# Under the spyre



## abri (Mar 16, 2003)

After being in the state for four years I've found that my English skills is much worse than it used to be.
So I'm starting this story hours, trying to preserve what's left of my Cambridge English 

This story is based in the GW world of necromunda.

Under the spyre.

Characters:
Elena is from house Esher. All the male member of this house suffers from a degenerative disease and are vegetables. The female rule the house and tend to be violent and wear “unusual” clothes. Elena is an extreme example of her house: she loves her flail, which she calls “soul crucher” and fight almost naked like all the warriors in her house. (Barbarian1,  power attack, cleave)
Radul comes from house Orlock, and could pass as a typical Necromunda citizen; he is the most charismatic of the group and the negotiator. His fighting techniques are based on speed more than strength. (Rogue, expertise, dodge)
Marc is an outlaw of house Van Saar: he is an expert in weapons, one of the rare people under the spyre able to modify a weapon or makes reliable ammunitions. He is an expert in ranged combat. (wizard, point blank shot, rapid shot)
Heinrich is the leader of the group; he has psychic powers making him in touch with the planet and a friend of all animals and a master of the staff. Nobody knows where he comes from. (druid, two weapon fighting, ambidexterity)


Elena walked outside her home, breathing some fresh air. Well, not exactly, there was no fresh air in the hive, not at this depth anyway. And it wasn’t really a house; it was few metal tubes holding some other metal scraps in a kind of roof. Still at least she still lived in the hive and had a pretty safe life, poor and miserable and short, but safe.
She took a long look around: tents and huts were filling this sphere*, women** coming out from the Esher factories, other just starting their work there. She needed to look at this life, to give her the courage to give it away: here she would die around forty, poor and without hope.
In the underhive she would risk her life every hour, but with luck she could make a fortune, become someone and maybe even buy her way into the spyre…

One hour later she entered the rendezvous building: it dated from an ancient time, where the hive had high and vast spheres that made people think they didn’t live underground. Nowadays it was both half-buried and headquarter of her friends. Radul and Marc were already there: Radul was practicing with his sword, while Marc was greasing his rifle. She smiled thinking that they made good partners: both were always preparing or training and she knew they would fight to their best in the underhive. Radul was the first to spot her and threw her a bottle. As she caught it, she grinned: “Arh, second best***. How can you drink this rat-stew?”
“Well, it’s the only drink I can afford. So I just ignore the pieces of rat pelt they left in there”
She just laughed as she took a sip. The taste was extremely bitter but they were all used to it. Marc had just finished with his preparation when the last member of the team showed up.
“Elena did you find out where did old Fred found the pieces of archeotech**** he sold to the guild merchants?”
“Hi, Heinrich. You know you just have to work on your social skills… Ah, well yes, I heard him when he was drinking at Hyne’s Pit. He mentioned once the blue cascade and only once, even drunk he knew better than to talk too much though, so chances are that it is the good place or at least the way to it.”
All acquiesced and prepared to leave.  Four hours latter Marc was asking himself what he was doing in such a hellhole : The ceiling of the cavern was dripping what was looking as highly toxic chemical (anything fluorescent had to be toxic for him) and the noise of the nearby cascade was unbearable.

*Sphere: Almost everyone live underground, a sphere is actually a hemisphere dug inside the needle that is the main hive.
** Only female qualify as sentient being in house Esher.
*** Second best is any unidentified alcohol,  most are made from fermented mushrooms and rat pelts.
**** Archeotech are pieces of technology from before the great crusade (10000 years ago) and are more valuable than gold. Some archeotech are valuable enough to buy you a space-ship. (equivalent of magic items).


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## Horacio (Mar 17, 2003)

WOW! A Necromunda Story Hour!

More, please!


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## abri (Mar 18, 2003)

I know I was harsh with my player in their first fight, but I wanted to insist that the campaign was going to be though. Necromunda is a VERY harsh place after all.

They stood at the top of the Blue cascade: solidified deposit of metal oxides in the shape of a three hundred foot water cascade, nowadays though it was dry the chemical exhaust of the factories having been relocated centuries ago. Marc was the first to speak: “Be cautious. One thing I learned in the factory is that dangerous things often look nice.”
Heinrich eyes became black as he looked all around; scanning for possible problems, while Radul throw a glow-tube down the cascade.  Marc and Elena where already securing some ropes when Heinrich spoke  “Something is wrong. I cannot sense hive spirits* it feel like something alien has conquered the place”**. 
Still they descended the cascade: the promise of riches was the reason they had left their ancient life after all…
Heinrich was the first to sense danger, a shout of warning was all he could do before eight men emerged from behind rocks: all looked like green-hivers,*** but there should be no green-hivers here. And the axes they carried didn’t fit such a profile…
Elena charged the closest two crushing their skulls in one powerful swing of her flail as she started laughing; feeling more alive than she ever had felt. Soon, the combat was chaos: Radul was avoiding blows after blows, preferring to wait until he could assess the situation. He knew this ambush was wrong: his adversaries were no match for him and he knew that they knew it. And still they fought. Also, where the hell had Marc disappeared?
Heinrich was again the first to spot the real danger: Old Fred, sitting on a rock, smiling. The book he was carrying seemed made of a dark metal and a deformed screaming face adorned the cover. 
As the last of their enemies was dispatched they felt their hair rising on their skin and smelled a strong musk in the air. Suddenly eight rocks took the shape of blood and blood run from the corpse forming a pool at the center of the rocks, right in their center!
Radul was awe-struck by the women that emerged from the pool of blood (4): naked and covered in blood she looked like the sister he had lost five years ago, like the first girl he loved, like the last women he would ever love. He was no longer in a dark cave; he was standing in a noble room walking toward his lover.
And then two detonations reverberated in the cavern: the woman was thrown to the ground and rose again. Just now did Radul realize that her hands were scythes made of blue horns, that her tongue lashed a few inches from her mouth and that she had two straight horns standing on her head and now two bleeding wounds in her chest.
Marc was shouting, “Snap out of it you two drooling fools. And start fighting!”
Combat was joined again, but this time their enemy was no weakling: in a swift move, the demon-girl avoided Elena’s flail and stroke her twice, leaving her unconscious on the cavern floor. Heinrich and Radul were trying their best to avoid her deadly hands, but were unable to even think about landing a blow. Until the demon screamed from pain: Radul saw a blue snake biting her ankle and Heinrich smiling. Gunshots started again and she recoiled from the impact. Marc shouted “Heinrich! Take care of Elena I have a surprise for this demon-CENSORED” Radul just had the time to realize what the surprise could be and jump out of the way before Marc throw an homemade grenade at the demon.
It took Radul a few minutes before he could hear again…
Heinrich was healing Elena, putting some strange paste in her wounds and Marc was already looking around for archeotech. It took him several hours to find something: by this time Elena was conscious, her wounds were almost healed. Heinrich’s balms were very efficient; this is why he had been pursued out of Barter’s pit.
“A recent hive quake seems to have opened a tunnel nearby: it seems manmade. I think it is what we were looking for.”
Five minutes latter they were in the tunnel, standing in front of a metal door: they all knew it lead to something important: there was a strange symbol, a multi-headed snake carved on the door (Marc latter told them that was an Hydra) and the door looked unlike anything they had ever seen. It took Radul several hours to open it after realizing that the keypad on the right of the door served as the key.
What they found inside was indeed a treasure: the chamber was cylindrical, with many strange machines inside. The whole room seemed heavily damaged as if it the room had crashed on the planet. Most of it was too damaged for them to use directly, but could be sold easily at the guild merchants. Several items were salvaged and repaired easily: most important was an ancient bolter (5), chain-fed. The rest of the groups didn’t even try to claim it as they could see that Marc was in love with the gun. 
One day latter they were celebrating at Hine’s pit, drinking snake wines for the first time of their lives. The pieces they had brought back had brought them almost two hundred guilder credits, enough for them to buy a lot of equipments and live large for a few weeks: expensive ammunitions for the bolter, a mesh armor for Elena, a few grenades, a chainsword for Radul…
They felt like kings, until Marc talked quietly “We might have stumbled in some big problems. Don’t look at me with big eyes and listen carefully. What we found was a boarding torpedoes, it is only used by space marines, the elite fighting force of the Imperium. It must have been millennia old, actually I really think that this dated back to the beginning of the Imperium. They don’t make this kind of bolter anymore.”
“So what? We found it, big deal.” Said Radul.
Elena was the one to respond, “You said it was from the first space marines. Then the marking on the door was the chapter symbol. That can’t be true: the nine original chapters are known throughout the whole Imperium. Not a single one of them had a snake-like symbol”
Heinrich started talking “Even though we have to take into the strange creature that attacked us. The only way to describe it is a demon a creature of nightmare, something that should not exist…”
Marc finished his sentence “…and if it should not exist then there is a big chance that we’ve stumbled into something the arbites (5) know about and don’t want known”


* He was using detect magic and detected the magic of the octagram.
** What a "druid" consider natural in the hive can be quite unusual to our standards.
*** green hivers are people that have left the factories for the underhives, trying to live a "free" life.
(4) Yes, that's a demon, a demonette to be precise. I used the stat of a L2 fighter with the half fiend template and DR5/+1 as well as a kind of charm. 
(5) adeptus arbites are a mix between the FBI and nazi's strormtroopers, not the nicest people around and they ARE the law. Think Judge Dred.


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