Dark Heresy, Session 9: Damned Cities

We had gone back out to Grey's hab, then, completely at a loose end. Times like these make me miss command structures like in the Guard. No mucking around, you just do as your told. Here, sometimes, I feel like nobody really has a grip on the plot, so we just plod along.

This trip to the habs, though, was my call. Surely, we had missed something? It turned out we hadn't any new leads when we got there, though, so we went over what we know and decided to search out Enforcer General Khan to coordinate our investigation with his.

Before we knew it, however, we were escorted as 'guests' of the apparent rulers of the Undertow, the Rag Court, which consisted of three. Here, I'll call them Creepy, Fatty, and Crazy, because that's what they seemed to be to me. The one, Crazy, even invited us to assassinate the Enforcer General! Assassination of a civil servant of the Empire is a grave offense (unless such an assassination is gone through the right channels and all, but nevermind that), no matter the compensation, which has been rather poor for us since Inquisitor passed.

All that aside, and being prudent, we agreed to take the hit into consideration, and were let go with a small bit more of information after we divulged a little, ourselves.

Earlier attempts to contact Enforcer General Khan met with difficulty, since he was busy in the quorum, but we arrived at the Judiciary and made our way in just in time to hear someone say that we were the Inquisitorial investigation team, not whoever was let in before us, and witnessed a small amount of panic set in before the realization that the impostors were still around and also very dead, much like the other attackers from the other murders.

We engaged these targets (save for our new companions...the pilot hadn't been seen since before we left Haarlock's Folly to visit Grey's hab, and the silent one had ran out of the room as the dead men revealed themselves, be it out of fear or hoping to find the Enforcer General, who knows), but not very efficiently. They can take massive amounts of small-arms fire before they go down, and it took us a fair bit to realize hits to the arms and legs weren't effective at all. Add to this the fact that none of us were laying down effective fire, and things just seemed to spiral out of control early on.

We finally took down one mark, but the other two targets had barely been touched and ammo was becoming scarce. Xantippa (Warp take her soul once she actually dies!) layed on her psychic abilities thick, and - naturally - created no little amount of warp disturbances with the sheer amount of power surging through the area. Were the situation not so dire, I would have shown that damnable woman penance for disrupting His work with her indiscriminate display, but the very strong physical presence of dead men trying to kill us deterred me...for now.

Whatever Xantippa did that set herself alight, or whatever that set her alight, anyway, was punishment enough and besides, Nico was there to douse her after she had burned enough to learn her lesson. Rhia, in the end, put paid to the dead, though it cost us a precious plasma weapon. Rhia immediately paid restitution for her sacrifice of such a holy relic with her leg, and so He took His payment and all was balanced in that effort. A few grenades that detonated in the plasma meltdown were an added bit of excitement and firepower to an already impressive explosion, and it's a small wonder that Rhia lived at all.

Light arms and a big explosion is all it took, in the end, and we were all alive, though needing to regroup, badly, since triage was unavailable to us then.


Cast of Characters
Rhia, Gunpoint (Hive World) Investigator (Arbiter 5) - Angela
Xantippa Thebe, Son of Nightmare (Void Born) ?? (Imperial Psyker 5) -  Paul
Nicodemus, Regulus (Imperial World) Scholar (Adept 5) - Taylor
Mohrdecai, Cadian (Fortress World) Veteran (Guardsman 5) - Me
??, (Feral World) Assassin (Assassin 5) - Sam

Here, we were pretty sure that Khan was the "bad guy". I'm not sure what led to this decision, but it seemed logical to all of us at the time. After the Rag Court offered us a bounty, it just seemed to strengthen our conviction. Perhaps we were all just frustrated that our characters aren't very investigatey and we wanted David to hold our hands? Either way, we assumed we'd put down the Enforcer General, collecting the bounty on his head and solving Sinophia's problems in one fell swoop. How wrong we were to be!


Another aside, even though I dropped the ball on this month, I'm fairly proud that this is the best year (as far as post count goes, that this blog has seen. I've not had much time to actually write out a post, but it's good to get this one, at least out before the year's end.
I hope everyone's holidays are great!