The Inquisitor dropped Nubby from his attention and finished the Marines' orders with an apology for the indignity of the assignment and a promise to call an extra team down to properly arrest us when his ship returned in a few hours. Then, almost as an afterthought, he warned them that "the little one is a psyker, and will need to put in one of the cells". Both the Marines turned their bolters on Nubby and began advancing. There were a bit of confusion as Nubby, who was still incapable of speaking, attempted to hide behind the rest of us. Sarge, seeing an opportunity, grabbed the undersized trooper by his collar and proffered him to the advancing Marines while Aimy and Doc moved in front of Fumbles. Unfortunately, this brilliant plan was spoiled by the fact that the Inquisitor wasn't a gullible idiot. When the Marines returned with Nubby suspended by one augmetic leg, the Inquisitor let out little sigh of annoyance (which was the most emotion we'd seen from him yet) and told the marines to stop embarrassing themselves and collect "the one in the psyker-coat". When the marines returned with Doc, who'd hurriedly put on Fumbles' coat, the Inquisitor let out another sigh, and made a gesture. There was a little yelp from the back of our group as an invisible force yanked Fumbles into the air and began levitating him across the landing pad. Without another word to us or the Deathwatch marines, the Inquisitor followed our whimpering psyker into the large elevator where his non-superhuman flunkies were waiting with the Daemonthrope.

So, to summarize our situation: we were sweating through our fancy, but completely unarmored uniforms, on a landing pad, while two bolter-armed Deathwatch Space Marines kept us covered and watched our every movement like genetically engineered super-hawks. Since Fumbles was off enjoying the hospitality of the creepily-monotone Inquisitor, our landing party consisted of all us guardsmen, the three adepts, and a very-unhappy Jim. Armament wise, none of us except Twitch and Nubby, who had a few party favors crammed into their pockets, were armed with more than our las-pistols. We hadn't just left our pulse-weapons behind mind you, we'd just decided to leave them in the shuttle, where their techno-heretical nature wouldn't cause any problems if the Inquisitor running facility had a rod up his ass. In retrospect we might've underestimated the size of the hypothetical rod. Our weapon-filled shuttle was parked a dozen meters away from where the Space Marines had corralled us. Aside from our cache of weapons, it was equipped with a multi-laser turret which only Jim knew how to actually use, enough armor to hold off bolter-fire (if the Marines made sure to miss the half-assedly-patched brightlance holes), and MAYBE enough fuel to get us back into orbit. Oh, and it also had Sergeant Gravis' stasis unit, but we didn't really see that as tactically significant. The facility we were on top of was your standard secret mountain base affair. You know, a landing pad and a bit of rooftop sticking out of a dangerously steep mountainside, with emperor-knows how much stuff hidden underground. Its only real distinguishing features, as far as we were concerned at least, were the local climate, which was blisteringly hot despite the altitude, and the massive ring of anti-air turrets surrounding the landing pad. We weren't quite sure who was controlling said turrets or what their reaction time was like, but none of us felt like doing any experiments to figure that out.

I mean, it's not like we thought the question of whether or not our boss was a heretical mastermind that'd been destroying the Inquisition from within wasn't important… We just didn't see how it was relevant to our current situation. Either: >A: Oak was a heretic. In which case the Inquisition would imprison, torture, and slowly kill us. >B: Oak wasn't a heretic, but someone had framed him as one. In which case the the Inquisition would probably imprison, torture, and slowly kill us, though they might apologise to Oak about it afterwards if everything was ever sorted out. >C: Oak wasn't a heretic, and the monotone Inquisitor was lying about the Inquisition ordering his arrest as part of some sort of conspiracy. In which case a bunch of political backstabbers or a shadowy cabal of heretics would imprison, torture, and slowly kill us. I'm sure you can see the common theme here. As far as we were concerned the question of our Inquisitor's moral status was academic, and was therefore something that could be left to the academics while we focused on more important issues. Specifically, how we were going to avoid being imprisoned, tortured, and slowly killed. The old Diplomat got a little huffy with us, and said some very hurtful things about our attention spans and our intellectual capabilities as compared to those of a bunch of a drunken Orks. Eventually though, he calmed down and announced his and the other adepts' certainty that Oak was innocent. Sarge, who was in just about the worst mood any of us had seen him in, responded with bitter sarcasm, which the Diplomat returned with interest. The situation had all the makings of a really good argument, and lacking anything better to do we all gathered 'round to watch the fireworks, but then Tink spoiled everything by asking whether we should tell the Inquisitor everything about the "Zoanthrope" before he finished taking it out of the stasis unit.

The debate over what to do about the Deamonthrope was a very awkward one. I mean, you can't just say stuff like "I think we should use this device right here to unleash the daemonhost we brought with us, and then escape in the resulting confusion" in front of a pair of Deathwatch Space Marines. It'd be rude. Also, they'd shoot us. So we had to be careful not to say anything about the daemon, or Spot, or escaping, or anything even remotely related to what was going on really. Now, if we'd been proper Inquisitorial agents, we'd have used witty metaphors and ironic codewords, possibly leaving the Marines with the impression that we were merely planning a fancy dress party or something. Unfortunately we were just a bunch of guardsmen, and had to make do with grunts, shrugs, expletives, and a wide array of rude gestures. Judging by the looks on Jim and the Adepts' faces we wound up looking like a bunch of Ogryns trying to argue philosophy, but it honestly worked pretty well. Who knows what the Marines thought, maybe that we'd all suffered strokes or something. Anyway, skipping over a whole lot of nigh-incomprehensible arguing, we eventually decided that the odds of us surviving the Daemonthrope breaking loose were even worse than what we'd get in an Inquisitorial trial. Unless, that is, the bug only broke part-way out and they pinned smuggling a Daemonhost into an Inquisitorial facility on us along with everything else. Put together, it was enough to convince Sarge that our best option was to fess up to the Daemonthrope's true nature, and hope we got bonus points for saving whichever idiot was in the process of releasing it. That decided, Sarge stood up, walked towards the Marines until they ordered him to stop or be shot full of holes, told them that Zoanthrope we'd delivered had been possessed by a Daemon, and asked them to warn the Inquisitor not to mess with its containment. Heart-Marine called him a liar and Grumpy-Marine called him a heretic.

So while Sarge and the old Diplomat glared at eachother, and the rest of us began laying plans for taking advantage of the inevitable Daemonthrope escape, Doc walked over to the two Deathwatch Marines and tried to convince them that we totally weren't heretics. Between the fact that Doc was just about the opposite of a confident and persuasive speaker, and the Deathwatch Marines being a pair of three meter tall killing machines with glowing red eyes and permanent expressions of angry disapproval, the whole thing was rather comically pathetic. Our medic stammered and nervously giggled his way through an explanation of how we had no idea what was going on with our Inquisitor or what sort of experiments were going on in this facility. We'd just been following what had, at the time, been a perfectly legitimate Inquisitorial order like a bunch of good little guardsmen, and then our Astropath had exploded, and every time we'd tried to get a new one people attacked us, and we'd really had no other option aside from following our original orders, and so on… The whole time both of the Marines just stared at him, as if eyeing a small, furiously yapping dog and debating whether to laugh at it or punt it over the horizon Doc finally began to run out of steam when he got to the part with the space station, because there was no denying we'd shot, exploded, and MELTED a bunch of loyal Imperial subjects, which is something that's sort of hard to wave off as "just an accident". Even if it totally was. Also, there was just no way to explain the whole thing with the Warp Fungus without sounding like either a liar or a madman. He stuttered to a stop, stared at the impassive Space Marines for a few seconds, and then in a burst of sudden confidence, announced that at least we DEFINITELY hadn't murdered any Space Marines. In fact, except for the one that'd gotten skewered by the Hive Tyrant, all of them were still alive, and he could prove it since Sergeant Gravis was currently in our shuttle.

As Doc finished his explanation for the second time, the Apothecary turned to the other two Marines and the three of them began arguing. They were using their helmet comms, so we couldn't hear a word of it of course, but it was obviously a very heated argument, and since we had a lot on the line (and were bored) we decided to see if we couldn't listen in. Approximately half a second after Tink managed to get his drone-controller tuned to their comm frequency and had started working at "cracking it", all three Marines turned to face us and Jim sprinted over. The techpriest yanked Tin'ks controller away and suggested that, if we wanted to die, shooting ourselves would be a far more pleasant way to go than getting caught in a half-assed attempt at Aetheric Warfare. Tink eventually got his controller back, but only because Sarge promised not to let him use it anymore. Anyway, the Space Marines resumed their argument after that little hiccup, and after another few minutes of agonizing wait (seriously, it'd been about twenty minutes since we'd received the warning about the Daemonthrope's containment being disabled), they apparently reached a decision. The Apothecary announced his intention to temporarily revive Gravis and obtain testimony from him. Doc asked how this was possible, Gravis' lungs being rather nonfunctional (see: cut in half) in addition to the whole being comatose thing. He was told to stop asking questions and be ready to assist as needed. Doc had few seconds to swell with pride at the thought of assisting an actual Apothecary in treatment, and was then nearly crushed as the Space Marine began unloading a hundred kilos of oversized medical equipment onto him. Everything was laid out, Doc was sprayed with an astartes-grade disinfectant which didn't quite cause him to run screaming in unbearable pain, and the stasis unit was deactivated.

When the Marines' argument finally ended with Heart-Marine storming off towards the base's elevator and the Apothecary returning to pick up his medical gear, Doc decided to see if he was allowed to ask questions now. It turned out that either the Apothecary was a far friendlier Space Marine than any that we'd met, or perhaps Gravis had said something on Doc's behalf. Either way, we were finally given a run-down of the situation. >Sergeant Gravis had testified. >No, we would not be told how collecting said testimony had worked. >Because the mysteries of the Black Carapace were not for us to know. >No, not even if it turned out that we were completely innocent, what part of "not for us to know" didn't we understand? >No, the secret wasn't that all Space Marines were actually psychic, and our questions-privileges would be revoked if we did not ask about something else. >Gravis had said we were a bunch of dangerous incompetents, but probably not heretics, and had backed us up in regards to the dangerousness of Daemonthrope, if not the Daemon-ness. >The Inquisitor had been informed of this, but had been dubious about the reliability of Gravis' testimony. >After a bit of… debate, the Inquisitor and the Marines had decided that the Daemonthrope would be immediately destroyed. Heart-Marine was going down to observe the procedure. Purely for reasons of protocol, of course. The news that they were just going to kill the literally-damned bug, after we'd spent all that time and effort hauling it across the ass-end of the Imperium, did NOT go over well. I mean, we probably should've been happy, since it was supposed to be used as evidence of our crimes or something, but still…

While Sarge yelled unhelpfully at the Marines, Tink pulled out his drone controller and announced that he'd started getting a faint signal through the jamming again. From what he could see, all the regular psi-suppressors were offline, the Wraithbone one had been disabled, so only the stasis field was left keeping the Daemonthrope in check. Feeling pretty sure that he knew what his orders would be if he asked for them, the techie immediately started mashing the button to re-engage the Wraithbone suppressor. Through some sort of miracle the signal made it through, and the psychic pressure of the Daemonthrope's mind began to diminish. For about ten seconds that is, then Spot 2.0 reported a "FLAGRANT SYSTEM ERROR" and a second psychic screech knocked all non-superhumans on the pad to their knees. Over by the Marines, Sarge and Doc hauled themselves back to their feet and practically begged the Astartes to DO SOMETHING; the two Deathwatch Marines ignored them and started arguing again. Since our guards were preoccupied, and it looked like the shit was about to hit the fan either way, the rest of us decided this would be a good time to go collect all the weapons that had been left in the shuttle. Jim and the Adepts were left standing in the middle of landing pad, viewing the situation with increasing alarm, and were therefore in the best position to observe what happened next. A third screech doubled everyone over again, and was followed by the "sound" of Fumbles screaming for someone to come help him before "they all go loose". Then the entire pad shook and a geyser of fire and blackish-green lightning shot out of the facility's roof. As we all pulled ourselves upright and followed the standard Guard post-explosion procedure of asking everyone else if they were dead, the Heart-Marine punched his way through the elevator's doors. He began walking towards us, and then turned around as a pair of lightning-wreathed figures rose out of the flaming crater behind him.

Jim and two out of three Adepts screamed, Aimy snickered, Tink and Twitch simultaneously yelled "TOLD YOU SO" at no-one in particular, Sarge facepalmed, and Doc looked up at the Apothecary. The medical-marine let out a weary sigh as the Inquisitor's hat drifted down to rest on top of his compressed corpse, and muttered something about needing yet another new Inquisitor. Nubby, his voice returning, pointed out "da big daemonic bug fing 'overing over dere", which was entertaining itself by tearing a hole in the fabric of reality, and asked the Marines what they were going to do about it. Grumpy and Heart-Marine both let out battle cries and charged forward; the Apothecary shook his head and followed them at a more sedate pace. With a little mutter about them having fun with that, Nubby started to sidle towards the shuttle, only to be yanked into the air by Sarge, who was already bellowing orders and demands for information at the rest of us. Jim reported that the shuttle was still out of fuel, still had twenty AA guns pointed at it, and STILL had its long range comm jammed. Tink checked his controller and said that his drone was coming back online, and the wraithbone suppressor MIGHT be salvageable if he went down to fiddle with it. Sarge digested this, and then declared that, since running away and calling for reinforcements weren't viable options, our only real choice was to kill the bug. The problem with this idea was that none of us had ANY desire to go toe-to-toe with something that could compress someone into paste with a glance... Luckily, there were three crazy bastards in power armor who would do it for us. All we needed to do was figure out a way to help the Marines without getting ourselves horribly killed in the process. A short debate was held, and by the time the Deathwatch Marines had opened fire, a plan had been formed.

Those of us in "Team Doc" climbed through the hole that Heart-Marine had punched through the elevator's doors. Inside we discovered the reason for the Marine's violent exit: the elevator's car appeared to be stuck about halfway down the shaft and all the lights and control panels were dark. There was a maintenance ladder on the far side of the shaft which, judging by the massive hand and foot shaped dents in its rungs, the marine had used to get back to surface. We noticed that a few of the rungs had either broken or been ripped entirely out of the wall, but the Space Marine weighed a lot more than us, so we figured it was probably safe and began climbing down. Jim and the Adepts were a little more dubious, but they eventually gave up looking for other options and followed us. After Twitch popped a rung loose (which barely missed Doc) and dropped half a level, they decided that whatever they were going to do could probably be done on the first level and hastily exited the shaft. We asked them to look into fixing the elevator while they were at it. The signal from Spot and the volume of Fumbles' periodic incoherent psychic shouts peaked three levels below the stuck elevator, and we decided to exit the shaft. Tink suffered a minor heart attack when the first thing he saw after prying open the doors was a pair of turrets aimed at his nose, luckily they didn't seem to register him as a threat, and the rest of us managed to catch the techie as he reflexively dodged backwards into the shaft. After a little debate over whether the turrets were "just waiting for us to let our guard down", which ended with Nubby tossing a half-eaten ration bar at one of them to see if they'd return fire, we all climbed through the doors.

A bare second after the door slid closed something slammed into it, leaving a large outward dent in metal. This was followed by the sound of four turrets beeping to life and a sort of general fracas as they and the lizard monster sorted out their differences. Nubby, his finger still held firmly on the "Close" button, suggested finding another way into the evidence room, or at least waiting to see if the turrets won. Doc, feeling like he should do something leadery, announced that there probably wasn't enough time so we'd have to open the door and deal with the thing. The rest us agreed, but the question of just how to do it was up for debate. After a short argument, in which it was decided that trying to flash and rush a creature that had a metal plate instead of eyes and could punch head-sized dents in security doors was stupid, we decided to go with our other usual strategy of blowing the ugly thing up. There was a problem with this plan though: it'd been several weeks of combat since our last resupply and Twitch's stockpile of explosives down to just his backup-backup grenade and frag mine, plus the single improvised explosive which Sarge had let him bring on the shuttle. Twitch asked for the rest of us to pony up whatever we had, but Tink and Doc didn't have anything except a few flashes (Doc was given shit for not saving the syringe of face-melting biotoxin that had been recently extracted from Gravis, at least until he threatened to go get another one and make Tink carry it). Nubby, on the other hand, grinned an evil little grin when he was asked, and reached into his perpetually-filthy coat. Up on the surface, Brother Bellicus of the Black Templars noticed a large group of daemonic hormagaunts moving to flank him, reached for his grenades, and swore when his hand closed on nothing.

We stared at the carnage for a while, and then unanimously decided that we wanted NOTHING to do with any of it. Don't get me wrong, we were all brave upstanding soldiers of the Astra Militarum. "The Many, The Expendable, the Guard" and all that… It's just that we had more pressing things to deal with, and honestly we just didn't really care about who was fighting who over what. In our professional opinion they all looked like psychotic assholes, so we were perfectly fine with them killing each other to their hearts' content, at least so long as they didn't drag us into it. We began sidling around the edge of the room and towards the Daemonthrope's crater (the Sidle being the form of movement which best conveys "I am not part of this, please ignore me and go about your business/argument/murder"). It took a little work to find our way through the scattered evidence boxes while simultaneously trying to keep as much cover as possible between us and the melee, but aside from the occasional stray shot whizzing by or still-warm corpse lying in our path, we managed to avoid most of the locals. There were only three real interruptions in our progress. The first was when a terrified man we recognized as the scribe that had accompanied the Inquisitor on the landing pad nearly ran into us. Twitch shot him on reflex, and the rest of us refrained from commenting. The second interruption was a little more eventful. The giant man-thing in the middle of the room bellowed, a cell crashed into the wall ahead of us, and something tentacular began to worm its way out. Twitch shot this interruption on reflex too, but this time we all joined in. After a few volleys the tentacles retreated into the cell, Twitch tossed his frag grenade in after them, and we continued on our way. The last interruption occurred as we neared the crater entrance and did not begin with Twitch shooting anyone, but that was only because Nubby grabbed his gun.

After an initial second of shock, scantily-clad women being just about the last thing we'd expected to find in an Inquisitorial research facility, we realised that things were not as they seemed. It's hard to say what tipped us off exactly, it might have been the odd shape of her ears, or the unnatural harmonics of or singing, or maybe it was the words "ELDAR SUBJECT #4" printed on the back of her tattered straitjacket. Regardless, our well-honed Inquisitorial investigation abilities told us that, while the creature prying at the containment unit was female, she was not a woman. She was also not an Ork, no matter what Twitch said. So no shit, there we were standing in the only entrance of a room containing a half-naked, unarmed Eldar of the female persuasion, who was apparently too focused on singing to the Daemonthrope Containment Unit to even notice our arrival. The question of what to do in this sort of situation is something that bored guardsmen (or idle cogitator adepts) might spend endless amounts of time arguing over. Not us though, we were above that sort of thing…. Yeah, okay, no we weren't. I mean, aside from avoiding work and blowing things up, pointless arguments (especially sordid ones) were just about our favorite pastime. It was just that before we could get started Tink noticed that a tendril of wraithbone was snaking out towards the singing Eldar from the Containment Unit. Before any of us could stop him the techie stepped around the corner, raised his plasma gun, and told the Xenos to stop messing with his stuff and get her own damned Wraithbone. Nubby snickered, Doc groaned in exasperation, and Twitch pulled Tink out of the way of the bolt of lightning the Eldar flung at him. We all reflexively ducked into cover as two more lightning bolts shot through the hole, and when we peeked around the corner again the entire back half of the small room was filled with an opaque mist.

Now, Doc wasn't a good smoothtalker, but he did tend to radiate a sort of awkward earnestness, which can really count for something in this sort of situation. The rest of us watched this all with varying degrees of incredulousness as he started off with an apology for Tink's behavior, and then began explaining the overall situation and how the Containment Unit figured into it. The Eldar only responded with more silence, but since that wasn't a lightning bolt, Doc took it as a good sign and moved a little farther into the room as he continued talking It was honestly the most impressive attempt at interspecies diplomacy we'd witnessed. I mean sure, we'd seen whole worlds shared between humans and the Tau, but the slit-heads tend to be sort of wishy-washy and there'd probably been a lot of highly trained diplomats involved in all that. This was just one slightly naive soldier trying to convince a xenos (who probably had a massive grudge against the Inquisition, not to mention a racial affinity for dickishness) to give peace a chance. It was powerful, moving really, and we all honestly believed that given enough time it totally would have worked. The thing was though, that while Doc was making his heartfelt plea, Tink was playing around with his drone controller and managed to get control of Spot's recon sensors as well as one of the mundane psi-suppressors…. And we were sort of on a tight schedule what with the Daemonthrope doing Emperor knew what up above us and Fumbles still needing a rescue… And, you know, better safe than sorry, right? The Eldar had a second to be very surprised when her cloud of mist fizzled into nothing, and then a barrage of plasma and pulse rounds knocked her off the Containment Unit. Doc was NOT happy. Even though we pointed out that our shots had missed anything immediately fatal, so if he really wanted to he could patch the Xenos up and give her the whole friendship speech again.

The scene was a… weird one. Fumbles, or some other scrawny little psyker that periodically flickered in and out of visibility and radiated fear, had been chased up a large pile of boxes by a mob of small, green figures that looked vaguely like Nubby. The Gretchins were taking turns climbing up the pile and then fleeing back down as Fumbles' aura of terror overwhelmed them, but that sort of behavior wasn't anything too unusual given their racial affinity for cowardice, it was their boss that was the weird part. You know those really secure prisoner transport thingies? Like with all the straps holding someone to a gurney, along with a facemask and maybe some padlocks? Dial that up to 11, replace the gurney with a hand-truck being pushed by three Gretchin standing on each other's shoulders, and replace the prisoner with a raving Ork Weirdboy surrounded by an aura of crackling green light. And when I say raving, I mean it. The weirdboy could speak gothic, seemed to be using his mouth to compensate for being unable to move anything else, and from the sound of it was (even by Ork standards) completely bat-shit insane. It was hard to keep track of everything he was saying, but in the minute or so Twitch and Nubby were listening, the primary theme seemed to be that he wanted Fumbles' head. Literally. You know, like attached to his shoulder with stitches and stuff. He even had a Gretchin with a surgical mask standing by. From what we could tell his motivation for this had something to do with two heads being better than one, and it being the secret to "DA BRAINY 'UMMIE'S POWA". So yeah, totally nuts, and very frustrated with Fumbles, who kept doing rude things like refusing to come down to be decapitated or claiming that he was only a figment of the Ork's imagination.

Several things happened at once. Twitch's mine bounced off the thick metal band restraining the Weirdboy's head, sailed off in a random direction, was snatched out of the air by an overenthusiastic Gretchin, and promptly exploded. The force of the blast knocked the Weirdboy's dolly over backwards, taking the Ork out of Nubby's line of fire and crushing the three Gretchins that had been pushing it. Nubby adjusted his aim, but as he did so, the ork psyker bellowed something. Somewhere in the pack of Gretchins one of them exploded in a shower of green sparks and a small cloud of acrid smoke, the rest surged forwards with a high-pitched "WAAAGH", intercepting Nubby's fire and closing the gap surprisingly fast. Nubby held the trigger down until Twitch reached him, then they both did some quick math, decided that thirty-and-an-enraged-weirdboy-to-two odds weren't in their favor, and cheesed it. Now, despite what it looked like, this was not a cowardly retreat. It was actually a carefully planned tactical maneuver to distract the enemy from the true objective. Or at least it turned out that way in any case. Veteran retreaters that they were, Twitch and Nubby easily outpaced the xenos and broke contact long enough to come up with a plan and split up. Twitch stayed on the path they'd been following. He found a nice firing position and started shooting Gretchins as they came around a handy corner, racking up seven kills without any real trouble. Then the Weirdboy (and the Gretchins pushing him) shot around the corner, tilting up on one wheel, and bellowing "ITZ SQUIGGIN TIME", as he came.

On the outskirts of the minor war occurring in the middle of the evidence warehouse, a group of genestealer cultists finally finished off the Inquisitorial minions that had been keeping them from the cell that contained their master. They clustered around the cell door and began hacking at it with their claws and weapons, but paused at the sound of approaching footsteps and turned to face the new threat. Twitch came around the corner at a dead sprint, saw the group of mutated cultists, sighted on an alley on the far-right side of their group, closed his eyes, and triggered the under-barrel flash grenade launcher on his pulse-carbine. He barreled into the stunned cultists, knocking two aside with his shoulders and nearly tripping over a third, and somehow managed to push his way through them to the alley he had targeted, where he slammed head-first into a crate. Twitch reeled backwards, barely dodged a falling crate marked "CLASS-5 FORBIDDEN XENOTECH", and staggered into the alley before any of the cultists could follow. Behind him there was a high-pitched "WAAAGH" and the distinctive sound of a warp-propelled hand-truck slamming through bodies like a demented war-chariot. There was a split second where Twitch worried that he'd under-estimated the Weirdboy's momentum and the xenos would just bowl through the cultists and keep chasing, but then he hear a horrible *schlorp* sound and a bellow of: "YOUZ GETS A SQUIGGIN, AND YOUZ GETS A SQUIGGIN, AND YOUS GETS A SQUIGGIN, EVERYONE GETS A ZOGGIN SQUIGGIN." With that, Twitch declared the plan a success, and began working his way towards the Daemonthrope crater. After a minute or so he ran into Nubby, who complained that he was tired of dragging Fumbles and insisted Twitch take a turn. Fumbles groaned and asked whether he could be carried upright, as the floor was really beginning to chafe. The three of them arrived back at the crater just in time to see Doc get stabbed in the face.

Tink still hadn't thought of anything by the time he'd finished prying everything loose, so he screwed around for a few minutes setting up the mundane psi-suppressor next to Doc so the medic would stop bugging him about it. While he did this, the techie debated pulling out his plasma gun and telling the Eldar to return the wraithbone to its original shape or die. Doc was against the idea for various reasons, and there was a brief argument which ended with Tink asking the highly inappropriate question of why the xenos had reshaped the wraithbone into an, ahem, "giant stone dong". Doc impatiently told the techie that she was probably making a spear or something, and suggested that he get back to work. Doc's response triggered something in Tink's imagination and the techie got thoughtful. Then he got even more thoughtful. Then he went over to his drone, lined up all the parts in a new orientation, and started snickering. And that's why, at the end of things, it turned out that our secret anti-Daemonthrope weapon was Spot the Wonder Drone with an amusingly-shaped wraithbone spear strapped to its undercarriage. You know, like a battering ram, or a bayonet, or… well… a lot of other non-phallic things… ANYWAY, Tink got to work strapping things on and just bending the shit out of Fio's device until it fit the new shape, and the whole time this was going on, Doc continued watching the door and working on his patient. The medic's time at the bottom of the crater was even less interesting than Tink's, for the most part at least. The Eldar wasn't in great shape: plasma and pulse rounds are nasty enough when you're in full armor, taking a barrage more or less naked is NOT good for one's health. Still though, they were the sort of wounds Doc was good at treating, and he did a fair job of patching her up. Hell, he even cleaned the all the gore and the debris off the area of floor he was operating on, if that's not quality service, I don't know what is.

Luckily, Doc was a combat medic, which meant he typically treated guardsmen, armsmen, and other violence-prone individuals, and when that sort of person is hurt and confused, they tend to lash out. Over the course of his career he'd had his arm broken, been jabbed in the thigh with a fistful of tranq ampules, received small caliber bullets to the chest and helmet, and had been socked in the face at least two dozen times. That sort of experience builds up some serious reflexes, so when the wounded Eldar tried to stab Doc in the eye with his own scalpel, the medic was flinching backwards and raising his arm to block before he'd even registered what was happening. Of course an unarmored arm can only do so much to stop a blade. The scalpel went right through Doc's forearm (between what he still referred to as "the inside arm-bone" and "the outside arm-bone"), then continued upwards into the meat of his face, and finally lodged his cheekbone. Doc swore and reeled backwards with his arm pinned to his face, but that was still a lot better than getting stabbed in the eye. The Eldar followed her attack up with a grab for Doc's pulse-carbine, but it was still on its strap and Doc's pinned arm was in the way. Doc swore again as the gun caught on his arm and twisted the scalpel in face, and countered by punching the uncooperative xenos in the nose with his free hand. This was enough to knock her backwards, but she kept her grip on the gun as she fell and Doc swore a third time as he landed face-and-scalpel first on the ground. At this point the Eldar decided that a change of plan was called for. While Doc struggled to roll over and bring his gun to bear, she staggered to her feet, sighted on the psi-suppressor that had been set up nearby, and sprang towards it. She got to within a meter of it before Nubby and Twitch shot her in the back.

Over where he was working Tink let out a surprised curse, and began loudly complaining that there were bits of brain all over Spot's new external battery unit. Nubby just snickered, but Twitch yelled some rude things back at the techie and began loudly complaining about how no one was ever grateful. When Doc told him to calm down, the demolitions trooper rounded on him and asked whether he was going to start whining about shooting his new xenos girlfriend. Doc pulled his arm forwards off the scalpel with a squeching sound, and gingerly poked at the surgical implement stuck halfway into his face. He then let out a pained sigh and pointed out that he already had a girlfriend, and he wasn't inclined to feel too sorry for anyone who stabbed him in the sinuses. Further discussion was called off on account of the deafening sound of two dozen AA guns opening fire above us, and the arrival of the Daemonthrope at the top of the crater. The Daemonthrope's arrival was accompanied by a painful wave of psychic pressure and a slight breakdown in the fabric of reality. Up at the top of the crater, the walls and ceilings nearest the Daemonthrope sprouted a film of pinkish-green stuff that might've been a cross between flesh and fungus. Down at our level the pureed remains of the Inquisitor's retinue began to bubble and reform into the mutated forms of rippers and gaunts. It was abruptly and unanimously decided that it was time to abandon the room and retreat to the larger warehouse. Doc stopped poking at his face, and he, Nubby, and Twitch began firing on the forming daemonids in controlled bursts. Tink gathered up his drone and the few tools he still needed, and then sprinted for the exit while the rest of us gave covering fire. Fumbles met him at the edge of the warehouse, helped him unload, and then began assisting the techie by providing tools as needed and without being asked. Tink didn't actually notice him doing this, but it really was quite helpful.

First the lights came on, then the hover unit engaged and the stealth field cycled, and finally there was a flicker of static all along the protruding wraithbone *ahem* prow. Tink held his breath, then let it out in a high-pitched shout of victory as the oppressive force of the Daemonthrope's mind vanished. Over at the hole the rest of us were little too busy conserving ammo and holding the bloody line to see what had Tink so excited, but we figured it out when Spot shot between us and cut a small swathe through the approaching swarm with its mere presence. We cheered as well as the drone did a short victory lap and pushed forward to watch as it rose up towards the Daemonthrope. Spot the Wonder Drone flashed upwards, sliced through the crackling green shield surround the Daemonthrope, and slammed into the thing's underbelly. As Spot's psi-suppressor, er, penetrated the creature's hide, it let out a roar of unfathomable pain and fury, its shield vanished, and the daemonid minions around us collapsed into goo. We all cheered again and watched, the inky black tendrils holding the Daemonthrope aloft twisted, flickered, and then… reappeared.

The fight on the top of the facility had begun with the three Deathwatch marines charging forwards in an attempt to blitz the Daemonthrope. In the opinion of (possibly former) Interrogator Greg Sargent, this was a very stupid idea. It wasn't that blitzing a Zoanthrope was a bad idea in and of itself. In fact if you look them up in the Tactica, they're defined as "Psychic Artillery" and the preferred methods for dealing with them are generally the same as other varieties of artillery. Ideally you just call in an airstrike, or some (preferably longer ranged) artillery of your own, but if that's not an option then you're going to want to get in close where their big guns can't easily get at you. Of course the tricky part is not getting blown to little pieces while you close the distance, but the Tactica has some good recommendations there too: If you're a Brave Soldier of the Imperium, then you're supposed to just sprint across the killing field, firing wildly and relying on your faith in the Emperor to protect you. If, on the other hand, you're a cowardly dog not fit to wear the Emperor's uniform, then you'll want to make use of cover and sneak around the flanks while all the Brave Soldiers get themselves killed. So, given that Space Marines are the very definition of Brave Soldiers of the Imperium, (and were wearing enough power armor to survive that sort of foolishness) their choice of attack was tactically sound. Or it would have been, IF THEY WERE ACTUALLY FIGHTING A ZOANTHROPE. Seriously, it wasn't some frail, slow-moving creature that relied on distance and minions to protect it from harm. IT. WAS. A. DAEMONHOST. You know, those things that can turn frail little cultists into nigh-indestructible killing machines capable of tearing tanks apart with their bare hands? What the Marines thought they were going to accomplish by getting closer to it was a mystery, especially since it was currently flying fifteen meters over the top of a deep crater.

Now this is where the Deathwatch Marines learned the real difference between a Zoanthrope and the unholy creature we'd hauled across the galaxy. When their barrage broke down the Daemonthrope's shield, it didn't fall over dead or try to wriggle away. No, all that a dozen bolt-rounds to the center of mass managed to do was make the thing angry, and daemonhosts can get very, very angry. The only reason the Astartes weren't vaporized was their superhuman speed and the fact that, despite their initial choice of tactics, they DID have a bit of self-preservation instinct. When the Daemonthrope rounded on them, the three Marines scattered, barely avoiding a psychic tantrum that turned roughly fifty meters of facility roof into a warp-tainted mixture of rubble and molten slag. Sarge and Aimy watched the light show, noting the power of the attacks and the way bits of dead daemonid rose into the air to fill in the Daemonthrope's bolter-wounds, and congratulated themselves on their decision to stick to shooting the little bugs. Eventually though, the Daemonthrope's tantrum ended and the bug turned back to its now-shrinking portal. It seemed to go pensive for a few seconds, and then with a flap of its wings, the bug entered the portal and its oppressive psychic presence vanished. Sarge and Aimy stayed in their cover waiting to see what horrible thing would happen next, but after a solid minute of nothing, they went back to picking off the daemonids. A few minutes later the last of the bugs were dead, the Marines had clawed their way out of the rubble at the edge of the destroyed area, and everyone was gathered around the shrinking the warp-portal. As the hole finally disappeared with a little pop, Sarge sighed in relief, then froze as Grumpy-Marine said: >Hmm, more power than I expected, but far less courage. That was almost too easy. Aimy got as far as "YOU JUST HAD TO FUC-" before the nearby mountaintop exploded in green light.

Once again, it was a matter of Sarge and Aimy providing covering fire while keeping their heads down, but this time the rough terrain and large number of hostiles meant the Astartes' attack was more of a slog than a blitz. Not that the lack of speed made it any less impressive, these ARE the Emperor's Angels of Death we're talking about. All three of the Deathwatch Marines collected more kills that Sarge while simultaneously dealing with enemy attacks and climbing a bloody mountain. If it weren't for the fact that Aimy's sniping skills, not to mention her techno-heretical armament, managed to keep her in the lead on points, Sarge might've had to admit that honest Guardsmen couldn't compete with genetically engineered supersoldiers. Anyway, the advance to the top of the mountain went off with only two or three sketchy moments. The worst of which was when the Grumpy-Marine let himself get flanked by a bunch of mutated gaunts for some reason. I mean seriously, he just stood there like an idiot pawing at his belt, it was like he forgot how many grenades he had or something. Aimy had to pull off an absolutely amazing barrage of double-kills to keep his stupid ass bug-free. Aside from that, the time when one of the larger Daemonids almost managed to sneak up on Aimy before Sarge noticed it, and the incident with the looser-than-expected boulder, the advance to the mountaintop went smoothly. Of course, you know what Murphy says about attacks that go really well…

Actually the "former" was premature, when Sarge reached the battered Marine he was still breathing and in possession of over three quarters of his appendages. It was hard to say whether the missing foot was due to the blast, the fall, or the pack of daemonic rippers that had started gnawing at the Astartes while Sarge was staggering around, but it's not like it really mattered. After some initial clearing, Aimy began picking off all nearby bugs, while Sarge propped the wounded Space Marine up against a cover-providing rock and tried to decide what to do next. His thought process was interrupted when the rock exploded. For the second time in five minutes, Sarge found himself on his ass, wondering what the hell was going on. This time though, the sight of the Daemonthrope drifting down the mountainside shook him out of it. He staggered upright and analyzed his current situation with the speed of the truly desperate. It was a complex tactical situation. Sarge was bleeding, slightly burned, and had at least one broken rib. The Space Marine was still unconscious, and was now slightly less than three-quarters-intact. Both of them had been flung a few meters down the scree slope, and were now at the top of a twenty-ish meter cliff. Friendlies-wise, Aimy wasn't anywhere to be seen, and neither were the other Deathwatch Marines. As for hostiles, all the little bugs in the area were dead, but the Daemonthrope appeared to focused on the wounded Marine, and was gathering greenish-black electricity for another attack. Finally, the only option for cover was a smallish pile of rocks a few meters away, which was way too far to drag a tonne of power-armored Space Marine. It was a tricky situation. In fact it was the sort of tactical problem that a tribunal of senior Inquisitors might spend an entire day and a half arguing over... Sarge didn't have that sort of time though, so he responded to the complex tactical situation by pushing the Space Marine off the cliff.

The Daemonthrope screeched and released Sarge as the pulse-round punched through the metal plate welded to its face and put out its left eye. It then turned towards Aimy and then turned and caught a shot in its other eye. As Aimy had suspected neither shot did much to incapacitate the creature, but they sure as hell pissed it off. The rock that the Markswoman had fired from exploded in a shower of semi-molten shrapnel, but by that point she'd already rebased. Aimy popped up from her new position, landed yet another headshot, and then scrambled backwards over a ridge of scree, where she paused for a second before picking out another good-looking rock. She scrambled downhill, keeping the small ridge between her and the enemy, until she reached the rock, where she readied her rifle for another shot. It was then, as Aimy rose up for her third attack, that she realized it'd had been really, really stupid to assume the Daemonthrope would keep hovering around a few meters above ground level while it chased her. Aimy peeked out of cover to find the Daemonthrope a mere thirty meters above and in front of her, and with a corona of green electricity already gathered around it. The Markswoman reflexively flinched downwards, but it was already too late. There was a flash of green light, a blast of heat, and then… nothing. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity of silence and darkness, there came the horribly, horribly familiar pain. A couple hundred meters away, Sarge paused his search for his dropped carbine, and listened in confusion to what sounded like the bellowing of a stuck Grox. Then after a few seconds the incoherent screaming transitioned into a wail of: "WHY IS IT ALWAYS THE FUCKING FACE". Sarge gave up the search for his weapon, drew his laspistol, and started sprinting.

After a VERY awkward silence the Apothecary sighed and began explaining the tactical situation. In short, Jim had commed the Marines (ours were still jammed) and informed them the AA guns would be coming online soon. Heart-Marine was distracting the Daemonthrope and drawing it into a good position for all the guns to hit it, while the Apothecary was trying to get him some reinforcements. Unfortunately, the Apothecary had been disarmed (heh) and running on stimms, Grumpy-Marine's diagnostic cogitator was reporting massive trauma and something like fifty broken bones, and Aimy had been temporarily blinded. So Sarge was all there was and he'd LOST HIS BLOODY GUN. Anyway, there was a bit of yelling, a bit of negotiation, a futile search for wherever Aimy had dropped her weapon, and just maybe a small amount of theft. In the end, Sarge left Aimy and the incredibly battered Grumpy-Marine to the Apothecary, and ran down the mountainside armed with a far-too-large bolter, and an oversized krak-grenade. As Sarge quickly descended back down to the facility (and desperately tried to avoid faceplanting as he did so) the Heart-Marine was playing hide-and-shoot with the increasingly frustrated Daemonthrope. Sarge couldn't see much of the Marine, who was wildly dodging through the roof-top structures, but it was impossible to miss the lightning blasts, large-scale psychokinetic tantrums, and the occasional more daemonic attack that he was dodging. All-in-all, it looked like an absolutely suicidal fight to get involved in, especially given how poorly Sarge's own attempt to do that sort of thing had gone (his back was absolutely killing him). Still though, Sarge had to do something to help, so when he finally reached the facility's rooftop, he propped the oversized bolter up on a chest-high pipe like it was a heavy stubber. Sarge planned out his escape path, took careful aim, fired… and completely missed. By, like, thirty meters. It was pathetic.

Sadly, the hail of flak didn't immediately reduce the Deamonthrope to an airborne pile of daemonically-tainted chunky salsa. The creature took several hits, enough to kill anything that could really be called "alive" in the first place, but before was overwhelmed it managed to furl its wings into a sort of shield and drop into the mouth of the crater it'd originally exited the facility from. It didn't drop all the way down the crater though: once out of the AA turrets' line of sight, it spread its wings again and began regenerating its wounds. Sarge swore at the creature's refusal to just die already, but noticed that it was lot more trouble healing itself than it had previously. He wasn't sure whether it was the lack of nearby Daemonids to cannibalize (the corpses had dissipated after the warp-rift had closed), or if the creature was FINALLY running out of juice, but either way it's regeneration was going slower. Unfortunately, it appeared to be countering for this difficulty by getting even more daemony: some of the wounds were filling in with eyeballs and tentacles instead of chiton, and the local area was getting awfully warpy. As Sarge moved closer to the crater, in the vague hope that the shorter range would let him use his laspistol or grenade effectively, he crossed through patches of rapidly-growing mutated plants, chittering whispers, frost, and other lesser phenomena. Of course compared to the stuff he'd seen during the warp-voyage with the Daemonthrope, these phenomena were positively mundane. He soldiered through them without any problems more significant than one of the little biting bugs that the Daemonthrope loved so much getting partway up his pant leg before he squished it. Still though, it slowed him down a bit, which meant that only the Heart-Marine was there to keep pressure on the bug while it healed up. Luckily, the Marine as a big boy who could handle himself, and only suffered a few non-fatal injuries during his wait.

Down in the facility, Tink swore as Spot reported severe damage to its hover-unit. He desperately tried to use the drone's little manipulator-arm to grab the something, but wasn't fast enough. The drone sank away from where it had been pressed into the Daemonthrope's underbelly, until it was hanging by the, er, spearhead at the end of the Wraithbone psi-suppressor. Sarge watched in alarm as the Daemonthrope's wings flared larger. Lacking any more useful ideas, he began firing his laspistol as fast as possible while screaming at the Heart-Marine on the opposite side of the crater to kill the thing before the drone fell off. The Astartes responded to these unhelpful instructions by pausing for a second, and then lowering his bolter. Seeing this, Sarge began to scream something impolite, but paused himself as the Space Marine suddenly exploded into a full sprint towards the Daemonthrope. The yellow-shouldered Deathwatch Marine charged forward, simply ignoring a lightning blast which ripped a large chunk out of his side. He reached the edge of the crater where, with an echoing shout of "WE DIE IN GLORY!", he jumped and hit the Daemonthrope with a literal flying tackle. Then, with one arm and both legs wrapped around the creature, he reached down, ripped Spot loose, and then slammed the Tau drone spike-first into the Daemonthrope's metal-covered face. Repeatedly. Now THAT was a sight to give us pause. I mean, who wakes up in the morning expecting to see a Space Marine beat a daemon-possessed Tyranid psyker over the head with a Tau drone and a Wraithbone marital aid? Seriously, it was single weirdest thing we'd ever seen, and believe you me, that is REALLY saying something.

As soon as we'd turned (and Twitch had been stopped from snap-shotting anything), the big Servo-skull began transmitting a rather nasal voice. It welcomed us to the lab, informed us we were over two months late delivering the Zoanthrope, and asked if we'd seen the Inquisitor's rosette anywhere, as he needed it for opening the rest of the stasis units and- Doc (who STILL had the scalpel in his face) seized on the words "Zoanthrope", "my lab", and "stasis", and interrupted the skull. The medic, speaking quickly and rather incoherently, informed whoever was controlling the skull that if they wanted their damned Zoanthrope, we needed: a psi-suppressor equipped stasis unit, whatever parts Tink asked for, and another stasis unit to hold the Heart-Marine until we found the Apothecary. The skull rocked backwards, probably imitating its owner's shocked expression, and began to respond before Doc cut it off again with a shout of "NOW NOW NOW NOW". This was enough to convince whoever owned the facility that we were serious: the servo-skull fell silent and zipped away. Less than a minute later one of those prison-cell cubes was carried through the hole in the wall by the giant man-beast we'd seen in the middle of the fight. It was followed by some servitors carrying another cube and a wide selection of parts. With the help of the servitors and the giant (seriously, up close it seemed like a man-shaped bio-titan), the Daemonthrope was secured before its wings grew more than a meter long. The Wraithbone was hooked up to the cell's power supply, and since it was thoroughly embedded in Spot, the whole battered drone was taped to the ceiling just above the cell's stasis field. The Heart-Marine and all the organs Doc could find nearby (some probably weren't his) was put into stasis in time as well, and everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Then the servo-skull noticed the dead Eldar and started screaming at us, which pretty much set the tone for the next two days.

Before Sarge could get his mind around what he'd just heard, Twitch announced that he'd known the dead adept was a traitor all along, and asked if he'd been working with the Daemonids or the Orks. The old Diplomat told him it was the Orks, suggested he go figure out what data the deceased might have passed to the vile xenos, and then patiently waited for Sarge to ask something less retarded. After a painfully long wait, Sarge said he'd never seen the Xenologist Adept do anything traitor-y. The Diplomat pointed out that waiting to kill a traitor until AFTER they'd betrayed you would be horribly sloppy. Sarge nodded at this sage advice, asked how the diplomat had known the adept was a traitor, and immediately regretted the decision as the man launched into a long and detailed explanation. About half way through, Tink got bored and asked if the Diplomat was secretly an Inquisitor or something. This remark cause the old Adept to give up on his explanation with a pained sigh. He spent a few seconds thinking and then declared that he was not an Inquisitor, it was far too athletic a profession for him. He was just a simple adept who'd been part of Oak's retinue since the man was an Interrogator. Of course, he said, this meant he'd been in the Inquisition since before our great-great-great grandfathers had been born, and despite it not being the Administratum, seniority did still count for something. Essentially, he was Oak's trusted observer and knew how to Inquisit better than all of us put together, so we should shut up and trust him. Sarge announced that he was too tired to argue, and would worry about it later; Tink, Nubby, and even Twitch (who was flowcharting the Ork conspiracy) all agreed. Doc asked if all that meant the Adept was supposed to be keeping us out of trouble, because if so, he'd been doing a terrible job of it. The Diplomat said he was actually pretty happy with our performance, which was pretty disturbing when we thought about it.

Bringing the Apothecary and his nearly-comatose battle-brother up to speed took a while, mostly because they kept asking for annoying little details and the Diplomat kept showing them a dataslate full of files he'd gotten from somewhere. Then things were delayed even further when the elevator was pried open by the giant man-thing, and the a tech-priest we assumed was the Magos (based on how he had the big servo-skull perched on his shoulder) stepped out. As the Magos and his entourage came over, we all reacted in the usual semi-paranoid way, but Jim took it a step further and stretched his mechadendrites out towards the tech-priest and his skull. This elicited a screeching burst of feedback which made us all flinch, and then the Magos' skull sped over until it was in front of Jim's face and screeched "TRY THAT AGAIN BOY, AND I WILL MELT THAT PATHETIC ORGAN YOU CALL A BRAIN OUT YOUR EARS, AND REPURPOSE YOUR SHELL AS A JANITORIAL SERVITOR." The Enginseer went as pale as he could, turned around, and ran off to go check on the shuttle; his flock of servo-skulls sped towards the Magos, and then disappeared into the facility. After that little show the Magos strolled up to the Diplomacy Adept, who (to our complete lack of surprise) greeted him warmly by name. The Magos responded by screaming at him about having asked for a Zoanthrope, not a daemon-tainted monstrosity. This ranting continued for several minutes, and also branched out to cover how even if the Zoanthrope had been untainted, all of the Magos' genestealers and cultists had been turned into Squigs. The Diplomat asked if they could be un-squigged, and was informed that it didn't work that way. The yelling ended (at least for the time being) with the Magos promising to file a complaint with Oak. He then turned to Sarge, and asked where the squished Inquisitor was. A minute later the Magos' skull flew down into the facility with an Inquisitorial rosette hanging from its oversized mechadendrite.

To sum up what was, in our humble opinion, a bunch of overly-dramatic barracks lawyering: the Deathwatch Marines decided (with the occasional suggestion from the Diplomacy Adept) that they were going to just pack up their shit and go home. They would take command of the Inquisitor's ship (when it got back from futilely trying to send Astropathic messages) and any of his surviving retinue, and haul it all back to some Deathwatch Fortress or other, where THEIR superiors could sort things out. So basically: "Yeah, you guys are probably in the right here, but we don't want to get involved. We're going to creatively interpret our orders and just leave you here with your questionably-legal research facility, conspiracies and counter-conspiracies, and assorted other bullshit. We'll send a new investigation over to arrest you in a few weeks, try not to accidentally pack up all your shit and leave before they arrive." It was a very "Screw the Brass" response, and in that moment we all felt a very deep sense of camaraderie with the Marines. We didn't say anything though, because even the most reasonable Space Marine would probably take offense at being congratulated on how "Guard" their decisionmaking had been. Anyway, the Deathwatch wasn't going to start any fights with us, and as an added bonus, the Apothecary said he'd be taking Gravis off our hands. The Deathwatch would handle the rest of his treatment, and get both him and the Emperor's Scythes that we'd left stranded back to their chapter. Doc and Sarge both practically collapsed in relief. (And so did Nubby when the Marines just accepted the list of "Wargear lost due to enemy action")

Hi, I am a shadowy group of Inquisitors who have fallen under the influence of chaos, you can call me The Conspiracy >Hello, I am Inquisitor Quercus, but you can call me Oak. Hahahaha, we are going to use Inquisitorial resources to create a successor to the Cognitae, which was and "evil super heretic school for bad people". >An evil Inquisitorial school you say? I am going to stop you, then take your plan and use it to make a good Inquisitorial School. TAKE THAT! CURSES! You and your retinue of brave, intelligent, and handsome individuals have foiled our evil plot! We will get you for this Oak, and take the school back for ourselves! >Not if I get you first! TAKE THAT, AGAIN! Ha, that was only one of our useless minions, we're far too evil and sneaky for you to ever catch us for real! >No one is "too evil and sneaky" for me to catch! I'll track you down, even if it takes me three hundred years!