- Astropathic communique to Inquisitor E, from imperial psyker Elric Nilius.
The freaky stuff just got worse!
It was all a bit of a blur, or perhaps a nightmare, so that's why it may seem a little vague at times. I think I got a little ahead of myself last time, so let me back-track a bit.
After our green-haired militant defeated the pirate lord's champion we decide to retire for the night. What I next recall is waking up imprisoned in a chamber with my fellow crew members. I say imprisoned since this room was featureless and had no exits. There is a single source of flickering light in the room, and dark shadows everywhere. The shadows themselves seemed to move in the corners of our eyes (or the corners of our brains?), and that's when they attack us. We fight back using all the tools at our disposal, and then awake for the second time.
We realize that we were in some type of mental "fortress" with a xenos creature known as an Umbra. We had managed to mentally punch ourselves out of the prison, only to awake for real and find ourselves now chained up in a huge room, with a pile of bones in front of us, and a pool of blood around the bones. More like a mountain of bones! Out of the bones arose the black spherical shape of the Umbra who, despite our best attempts to kill it, manages to escape.
We put the pieces together, and realize that we had been drugged with some type of psycho trance-inducing toxin. While we were asleep our minds were being held captive by the mental prison. Though it was primarily mental in nature, actions in the prison had a physical effect on us as well. For instance our void-mistress Nicole had gotten up close and personal with fire while in the prison, and when she awoke she had large burn scars across her chest and part of her scalp. And it seems that in our effort to escape the mental fortress we essentially "awoke" the Umbra as well.
Looking about the vast chamber we see on the far side of the blood pool that there are several robed guys. We are in no condition to fight, with little in the way of armor (or even clothes -- I can only imagine what happened to our female crew members) and no weapons other than a few knives and such. So we wisely decide to try and sneak away, with Moll leading the way through the deep pool of blood.
We find a ventilation shaft and, using the blood as lubricant, manage to squeeze our way into it. In this manner we crawl through ventilation shafts for hours as we try and make our way back to our ship. During this time we also stabilize one of our crew-members, another arch-militant, who lost his arm (it was ripped off).
In time we eventually find the pirate lord's trophy room, where our gear was being kept. After re-arming ourselves we feel much more confident about encountering any more pirates, but decide that it's best to still keep a low profile. We do in fact encounter more pirates, including two twins (whom we interrogate... sorta), but manage to keep them from sounding the alarm.
In time we make it to the docking bay where we see the pirate lord and several of his murder-servitors. The pirate lord is demanding that he be able to board Erika Damos' ship the Brisk Intervention, but fortunately the sergeant stands firm and tells him that he has orders to make sure no one boards the ship except under Erika's specific command.
While this is going on we hide behind a cargo loader and manage to sneak aboard the ship. Once there Erika immediately recalls her men still aboard the star fortress, and then violently disengages from the docking port not waiting for the docking clasps to unlatch.
We fire our nova cannon straight ahead of us, hoping to detonate as many of the space mines as possible, and then get out of there as fast as we can. As we leave we use our maneuvering thrusters to turn completely around, while still moving forward, and with Moll's incredible aim we fire the nova cannon into the star fortress a couple of times to create some havoc while we escape.
After a mostly uneventful 5 week journey through the warp we emerge back into Jika's system, where we see the splendor of the Damos Crusade in front of us!
In service, Elric.
- Astropathic response from Inquisitor E.
Glad to hear that you're safely back home. From the reports we've received it seems that without the pirate lord's fear holding that group together his more senior lieutenants immediately began to fight for control. The infighting has considerably weakened them, and they are now several disjoint groups of raiders instead of a more threatening cohesive group.