Chapter 24

461. Electricity and water don't mix: Unless there are enemies of man standing in the water, then they go together like salt on freshly roasted Grox. Now look, I get that the Imperium is loose when it comes to central regulations and that some planets are utterly gung-ho about proving how deep the term "no standards" can go. Hence why some planets have the majority of the populace be illiterate because the planetary governor just gives zero shits about education, but you really need to see one of these planets to see just how few shits are given. Like, one feudal world that was starting to slowly be industrialized with off world help, Emperor on his Throne it was a mess. It would've been easier to just find a new world and set up shop there. But we wanted to develop the world we already had and we were stuck with this moron. And he wanted his serfs (not slaves because serfs sounds better. I know that sounds like me being a bitter asshole, but they were his words, I'm not making this up) to not be educated because then they would be easier to dupe (again, his words) and that kind of came back to bite him in the ass when they were installing the lighting in his new solid gold pool. While he was taking a swim in it. Lesson learned. When you're trying to keep everyone dumber than you, make sure that isn't a pitifully low bar.

462. Powered loaders are not toys: There's a model of Sentinel used primarily for moving heavy cargo, and as such it has a couple of loading prongs designed to lift up tons of cargo. It's mainly used by the Administratum and the Navy, although you'll see it anywhere where there's a good deal of heavy objects and the need to move them. It's an effective tool, but that's the thing. It's a tool. It is not a ride where you pile all of your drunk friends onto the forks and then go for a drive. Nor do you try to use its intended purpose while the drunk friends are still on it. A week later I was still finding places the blood had seeped into.

463. Space Marine breeding doesn't work: Well, I finally had a lifelong question answered. Space Marines do have dicks. They're just infertile. So don't try to get them to screw. But even if they did, I wouldn't recommend it anyway. Ok look, I'm veering into territory I've very little information on, mainly because I can't go up to a Space Marine and say "excuse me sir, could you kindly take off your codpiece, I want to see how big your dick is," but I imagine it scales with their size. And if the horror stories I've heard about Slaanesh controlled worlds are even 10% accurate, then NO! Something that size? Just...no.

464. Used properly planned combined arms tactics: I get the appeal of throwing a swarm of Baneblades and nothing but Baneblades at the enemy. But do you have any idea what a Baneblade traffic jam looks like? It's actually kind of surreal. As cathartic as it is to rampage into enemy territory with those massive walls of death, there are situations where just trying to stuff Baneblades into it just won't work. You need infantry, lighter vehicles, air support, artillery, the works. Just having a neverending swarm of tanks trying to cram into narrow areas just ends with the enemy being able to call down artillery and air strikes when they get stick, and with the command being caught in the crossfire, crawling around on the ground. Trying to figure out which way his dick went.

465. Make sure your ambush plans for where the enemy will actually be. The element of surprise is a game changer. I have seen armies outnumbered ten to one pull a victory out of thin air because they were able to hit the enemy where they weren't expecting it. The problem is that if the enemy themselves aren't where you expect them, then you're not plotting an ambush, you're just playing the galaxy's fucking dumbest game of hide and seek. Like the time we were setting up an ambush for a Chaos supply convoy. That ended up being on a DIFFERENT FUCKING PLANET! At least the lady who ordered it got blown to chunky bits by the artillery shells that convoy delivered.

466. Recognize that the Inquisition's power is nearly limitless: There are four instances where I can see an Inquisitor's authority being challenged that is more than just blowing hot air. When the Mechanicus or Space Marines in general oppose their power (as both have a lot more autonomy than most Imperial organizations in addition to their own standing militaries that don't answer to anyone else) one or more High Lords of Terra getting enough clout together to oppose the Inquisitor, or when another Inquisitor is opposing the Inquisitor. Those people are the few within the power that have the authority and reach to say "no" to an Inquisitor and have it mean something. Everyone else is just hilariously overestimating themselves. At one point, a low ranking noble family on a remote planet was being investigated for collaborating with anti-Imperium rebels. It was bad enough that an Inquisitor got involved, with her delving right into the middle of it and getting some pretty damning proof. The patriarch of the family tried to challenge the Inquisitor's involvement in the investigation...because her bias against his family would cloud her judgement. She looked at him in the middle of the courtroom and just laughed for five minutes. I'm not exaggerating, I counted, five whole minutes of uninterrupted laughter, I honestly think she has artificial lungs. And that had been the patriarch's entire defense against the charges. Needless to say, his entire family, minus the one son who had played whistleblower and a couple of kids too young to be involved, had their heads on spikes by the next morning. Organized by age too. This Inquisitor was a tad quirky, but not in the creepy way. Well. Not TOO creepy.

467. Mutants aren't as sexy as you think. Ever: Some people think mutants are basically human women with green skin or a third tit, something like that. I think it's safe to say these people have never seen a mutant in their life. Let me tell you, it's actually kind of horrific what happens to them. I didn't know you could grow eyes on your tits, but I sure as hell know it now. I was incapable of finding anything sexually attractive for MONTHS, but I know it now. Some people think that a mutant has a third tit or an attractive third eye. But no. And it tends to end badly. And bloodily. And yet it still wasn't as bad as the tits with eyes. Close. But not quite.

468. Learn to work with people: Some people think that if someone's an ass to them, they're irredeemable assholes with no defining traits. If you think that, grow the fuck up. Well it's true that there are plenty of assholes like me out there, you assuming that they have nothing to offer because of how mean they are is you nursing a broken ego and tying a person's worth to how much they suck your genitals. There was a doctor I knew five years before I met Zamora, biggest bitch that I wasn't allowed to kill I ever met, but she knew her medicine. There'd be a symphony of snide insults and backhanded comments, no matter how many times I told her to GET TO THE FUCKING POINT, but I'd always leave her with my injuries healed and proper medicine in my stomach. But we had the one guy who didn't want to go to the doctor because she was a jerk. I'm just saying, if you don't get your bullet wounds treated, you have no right to complain when I have to do a battlefield amputation with my power sword. Assuming I can get to you in time, I usually can't because they tend to do it themselves. With dirty, blood-soaked knives that just cause the problem all over again.

469: Be careful when you come out of Warp. Warp travel is an imprecise art. Even with Navigators spending thousands of years refining their charts and techniques, we've come to expect that the ship will be in the general area of where we want to go when we exit Warp, barring exceptionally good luck, equipment, and a calm stretch of space. This can lead to some rather embarrassing situations, such as when you're launching an attack on a pirate base and you end up coming out of warp five meters in front of the base. The captain had ordered us to come out as close as possible. Well, he got his wish. I hope his wish was brutal CQC action that lasted for 12 hours and ended with him getting sucked out of a busted airlock. The twat.

470: Melta charges are not for pranks: If you even think about doing this, even as a joke, fuck you. No seriously. Go find a desert planet, land in the hottest part of it that you can find, find out if the planet has cactuses on it or, failing that, an alien equivalent, find the biggest one you can, and fucking sodomize yourself with it until you fucking bleed, THEN KEEP GOING! Words cannot describe how pissed off people who dick around with melta charges are, mainly because I haven't been able to blow my nose properly for a century and a half. So if you try and plant a melta charge on the back of someone you don't like and give the detonator to someone else, no one will be upset when the Commissar blows your brains out. Well, I will be, but that's because of the two people who did it, both of them died with their anuses free of cacti.

471: Do not bring little kids along when you're fighting fucking Necrons: I've covered this before already. Kids make shit soldiers. But apparently I have to keep hammering this in in order to get some people out there to get it. So a slight amendment. Don't have bring your kid to work day. I didn't let my daughter go anywhere near the front lines until she was fully grown and in guard kit. So don't bring the spawn of booze and misplaced sperm nearly the planet that's a known Necron hot spot. Particularly if you can't keep an eye on them and lead a suicide charge against a Monolith because you think they've been captured, only for me to find out they were hiding in the pantry, eating all of our FUCKING CHOCOLATE RATIONS before falling asleep. Hope these little shits were worth vaporization.

472. Don't try to have sex with anything that lives underwater: Apparently some planets romanticize the idea of someone whose half human half fish, particularly as lovers. Question. Why the fuck would you ever do that? They've got nothing below the waist. They've got a mouth and maybe tits, that's it. But this is assuming that anything that's half fish, half person would be sexy, and this is the same bullshit problem we had with the Felnids. I only saw one thing that was half human half fish. Or rather, the end of its tail resembled an attractive woman and the rest of it was a ungodly horror with more teeth than I could count. We lost four people who charged out there to try to get laid, and two more lost limbs when the rest of us had to burn it full of holes. Nothing quite like dying with an erection. Particularly when it gets torn off.

473. Make sure your armor actually covers shit: Hive gangers are among the dumbest motherfuckers in this Imperium. And that's not something I say idly. Granted some of them are smart enough to fight in either regular clothing to go unnoticed or in surplus Guardsmen armor, but then there are the types who homebrew their own armors. Emperor help me. I honestly don't know who's dumber, hive gangers or blue bloods. On the one hand, gold on everything. On the other, metal bikinis and speedos. I'm serious, that happened once, the hive city was right in front of a beach, it looked more like a low budget porno than a gang war. The kind of porno where no one gets tested for anything because everyone involved already had something. Yeah, anyway, after some of the most asine ganger on ganger violence I've ever seen, I'm talking them missing entire volleys from ten meters away, my platoon slaughtered them all in sixty seconds. Easiest kills I've ever had. My vox caster was able to get some badly needed notches on her rifle stock with this. Not how I would've wanted her to get them, but hey, a kill is a kill.

474. People are not an effective food source: First of all, fuck you. Even Chaos Space Marines are disgusted by this shit. Second of all, since we've established that you have no moral compass at all if you're considering this, it doesn't make any sense to try and have people as an effective food source. I told you all I spent some time as a farmer once when we were trying to get a planet's agriculture unfucked. A more experienced farmer had to talk me through a lot of it, and I learned a fair bit. Mainly, if you raise an animal for the slaughter, you put ten times as much food into it as you get out of it. With Grox and other livestock its ok, they fully mature in a couple of years, and Grox can live off of vegetation and other things we don't eat. But humans take over a decade to fully mature, and you need to give them protein in order to make sure they mature properly. So maybe, all the food you're giving to the human to raise to be your dinner? Maybe just eat that instead? There was this one really fucked up estate on a barren moon in the middle of nowhere that said they would be truly pure humans and only eat the flesh of other humans. Thankfully they were all dead in a month because they ran out of victims real quick and started murdering each other for food.

475. Do not wear ancient xeno armor: I mentioned that I spent some time with a Rogue Trader. Highly unpleasant portion of my life, don't recommend it, Rogue Traders are encouraged to be self serving pricks. So long as they bring back valuable treasure, set up a new colony or two that can be taxed, and don't fuck with the Imperium's interests, they tend to be given free reign. But their greed can be very short sighted, like the time one Rogue Trader's pet preacher found a set of xeno power armor. It was good armor, but it had an odd work. Any time she took a wound, the thing grew INTO the wound, rooting itself in her. And after a particularly nasty incident where we got hit by a hidden heavy bolter, she somehow didn't die. Or maybe she did. Because when the armor got really into her and something about her was wrong. As in, she was speaking alien tongues, bending her joints the wrong way, and tried to kill us. Fifteen armsmen died before we could bring her down with krak grenades and missiles. LEAVE! ALIEN ARMOR! THE FUCK ALONE!

476. Make sure camouflage matches the environment you're in: If you've been to at least a dozen Imperium controlled planets, there's something you'll notice right away. PDFs and local Guard regiments tend to color their armor based on the environment they fight in. Green armor for those in jungles and forests, yellow for those in deserts, gray for urban environments, etc. Not all uniforms have that, and fair enough to that, some regiments are too heavily armed and geared for frontal combat to bother with the pretense of staying out of sight, but if you are trying that, make sure it works. I'm not sure what those idiots wearing bright purple while attempting to sneak up to a rebel forest base were thinking. I think the garrison only hesitated before opening fire because they weren't sure if it was a prank or not. Either way, the armor was shit against heavy bolters and it turns out purple and red don't mix.

477. Don't hit shit in space: Ok, I have a bone to pick with one naval captain. We were moving in on a Chaos held planet, this was when we were pushing back the dregs of the Chaos Lord's forces after she had retreated. Lots of lesser commanders under her command dug in and tried to hold what planets they had gained. This one planet, a decent sized hive, had a large reclamation fleet dedicated to it, with a two pronged assault. One prong that was charging the main defenses head on, another that was hitting from behind in a sneak attack. We were running silent, using controlled bursts of thrusts to propel ourselves towards asteroids and rubble before killing the engine and letting the built up thrust carry us. Twenty different ships, nineteen captains executed this perfectly. But the captain of the ship I was on really wanted to hug the objects we were hiding behind. And I know I am a lowly ground pounder, but can I point something out?

WE WERE IN FUCKING SPACE! Do you have any Emperor-forsaken idea how BIG space is? Imagine a planet and how long it would take you to walk from one end to another. Now multiply that by a hundred trillion times. You now have the size of ONE star system. Rough estimate on my part, may not be a hundred percent accurate, but that's how big space is. The asteroids we were hiding behind? We just had to keep them between us and the enemy scanners. We could've easily been thousands or even tens of thousands of kilometers away from them. But nooooooooo, we had to practically be sticking our tongues down their throats so the captain could show off how good he was. Yeah, he ended up shaving off a couple of decks before his XO tackled him and gut stabbed him and then had the bridges armsmen stick his head (and ONLY his head) out the airlock before she took over. She was green as hell, but she was able to keep us from smashing into anything else and being detected, so she was a step up in my book. (Which I guess is this book the more I think about it...shut up.)

478. There are only six Temples of the Officio Assassinorum: Look, I'm not going to pretend to get this one, but you need to listen to me. Shut up about a hypothetical seventh Temple. I don't know the details or what happened, I just know that everyone I ever met who went around bugging people about a seventh Temple disappeared not long after, followed by an Inquisitor asking questions to everyone they had been in contact with. There's probably a lot of dirt there but it won't do anyone any good if you dig it up, so just stop before the screws get taken to your genitals. Along with every other part of your body.

479. Construction vehicles makes for poor war vehicles: Now I know what you're going to say, there are instances of rebels utilizing and arming construction vehicles to overrun PDFs and overthrow local governments. Ok, first of all, they do that because they have no alternatives. If they could get Chimeras and Leman Russes, they wouldn't bother slapping heavy stubbers on a bulldozer. Secondly, these rebels often rely on the element of surprise, moving fast, and fighting unprepared PDFs. They never win against retaliation by Imperial Guards units, or PDFs that were prepared. Thirdly, you should not ditch your proper tanks and APCs that the Mechanicus were nice enough to make for you to go steal from an abandoned construction site. You know something is wrong when you charge against Orks with these vehicles, only to find out they looted the tanks you abandoned. Fucking morons.

480. Recognize that humans aren't a universally perfect species: If you've studied Imperial history for an extended period of time, you've probably realized something. We suck. The Emperor had 20 sons, two of them were stricken from our history for reasons unknown, nine of them betrayed him and tried to kill him, slaughtering billions if not trillions of humans while working out their daddy issues, and Rogal Dorn could kind of be an ass at times because he didn't seem to know the meaning of the word "tact." And if the sons of the Emperor himself can fuck up that badly, well, it doesn't say great things about the rest of us.

It's not a huge secret, is it? We have REALLY dropped the ball in the last ten-thousand years. A combination of how spread out we are and having to deal with both the Horus Heresy and the War of the Beast did a number on the Imperium, along with everything else that happened in, M31 and M32. And then there's what happened after that with the Age of Apostasy and-look, the point is that after the Heresy we've just been consistently going deeper and deeper down the shitter, with the command structure of the Imperium getting more and more fanatic and unstable as we went.

This is without getting into the fact that we suck even when everything is running properly. But with the Imperium's heavily decentralized governmental system and heavy emphasis on nobility on a lot of planets and the general "do whatever the fuck you want so long as you obey the Imperial Creed and pay your tithe" is a fertile breeding ground for shitheads, of the dumb, dumb in denial, and the rare breed of smart variety.

And yet, many leaders of the Imperium just can't seem to recognize this. They expect the very best from those who serve in the many branches of the Imperium. The finest duties and the finest results. Stupid twats. One high ranking general just couldn't seem to get her head around this during the Chaos Lord's first incursion. Continent after continent was falling, and she was demanding to know why her soldiers were breaking and retreating. This is the time the Chaos Lord opened up that continent-wide Warp rift by the way. She ordered a summary execution of all those who had fled. All five million of them. Yeah. The Warmaster put a bolter round in the back of her head. She didn't have time for that shit.

XXXXX

Author's Note: Fun fact, I recently discovered the 40k/RWBY fic "For Those We Cherish" and 462 was based on a rather heartwarming scene where a Guardswoman is entertaining local kids, with a Lamenter Space Marine saying that that was not the device's intended use. Before adding "I didn't say stop." So of course, I had to go and be an asshole about it.

464 was actually inspired by real life, at least the part about the Baneblades. Apparently on D-day there was an incident where allied armor got congested and couldn't advance. So I decided to take that realistic pitfall and make it absurd.

466 was inspired by our old friend EP, and how, when an Inquisitor's followers made an arrest, one had to prove he didn't have any bias towards the accused. As if the Inquisition needs to give a shit about that.

470 was based on an asshole that fragged me during a Rogue Trader game because he was bored. It helped me form a policy towards PvP when I was a DM. Either have it be not dangerous, have it be a crucial part of the story, or eat shit. No killing allies for lolz at any table that I'm running, none of that garbage. But let me tell you. Writing about something that pissed me off IRL is a damn good way for me to get across the narrator's rage.

469 was based on the same game, where we came out of Warp right into a pirate base, dealing decent damage. We decided that since we had pissed the pirates off, we should go all in, firing our weapons at point blank range. It didn't work. So we kind of had to scarper, with one guy who I used to be friends with but I am no longer on speaking terms with dubbing it a "one night stand."

471 is based on the fact that Games Workshop is apparently working on a couple of comics for younger kids that involve kids and young teenagers in the 40k universe. And if the few scraps that are out are anything to go by, Necrons are involved. Uh. Yeah. Little kids + Necrons = Little kids being ripped apart at the atomic level. Also, even though it's kid friendly 40k, there's still some grim dark elements. One of the three kids is in a HIVE GANG for the love of God. Par for the course for 40k, utterly tame compared to what it can get up to, but not exactly something that's kid friendly.

472 is based off of an encounter in Sunless Sea. Very pretty lady standing on the beach. Going up to her is a good way to lose crewmen. And if you're smart enough, you can send an asshole crewman to his death in order to boost morale. Sunless Sea has a dark sense of humor.

475 is once again based off of Rogue Trader. There's an expansion that gives you randomly generated loot, and one of them is a set of xeno power armor that grows into wounds you take to "heal" you. I got that. And then I got blasted by four Alpha Marines with full auto bolters. Somehow my character was a still alive bloody mass of flesh whose heart was spewing as much blood out of her as it was through the rest of the body, but, WHOOO BOY, did the armor get into her then. (We were storming a Space Hulk, trying to cheese it with a few thousand men armed with Meltaguns)