Cassia used her Psyker powers to get us all high, in a last-ditch attempt to prevent Lazarus from executing her entire family for bleeding on his palace floor. Pascal spent the downtime stripping and rebuilding his plasma rifle, which had overloaded and exploded—almost killing Cassia during the aforementioned family feud.
This, mind you, was the dramatic crescendo following several hours of mind-numbing space travel, scanning boring planets in boring systems filled with, you guessed it, nothing. Even the promise of a Space Hulk turned out to be a galactic nothingburger.
At one point, as we neared the principal planet of Lazarus’s Rogue Trader domain, a delegation from the Adeptus Mechanicus requested to come aboard and speak with Pascal. Lazarus agreed—his old trading buddy Omicron-22 was leading them.
What arrived instead was a grim parade of fifteen heavily armed Adepts led by a barely-functional crankcase in rusting power armour. He accused Pascal of heresy, blamed him for the scrap code outbreak on Karvis Gamma, and claimed he’d broken faith with the Omnissiah. Lazarus, not one to be out-pomped in his own palace, refused to hand Pascal over without evidence.
Trzus—yes, that was the thing’s name—responded with logic so flawed it practically looped back into parody, declined our offer of a joint investigation, and doubled down on his request for Pascal’s head on a platter.
We politely declined, of course.
It promptly escalated into a firefight in Lazarus’s trophy room.
“Not my precious tank!” Lazarus cried, as laser fire pummelled the one Omicron had chosen to cower behind.
We prevailed, naturally. Pascal stood victorious, looming over his fallen foe, then reached out with his mechanical arm, ripped the man’s head open, and extracted some mystery circuitry. Everyone was extremely impressed, I assure you.
⸻
The palace itself had devolved into whispers of broken comms, portents of doom, and lots of “Only Lazarus can save us now!” The planetary governor tried to nudge us toward solving his family’s internal squabbles. We left swiftly.
“I’ll get right on that,” Lazarus announced, already halfway to the door.
⸻
Back aboard the Voidship, it was time for a bit of empire maintenance. We kicked off development projects on our planets, fulfilled some dusty old contracts, and—this being us—went shopping. Lazarus finally tended to some long-overdue ship chores: adjusting fuel levers, complaining about Vox comms, and cracking his predecessor’s encrypted data vault like a sanctified tin of beans.
We then jumped across his domain, looping back to Footfall to tidy up loose ends. On the way, we intercepted pirates attempting to escape with a merchant vessel. That didn’t last long. We upgraded the ship, bolted on new weapons, trained up some of the crew (because Lanto and Argenta were doing absolutely nothing in combat), and made a few key personnel changes: Cassia was promoted to ship commander, giving Lazarus the boot, and we created a new Void Master role for Idira.
⸻
And what of exploring, you ask? Let me tell you—exploring sucks.
We responded to a distress call, landed on some insignificant rock, and braced to be hailed as heroes. Instead, we found ourselves in the middle of a well-prepared ambush: six auto-cannons, a minefield, and precisely zero decent cover.
We emerged battered but victorious.
“No trap shall defeat us! No foe overcome us! We flee from no one!” Lazarus declared triumphantly.
“Aside from that one time, with the Chaos fleet,” someone reminded him.
“One time! And you never let me forget!” snapped Lazarus.
To be fair, we usually hear that line from Craig when someone mentions the gold dragon incident—which, of course, we do not speak of. Except just now. But it doesn’t count.
⸻
It felt like we spent nine hours doing the following:
• 5 hours watching Lazarus talk.
• 1 hour shopping.
• 1 hour jumping around the sector.
• 30 minutes in a pirate battle.
• 1 hour upgrading the ship.
So what happened in the remaining 30 minutes?
Ah yes. That was the family reunion.
Cassia’s family requested a meeting on Dargonus, capital planet of Lazarus’s far-flung empire. We released her from her force cage and brought her down planetside. Lazarus, ever frugal, refused to throw a grand reception.
“Send in the House Navigator delegates,” he instructed coolly.
Not exactly a warm start. But we did roll out a literal red carpet leading up to Lazarus’s throne. Points for effort.
Cassia’s family insisted she be returned to complete her training. We counter-offered: she could stay and train with us, on the job. Lazarus—shockingly—asked for Cassia’s opinion.
“WTH? He never consults us,” muttered Argenta. “Are we not pretty enough?”
Cassia responded with a scathing stink-eye. And when you’ve got a third eye in the middle of your forehead, that’s some stink-eye.
Cassia declared she was having too much fun with Lassy (her nickname for Lazarus—yes, we’re trying to ignore it) and wanted to stay.
Then someone in her family tried to assassinate her. Obviously.
Two of Lazarus’s palace Wardens leapt to her defence and were cut down immediately. Vegetable flattened the faction’s leader while the rest of us cleaned up her guards. Pascal stood heroically between Cassia and two of her attackers… until his plasma rifle exploded (again), nearly killing her.
⸻
At last, it was over. The enemy lay defeated, shackled, awaiting trial. You could barely see the litres of blood on the red carpet—though the pillars were still streaked with arterial flourish.
Lazarus pointed to the head of Cassia’s family.
“Give me one reason why I shouldn’t execute the lot of you.”
“I throw myself at the mercy of the court,” came the reply.
“Well, Cassia, what shall we do with your family?” Lazarus asked.
At that point, the throne room lit up with shimmering colours, reality wobbled, and everything got a bit dreamy. In the haze, we… let them go.
Lazarus and Cassia walked back to the ship hand-in-hand for dinner.
The rest of us stayed behind. Scrubbing blood out of marble. Again.
