Project: Jailbreak.

[Ghurlag]

I'm still here, though I'm not sure what I should/could be doing at the moment.

[Stuart000X]

I'm still around, just wondering what's going on?

[Maugan Ra]

I am still on board with this. However, right now I'm in the middle of my exams - had the "Molecular Biology of the Gene" exam on Monday, and I have the "Physiology of Human Cells" exam on Friday. This, as you might expect, has kept me a little distracted from writing.

Will get this done, though.

[Raziel4707]

Absolutely on board!

[Stuart000X]

If worst comes to worst, I would like to consider this group story going into hibernation, it still be alive but not active if people disperse.

[Raziel4707]

I can only appologise for the lull in activity, I have been ill for the last month on and off and when I haven't, my wife and children have been. Nothing serious just bad colds, throat infections and such but writing time has been severely comprimised in the evenings and at weekends and now that I'm (mostly) fixed, I would very much like to get this started.

Right, first going off, the list 'o' stuff.

Do we want the prison complex to remain intact at the end or be destroyed when Ha'Bazz goes critical?

The opening section: Do we want the treachery to begin here directly, or to go with the sneaking off and messing stuff up plan?

Dark Eldar character (my job, I know, will dig the codex out and devote some time to this asap, by monday evening at the altest or sooner if I can manage it)

Shall we just ditch the Tau? Twas a vague idea and no-one seems to be falling over themselves to do one. Admittedly I had hoped that Tyrant might join us and advise me on Tau but in lieu of Tyrant, shall we just drop it?

[Rusk]

So we have Maugan doing the bit on Schiffer getting captured (thats what I assumed anyway, if I'm wrong please correct me) when his exams/real life (agh, that cursed real life strikes again) are done, so there's no real rush.

I would say have it destroyed unless there's any wish for it to be used again, I'm just imagining the visiting Inquisitor having to clean the whole place out if he discovered it. Maybe have it detonate into smaller chunks like Stuart? suggested.

I think we need to move on to the treachery fairly quickly, as you said you wanted this to be a relatively short, contained piece and any mooching about by Raxell would just serve to drag it out. Imo.

I've not got any interest in a Tau character. If anyone wants to use one in their piece, I don't see why they can't just make it up, I don't think we need a particularly developed Tau, specially as there are only 5 writers. (Ha'Bazz, Schiffer, Brass, DE, and Ghurlag's?) Or the Tau could be a redshirt, but then again, wouldn't need to be particularly developed.

My twenty pennies.

[Raziel4707]

Groovy, thanks Rusk!

Tau wise I think I might have a load of them killed just for a laugh. (Basically to upset Ty. He does love him some fish.)

[Maugan Ra]

Below is the first part of my intro piece. Its not complete - still got to do the part where Monn shows up and captures Schiffer, but its what I managed to scribble down at some ungodly hour of the morning

~~~~~

Sorcery has a very distinctive smell, one that no servant of the Inquisition could ever mistake. To anyone who has ever fought against the powers of the warp and survived, there could be no mistaking the scent. It was quite unlike anything else, greasy and electric and in some indefinable way distinctly otherworldly. It burned the back of your throat and made your teeth itch with its sheer malevolence, until the merest instant of exposure made you want to take a long bath.

The air was thick with that smell as Victoria Schiffer kicked down the ornate metal door and strode out onto the roof of the Luminous Cathedral. The wind howled madly all around her, causing the leather storm-coat that she worn to billow wildly while her long white hair rippled and writhed. She’d lost the distinctive pointed hat of her office over an hour earlier, duelling something cackling and nameless in the entry hall of the cathedral she now stood atop, but the gleaming badge affixed to her chest left no doubt as to her office.

A pair of the Royal Guard rushed to stop her, the golden plates of their carapace armour scorched and ruined by the billowing clouds of smoke that rose from the ruined city all around them. The halberds in their hands were still glittering and perfect, however, preserved by the crackling power fields that surrounded the blades. With a disdainful snort, Schiffer raised the bolt pistol in her left hand and placed a booming shot right between the first one’s eyes. The initial impact pulped his entire head, an almost certainly fatal wound that was compounded a moment later as the delayed charge in the bolt shell detonated, spraying grey pieces of brain tissue and razor sharp bone fragments over a surprisingly wide area.

The Guards were well trained, at the least – the second attacker didn’t even spare a glance for the messy demise of his comrade, instead swinging his pole-arm around in a vicious cutting gesture that would have cut her completely in half had it actually connected. Moving far faster than should have been physically possible, Schiffer stepped forwards and rammed the sword in her right hand into his gut. The obsidian blade keened softly as it drank in the dying man’s pain, scarlet runes flaring into life along its edge as the Guard paled and then crumbled into a cloud of drifting ash. The Inquisitor didn’t spare her fallen foe as much as a glance, walking through his disintegrating form with cold contempt on her face. Her target was up ahead.

Bishop Ortega liked to think of himself as an intelligent man. And certainly there was a wealth of evidence to support that claim. He had risen from a lowly birth to become one of the youngest members of the Planetary Council through little more than willpower and an ability to say the right things to the right people at the right times. He had woven himself a web of contacts, both political and mercantile that stretched across half a sector in under a decade – a feat that some Inquisitors had failed to pull off. And he had created for himself a career that promised to take him to ever greater heights without accumulating the near-infinite legion of enemies that most people in his position picked up as a matter of course.

Unfortunately for him, he had also come to believe that he could dabble in sorcery, ritual murders and at least one diabolic pact without the Inquisition ever discovering him. The lie of that statement could be found in the burning city that stretched out all around the base of the cathedral now, an unfortunate by-product of any well conducted Inquisitorial purge. The bishop’s agents had evidently dug themselves in deep at every layer of the religious and civil administration, and Schiffer had given her forces very specific orders not to let anything stand in their way of digging them out.

To his credit, at least, the Bishop remained calm as he watched her stalk closer to him across the open roof of the cathedral. His secret had been uncovered, his agents were compromised and soon to be dead, and the last of the personal bodyguards that he had managed to secure for himself from the office of the Planetary Governor lay dead behind the Inquisitor. And yet, he still faced her down with the utmost confidence, a faint smile on his lean face.

Schiffer didn’t bother with the formalities of the issue – she’d never had the patience for such things, and this was not a man who was going to surrender quietly for interrogation and a painful death on the pyre. She simply raised her pistol once more, and shot him twice in the chest.

Ortega waved a pale hand in a lazy gesture and the two bolt shells slid to a halt in front of him, hanging motionless in the air before detonating prematurely and falling to the stones beneath with a faint tinkle of shattered metal. Schiffer sighed and released her pistol, letting it dangle from the silk cord that bound it to her waist and hefting the menacing looking sword once more. The Bishop shook his head in a pitying manner at the sight, like a teacher deigning to explain something to a particularly slow pupil.

“That won’t work either.” He said softly, the faint smile never leaving his face. “That’s the trouble with Inquisitors – you never see more than you expect to see.” With that, Ortega raised one hand above his head, as though grabbing at the clear skies above them. The greasy stench of sorcery filled the air once more as a writhing tendril of blood red lightning appeared to coalesce out of nothing into the bishop’s hand. With a sneer, the heretical clergyman swept the hand down and the energy snapped towards his foe like a whip.

Victoria Schiffer sighed, reached up with one gloved hand and caught it. The lightning coiled around her arm for a moment, then dissipated on the wind like so much smoke. She smiled at the stupefied expression on Ortega’s face for a moment. “That’s the problem with heretics like you. You never consider the fact that someone else might actually be better than you.”

Still smiling, she levelled the obsidian blade at Ortega’s heart and spoke a single word that seemed to twist and writhe in the air. The scarlet runes along the edge of the blade flared into unholy life once more, and several metres away the bishop started to twitch and thrash madly. The Inquisitor slashed the sword upwards and watched with no small degree of satisfaction as her prey exploded apart violently, all the blood in his body tearing its way vertically upwards in a great fountain of gore.

[Raziel4707]

That was fecking excellent, Maugan! Wicked action and snappy dialogue at the end, really gives me a feel for what this story is going to look like now.

Few minor crits but I'll not point them out, pretty clearly simple errors made by someone awake way past their bed time!

[Stuart000X]

Brilliant stuff. A reallly good piece to have as a beginning.

[Stuart000X]

What is the next step?

[Raziel4707]

Looking at and resopnding to the post I put up on the 20th would be a good start, Stu!

[Maugan Ra]

I'm personally fine with just dropping the Tau as PoV characters. Have a few of them hanging around to die messily, naturally, but there's no real call for an actual Tau character in this one.

I think I'd quite like to have the treachery being conducted sneakily, by way of Raxell releasing Ha'Bazz from his cell. It also strikes me as being the better plan for Raxell - that way, even if his master isn't slain, he's still in the clear, having obviously gotten seperated in the confusion rather than openly trying to kill his boss.

Ha'Bazz going critical and outright destroying the station strikes me as a good end-point for the story, rather than leaving it intact. Gives us a single destination for us to frame the story around, rather than having it slowly trickle off as various characters either die or escape.

Beyond that, my last exam has now been concluded, so I have time now to properly finish up and refine that opening piece that I put up earlier.

[Stuart000X]

I like where this is going.

[Raziel4707]

Anyone else care to venture an opinion?

[Rusk]

Alrighty, I think we could do with establishing some rough form of writing order? It'd be flexible to fit the story, naturally, but a rough idea of the first round of writing could be useful.

I assume maugan will finish his piece about Schiffer being captured first, then we'll move on to Raxell's plot. Is there a large time gap between Schiffer's capture and the incident on the facility? I don't think that's been established yet (or I'm an idiot and didn't notice), could be useful to know.

After that, we'll move on to Raxell talking to Monn/general tomfoolery when he releases Ha'Bazz. I don't know who would definitely write that, but probably Stuart or Ghurlag? I can't remember if there is any specific character Ghurlag's tied down to. I guess this would involve Ha'Bazz dishing out some banter and screwing up the prison, allowing at least some of the other captives to escape, which releases more and so on and so forth. Maybe give the nids a quick cameo?

Following on from that, I'd say give the rest of the POV characters some love (Brass, DE, anyone else I've forgotten), before rounding it back round to Schiffer getting out of her cell to tie up the first wave. Possibly have some alliances form (I reckon Schiffer/Brass and Raxell/DE [use the DE to go for Monn]) but that doesn't need to happen too quickly.

All imo, of course. If anyone has a different insight please overrule me.

-R.

[Stuart000X]

I'll write about Ha'bazz when he is released.

[CplPunishment]

I am interested in participating in this project if it hasn't been abandoned yet and if you want another collaborator. I'm thinking of a human inmate who commited a dastardly crime (Tax evasion? haha maybe I should think of something better...) who was pardoned by the inquisitor only to be imprisoned and employed due to the fact that he is a psychic blank.

[Rusk]

Well I hope there is still interest in this. May have to get the others to reaffirm as well. I was about to try and pound out a brief bit on Brass maybe to revive some interest. Would be good if this can be salvaged.