During this time, our hydra cell needed a cover with which to operate within the Calixis Sector. To do so, we operated through our networks within the Imperium itself to fabricate the founding of an Adeptus Astartes Chapter known as the Sable Specters, descendants of the Dark Angels. The Sable Specters were left unaware of their true lineage, however – the Twentieht Legion. To delibareatly milead any who attempted to analyze their gene seed – we could not risk revealing our involvement – we deliberately mutated the geneseed and indoctrinated them in practices of terror so as to forge a link between the Sable Specters and the Night Lords legion, our hypothesis being that if scrutinous indiivudals were to grow suspicious of their founding and hunt for heresy within their ranks, it would be more ideal to leave a falsified orgy of evidence to distract them from the truth. Finally, our hydra cell was able to operate freely, donning the black and green of the Specters and moving without question.

During this time, an ally of Toreaux’s within the Ordo Xenos, Inquisitor Manus Antemony, received commendations from his Ordos’ high Cabal for the successful seizure of a Space Hulk named Woe’s Blossom by units of the Deathwatch. Upon the hulk, cultists venerating the Plague Lord were found in abundance, and while some escaped, such as Nixios Morrowgrave, most were eradicated.

Antemony was later tasked with the liberation of a system of hab-zones from the invasions of the Tau Empire, within the Jericho Reach. The defense mission ended in Exterminatus. We include him within this briefing for the purpose of identifying one of the first culprits with whom you must be familiar – Tobias Satter, an insane tech-priest serving in Antemony’s retinue. Antemony’s records reveal that, while the tech-adept was horrendously mutated, he was possessed of the vital Pariah gene, which is what led Antemony into trusting Satter’s usefulness. We took an interest in Satter, for we had hypothesized that this mutation was linked in some way to the C’Tan. While Antemony surely died, Satter lived on, and it is believed that by his hand Antemony was slain.

With Antemony deceased, Toreaux overtook his investigations and dispatched his own acolytes to investigate the loose threads of his final operations. Storm Trooper Galvian Webber was attached to the trading known as the Imperial Fist, which had been involved in major fiscal transactions nearby the sector where Woe’s Blossom had been purged by Antemony’s Deathwatch.

Meanwhile, Toreaux’s investigations into House Belarus were furthered when the House – represented by an individual by the name of Barnabus Longfellow Belarus - reported that one of their ships had been abducted by a fleet of Eldar pirates known as the Kabal of the Flayed Claw. The ship’s captain and his son, Venini Belarus, were captured and imprisoned – what we know now is that both father and son were powerful psykers, which is undoubtedly why the Eldar were so interested in them. The agonized cries of a psyker are far more fulling to their dark palates.

The Rogue Trader died, but his son lived on. Venini Belarus managed to escape from his captors and travelled the unbeholden reaches for many years. During his travels, he encountered many a xenos and a heretic, and even a daemon emissary of the Plague King – an entity that identified itself as Ptolimo. Venini, in a self-amusing jest, tricked the daemon into believing that a war between the Ruinous Powers, the forces of the Emperor, and a force yet to be revealed was soon to be at hand, and that Ptolimo should begin assembling champions to fight on behalf of his god.

The ramifications of this action are manifold. It is believed that this jest is what resulted in Ptolimo’s patronage of Nixios Morrowgrave, along with Ptolimo’s formation of the daemonic council known as the Diablovirate, members of which included the daemons Khar’Amon and Shey’Lya’Thuul.

Now, the Imperial Fist. Not only was Venini Belarus accepted with open arms onto the Imperial Fist’s deck – he was, after all, still a Rogue Trader – but upon this ship matters were far worse than Toreaux had even begun to fear. Webber reported that yes, contingents of Woe’s Blossom’s cult had survived, and were hiding aboard the Imperial Fist, impersonating a flock of the Imperial Ecclesiarchy. They were led by Nixios Morrowgrave. Tobias Satter too worked aboard the craft as its head enginseer. Prior to encountering Venini, Webber informed Toreaux of a spy aboard the ship, operating for a third party. This spy, a criminal named Archimedes Noxt, was later killed by the crew. In reality, Noxt was an agent operating for Rabley Nidon, who in turn was operating in conjuction with our own desires.

After a few weeks, Venini Belarus’s return to Imperial space was greeted by the Firefly, a frigate of House Belarus belonging to none other than Barnabus Longfellow Belarus. It was Longfellow who ordered the Dark Eldar attack on Venini’s father all those years ago in an attempt to be rid of his major rival and enemy within the dynsaty’s power base. We contacted Longfellow and bribed him to perform this, so that we could impress upon the already rebellious Belarus a hatred of the uncaring Imperium.

Unbeknownst to us at the time, Longfellow had brought with him a contingent of that same Kabal of the Flayed Talon, and Belarus and his crew were imprisoned within Comorragh to participate in their primitive blood sports and torture games.

Spies in Comorragh report that the crew of the Imperial Fist escaped in a massive slave revolt, no doubt instigated by Venini’s alleged silver tongue. Having abducted the Firefly, with Longfellow slain, their crew now swelled with slaves, mutants, and xenos – even, I gather, a foul chirurgeon of the Eldar themselves, a haemonculus called Dhurzha.

For the next matter of months, the Firefly and the Imperial Fist traversed the Koronus Expanse and the Calixis Sector, abducting vast quantities of people for the purposes of colonizing a new world free from the Imperium’s rulership. The merchant captain of the Fist, Rhaegar, was displeased by Venini’s heresy, as his attempts to contact the Imperial authorities to report of his new ally’s predilections, which we intercepted and monitored, were forwarded immediately to Inquisitor Toreaux. He began long-term communications with Rhaegar. Belarus planned to start an empire away from the greatness of the Imperium, a collection of worlds under the command of heretics. To our hydra cell, this proved ideal, as it would serve as a potential base of operations and a means by which to introduce these heretics into the grander vision we had planned for them.

While Satter and Venini were content to erect their liberated empire, and Webber and Rhagegar remained in loyal correspondence Toreaux, the monster of Nixios took a darker turn. His cult growing rapidly, Nixios became enthralled by the idea of ascendancy – the prospect of daemonhood, immortalized in the unholy warp-stuff of the Chaos Gods. Summoning a demonic emissary of the Fly Lord – Ptolimo, who answered him in eagerness to accrue a power base within the Octaviumrate – Nixios sold his body to the daemon in return for the powers of the unholy. Ptolimo was undoubtedly motivated to bestow this gift due to Venini’s fictional warning. His allies would not become aware of the treachery until far later.

Upon his own discovery of Nixios’s betrayal, Tobias Satter began to make preparations against Nixios’s daemonic plot, rooting through the populace of the fledging Good Protectorate for skilled men and women ready to fight against the powers of Chaos. Nicknamed “the plaidclads” for the eclectic tartan-colored armor that Tobias fashioned for them to don, the small army began to take up arms and rooted itself in an orbital defense station within Acrides’s asteroid belt.

After settling the world of Acrides, along with its brother planet Kelvin, the Secessionists encountered that errant son of Mars – Irtfaufe, upon which one of the shard of the Temptress was recovered. Following the escape of Irtaufe all those years ago and the destruction of the world’s cogitators, Nidon began to lose hope. Without the server-columns, production and innovation on Irtaufe ground to a halt, which, coupled with the sudden isolation of the planet in the cold expanse of the void, meant that the population, tech-priests, Skitarii, and labor units alike were soon to die of starvation. Nidon began to pray to the Omnissiah for salvation and guidance, and underwent a crisis of faith, fearing that his dabbling in dark science had brought about the terrible misfortune. It was at this point that we, operating through our cult network, instigated the reveal of the shard of the Temptress – a young girl by the name of Lydia Toth, the child of two nameless labor units, began to perform miracles within the dark, crowded bowels of the manufactorum in which she worked. The waif was inexplicably capable of repairing broken tech-devices with a touch, communicating with the factory’s machine-spirits without use of an uplink, and transforming excess stores of promethium into pure, life-giving water.

Upon hearing the tales of the miracle-worker, Nidon himself descended into the ruins of the factory to rescue Toth. Extensive studies revealed no abnormalities – Toth possessed no psychic abilities, mutations, or malignancies that would give any indication as to why she was capable of interacting with technology in this way. Only one other being in Imperial history had been capable of the feats that Toth had been performing – and that individual was the God-Emperor of Mankind itself.

Nidon came to believe that Toth was, in fact, the Omnissiah Incarnate, a fleshly form embodying the essence of the Machine-God’s innovation and knowledge. Toth’s parents were overjoyed when Nidon offered the child a place within his own forge-palace, where he could protect and watch over Lydia Toth as she grew and developed her abilities. As knowledge of her miracles became commonplace, Toth became known as the Creatio Machinae – “The Creation of the Machine”. Thousands would appear before the gates of Nidon’s forge-palace, begging for him to reveal Toth so that she could restore life to their broken machines. The crowds became so urgent that, after a few months, Nidon held the first Festival of Knowledge, a grand convention emphasizing the exchange of cultural ideals, technological marvels, and scientific accomplishments. At the finale, Lydia Toth would appear before the congregation and, one by one, repair their damaged bionics and devices, much to the gratitude of many.

All became unwell, however, when individual tech-priests began to take their newfound freedom of creativity into realms unforeseen by Nidon. Daemon engines, warp-tech, and other malefic devices were devised and distributed by the most depraved of Irtaufe’s tech-priests which, while few in number, found their way into the hands of Lydia Toth’s tech-priest tutors. At the same time, Toth became aware that her surrogate father had been experimenting on live humans, attempting to replicate her abilities, with fatal catstrophes. To end Nidon’s macabre studies and solve the mystery of her own abilities herself – for Toth, thanks to her shattering, was unaware of her true nature – Toth began dabbling in the fell powers of the warp and, when confronted by her surrogate father, fled to the external station housing the repaired cogitator sever-columns to practice her fell arts in peace. Using daemonic wards and corrupted machine spirits, Toth’s misled mind turned the cogitator-station into a floating fortress, impregnable even by the most able Skitarii.

In order to find somebody with enough skill to bypassing the station’s defenses and rescue Toth, Nidon searched through his forge world’s population to find informants and couriers. An apt individual – one of our more knowledgeable agents – presented himself in the form of Archimedes Noxt, a mutant whose constantly decaying flesh rendered him unfit for bionics of any kind and, in the eyes of Irtaufe’s former masters, utterly disgraced in the eyes of the Omnissiah. To Nidon, Noxt’s criminal connections made him an ideal candidate for recruiting aid, and before long Noxt and our agents were “scouring various sectors, searching for individuals with the skill and ability to perform the task that Nidon required of them” – we already knew who we were to call. Poor fortune befell Noxt upon encountering the crew of the seneschal Captain Rhaegar, when Noxt himself was cut down by the ship’s cleric, Nixios. His rotting remains were recovered and revived with fresh organs, and Nidon now knew whom he needed to save the life of the Creatio Machinae.

We were very proud of that one.

And that is how Irtuafe came into the path of the Secessionists. The explorers seiged Irtaufe’s cogitator-station, battling murder-servitors, data-daemons, and all manner of other horrors to reach the heathen goddess. Webber was slain in the attempt. While the rest of the Secessionists fought ton Irtaufe, Tobias remained on the Imperial Fist and slaughtered the resident haemonculus and his retinue of wracks.

Following Webber’s death the Secessionists made their way to the hive world of Mourner, the “recruiting ground” of the Sable Specters. Toreaux’s records state that the Specters’ preference for mind-cleansing their initiates and emplying terror tsctics against their foes was always been too reminiscent of the traitor legions for his liking – evidently our ruse was most cunning. Prior to their arrival, specially plced agents wwithin the fourth company were introduced so as to facilitate operations between the Secessionisrs and the Chapter. We allowed them to believe that Venini’s mastery over the art of the wordsmith seduced the 4 ^th Company’s captain, Corlmorrow, into allying with them. Corlmorrow was one of us, and that was not his real name. With Corlmorrow, the Secessionists also acquired a few other “traitorous members” of the 4 ^th company to add to their ranks, as well as a void pirate operating on Mourner – Baltro D. Baltro. We had predicted that Baltro would later achieve the power of daemonhood and, hoping to ally him to our cause, we lured his brother to Mourner with promises of induction into the Chapter, hoping that Baltro would follow.

Which he did.

The man-thing that was Baltro eludes us to this day. He was utterly insane. His ship, the Leering Doge, a blasphemous creature of flesh and metal, embodied its captain’s madness in full. The universe’s breeding of such madness terrorizes my nightmares.

Following the disappearance of the 4 ^th Company – in reality our hdyra cell – Toreaux decided it was time to take action. The loyalist elements of the Sable Specters Chapter and the Order of the Veiled Lily attacked the fleet of the Secessionists, which numbered four ships – the Firefly, the Imperial Fist, the Leering Doge, and Spiteheart, the ship of the Kabal of the Flayed Talon’s archon, Vyorla Mikaeliss. We hired her to ally with them, under the pretence that the hameonculus Dhurzha was a rival of hers in Comoroaggh, and her services as a reaver constuted the xenos’s dark perview of repayment. Our motives for this were to act as a double agent should any of the Secessionists become too unpredictable or chaotic – a hidden dagger we could deploy without revealing the truth of our hydra cell.

The battle was less than successful for the servants of the Emperor. The Sable Specter captain Antellox was outmaneuvered by the Eldar pirates. Toreaux’s battle sisters were demolished by Nixios’s demonic abilities. Some success was made in the initial hours, however – Toreaux personally butchered the heretic king, Venini Belarus, using lightning claw and bolter. Additionally, Tobias Satter was incapaciatated, nearly killed, but our Mechanicus agents within Toreaux’s ranks revved him, under the excuse of a through, brutal interrogation.

]The second wave of attackers hit the Inquisitorial fleet in full. Satter was sequestered away, and they were forced to withdraw, their ship left as a burning husk far from the Good Protectorate’s capital world, Acrides, which had been their intended target. The defeat was especially crushing, as Nixios’s ascendancy was near at hand – this was of concern to us. Using records and heretical tomes stolen from the Inquisitorial librarium, Nixios discovered the potential key to his ascendancy – the Heartstrings of Mortarion, the daemonic flesh of the Daemon primarch who did battle against the Ordo Malleus’s champion, Kaldor Draigo. The fragments of flesh sliced away in that battle would be more than enough to grant Nixios his power. Nixios took command of Venini’s ship and rechristened it the Bot Fly in his death.

Rhaegar, ever-faithful to the crumbling Imperium, warned Toreaux that Nixios and Baltro were rapidly en route to the Heartstrings’ last possessor, a Pirate Prince known as Taradiel the Everliving. A worshipper of the Chaos power Slaanesh, Taradiel had hoarded many a vessel and had accumulated a collection of occult artifacts. Taradiel, Nixios, and Baltro tracked the Heartstrings to their final resting place – the space hulk, Woe’s Blossom. A fitting stab in the gut by the Runious Powers, is it not? The time for brute force was lost – Toreaux had only time to dispatch a cadre of Death Cult assassins to intercept them, but the effort was moot.

Right at the point before Nixios’s ascendancy, the daemon Ptolimo appeared before him and attempted to destroy its former client, knowing full well that Nixios and his now-expansive cult would attempt to take control of Ptolimo’s daemonic legions should Nixios become a daemon prince. Ptolimo was slain by Nixios’s hand, and Nixios became translated into a vile thing of distended entrails, bleeding eyes, writhing tentacles, a daemon true in name and form. Rheagar and Tobias began constructing defenses on Acrides to repel Nixios and keep the Good Protectorate free of his daemonic tent. Lydia Toth assembled Irtaufe’s renegade Skitaari aboard the Wrath of Numerology. Our hydra cell mobilized. Soon the two sides of the coming battle were arrayed – one side, Tobias Satter and the plaidclads, Captain Rehagar and the Imperial Fist, Lydia Toth of Irtaufe aboard the Warth fo Numerolgy, and the Kabal of the Flayed Talon and the traitors of the Sable Specters 4 ^th Company aboard Spitehart. On the other side was Nixios Morrowgrave and his Malignant Concordant aboard the Bot Fly, Baltro D. Baltro and his reavers upon the Leering Doge, and Prince Taradiel the Everliving aboard his ship, Passion’s Darkness.

In the battle, Taradiel was slain. Baltro ascended to daemonhood and became a daemon prince of Malal, the God of Anarchy. Nixios disappeared, with the intent of seeding his cult throughout the galaxy. Mikaeliss fled into the shadowy realm of Aelindrach, seeking refuge. Satter and the survivors returned to Acrides, with the intent to begin their new lives. Our hydra cell monitors the Good Protectorate even now, keeping a close eye on Lydia Toth.

GAMMA FILE: THE VLADIC SECTOR

Decades later, our operations’ next phase of preparation resurfaces in the Vladic Sector, in the Segmentum Ultima. The Vladic Sector is bordered on two sides, on one by the fringe of the Tau Empire and on the other by a warp rift called Shemjaza's Eye. The Eye is very temperamental and often is inconsistent in where it leads, but ships travelling through usually end up on the edge of Imperial space or in the daemon infested hellhole called the Tear. Through a series of political machinations and assassinations, an agent of our own sympathetic to our interests, a man by the name of Heckler Reinhold, came to power as Lord Sector Governor. He was aided by our own cult of navigators, operating under the name “House Damocles.”

Our interest in the Vladic Sector is owed to the existence of a series of xenos constructs known as the Ley Configuration. Constructs of the ancient Old Ones employed during the War in Heaven, the Ley Configuration operates through redistributing the “anima” – the sentient energy of life – of the inhabitants of the region based on varying levels of psychic significance. In short, when activated, the life force powering the Necron tombs would be siphoned away and divided between the psychically resonant populace. This redistribution is conducted through individuals known as Loci, each of which is connected to one of the Ley Worlds. Our interest is not in the Ley Configuration, but what it implies – this is clearly a region infested with Necrons, and here we may be able to locate a fragment of the Temptress for Operation Daedalus. Other hydra cells have accumulated other shards, and each one brings us closer to completion of our goal.

In the last few decades, the Vladic Sector has become an area of intriguing activity. The expansion of the Tau Empire, first of all, serves as the primary antagonists. In order to combat them, the Imperium dispatched the Astral Barons chapter of Adeptus Astartes. In order to help maintain our cover, we borrowed that age-old skin, the Sable Specters, and falsified orders of dispatch, under the pretence of giving the chapter a chance to re-prove its loyalty by serving as an auxiliary force.

Our previous mission with the Good Protectorate had been a success, so in an attempt to recreate that success we reached out to the controversial rogue trader Caston of House Moretti. Unfortunately, his interest in our true natures became too dangerous and Reinhold dispatched the rival house Romano to eliminate them in what would appear to be an attack of economic nature. Caston’s son, Giovanni, irritably survived.

We allowed Reinhold to make reforms as he saw fit, with the hope of improving bureaucracy and administration. Reinhold, in doing so, hired an investigator by the name of Sylvester Toussant with the intent of assassinating corrupt or dangerous terrorist threats and nobles. Meanwhile, Giovanni Moretti, seeking vengeance for his father’s assassination, created his own crew and took to the stars, having inherited his father’s warrant. The members of his crew included:

Penultimo Reinhold, an operative of House Damocles and Reinhold’s illegitimate son – for security’s sake, we kept Penultimo unaware of our involvement.

Bubsy Malone, a missionary of the Ecclesiarchy. In fact, Bubsy was one of the Loci, tied to the Ecclesiarchal shrine world of Obyron, which was in fact a Ley World.

Acemyth Malakai, a survivor of a hrud attack on the Imperial navy and declared madman.

And Isaac Havelock. Havelock concerns us in the extreme, as he is connected to the Havelock Dynasty, a splinter cult of the Malignant Concordant founded by Nixios Morrowgrave. By his own words, Nixios’s manifesto:

“Basically, Nixios was a complete psychopath, who mutilated himself trying to evolve. He decided that he couldn’t do it, so he assumed the name Havelock and established a dynasty with himself as the patriarch, with the intent of evolving and guiding humanity’s evolution through his clones.”

Isaac is a clone of Nixios displaying an inbred pathological genetic inferiority complex, worshipping the Eldar form and pursuing its dark flesh-crafting for his own self-improvement. It seems our past endeavors come back to haunt us all.

With this in mind, we instructed Reinhold to aid us in transforming the Vladic Sector into a utopian bastion like the Good Protectorate, and Reinhold’s naïve idealism drove him to agree. Reinhold attempted to distract the crew of the Ira Saccarius – Giovanni’s ship – using the Ley Configuration, hinting that its activation could be used to rid the sector of the Tau menace. While Reinhold’s agents led them on an intangible chase for information we already possessed, our hydra cell scoured the sector for a trace of a shard of the Temptress.

The operations of the Ira Saccarius begin on the world of Noma, our staged recruiting ground and academy for House Damocles. In reality, the planet has no connection with the House whatsoever. It simply served as a convenient means to introduce Penultimo into their crew, giving Reinhold an excuse to monitor them. Following this, the Ira Saccarius had an encounter with the vicious xenos known as the Rak’Gol. From the bowels of the xenos vessel they rescued the preacher Bubsy Malone and sought for a location to store their loot of xenotech. In their folly, they settled upon an unnamed world populated by Dark Eldar. After a number of excruciating encounters, they escaped.

Following this, the crew encountered the Ork mercenary going by the name of Sparky McBoomDoom. He will be abbreviated here as SBD. SBD concerns us due to his connections to the Daemon Prince Baltro – the two seem to be old friends. The Ira Saccarius, however, was unaware of this.

Following this misadventure, Reinhold decided it was time to introduce the Ira Saccarius to the Ley Configuration. A number of agents posing as members of the Adeptus Mechanicus contacted the ship, claiming that Reinhold had forbidden any from setting foot on the planet of Salinus, due to the psychic phenomena present there. Salinus was a Ley World. The Ministorum, however, believed that the planet was a site where the Emperor himself had once walked, imbuing the land with his holiness. The Mechanicum wanted to study the region. In reality, Reinhold had indeed forbidden passage there, but the Mechanicus agents attempting to go behind his back were actually our servants all along.

Traveling there, the crew encountered Eldar defenders, led by Dario el’Ashabel, who warned them against tampering with the science of the Old Onces. Dario was in fact a reformed Eldar hedonist seeking refuge amongst the Craftworld Luorengorm. This note becomes significant later. It was here that Bubsy was revealed to be one of the mysterious Loci. In order to lend a hint of realism to the scenario constructed, Reinhold once more dispatched the Romanos to Salinus with the intent of making it seem like Reinhold had hired them for the purposes of defending the planet from interlopers in a trade deal. The crew of the Saccarius accepted this, believing Reinhold had hired the Romanos to kill Caston Moretti for his knowledge of the Ley Configuration. This could not be further from the truth.

Following this incident, the Ira Saccarius travelled to the local Station of Passage, nicknamed the Den of Iniquity, in order to learn the location of an Eldar maiden world – hoping that doing so would uncover more clues regarding the Ley Configuration. Upon the Den of Iniquity, they became aware of the nominal presence of Slaanesh cultists in the sector – due mostly in part to the high presence of the Eldar and Eldar constructs. At the Den of Iniquity, the crew purged a Slaanesh cult, but in doing so a daemon of Slaanesh reached out to Bubsy Malone. The hope of the daemon was that, in return for power, the daemon would be able to corrupt Bubsy, thereby tainting the anima running through him once the Ley Configuration was activated and corrupting millions more. Bubsy remained resolute in the face of such temptation. Also, it was here that Sylvester Toussant began cultivating his interest in reverse-engineering xenos technology for the good of the Imperium, contacting a gang known as the Skinwalkers and offering them political aid in return for putting him in contact with First Party, a kabal of xenotech enthusiasts. While here, Sylvester attempted to have his arms, wounded badly in his fight with Romano, replaced with bionics. The Skinwalker heretek who attempted the operation did so while clouded by narcotics and amputated his limbs before committing suicide to escape his masters’ retribution. Sylvster was unamused.

Travel to the maiden world provided few clues to the nature of the Ley Configuration, but it did provide Bubsy with a pet in the form of a Grynnix. Also, it was here that they met the infamous rival Rogue Trader, Anastasia Blayze. SBD disappeared here. He resurfaces later.

Alpha Legion plot's gone out the window. The players are at this point probably just going to build a human version of the ressutrix chamber, mail it to Mars as an STC, and have the Ad Mech do it.

They'll probably misfile it and get it lost in some data vault, or field test it for a 100 years.

Any updates?