SELENE VOSS

"CAPTAIN," Selene would have liked to have time for herself, to think things through, to get a handle on the absurd situation she'd found herself in but as life tended to, it didn't let her, "CAAPTAAAIIINNNN!"

"WHAT?" she snapped back at the annoying idiot that was screaming at her door just half an hour after she had gotten into bed, yeah she couldn't sleep but damn it! Couldn't they let her catch a break? "Come in already and Report!"

At her order the door unlocked, two of Orion's men standing guard outside letting the slightly dishevelled officer into her room as she pulled the coat hanging on a nearby chair over her nightclothes.

"Well, it'd be best if you saw for yourself captain, you should come to the bridge," the officer started, making Selene's irritation spike before he continued, "It concerns the Lady Inquisitor!"

She wanted to bite his head off for a moment, Seraphina's death hit her hard, especially after nearly dying in that Warp shockwave and apparently being stranded right in front of a Tyranid Splinterfleet. Selene wouldn't have called the Astropath a partner but she was certainly more than a friend, her loss was constantly weighing on her mind and straining her nerves.

She sighed, breathing in and out through her nose. A practice she'd gotten used to when she had to calm herself back in the Guard, she wouldn't say it outright but her parents might have been right in their decision to send all of their children into the Guard. However, it didn't help her opinion on it that she was the only one that survived long enough to retire and take up her grandmother's profession.

"If it's something inconsequential you are cleaning the sewage system for a month," she said as she quickly pulled on some pants and tied together her coat with a belt. Her sidearm slid into a holster on her side, then she jumped into some boots and she was off, striding past the officer who quickly fell into step behind her, silently.

"What in the Emperor's name is she doing?" Selene found herself saying before she slumped back into her ornate chair, the thing was more than gaudy enough to be called a Throne in her opinion but appearances mattered.

She stared through the reinforced window at the magnified form of Inquisitor Echidna floating around languidly in the void of space. She was horrified for a moment, already hating the task of finding out who managed to throw the enigmatic woman through a space-lock when she moved, obviously alive as she stretched.

The woman did some exercises that Selene realized were meant to relax joints and tendons.

"So," she started, somewhat uncertainly, "I had to come here, instead of sleeping, because?"

"What should we do about this Captain?" asked one of the braver officers.

"About what?" she asked, turning her gaze at the woman who was now floating in a lotus position, spinning slowly in random directions, "The Inquisitor stretching and meditating?"

"Yes?"

"None of you noticed when a space-lock was opened?"

"...No Captain, there was no alert for it," the officer said with some resignation.

"There is nothing we can do," Selene shrugged, "for all I know she used her authority to open our space-locks without notifying any of you, I'm going back to sleep."

I want to get some damned sleep before having to give a speech at Seraphina's funeral...

She knew that was the least the woman deserved for all she'd done for them.

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Meditation and Yoga supposedly helped calm one's mind, unify the soul and the body, yin and yang...or something. I never paid much attention to the spiritual part as my focus was on which exercises helped in making my figure more...accented, yes.

I don't think this vanity is new, nor is my narcissism.

What was new was my whimsical and unpredictable mood swings. Well, I called them mood swings but in reality, it was nothing like that. With most of my mind being made up of the brain-power of my eldritch body which didn't feel anything the rest which usually came from the brain of the form I took tended to influence me.

It wasn't too problematic yet, I was sometimes more cruel, apathetic or empathetic than I'd have liked to but this was a shitty galaxy to be in, those were supposed to be positive things.

So why was I trying to do this spiritual fusion meditation thing? That was because if these escalated in the future it could be a huge problem. I was me, not a monster, maybe a bit but not fully. I had to keep my original self intact, if changed in some ways for me to still be me.

I didn't fear my body changing into what it has become, nor did I fear my soul channeling supernatural energies. what I feared was my mind changing, me losing my emotions fully or morphing into something like the Hive Mind, driven into insanity by an unquenchable hunger. I've noticed my unnatural response to threats and that my only seemingly strong emotion that still kept going strong was greed.

Unforgivable, I will enjoy my reincarnation, I'm going to mess around with my form like an I'm building a Bionicle, I'm going to learn how the tech worked in the Imperium, I'm going to go mess with the Tau, I was going to....

I had so many fun things ahead of me, that I couldn't let this galaxy drag me down onto its level, degrade me into a mindless monster.

I was overdramatizing that for sure but I remembered books where the MC was on a slow but straight road to hell. Nope, that wasn't my future, I was going to have fun and be happy.

Why did I want to pull my soul closer then, you may ask? Well, I figured, if the body affected the soul, shouldn't it go the other way around too? Unlike other people whose soul was the imprint they as a person left on the immaterium I was a Soul first and foremost.

A Soul that was changing to fit my body, nuh-uh, if that was to continue on like that I'd be an apathetic mass of white tentacles. Usually I don’t think this would ever happen, Demons never got affected by the one they possessed but then again, they didn't have souls.

Luckily for me, my body wasn't some malicious thing, it didn't have sentience, nor did it have much more than some base instincts. I could think back when I was just a soul, that was the foundation of my plan going forward. My mind was like a pyramid, at the bottom were my mind-threads, separating under Mind-Cores that oversaw everything they did and directed resources and above those was me, omniscient above the bottom-feeders of this mental pyramid.

For everything but my Main Mind the apathy would do, calculations, simulations and other such things didn't require emotions, the only one I HAD to have feelings in was my main mind. I assumed my eldritch body had some natural instincts which it'd act upon if I wasn't possessing it, based on my observations so far it should be something like, 'survive, eliminate dangers, assimilate, evolve', I wasn't sure if I could even remove these instincts but what I've planned should mitigate their downsides.

My mental hands grabbed the end of the cord connecting me to my soul and I connected it to the top of my enormous mental pyramid. My mind was a temple, a server room, and a palace all in one and the entirety of it was organized into this giant pyramid that made up my mindscape.

Semi-Real and Semi-Immaterial the cord connected and my mind and soul felt connected like never before. In some stories I've read organizing the mindscape was the first thing any telepath should do before getting into anything deeper.

My Soul looked human still, it could spread and morph but when I didn't focus on it, it returned to my form as Echidna. Was it because I saw myself more as Echidna than a Lictor? Or a tentacle monster?

I've put tape onto a collapsing dam but it wasn't repaired, this would let my soul influence my thoughts much more but if my soul changed too much I'd lose myself all the same I assumed. So, what if I forced my imprint on the Immaterium to change? Or to remain as it was right now? I'd need to do much more self-reflection if I wanted to do that but until I could somehow put my soul into a sort of stasis it was the only option.

There was also the possibility of my soul trying to acclimatize to this new reality, searching for a balance between soul and body or something like that. If that was so then I’d have to guide this process so it didn’t fuck me up even more but at least it’d mean that there was an end to this uncertainty.

If I was looking it that way all of my inhuman emotions and instincts aimed to keep me alive, apathy made sure I didn't die uselessly because of my emotions and greed gave me an incentive to grow, and have a better chance at survival.

So this is a high stakes 'fake it till you make it'? Though I was a human once so faking to be something more similar to that shouldn't be hard.

I sighed, my lungs trying to expand but the only thing that filled them was some random hydrogen atoms floating around the void of space. The other reason I was out here spinning like a moron was to test how resistant I'd become to the extreme environment that was space.

The answer was mixed, I was still waiting for Zedev to return and come through with his samples of two interesting creatures but I already had a solid foundation for being space-resistant.

Solar radiation wasn't a problem anymore, the cold was somewhat uncomfortable but I could manage but the worst was by far the lack of air. I had to constantly waste bio-energy to energize my cells as oxygen wasn't getting transported through my blood.

Bio-energy didn't make oxygen for the cells or anything like that, oxygen was far too inorganic for that, what it did was give some sort of energy to every single cell that kept them going even better than oxygen could have. This was probably because I was just better when I flooded my body with it.

The Ambull sample would help with this as those ugly bugs could live off of heat and radiation of all things. If I could incorporate that and their extreme temperature resistance into my body I'd be good to go as far as spacewalking went.

The last problem was the actual walking part of the space-walk, or float in this case. All I could do now was push and shove myself around with telekinesis or small bursts of pyromancy. Something about exhaling mass pushes me in the other direction than the mass.

Yeah, I know, I was a hard sci-fi nerd, how was it that I didn't remember the exact physics laws? Well, I knew their effects, mostly, and that was enough. Speaking of physics, Hard-Sci-fi had a hard-on for radiators and other tricks space-ships could use to give off heat but I couldn't see humongous wings on the ship from the outside that could be a radiator.

I'll have to dig that information out of someone, they should be boiling inside, as far as I saw up until now physics functions as far as now Warp fuckery is abound so there should be an actual answer to this.

My nerdy interest ignited like a roaring inferno and I shot back towards the ship, making sure to blend through it somewhere my peepers couldn't see me. I slipped through tightly closed bulkheads serving as space-locks easily and I dripped down onto the floor.

I retook my human form and somehow my clothes were still in one piece despite the fact that while it was inside my tendrily body I had squeezed myself through a crack that was less than a nanometer.

I shook my head at it, whatever phase-technology or bullshit my body seemed to do by instinct was far beyond my understanding of technology or science for now. I'd have to crawl my way up, bit by bit, just like with the genetic templates.

Bit by bit, inch by inch, I'll have it all in the end.