Echo

"Infrequently," Sargon allowed. "I did my best to stay away from Calixis where possible, but a Navigator goes with the ship. It was sometimes required."

Spoiler: Echo Only
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All too soon, it was time for Echo to take his station and guide the ship. The Maw boiled and whirled in space, a seething cauldron that would be difficult to pick through on a good day. The Astronomicon was there, though, and Echo held to that to orient himself. The ship's engines pulled it forwards, through the warp, and Echo kept it out of the worst, riding the shallows and making good time.

Or.. was he? The Maw was a short passage, it should have taken very little time overall to pass through. Echo kept needing to drop from the warp and check location, to make sure he hadn't gone too far. The stations of passage marked safe locations within the maw, and there were a few that were well known, but it seemed to take forever to get from one to the next. He knew where he was, and he knew where they were going. The engines weren't straining, everything felt... normal. As normal as the warp could. It was just...

What was that?

Something shifted, beneath the currents of the warp, and Echo felt certain it was watching him. Him, specifically. The currents closed in around the ship, becoming more rapid, no matter how he tried to steer around the worst. The ship was fighting for every inch now, trying to make headway against the flow of the warp, as the tides of the Empyrean itself altered course, flowing backwards towards the Expanse.

"You. Cannot. Escaaaape."

It called to him, and he could see it in his third eye, reaching out to claim the ship...

An eternity passed, and they burst forth from the swirling storms of the Maw to the calmer seas surrounding Port Wander. Sweating profusely, Echo found his knuckles white, his hands inadvertently clenched on the armrests of his throne... and Sargon watching him from the tank, a wary expression on the older Navis' face.

"I thought I heard something just then," the older Navis said. "Did you experience anything... unusual... during that passage?"

Spoiler: Hannabel, Anika, Ravia
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While Echo guided the ship through the warp, there was time for Hannabel and the others to go through some of the recordings. Based on when the transmissions started, it was fortunate they had been noticed when they were; any longer, and the old recordings would likely have been purged to make room for new ones. Knowing when to look was just as important as knowing where to look. Eventually, they located the culprit: an adept in the red robes of the Mechanicus, a woman, who walked with the help of a staff. She looked familiar, but it was hard to place where exactly they'd seen her before

Spoiler: OOC
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Intelligence test to remember where you know the woman from


Ravia

While she had some time, Ravia ran her new toy through its paces. On the lowest setting, it worked almost exactly like a standard hellgun. It put holes in all the targets she tested it on, and never seemed to run out of juice. Whatever had been done with the power source, it was holding up quite well. The beam it fired was an unusual colour, a soft pinkish-red rather than the usual bright red, and it fired with a wailing shriek rather than the more typical snap-crack of lasfire. Testing it against some heavier plates revealed that it was more than capable of punching through just about any armour - the designer must have done something to increase the penetration power. It didn't seem to do any more damage than a regular hellgun, but that was on the lowest setting...

Spoiler: OOC
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Anything in particular you want to do to it to test it, other than the standard firing tests and whatnot I've described here?


All

The voyage through the Maw felt longer than it should have. It wasn't far, a relatively short trip from Footfall to Port Wander, but it seemed to take an age. Chronometers all over the ship were off by the time they had dropped from warp, or seemed that way, the clocks insisting that only a short time had passed.. but surely it had been longer? No, perhaps not. Their hails to the Port were met, their requests for time checks confirmed. Everything was as it should be, but still, that had felt like an unreasonably long stretch of time.

Unfortunately, they were perhaps now in for an actually unreasonably long stretch of time to be spent. The Port provided them docking coordinates, and requested they make berth for inspection, on the authority of the office of Ordinate-Majore Mordechai Lorik.