All Guardsmen Party Storytime

I should be studying for my exam, but I can put it off

Shoggmaster. It's half one over here, I need sleep, but I need to have my agp fix!

Count me in

"WHAT! Let me see that!" the dataslate was abruptly ripped from Tink's hands by Twitch, who began scanning at a far faster pace. "Oh shit shit shit shit shit shit, there's more." All three troopers bent over the dataslate. "No more than twenty kilograms of Munitorum Grade-B explosives?"

"Do you even have any Munitorum-issue 'splosives left?" asked Nubby. Twitch just shook his head and held up the cluster of lasgun power packs he'd been taping together. "Oh well, don' worry, I'm sure I can work somefin out if we can get to a depot... " Nubby paused as Tink and Twitch both pointed at the last line on the dataslate. "No items considered contraband under Administratium edict G-somefin-somefin-stroke-17e, Commissarial decree number… Cogboys… Arbites... 'Quisition... ECCLESIARCHY? What does da 'clesiarchy gotta do wif what I can or can' bring on a mission? Dis is mental! Who's making these rules?"

Tink straightened up and tried to recapture his initial indignant tone. "These are direct orders from Inquisitor Sciscitat."

"Wasn' ee da one who got squished by da bug? Ee get better or somefin?"

"No, the other Inquisitor the one from the stasis cell. He's taking command."

"What? Dat pillock? Does Sarge know about this?"

"He's in on it! They're both down in one of the conference rooms with the diplomacy Adept planning some sort of suicide mission!"

There was a pause while this sank in, followed by Nubby swearing and Twitch abruptly shouting "IT'S HAPPENING! I KNEW IT!", and sprinting out of the room.

You know when you advertised this as the big posting of doom 12 posts is not what I pictured.

After a good week or two of reading the archives, I can finally be face to...name with the chap who taught me that 40k is a pretty cool guy. Eh fights Chaos Space Marine and doesn't afraid of anything so long as we have detpacks

Nubby watched the demolitions trooper go, then turned to Tink and asked "So, uh, ou' of curiosity, 'ow exactly did you get dis 'ere list?"

Tink brushed the question aside. "That's not important, what is important is that we get together and make it clear to Sarge that we're not going to have any part in this. We've got to stand up and say NO, we're not going to go off on a mission without proper equipment." Nubby, his self preservation instincts kicking in, took a step backwards, Tink failed to notice. "We're not going to get ourselves killed on some horrible backwater just because of some Inquisitor's ridiculous prejudices.

"Uhhhh, we're not?" Nubby took another step backwards.

"No, we're going to march in there and tell Sarge that either he gets rid of these ridiculous rules, or he goes on his mission alo-URK!" Tink let out a strangled little yelp as a large hand landed on his collar and yanked him backwards.

Somewhere behind Tink, a very deep and angry voice growled, "Guardsman, a word please."

Nubby watched Sarge drag Tink out of room, and let out a sigh of relief as the door slid shut. After a few seconds of standing around, listening to muffled shouting and thumping sounds coming through the door, he decided it was probably a good idea to figure out where Twitch went, and possibly join him.

Aw yesss. Glad to have you back in form Shoggy, hope life has gotten more manageable.

>Sarge's Rules About What You Can and Can't Bring on a "Stealth" Mission With Inquisitor Asshat

No Pulse Weapons
Because people notice when lasguns fire little blue balls of plasma, that's why
No Tink's techno-heretical plasma monstrosity
No Spot
Not even if you make him a REALLY GOOD DISGUISE
Nothing, no matter how small, easy to hide, or "awesome", which could be described with the prefix XENO
No, we are NOT bringing Fio. Why would you even ask that?
No more than 20 kg of Munitorum-issue explosives
No piles of ammunition for weapons we don't use
Nothing that is almost but not-quite an explosive
Nothing that came out of Sergeant Gravis
NO CHEMICAL, BIOLOGICAL, OR WARP-BASED WEAPONS PERIOD
No contraband
If you have to ask, it's contraband
Your bags will be checked Nubby
No Fumbles or Aimy
Just because Fumbles can turn invisible sometimes does not mean he's stealthy
Medical patients regrowing their entire scalp are not stealthy either
No Jim, Hannah, or Sister Valerie
Because they're staying on the Occurrence Border
No Occurrence Border
BECAUSE A SPACE HULK IS THE OPPOSITE OF STEALTHY, THAT'S WHY
No detailed plans to kill the Inquisitor, desert, and enlist in the Kulthian Foreign Legion
Because the Emperor hates you, that's why

>The All Guardsmen Party and Inquisitor Asshat's Stupid "Stealth" Mission

So, no shit, we'd finally delivered the requested Zoanthrope. It'd taken the crippling, marooning, and deaths of two squads of Space Marines, gratuitous use of heretical xenotech, an assault on a technically-friendly civilian space station, the second worst worst warp voyage in the history of the Imperium, our arrest on trumped up charges by a traitorous Inquisitor, yet another pitched battle when said Inquisitor tried to steal the Zoanthrope for his private collection, and the general maiming of yet another squad of Marines, but we'd FINALLY delivered it.

Admittedly the bug had suffered some wear and tear during transit; what with the theoretically-impossible Daemonic possession, and the way it'd been beaten to the very edge of death by a humorously shaped piece of wraithbone wielded by enraged Space Marine. But nowhere in our orders did it say that the thing had to be in good condition. It was Zoanthrope, it was alive (if only barely), and only the most ungrateful, pedantic, asshole would dare complain about the quality of the package after the sheer hell we'd been through to deliver it…

Of course "ungrateful", "pedantic", and "asshole" were just about the perfect words to describe Inquisitor Sciscitat, and if you added "bat-shit insane" it'd cover the Magos that ran the research facility as well.

The first thing the two of them did after the Inquisitor had been released from stasis was hold a meeting with us, the Diplomacy Adept, and a few their own minions. Supposedly, it was to catch everyone up on the overall situation and plan the next move, but it was really just several hours of people yelling, lecturing, and just generally blaming us.

WHY DOES IT HAVE TO BE SO LATE
I NEED TO WAKE UP AT 3 AM (7 hours from now) FOR WORK
FUCK

Word!

Seriously, EVERYTHING was our fault.

It was our fault that several members of Sciscitat's team had died during the battle in the evidence warehouse.

It was our fault that the traitorous Inquisitor had died before he could be questioned.

It was our fault that several extremely rare and valuable xenobiological specimens had escaped, died, or been turned into squigs.

It was even our fault that a several lightyear wide shadow had fallen across the warp, disrupting Astropathic communication, causing sub-sector wide political turmoil, and prompting the redeployment of several Imperial fleets to protect against a supposed hive-fleet incursion. (Okay, in retrospect putting the Daemonthrope in an Astropathic Sanctum might not have been the best idea, but how the hell were we supposed to know that? The closest things we had to experts on psi were Fio and Fumbles.)

Oh, and finally, it had apparently been our "inexcusably reckless" actions which finally gave Oak's enemies the ammunition they needed to bring charges of treason against him. So the whole entire current mess: the arrest orders issued for all of Oak's teams, the attacks on his allies under the cover of official investigations, the seizure of the research facility and Sciscitat's own imprisonment, and even Oak being forced to take his battleship into hiding; it was all OUR fault.

Or at least that's what Inquisitor Sciscitat and his minions thought. Personally, we blamed a combination of bad luck, everyone else being stupid, Orks, and the perverse nature of universe itself for at least eighty percent of all that. As for the others, the Magos didn't seem to care about anything other than his specimens, and for all his complaining, he actually seemed very interested in the Daemonthrope. And the Diplomacy adept, who'd inexplicably wound up in charge of the discussion, claimed it didn't matter either way, and encouraged everyone to focus on the next stage of their respective missions.

Our role in these "missions" was that of hapless go-fers.

See, before the arrival of the traitorous Inquisitor and the Daemonthrope's astropathic jamming aura, Oak had sent orders which assigned us to Sciscitat's retinue for the duration of some vaguely-defined investigation. Since the Inquisitor thought of us as "a bunch of juvenile, tactless, indiscreet, and dangerously incompetent meatheads", and we considered him to be a socially inept cogitator weeny with delusions of genius, why we'd been paired up like this was a bit of a mystery, but the orders seemed genuine.

It belatedly occurred to us that our decision, back on our second-ever Inquisitorial assignment, to ever-so-slightly falsify then-Interrogator Sciscitat's after-action report might have been a bad idea. Sure, before we'd edited it, the report had been full of accusations of incompetence and obstruction, and it had ended with a recommendation that we all be re-assigned to a penal legion… But maybe that was how all his reports were written, and the way we'd removed all mention of our antics and put our own performance down as "Nearly Adequate" had wound up looking like high praise in comparison. Or maybe, as Twitch now insisted, Oak had seen through the forgery on day one, and this was his punishment.

Anyway, whatever the reason we'd been assigned to the asshole, we had no choice but to stick to our orders. Well actually we could've told Sciscitat and Oak to stuff it and then went off to do our own thing, but there's nothing like knowing that the Inquisition has issued a warrant for your arrest to motivate a cooperative attitude.

So yeah, Inquisitor Sciscitat was our new boss, and his first orders were to "Stay out of my way, and Assist Magos Smith in any way possible." Which is why we spent the next few days fetching, carrying, and occasionally squig-wrangling for a tech-priest who, in a totally unexpected twist of fate, turned out to be completely nuts.

Shoggy!
Truly the Emperor shines upon me!

Well, maybe not COMPLETELY nuts, but that was only because the Magos was so far around the bend that he was re-approaching sanity from the opposite direction.

First of all, it turned out that he wasn't actually the tech-priest that we'd seen walking around with the Inquisitor and Diplomacy Adept. It took a while, but after the third incredibly awkward conversation with the inexplicably unresponsive tech-priest, we finally figured out that it was actually the oversized servo-skull that was calling the shots. The tech-priest-looking body, as well as that giant man-beast we'd seen in the warehouse battle and a fair number of other freakish looking things, were something like a cross between a servitor and a full-body augmetic. He called them "Meat Puppets", which should tell you everything you need to know about the state of his mind.

At first some of us (mostly Tink) were rather curious about how a tech-priest winds up as a disembodied brain flying around controlling a horde of servitors and flesh-sculpted monstrosities. When Tink tried to press the Magos on the why and how of his servo-skulliness though, all he got was a vague comment about having done it to himself for political reasons and an assurance that: "Getting the brain out was the easy part. The hard part was getting the brain out." Then the Magos flew off cackling, only to return a few minutes later to scream at us (for about the fifteenth time) for killing his prize Eldar test-subject. Or maybe he'd been angry about the death of the lizard thing, or the group Bendies we let escape, or how his entire collection of genestealer cultists had been squigged. It all sort of ran together after a while.

Putting the Magos' weirdness aside, the reason we were helping the crazy cogboy was that the brainy people had decided that the planet was no longer secure. The whole debatably-heretical research facility needed to be packed up and moved via the first available Imperial vessel. Which is to say, the Occurrence Border.

You can just imagine how thrilled the Captain and Ol' Bill were to find out their ship would be playing host to a xenobiological research lab, completed with an insane Magos Biologis, numerous psychically-gifted specimens, and the damned Daemonthrope they'd only just finally gotten rid of. The only reason they limited their complaints to bitter grumbling (as opposed to orbital strikes), was the Occurrence Border's supply situation and the awkward tactical problem which had resulted from it.

See, after such a long and hard journey without resupply, the Occurrence Border was out of just about everything. So when it finally used the last of its fuel (and the recoil from its macro-turret) to slow down enough to dock with the small refueling station orbiting above the facility, its Captain was in a rather ruthless state of mind. The ex-naval officer, having had it up to here with politely asking, begging, and (Emperor forbid) paying for supplies that were rightfully his to requisition, had broadcast his ship's Inquisitorial credentials and announced his intention to commandeer EVERYTHING. Not everything as in "everything you can spare", literally everything. As in down to the crew, atmosphere, and the station itself.

The locals objected to this of course, complaining loudly that this sort of looting wasn't even remotely within the legal limits of the Captain's Inquisitorial charter, and called for aid from the only other ship in the system: the light cruiser which had brought the recently-squished Inquisitor and his arrest team.

The light-cruiser was a standard naval vessel that had been commandeered by the traitorous Inquisitor to provide transport and overwhelming fire support for his arrest team. After the initial excitement of its arrival the ship had just sat in orbit, serving as protection, Astropathic communication provider, and storage for items that were too large to fit in the evidence warehouse; such as the facility's shuttles and a small cogitator-filled normal-space vessel that had been in orbit when they'd arrived.

It'd been a nice boring assignment for them right up until their Astropaths lost contact with the rest of galaxy. Then, while they'd been off at the edge of the system, futilely attempting to outrange the Astropathic jamming we'd unknowingly been broadcasting ahead of us, the Occurrence Border had arrived. By the time they managed to get back to the facility their Inquisitor was very dead. Left to their own devices, they probably would have just destroyed the Occurrence Border and blockaded the research facility until the arrival of further orders. Fortunately for us though, the Deathwatch Apothecary had claimed command as the technically-ranking survivor of the dead Inquisitor's retinue, and told the ship to stand down.

The light-cruiser had sat in orbit, waiting for the Apothecary to finish his business on the planet, until the Occurrence Border started its looting spree and the Station requested their aid. The ship's captain, being mindful of all the Inquisitorial bullshit going on, voxed the Apothecary for orders, and the Space Marine kicked the problem over to Sciscitat, who probably made some sort of smug "just as planned" comment before voxing the Occurrence Border. The Captain was basically asked whether he'd prefer to transport on the Magos and his lab, or go toe-to-toe with a ship ten times more combat-capable than his own. The Captain went with the former, but it was a close thing.

So, while shuttle after shuttle carried xenobiological specimens, techno-heretical research equipment, and bizarre servitors into orbit, the Occurrence Border's entire crew flooded into the little station, and under the guidance of Ol' Bill and his engineers, set about looting the place more thoroughly than even the most determined Freeboota could manage. Every scrap of fuel, supplies, and equipment aboard the station was commandeered. The entire crew, down to the dependents, servitors, and family pets, was rounded up by the press-gangs and given a once-in-a-lifetime chance to earn their passage out of the system as an indentured voidsman. Finally, the handful of backwater tech-priests and Administratum scribes that ran the place (and who were technically exempt from naval conscription) were given a choice between "voluntarily" joining the crew or staying behind as Ol' Bill and his engineers sucked out the atmosphere, cut the station into manageable chunks with lance-fire, and then strapped the pieces to the Occurrence Border's hull like hunting trophies.

Of course we weren't personally around to see the entirety of the looting spree: we actually only stayed in the system for a few days before our new boss decided it was time to go, and during that time we were all very busy helping the Magos move his lab. Well, I say "we", but honestly, certain members of the team didn't pull their weight during the whole packing process.

For instance, Aimy dodged her fair share of the work by collapsing in a heap about ten seconds after the Astartes-grade painkillers she'd been given for her MASSIVE scalp wound wore off. She wound up spending the rest of her time in the facility lying around alternately moaning and swearing at the rest of us, and rode up on the first shuttle back to the Occurrence Border.

>this is supposed to be the last arc of the campaign, if I recall correctly
>there were multiple references in previous chapters to Inquisitorial tribunal judging the AGP, which still haven't been explained
How big is the chance the campaign ends here because the entire AGP is with the Emperor after this arc?

Doc, no doubt encouraged by Aimy's bad example, announced that he was too busy with medical things to do an honest day's work. At first he insisted that keeping Aimy's head from getting infected and falling off took priority over carrying boxes and herding squigged genestealer cultists. Then he just had to help the Apothecary reattach his arm and get Heart and Grumpy Marine into stasis. And after that it was all "I've got to transfer my information on Sergeant Gravis' condition, and fix the scalpel wound in my face", the lazy bastard.

Sarge wasn't any help either: he kept running off to chat with the Diplomacy and Cogitator Adepts about "conspiracies" and "politics" and "how did you know the Xenology Adept was a traitor before you shot him". This newfound laziness was a perfect example of what promotion over the rank of sergeant does to a guardsman.

The worst of all were Tink and Jim: they were so desperate to avoid some honest work that they actually left the whole planet, taking our shuttle back up to the Occurrence Border before the ship had even finished decelerating. Jim claimed he had to go warn Hannah and the tech-acolytes that someone called "The Fleshsmith" was still alive and would be coming aboard, so he might've had an actual reason, but the only excuse Tink had was that he needed to go hide Fio before the annoying little xenos wound up in the Magos' specimen collection. Of course that turned out to be a load of bullshit. Firstly, the Magos found his super-secret hiding place all of ten minutes after arriving on the ship. Secondly, all the Magos did upon seeing the annoying little xenos was point out that Tau were genetically uninteresting, and ask whether the room was the xenotech garbage dump. He then tossed the battered remains of Spot (sans-wraithbone, he was apparently keeping that for himself) onto the floor and left without waiting for an answer. So yeah, time well spent.

Hell yeah! First time I've ever seen one of these live.

Ah, I should answer this immediately instead of putting it off to a pause point:

The CONSPIRACY arc is sort of huge, but here's how the official chapter layout is going to look:

>1: Zoanthrope Recapture Shitshow
>2: CURRENT POSTING and NEXT POSTING
>3: Final chapter, probably split into two parts again god help me.
>4: Epilogue

So, after this, expect 3-4 more serious postings. One to finish this chapter, probably two to start and finish the last unless I get my shit together, and then a wrapping-up-everyone's-questions epilogue.

The point is that, despite it being our Inquisitorialy-assigned task, the only members of the team that actually did any real Magos-moving were Nubby, Twitch, and Fumbles. While everyone else made up excuses, the three of them slaved away, carrying boxes and recapturing escaped specimens while being screamed at by a crazy cogboy's disembodied head. They even used their own personal free time to collect desperately needed supplies for the team, and did they get thanked for their efforts? No! It was all:
>"We're not going to PAY you for returning our pulse weapons."
>"Deathwatch-issue hand weapons and wargear cannot be claimed as legitimate battlefield salvage."
>"That bolter wasn't 'gifted' to us. 'Gifting' is not, and never has been, an ancient Space Marine tradition. If you know where it landed, go get it and give it back to the Apothecary."
and
>"It doesn't matter if they're not going to need them anymore, we're not taking any of the facility's anti-orbital missiles with us. Even if, no, ESPECIALLY if Twitch says he can convert them to be man-portable."

Anyway, putting aside matters of laziness and ingratitude, after a few days almost everything was packed up and word came down Sciscitat had finished digging through the dead Inquisitor's underwear drawer, or whatever he'd been doing, and it was time to get ready for our mission. Not that we knew what the mission even was: the closest thing to a briefing we'd gotten was our initial meeting with the Inquisitor after we pulled him out of stasis and collected those of his retinue who'd survived the evidence-room battle.

sounds good. take as much time as you need shog, we'll be far happier for it as long as you keep us in the loop.

That meeting had been singularly unpleasant. Aside from all the aforementioned yelling, realizing Sciscitat was our new boss had come as a nasty shock; he'd been an Interrogator last we'd seen him, back when he'd led our second ever Inquisitorial mission. Back then he'd been a self-important data-analysis weenie, who sat around on a small normal-space corvette stuffed to the bulkheads with cogitators, while his team did the dirty work of gathering intel and executing the over-complex plan he cooked up. Picture the most arrogant, annoying intellectual you've ever met, then add a fondness for self-praise filled meetings and berating his minions, and finally top it off with just enough analytical genius for him to get away with all this. On our previous mission he'd done a decent enough job of unraveling the mystery we'd been sent to solve, but in our opinion he was a terrible Interrogator, and never should've been allowed to lead field ops.

Of course that had been a while ago, and time changes everyone. He wasn't an arrogant little shit of an Interrogator anymore. Now he was an arrogant moderately-overweight shit of an Inquisitor. Oh, and this time he was convinced that we were dangerously incompetent from the outset.

Along with his charming self, the Inquisitor had also brought some of our former teammates along. The psychic eavesdropper, Snitch, was just as weasel-like and eager to report our thoughts to his boss as we'd remembered, though he'd acquired a nasty skin affliction somewhere along the line, possibly due to way he constantly used his psychic powers. The other psyker to survive that mission, Face, seemed little buffer than we remembered and carried a force-sword now, and he'd added a prissy little mustache to his pretty-boy look. Finally, noble-born social infiltrator chick was just as posh and assassin-y as we'd remembered, but had also acquired a bunch of Cyber-Mastiffs and been promoted to Interrogator.

So now, Your definitely Nubby right? There is no way your not Nubby. I know you haven't said but DANM IT I KNOW!

also sweet jesus yes its out!

>tfw on holiday so can actually catch it live for once
Truly the best part of being Hawaii.

On top of the familiar faces, the Inquisitor's retinue included several combat specialists. Well, at least it had before the whole evidence-room battle, now it was down to just a Cleric with a brand-new augmetic arm and a Sororitas-style bolter instead of the usual flamer, olus a wiry guy with far too many knives who literally had "Deathcult Assassin" tattooed on his forehead. The final member of the team was the Tech-Priest who maintained the Inquisitor's surveillance toys; his chief distinguishing feature was that he hated us.

Actually, hating us was pretty universal. Snitch, Face, and the Interrogator all shared the Inquisitor's theory that were completely unfit for Inquisitorial service, and the Assassin and Cleric bore a serious grudge over how those of us in the evidence room had just edged around the big battle instead of chipping in. We tried to explain about how important dealing with the Daemonthrope had been, and how we totally would've helped them if we'd known we'd have to actually work with them later, but they didn't seem interested in listening. Their hatred was more of a mix of disgust and resentment though; the Tech-Priest's was the real deal. See, he was one of those hardcore religious types, and our collection of xenotech weapons (especially Tink's Tau-hybrid plasma gun) did NOT go over well with him. He fervently believed that we should all be killed in horrifically violent ways for our blasphemy, and while he wasn't quite crazy enough to act on that belief, he did make sure to regularly remind us that we were all damned to robot-hell.

So yeah, these people who respectively thought we were dangerously incompetent, blamed us for the death of their comrades, and wanted to burn us at the stake (or whatever the cogboy equivalent is), were the guys we were supposed to "accompany and assist on their mission". Thanks Oak.

As far as what that mission was, all the Inquisitor was willing to tell us was that he had been sent to investigate an Imperial world that was believed to be a stronghold of The Conspiracy. This wasn't exactly a wealth of information, but it was enough to convince us that we wanted absolutely NOTHING to do with it.

Seriously, he was proposing going to a world that was under control of what had been described to us as cabal of traitorous Inquisitors, you know, those guys who can requisition everything up to and including an EXTERMINATUS? I mean, as nasty as Inquisitors (especially ones mucking around with daemonic powers) can be on their own, it's their massive, nearly-unquestionable authority that really makes them really scary. Having that on your side is great, not only not having it, but actually going up against it? Not so much. What Sciscitat was proposing wasn't a stealth mission, it was a "if someone even suspects you an entire planet will hunt you down" mission, and that was just the BACKDROP. Emperor knew what sort of crazy shit the actual investigation was supposed to be centered around… oh and let's not forget that our teammates, the only people on the whole planet we could trust to watch our backs, actively hated us.

Okay, maybe that's overselling things a bit, but it really was an unpleasant sounding mission, and we responded to it in the traditional guardsmanly fashion, which is to say that we desperately attempted to weasel our way out of our orders. Sadly, the entire situation turned out to be remarkably weasel-proof. Oak's orders attaching us to Sciscitat they were far too simple and direct for us to get away with creatively misinterpreting them, and we didn't have any better luck trying to get Sciscitat to dismiss us: as distasteful as the man found working with us, he seemed to consider a "suggestion" from Oak roughly on par with a divine mandate.

I caught it live YES!

>boo no pic

Suggestion for the Tyranid arc to be named Tyrantics.

our prayers have been answered!

Of course divine mandates tend to be open to a bit of interpretation; while Sciscitat was dead set on bringing us along, he made it clear that he wouldn't trust us to organize a piss-up in a brewery, much less perform an Inquisitorial investigation. This had led to our official designation as dumb muscle, which was just fine with us, but it had also led to The Rules, which were less so. Sciscitat had described them to Sarge's face as an attempt to "idiot proof" our part of the mission, and almost gleefully put the tech-priest in charge of writing them. That of course led to a lot of arguing, Tink's little aborted attempt at mutiny, and a desperate scramble to find where all of our old weapons had gotten to, which ended in even more yelling.

All of us had known that our supply of non-rechargeable munitions had been running low for ages: the grenades and detpacks had lasted almost to the end thanks to Twitch's hoarding, but the existence of things like krak-missile launchers was just a vague memory, and Sarge's ammo-less grenade launcher had been traded away to some tech-acolyte building a combat servitor long ago. What had been less well-known, was that the hotshot lasguns which had been shelved in favor of our pulse-weapons had been marked as "extra-knee-us" and left in the possession of a certain Ratling black marketeer in favor of more lucrative items. Nubby's justifications about how he'd been planning to just buy us new ones if we ever needed them didn't go over well with any us. Long story short, we wound up armed for our upcoming Inquisitorial mission with nothing but our sidearms and standard-issue lasguns from the Occurrence Border's armory, which sat especially poorly with Tink, who hadn't used one since basic.

Anyway, word came down that the Inquisitor had finished his pre-mission whatever and it was time to move out, so we packed up our measly armament, and for the first time since we'd left Tau space, said goodbye to the Occurrence Border.

I fight in your great name Shoggy!

While we weren't going to miss the horrible pile of warp-tainted scrap we'd been riding around on, its crew was another matter, so on our way out we paid a few visits to say goodbye (and make sure all of Twitch's little "surprises" had been disarmed, or at least documented).

The Captain and Ol' Bill were too busy to do more than tell us not to get killed, Jim promised to look after our stuff and make sure nobody dissected Fio, and Hannah thanked us for not trying to bring Jim. The Diplomacy Adept, who'd somehow wound up in charge of everything, asked Sarge to at least TRY to work with Sciscitat, and said he'd take care of our official report to Oak, since the Occurrence Border would be proceeding directly to the Inquisitor's hiding place. As for the other Adepts: the Cogitator Adept wasn't in his room and we didn't actually care enough to try and find him, and the Xenologist was still dead.

When we all visited the medbay Aimy wasn't really coherent enough to say goodbye. Unlike her previous two head injuries, this time every scrap of skin above her nose needed to be regrown, so her head was pretty much this giant pile of bandages and (this being a Sororitas-developed procedure after all) prayer seals. Aimy was too doped up on painkillers to really understand anything, but Sarge tried to fill her in on the situation. The rest of us just stood around speculated on whether the markswoman would still obsess over her hair, since this time her entire scalp would be regrown Sororitas-white, and whether there was some sort of energy-attack-attracting magnet embedded in her skull somewhere (Sister Valerie said she'd check). As for Doc's girlfriend, the two of them had already said their disgustingly sappy goodbyes, and all she had for the rest of us was a promise that returning without our medic would just be a very slow and painful method of suicide.

So, is the CONSPIRACY in the Inquisition supposed to be the underlying event within your game sessions, or is it simply a story arc with no relation to any other event?

Our final stop was the poorly-hidden lab where Fio was setting all his gear back up with Fumbles' help. While Tink pulled Fio aside for a final go over of the plans for Spot's third rebuild (being used as a bludgeoning weapon by a Space Marine isn't as bad as a nuclear blast, but it's pretty close), the rest of us said goodbye to our favorite psyker. We'd really wanted to bring the little guy, but the Inquisitor had flatly refused, and we couldn't really argue. When you get down to it, a psyker who uncontrollably broadcasts his emotional state and has problems controlling his powers at even the best of times has no place on a stealth mission. Also, he didn't really get along with the Inquisitor's psykers, especially Snitch, who claimed that Fumbles was like a cross between a painfully-loud Vox unit and an unexploded artillery shell.

Anyway, it sucked leaving Fumbles behind, but at least he took the news better than we'd expected. There was some initial moping, but he actually seemed pretty relieved not to be going to a heavily populated Imperial world where he'd have to worry about religious fanatics lynching him for having oversized eyes or just being a psyker. Also, he said it would be nice to get a break from constant life-and-death struggles, or at least as close to one as you can get as a psyker on a warp-tainted scrapheap of a ship. We wished the little guy luck, Nubby tried to give him a list of not-quite-legal things to trade for if the ship made any stops, Sarge hit Nubby, and then we rounded up Tink and left the Occurrence Border.

It should've been a happy moment: there were few things we'd wanted more than to leave that horrible deathtrap… But honestly, given a real choice between whatever shit-show of a mission was waiting for us and a five year stint on the Occurrence Border, we probably would've taken the latter. It just goes to show that the Inquisition can, and probably will, ruin anything.

Actually, what color scheme does the Generian Infantry Corps use, anyways?

The shuttle that took us to the Inquisitor's ship was one of his. Officially this was because all of the Occurrence Border's were busy strip-scavenging the station (even Tink's repaired and de-fungused stealth shuttle was used, though everyone on it kept their void-suits on), but it probably had more to do with how much harder that made it for us to sneak anything aboard. It was unnecessary of course, we had given our solemn word to follow their stupid rules after all (and we knew from experience how hard it was to get stuff past Snitch), but that didn't stop that damned Tech-Priest from inspecting our gear and baggage before he let us onto the Inquisitor's ship

The Inquisitor's ship was the same one he'd had back during our previous mission: a little corvette that was mostly just there to carry his massive cogitator array. It was small, cramped, unarmed, and didn't have a warp-drive, all of which seemed like major design flaws to us, but for some reason we hadn't been consulted when they'd built the thing. Unlike a proper ship, it was crewed by only a couple dozen professional voidsmen and tech-priests, who generally treated us like a visiting friend's incontinent little yappy dog (We got the distinct impression that they were still unhappy about the time we'd propped a dead psyker up in one of the bathrooms).

Anyway, lacking a warp-drive, the Inquisitor's ship depended on larger vessels to carry it between systems. Unfortunately, the only such ship present (aside from the Occurrence Border, which wasn't going our way) was the light-cruiser which had brought the arrest team into the system. This led to the very awkward situation where we had to ask for a lift from the ship that had recently boarded and impounded our vessel. Well, that is to say it was awkward for the Inquisitor and his minions, we dismissed the whole situation as "Not our problem" and set about making ourselves as comfortable as possible in the cramped quarters we'd been assigned.

It really shows how far the gang's come, that they feel regret at leaving a psyker behind. Then again, I suppose Fumbles is the first competent psyker they've ever come across.

my guess would be Cadian "the Cog boys can't be asked to mix any other colour" standard

How far are you along in the campaign compared to where we are now? Also, how many sessions is one of the chapters?

By the Throne, I caught it live!

Funny, I kinda thought he was Sarge, mainly because exactly what Sarge's emotions are on most given issues are described pretty consistently.

my money is on Sarge or Twitch, Shoggy is too funny NOT to be Twitch

He admitted to being nubby a while ago.

>there'll only be a dozen genuinely NEW posts in here
Eh, at least we can mine it for reaction images from those who missed the last couple threads
Good to have you back, man

I do feel as if sarge is the main character but I think that's just because Sarge is the only competent member. Nubby is the one that is constantly shown what is going on around him and also the fact that he constantly sympathizes with Fumbles and we knew that far before any other character did.

ive heard twitch several times. We're likely to get it confirmed in the very final Q and A

I always imagined them as the standard green on green, regardless of whether there's actually anything green on the battlefield.

God, it got into such a clusterfuck after the DM switched to big arcs instead of self-contained chapters. Bearing in mind that when I say "session" I mean 2.5 days of playing, most of these later chapters are 2 or 3 sessions. The contents of what's being posted today all fall into one of those large sessions.

As for how far along we are, 2nd to last real chapter of the last arc. 1.5 chapters and an epilogue left.

Fuck you shoggy im supposed to be studying for my chemistry test tommorrow now its 2 in the morning and im on your fucking tg thread

I WAS RIGHT, YES!

really? the AGP web page says ">Which character do you play? So far people seem happier not knowing, if you really want to know jump into a thread and try to get popular support."

Our time aboard the Inquisitor's ship was pretty unpleasant. The problem wasn't that he and his crew did anything to antagonize us, they just ignored us in the sort of put-upon way usually reserved for racist old relatives visiting for the holidays, and we did likewise. So really, it was just like all of our missions before Sarge's forced promotion, except for one big difference: nobody let us do ANYTHING.

We'd gotten used to being on a ship that suffered near-continuous warp-phenomena, equipment failures, xenobiological infestations, and minor daemonic incursions during even the smoothest of transits. There'd always been something that needed shooting, fixing, or fortifying, or a mission to plan for, or some sort of Nubby-related scam going on. Compared to that, travelling on the Inquisitor's ship was just, well, boring. Not that we were against being bored mind you. Life in the Guard is pretty much long periods of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror and Orks. So we were used to boredom, in fact we loved it, because the alternative tended to involve xenos, heretics, superior officers, or some combination of the three trying to kills us. It was just that we didn't have enough space to enjoy our boredom.

See, since the Inquisitor thought we were borderline-retarded and therefore a massive hazard to operational security, we weren't invited to his stupid meetings. This was fine by us: we'd hated the meetings, and were perfectly okay with him just handing us a briefing when we got to wherever we were going. Unfortunately in addition to not-inviting us, Sciscitat ordered us to stay in our quarters during all hours in which a meeting might be held, presumably in case we overheard something and somehow managed to blab it to the enemy despite being in the middle of bloody warp space.

Said quarters consisted of a single shared bunk-room and the Inquisitor's "working hours" lasted from 0700 to 2300. It was a miracle that nobody was killed.

You and I both know storytime is far more important.

Let me tell you, twenty square meters with low ceilings is NOT enough space for five guardsmen. Well technically, according to the Astra Militarum regulations book which the Inquisitor gleefully cited when we complained, it's enough space for either eight standard-issue Guardsmen, twelve Ratling auxiliaries, four Ogryn, or twenty-six and a half Kriegers, but those regs are "ideal circumstances" Munitorum bullshit and everyone knows it. Except the Krieger part.

Anyway, sixteen hours a day confined in a small room with Nubby, a chronic whiner relearning basic las-gun use, a hyperactive paranoid with no perimeter to secure, Nubby, a man who just would not shut up about his absent girlfriend, the grumpiest noncom in several cubic lightyears, and Nubby was just too much. The one small mercy was that Aimy and Fumbles weren't along, otherwise we might not have even made it through the first day. As it was we were all just about ready to strangle each other by the end of the third.

Of course we didn't just sit around waiting for things to reach that point, it was obvious from the get-go that we weren't going to survive the trip unless we got a little more space. Sarge wasted a fair bit of time trying to talk Sciscitat around, but when that failed we decided to just quietly annex a few rooms which we felt were… underutilized. Unfortunately, some of ship's crew noticed us hauling our stuff into the rooms of the guys who'd gotten themselves killed during that shit-show at the research facility (C'mon, it's not like they needed all that space anymore). When the Inquisitor and all his minions showed up to yell at us Sarge made some very good points about about efficiency and the importance of keeping morale up, but since Nubby and Tink were rooting through the deceased's stuff behind him, his arguments didn't go over very well.

Fuck it i was already drunk anyway lets do this shoggy

So what exactly is the criteria for someone to end up in the skeletal poker game? Cause that scout marine was in, but not that impersonation guy at the Tau Imperium borderworld who got his head blown off

I think its a matter of the DM choosing on the spot, and whether or not they were combat operatives that weren't grunts on the same mission as them. Although only the space marine was the only non group member in there.

wow... that is... impressive, my games are more like a series of self contained fuck ups that come back to haunt us the next time we play (said fuck ups include turning our Inquisitor to Chaos, "fixing" a nuclear meltdown we caused via vortex bomb, and managing to fuck with time during a particularly bad warp trip, I think the GM may have stuck us on your ship....)

We did see the Khornate in there at one point and the priest who killed him.

Well, Khornebro is also there.

well, the Khornate was a pretty cool guy

Our second attempt to expand our quarters was a bit more direct, and consisted of Tink rigging up a lascutter and cutting through the wall between us and a the storage room next-door. Sadly, he only got a quarter of the cut done before that damned tech-priest burst in and started screaming at us, and the rest of the retinue showed up before we'd decided whether we could get away with shooting the cogboy and blaming it on our combat reflexes.

That little incident ended with yet another painfully long lecture from the Inquisitor, which was capped off with a promise to kick us off his ship if we disobeyed orders again. Sarge, who was reaching critical levels of grumpiness at that point, began to respond with something along the lines of "You can try", but reconsidered as the exact nature of that threat dawned on him, and wound up struggling to maintain a poker face (and mind) while the Inquisitor ranted. When the lecture finally ended with Sciscitat and his minions storming out to return to their meeting, Sarge asked the rest of us how we felt about taking the Inquisitor up on his "offer".

That night a note was taped across from the Inquisitor's door, regretfully informing him that we'd violated his orders against screwing with the ship's systems by disabling the forward airlock's alarms, and since he was asleep at the time, we'd undertaken to kick ourselves off the ship for him. Then we'd gathered our gear, donned our voidsuits, and one short walk through a depressurized assault-shuttle bay later, we were arguing with a bunch of confused navy armsmen about whether we honored Inquisitorial guests or a hostile boarding party.

... did you just say that your player characters ACCIDENTALLY made their Inquisitor turn to Chaos?

How did THAT happen?

Knowing Chaos, he probably just had a really nasty book thrown at his head.

if this is who i think it is i am pretty sure they annoyed him to heresy

99% chance it was a pyscker, fucking psychkers.

long story.... but the gist of it is out Inquisitor was quite mad (he hadn't been the same since he took a bolt round to the skull) and when we were captured by Communist Revolutionaries he wanted his body double in our party to kill himself.... he said no... kinda insulted the Inquisitor... and he then announced he was looking at "some very bad tomes to find something suitably horrible to do to you" and other very Chaosy threats, but the guy playing his body double has a bit of a reputation for pulling Henderson's by accident, put him in a corner, and he will wing it.... and it is always interesting...

and yeah, The Inquisitor was a psyker

yep exactly who i thought it was. the man was unstable and headed for retirement and got pushed off a ledge

That's what I'm hoping. I've successfully obfuscated my own memory of that arsewipe who spoiled it in here a couple threads ago after learning it from Shoggy answering questions on another site.

There was also the armsman Doc failed to save right outside the door during the Zoanthrope transport, whose body actually disappeared when his shade appeared at the bar.

Without knowing the true mechanics behind the room, it just seems to include people the living witnesses saw die.

Shit that's going to bother me all night... speaking OOC here, it's because we just forgot about him.

The room started as that "see dead friends and family" event on the Warp Travel Weirdness table, and just sort of grew in populations based on the random whims of the DM. Supposedly everyone who died in our regiment and on our missions is floating around vaguely in the background, but only the most memorable ones are really visible.

So yeah, maybe he escaped that fate by dint of dying when the Occurrence Border was outside the system and not being remembered well enough by the party to drag him there, or maybe he's just passed out on the floor somewhere. Take your pick.

The saga continues!

That would make sense, since it also mentioned how they at one point saw troopers with regimental insignias they thought they almost recognized

After everyone stopped pointing weapons at eachother (except for Twitch), it only took us showing off Sarge's Interrogator rosette to convince the armsmen to kick the problem upstairs. Talking our way through the succession of Navy officers wasn't too hard (even if they are unquestionably inferior to the Guard, the Navy does at least speak the same language), and before long we were escorted to the section of ship that had been claimed by the Deathwatch Marines.

The Apothecary, who'd traded his damaged Power Armor for blue and gold comet-embroidered medicae robes, greeted us at the door. The Marine obviously wasn't overjoyed to find us on his doorstep asking if we could crash on the equivalent of his couch for a few weeks, but we'd apparently earned some respect from him and his team during the battle, because he let us in with no more than a pained sigh and a comment about how "Monitoring for stowaways does not fall under the purview of the Deathwatch". The Apothecary directed us towards the quarters which had belonged to the squished Inquisitor and his retinue, told us not to bother him or his patients, and that was it. No request for an explanation, or rules about what we could or couldn't do, just that special brand of apathy that is the hallmark of a good barracks-mate. If he'd been a Guardsman we'd have bought him a crate a beer, but since he was a monastic super-soldier older than all of us put together, we settled for staying out of his way.

maybe it has something to do with the people the AGP remembers? their former squad and a fucking Space Marine making quite an impression

There's a fun thought. Imagine Sarge in the position of literally any boilerplate shonen anime protagonist.

To be fair, considering your other post-death options in 40k, being trapped in a kinda shitty poker room for all eternity isn't that bad an option.

He was in the head praying to the porcelain gods when the AGP stopped by for a chat with the skelebros.

>Its the warp shit aint gotta make sense

good choice to make

We made ourselves comfortable in short order. Twitch found a comm system and put in a requisition for a staggering amount of explosives, rations, and other supplies from the light-cruiser's stores. Nobody else had expected this to work, but since the ship's quartermaster was under the impression that the order was on behalf of the big scary Space Marines, the stuff was actually delivered. Seeing this, Nubby put in his own requisition for "all da money you got", which was met with a bit more skepticism. Sarge barely managed to bluff the Quartermaster off without the Apothecary finding out, and announced that the next person to even talk to someone from the light-cruiser's crew would be sent back to Sciscitat's ship.

Fully resupplied for the first time in ages, Twitch made a horrible, but very secure, mess of our new quarters. As a sidenote, most of this stuff was left in place when we reached our destination on account of the Inquisitor's silly twenty-kilo limit, and because nobody felt like cleaning it up. An official complaint from the ship's captain caught up with us a few months later, just in time to be used as evidence in fact, but it was really pretty minor compared to the rest.

While Twitch fortified, Nubby and Tink gave our new quarters a thorough looting. Now, the previous occupants having been an Inquisitorial team (and possibly a traitorous one at that), there was a fair bit of stuff that could be loosely described as "eldritch". Your average Inquisitorial team would've gotten excited and started sifting through the stuff search of intel or whatever, but honestly, when was the last time you heard of digging through a pile of eldritch shit working out well for someone? So per rule #38 of Greg Sargent's Guide to Not Dying in Inquisition, we employed The Big Box of Do Not Touch. If you're unfamiliar with this technique, basically what you do is you take a big box, put all the weird stuff into it, and then Do Not Touch it. Very complex.

Imperial Grade Brain Bleach! Inquisition Approved! We'd get some references for you... but they can't remember using it!

Most of the stuff that wasn't Boxed found its ways into Nubby's grubby pockets, the only notable exception being an oversized plasma pistol that went to Tink, which the two of them claimed had belonged to the arrest-team's Ogryn. Upon seeing the weapon and hearing the explanation, Sarge weighed our need for a heavy-ish weapon (not to mention how annoying it had been trying to re-teach Tink basic lasgun use) against how angry certain people could get. In the end he decided not to ask any questions he didn't want answers to. Such as why nobody else had seen this Ogryn during or after the warehouse battle, or why anyone would ever give an Ogryn such a notoriously finicky weapon, or why: "PROPERTY OF THE LAMENTERS SPACE MARINE CHAPTER" was stamped along the pistol's side.

After the "cleaning" and fortifying we settled into a nice comfortable routine that mostly consisted of naps, PT, gear maintenance, a few personal projects, and more naps. Twitch and Nubby did their best to keep out of trouble and carefully planned out what supplies would be brought with us when we eventually arrived. Tink spent most of his spare time reconfiguring his oversized plasma pistol into something that could be used by someone with normal-sized hands and putting together replacements for all his Tau-tech toys. Sarge, along with being generally sergeanty, waited a few days for tempers to cool then started making regular visits to Sciscitat's ship to see how things were going. Most of the visits consisted of him just being told that there still wasn't anything he needed to know and to go away, but he was occasionally given little tidbits of nearly-useless information. Such as the fact that our destination was some shit-hole of a Hive World, that Oak still hadn't been caught, and someone or other had finally noticed the squished Inquisitor was missing. Sarge reciprocated by dumping the Big Box of Do Not Touch in Sciscitat's airlock. He was not thanked for this.

The odd man out in all this was Doc. Instead of relaxing while he had the chance like a proper guardsman, the medic went and practically begged the Apothecary to let him assist in the treatment of Sergeant Gravis and the wounded Deathwatch Marines. Doc must've earned some actual respect from the Astartes for keeping Gravis alive, or maybe his display of fanboy-ism was just too much to ignore, because the Apothecary eventually accepted and our medic was temporarily promoted to Volunteer Nurse and Janitor. He was also made to swear this oath not never talk about any of fancy-pants medical procedures he assisted in (which the we were thankful for, since it spared the rest of us a whole lot of disgusting medical stories), but he was allowed to update us on the status of the three Space Marine patients.

According to Doc, Heart and Grumpy were out of stasis and being kept in an induced coma. Between them they were going to need four augmetics, a dozen replacement organs, over a hundred hours of bone-realignment surgery, and a few months of bed-rest, but were expected to make a more or less full recovery. Sergeant Gravis was obviously in worse shape, but had at least been cleared of the Tyranid biotoxin by some Space Marine techno-magic, and had finally been removed from his damaged Power Armor. Doc said the Apothecary wasn't quite sure if he'd be returning to duty (mentioning something about Gravis' chapter being undersupplied), but had started installing neural links for some type of specialized full-body augmetic anyway. We figured that sounded like as good an ending for him as was possible, though we were all a little unclear on what sort of augmetic a "Sarcophagus" was.

Anyway, asking about the Space Marines was the closest thing to work most of us did on the trip, so we were all in a pretty good mood when the light-cruiser finally reached our destination and we made our way back to Sciscitat's ship.

Thankfully, it only took a single day of cramped normal-space travel to reach orbit over our destination, the hive-world Haarlock's Wager. Or, to use its full name, Joseph Haarlock Sucks At Cards. We were advised not to discuss the planet's name, or the names of its primary hives, with the locals. It was apparently a touchy subject.

Upon reaching orbit we were subjected to that most wonderful of experiences: a customs inspection. Which explained all that stuff about what we could or couldn't bring, even if didn't explain why the Inquisitor hadn't just told us the reason beforehand. Maybe he didn't want us trying to solve the problem ourselves.

Anyway, on a normal mission the Inquisitor would've flashed his rosette and that would've been that, but Sciscitat apparently felt that wasn't discreet enough. By the time we'd hit orbit, he and his minions had done some sort of cogitator stuff to convince the locals that our ship belonged to a local asteroid-mining syndicate, and even dug out some business suits and scribe robes for everyone but us to wear. We were just given little insignias to put on our armor and asked not to accidentally kill any inspectors. Between all that and some gentle psychic manipulation from Face and Snitch, the inspection went off without any significant hitches. Though there were an awkward few minutes when they insisted on going through the pile of stuff Nubby had brought back from the light-cruiser. Luckily there weren't any laws against having a bunch of second-hand small valuables and expensive clothing (mostly of the feminine variety), and while there probably was one against ripping an all-in-one kitchen and laundry unit out of one's quarters on an Imperial Navy Vessel, transporting it was entirely legal.

Once the inspectors were packed away there was another day of cogitator stuff and meetings, and then we were handed our orders, packed aboard a shuttle, and sent down to do some Inquisiting.

Catching it all live!