Egression part 1

In which the Supreme Overlord is very serious...

Story: Egression part 1
Author: WalkingMaelstrom

 WalkingMaelstrom is, I realize, something like a fan-literature version of Uwe Boll.

House of the Dead was hi-ho-lariously amazing simply because of how bad it was. Most of his early movies are like that: good for a couple cheap kicks but nothing else. However, as he's progressed he's actually started to figure out how film-making is done, and has started injecting this new knowledge into his work in pieces.

Fucking nazis...

So now Herr Boll has gone from amazingly bad to just mediocre. There's nothing special about him.

This is the case with WalkingMaelstrom following Divination. I don't know who sprayed the water bottle in his face, but we're starting to see a decrease in the things that made us love to make fun of this series, and instead he's begun to try and emulate greater writers than him by injecting various writing techniques into his work experimentally.

There's quickly becoming less and less worth pointing out. It's getting boring. I fear that soon we'll be entering a phase where his writing style becomes so "eh, we've complained about this a hundred times before" that all we'll be able to talk about is how bad the plot is, or how some slut is once again only there to comment on the men.

But while we're on the topic of cinema, you know a Warhammer 40,000 fan project that is no-doubt going to blow Rivals Til Death out of the water?

Yes, I have high hopes for The Lord Inquisitor and I'm not entirely unjustified in them, I think. I mean-- come, now! Aaron Dembski-Bowden is involved! I can't name a single thing he's ever published that wasn't good!

I can't even find a compromising photo of him.

 All that WalkingMaelstrom can boast is having some severely disturbed Russian with unusual artistic ability to back him up. That and a disgustingly large pocketbook for commissions.

We start out this part with an all-too-familiar lack of names:

  More than a week had passed since the last interrogation with Judias which left her a little worse for wear.  Her wounds had healed and so far it was a miracle of the Emperor that neither she nor her retinue had cracked for any wrongdoing, nor had any succumbed permanently.  She knew they were of no fault even if she wrought herself with guilt day and night aboard Tenepht's ship.

I do not think "wrought" means what you think it means...

Aside from that, after a paragraph's breadth (that's a sophisticated word used correctly, WalkingMaelstrom) he finally mentions that this is the Lady Inquisitor who we are getting a report on.

 See what I mean though when I say WalkingMaelsothstrom is starting to inject better writing?

Eximus.

High Gothic.  It was loosely translated into "We are leaving." 

 Knock off "was" and choose Wiktionary's Latin tertiary figurative definition of "we escape" rather than the first definition of "we are leaving", and we get a fairly solid technique.

Unfortunately this is the next sentence:

The word gave her a sliver of hope only the thought of the Chaplain being alive could outdo.

 So much for improvement. WalkingMaelstrom has a consistent problem with word-choice, and how he assembles these words. Look at how that sentence alone is structured: a thought of something is given to Lady Tina, which in comparison to this thought of this other thing what were we talking about? When a sentence begins to drag on like this the reader loses focus, and often is forced to double back to figure out what the writer is talking about. It's completely alright if a sentence is linear (as they should be), but if thought A connects to B, but the two intersected by C - well, C had better be fucking short or there'll be issues.

Okay, if I take too long to discourse the flaws in WalkingMaelstrom's writing style, I run the risk of, before finishing, either Duke Tathrax or Her Excellence Hesperax waking up and finding themselves in my bed - or both of them at the same time, and speaking frankly, I don't need another replacement part.

You know which part I'm talking about.


Now, anyway, after summarizing events in the most contrived manner possible, WalkingMaelstrom reveals that Inquisitor Tina is apparently receiving messages from tech-priests who randomly visit the prison cells, apparently frequently.

And this happens:

Chattering in tech-speak, the guards paid no heed to them, but the middle glanced his greenish eyes over to the Inquisitor for but a second and in blinding speed spoke to her in Low Gothic.

"Look for the fire to bring the darkness, the small fowl borne in the belly shall provide flight without threat, waiting."

Astounding. Forget that this greenish-eyed priest's speech is so quickly-uttered that it will blind you, but how a person comprehends something spoken with such rapidity is beyond me. Look at how lengthy that sentence is, for pity's sake!

A fugitive, though?  Would she really be willing to become one?  Would she rather accept her fate as one fallen from grace?  No.  As long as the Chaplain lived, so would she, even if the Ordo Malleus damned her for it. 

 Just stop expounding and escape already, you dumb slut!

So Trooper Pillock starts shouting deliriously about how the prisoners must place their faith in the Imperial Paladins to survive.

And what are humanity's defenders doing at the moment?

Worse than that, actually. But I'll be dealing with that two weeks from now.

But Tina sees Pillock's useless faith for what it is: insanity manifesting in its early stages. Honestly, when did sitting and happily awaiting ever work out for anybody besides Princess Peach?

This would be the point where if this were as predictable as we'd like to think, a random Space Marine in the colors of the Imperial Paladins would jump out of the ceiling and bite his way through Lady Tina's cell.

Instead, after a few hours Tina ends up being taken to be interrogated yet again. WalkingMaelstrom spares us another instance of Catfight 40K by seguing instead into --

"Mmmmmm…my Lord?  Where are you going?  Are you coming back?" The pleasured groan from the cultist carried through the miasma of incense and chemical smoke wafting through the air within the private room.  She and another female laid themselves upon the purple silken sheets, naked as babes.  From the looks on their faces and how spent the bodies were, pleasures were bestowed upon them a thousand fold, and then some.

There stood Torturer donning the scraps of his armor he felt necessary, meandering around his quarters observing the various trophies as the daemons inside the ceramite hissed and snarled.

... Can we go back to the Lady being tortured, please? That's more interesting than watching Torturer just put on power armor as if it were something you casually throw off before love-making.

I really must harp on the writing style again, because WalkingMaelstrom seems to think this be ye olde tymes.

Many a time his brute strength was used in an effort to defile her in ways she had no intention of, but her lord was always quick to act, quick to reprimand. 

 Is it really that hard to type this out instead,

Razorwire often tried to rape Cath, only to be stopped by Torturer's intervention.

 Rather than forget you're in the middle of a sentence so that you can assure us Torturer doesn't let his little snowflake get raped by the idiot with half a mask? The value of Maelstrom's words is decreasing dramatically due to his crumbling word-economy. At this rate I'll be able to compare it to the Zimbabwe-dollar.

"No.  I would prefer to stay out of his conversational prowess, or lack thereof, at this present moment.  Besides, he is still busy having some fun with the Eldar slaves we just took, or with the time passing what remains of them."

No, hold that thought - I already can.

Next we... ugh. Next we have a situation identical to the opening of Vessel of His Wrath where, in an attempt to mystify a character, WalkingMaelstrom subjects us to a half-page of text with no names given, despite mention of Malexis and sudden roundhouse kicks being thrown by third parties.

Three pages later it is revealed to be Ignis meditating in true weeaboo form, a traitor space marine who somehow bears the rank of "Sergeant" in an organization which otherwise seems to lack such ranks entirely. I figured out two pages in that it was Ignis because it mentions the Black Legion, and I recalled Ignis was a former Black Legionary, according to the author's comment on this lovely yet hilariously stupid portrait. I'm sure you'd probably also know he was a Black Legionary if you'd read through the fucking glossary for this series which WalkingMaelstrom wrote in an effort to shed some light on the mess that is his writing.

The Sick/Siege/Stealth Six gather then on the ship's bridge. Somewhere in this discombobulated pair of sentences I think WalkingMaelstrom is trying to insist that Torturer is some sort of space-hippie now:

Apart from Eleaxus and his increasingly apparent sense of nobility, the Sixes were seen as mentors and actual champions.  Torturer mused that this was how it ought to be, not overbearing superhumans casting their lesser ilk as cattle but instead being an example for them and how to live for the Dark Prince.

 Really, the whole "we're your equals" thing is complete nonsense when you reflect that Space Marines can survive hard vacuum, direct exposure to solar radiation, temperature extremes, most forms of ingested poison... you know, overbearing superhuman things.

Characters who we have never heard of beforehand start talking as if they've been here the whole time, like they're our old buddies we meet up with every Saturday to play shuffleboard.

"Wouldn't be wise to annoy Ignis, heh, would it?  Havoc?"  Vorren with surprising audacity called out to Razorwire.  

      The Alpha Legionnaire craned his scarred neck to the man, teeth grit in a manner that would have him thrashed if it was a one-on-one.

 This Vorren fellow is a fat elephant sitting at the dinner table, and nobody else seems to be surprised by his sudden appearance. No explanation is given as to who he is, so we have to go to the accursed glossary in order to learn that he is a raging homo.

Torturer reveals that he gathered everyone together onto the bridge, disrupting Captain Tarragus's efforts to actually run his critically undermanned crew of 90-ish men*, for no better reason than to inform them they are approaching the Maelstrom, where they will suck Huron Blackheart's warped, prosthetic cock.

Someone (Phoeb, Tarragus, Torturer - I don't know, it's a "he", like there's not 40 men in the room) states this, then:

"As you can already see, brothers, the Maelstrom lies ahead of us.  We are so close…yet so far." His clawed fingers swam through the holo-pict and pointed directly to a small cluster of flashing red circles in the projected pathway of his ship.  "Alas, one does not simply fly into the Maelstrom..."

It's amusing because "Walk into the Maelstrom" is a pun on his name.

And immediately upon reading that my face met my keyboard. Repeatedly. This is what it looked like:

Anyway, I think this is what is meant when it is said Zekkel speaks in tongues, because this statement is indecipherable:

"You see, dear Rakkes, it wouldn't be our nature to never think of plans, yes?  Is it not our nature to be creative and intuitive when approaching the lapdogs?  Did you not remember Grexx?  This realm, nay, this galaxy, is built of happenstance, is it not?  Yes.  We have our plans built upon plans and just the delicious irony of doing so."

 Frankly, after this the dialogue ceases to make any sense at all, but from what I can make out in the planning for plans of happenstance (which makes it not happenstance at all really) they apparently plan to shoot Ignis out of a torpedo tube to "represent" the crew if the Inquisition comes knocking while they try to break into the Maelstrom.

Wait, why would they need to worry about Imperial ships at all? Combat isn't possible in the miasma of the warp. All they need to really do is just stay in the Empyrean until they pass any Imperial checkpoints. That's precisely how Huron sends out raids.

In spite of this they've somehow stolen the vox-codes which the Imperial Paladins use. I must say, this is a blatant shoehorning of the plot-point from Dawn of War II: Chaos Rising, wherein a traitor amongst the Heroes of Typhon gave up the Blood Ravens' vox codes to the Black Legion on the orders of Chapter Master Azariah Kyras.

So what I can assume from this is that the Imperial Paladins are so bad at encryption that a third-rate crew of idiots can steal their identifiers and their vox-codes-

Oh right gay fencing. You've that to look forward to here soon, reader.

So, after Torturer receives yet more ego-stroking for his incredibly bad plan, more sexist comments are made, and more absolutely alien dialogue is uttered, we return to Lady Tina meeting with Inquisitor Tenepht.

Morran Tenepht X was finally waiting for her.

Oh, he's finally waiting for her. Like she's been waiting for this moment before she is permitted to do anything else.

No! We are never -- never -- going to let it go!

At this juncture I must comment it has been so long since I last saw a numerical denominator tacked onto any person's name in anything 40K-related that up until recently I thought "X" was supposed to be some odd form of Inquisitorial censorship on this fool's true last name. I am left wondering why there is a tenth-generation Inquisitor Morran from this Tenepht family. It does not work that way! Nobles receive ordinals to identify that they are the eleventh or ninth or twenty-seventh individual of the name "Harold" in that dynasty to hold his specific office. The position of Lord Inquisitor is neither hereditary nor is it particularly a stable one, as "Lord Inquisitor" is more a rank the Inquisition gives you for seniority and hard work.

No justification that WalkingMaelstrom and Torture-Device can offer will make any sense of this. It nags at me every time I see this guy and watch him seethe and curse and grit his teeth when things don't go his way. He's an obvious parody, and judging from the fact this obnoxious creature is a parodic villain of Imperial origin, I'd say he's yet another instance of Torture-Device vomiting his twisted victim-complex of "the Imperium is bad for no reason and Chaos is for the cool guys" everywhere.

I was summarizing something, wasn't I?

Of note, Tenepht greets Tina with what is nearly word-for-word the same line Judias used in Rumination:

"Ah, Lady Almathea Tina…or whatever you go by nowadays.  I haven't the time to play guessing games anymore with your monikers, so mayhap we should cut to the chase."

I truly pity this MaKo85 person. If her idiot-friends won't even break their habit of using the phrase "mayhap" incessantly in scenes incorporating her own intellectual property, they're not very good friends at all.

Suddenly, gravity apparently fails and Tina is yelled at by some mysterious savior. The remaining two pages of this feature the revelation that Lady Tina's savior is named Andres, and then all interest is lost as they release of the entirety of Tina's entourage.

I guess I should add that it's actually something happening, but after having to dig through an earlier 14 pages of incomprehensible writing to get to it, this isn't really impressive.

---~~~---

* Torturer's vessel the Engine of Obscenity is, according to this, an Infidel-class raider.

This is what an Infidel-class actually is.

Must get awfully lonely in the empty halls of that flying pink dildo that doesn't look a thing like an Infidel-class.

Not all of that 24,000 crew is expected to do something at once, but a lot of them are there as back-up in the event the 1/3 of the crew that is necessary is spontaneously spaced. With a crew of 91, Torturer's macrocannons are hard-pressed to get their house-sized ammunition loaded in time to fire. If a hull breach occurs, there's no chance of pulling others from their current duties to fix it. When someone needs to perform maintenance on the shuttle that just docked, I guess Captain Tarragus has to roll up his sleeves and help run fuel-lines.

Brace yourselves for a rant here. Today's topic is on themes in fiction and how not to fuck them up.

Warhammer 40,000's unique appeal is the absurd scale of everything in it. The galaxy is a huge place and to manage it the Imperial bureaucracy is impossible to navigate. Ships are huge things because the long-term nature of warp-travel necessitates enormous systems which necessitate enormous crews to maintain those systems which necessitate enormous stores of food...

Ships in Warhammer are enormous, and not all of that 1.5 km is wasted on vaulted ceilings and elaborate decoration. These vessels are towns and cities going through space! Crews live their entire lives on these ships, often in communities, working jobs, building their own economies and having their own internal conflicts, living their own daily rituals despite everything in the galaxy around them. When one of these ships blows up in Battlefleet Gothic, that's tens of thousands of lives that just go down the drain. Destroying an Imperial Battlefleet is the equivalent of exterminatus - and people just cheer when a shattered vessel's drives explode!

Having crews of this size is integral to the point being driven home in 40K: an individual human life is meaningless in the far future.

What I'm knocking at with this is that Torture-Device (and WalkingMaelstrom by extension) does not understand Warhammer 40,000. He writes Torturer like some sort of extremely evil Commander Shepard, and the Engine of Obscenity is the SSV Normandy.

Spoilers: Necrons are the Reapers.

 40K is a gothic space opera. The Imperium is so steeped in ritual and mysticism that the only way they know how to completely protect a ship against any warp-intrusion is to inscribe 12-pt. psychic wards across the entire hull of a vessel.

Torture-Device forgets this and writes it like a generic hard-science fiction: he just casually mentions technology which we've never heard of anywhere else nor seen precedent for in the Imperium, such as "holonets" and turret-mounted railguns. The Chaos gods aren't really doing anything despite every piece of evidence indicating they are very much active players on the board. After reading about the Gheistos Cataclysm, I have every inclination to think that Khorne would have a dozen champions chasing this idiot down for betraying him in favor of Slaanesh.

WalkingMaelstrom also neglects what Warhammer 40,000 is, and instead writes it like some... generic... some generic...

Yes, something like that! Idiots swinging swords and shouting at one-another and sensing power-levels. It pretends to be 40K, but the disguise is juvenile in its misguidedness, for SemperFiTRex does not understand the universe he is writing in.

More often than not, apart from challenges with basic English, this is what defines "bad fanfiction" on various levels. Characters don't fit the mold of hopelessness that encompasses the setting by not hating/fearing eldar to death, or being Chaos-worshipers and not inarguably evil.

The worst case of this I ever did lay eyes upon was the "Kitsune Marines" or whatever they might have been called. The basic premise was a space marine chapter with a female chapter master who was part-daemon, part-Eldrad's daughter, and she had cat-ears and the chapter's homeworld played host to countless different xenos-species trying to get along, including "reformed" dark eldar and peaceful tyranids.

An attempt to track this atrocity down failed disastrously as I suspect it has been removed. I couldn't tell at the time whether the person who made it was a vicious troll or serious, but they cared enough to write a story in response to a tide of complaints, wherein an Inquisitor arrived and declared all of it non-heretical.

I imagine if I start digging through the 40K section on Fanfiction.net I'll find plenty that is far, far worse than the Kitsune Marines, but that's an unpleasant thought.

Right now Lelith and I focus on the overtly pretentious fanfictions, those that are irredeemably bad yet are convinced they are good. Every 7-year-old with access to a keyboard writes those sorts of things, but that's something kids do in emulation of good writers. You don't slap the dog for humping your leg, but when people who are clearly adults write diarrhea like this and hold it out on a silver platter, that's truly arrogant.

So, that is what we mean to focus on as of this moment. I'm not sure how many more idiots we'll find who commission dozens of pieces of high-quality artwork for their sins against literature, but if we do find them we'll be breaking them down.

 'Till 'Til next time, Kabalites!

- V.