#sebrius

The Warp journey was over, and we came to a cold planetoid of grey ash and ice. We were sent to the surface to a psychic hotspot the imperial Diviner identified while the Inquisitor's ship, the Lance of Minerva, engaged with the Eldar ships in orbit.

Landing on this dark, snowy, Pluto-like planetoid, the Party, Walrond, and three Honor Guard the Inquisitor was supplementing us with sped off in our refurbished and repainted landspeeder towards a tall spooky tower of bone and metal and oddness. We engaged a few Eldar jetbikes and a light speeder thing, relying almost entirely on Sebrius' mounted heavy bolter and the assault cannon inside the speeder. (I used my autopistol to slightly annoy them, and did a grand total of one damage that entire engagement.) Dodgy but fragile, the most notable part of this fight was when the last Eldar bike decided to charge and melee us with his power weapon. This was actually really effective, as it utterly smashed the barrel of our assault cannon, though it didn't stop Sebrius from blasting his engines then Walrond ramming his frail little Eldar bike so bad it crashed and burned.

Wrapping that up, we drove up to the creepy door of the smooth citadel (imagine creepy smooth-stone aesthetic, peppered with Old Gods in the air) and got out, leaving two of the NPC and Walrond (our friendly driver) behind to guard the car and the doorway, while we went in with one of the NPC guard of the Inquisitor. Descending into this den of warp magic and witches, who do we find but the Eldar spiritseer and her Wraithblade of a father, who had previously smashed up that noble's mansion and almost cut Sebrius in half. After a brief discussion where she lamented roughly 'of course you'd come to ruin this, our last chance to save our world and our selves, you monkeigh ruin everything you touch, just go away let us fix this' to our general disinterest. How very Eldar, to think only you can fix things, that anyone ever doing anything that bothers you is dooming all life, and that you're entitled to run around smashing things just because your dad really shouldn't be an art piece in some rich idiot's mansion. Sebrius and Reguba dismissed her pleas, and high fived after commenting that the creepy, inhuman chanting we could hear coming from the chamber behind her was way less cool sounding than Ecclesiarchy psalms. Seeing that there was little chance of deterring us, and also because she didn't really want to try to explain anything in the first place (xenos witch and all), we began the Great Rematch!

The experience against the creatures of the Warp changed us, and gave us valuable experience. Unwilling to be caught alone, Reguba, the Honor Guard, and Sebrius stuck near each other. Ok, Reguba tried. The Honor Guard was from Manoj, a feral world, and so had a delightfully martial mindset. He charged the wraithblade head-on, it blocked his power sword, and then cut him in half. This was a sufficient distraction however, as Dariel started to slink around the great pillars of stone to try to get at the Spiritseer, while Reguba and Sebrius tried to handle the Wraithblade. With it overconfident from having effortlessly slaughtered the Honor Guard, it didn't expect Reguba to walk up to it cautiously, then slam into its leg six different times with a warhammer as hard as he possibly could. This rattled stunned and crit the Wraithblade to the point it fell to the floor, while Dariel and the Spiritseer engaged in a duel of the lithe and athletic variety. Two nimble and graceful duelists, except one was a slightly psychotic twink with an insanely serrated dagger and one was a severely psychic alien lady with horrible PTSD. With the blessings of the Emperor (and Reguba burning off part of his soul in devout prayer), her xenos witchery failed to implode Dariel's face. She also cast some witchery to explode the air between Sebrius and Reguba, but again the prayers of the faithful prevented any serious wounds (I lost even more fate, but The Emperor Protects)

Knowing from our last encounter that she's an annoying ice lady who makes ice walls, throws ice at us, and does other Psyker things, Sebrius came with a secret weapon. Seeing the spiritseer Jaii Zan engaged in melee and the Wraithblade lying on the ground brutally hammered, Sebrius threw a psyk-out grenade, a powerful weapon tailored to drive those sensitive to the warp into helpless writhing on the floor in a cloud of psychoactive dust. Jaii Zan foresaw this and dodged, but she failed to account for Dariel using his manly physique to just barely manage to shove her into the cloud. This greatly stressed out her mind and had her trigger psychic phenomenona, which is a random roll. She rolled (i forget but it was over 75), so she triggered Perils of the Warp, another random roll table of bad effects. She then rolled a 94, and got the result Lost to the Warp. This instantly teleported her to an unknown location deep in the warp, and far from us. The grenade seemingly disintegrating her was a sudden resolution to the eldar witch situation we had, and so we then clubbed the Wraithblade to death while it was lying on the ground with a broken leg. Briefly mourning the bisected Honor Guard (we never even got his name), Reguba took up his Power Sword, judging whatever came next would need the strength of the power field.

Proceeding deeper in towards the creepy chanting we heard, we entered a large cavern. Reddus did a brilliant job setting the vibe of the whole session, but entering this cavern my mind's eye had the room as concrete as any video game final boss room I've experienced. The ceiling was a swirl of the warp, and at a slight incline below us a half dozen eldar in flowing robes danced and flowed with the rhythm of the warp around a great statue of blue crystal, of metal, of gems and shiny things. It was humanoid, but very much not, no more than it was Eldar. This ritual centerpiece was what was taken from the Inquisitorial Vault, and to see such a locus of Aether and the Warp strained our sanity. Luckily, Sebrius is a grounded fellow, and with almost Orklike determination he rallied us to focus on the material, the mortal, these xenos thieves. Reguba quickly distributed grenades to Dariel and Sebrius, and together they threw fiery death at this coven of sorcery. The eldar were blown apart and their corpses set aflame by the incendiary Sebrius was given, but our triumphant disruption had consequences. The flames burned blue, and dark laughter shook through the cavern as our ears rang from the explosions. The crystalline statue shifted and moved, and it thanked us for our effort in a voice with a timbre that mocked our souls. It raised its arms, and so both into the flames and from the flames daemons of the warp came into being, two pink horrors and a Flamer of Tzeentch.

Dariel began shooting at this Crystal-thing, but Zzoq'Qaz The Knower of Many Things is not one to actually be damaged by someone shooting at him with a pistol from like fifty meters away. The Flamer came close and at an angle to spread its warpflame against all three of us, but we were ready to dodge and drop. The pink horrors closed while throwing flame, and Zzoq'Qaz stood on the pedestal cackling. Reguba lifted the power sword, darted up to the Flamer, and in a flurry of blows hacked it to flaming dust and ash through righteous fury and rage. Sebrius closed himself and blasted away with his shotgun, and Dariel continued firing at the great Daemon as it watched us. Seeing the Flamer go down so quickly, he descended the pedestal and actually entered the fight, aiming to use his crystal body and Tzeentch staff to set us alight and also beat us to death with Change. Spellcraft again fizzed, as the warp here was in too massive flux, with one of the Horrors also poofing out of existence. As he was a massive crystal-thing and had a staff, he had tremendous melee range, but the powerfield of the sword parried it without being turned into a frog. Reguba then swung his new blade as many times as he could, and the shotgun'd and sliced pink horror split into two blue horrors, who themselves quickly became little brimstone horrors as they too were slashed in half. Sebrius had a clear unobstructed shot, point blank, against a giant crystalline statue. He blasted the absolute hell out of it with a powerful shotgun, and it shattered, with the laughter of Daemonic disbelief flying against the walls, amazed at how quickly it happened.

Feeling this flaming cave of dead eldar and warp-stuff was a bad place to linger, we quickly left, bringing the body of the honor guard to the Landspeeder and calling the Inquisitor to let her know we messed up a horrible eldar ritual and then banished the Daemons who appeared as a result of said mucked ritual. Inquisitor Shiva had wrapped up the orbital Eldar presence via a well executed ramming maneuver into their prow, which is perfectly in keeping with her straightfoward and physical methods. In the final debrief, we discussed what the Eldar might have aimed to do, with only the scattered memories of the Supplicator and the barely understood riddles of the Spiritseer (and the even harder to comprehend bragging of the Tzeentchian herald) to guide us. Piecing it together, mostly through spiritseer Jaii Zan's ranting about her father, we came to guess that their craftworld was deeply cursed. This was an attempt to displace the curse onto the human worlds of Byzanaar, justifying our actions against these Eldar entirely.