My Bad Girls kept me cheerfully informed about their seizure of power. It actually went pretty smoothly once they identified all the Amourean cultists and hard-line loyalists and bodyhoppers... not that doing that hadn’t taken a bit of effort. Still, they got a considerable amount of help from younger sisters with appropriate Talents and no sympathy at all for either cultists or Psion body-stealers.
When a thousand Rantha Hags move, even a millennia-old mafia house is going to have problems dealing with them.
It could have been far more violent, but with Ranthas stepping right into the positions of power that had been spontaneously released by bullets, and furthermore having instant access to the secrets and connections of said positions by vivic-nomming those holding them, the transition of power was basically not very noticeable. The fact they could alter their appearances as perfectly as a dop, and tended to have much, much better Charisma scores to convince people that they didn’t want the change to be false, also helped immensely.
The Map of Underspire was much, much more extensive now, although there were still huge areas in it dark and blank, as the area was just that damn big. There was both no reason to go into certain areas, and certain areas didn’t let you in, period. Still, the city defense teams would have been aghast at how up-to-date and extensive our maps of the higher tunnels and complexes were, and we didn’t apologize about it at all.
I moved through the tunnels as easily as if I lived down there, and Inigo did have a lot of travel up and down the Spires, getting around more than all my other Extras... and was one of a special breed of Marked who went into unMapped areas on a lark to find out what was in there.
I wasn’t going to the Themis headquarters, which was currently being remodeled to get rid of a lot of suspicious stains, holes, burned furniture, smoke damage, and death traps of various sorts. The mini-nuke going off would have been a nice touch... as long as the matriarchs knew it was coming, most of them could have jumped right to new bodies, while the demon in the dop could have just gone and taken over a new shapeshifter.
The jail was just a food warehouse with a section set aside for special prisoners, now completely empty except for a grey-skinned, three-fingered, smooth-faced humanoid with a nihilaen spike (Energized Hardened Lead Crystal Glassteel to the pedantic) sticking out its skull. Any normal human would have been completely unnerved by its alien biology, and probably have a hard time believing it was either a shapechanging or cannibal once-human who had gotten too much into the ‘You are what you eat’ mindset, and Amourae had blithely gifted them with the status.
Of course, their kids would inherit the dop genes, too, which activated the first time they ate another human and likely took their place. I understood first-time lovers were preferred for this purpose...
There was the Dancer, sitting inside it, looking out the lidless eyes at all of us, sneering at the circle on the ground that was preventing it from retreating to the Warp and finding a way back to return and reclaim its power and position.
Mahsh was the only one there, although Marked were standing guard at a couple locations, and the rest of the defenses were mostly cybered stuff.
Mahsh had yellow and brown hair worn very short in a layered, almost scaled pattern (Compressed, naturally), and disturbing yellow eyes which she had slitted to make her look even more disturbing, letting everyone think she had cybereyes or reptile genes. She moved like a serpent, which put a lot of people on edge, and I gave her a nice friendly hug as I wandered in by way of greetings.
“How has the purgings of the dops been going Down here?” I asked her conversationally. It was a nice way to earn cash, so Ranthas popped them whenever they saw them. All those eyes wandering around with True Sight was really a nightmare for the creatures.
“We’re in the thousands,” she replied back, not caring if the dop and its multi-lobed head heard us, or the demon riding inside. “That’s spread across the city, of course, and doesn’t make allowances for other mega-cities. The Sweiss were not happy to find out the dops had swapped in for some of their engineers, and had rewritten their own detection protocols so their sensors would ignore them. We ended up picking off one of their Veeps, and they had to thank us and pay us for it! Was damn funny.”
“Do you think you’ve won?” The voice of the dop was multi-leveled, like two or three women whose souls it had eaten were speaking at once. “I am eternal! The Warp itself will bring me back if you kill me! I will hunt you down like the puny mortals you are! I will eat your family and replace them with my brood, I will-“
“Shut. Up.” I turned my eyes on it, and that ranting strangled in its hole of a mouth. “I’m talking to my daughter here. There’s no need to be rude before you die.” I looked back at Mahsh, who looked quite impressed. “Possession?”
“Selective, but... yeah. Those orgy ceremonies make a lot of money, so the Themis just set them up and turned a blind eye to anything that went too far. They mostly just supplied the raw materials and prepped the settings. However, the databases on who attended those things are... extensive.”
I rolled my eyes and sighed. “And people wonder why I have so many daughters,” I asked the durasteel ceiling above. Mahsh snickered. “I imagine the Themis know a whole lot about infiltration of the Spires by all sorts of things.”
A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.
“We are everywhere! The Warp cannot be denied! All mortals live to serve-hkk!” I turned my eyes on it again, and it choked and shut up despite its frenzy.
“There’s massive jRaztl influence among the Scythilians, the Trikes, the Yaku, and the Sweiss, all in competition with one another. Riggibuhl has influence among the Steiners and has been trying to get into the Askar, but the zealotry of the Cult of Man is pretty strong there. Klaw is hooked into the low levels of the Skraeling, but the top end we’re pretty sure is Wilder body-hoppers or Warp Sorcerers manipulating the low-end, who would not be happy to find out what happens to the successful ones among them.”
“As the Bad Boys are finding out,” I agreed, and just lifted a finger to shut the dop up and shrivel it up as it became aware that I really was something dangerous to it. “Looks like you’ve got a lot of work cut out for you.”
“There’s nine other Themis branches on Janus III,” she hissed.
“And how many Vats?” I inquired.
“We flushed all of them here,” she admitted. “Which means no noobs for three months, but that’s not an issue. Plenty of willing Marked looking for a shot to a better life, and plenty willing to shoot the recalcitrant to get it.” She gave me a lopsided smile. “They got two thousand of those things ready to go, Mom.”
Two thousand...
“You got the tech teams going over them? They are bound to be infected with all sorts of crap.”
“Yeah, we had to swap out most of the computer tech for Rantha-tech, and totally purge a lot of the operating algorithms. There’s shit woven into the code that basically made them all susceptible to Amourean influence, psi-gaps for bodyhoppers to exploit, the works. The physical containers... about ten percent of ‘em had micro-runes of the Warp inscribed onto them in unseen places. Had to melt that shit off.” She shook her head. “If there was a true Warp event, the whole of the Themis would have fallen almost instantly, and provided both willing hosts and psionic catalysts for those around them to succumb, too.”
“Doncha just hate otherplanar entities with millennia-long planning capacity?” I asked nobody, and she just shook her head. I had little doubt a similar situation existed for all the Houses, as Vatted made awesomely excellent sources of raw material for the Warp, what with their stunted souls and carbon-copy base psyches, so easy to reshape and corrupt.
“Well, let me take care of this thing.” I turned on the dop, which tried to widen its lidless eyes, and couldn’t.
My Null came crashing down on it, hard and solid as a mountain of Reality letting that demon inside know that oh, no, it wasn’t going to go freaking ANYWHERE. I pulled the hypo out of my Vest with my hair as my Clawed hand grabbed its oversized head, latched on, and I pulled out the spike that had been stuck in it to prevent it from using magic and being annoying. The fact my hand was aggressively worse than the spike had the creature screaming and writhing in my grip, but its broken spine meant that it couldn’t do more than shudder much, and couldn’t heal the damage even with biopsi, or Warp sorcery, due to the Curse power of the Blooding magic on the wound.
The hypo drove into its throat, and hissed once. Psiactive concoctions went bubbling into its bloodstream, and the grey-white smooth leathery hide of the thing began to shake and shrink, pulling into itself and sending off its mass, down, down, down, to 1/12th of its normal scale, its head suddenly not all that much larger than my thumb.
The demon was squealing, not very loud in my Null, aghast at the feeling of steel walls weighing down on it from my Null not giving any ground to its power.
“You,” I looked down and told it with an eight-canines smile, “are about to get a very unwelcome surprise.”
And without much thought I stuck the shrunken dop in my mouth and swallowed it whole.
The Runes I’d formed in the lining of my own stomach lit up, and vivic fire flared as acids that the creatures of the Wastes outside would fear washed over the dop inside me, rapidly raising the temperature in there to well past the boiling point of water in addition. Its flesh literally exploded, and as it did it was vivified away, the entire mass of it... but as that happened, all sorts of things were drawn out and deposited in my bloodstream.
My gut was actually glowing as the fires of the Dancer burning inside blazed very strongly, powering this whole process forwards. It was dying forever; no, it was not going back to the Warp, nyar, nyar, suck on it. However, it had been riding a dop, and depositing its memories, along with those of the victims whose brains it ate, in the brain of said dop.
Greater dops were one of the crazy bloodlines subsumed into being a Rantha Hag. I didn’t go wild on using it, but I’d used it to secure my Colonel rank in the Planetary Guard, and now I was going to use it to draw out a thousand years worth of memories from the self-indulgent megaperverted mind-raping shapechanging voyeurist, to plumb and abuse for the public good.
Ahg, such sick stuff. I was already sweeping tons of shit aside, especially most of the filth that had to do with its own thoughts and desires, as I had little desire to experience and understand them. Now, I could have, and it actually wouldn’t have done shit to me, as Rantha Hags also have a very strong helping of succubus in the old bloodline, as well as other Fiends, so the vile shit this bitch was putting out was like, eh, really? But I had no desire to keep it around, so I didn’t.
“Okay, I’ve got it, and am dumping it into an akashic node for myself. I’ve got a couple thoughtstreams working on it, and will start dumping the most recent and relevant information, and work backwards to things that are of more interest.” I looked at her, she looked at me, and I leaned forward to bop heads with her, sighing. “Two hundred and fourteen brothels, to start with.”
Her slitted eyes closed, and she twitched. “That’s a lot of dead sex workers, Mom,” she said coolly. She could do it; she would do it, but that didn’t mean she didn’t recognize the human cost.
“Yeah, and one of ‘em I’ve got to make a special trip to. I think we’re lucky they didn’t get clever on her...” I sighed. “By the way, you got souls for your sisters?”
“To start with, all the Themis we dumped.” I gave her a thumbs-up for forward thinking. Dumping a lot of vat-born vulnerable to outside influences was a prevention tactic, and then bringing them back as Ranthas pissed at what someone had tried to make of them completely poetic justice.
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Author’s Note: In Warhammer 40k, use of cloning and similar technology results in physically superior specimens with absolutely horrible luck and spiritual potential. Still, the tech is there, and when mixed with the Hag Curse, is naturally VERY abusable... and so Sama is abusing it!