The Sasha Heresy

So this is an incredibly stupid story, featuring probably one of my favorite characters I've ever played. There's no real moral to this story, however, in this story, I think I derailed the story more than I ever had in any other game. Keep in mind that I don't do this intentionally. I really do hate trolling stories and players that try to make the game all about them. Still, by playing in character, and making a couple of stupid decisions, I caused what I hope will go down in-universe as the Sasha Heresy.

To begin this little anecdote, I'll have to introduce you to my character. His name was Sasha Nex. He was a Heretek in a game of Dark Heresy I played with about six of my friends.

Art by another player in the game, who was playing a sociopathic sniper. Pretty good buds with Sasha

The Adeptus Mechanicus has always been my favorite Imperial faction, so, while I've played them a lot, I've always tried to put a different spin on them. My first character was a naive, young nooby Mechanicus trying to appease his masters in the Tech Priests and the Inquisition. My second character was a fire and brimstone preacher from an Old West themed world, who merged Cult Mechanicus philosophy with being a cowboy gunslinger. Sasha was my last Mechanicus character, and he stood out because he was an actual scientist, not a follower of the Mehcanicus creed. Because innovation is a very bad thing within the Imperium of Man, he was cast out, joining the Dark Mechanicus, before realizing that those guys were totally, utterly, batshit insane, and defected again to join the Inquisition.

Sounds like a derpy backstory, but I really wanted to play Sasha as someone desperately searching for a purpose in life, someone to accept him, and when he fled to the Inquisition, deserting his Dark Mech comrades, he believed, truly and utterly, that he had finally found the last bastion of sanity within the Imperium of Man. Sasha was a Heretek, fused with his mechanical implants into a bio-cyborg of nightmarish proportions (Complete with nifty draco-cyborg wings. Random mutations charts sometimes are nice to me), having studied the Warp, Chaos and Tech Heresy to the nth degree, all with the ultimate motive of creating a new golden age for mankind. He's....misguided.....to be sure, just like every other mad scientist, but what I'm getting at is that this guy wasn't really malicious, or evil for evil's sake. He was a guy with a dream, a dream of a beautiful utopia, and he was willing to commit the vilest and most terrible atrocities to achieve it. A true visionary in every sense of the word.

Sasha and Mordecai the sniper being morally ambiguous BFF's

As you can imagine, Sasha got along with some members of the party more than others. The utterly sociopathic and kill-crazy sniper took a liking to him and had his back, as illustrated in that ADORABLE comic. Even the more puritanical members got along with him, when he proved his loyalty again and again. Still though, Sasha was constantly looking to push the borders of science, science that would inevitably get lost or be left to languish, without any recognition. It was this act of desperation and an unfortunate random encounter when we got lost in the Warp that mark the beginning of the Sasha Heresy.

So we got lost in the Warp thanks to a roll, and we were working on how to get out of it when the ship was contacted by another ship. A very large, terrifying daemonic ship that made our ship look like a canoe at best,, and was readying it's forward firing death ray to kill us. People were panicking, and no matter what we did, there was really no way we could fire our Warp Drive and get away without the ship killing us. Sasha was not prepared to die before his genius could be rightly revealed to the universe, and didn't want to see his friends dying either, so he did the first stupid thing. He contacted the ship over an encrypted channel. He agreed to become the daemon's representative in exchange fir both his friend's lives and the power to make his vision become reality.

Funnily enough, no one suspected him when he got the warp drive working 'just in time.' Just goes to show that sometimes finding the heretic is just a matter of pointing to the guy with demon wings and chaos tattoos.

YOU SEE NOTHING

So, fast forward a couple of months out of game. We finished our mission and our Inquisitor sends us on the most dangerous mission yet. We are to go to Holy Terra and investigate one of the High Lords. Now for those not versed in 40k lore, this is essentially the equivalent of going up to the king or queen of the land and accusing them of treason. The High Lords are almost literally beyond reproach, but the Inquisition's job is basically making sure nobody is beyond reproach. They need to seek Heresy everywhere regardless of how dangerous. So off to Holy Terra we went.

Now, obviously we agonized a little about how to hide my presence, as I was going to be about as welcome on Holy Terra as a guy with severe necrosis at a strip club. Turns out this wouldn't be a problem, as we got ambushed as soon as we landed our ship on Terra. Now, middle of a shipyard, weapon fire going off everywhere and our cowardly little Heretek hiding in the ship trying to figure out what to do.

Now, everything beyond this point is the result of my very stupid decision here. I decided to overload the engine of ship, hoping to cause an INTERNAL explosion that would allow us to get away.

Now, hindsight is 20/20, and I know that a lot of you are probably following the example of this Astartes up here, and I really don't have any excuse. It was a stressful situation and it seemed like a good idea at the time and....well, fuck, it was a mistake.

So I rigged the engine and ran outside, hoping my wings would carry me away from the explosion. Now, several things happened at once.

First the ship's engine exploded. Warhammer 40k ships are pretty huge, like the size of several football fields, so it didn't take out the ship itself completely, but it did make a giant, flaming, melting wreckage.

Now, docking bays are loaded with lots of fuel. In Warhammer 40k, the most common flammable substance is Prometheum, essentially super-fuel. So, all the Prometheum canisters on the dock explode, killing the ambush people, our men, and several party members.

Next, the ground beneath the ship has had about as many massive explosions as it's going to take, and promptly collapses, taking the three thousand plus ton ship (which is on fire) and thousands of gallons of flaming Prometheum with it to the dock directly below it.......which also has a ship.

Now, you can see where this chain reaction is going, because everyone below me did. This giant fiery stream of death burned through dozens of layers in Terra's main dock, destroying most of it, hitting critical infrastructure, before finally hitting the Underhive. Terra was held on military lockdown for the next two decades if I'm not mistaken. In a single instant, Sasha Nex caused the single greatest heresy in human history since Horus walked the earth 10,000 years ago.

Now, for those of you in the know, I was using a Black Crusade character sheet (essentially the same system as Dark Heresy but with some different stats to represent my character's more deviant ways.) Now, one of these stats that it added is one called Infamy, which is essentially how far word has spread of your dark deeds. Hit 100, and you become a daemon prince. Now for upstaging Abaddon the Despoiler himself, I shot straight to 100, but got taken out by an angry former party member who insisted on personally hunting Sasha down and killing him. Still, the Slaanesh daemon who was his patron was quite impressed with his deeds, and installed his soul in a suit of Terminator armor.

So, there's no great moral to take away from this. Just.....I don't know.....think before you do stupid shit in any RPG. But then again, accidentally winning at Black Crusade while playing Dark Heresy isn't the worst fate a character can come to.

You'll get there one day Abby. Don't stop believing.

- Kephn