Before the Storm: Intro Part I
Lightning arcs blossom across stormcloud smothered skies, fringing the city's cool summer air with the scent of ozone and static. There would be no rain tonight, nor for several weeks to come, but a heavy mist would descend in its place, and blur the sprawling city lights like fading memories.
Neueroi, a gravity-heavy superterran classed planet, with thin dust rings in place of a moon, teased the promise of rain as much as it did sunlight, making the reliance on artificial light and water capture all the more paramount. Many a wealthy denizen thus flaunted their status via brilliantly illuminated fountains and lightning pylons that reached far into the sky.
The high governor's palace was no exception. The smooth, monolithic-like series of jet coloured buildings towered over the rest of the metropolis, breaking through the thick mists that plagued the populated streets below. The spires crowning each rising roof had no competition when it came to harnessing Neueroi's electrical storms, thus the underlit tiles lining its public halls, hydroponic gardens, and corridor floors were always bright.
The glare gave Lord Simons a headache.
Like most people living on the planet of near perpetual twilight, the middle aged man had opted for visual augmentation - glass, nanotronics, and circuitry to see beyond deep shadow and haze. The discrete instruments, which often gave his dark, grey eyes a thin, silver-ringed glow, now pinched his brow with a sharp, electric pain and soured his already humorless mood. Canceling his evening visitations, the governor slouches in voluntary darkness behind thick pains of sound-reducing glass, and sips a medicinally spiced tonic in hopes of culling the pain.
If only he could disband the Imperium emissary meetings just as easily, he wishfully laments, turning the glass vile counter-clockwise between his scarred hands. Their increasingly frequent demands were a migraine all their own. Neueroi was not a designated forge world, but the dry southern hemisphere's experimental tech industries yielded such commendable outputs that jealous neighbors wished their success could be called heresy.
Simons sighs, running a hand over his sharp, pale features at the thought. He suspected someone in the Imperium did believe the superstitious slander, but chose to ignore the accusations of blasphemy as long as Neueroi helped maintained an edge in the cosmic wars humanity raged.
A heavy pounding suddenly thunders at his study's doors, and turns Simons's vision red. “What is it?” he hisses, drawing himself straight. A hand instinctually reaches for the firearm hidden beneath his evening robe. “I distinctly remember saying that I wanted to be left alone for the rest of the night.”
The door opens anyways and a lone, hulking, figure unapologetically intrudes on his quiet.
Simons, glancing over the newcomer finishes his snarl, but otherwise relents and relaxes to the newcomer's presence. There was no real stopping of the mechanicus named Icarus, for machines, he reminded himself, stopped for no one. Thirteen years Icarus's senior, Simons had watched the once Adonis-like lord and spymaster systematically hack off his flesh and bone in favor of hydraulics and armor plated steel. Likely, the lower half of his face and his upper left arm were the only human parts left, though Simons never cared to ask about his transformation now. "Human flesh is weak and inefficient," the younger man would drone while flexing a new artificial limb - perhaps bored of repeating this answer after years of practiced interrorgating.
With unnerving speed for something so large and brooding, the crimson robed Icarus halts before his master's table before the echoes of his heavy boots and snake and talon-like appendages dissipate across the polished floor. "LORD," he addresses in dark, vox-coded monotone. "LOCATION OF WORLD DESTROYER OBTAINED."
Simons quietly sets his glass down, letting those words hang on silence. "Are you certain," he asks but out of habit. Icarus would not have bothered over inaccuracies.
A clicking much like the sound of an upturned beetle emanates somewhere beneath those heavy robes as a clawed coil dips beneath them. It returns a second later and drops something round and coated with thick, clotted blood between Simons arms. The governor's lips recoil.
Although Simons did not appreciate the mechanicus's lack of hygiene, it was not the blood that disturbed him as much as the connotation. The recorder Icarus had dropped so unceremoniously was the sort often implanted behind the user's eyes. Nestled within the brain. It would hold no lies.
Simons tilts his head and purses his lips. The hem of Icarus's robes were, indeed, unusually dark...
"We'll need a ship," he whispers, plucking the small instrument up between his fingers, "and a crew."
"THE MAJESTIC ILLUMINATION," suggests or states the towering other.
Simons shakes his head and drops the sphere into his tonic. The fizzing drink instantly turns a ruddy pink as organic tissue dilutes. "No," he replies, pulling it out once more: a silver, bolt studded disk. "Something discreet."
