Kratesis

Warhammer 40k: Enemy Without, Enemy Within - an 'Ecclesiarchal' RP [Mature][High Casual/Low Advanced]

Posted.

Warhammer 40k: Enemy Without, Enemy Within - an 'Ecclesiarchal' RP [Mature][High Casual/Low Advanced]

The sister fell into place at the front of the column Celestian Victorine had organized the group into. She kept her bolter in firing position, pre-aiming at each corner as they approached so if an enemy emerged they would already be in her sights. When they rounded the final corner and saw the mass of xenos, mutant and renegade filth threatening to overwhelm the Crusader Vitruvia opened her mouth to suggest that they all throw frag grenades into the mass of enemies while they were clumped together and their backs were turned. Six frag grenades, a magazine dump and a charge would have done tremendous damage but Vitruvia was too late-- Sister Caroline opened fire with her heavy bolter and the enemy charged.

Vitruvia dropped to one knee behind protruding section of bulkhead and squeezed the trigger on her bolter. A tongue of fire a meter long spewed from the barrel as dozens of bolter shells ripped through the air into the charging men. Vitruvia was an excellent shot. At point blank range and firing into the teaming mass of flesh she couldn't miss. The carnage was immense; it was as if an invisible scythe swept through the air and struck dead those who fell inside it's path.

A mutant's leg was blown in half at the thigh. Another disemboweled by the detonation of a .75 caliber bolt shell in his gut. A kroot was unlucky enough to survive a bolt shell that shattered his hip and left him squirming upon the ground in agony before his companions trampled him to death in their headlong, maddened charge.

But still they came. Sister Caroline was driven back from her exposed position and autogun fire raked Vitruvia's position, the section of bulkhead that was thrust out into the corridor absorbing most of the rounds. Still, she felt the ringing blows of metal projectiles upon her shoulder and arm as sparks and paint flew as her helm and shoulder plate deflected the fire.

The barrel of her bolter glowed cherry red as Vitruvia let off the trigger, sweeping her gaze to the small group of humans who had set up a heavy stubber and were attempting to suppress her fire (power armor changed the suppressing-fire equation, thank the Emperor.) She looked down her scope and pulled the trigger; a bolt punched through the tattooed gunner's yellow teeth and detonated in the back of his neck, half decapitating him. His companions screamed and fled.

Vitruvia laughed and swept her bolter back toward the horde of charging flesh. They were close. She squeezed the trigger.

It clicked empty.

Armored fingers snatched her chainsword from her belt and mashed the throttle-- the blade roared as it severed the arm of a puss-dripping mutant in it's draw-cut and then punched through the flimsy makeshift armor of a pirate's chestpiece and out his back.

A trio of frog-like xenos leapt across the section of bulkhead that Vitruvia had taken cover behind and forced her back with thrusts from jagged, rusty spears. She retreated before their advance, warding off their thrusts with sharp, precise parries that flowed one into the next like a well-oiled clockwork machine until with a sudden twist of her chainsword and sharp lunge she intercepted the advance of one xenos, closing the distance between them and severing his lead hand with a snap of her wrist and rev of the chainsword's throttle.

She was among them then and the reach of their spears became a handicap. The wounded one stumbled against his closest companion letting out a shrill screech as he clutched his stump while green ichor squirted into the air and Vitruvia's chainblade snapped out, humming through the air with the speed and power of a heavy-worlder augmented by the servo-motor's of power armor, splitting the skull of the unwounded xenos down to the neck and then finishing off the outmatched survivors with precise thrusts through the torso.

Something struck her in the skull hard enough to drive her to one knee and leave a long dent in the helm of her power armor. Out of the corner of her eyes she saw Horatio driven back into another room but before she could process the though something drove through the shoulder of her power armor and hot blood ran down her arm.

The Kroot yanked his rifle-spike out of her shoulder armor and his companion lifted his own rifle for the coup-de-grace against the kneeling Sister.

A heartbeat of hesitation was lethal but a childhood of neural conditioning at the Schola Progenium had erased the human foibles of doubt and uncertainty. She felt no fear only the razor edged focus of the martyr.

Vitruvia simply lifted her wrist, squeezed the throttle and drove her chainsword into the groin of the Kroot whose rifle-hook was stuck in her shoulder plate. He let out a piercing scream as the adamantine teeth ripped his guts out through the hole in his crotch.

The second Kroot swung his rifle down at her skull again. Vitruvia lifted her free hand above her head and took the blow on her bracer. It drove into her helm with enough force to rattle every bone in her body and her fingers went numb.

She stood and knocked the hooked-rifle out of her shoulder plate.

"Hail Imperator, full of grace."

The Kroot reversed his rifle with an uncanny, alien grace, hammering Vitruvia in the jaw of her helm hard enough to whip her head back.

"Be with me now."

It feinted and Vitruvia's blade snapped across her body but the xenos flipped the rifle about and struck her a blow on the leg that left another dent in her armor and buckled the athletically muscled sister's leg.

"And in the hour of my death."

She stumbled back, chainsword flicking through a pair of parries that deflected his next two attacks until she felt her back bump into the wall. He was good. She thought she could beat him had she been uninjured but it would have been a close thing.

He feinted again but Vitruvia parried his strike-- the strength of the blow nearly knocked her chainsword from her hand and she felt blood oozing down the inside of her armor. It had reached her hip now.

The xenos was fast, freakishly strong and very, very skilled. Vitruvia was wounded and had begun the fight ambushed and outnumbered. Were it not for her power armor she would have been killed several times over.

The rifle snapped into another feint-and-strike; the final blow. Vitruvia didn't bother to block. She spun into the strike, her power armors boot screeching on the floor. The blow fell upon her back unguarded and she felt a rib snap under the force of it-- but her chainsword slammed into the Kroot's neck simultaneously.

The motor screamed and adamantine teeth ripped through the Kroot's neck to the spine. Black blood splattered her armor and the Kroot reeled and fell to his hands and knees, arterial spray squirting across the decking.

She stomped his skull until he stopped twitching, recovered her bolter and looked for members of her squad who needed aid.

Warhammer 40k: Enemy Without, Enemy Within - an 'Ecclesiarchal' RP [Mature][High Casual/Low Advanced]

Battle Sister Vitruvia Procyon spent most of her days in isolation. The briefing had hinted at the possibility of an encounter with the enemy and the athletic Sister of Battle devoted herself to spiritual preparation. She drank only water and deliberately choose the unflavored rations that were fed to the ships lowest laborers. Hours were spent in prayer and at night she self-flagellated and performed other mortifications of the flesh; through pain the spirit could be purified.

The physical body was not neglected for it was through the material world that one served the God Emperor. Prayer without works was thunder without lightning. Vitruvia honed her martial skills as best she could in the cramped ships quarters and kept her armor clean, her bolter oiled and her chainsword greased.

Without access to the Order's texts on Uvultu it was difficult to advance her studies so Vitruvia devoted herself to mastery of the minutia. The way the wrist turned in a parry-- just so. The position of the knee and ankle on a lunge-and-redouble. The way power armor changed the timing of one's footwork. Perfection in the service of the God Emperor was righteousness. No detail was too small.

Another soul might have been crushed under the self-denial, relentless training and monotony of being trapped in a small space for day after day after day. Vitruvia found it spiritually moving and spent hours in awe of the The Holy Flame. To think, it was a kilometer and a half long and home to fifteen thousand souls-- and the Cobra-class was one of the smallest ships in the Imperium's service. Was this not proof of the divinity of the God Emperor? That ten thousand years after he drew mankind up from the mud of internecine warfare and forged an empire from a million worlds that his faithful servants still built on such a scale?

Truly, Vitruvia was blessed to see such a monument to the God Emperor's glory.

"Squad Victorine, assemble! There is trouble afoot, and judgement to deliver, by His will!"

Blue eyes opened and Vitruvia brushed her white bangs back with fingers scarred from many hours sparring in the drill-yard of the Order. She rolled off of the hard bunk (she had removed the mattress as an unnecessary comfort) dressed with quick, efficient movements; donning her armor from the ground up, beginning with her boots and greeves, then cuisse, then cuirass and vambrace and gauntlets. The light, razor sharp chainsword was hung from her belt along with her six grenades, spare ammunition and the worn plasma pistol she had recently acquired.

Holding her bolter in one hand with her helm tucked under her left arm she walked out into the hallway and joined the squad. Under her armor her back stung with the fire of her nightly self-flagellation and an aura of focused spiritual purity emitted from her every movement while her eyes burned with the quiet intensity of the fanatic.

"Sisters. Horatio." She nodded at each of them and put on her helm, then racked the slide in her Godwyn-De'az bolter, double checking the sixty round drum magazine. "For the glory of the God Emperor."

Warhammer 40k: Enemy Without, Enemy Within - an 'Ecclesiarchal' RP [Mature][High Casual/Low Advanced]

@Jbcool I'm back and typing now. Let me apologize for the delay.

EDIT: And there we go; posted.

Warhammer 40k: Enemy Without, Enemy Within - an 'Ecclesiarchal' RP [Mature][High Casual/Low Advanced]

Posted, for the God-Emperor.

And a new sister joins us! Welcome :-)

Warhammer 40k: Enemy Without, Enemy Within - an 'Ecclesiarchal' RP [Mature][High Casual/Low Advanced]

The Sister listened while Victorine spoke, her helm tucked under her left arm, plasma pistol and chainsword at her belt and bolter with scope and drum-magazine hanging from a black leather sling adorned with golden fleur-de-lys that wrapped around the neck of her ceramite armor. Her hair was freshly trimmed and dyed into a white bob-cut, as was the custom of many Sisters.

Miracles. Her lips pursed into a frown. Was it truly? Perhaps it was but the common folk were often deceived by charlatans and their own imaginations which ran wild after decades of monotonous physical labor. The mention of the ruinous powers turned her frown into a scowl. Such things were not to be trifled with and a small village was unlikely to have the resources to sniff out the complex deceptions the enemy could muster.

Vitruvia didn't have any questions. She rarely did. For months she had lived the life of a ascetic warrior, eating, sleeping and driving her body to it's limits. Now the God Emperor had honored her (her!) with the chance to destroy his enemies. Just the chance. It was possible it was a true miracle, or a miscommunication. Goosebumps ran up the back of her neck as she offered a silent prayer of thanks.

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

<Snipped quote by Kratesis>

Yes this actually happens constantly, because race and to a larger extent ethnicity is arbitrary, 'ethno-states' are barely ever realised. America is a perfect example, they still cant settle on the lines on what a white person is.

The Irish, Italians, Catholics, Swedes, and a bunch of other groups youd consider white were not always included in that category making an 'ethno-state' pretty damn impossible by any working standard. And then even today there is split opinion over the whiteness of white hispanics, jews, and various arab and medeterrianian groups who may or may not look pretty caucasian.

@Dynamo Frokane

So the United States is an ethnostate? Or was at some point but isn't anymore? And then it imploded because it was an ethnostate? Or it didn't implode because it wasn't an ethnostate?

But the U.S. is complicated right? Lets have a more 'homogenus' example, maybe somehwere like china, or india. They seem like natural ethnostates right?

Well China has around 50 different ethnicities, india has close to a couple hundred, which they can group and recognise but to the westerners eye they probably seem like on race per country.

So China an India are or aren't ethnostates now or at some point in the past? I feel like you are saying they are not and never were but I could be wrong.

If you want to go by any working definition of ethnicity, there are very very few ethnostates in the world today, and even places like japan cant qualify when they are encouraging imigration to support their low workforce and stunted birth rates.

And Japan isn't an ethnostate either by your definition, alright.

Okay so what is your claim here? That ethnostates are so rare we don't know of any and thus we can't say anything about what an ethnostate is because they never existed? The true ethnostate has never been tried?

The Book Club

I'm wondering if anyone has read any work by John Keegan. I have here the "Book of War" by him that is basically a bunch of primary sources of various experiences of warfare starting from the Peloponnesian War all the way up until the modern period, but I am curious if anyone can tell me if his own opinions/research is noteworthy or not.

@POOHEAD189

I completely missed this. John Keegan is a giant in his field. Virtually anything he wrote is well worth the read. I have found that even when I disagreed with his conclusions I still found his arguments extremely interesting.

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

<Snipped quote>
Well I guess it would be bad if they didn't share any of the whole planet.

@POOHEAD189

How much of the planet should they share in order to be a moral ethnostate, in your view?

<Snipped quote by Kratesis>
Get two racists in a room together, and you'll get 3 opinions about where the lines between any two given ethnicities begin and end. The very concepts of race and ethnicity are outdated, and it seems they provide many more cons than pros. I imagine the colony would implode over time, due to shifting or vague definitions.

@catchamber

Can you name an ethnostate that has imploded over shifting or vague definitions of ethnicity? I'm sure this has happened; human history is replete with failed states but do ethnostates implode over shifting and vague definitions of ethnicity with greater frequency than multiethnic states implode over violence between separate ethnic groups?

However your reply implies a rather large degree of confidence that this will occur. Have ethnostates in the past failed due to shifting and vague definitions of ethnicity that we can say with great confidence that a state must be ethnically heterogeneous in order to be stable?

Furthermore if this hypothesis is correct what happens if all feelings of racial prejudice and animus between groups in a ethnically heterogeneous state fade away and they intermarry until all ethnic differences are extinguished and they become ethnically homogeneous once again? Does the state become unstable until they can import members of a different ethnic group into their state?

Frokane's Mildly Politcal Hangout Thread

Lately I have heard a lot about the ethnostate and I have been giving it some thought.

First of all I think it is important to distinguish between ethnostates that already exist and are simply preserved in their current form by peaceful means and ethnostates that do not yet exist but could and which violence may be used to create. These are different things.

Japan for example is one form of an ethnostate. It exists now. It is preserved in its current form by means of restricting immigration. Its existence is also relatively uncontroversial. Large groups of people are not calling upon Japan to disband itself because to exist as an ethnostate is wrong and it must be ethnically diverse (or at least open to ethnic diversity) in order to exist as a moral sate. I do not imagine anyone would advocate the use of violence to force Japan to accept ethnic diversity.

However Richard Spencer's America does not exist now. You might say it is the potential ethnostate where Japan is the kinetic ethnostate. Japan exists and is in motion through time and space now where as the ethnosate dreamed of by Spencer and his fellow travelers exists only in the realm of ideas and may potentially come into the physical world. Unlike Japan this ethnostate is extremely controversial. It's right to exist is disputed and many would advocate the use of violence to prevent such a state from existing.

That raises the question; if one could create an ethnostate on Mars, which is entirely uninhabited, and all those of a specific ethnic group who wished to live on the Martian ethnostate could be magically teleported there to live surrounded by their group under their own flag, would that be morally wrong?

I suspect not but I'm interested in hearing opinions on the matter, especially arguments that object to the Magical Martian Ethnostate.