All Guardsmen Party Storytime

Yes!

Yesss. Glad to have you back, shoggy. How are you?

Welcome back!

I am very looking forward to Judge shenanigans.

How's it going shoggy

I caught one live!

Holy shit yes!

I never asked for this...

Bloimy, I caught a live one

Oh shit! I caught it live, and so early too!

I love SHOGGY!

SHOGGY LIVES

Yay got one live! Long live the Emperor!!

First time catching one live! Glad to be here.

PRAISE SHOGGY

First one caught live!

Holy shit, I haven't seen this in forever!
Awesome!

How you doing Shoggy? Taking care of yourself?

Awesome. Caught it live.

youtube.com/watch?v=Z-48u_uWMHY

Nazareth, I'm fucked up
Homie, you fucked up
But if Shoggy got us, then we gon' be alright

inb4 "PRANKED!!!"

Another few hours of driving later, we discovered that the target was a "bank" in the same sense that a divisional armory is a "gun rack". Yes, there was something bank-like in there, and that was the part we were going to rob, but it just happened to be situated inside an entire sub-spire belonging to some sort of merchant shipping Cartel. This discovery did not make us very happy, and neither did the painfully long briefing we received from Sciscitat's Interrogator via combead.

A lot of the briefing was just stuff about the Cartel, which mostly boiled down to "think Rogue Traders, except with less megalomania, more bureaucracy, and deep Administratum ties." Not being particularly interested in any of the fine details of the Cartel's sub-sector wide political connections, we strategically muted our combeads and spent most of the lecture getting some absolutely terrible "breakfast flavored" soylens wraps and fuel-station recaff. Eventually, possibly when she realized none of us had said anything for over half an hour, the Interrogator got to the point, which was that strange heavily armed men in shitty vans were not typically allowed on the Cartel's sub-spire. Unless that is, they were a PDF patrol sent to do a sweep for mutants in the sub-spire's sewers.

At first we were fine with this, we could pretend to be a PDF patrol in our sleep. Literally. The part that spoiled what was left of our appetites was where we were expected to actually go out and perform the sewer patrol. Sarge had suggested that the inherent laziness of PDF troopers would give us enough leeway to just sit around in our van for the whole mission without blowing our cover, but the Interrogator insisted that us fighting ravening mutants while wading through waist-deep, er, waste was a critical part of Sciscitat's plan. Unfortunately (for everyone involved) this turned out to be true.

Welcome back Shoggy.

WE ARE HERE, AND IT IS LIVE. REJOICE, BROTHERS.

HURGA FLURGA HABEDING

AAAAAHHHHHH

I first time catching one live. Im so glad this is back.

We entered the Cartel's sub-spire via its lowest vehicular entrance. Sarge handed the Guard in the gate-house a dataslate full of falsified credentials and orders which had been commed to Tink by the Inquisitor. The Guard was a bit surprised to see us, but turned up a previously unnoticed request for a PDF sewer sweep when he checked his cogitator, and accepted Sarge's grunt of "commandeered" as sufficient explanation for our non-regulation vehicle. He was in the process of standing down his security servitors when he suddenly got all thoughtful and asked for Sarge's name again.

Now, our default approach to this sort of thing was to just use our own names, because honestly, why bother? The Imperium's a big place, and it's hard to get more faceless and interchangeable than a guardsman. The Inquisitor didn't see it that way though, and had issued us some "less stupid" names along with our falsified orders, and thankfully Sarge actually remembered his.

As "Sergeant Eastwood" reintroduced himself, the Guard rooted out a piece of paper, which he held up next to the window for a second before snorting and apologising. When Sarge asked what for, the Guard started chuckling and handed him the paper. He said we could keep it, since every Astropath in the hive was handing them out and he had over a hundred.

When Sarge began emitting a high pitched wheeze the rest of us peeked over his shoulder. The paper was headed by the words "Wanted for crimes against the Adeptus Telepathica" and a number with a ludicrous number of zeroes. Below the bounty was the most cartoonishly evil caricature of a man ever seen outside of a Commissarial pamphlet. It was covered with scars, wearing a sinister military uniform with a stupidly oversized hat, and (with the possible exception of its grumpy expression) looked ABSOLUTELY NOTHING like "Rogue Inquisition Agent, 'Interrogator' Greg Sargent".

We were still laughing when the Guard waved us through the gate.

PRAISE THE FUCKING EMPEROR

Hey look Sarge! You're famous!

>"Sergeant Eastwood"

Admittedly it was impressive (and a bit worrying) that the crazy Choir Master had actually carried through with his threat and sent these wanted posters to every astropath in the sector... But, seriously, who goes through all that trouble and then uses an EDITORIAL CARTOON for the mugshot? Psykers man…

Our high spirits lasted for most of our drive through the (comparatively) clear and clean streets of the sub-spire, but faded as we reached our destination on its lowest level. We parked our trusty vehicle on the curb outside a maintenance station, where a pair of workers in stained coveralls met us. We were guided to a hatch that looked far more vault-like than your average manhole, and the grimier of the two men promised to stay by the hatch for six hours to let us back out. If we weren't back by then, he said, they'd check the filtration system in about a month, and send what was left of us back to the PDF. While Sarge thanked the men and reviewed the few grainy vids of the mutants they supplied, the rest of did a final gear check and made sure our rebreathers were as tight as possible.

When we got the word go, the hatch was opened, and something that looked like a cross between a man, a donkey, and a squid launched itself through the gap. Twitch shot it in what was probably the face, and then swore as the piddly little lasbolt failed to kill it. Fortunately, instead of following up the attack, the slavering mutant let out very human-sounding scream of pain and retreated. This didn't stop Twitch from flinging himself backwards and opening up on full auto, but the hatch-cover soaked the fire just as well as the mutant would've, so he only hit the maintenance man holding it open once. It turned out the guy's hand was already an augmetic so he was fairly understanding about the whole thing.

Sarge made Twitch apologize, the area under the hatch was carefully checked for any more lurking mutants, and one by one we plopped down into the muck.

aww yeah, favorte time of the year. I've been making the AGP in XCOM, here's sarge

Did the GM make an actual wanted poster?

And I expect Nubby will try to turn Sarge in for the bounty - then break him out and do it again.

>waist-deep in waste
Back to the shitty jobs for them.

TUT

>Jim Sargent
>Jim

JIIIIIIIMMMM!!!!!!!!!!!!

Here's twitch

I have a choice between catching shoggy live and watching stella cox scam, and I choose Shoggy!

Why you always gotta update while I'm at work, Shoggy? Great to see you're well, though!

Now this wasn't our first shit-slog: sewer patrols are a core part of what it means to be a Guardsman, and don't let any highborn stormtrooper fancypants tell you otherwise. It's a widely believed fact, at least among Guardsmen, that sewers magnetically attract enemies of the Imperium, and if none are present to be attracted, will just spontaneously generate them out of thick air. Why this happens is a mystery which eludes even the most unqualified barracks scholars. Maybe it's something to do with the universal vacuum hatred thingy, or maybe there's actually something to that line in the Primer about how "filth breeds filth". In any case, the important part is that leaving a sewer unpatrolled will inevitably wind up biting you in the collective ass, sometimes literally.

Back in the Guard, long standing tradition dictated that the least senior regiment on the battlefield (which always seemed to be ours for some reason) got the fun job of going down there every few days to clear out the latest infestation of greenskins. Or heretical cultists. Or genestealers. Or gangers, carnivorous plants, secessionists, mutated housepets, deserters, rogue servitors, previously unidentified intelligent xenos races, dead gods, or cannibalistic humanoid underground dwellers… It was sort of like a lottery: you never knew what you were going to get when you went down, except you sort of did, because nine times out of ten it was Orks.

Fortunately, the Cartel's sewers were one of those rare Ork-free ones, and it turned out that the horrific mutants which did inhabit it were a lot less suicidally aggressive than your average greenskin. Well, at least the humanoid ones were: we did encounter some unusually sized rodents which were, in Twitch's words, "suspiciously similar" to squigs.

...

Ok, that's clever.

The description of what you find in sewers sound suspiciously like what you find aboard the Occurrence Border...

> We did encounter some unusually sized rodents which were, in Twitch's words, "suspiciously similar" to squigs.

Skaven????

>Implying the Occurence Border isn't just a galactic sewer.

Great to see you back Shoggy, I for one am psyched to see what happens next.

This series inspired me to get into rpgs and 40k

You and I both know that no sewer mutant has anything on the various horrors of the Occurrence Border user. Fucking ghost-ork-nid's...

You've been missed Shoggy!

Anyway, the majority of the sewer's occupants wanted to get shot about as much as we wanted to get shivved with a piece of sharpened fecal matter, and we quickly came to a mutual understanding with them. This wasn't anything official mind you, the presence of Cartel security monitors meant we couldn't just announce that we were just passing through on a secret Inquisitorial mission, but we managed to convey the gist of it by making as much noise as possible, waving our lights around, and loudly announcing the complete lack of mutants we were seeing.

So, by the standard of armed patrols through ass-deep (or neck-deep in Nubby's unfortunate case) sewage, it was a fairly pleasant experience. Or it would have been if it weren't for the Inquisitor's fetish for overly complicated plans. He'd put together this amazingly complex series of carefully timed infiltrations, misdirections, psychic tricks, and cogitator infiltrations, which was supposed to result in them nicking the doohickey without the Cartel even finding out they'd been robbed. We were fine with all that, it wasn't like we wanted to get into a shooting war with someone who could afford to employ entire goon-battalions, and our part was actually pretty simple. All we had to do was to sneak into one of the sub-spire's auxiliary power stations via the sewers and do something technical to some sort of feed line thingy. Honestly, we were a little hazy on the fine details, but Tink claimed it was all "super simple", which was good enough for the rest of us.

The problem was that, for some reason, the Inquisitor didn't trust us to get our part done unsupervised. Which is why, instead of just giving us a map and the codes to the security doors, we were being guided through the sewers via combead.

By the tech-priest.

The one who hated us.

no orcs? not-quite-suicidal mutants? This means the other shoe is about to drop. This'll be epic.

...

>By the tech-priest.
>The one who hated us.

I can foresee imminent disaster of a stupid and easily avoidable nature

This will end well...

...

Oh, awesome. Just noticed the image. Now I'm itching to convert some figures.

We bore the constant stream of insults, slanders, and reminders that our sins against the machine god had damned us to an eternity of torment in the unholy scrapyard of lost souls or whatever without complaint. What was harder to ignore though, was the way our directions seemed to guide us unerringly right through the middle into every single dangerous, disgusting, inconvenient thing in the entire sewer system. Call it the kneejerk paranoia of a bunch of jumped-up jarheads, but by the third time he sent us directly into a nest of mutated rat things, we were fairly certain he was trying to get us all killed.

Of course, consummate professionals that we were, we put up with the tech-priest's shenanigans. After all, it wouldn't do to disrupt the Inquisitor's plan and put both the objectives and our beloved comrades at risk over something as minor as a bit of degradation and danger. Also, the metal bastard had control over the only external channel our combeads could reach from down in the sewers, so our choices were a bit limited. In any case, as guardsmen we were quite familiar with suicidal orders and knew how to deal with them, so it was more of an annoying inconvenience than anything.

Through a combination of lying, paranoia, undisclosed scouting, and creative interpretation, we made it to the section of sewers which paralleled the power substation's maintenance tunnels without any serious cock-ups. Admittedly Tink and Twitch were going to need to need a whole lot of immune-boosters for the scratches they'd received from the second rat nest, and Nubby had been submerged to the point where even he agreed that a bath was needed. Doc was just incredibly thankful for the purge valves on his rebreather after some sort of tentacle thing ripped it off long enough for the smell and subsequent nausea to set in, and Sarge was a simmering pot of barely-contained rage over the whole situation, but we reached the target on schedule and in piece. More or less.

I forget, was Aimy in on this mission?

Rupert turned out bretty gud

No, she got laid up with a faceful of burns again.

Pretty sure it's just the guardsmen on this one. Fumbles and the rest were left absent too, because the Inquisitor basically

No, she's in the infirmary again

Holy shit I caught a AGP thread! And its still fresh! This is making me feel way too many emotions, what have you done to me Shoggy?

Getting into the power station's maintenance tunnels turned out to be a bit of a problem. This was partially because the people who ran the place had put quite a lot of effort into separating the vital heart of their sub-spire from the mutant-infested sewers adjacent to it. Mostly though, it was because the tech-priest kept insisting the only possible entrance was located in a chamber which just happened to contain an entire mutant village, complete with hovels, barricades, and what looked to be a sizable militia. When Sarge pointed this out to the tech-priest, he just made a suspiciously snicker-like sound and asked how that was HIS problem.

After a brief debate, we decided that there was no way in hell that we were going to try fighting our way past seventy-ish spear-carrying mutants, and an alternative approach was needed. We spent a bit of time searching the immediate area for likely-looking passages and checking the map Tink had been compiling (so we could navigate our own route back, thank you very much), but weren't making much progress until Doc suggested just asking the Mutants if they'd let us through. The rest of us, especially Twitch, thought this was a bit overly optimistic, but there wasn't any real harm in asking, so Sarge approached to what he felt was just beyond spear-chucking range and committed diplomacy.

To our considerable surprise given Sarge's diplomatic track record and all, things actually went pretty well with the mutants. As it turned out, not only did a few of the mutants know how to speak a sort of horrible gargly version of Gothic, they were also fairly well disposed towards us on account of how much effort we'd gone through not to fight them. "Well disposed" isn't the same as "stupid" though, so they weren't keen on the idea of letting a bunch of armed goons pass through their village, but once Sarge explained our destination they were more than happy to point us towards an alternate entrance to the maintenance tunnels.

smile sarge!

Despite Twitch's insistence that the mutants were sending us into a trap, we followed their directions to a small security door without incident. Unfortunately, there was a slight holdup at this point, because when we asked the tech-priest for the access code he immediately figured out we were at a different door, and kept trying to send us back through the mutants to the "correct" one. When Sarge refused to budge without an explanation, the contrary cogboy told him that the door we'd found connected to an entirely different facility. Tink, who'd discovered a dataport next to the door and had (without asking for permission or sparing the slightest bit of thought for all the bad things that might happen) immediately plugged his dataslate into it, announced that he'd found a map of the power station and that we were only three rooms and a short hallway from the target. The tech-priest immediately backpedaled, declaring that the REAL problem was that he didn't have an access code for this door; Sarge told him we'd just cut our way through it then.

After a few more go rounds with the tech-priest, in which he tried to convince us that the door was monitored, booby-trapped, a secret portal to the eye of terror, etc. and we checked his assertions and found them to be a load of bullshit, Tink set his plasma gun to "cut". The home-converted astartes pistol, which had not originally had any such setting, immediately vented a stream of superheated gas in the general direction of Tink's face and was dropped into the ankle-deep muck at his feet. After three more failures, and a lot of complaints about how it'd been working earlier and how much better his Tau-ified weapon had been, Tink admitted defeat and just shot the thick door until a sizeable hole had been slagged through it. After cooling the hole with the readily-available resources, we squeezed our way into the power station.

>and something that looked like a cross between a man, a donkey, and a squid launched itself through the gap.

...

The room on the far side of the door turned out to be one of those weird mechanicus combination shrine and control room dealies. As we tracked sewage over cogboy-themed religious icons and the occasional piece of delicate machinery, it occurred to us that the tech-priest might've had an actual reason for not wanting us to come this way. Not that any of us particularly cared, but it did shine a bit light on why he was screaming at Sarge loud enough for the rest of us to hear him despite our muted combeads.

Sarge, being aware that there was probably a limit to how many doors we could breach before triggering an alarm, announced a short halt to see if the furious cogboy was going to calm down enough to start giving directions again. Twitch, Nubby, and Doc respectively used this time to barricade the door behind us, nick the candlesticks, and wipe off as much filth as possible at the expense of a tapestry depicting the discovery of a new type of toaster by Tech-Saint Gearface. Despite his personal tendency towards tech-heresy, Tink didn't join the rest of us in desecrating a holy mechanicus shrine. Instead, the techie wandered over to the main control altar, and after a few seconds of translating cogboy glyphs, excitedly informed the rest of us that he could use it to disable a thing, overload another thing, and start some sort of cascade. When the rest of us just stared blankly at him, he explained that this would automatically trigger the thing which the Inquisitor had sent us down here to do.

Sarge was a bit dubious, and claimed to remember our orders involving going to the main transformer room and doing something a bit less catastrophic sounding, but Tink maintained it would have the same end result. Probably. That is, assuming "logical" failsafe design. And good maintenance practices. And none of the capacitors being too full. And no stupid machine spirit shenanigans.

It's never that easy

Sarge decided to make "potentially blow up the power station we've just infiltrated" Plan B, and informed the tech-priest of it in an attempt to get him to start cooperating with Plan A. The threat didn't have as much effect as we'd hoped: it turned out that while we'd been ignoring him the cogboy had managed to find a vid feed of the shrine and was practically frothing at the lips over our actions. Or, y'know, would've been if he'd had lips. Anyway, he wasn't in the mood to be helpful, but fortunately the Inquisitor chose that moment to join the comm channel and check what our ETA was; Sarge gleefully threw the enraged tech-priest under the proverbial armored personnel carrier.

Showing his usual lack of tact, Sciscitat decided to chew out the tech-priest on the open channel. It'd be a lie to say we didn't enjoy listening, and maybe the tech-priest had enough awe for the Inquisitor's supposed genius that he wasn't going to hold a grudge towards him, but we were fairly certain the experience pushed his irrational hatred of us to whole new levels. For the time being though, the lecture did the trick, and the tech-priest grudgingly began opening doors, disabling vid feeds, warning us of servo-skull patrols, and providing non-bullshit directions. While the route he sent us down was a little less direct than the one Tink's map suggested, there seemed to be actual reasons for the detours this time, so we kept our mouths shut and advanced into the heart of the power station in as professional a manner as possible for five men covered head-to-toe in shit.

Art!

Something must always go wrong. It's a rule of the universe.

Nice art.

Damn, welcome back Shoggy. Hope things are getting better for you.

>assuming "logical" failsafe design.

Never assume logic from any design you didn't take part in.

As in reality, so in RP.

Unfortunately, the station was rigged with explosives. As soon as Sarge entered the power station, they detected him and detonated, killing everyone instantly. As the deafening boom quieted, a figure spoke from the shadows

"Hwee bloowed eet hup fhor Khaos!"

We eventually entered the target, "Distributor Room C", via a small conduit-filled tunnel and found ourselves on a raised catwalk above a room full of large, occasionally sparking machines which we assumed were the distributors. Thanks to our aerial perspective we didn't have any trouble finding the machine which controlled the power flow to the upper levels of the Cartel's sub-spire, and Tink was easily able to identify the control altar on it that he needed to sabotage. The problem was that said control altar was currently in use.

By another Inquisition team.

It was awkward.

We considered going down there and asking them if their super secret mission was going to take very long, and if they wouldn't mind if we snuck in ahead of them, but we got the feeling that wouldn't go over well, so in the end we decided to kick the problem upstairs. To nobody's surprise, it took a few tries to get the tech-priest to patch us through. He was a bit leery of our identification of a bunch of random people in our way as a highly trained Inquisition team that just happened to be infiltrating the exact same facility at the exact same time as us, and suggested that they might just be a simple maintenance team and we might just be a bunch of paranoid idiots. Sarge rather sarcastically pointed out that the "maintenance team" consisted of a combat-auged tech-priest with a pair of gun-servitors, a mohawk-sporting underhive Ganger carrying her bodyweight in firearms, and a Sister of Battle in full body armor. Honestly, and some people accuse US of being unsubtle…

The tech-priest was very obviously in the middle of trying to figure out a scenario where we could still be wrong, when the distributor-thing the other team was messing with let off a massive bolt of electricity, the lights went out, and Sciscitat cut into the channel himself with a screech about how we'd reset the thing too early and had nearly killed three of our teammates.

>"Hwee bloowed eet hup fhor Khaos!"
Cultist-chan????

Bad user. Respect the Shoggy.

Wait, did somebody impersonate Shoggy???

That's lower hive civies for you! You shoot them with a military-grade assault rifle and:
>Yea, man. Mistakes happen. Fucking Mutants love to surprise, you know?

huh interestng.

pic related was my mental picture of sciscitat.

Well, this is awkward.

Well at least ass face is listening now...

How much did your GM enjoy playing the unhelpful tech-priest?

>The problem was that said control altar was currently in use.
>By another Inquisition team.
>It was awkward.

One wonders what would have happened if they had blown up the power station remotely...

That was MY conclusion. Then again, Shoggy might just have been fucking with us. In which case I'll look like a massive prick.

When the horribly disfigured crazy people you're fighting are friendlier than the horribly disfigured crazy guy your fighting for, you know it's time to start plotting friendly fire incidents.

Probably something a lot less complicated than whatever is about to happen. We all know what happened last time Nubby was around a Sister of Battle...

Almost certainly an impersonator. The fake post and Shoggy's real post are less than a minute apart.

Reminder that the Jew was absolutely in the right regarding the AIDS drugs.

Praise the Emperor and pass the ammunition!

but user they did