Chapter Text
The party wakes up in a metal box, almost naked in very thin undergarments shivering from the cold. A servo skull greets them and explains they’ve been “volunteered” to work for the Inquisition, under “Lord Constantine”. Tech priest does the cogboy thing and gets the servo skull to spill more info, including the IDs of everyone. Party looks weird at and ostracizes the Voidborn Witch, especially the Sister.
They have to go through a few tests to prove themselves, and failure can mean death or servitorization. Faced with little choice, we all agree to them and are handed parchments in High and Low Gothic. The Sister buddies up with the illiterate and feral Guardsman, reading it to him. We then are lead to an even bigger room, but it’s fucking cold; we make progressively more difficult Toughness checks, the Sister is flimsy and fails it badly, getting fatigued. But she’s the only one who fails, everyone else endures.
I can't explain just how bad and good the rolls in this game are, we’re running the game on Roll20.net and we start off with nothing above a 50 on the d100 in a roll-under system. It’s either 1 or 100, but at least the GM also rolls awful, leading to some looney tunes shit in the future.
The first test is a cognitive one, another servo skull comes and spits metric tons of parchment in Low and High Gothic. The Sister is the only one who actually went to a school, so she gets to read it with her high Literature skill. The witch and the cogboy help by ripping parts of the parchment together so she can write answers with a provided ink pen. Since no one wants to be near the witch, he throws the papers across the room once he’s done. actually throws it over since no one wants to be near him.
After hours and more fatigue, the Sister, having caught a cold, finishes the test. The servo skull looks it over once, says we passed, and burns the parchment we’ve been labouring over. We’re sent back to the metal room and given heating privileges. Each one goes to sleep in a corner of the floor, everyone the furthest away from the psyker.
A few hours later we’re woken up to the next test; this time the box opens to the large room with a huge pool of mud, barbed wire and servitors shooting across it.We have to crawl through the muck and survive the live fire. Galen jumps into the mud and goes through, making good distance, the barbed wire barely even scratching his back, but a servitor ends up filling him with bullets and Critical Damage. Quintos goes next, gets a couple scratches from the barbed wire but makes it through. Cellanus uses psyker stuff to get lucky and throw the servitors’ aim off. Callidia gets pinned under the barbed wire, the bullets flying over her head scaring her too much to go on. Did I mention we’re on a timer? She manages to continue through the mud and the psyker helps her by lifting the barbed wire. We complete the test, with only the guardsman being full of holes.
Fortunately or unfortunately, alarms go off and we’re spared the other tests. We’re drafted and sent to the box. Callidia asks for a shower to get rid of the mud, the servoskull grants them the privilege back at the box, along with their gear back.Galen goes first in the shower, letting the water splash the mud from him as he drinks the water from the shower. Callidia gets her medicae tools to start patching him up and helps him wash, she gives him a lecture on mud medicine, since Galen said that back in his world, the healers just slap mud on wounds and it works. The Sister patiently goes with an explanation that it works as long as it’s mud from their home planet, which this one isn't, and that she can heal him much better than mud. This convinces the Guardsman and she pulls several bullets off him as she patches him up. Callidia showers next, taking example from Galen’s resourcefulness and drinks some water from the shower too, who knows when they will have “”””clean””” water again. Then Quintos. Cellanus is the last one after they’ve used up all of the hot water.
We’re briefed on our job to prove ourselves. A primitive feudal world named Acreage just opened its spaceport and has a civil war going on. In the city of Olrankan a bunch of people are going missing, we have to go there, investigate, find out about it, preferably solve it and get back. We have 6 days to do that and come back to a ship, otherwise we are going to just be left there forever. Callidia dumbs this down so Galen can understand. Quintos gets jumpscared as the tall and lanky Cellanus reads it over his shoulder. The group admonishes the psyker, calling him a witch and other mean things, before going to sleep on the beds provided for us. Needless to say none of the beds are big enough for Cellanus.
We wake up in our shared quarters on some spaceship.