all…
But there can be a shadow in it.
February, 1943, 4 AM
Kharkov, Russia
Mikhail was dying slowly, and he knew it.
He gasped once more, sucking in another breath of frigid air. Snowflakes fell all around him, and alighted in his hair and eyelashes, where they melted. His stark white clothing was already caked in it, save where the blood had melted it.
He let the breath go with a gasp of pain as he gripped his leg harder, trying to stem the bright red stream of blood that trickled from the bullet hole in his thigh and soaked his cloths before freezing hard. He gritted his teeth and tried to muffle his scream by biting his own collar.
Mikhail Merovich, of the 66th Army, a sub-branch of the Soviet Union’s Red Army was proped up against the sides of a shell crater in the outskirts of Kharkov. He had been shot by a marksman a mere twenty minutes before, and despite his best efforts, he was bleeding out, and very close to death. He was also in considerable pain.
And for the next several minutes this went on. He would work his hardest to staunch the flow, being careful to not raise his head above the pit, lest a sniper’s bullet carry him on into whatever awaited on the other side. He would grunt and muffle his screams, as the blood trickled out and warmed his thighs, lifting the sweet numbness of the cold and leaving only the searing hot agony of a bullet wound and shattered bone.
So, as life ebbed from him, he did what all men do in times of great need. Despite his atheistic politics –Mikhail was a party man through and through. His father had fought in the Glorious Revolution. Long live comrade Stalin!- he prayed. On the offchance that a God existed –any god- he would take whatever was offered to lift the pain, and, maybe, just maybe, to live.
As he begged the silent sky for relief, the first shots rang out. Men shouted in the distance. There was a very distant grinding as gears turned, and the crunch of booted feet running.
Mikhails vision was dimming, but he thought he heard something over those screams and the beat of gunfire. Voices were answering his unspoken pleas for mercy.
Though he knew it to be the deranged hallucinations of a brain deprived of oxygen-rich blood –he had been a hospital orderly for a time before the war- he grasped onto that tiny sliver of light, hoping it might at least ease his passage.
And so he lay there, listening to his hallucinations as they grew louder and louder in his mind, almost chanting. His vision dimmed, his pain grew distant, and he grew warm and sleepy. And so voices rose in his head to an almost pleasing crescendo, and Mikhal Merovich watched the edge of his crater as faceless men in a white coats sprinted by. One stopped and looked down into the pit. He said something that Mikhail either didn’t understand or couldn’t hear over the voices. The man raised the rieel –so he was german then- pointed it at Mikhail, and fired. For Mikhail, everything went black.
As the unfortunate German private would learn, shooting a latent psyker is what can be called a "Bad Idea". Particularly when his mind is so close to the warp.
So, in the chaos of the 3rd battle of Kharkov, 2 units, one soviet, one german, disappeared with a great big flash. Both were determined lost in action, or utterly decimated to the point of near total casualties.
Unfortunately, as it happened, both units, their equipment and vehicles had been embroiled in a small but highly concentrated warp storm. A millisecond long at most, the death of a powerful latent psyker who had almost been immersed in the Warp as it was, had made the pooled energy of the empyrean that had been soaking into him go, for want of a better word, boom. The unfortunate Germans and Russians were rendered temporarily unconscious from the shock of course. It’s just as well that they hadn’t seen the horrors around them as they flew through the warp. In retrospect, they were lucky. Compared to the horrific Warp of the 41st millennium, the Warp during the close of the 1st millennium was almost tranquil. Of course it was still a sea of piss and blood, a reservoir of hatred, evil and the most disgusting rape fantasies ever dreamed up by sentient minds, helped along no doubt by the horror and violence of the 2nd world war. It was just as well that a shadow in the warp flung them out when it did, otherwise they might have gone well and truly insane, if they were lucky.
M30, Imperial Army Report.
“6th Company, Alpha Legion 2 years overdue. Their ship, “Hydra” has been discovered derelict in deep space. No crew or Astartes aboard. 6th Company officially declared Lost to the Warp. The Bell of Lost Souls will be tolled once for each of those brave Astartes, who died in service of Mankind. Ave Imperator”
M41, Fire Caste Third Sphere Expansion Front Command Report
“Hunter Cadre 56, T’olku Sept, missing in action. Last seen moving to assault stronghold of Ork Psyker. Entire unit declared destroyed, along with local ork force during subsequent psychic explosion.”
M401, imperial guard report
“Vostroyan 855th Armored Brigade element lost after Gellar fields failed. Entire ship declared derelict. All crew and passengers presumed lost to daemons.”
M40.5, Imperial Navy Report
“4685th Bomber Wing, 13894th Navy Fighter Wing, 3791st Tank Hunter Wing destroyed. Chaos forces vortex shells struck airfield and succeeded in completely removing all equipment and personnel from existence. Requesting replacements.”
M41, Imperial Guard Report
“Yavis IX enveloped in warp storm. 18th Catachan en route to combat Tyranid Hive Fleet Typhon struck by aforesaid storm. All hands presumed lost in the Warp. No further details available. Requesting Exterminatus of Yavis IX, lest the Warp overtake it.”
M41, Hive Mind Memory
“Supporting tendril unfortunately lost to phenomena. Contact with hive-mind lost. Increase production to replace missing bioforms.”
//Praetor Systems Records\\
//Overlord Korsarovehk…portion of populace…escaped destruction of target world via untargeted teleportation++Status unknown.\\
Trevor
If there’s one thing that really seems nice, it’s driving along a completely silent road at 6:30 AM. At least, that’s according to Trevor.
Trevor didn’t know why he liked it. He just did. That time just before the dawn, when the sun is still below the horizon and everything seems real quiet and peaceful was a wonderful time for serene contemplation…and sleep, if you’re stupid enough to put on the whispering voice radio stations, or whatever they’re called.
Trevor checked his mirror absentmindedly. He’d been roughly jostled awake by his dozy girlfriend this morning and bullied into going to get Frontline for Loki, her dog, while she slept in. Normally, he kenw, he would have ignored her and gone back to sleep, but he’d had an early night, and this was a rare opportunity to enjoy the world when it was all his, with no one else on the roads.
Trevor couldn’t really explain why, but he just felt happy this morning. Sure, he was barley making enough money to scrape by, and the house needed a few repairs, but things were going alright.
He pulled into the drugstore and stepped in, leaving the car running, picked up a couple of boxes of Frontline and checked them out with the bleary eyed ginger at the counter. Then he got back into his car. As he sat down, he heard something thump on the floor. Trevor’s brows knitted and he reached down to find out whatever it was he’d knocked down.
The incredibly grumpy visage of Gregor Eisenhorn stared back at him.
He regarded the figure frozen in the act of striding purposefully across the cover of the book for a couple more moments, then put on in the passenger seat. Eisenhorn was a pretty good read. Once more, Trevor contemplated that he might play the game, were it not for the fact that it was ridiculously expensive. The thought slowly floated out of his mind as he drove out of the lot and onto Colesville Road. He wasn’t heading straight back, cause Nicole wanted him to borrow Griffin’s camera. She wanted pictures of the dogs or something to send to her parents or whatever. He’d swing by Griffin’s now and pick it up.
A crash of thunder interrupted him. He looked up just in time to behold the fleet of black clouds as they started pouring into the murky grey sky. It looked like some god had dumped an inkwell in the proverbial water jar of the heavens. He slowed down as he watched. There was a haze in the air too.. Almost a tinge of sickly red. It was getting hot.
When the clouds covered the sky for as far as the eye could see, a flash of lightning and a crack of thunder tore them open, and the ocean tried to reclaim the land via air-drop. Trevor pulled over, not willing to risk driving in such torrential rain. It looked to him like you’d need gills to be out in that. He wouldn’t have been surprised to have seen a fish swim by. There couldn’t be more than a centimeter of air between every drop. He watched as the rain poured, and lightning spiderwebbed across the sky and the thunder roared and crashed and rattled the old toyota’s windows. Trevor’s head felt heavy, like a great shadow was pressing down on him. He almost felt like going to sleep...
He rubbed his eyes, intent on staying awake.
When he took his hands away, the storm had abated. The black clouds were withdrawing, the sun was rising once more, and the soaked streets began to steam under the hot summer sun.
“Fucking weird” he muttered, and drove on to Griffin’s house.
Nicole
The harsh beeping of an alarm was never a good way to wake up. So she groaned, rolled over and slapped the off button, bypassing snooze entirely and went back to sleep.
(Nicole is in the main bedroom, asleep. Door is closed. Trevor is out of the house for now)
All your troops begin after having been flung through the Warp were mercifully rendered unconscious, if biologically possible and are just now waking up.