Most civilizations are not dath ilan! While the people in question do not trend especially wealthy by its standards, that’s not the same as them being what other civilizations consider poor, in terms of resources available. Between them in aggregate and, of course, the various charities looking for ways to efficiently decrease suffering and medical venture capitalists looking to claim the bounty in timelines where this does get lots of liquidity, there are quite a few eyes on this sudden jump in headaches. Dath ilan takes problems with the brain very seriously!

Of course, it also helps that the cause is difficult to isolate. Dath ilani are not unattracted, by the promise of being the one to solve a problem that other experts have failed at, not to mention the inherent joy of scientific discovery and the financial incentives now ramping up. The phenomenon resists analysis, and the prediction markets are fluctuating regularly on what their best hypothesis is. That’s only mildly surprising after this little time. After a day and examining thousands of cases, a group of researchers assembled by a venture capitalist start to put together some very comprehensive data analysis work tracking correlates. Whatever the underlying (probably chemical) changes, the pain  seems to be worsened by negative emotional states, so people probabilistically at risk are recommended to spend resources now on things that will make them happy. Shortly after, some of the charities are already subsidizing it, and set up to gather data on the effects of mental coping mechanisms more specialized than those usually employed by dath ilani, while other stick to primarily adding liquidity to the prediction markets or directly incentivizing researchers. By and large, though, life in dath ilan steadily marches on; some headaches are, in the grand scheme of things, far from enough to deal serious damage to dath ilan or it’s people.

Day: -7

The pains slowly get progressively worse, and start to occasionally become accompanied by visual and/or auditory hallucinations, even in people who never had hallucinations before. The visual hallucinations are usually either a whitening of the field of vision or quick, chaotic and bright bursts of warm colors across black background that substitute normal vision entirely. Auditory ones involve sounds reminiscent of explosions or hurricanes.

Certain animals start behaving a bit weridly. Domesticated wolves bark and howl on the sky more than they otherwise would. Dolphins get more agitated.

The patterns in people and animals selected are far from obvious, especially when you don't have some technology that dath ilan have never had any chance to design before.

Some would even call those patterns chaotic.

The first changes to the physical reality outside of conscious brains will start to become detectable in about one more day.

Dath ilan does not have that many pets, not when compared to their cousins far away on the bell curve of possible earths. They more than make up for this in ability to catalog and analyze data, especially when they were already on the lookout for it. This development is, in some ways, a good sign; animals are not precisely analogous to humans, but there are things you can ethically do to study animals that would be near impossible or expensive to do to humans.

The other changes, however, are far less welcome. That the issue would increase in magnitude and scope was trading highly on the markets, but it’s still an unwelcome change. The payout for finding the underlying cause, solutions, or methods of amelioration continues to climb, and with it, attention to less and less likely hypotheses becomes worthwhile in expectation. 

Dath ilani are not especially prone to hallucination, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t prepared for it. Even as the volume of people using Tsi-imbi rises, exception handling smoothly rises to the task and makes preparations for further expansions. Already, however, there is a small but noticable rise in people  requesting cryogenation, largely those for whom Civilization is currently only slightly net positive. The prediction markets tracking likelyhood of aliens and alternatephysics  rise slightly, although objectively they are still very low.

The keepers are also not uninterested in this topic, now. The impact on society would be sufficient to cause this, but it is not the only factor. Keepers find themselves affected in significantly higher numbers than the base rate would suggest, and while their mental techniques and methods of working through pain prove quite effective, they’re not actually perfect. 

Day: -6.

Around this point, people who spend their day listening to space with particularly large ears might hear a slow, initially negligible, intensification of static. It starts occurring at extremely long wavelengths, coming equally from all directions.

If someone was to conduct an experiment of taking a very, very large area of space, isolating it from outside radiation, and placing very, very accurate detectors inside, they might detect photons appearing entirely out of nowhere.

The warp storm has officially begun.

Headaches and hallucinations get progressively more frequent, but the rate of the rise of that frequency slows down quite a bit. Though, the number of people with headaches will very slowly start to crawl up.

Examination of animal brains will not find chemical reasons for changes, but some brain scans of both animals and humans will show uncharacteristic patterns of electromagnetic activity.

For the following three days, the background radiation will be rising and increasing in variation: from barely noticable superlong radiowaves to clearly noticible IR. At some point, wireless communications will start feeling the increase of static.

Even before the increases of radiation became clearly distinguishable from noise, people were trying various forms of isolation. When radio telescopes and other sensors report this increase, that number increases further. It’s the obvious thing to attempt, really. If the various faraday cages and radiation shielding have any effect beyond the placebo, however, it’s beyond even Dath Ilan’s ability to legibly detect. Prediction markets on its efficacy drop from their initial bump to around 20% as the data continues to come in, and continue downwards from there. People are still trying it, of course; it’s not that expensive, and even if the increasing radiation is a correlate rather than the cause of the headaches it’s worth taking some precautions. 

To say that changes to brain electromagnetism were detected instantly is not entirely accurate, but they *were* picked up on quickly by increased use of MRI in response to the spiking rates of headaches. That they were not meaningfully impacted by performing the operation in shielded rooms took a bit more, but it was not considered especially surprising, given the other data. What was surprising was when this same phenomena was noticed in partical accelerators, the photons seeming to come into existence within the facilities instead of traversing the intervening space between the interior and exterior filled with the cutting edge of isolation shielding. The alternatephysics markets, already elevated, match all time peaks and continue to rise, with odds reaching the single digits for the first time in the trade history. A few dath ilani with long held bulk yes positions find themselves in possession of an unexpected financial windfall. 

It would be a bit of a stretch at any point to call dath ilan unprepared for disasters, but if they were, that would be changing now. In the real dath ilan, this mostly takes the form of implementing preparations and ruggedization previously designed but held as, in expectation, not worth the cost. Further safeguards are placed against individual people being suddenly disabled by pain and rendered incapable of performing their jobs, goods are stockpiled, trading off efficiency now for the ability to function more smoothly through transportation disruptions. Air travel, while already held to standard higher than the objectively rigorous ones commonplace on earth, winds down moderately, reducing yet further the risk of crashes and freeing up capacity should there be a sudden need. In a less well organized society, these efforts might lead to runs on commodities that get in the way of hardening critical infrastructure, but not so for dath ilan; this, at least, their prediction markets are more than capable of dealing with. 

Many of the mental techniques employed solely or primarily by keepers hold that status due to it being considered unwise for them to be  spread freely, or because their requirements are simply too difficult for those not already keepers to reasonably learn or perform. Others, however, simply do not come up enough in everyday life to be typically worth the effort, or come with side effects that tip away the expected payout from values worthwhile to ordinary people. Many of these reasons still hold, but as the headaches and hallucinations continue, a few skills that had previously been all but the sole domain of keepers begin to enter mainstream dath ilani repertoires. While less effective than the full suite of techniques utilized by keepers, they nevertheless prove useful in mitigating the issues.

As far as the public is concerned, these make up the bulk of dath ilan’s preparations. For those keepers, officials, and researchers with the proper clearance, however, other efforts are ongoing. In a place that doesn’t officially exist, a fifth of the brightest minds of dath ilan labor in secret wielding more advanced technology than dath ilan is believed to possess, working to build a god. 

They aren’t ready yet. Not, in all honesty, do they consider themselves close to a creation they can trust with the Future. But a lesser, bounded creation, may become necessary in the near future, and while it carries immense risks to try and pull off a task of this magnitude in a matter of months, much less weeks, it would be far worse for the crisis to escalate until one is needed, and only begin the work then.

Day: -3.

Months? Weeks? Very funny.

Somewhere, something, breaks. Reality gives in to the uniform pressure.

The photons are no longer generated uniformly. Instead, in some portions of space they don't appear at all, and in some they appear MUCH more commonly, and at lower frequencies, now dipping into visible light.

The entire solar system and a pretty large portion of space around it is now covered in ominous red "clouds" of radioactive space. They move, spin, merge, fall apart, shrink, and, more than that, grow. Occasionally they move faster than the speed of light. The movement patterns distantly resemble those of a turbulent gas, except sometimes they don't, at all. Some form spirally patterns.

The moment this starts happening, everyone who previously had increased headache frequency, and a lot more people who hadn't, immediately get a short but sharp jolt of pain. This happens before the light from the nearest red "clouds" even reaches the planet.

Long distance radio communications are now pretty nastily jammed.

No further changes occur for the next half a day or so.

[Before this post, I would LOVE to see speculation on part of dath ilani about what the fuck is going on. If anyone does this, I'll edit it back before this post.]

Day: -3.

But 13 or so hours later.

Some "clouds" turn orange.

Gravitational anomalies begin.

Planets, asteroids and comets in outer space inexplicably change their trajectories, as if their masses are being slowly altered for the purposes of gravity - but not for the purposes of momentum. Dath ilan is one of them, but alterations to it's orbit or gravity are negligible - there aren't any earthqukes or anything. If one were to measure gravity in different regions of space, they would find the constant G to be an ex-constant.

Then, five hours later, the objects around the fourth planet of the solar system - two natural satellites and any drones flying around it - stop feeling any attraction towards fourth planet specifically. They just kinda casually float off via locally straight lines, that loop as trajectories around the Sun.

The particles within those objects remain attracted to each other as normal, weakly evidenced by the fourth planet not immediately falling apart due to electromagnetic repulsion.

In time it will become apparent that the fourth planet is lucky.

They are probably going to die. Not only that, but die a true death, without hope of waking up in the future, and with them will go the rest of dath ilan. It’s not certain, with how little they understand the phenomenon, but dath ilan is not unaware of the Anthropic principle when it comes to considering the evidence of their own survival.

What do you do, then, armed with the probable knowledge of the impending death of you and everything you know? When asking yourself the question of how dath Ilan responds to a crisis, start by considering what the best response would be; that’s the question they ask themselves when planning. At the current moment, these broadly fall into three categories.

The first is not unlike what earth would do, were it to come face to face with disaster and by some miracle make better use of what wisdom it has than usual. There is, obviously, some chance dath ilan will survive, in one form or another; possibly not even incredibly low, under some of the hypotheses being considered. In this category lies many of the strategies employed to date, which still trundle on with terrifying efficiency. Even aside from those possibilities, these have secondary decision-theoretical benefits; if there was some cheaper action that aliens could take to predictably get dath ilan to stop working to defend itself, it would create an incentive for such actions in the first place. 

The second, of course, has been happening in parallel. At this point, it’s clear there’s not really any reason for the basement to stay secret, and certainly none that outweigh the benefits of revealing it. It’s unlikely that enough people not already working in the basement will make brilliant discoveries in whatever time they have left for it to matter, but it’s better odds than a lot of the other strategies remaining to them, because the basement of the world is not ready. They began working in earnest before the rest of civilization did, in response to this crisis, but on tasks that are genuinely hard, even a heroic effort of dath ilan’s brightest efforts for a week will only go so far. They have the code for some limited things, abandoning even mathematical proving in their haste, that can be said to be somewhat corrigible as well as capable. While this has lead to new insights and improved modeling of existing phenomenon and allowed for the preservation of millions of labor hours of value, they have yet to agree on a model to account for all of the data. Hypotheses, yes, even some not yet considered at all by the minds of dath ilan, but insufficient data to distinguish them. This is not surprising with how limited these limited creations truly are, but that doesn’t make it sufficient.

Breaking the seal also offered benefits to the first course of action, like the use of the advanced supercomputers to aid their fellows on the network of dath ilan with their own work, efficiently plotting out and analyzing the vast chunks of data to sift useful evidence from the noise. Others members of the basement who’s comparative advantage doesn’t lie in the rush coding work to categorize the findings of the program, updating existing summaries of their work to help improve their utility to future Civilization, be it a rebirth of their own or by some cosmic coincidence one entirely new. Dath ilan is not currently in the business of asserting impossibilities on that score. It wasn’t the primary driver, but dath ilan does not leave money on the table if they can possibly help it.

The third set of preparations is far more speculative, but it is also plausibly the only one that matters at this point. Keepers reveal publically the isekai theory of immortality, and begin putting into place measures intended to improve outcomes thereof. The list of predictably salient facts assembled by the isekai fan community is edited and expanded upon, by keepers who have had more cause to consider this likely and a hold a better idea of what broader reality actually looks like. Also included with it are keeper skills, both in terms of instructions on how to learn them yourself and in the form of keepers running and recording classes on them to help as many as possible. Particular focus is placed on those easiest to learn, and those foundational towards rediscovering many of the others given time.

Day: -2

The warp storm continues without any drastic changes.

Clouds increase in number and speed, the orbits slowly fluctuate, but otherwise nothing much happens. Which is a bit weird, considering that dath ilan is mostly convinced that they are going to die, unknowingly increasing the probability of that actually happening. But even after all such factors are taken into account warp storms are very arbitrary in their effects.

In the very end of the day, three people of the headaches-and-hallucinations subset simultaneously recieve a brief hallucination of the seventh planet exploding, being torn into a miniature nebula.

Most civilizations one could imagine would be much too panicked and absorbed into emergency preparation to notice, but it have already been stated that most civilizations aren't dath ilan.

The seventh planet is currently 3 light hours away.

If one were to measure dath ilan's response rate to hallucinations, this would be a very noncentral example of an already usually impressive institution. All of these people are already under redundant observation, and the hallucination handling protocols have been streamlined optimized extensively over the last week. That three people have a severe one at the same time is flagged immediately, and the protocols implemented immediately following. Even now, in a system as efficient as dath ilan's current one at taking in hallucination data, the flow of information is not instantaneous. When the first report reaches exception handling, it is taken seriously, but when the second and third follow shortly afterwards, the importance jumps yet further. It is not impossible that three people would all hallucinate the same event at once, or that this is some trick internal to Civilization, it's pretty flaming unlikely, and their priors for the seventh planet exploding are immensely higher than they were last week. Realistically speaking, this data permits two primary interpretations. One, that the physical laws that embed both their previous model of the universe and it's current state offer magical powers to human minds under some circumstances, or two, that this is a message from aliens. Dath ilan is not so irrational as to fail to realize laws of physics that consider human minds as natural categories are designed, but there is a bit of a difference in actions implied by what degree of remove the other minds are currently at.

In the first possibility, this warning needs to be taken seriously. There's not that much dath ilan can do about it in the grand scheme of things - they are far from possessing the ability to stop any such explosion. Thankfully, they also shouldn't need to; the people involved double check their intuitions against experts, but this confirms their understanding of the situation. Dath ilan's previous model of physics doesn't permit the 7th planet to detonate, nor does it consider it to be especially meaningful if it did, but even in the least convenient world where it was perfectly converted to energy there's limits to the problem. The sun is an immensely larger ball of hydrogen and helium constantly undergoing fusion, and is about 20 times closer; at scales like this, the square cubed law is a bitch. By the time the resulting energy reached dath ilan, it would be a sphere 3 billion kilometers in diameter, with a corresponding surface area of 118 quintillion square kilometers, and the seventh planet is only 100 quadrillion kilograms; the upper bound for energy hitting dath ilan is the equivalent of a day worth of sunshine, and their 90th percentile guess is orders of magnitude lower. It might still do any damage, but the direct impact is not the priority; a lot of their possible actions are covered under what they're already doing, or will be with some minor re-prioritization. The possibility is, however, still absolutely flaming terrifying; dath ilan would prefer its planet unexploded, and indeed otherwise relatively intact, thank you very much. With the expected payout this high, dath ilan also steps up its effort to induce the headaches and hallucinations. Even if they are just informational sources, that possesses immense value in itself, and if they have some effect on the causation of what they see that provides a potential path to the actual survival of dath ilan. Fortunately, many of the keepers are experiencing these headaches, but dath ilan does not try one obvious thing and then stop; also brought in are artists, mathematicians, programmers, authors, as well as assortments of other populations in smaller numbers. They start with trying to effect a few small asteroids easily observable from dath ilan; if this actually is a type of economicmagic that operates on the scales of planetary destruction, dath ilan does not exactly want its first, least controlled usage to be taken in the same place they keep all their people. By the same logic, searches are conducted among dath ilan's populace, especially those comatose or hallucinating prior to the advent, in case the event is being caused by one of them. It's an obvious hypothesis, if you're entertaining the idea that minds can warp the physical world at this scale.

The second, that this is a communication, seems both more likely and with higher median payout if true. Dath ilan has been broadcasting information, first contact protocols, and requests for aid already, but they update some of those to acknowledge the message. Other, more speculative methods of communication, like speaking directly to those most effected or asking people suffering from the headaches to try and think back responses, are both deemed worth trying currently.  If this is true, they should not only be taking the actions listed higher up, but also create a more direct line of information flow between those most seriously suffering headaches and hallucinations to the people organizing dath ilan's disaster preparations and first contact groups, as well as arrange exception handling to more efficiently funnel such results from the rest of the population as needed. These actions would also be sensible in the case of  the hallucinators possessing some kind of distance-datacollection-economicmagic-capabilities (a 1 syllable word in Aeldari), but take on additional value under the latter hypothesis. Dath ilan does not dismiss the possibility of the hallucinations being aimed to redirect their efforts in a way advantageous to some adversary like some on earth would, but neither does it obsess over the possibility like others might. They consider their estimates for cost versus value to potential agents across different capability spreads and find it in expectation unfavorable, particularly given that most of their wide scale emergency measures are only minorly altered and they don't seem to have anything meaningful in the way of options for altering attack surfaces on their leadership to whatever is causing the headaches anyway. A 4th rank keeper is assigned to keep track of the evidence to make a decision on if that changes. Obviously there are others who will do that, but they are the one person whose job that is; dath ilan believes in making a specific person responsible for things that absolutely need to happen.

Astronomers divert more of their attention to watching the seventh planet. If it does explode, they expect they'll notice regardless, but they would definitely prefer to watch the leadup and see it happen. Attention is paid to how much time passes between the hallucinations and the explosion becoming predictable, if it does; such information would be useful in determining where in the causal leadup the information they received is coming from.

Day: -1

The seventh planet's explosion becomes visible with no prior warning, about 3 hours after the hallucinations, and it's not anything remotely like full conversion from matter into energy. It's more torn apart mechanically than anything.

Purple "clouds" appear! They radiate violet visible light, ultraviolet, microwaves, x-rays, and gamma-particles. But not anything less frequent than violet. It sure is weird how this totally impersonal phenomenon is stretching over the tiny patch of visible frequencies.

There's a yellow cloud slowly floating on a track towards the surface of dath ilan.

Some hallucinations happen on the topic, in two different people. It's gonna graze the surface of dath ilan, in an area including what's known in a different timeline as India. And it seems like it's not gonna be fun for people there.

The experiments with moving asteroids by the power of influencing mindstates.. surprisingly, can succeed while conducted in the middle of a strong warp storm, if the people with influenced mindstates are a far majority of the observers. Experiments that involve absolute most of dath ilan expecting really hard that a rock will fly in a different direction would move it a somewhat visible amount. Experiments that involve small subsets of it's population - even when the subset is made of population is one especially sensetive to warp - return no observable change.

There's no one to communicate with, not yet.

In seven a half hours, the cloud will hit the surface of dath ilan, and melt the brains of a substantial portion of dath ilani located in what an alternate timeline calls India.

You would think, in the midst of an unprecedented emergency, it would be impossible to coordinate something of this scale. Even making an attempt would vastly overstretch capabilities already working overtime to try and eke out a fraction of a percent better survival odds. For many worlds, even attempting a fraction of this would require a tremendous sustained effort of Herculean proportions just to not lose to badly. Not so for dath ilan; they try and win. If every person in dath ilan needed to step left simultaneously, they wouldn’t need months of negotiations to fail to reach even 50% compliance, they would jus do it.

They do not try literally every person in dath ilan. Some of them are doing actually important things, that cannot be delayed even for a minute. But the fact of the matter is, most of what they are doing is not actually important; there isn’t that much room, objectively speaking, between damages that dath Ilan can already survive, and those it cannot live through with any amount of preparation. When the images of the seventh planet’s explosion come in, most of the remaining alternate hypothesis drop down out of the range worth considering. Dath ilan isn’t sure, exactly, what the solution here will look like. There are a lot of ways you could construct a set of economic-magic alternatephysics laws and maintain consistency with what has been seen so far. Perhaps whatever magic abilities enable it are only held in noticable quantities by a tiny fraction of their population, perhaps they aren’t something that dath ilan can yet mechanically induce, or perhaps even they don’t fall into the realm of human capabilities at all, and everything they have seen thus far is the effect of some aliens messaging them. None of that will prevent dath Ilan from testing it; perhaps if the situation were less dire, the testing would happen with greater caution and abortability, but these are not those times, and even then - it digits the imagination, that dath ilan would possibly not want to know.

When inducing hallucinations on small groups not only works, but gives predictive abilities match or beat the capabilities of the lesser Things employed but the basement, these efforts are validated. And so dath ilan sets aside a time, where all the people of Civilization can all put down their work and, at least for a while, focus. It’s not that hard of a sell, to convince a dath ilani to do magic. More effort is made to free up those who experienced headaches and visions, even at the cost of two or three others to take over the critical work they were doing, but even those without a reaction are included in the experiment. The mental techniques of dath Ilan are not precisely designed to induce the state of focus most conductive to manipulating the warp, even if they had somehow figured out what that was, but by the standards of humans that can barely be said to try anything, the focus and guidance of imagination is astounding. They don’t just try one thing, either - they try to communicate, they try to manipulate some of the clouds of radiation, they try and nudge a convenient asteroid, that a few of those in dath ilan not currently in on the experience can easily track, out of its orbit. They even try to calm the entire phenomenon, just in case that’s a thing they can do. When the vision of the yellow cloud disaster comes in partway through, they turn their attention to that. It’s not their only resort, should the efforts fail, but it’s the kind of thing you really ought to try doing.

The asteroids, when the massed effort of dath ilan is put into play, do move. The one they picked was relatively light, but the delta V in objective terms is still astonishing. Unfortunately, the pushing the clouds proves less  effective. They aren’t one solid object, or even a manageable number of smaller ones; in a warp storm of this power, even the untrained might of dath Ilan is enough to move whichever piece of the cloud they grab, but the rest of the cloud does not go with it, and they have no ready means of turning moving a bit of cloud a lot into turning a lot of cloud a bit. Those sensitives far enough away from the Deccan plateau as to not need evacuation continue their work; they don’t need all the overkill they just had to make any progrss, and there is always the chance they find a way to solve their problem. Unfortunately, strength does not seem to scale linearly, and they cannot just break into a dozen subgroups to move a dozen times as much of the cloud at the time. 

If you had posed this issue to a dath ilani reader, prior to the crisis, they would have some things to say. Well, things to say after they finished critiquing the implausibility of the story, that is. Which comments were made would depend on what the audience in question was, but there is one question that they would definitely pose. Have you tried winning instead? Some dath ilani try to link up with animals, and use their collective human will to muster the combined strength towards their ends. Other work with AI, both directly creating links and trying to program ones that can do it themselves. This is, undeniably, extremely dangerous, but even the best case scenario of this crisis has millions of lives at stake. If there was a time to take those risks, it would be now. Some groups of dath ilani are told that other groups have successfully moved the yellow cloud en route, and told to recreate the feat on some other clouds their models predict have a chance of reaching dath ilan. Others volunteer for keepers to talk them into the neccesary state of mind, or combine that with stronger mind effecting drugs than had been previously used to induce hallucination. The mental requests for help take on a greater strength and breadth, and join with them trade requests, aimed at nearby stars and the clouds and their best guess at the idea of alien minds, offering creative work and mathematics and sex, as well as smaller amplitudes of a vaster array of potential trade goods.

Dath ilan doesn’t stop trying for a magic solution, obviously, but they aren’t the kind of people to give up if one doesn’t materialize. Alongside those efforts come more conventional ones, aimed to at least lower the scale of the disaster immediately at hand.

What does it take, to evacuate a subcontinent in 7 hours? Were you to pose the question to someone from earth, it would not be reliably possible to even let everyone know the evacuation was to begin within that period, much less with communications under as much interference as they are. But dath ilan has been preparing for this. They have the stockpiles needed, to end all other local usage of their logistics and transportation networks. In 10 minutes, a team of engineers and programmers refine the outputs of one of their AI into a highly optimized schedule of train, plane, car and helicopter transit to move as many people as fast as possible. The difficulty here is eased somewhat, by the ability to accept a good enough result; unlike a kinetic impact, they only need to get out of the actual impact zone to be safe. Planes from around the world are diverted to aid in the process, with pilots scrambled to the runways and hangars of those already on the ground, and many of those already in flight diverted to an emergency landing to discharge their passengers or cargo. Here, dath ilan’s predilection for cities serves them well; there are far fewer of them out away from all lines of transportation that their rescue can be assured by helicopter flights, and their fast and efficient rail systems lead right to the majority of the at risk population. Both cargo and passenger rail alike take on vast crowds of people, eating up the generous slack built into the system in the name of redundancy. 

In this way, the great numbers of dath ilani at risk will escape the collision, prioritizing children and those most able to contribute to Civilizations survival. Rather than press their way to the transportation arteries in the hopes of squeezing up a few spots in the queue, they form orderly onboarding patterns to minimize the time needed to spend in the stations between trips. For those who’s transportation is scheduled hours out, they return to work, at economicmagic and computer programming and logistical planning and astronomy. Others take measures to aid those further back in the queue, by prepping for isekai immortality or just making their last hours on dath ilan as happy as possible.

Even for dath ilan, this undertaking is unprecedented. People work with desperate efficiency to try and crank out even the slightest bit of extra efficiency, but as the hours drag on, the odds of someone finding a clever solution steadily drop, and it becomes clearer and clearer that not quite everyone will make it. In some ways, they are lucky; had their population been significantly higher than a billion, or less of it lived in Default  or other locations outside India, or in the worst case the cloud been aimed at Default itself, the tragedy would be immeasurably greater. But even for a Civilization that knows they balance on the brink of extinction, there are some tragedies it is not easy to bear.

Day: -1

If there were aliens around, a psychic call for help would only work if both civilizations believed it would work, and the same goes for moving asteroids. There's some interesting decision theory that could have been done about it if they had neighbours, but alas, dath ilan is currently alone.

Make no mistake: dath ilan isn't currently doing anything remotely like excercise of psyker powers. Instead, it is currently cosplaying a Chaos God, or at least emulating something like the WAAAAGH field. And while this type of direct warping of reality is arguably much cooler, it only works because they are alone and in a heavily warp-influenced space. In a Galaxy of many rivalling civilizations with their own outlooks on reality, and with demons infesting every corner of Immaterium, they'd have to try a little harder to impose their vision on reality.

The yellow cloud descends upon the Deccan plateu, violently killing everyone with a warp-induced headache, and shutting off or melting or boiling to explosion the brains of about 70% of the rest, with about 25% suffering variably grotesque forms of damage to their mind, and about 5% going relatively unscathed.

Over the course of the day, few planets and moons get destroyed in creative ways. First planet starts rotating faster and faster until it turns into a molten torus. Some of the fifth planet's satellites sink into it. Sixth planet turns into a tetrahedron. Yes, really. The warp storm is really pulling out the stops, and the "clouds" are dancing a deranged dance. In some ways, over the course of the day, it's area becomes more warp than physical reality.

Some headache-induced people have visions about the planetary destruction.

Before the sixth planet's weird shape alteration reaches dath ilan's advanced electronic telescopes, dath ilan is hit by a planet-wide EMP, searing tons of surface-level electronics.

By this point, you should expect this to destroy approximately zero knowledge, even if some other imaginable civilizations would find this a permanent setback.

Dath ilan's last few hours here are, to say the least, chaotic.

These events are frustrating to dath ilan, not least because they haven’t managed to do anything about it. Efforts to interfere when the first planet began to speed up we’re able to ensure it would miss dath ilan by a greater margin if normal physics started working again and flung it out at the worst possible moment, but it wasn’t very likely to start out with and was rendered wholly irrelevant when it ended up turning into a torus. If preventing it had been neccesary for the survival of civilization, they would have come up far short, and were it not for the new economicmagic abilities they developed at the last minute, it would be even shorter. Prediction markets suggest that their expectations are collectively contributing to the stability of the planet, and they take steps to strengthen that effect, but it’s clearly not the whole story or the storm wouldn’t have started in the first place. The movement of the colored clouds and transformation of the 6th planet suggests that controlling the yellow cloud that recently struck was in principle possible from these abilities, but it seems like even for dath ilan, getting to that point takes longer than a week.

in comparison to everything that has lead up to this, the emp is essentially a nonissue. Had it struck prior to these events beginning, or during the evacuation, it could have been an issue, but even then not a critical one. Were dath ilan so vulnerable to an issue they had known was possible for decades, it would have suggested a level of incompetence on the part of governance so severe that required the firing of everyone tangentially responsible and the resignation of the overseeing legislature in shame.

Information models developed in the basement of the world offer 95% odds that the worst is yet to come, but 20% odds that the event is also almost over. Prediction market guesses consider other information and their overall state of uncertainty, and so differ from these noticabley, but they don’t discount it either. Dath ilani programmers lament their fate, to have to deal with code whose outputs they don’t even understand well in retrospect. It’s not that they don’t respect the efficacy of the deep learning algorithms, it’s just that even if you ignore the risks it’s a really inelegant solution. There’s something embarrassing, about your chances of survival moving entire percentage points based on something like this. If they had been better, they would have done even better without it.

Day: -1

And then, everyone in dath ilan experiences a sensory overload for ~6.4 seconds! The world is bright, loud, bitter and sour and sweet and smells of everything, enveloping you from every side, and painful and joyous.

Those who can somehow catch a glimpse of what's happening will see skies covered in a bright and maddening reddish-rainbowish-blackish special effect. Glimpsing it deals sanity damage!

AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHH!!!!

Dath ilan is not so lacking in dignity that it will pretend to take this kind of event with poise. Dath ilan, taken broadly, experiences things less strongly than is typical for human populations. They feel less strongly, less often, and struggle more with hedonic treadmills robbing them of things they previously enjoyed. For them, this is even worse than it would be for the median human. If the events of the last week are anything, though, they’re good at putting other problems into perspective. Even if Civilization makes it through this, it will not lack for bigger issues to deal with than this, not at just 6 seconds. Objectively speaking, however, this is still extremely overwhelming, confusing, and terrifying. 

Even among dath ilani, it requires a noticable  amount of mental discipline to see through that, even if they have the requisite psyker strength to attempt it. Many could in theory manage it, but not in 6 seconds on no notice. Those who do manage it anyway are typically in some sense outliers, and as a result of the combination of factors largely consists of keepers. In some sense, this is a good thing; they are the most equipped to deal with it, and  have it as part of their job; they have reaped the rewards civilization pays out to those willing to undertake the task of keeping harmful truths. On the other hand, right after the peak of an incredibly powerful and unprecedented alternatephysics event is just about the worst time to be down a notable fraction of your most capable and economicmagic-able keepers, even if for most of them it’s just temporary or partial. It’s a mixed blessing, all things considered, considering what comes next.

Day: 0.

There's no more sensory overload.

The world is calm.

The skies are clear.

The stars are different.

Welcome to the Galaxy, dath ilan.

The solar system is entirely new, and even the sun is different.

Dath ilan is orbiting it stably right in the sweet spot of the Goldilocks zone. Dath ilan's moon appears to be the same.

There's no warp storm around them. No planets turned into platonic solids or anything of the sort. No headaches and hallucinations. Self-persuasion will stop producing blatant and instant physics-warping effects. (It will turn out to produce subtle but statistically detectable effects if done by lots of people over long periods of time. In the meantime, though, physics around them appears to be back to normal familiar.

The distant stars, upon examination, will turn out to be the stars around Dath Ilan, shifted around 38 thoudand years into the future, as seen from a place nearly opposite to Earth's placement.

It's peppered with warp storms, some of them permanent. Some stars are missing prematurely.

There are clearly artificial radio signals coming from space. Some sent from different directions seem to share formats (?), though obviously their contents will remain a complete mystery until way more data is collected and analyzed.

There are currently about a thousand people on dath ilan with untrained and untapped but existing psyker potential. A few months after, they - especially those who are participating in economicmagic research projects - will start experiencing some suspicious temptations that would lead to disastrous results if acted upon. They won't give in, and they will report them, and the problem will be controlled and contained.

That aside, for a pretty long time, there won't be any surprises. From the perspective of dath ilan, their only real connection with the new world will seem to be the radio transmissions, and their biggest source of updates will be updates in their understanding.

A new planet have popped into existence in the middle of nowhere.

And with it's arrival, the landscape of possible futures massively shifts.

Dath ilani, given full information about their new universe (or at least galaxy), and a button able to destroy it, would push it without much hesitation.

This universe is easier to change than to destroy.

A new planet have popped into existence in the middle of nowhere, a backwater planet without particularly rich resources or special properties, populated by completely normal human beings (quadrillions of which roam the Galaxy by now), utterly technologically backwards and ignorant of sorcery, without any friends or influence. Without any intrinsically special fate. Without even a single clue about what is even going on.

And yet, in many futures, it's denizens will play a pivotal role in every event.

Mortal psykers with honed forecasting abilities are going to sense the change in far futures. But they, not living in dath ilan, will have a hard time correllating it with the location of a the suddenly materialized planet in the middle of nowhere; and uncovering the location of the crux of this change through scrying alone will take a LOT of time for mortal psykers.

Deep within the bloodied radiance of The Immaterium,

In the middle of the ever-shifting, all-mirroring, foggy and blinking and crackling Realm of the Sorcerer, 

In the center of The Impossible Fortress, a maddening impassable Escherian labyrinth where the observed and the imagined blend into each other,

Amid the Hidden Library, the biggest repository of knowledge in the galaxy, partially transcending even time,

Sits the God of Change and Hope and Pursuit.

The God of Magic and Technology, of Knowledge and Deception, of Strategy and Madness.

He smiles. 

DATH ILAN

DAY: 0

Population: ~1B

Military personnel: ???

Interstellar spaceships built: 0

Planets visited: 2

Planets controlled: 1

Sentient species encountered: 0/~3K

Major factions encountered: 0/8

Current alliances: 0

Current wars: 0

Casualties: ~130K

Kill count: 0

Transistor count: ~10^18

Kardashev's scale: 0

Chaos Gods created: 0

Present advantages:

- Mastery of probability and game theory.

- Mastery of coordination.

- Mastery of persuasion.

- Mastery of planning.

- Mastery of automation.

- Largely undiscovered. 

Present disadvantages:

- Ignorant of technology. 

- Ignorant of sorcery. 

- Ignorant of society. 

- Laughably tiny.

- Monoplanetary.

Achivements: 2

- I reject your reality and substitute my own. (Edit a movement course of a physical object solely through direct application of belief and will.)

- Arrival. (Get yeeted into the Galaxy of grim darkness.)

If dath ilan were to see this achievement screen, they would have some questions. Not about the screen itself; that one isn't too surprising, once you already accept the premise of a planetary isekai, long range economicmagic run on belief, and planets turning into tetrahedrons. Even without being given the knowledge, dath ilani have been trying without success to interface with varying possible game UIs. Rather, they would take issue with the advantages. What does it mean, mastery of probability, game theory, coordination, and planning? Dath ilan hasn't mastered those, it has a perfectly normal level of competance for a civilization just starting to develop space flight. You couldn't possibly run even a planetary society without those, you'd be too busy fighting yourself to accomplish anything of note. Many dath ilani fiction writers, now with access to the true history of dath ilan, are working on some new alien trade and first contact books and festivals that span a wider spread of potential competance to account for the evidence from their history.

The truth, of course, is far outside their range of projections. It's far too stupid to possibly be real.

In the days following the event, dath ilan struggles to put itself back together. The task is gargantuan - over a hundred thousand dead, of the true death, vast swathes of territory damaged by varying events, transportation, logistics, and manufacturing infrastructure damaged by days of pushing them to the very brink of their capabilities, not to mention the incredible amount of stress and mental toll taken. Not all of dath ilani are like Merrin, able to continue working for hours without unacceptably flagging. People tried, of course - tradeoffs like recovery periods, long term damage, and withdrawal symptoms look a lot better when compared against extinction - but even if they were worth it here, there is a reason they're typically ill advised. It doesn't help that they have other priorities, either; it's a lot harder to put damaged equipment through the proper maintenance cycles when you aren't actually sure the storm won't suddenly return full force and require you to have it all up and running to avert disaster. Still, Civilization is capable and resilient; having survived the events of the previous week, it would be rather embarrassing to stumble overmuch now.

Still, time is something they have, now, albeit not in unlimited quantities, and as the days pass, Civilization's work becomes more and more efficient. People recover from their exhaustion, repairs to transportation and communications increase their ability to bring their industrial might to bear, and the prolonged days without disaster increase market confidence. The last of these is rather more important than it sounds, to someone used to the idea that market confidence is an arbitrary game played on a mixture of shared delusions and filtered reality; dath ilan uses prediction markets to aid in its decision-making, but it's hard to gauge how much weight you should place on the opinion of someone willing to risk money when it's rather ambigous that money will be worth anything for long enough to spend it. They're still not as useful as they were before just yet, but they're rapidly making the climb back to efficacy, now aided by the vastly increased amounts of public compute available on basement computers. The programmers there, meanwhile, take one look at their creations and then fill with a determination to never use them again. They proved valuable, yes, and dath ilan needs to keep them in a state where they can rapidly make use of them should another emergency start up, but there's no denying that right now they're one of the biggest threats to dath ilan's existence. You don't hand over control of your civilization's resources to a loosely bound demon you barely understand if you can possibly help it, after all. (This mindset will leave dath ilan in good stead in the days to come, albeit far more literally than intended).

The damage is not incalculable; indeed, dath ilan is perfectly capable of calculating it. It's just the result of the calculation they take issue with. 100,000 new members of the lost dead, even if split among the entire event period, is more than joined their number in any day since dath ilan first implemented cryonics at scale. When considered in the context of a single day and the lower populations earlier in Civilization's history, it ranks among the worst days in the history of humanity. Taken together, the loss of productivity from those temporarily or permanently unable to return to work, the damaged property, and all the new construction required to prevent further disaster, as well as miscellaneous costs like medical and psychological treatment or drops in market confidence, total up to the loss of multiple years of gdp-in-expectation. Absent the consideration of economicmagic, the path Civilization now walks along is notably darker than that they predicted themselves to be on a month ago. Including that factor, it's far harder to say. After the end of the warp storm, the mass manipulations ceased to function noticably and even promising lines of research came up empty, but now that they know the laws of physics at least circumstantially permit it dath ilan is hardly about to let this prey escape its grasp.

The injured keepers are not cleared for interacting with Civilization, obviously; dath ilan is not an idiot about dealing with unknown infohazards that can even injure a rank 7 keeper. But the amount of care they need goes down, and their condition improves significantly.

Noticing dath ilan's spacial location took less than a minute, and only a handful to confidently confirm. Figuring out where they were instead took longer, a task made harder by the changes in the stars, cosmic background radiation, and a dozen other more subtle metrics. It's a bit of a confusing result; if you were being transported conventionally, it would be strange to move this far and precisely, whereas if their star was chosen arbitrarily there's no reason to expect to find themselves even in the same galaxy. It suggests, even beyond that of the effects seen thus far, the input of sapient minds beyond just those of dath ilan at some step of the process. That they're now in a different universe is considered somewhat unlikely, given how many more degrees of potentially altered results that allows and that they have available other hypotheses that explain the premises, but it's a decently strong minority. The tropes and storytelling conceits of dath ilan are not the same as those of Earth, but Civilization is still made up of humans, and the events they've observed sure are a lot more likely to occur in stories than anything with actual rules like real life. To further refine the hypotheses, dath ilan begins designing a series of new, incredibly powerful radio telescopes and listening beacons to examine this new corner of the universe they find themselves in, and sets to work those extant devices not better served plotting out their new system's asteroids on the topic.

This about the Galaxy: It lives on FTL technology and civilizations in it span tens of thousands of light years, therefore radio is way too slow for any actually important communications. The nearest large neighbours of dath ilan are Imperium (including, more specifically, it's Ultramar vassal-kingdom), the Tau empire, and Sautech dynasty necrons - near enough that they can overhear some of their communications before they completely dissipate, and occasionally with relatively small lags measured in single-digit centuries.

Imperium primarily uses astropathic telepathy for it's long-range communications, Necrons primarily use wormholes, and Tau have to make-do with automated messenger ships. (There may be some Tau experiments with using Gue'vesa astropaths, but they lack numbers for a proper communication network, and have no training infrastructure.)

But, of course, analogously to Earth still using postal system and phone lines in the age of the Internet, plenty of radio transmission capable of reaching between solar systems still happens, in all three races.

Moreover, it should be noted that Necrons, Tau and Humans by no means exhaust the neighbouring species of dath ilan! The Galaxy is chock-full of minor sentient species, many of whom are technologically developed but lack any kind of FTL. Dath ilan has a couple of such neighbours in near-vicinity. And a few more which no longer exist, being exterminated long before by Imperial crusading or Necron harvesting or other joys of the Galaxy, but whose transmissions still echo between the stars, perhaps the sole token of their existence.

So, then.

There may be some things to hear.

Days: 6-15.

In some other worlds, long range communication formats are magically standardized into something like, say, a spellform cheekily called Message. In some other worlds, there are no language barriers, and everyone understands everyone perfectly.

The Galaxy, however, is a huge mess, and so are it's communication, um, un-norms.

Most transmissions come digitally encoded in an unfamiliar format, compressed, and in an unfamiliar language; ~60% of those are also encrypted, with security varying from Vernam Cipher to Caesar Cipher. (Yes, really.)

Some transmissions are just periodic bleeps or something similar. Maybe dead man's signals, maybe help beacons, maybe pranks, maybe byproducts of some technological or magical process - it's... hard to tell. 

But not all is so hopeless. Analog interstellar transmissions are rare, but happen, and in the case of analog sound transmissions specifically, they map a 1D soundwave frequency pattern into a 1D radiowave frequency pattern. There aren't too many natural ways to correspond them, and after the ears of dath ilan are attuned enough to hear distant transmissions clearly enough, almost as soon as they hear the first one of them, they'll be able to hear the sound.

The sound could have been easily produced by human vocal cords. In fact, it sounds like a very agitated and distressed human frantically babbling something, then screaming, and then cutting out.

What an exciting first communication from aliens!

They hear more things!

They hear a few pieces of music, made by unfamiliar but potentially analog instruments and voices. They seem clearly intended to please the human notions of desired sound complexity, frequencies with close-to-simple-rational ratios, and rhythm.

They hear transmissions that contain what seems like language that couldn’t have been produced by unaltered human vocal cords, in languages that sound unlike anything that would evolve naturally among humans.

They hear a strange chant that acts as a perception-altering drug, putting people who listen for a long time into a trance-like state and possibly maybe dealing subtle SAN damage and maybe, slightly, subtly, very subtly, doing just barely unnatural things with their brain activity, that dath ilani MRI or heat tests probably won't pick up on. For weird technical reasons, it doesn't act differently on the warp-sensetive.

They don't hear anything that would sound like an officer barking orders.

Here's an exciting experiment that dath ilan may or may not have thought to conduct:

Take some people who had headaches and hallucinations during the - by the way, how do dath ilani call it? - warp storm. Have them wear blindfolds, and spin them around until they completely lose orientation. Then, have them point their finger at a random point in space.

Do it a hundred to a thousand times or so.

And you'll see that while they are mostly pointing at random places, they tend to point more closer to the place where dath ilan should be, if it was a part of this galaxy on it’s original location 38 thousand years ago.

As if there's a subtle call of some sort from there. None of them will feel it explicitly, of course.

There's also a secondary tendency to point at a relatively nearby area of space where a huge remote warp storm (actually two of them - as the two almost fall into a staight line from dath ilan's location). That'll become apparent with even more trial and error.

Have dath ilan conducted this curious experiment yet?

Thus far, dath ilan has settled on calling the event a highenergy-consensus-economagic-phenomenon, when seeking accuracy. In Baseline, however, this takes up a full six syllables, which is obviously unnaceptable for something you want to refer to in a clear and timely manner. Linguistic prediction markets are deliberating on various propositions for the best way to integrate it into baseline as a new word. Ideally, it would allow for further simple but distinct alterations for related phenomena, is far enough from other words to be distinguishable, and stays closely enough related to the words its current for is a portmanteau for for ease of learning. In the meantime, they use one of the baseline's standard concept-holder words, which would literally translate as lowcontext-simple-nounsubstitute and is part of a zone of two-syllable Baseline phoneme combinations reserves for such purposes.

Even if dath ilan had heard the sound of an officer barking orders, they wouldn't have recognized it. Dath ilan's military has always been able to count on its lower ranks to excercize initiative withinthe confines of the strategic objective, and to understand complicated tactical considerations with only short explanations. They have also had more than enough budget to ensure all of their soldiers are well educated and well trained volunteers, as opposed to conscripting whoever couldn't escape the recruiters. Even so, it's not that the explanation would baffle them, it's simply not where they would put the majority of their probability mass. Dath ilan has a robust infohazard protocol, which in this case means decoding potential alien transmissions is performed by a combination team of keepers and specialists overseen by a higher ranker keeper with no direct ability to hear the sounds, only a computer generated text-based transcription in a keeper conlang. Both they and the teams have regular check-ins with exception handling, also run by keepers, but there is some tradeoff between ability to cordon off spread of information and ability to keep an eye on people in question. Dath ilan has aimed towards the security side of the tradeoff, but they're still on the pareto frontier, and while this infohazard is stronger than most they've encountered it's not outside the range of what they prepared for. In comparison, the others are far more simply dealt with, including the one sounding of human screens, although it is specially tagged when undergoing data consolidation.

That particular experiment is one they have yet to get to. it's simple enough conceptually there's no doubt they will, given time, but prediction markets have a host of proposed experiments with higher expected payouts, from simple exercises of comparing their guessing skills of cards to statistical baseline to refining the methods of inducing hallucination to attempting to communicate telepathically.

Dath ilan has a lot of very bright ideas. That’s what happens, when you have an entire planet of well above average intelligence and a society that encourages at every step creativity, critical thinking, and problem solving. These are, admittedly, mostly calibrated to real life, but dath ilan doesn’t consider that an excuse to give up on the subject. Though hampered somewhat by how different their story tropes are, both from the galaxy around them and the minds on earth that spawned it, many bits of genre savviness still transfer, and unlike your typical genre aware protagonist who reacts to tropes as they happen, dath ilan tries to get ahead of the curve. When they’re unsure which curve to get ahead on, they go ahead and try for all of them at once. Even in circumstances as bizarre as these, this effort has resulted in significant advantages for them and their Civilization, and they do not intend to rest in their laurels. however, when modeling across an unknown cultural gap with low legibility, there are always going to be mistakes another group might find obvious that will not occur to them.

Some dath ilani are more selfish than others, but by the standards of other people’s, that’s still not that selfish. They’ve made efforts to curb that genetically, and more critically attacked the problem on the societal level, engineering values of altruism and cooperation at a fundamental level even as they work steadily to remove the material conditions that hamper the development of these attitudes. Even the 95th percentile of dath ilani is noticeably xenophilic and eager to explore the unknown, as others measure such things, and those who choose a career in first contact trend towards the other end. They really beleive in principles like multi agent cooperation.

Unfortunately for dath ilan, the universe they have found themselves is not so kind, and most within it are all but bereft of the light dath ilan considers its mission to keep. It’s these inhabitants, so different from how dath ilan imagines other peoples to work, that see an untrained human psyker opening themselves up and attempting to call out into the immaterium.

Oh boy.

The Immaterium can be described as a layered cake. Being a dimension not only in cosmological but also in a mathematical sense, Warp has a coordinate component of 'depth' to it, with Realspace being at 0, and it's properties radically altering as the component increases.

First, right near the realspace and spatially corresponding to it directly is Warp's outer boundary, more realspace than Warp, where demons cannot even survive for long without additional sustenance and which they cannot casually breach; it is travelled by Tau ships and houses the Webway gates. It doesn't look much different than correcsponding realspace, except when it does. Unlike with other regions of Warp, you cannot travel into or our of this here by physical movement.

Then, there's the inner boundary of Warp, housing the Webway, and within it the Black Library, the fragmented city of Commorragh, and many other interesting places. It still corresponds nearly directly to realspace, but if you know what you are doing, you can find some very impressive shortcuts - and the ancient engineers of the Webway knew what they were doing pretty well. When a tunnel of the Webway gets breached, the daemons are in fact able to flood it, unlike with breaches of the Tau ships in the outer boundary - but it's still hard for them. Outside of the tunnels, it's a shadowy, dark, thick emptyness.

Then, the higher regions of Warp proper. This is what the ships of Imperium and Orks traverse. correspodence of space to realspace starts to break down and shift in time. Travel times are short on average, but really inconsistent, unless you really, really know what you are doing, and neither Navigators nor Weirdboyz do. Demons here live in constant soul-hunger, but still patrol prospective locations in wait of potential rewards. From inside it looks like space, but shifting and undulating in various colors - mostly shades of red and yellow, which you'll see even if you lack appropriate color recognition cells in your eyes. While your mind is probably getting warped.

Next is the middle layer of the Warp, the Formless Wastes. This is a chaotic mess of free-range thoughts and concepts, demons, dead souls in hiding, and various weird bullshit. The correspodence with realspace isn't gone, but it's more conceptual than physical - for example, areas around populated planets and historically important sites are huge, with connections between based more on conceptual than physical closeness, and areas corresponding to empty space are tiny. The light of Astronomicon doesn't reach most of locations in this layer, and almost any ship that flies in will either be destroyed or lose course entirely. It's both possible to traverse this space by foot, as it loses most of resemblance to outer space and in many places has something like ground - except that you'll most probably die very quickly if you dare, and probably not even of demons swarming it, but of sheer clashing surrealism.

Then, the deep Warp. This place is not corresponding at all to the geography of realspace. This is where most demons live, and where most dead souls end up - to be tortured forever by those demons. This is no longer reminiscent of outer space at all - this is a flat territory of an Earthlike planet, for most mortals precieve space as that, day-to-day. Well, it's occasionally Escherian, but locally, usually, it isn't; moreover, it's stable in time. If not for the daemons and environmental hazards and anomalies, this place would be actually safe to travel by foot - and it is, if you are in a territory of a Chaos God who has a LOT of favor for you, or if you are such a raging badass that even greater demons decide that messing with you isn't worth it. (Which at least one person, Kaldor Draigo, is currently managing to pull off.) This is where the influence of the Four is the strongest, and in fact, the territory is divided entirely between their daemonic kingdoms - Realm of the Sorcerer, Land of the Plaguelord, Dark Prince's Realm, and the Blood God's Domain, with landscapes shaped by their essences. A planet that is a different timeline version of dath ilan might concisely call this place by a single-syllable word - Hell. 

Finally, there is the far Warp. Utterly unstable and rather untethered from time, this place is directly linked with far past and with possible futures. Here are the embryos of future Warp Gods, corpses of the slain Warp beings of the past, thoughts unthought and gifts ungiven, ossified conceptstuff of the past millenia, and who knows what else. This accursed abyss is far too unstable for any known properly sentient being to survive here for long, even for demons or Chaos Gods. This place is almost entirely unknown, and entrances to it are rare - in only the deepest cracks and darkest caves of the kingdoms of deep Immaterium, and in sealed mines in the basements of the Four's seats of power. Demons whisper among each other that something or someone occasionally comes up from there with no warning, slaughters an entire demonic village with no witnesses or survivors, and goes back in, without a trace.

Ahem. Anyway.

Normally, if an Imperium citizen with untrained Psyker potential calls out into the Warp without taking any preparations, and their call manages to breach the Warp's boundary, they'll be immediately posessed by a daemon or twenty who are specifically prepared for the mission, and then, maybe in half of those cases, the planet will be done for in a span of weeks. Or in the span of days, if a greater daemon is involved. Soon, it may very well become an arrival point of a Chaos incursion, or a silent asymptomatic carrier of heresy that's rotten from the inside and working ceaselessly on corrupting it's neighbours, or occasionally even turn into a daemon world.

Demons clump up like blood clots around densely populated planets, warp-travelling ships, psyker training compounds, and chronic battlefields, looking for any chance to slip in and feast on mortal souls, preparing amd plotting for it in advance, subtly pushing events towards it, and when the opportunity comes, instantly seizing it.

Dath ilan's arrival have gone pretty much unnoticed even in Warp, and it's low population density and absence of trained psykers, plus a very short time since it's arrival (Chaos, as most other factions in the Galaxy, usually operates on a scale of decades), means that there's no flock of hungry demons circling around it, yet.

The call of a completely untrained psyker, upon breaching the boundary, wouldn't actually penetrate very far, wouldn't reach the depths of Warp where hellish legions await. It would reverberate throughout the Outer Warp, and if at the moment, the surroundings are empty, for a few minutes, it wouldn't be answered. 

And when it will be answered, it will be answered by a more or less random daemon just flying around and minding their own business, not someone who spied on them for decades and hungrily plotted their demise.

However, it should also be noted that the call wouldn't heard by all daemons equally. Depending on the caller's values and currently dominant emotions, as well as circumstances of the call, some daemons will hear it louder than others.

Now, this particular call was made in a research facility, as part of a project to understand magic via experimentation. The individual making it is a volounteer, enthusiastic and hopeful for contact with a potential friendly trading partner. That would allow dath ilan to trade for more understanding about what is going on, for magical knowledge and maps and resources and just things directly desirable according to their utilitufunction, thereby increasing it's power, and making life more enjoyable and safer. Naturally, their trading patner would also benefit! Of course, they are wary of and frustrated by this new universe and it's deadly phenomena, and would love to be more certain in this risky endeavor. And obviously, it might just not work at all. But given the weridness of the past few weeks, every approach is worth trying. Besides, wouldn't it be really flaming cool to contact aliens via a psychic call? Ahem. Though ready for the worst, dath ilan expects a reasonable, strategic agent, if they do contact anyone, and why would such an agent immediately defect where math itself points towads a mutually enjoyable outcome?

So... what kind of a demon would probably hear such a call first? Obviously, a Tzeentchian one. 

Except, by pure coincidence, there are currently no Tzeentchian daemons anywhere near this location in the outer layers of Warp.

They are out to lunch.

uhh...

Okay then. 

That Demon Prince's party was incredible! So much delicious, delicious torture! Who shall I service next...

Oh, that's an interesting place to recieve a summonning from! I never even knew there was a planet here. Well, finders - keepers!

The body feels human! The mind... hmmm.

Say, what's the deepest, darkest, most secret desire of my new bodymate?

Uhm. That's....a lot of math?

Um. That's... a lot of very convoluted status symbols??

Who in the world is Reckless Investor Miyalsvor???

W... what????

You know what, deepest desires? How about we wait on those. What's the biggest carnal pleasure you have ever experienced?

That's... an incredibly pathetic concept of "ill-advised". How about... you feel this, but 30 times more intense.

Now, ready to submit to my will eternally for a few more orders of magnitude of this?

The summoner have experienced basic Keeper training. He haven't yet fully processed what is going on, and is currently suddenly extremely high, but obviously, he instinctively resists with all the force he can muster.

Your call was so, so very eager, you know? You left all the doors wide open, and welcomed me whole. And now you're trying this hard to evict me? Well, that's just inconsistent!

The summoner's soul is immediately devoured.

The summoner stretches his arms, as body starts rapidly mutating into a form that SHOULD be hideous, but is in fact infohazardously beautiful. And growing more and more infohazardously beautiful every second.

When a daemon first manifests, there’s a moment of weakness. The same energies that open a hole to the warp and allow them through, also permit them to be forced back relatively easily. It doesn’t even require warp techniques, just good resources and sufficient force. Dath ilan does not do this.

In their defense, consider this; the ways life could form and exist are myriad and strange, even under their old understanding of the universe. With access to economagic of unknown capabilities, that number expands still further. There are all kinds of possibilities for how a first contact could be conducted. They aren’t even sure that something is wrong with the contacter, though their intuitions (and the prediction markets, once they catch up) suggest the answer is yes. Perhaps this change is voluntary, or temporary, or regrettable but accidental damage from economicmagic used on an unfamiliar pattern of biology. More than this, however, dath ilan really does not want to be the cause of a first contact going wrong, to misunderstand a hand reached out in good faith and respond with violence and betrayal. The economagic-sensitive-broadcaster endorsed this, as well; they knew there was a chance of their death, even true death, and agreed it was worth trying and doing right anyway. They prepared the ability to use violence, in case they really needed it, but it’s primary dealers are not currently in the room with them (Also, incidentally, ideally protecting them from many categories of infohazard).

In warhammer 40k, this is not the correct response to daemons, so much so that even societies as blinkered as the Imperium would consider it to be only the act of the exceptionally foolish and Magnus, a distinction which still currently remains in spite of arguments that these are one and the same category. But being along your way is not magic, even when it seems to allow its users to do the impossible. Even high ranking keepers will make mistakes on incomplete information. 

“In the name of Civilization and the Light, greetings on behalf of dath ilan.”

They are also doing standard first contact communication from general principles, starting with sounding out primes, but between the economicmagic and the causal connection to a dath ilani, it’s worth a try to just communicate directly.

The daemon’s appearance is, if anything, more distracting than it would be on Earth, or any successor civilization thereof. Dath Ilani go around with face blinders to limit the stimuli caused by some appearances, and are very vulnerable to the hedonistic treadmill. Still, the idea that aliens would try and appear pleasant to them was in fact very obvious, and some steps were taken to mitigate the effects. People in first contact select somewhat for being less effected by this, and have been exposed to significantly higher steps on this ladder than your standard dath ilani. To aid further, they are trained in a variety of keeper techniques, which were recently augmented by additional training in the last week. At the point they stopped, it was predicted that increasing the estimated effectiveness of their efforts by 20% would require 5 times the budget. 

Dath ilan would dismiss the suggestion that this constitutes actual security, but to someone expecting the imperium, this is like heading to a fence gate and discovering a solid door with a padlock and deadbolt. A daemon can break such a door pretty easily if they tried, but if you give it a halfhearted kick expecting the whole structure to come falling down it might be mildly embarrassing.

This about daemonettes: They are, by their nature, very perceptive, and have an innate ability to read the deep hidden desires of anyone around them, as well as enough innate telepathy to speak and understand what they are told without actually knowing the language in which they are told it.

Yslivianne immediately notices that the room she's in is nothing like what you'd usually expect from the humans: no visible technological contraptions, no dirt or mold AT ALL, no gold or steel, no skulls, no posh inscriptions in High Gothic or grafitti in Low Gothic... No visible weapons anywhere either.

When she feels out the secret desires of people around, she becomes increasingly confused. These people want weird and convoluted and almost non-humanlike things! In fact, all they think and say is full of weird convoluted almost non-humanlike things!

When this priest guy have said "Civilization" and "Light", a torrent of unfamiliar concepts and numbers materialized in Yslivianne's head through telepathy - instinctively graspable, but way too much to untangle. His other words are simpler, but still terribly convoluted. These people's desires and language make her head hurt.

Normally, it's the Daemonettes who torture people through excessive intricacy!

(That "Light" thing actually sounds vaguely Slaaneshi! That should be interesting, but Yslivianne is kinda overwhelmed.)

By the way, none of the annoying presence of Anathema anywhere - neither in the place nor in anyone's minds. A relief, but...

It's becoming clear that these people have nothing to do with the humanity as Yslivianne knows it. From a strategic standpoint, this is an excellent reason to slow down, go with the flow, and try to orient.

This about daemonettes: They are MADE OF HORNY. Quite literally. They are VERY VERY HORNY, and that is their default state and, usually, dominant emotion. Thirst is their life. 

Of course, they are capable of doing a whole host of things other than acting on their horniness. Within their vast ranks, there are gardeners, sculptors, soldiers, deep-cover infiltrators, therapists (being written as one word isn't a typo), and even genuine diplomats specifically trained in such complicated skills as "not seducing or corrupting people who you are trying to negotiate with".

But even then, HORNY is still their fundamental nature. 

This daemonette is not from any of the categories listed, and moreover, in the overall confusion, she is falling back to that default state, that fundamental nature. Strategy? Yeah, about that...

Other people are thinking her looks and aura are... really distracting? Not distracting enough, if you ask her! These people should get more distracted, fast!

The daemon (technically still just a possessed mutated human) yawns seductively, and whispers, as she finishes stretching:

"In the name of Slaanesh, the Prince of Pleasure, greetings on behalf of Chaos, my dear. Now, come closer, will you? I want to explain what that means in more detail..."

(The words are kind of a mental assault. Everyone present now feels a desperate sexual desire towards Yslivianne, and everyone without full control over their reflexes is instinctively drawn forward by unconscious motions of their legs.)

Yeah, that's gonna go through.

Sexual contact is not the most likely form for alien communication to take. It's not even in the top 3. But it's very simple, conceptually speaking, especially when considered alongside the broader category of  "positive sum coordination paired with positive sensorium." Even dath ilan, who takes great deontological care to not engage in social actions analogous to politeness, wouldn't ask aliens to do diplomacy in uncomfortable chairs or rooms to conduct diplomacy if they could help it. Aside from the potential to interfere with coming to mutually beneficial agreements, it would just be plain embarrassing to fail that badly.

Much of the hiring preparations took the form of hiring really good computer programmers, linguists, cryptographers and mathematicians, as well as engineers to rapidly produce anything that became suddenly needed. But some of them went to preparing for this sort of possibility, and at their core is a group of keeper sex workers with smaller (and varied) disgust windows from the typical dath ilani, as well as the ability to modify themselves further. They have extensive training in biology, speculative xenobiology, dexterity, and dozens of other skills designed to be able to facilitate communications of this sort as needed. To support them is a broader crowd of dath ilani with more specific divergent tastes or general acceptances that it was inconvenient to source in numbers from only the population of keepers. It was their services dath ilan was primarily advertising in its prior broadcasts offering sex. They are also, of course, very good at almost every kind of sex actually practiced by dath ilani.

Jacem is not one of those specialists, and neither is his companion. However, he is still a keeper and a member of a first contact team, which involves a certain baseline level of competence. Also helpful, of course, is that the daemonette is roughly human in appearance, and an exceptionally pretty one at that. He still has some control over himself, but even on reflection this wouldn't necessarily be the wrong course of action in a general first contact situation, and with her economicmagic attraction strengthening his libido and weakening his self reflection (and the meta self reflection to correct it), he complies, and notices his companion does as well.

Security, on the other hand, is a ways off, viewing the entire scene through a filter and strongly selected for self control even among keepers. They still feel the effect, but in a way that triggers their internal alarm scripts, and they press a button to alert exception handling. 3 keep their full focus on the situation, while the fourth makes a longer report; they'll swap out, one at a time, to do the same.

They don't pull the trigger, though, not even on nonlethal attacks. Survival mode or not, mental effect or not, mysterious circumstances or not, dath ilan really doesn't want to be the one to initiate conflict in a first contact scenario, nor to be the kind of entity there's any doubt about your ability to approach in good faith. Not being idiots, however, the other first contact attempts are paused, the base moved to a higher level of lockdown, and a prediction market on how to deal with contact turning fully hostile gains liquidity.

Hey, the strategy of being aggressively horny at people worked, as it always have in the past! There's no reason not to continue doing that!

This planet will make such a pretty Daemon World!

The people dragged in experience the best sex in their life, by far. They also experience runes of Slaanesh being drawn on them, and hear utterly blissful singing, and absolutely caressing whispers. They experience a presence of some Huge being - a being very pleased with their efforts around running the henodic treadmills, but very eager for them to go further, and further still. Somehow, it feels like a good idea to revere it, like the people of Old revered their false idols. These people are gonna have interesting dreams in the future, and maybe some interesting mutations.

But, of course... pure pleasure is good, very good, don't get Yslivianne wrong, but it's kinda sickly sweet - as most other daemonettes would readily agree. It's gotta have that element of suffering, to balance the flavor. And maybe some artistically satisfying death in the end.

So, at some point, without bothering to ask, she starts to spice up the experience, at the expense of one of them, at first. To the people involved in this act, in the heat of the moment, it will somehow seem like a good idea.

Pained screams mix in with the moans.

In a badly designed system, this would be where you throw an exception. Badly designed by dath ilani systems, that is; if this were a project run by the imperium, it would never have gotten this far without failing catastrophically along lines dath ilan values even if it decided to try and save them in the first place, but if by some miracle it had not, this would be when you flipped a coin between security standing around doing nothing and opening fire with their guns. 

In the actual project, there is no need for either. The security themselves are both qualified for their actual jobs and for exception handling, and because dath ilan believes in actually succeeding at difficult tasks there is a line of exception handling for them anyway. Expert advice and experts are tabulated and come to the conclusion that there is still enough probability mass on this not being intended as an attack on civilization to be worth preserving when weighed against worldlines in which that hypothesis is accurate. With references to the prediction markets, they determine the most value preserving option is to send in a specialized team of first contact sex workers, with additional selection criteria of being skilled at dealing with human bodies, masochism or pain ambivalence, and ability to focus and communicate during periods of high sensory input, to distract the alien and attempt to advance the first contact scenario along dath ilan’s intended lines. Meanwhile, another team with sensory blockers, no headache susceptibility, and good self control are sent to retrieve Jacem and his fellow, for treatment, recovery, and ideally debrief. The expected success rate for this maneuver is hovering at about 70%, based on how the alien seemed to react to Jacem employing their own more limited arsenal and their rate of adapting to different stimulations; conditional on it failing, it is also expected (60%) to allow for a significantly more precise gauging of Yslivianne‘s intentions and plausibly (45%) not seriously cost them in negotiations. Armed security will enter the room with them equipped with non lethal weaponry, to guard against the negative tail of the outcomes bell curve. They have lethal force ready and available, but even if it turns hostile nonlethal is judged more value preserving if feasible.

3 such sex workers is judged to be the ideal tradeoff point between increased odds of success and costs of failure, when accounting for the diminishing marginal utility. They bring with them sex toys, specialized cuddleroom cushions, and a handful of other quality of life advantages dath ilan considers standard.

It’s unlikely to be a new situation for someone to try and distract a daemonette like this. Less likely to be typical is for them to be actually good at it, even beyond the relatively impressive repertoire used by Jacem, nor for them to have equipment worthy of the name. Outside of Slaaneshi and Dark Eldar, it’s quite rare for any society  to even consider this a domain you can try to be societally good at, much less put effort into actually succeeding; among those civilizations that do not demonize sec work, there is a disturbing lack of engineering know-how and effort spent on optimization of the experience. 

In comparison, the team here to retrieve Jacem and his cohort are much easier to miss!

Uhh. These people sure don't know what they want, do they? Are we fighting, or are we being willingly corrupted? Or... do I get to choose?

Obviously, I'm choosing corrupting the willing! I'm not some Khornate brickhead! I'll trade weirdo nerds for "sex workers" any day!

And hey, these "sex workers" are already almost there! Just a slight push here... a light touch there... a few good old Chaos runes... and here we have it! These people are now thoroughly playthings of Slaanesh, as is good and proper! That has to be celebrated!

Yslivianne kisses one of the "sex workers" deeply, and her soul departs into the Dark Prince's Realm, to experience interesting mindstates for the rest of eternity (?). The other two start to enthusiastically tear her apart, with the intention of feasting on her meat, which Yslivianne will also join.

I mean, these three people obviously came here for some good ol' debauchery. They brought torture toys and everything!

It wouldn't make any sense to get upset by a little mutilation now, would it? Hell, no one have even reprimanded me for eating the summoner!

Yeah, no.

Subtlety is abandoned. A magnetic grapple is fired at the sex workers, clipping onto a matching magnet on their back  and dragging them away. The rescue of the original contactees doesn’t have quite the same elegance, but they’re also not surrounded. Both attempts have the potential to cause some injuries, but leaving them there will cause more and also likely other negative effects. Simultaneously, a net covers Yslivianne and then magnetically locks against the floor, before tightening to reduce the room to struggle. They have tazers and gas, but there’s no need to take risks with electricity or potentially do experimental xenobiochemistry on the spot if kinetic force and mechanical engineering will do the trick. The net is made of woven strands of carbon fiber and armored against cutting by a layer of titanium alloy, and are immediately followed up with by further restraints. 

An observer might call the timing and aim of the shots inhuman, but a dath ilan would tell them they could do it too, if they tried hard enough. It’s not like it’s that hard to redevelop the athletic principles and engineering required from a standing start, after all.

The exits to the outside world have been thoroughly sealed for a while now, but once the non security personell are evacuated to a section of the cordoned off area for emergency treatment, that section will seal off too. 

The security are chose for their competance, experience dealing with info hazards, mental discipline, and lack of any headaches or other mental economagic responses. These requirements are rated at dath ilan’s standards, but even then when considering keepers that’s still a much larger recruitment population than you might think.

Even among this group, armed as they are with equipment designed to limit their inflow of sensory data and keeping their distance, they aren’t unaffected by the aura, just able to work through it. It’s this very downside, however, that reveals a useful - if worrying - data point. As long as they are in combat, the strength of the attraction diminishes; not a lot, but noticable, when you track your mental state as much as keepers do. Dath ilani are not idiots and do not uncritically accepting of this as true, much less a positive, but it’s added to their models and as an emergency measure, to be tested when a safer way is found at a future date. The effect is lesser, but still noticeable now that they know what to look for, when they go from direct combat to ready position with an eye out for responses.

“Dath ilan does not appreciate harm to our diplomats, nor mental interference with the execution of our duties. Cease, and this need not get worse for you.”

AHHHHH WHY YOU BROUGHT TORTURE TOYS AND EVERYTHING

Screw it. She've had a good time, she have thoroughly doomed this warp-naive planet, these people are CONFUSING and this net is HOLDING HER and THE SEX IS OVER and you know what?

Her work here is done. Done, she says!

"Yeah, I really don't get you guys. You do whatever. Maybe that Light thing'll be good for ya. Toodles!"

And Yslivianne leaves for Warp, as her body dissolves into an organic mess.

This could have been worse. Nobody says that, of course, even though in dath ilan that particular story trope is far less common, but the thought is there. There is a reason most alien invasion rehearsals aren’t reslistic, and it’s that they’re too depressing. Sure, this was in some regards an almost ideal situation, with only one alien coming into a location already under surveillance by armed keepers, but for some possible aliens - especially economicmagic aliens - that would be enough to destroy dath ilan. That’s not to take away from the tragic loss of at least two and possibly as many as 4 lives, but it was a risk they knew they were taking just by attempting this. Some heads will roll on the markets that’s in retrospect, somewhat underrated the danger, but with the numbers they had to work with the plan was reasonable even in the post mortem.

The victims, once it is determined they are unlikely to make any kind of recovery and have no useful tactical information they are able to convey (in dath ilan with keepers, this is a very swift process indeed, especially considering the state they’re in) they are prepped from onsite cryogenics. They’re significantly less confident than usual that they will be able to wake them up in the future, but unbounded artificial intelligence and economicmagic are both unknown unknowns when it comes to capabilities. It’s not pointless, not like the former person now forming a twisted ball of ex-flesh under the net.

Of course, just because it seems over doesn’t mean they come out of lockdown or the base goes off alert, just that they undergo screening questions to assess the effect of the mental attack and exhaustively record their experiences and impressions for analysis. Others within the cordoned off region set up the instruments for remote examination of the remains of the person, in case there is anything to be learned from it without getting any closer. Everyone who entered the room undergoes a thorough decontamination to cover the relatively long odds there is material cause, and everyone even near it is to undergo thorough surveillance during the waiting period. The reports will undergo infohazard screening by an entirely unrelated group of keepers before a limited dissemination occurs.

Across dath ilan, an advisory of potentially hostile aliens is put out. Dath ilan’s population can be expected to react reliably intelligently to that, as well as details of how to detect their intrusion or mitigate the effects. The specific methodology employed in the effort to reach out that cumulated in this is also banned, covered incidentally in a set of broader rules on economagic experimentation that happens to include this and a few other strategies with plausibly similar results. It’s not that they expect sharing how they did it would lead to a copycat among their population in a less secured area, but why trust what you can cheaply verify? Devices are prototyped with the aim of detecting the physiological changes associated with the mental effect; both false positives and negatives are epxlexted, especially considering their theories on other categories of mental influence, but they will be noticeably better than nothing when used intelligently and centrally tracked. Militarily, dath ilan is already on alert and there are serious costs to increasing readiness too much higher for too long, but preparations are made for responding to potential incursions or arrival via an alternate method of more aliens similar to the one they encountered. Training of citizens in those keeper techniques that proved most effective is prioritized, especially those in the military, governance, exception handling, and logistics. Surveillance of everyone who experienced headaches continues, with a somewhat different list of things to primarily look out for.

Well, with the echoes of the call dispersing relatively far in Warp, and a survivor returning to tell the tale, the Immaterium around dath ilan is soon going to get filled with a lot of daemons of all four kins lusting for it and spying on it and seeping into the dreams and fantasies of people. Eventually, it's location is going to make it to the Chaos Space Marine legions, Chaos cults in the Imperium and Chaos sorcerors, and from there, to who knows where.

Though recognized as weird and curious, the sheer importance of this world is largely lost on the daemons, except for the Greater Daemons of Tzeentch, who, being made of planning, aren't babblemouths.

This about the daemons of Tzeentch: They come in two categories. The first one are the lesser demons - who embody the more direct and physical aspects of Change and Pursuit. Though great at throwing combat magic around and turning things into different things, as well as being utilized as power sources and tools, they are barely stable, obsessed, insane, and rather freaking dumb. Not someone you'd want to trust negotiations to.

The greater daemons and daemon princes of Tzeentch, meanwhile, embody the mental side of Tzeentch, the conscious organization of Change through Knowledge. If the minor demons are insane fools, the greater daemons and daemon princes are insane geniuses. And their insanity is always uncontrollably contagious.

For that is how most of the Galaxy percieves - and uses - knowledge.

Which, of course, means that the greater Tzeentchian deamons are also terrible diplomats when sent towards unprepared people.

(And Tzeentch himself is a perfect diplomat, of course, but he can't just go manifest in realspace willy-nilly!)

Usually, genuine negotiations of his faction with unprepared people would be conducted by his sorcerors.

What a lucky, lucky coincidence it was, that there weren't any Tzeentchian daemons around during the first contact. The God of Planning cannot just go ahead and leave such a terrible first impression on those wonderful, wonderful newcomers.

And if the forces of Slaanesh, the God second most aligned to dath ilan, get to embarass themselves... well that's just so unfortunate.

There may eventually come a moment where the Father of Lies and Deception will need to lay his mind bare before the very clever people of dath ilan. Tzeentch considers erasing this plot from His memory - as would be trivial for the Lord of Change - but decides against it. This wasn't much of a transgression, and He cannot adopt this sort of deception as a policy - those with excellent grasp of probability would piece it together.

He'll be patient. He is patience himself.

And when the time comes, He will welcome His wayward children with open arms...

The information of the new planet seeps to other Gods, and, though they only expend miniscule amounts of attention on it, they have their reactions.

That concept of "ill-advised" really is quite pathetic!

Yslivianne have gracelessly screwed up, and I didn't feel an impulse to be merciful at the moment, so she is no more.

But it seems like the cuties are on the right track, what with their Light doctrine and sex workers and all. And they didn't even destroy my new playthings! Freezing them? That's isn't quite going to do it, dearies.

Come to me, little planet, I have the most QALYs. SO MANY QALYS. YOU KNOW YOU WANT TO.

THIS PLANET MAKES KHORNE DISPLEASED.

THEY ARE.

A BUNCH OF.

WUSSES!!!!!!!!!!!!!

These people are... really trying too... hard. Should... chill. I should send them some... gifts sometime to... calm them down...

Husband, I don't think that’ll work.

These people won't become chill even if all but the last of their kind succumb to your, ah, gifts. I can sense it.

(If Isha wasn't held as a half-prisoner half-refugee, she would back dath ilan so, so much.)

Eh... whatever... 

Some time later...

...and the relic was recently recovered by the Blood Ravens. And that's the interesting thing #1391 since the last time.

Okay... moving on to #1392. A human-populated, non-Imperium planet named dath ilan have appeared in coordinates such-and-such seemingly out of nowhere. Being ignorant of Warp, they have summoned a daemonette and successfully rebuked it. They are REALLY aligned with me, more than almost any Imperial world, impossible to miss when noted. Weird.

Interesting thing #1393... The Cleaved have designed a new bioweapon, specialized for...

Many thanks to you, my dear.

And, you know? With remote destinies shifting wildly, who knows, maybe our cause isn't as hopeless as we have thought! We may yet to have the last laugh! So stay strong, and under no circumstances give up!

Ha-ha. As if you could do a thing directly contrary to yoour portfolio...

Well, I'll be off. There's much to rehearse...

Ever wondered how the Black Library stays ahead on the secret Chaos lore?

Well, one of the reasons is, they have an insider with access to Chaos's highest ranks.

(Isha's husband should really know better than to be such a blabbermouth.)

There are other reasons. For example, one of the titles of the Black Library's master is "the keeper of secrets", lowecase. This title have stayed on a high-ranking Slaaneshi messaging list for literal millenia, and the delivery goes through so many secret intermediaries that no one who matters have managed to connect the dots yet.

Cegorach thinks that that is really, really funny.

Day: 16

Well, back to the present, it will be quite a while before Cegorach's Harlequins get their hands to scouting out dath ilan. There simply aren't that many Harlequins to go around, especially on speculatively useful missions.

How's dath ilan spending it's resources? How's it growing? What are it's best current models of the galaxy, of magic, and such? Have they noticed the tempting daemon-induced dreams from the last night?

What's the plan?

EMERGENCY MESSAGE FOR QT

All my internet devices are simultaneously broken. Writing from a random phone of a passerby.

Repairs at best in 10 hours cause night

Cant login into Discord 

Someone tell QT

[This here message is being written by me on an iPad 4 that I did not remember to exist but somehow unearthed, while I am waiting for repairs. Still cannot log into Discord. This post is not crucial to the plot, does not directly follow from previous posts, should not interrupt the narrative, and will probably be moved down and/or changed later.]

[EDIT: Have repaired my phone! This was mercifully fast.]

ON THE GREAT GAME OF THE GODS

It's all really the fault of the Old Ones' and Necrontyr.

Khorne's overall domain is incredibly unappealing. Yes, living sentient things struggle and fight plenty, but nearly universally, they would rather not. And by the time that their civilizations' warp presences become large enough and accumulate enough to start birthing Chaos Gods, normally, this really wouldn't be the focus of their emotions.

Well, in The Galaxy, that did not happen, because the Old Ones were too stingy to share information to save the lives of Necrontyr - which would have cost them nothing - and Necrontyr were too offended to respond to that by anything that's not starting a gigantic and endless and utterly merciless galactic war of mutual extermination.

On the accumulated psychic background created by this war, Khorne, the God of Struggle and Frustration and Conflict, was born, as the very first God. Everything that happens further down is his fault.

Chaos Gods can be fairly described lowercase s superintellegences, but Khorne's s is written in an especially tiny font, and he really isn't a good player in the Great Game. His domain continues to be largely unappealing and narrow. His demons and greater servants represent the least efficient possible approach to combat - kinetic melee weapons. Where the Greater Daemons of other Gods can conquer a typical planet in days while acting alone, a Bloodthirster need months.

His advantage lies in the echoes of sheer slaughter in the ancient war, and more importantly, in being the first mover.

Because after his birth, he had eons without any competition at all to reshape reality to his will, among other things intentionally making the Warp become more hostile for the living overall to intensify struggle, and multiplying the wars between peoples, turning civilizational engines that produce the war machines to grinding halt and decay, producing a low-boiling equilibrium of constant infighting, and driving people to resignation.

Upon this background was born the second God, Nurgle, of Stability and Decay and Acceptance. Do those domains sound naturally very adversarial? Not really. But Khorne was the dominant force in the warp, twisting everything into conflict, and influencing the formation of the new God. This would be a God of enforced acceptance and decay, of hostile stability. Thus, Nurgle's primary method became disease.

Nurgle is far smarter than Khorne, but is also that much less motivated, being of Acceptance. His domain is more attractive in essence, but repulsive in implementation. His main advantage lies in physics. Without taking Warp into account, decay is the easiest thing to cause and foster, and every system wants to reach a stable equilibrium. The energy economy of bacteria, viruses and fungi is far more efficient than the energy economies of slaughter, knowledge-accumulation, or recreation, reliant on complex systems to feed them, on vast arrays of energy collection and communication/regulation lines.

Tzeentch, of Change and Hope and Pursuit, was born in absolute spite of Nurgle and Khorne. Now he, he had no shortage of either motivation or intellect, and he used them to gather even more intellect, and then used that to gather more resources and power and broaden his domains, because if you aren't doing that, what are you even doing? He was an excellent player, and tied the other two Gods combined. However, in a world governed by strife and decay, knowledge already had some awful psychic baggage of associations - of being used for ill, and worse, of being unearthed rather than discovered, and worst of all, an extremely strong association of being a madness, and a very contagious one.

Tzeentch knew full well how terrible that was for him. Secretly, he despised dwelling in a giant transcendent library, and not in a giant workshop or laboratory. To the extent to which Gods and not popular beliefs shape demons, he tried to offload as much of his madness from himself as possible into separate minds - which is why his minor demons are so insanely erratic. Yet, a somewhat mad and erratic God he remained. His dominance was in many ways the golden age - Eldar empire reached a peak of psychic sophistication and Humankind created the most powerful mage to ever walk the land and then comparatively rapidly rose to incredible mastery of technology. But his dominance was a status quo, and He was erratic enough to wish change even to a status quo extremely beneficial for him. He could have subtly prevented the appearance of any new gods, and slowly grow to be able to slay the old ones. Instead, he plotted the Age of Strife, the Fall, and Slaanesh. Just to see what would happen.

With Slaanesh, of Joy and Desire and Art on board, Tzeentch's dominance ended, his scepter of power shattered, him being reduced to about 3/4 of his former power, and now easily outfightable by a coalition of three. Being birthed chiefly from very, ahem, interesting (to Tzeentch, who subtly pushed things to limits) ways to achieve Joy and Are and fulfill Desire, Slaanesh is rightfully widely despised.

Even then, Slaanesh's domains, fundamentally, are very attractive. People sometimes call her a God of Excess, but if you (dare to) ask her, excess implies there being such a thing as too much joy, and that just doesn't make sense. If given a choice between worshipping disease and despair, endless deadly combat, obsessed planning, or whatever makes you happy but less ethical, people overwhelmingly choose the latter. She is impulsive, selfish, sadomasochistic, irrespectiful of life, never bothers to ask, and treats her people quite badly (outside of pumping them full of pleasure), but she still has the most allies both active and passive. Though the newest God with the least time to accumulate power, her natural power accumulation rate is the highest, as al people worship and seek joy to some extent - that's what Joy means.

It's really fucked up that it took that much time for a God of Joy to form, isn't it?

Well. In a different universe with Warp, where Milky Way's first Civilization isn't fucking terrible, and where it doesn't get randomly thrown via a warp storm into a terrible hellhole, the first God to be born would be a God of Light. Of Joy and Desire and Art, but applied in such a way that is in accordance to all the values pursued, at once, for the shared benefit of everyone. Her offspring would perhaps be better called Aengels instead of Daemons, and her seat of power would resemble not a palace but an amusement park, or a festival, or an entertainment virtualspace, or a museum, or a psychic chorus. Other Gods would be born under Her influence. And the first of those would be the God of Progress, of Hope and Change and Pursuit but turned toward constant improvement, living in a cosmic laboratory, not a library. For Progress is a direct derivative of Light, needed to further it's expansion. And then, when civilization will hit a ceiling, when all the possible low-hanging fruit will be picked, perhaps after some other Gods are born as well, will come the God of Harmony, of Stability and Decay and Acceptance, but as stability of good things, and acceptance that there may be a ceiling on them getting better, and a decay of such efforts, residing in a beautifully cultured garden. And then finally, much much later, perhaps near the end of the world's fuel, should that not be averted via Warp, perhaps after Civilization's fall of some or other terrible cause, perhaps just of painfully slow accumulation of emotions, after dozens of other Gods, will come a God of Survival, of Struggle and Frustration and Conflict, against adversarial conditions more than against adversarial people, in a bunker that is a refuge of absolute safety.

Alas, alas, alas.

What does dath ilan learn, from that first contact? More and less than you would expect. More, because they have a theory of evidence that isn't completely superheated ridiculous; even a below average dath ilani understands that what evidence does is allow you to distinguish between different possible ways the world could be and how a given result is more or less likely under one theory or another. Less, because this meant they already knew some of the things this experiment revealed; dath ilan does not need to be hit over the head with a blunt instrument to figure out the obvious.

To gauge what they learned, then, consider the following: what could dath ilan already conclude or hypothesize from what they have seen thus far, what would they suggest as base rates thereof, and which hypotheses predict the outcome most strongly? Start with the obvious: aliens exist. This is vastly overdetermined by the amount of evidence they have so far, with the only competing alternate explanation being a low probability hypothesis of the universe having only alternate timeline humanity very dedicated to trolling. They track other, still more unlikely hypotheses, as well as the overarching category of "everything else," because they are not fools, but between the radio signals, the altered starfeild, and of course the mentally-responsive-economic-magic they've updated a lot in the past few days; also helps that their priors weren't irrational on the subject. Follow that with specifically economicmagic; that ability to use it exists on a spectrum, that it allows long distance FTL information transmission, that it allows for transportation and mental attacks - all of these were either probable or plausible consequences of their earlier experimental results. That aliens that could use this economicmagic more powerfully and skillfully than dath ilan could at its present moment existed was a foregone conclusion, and that the mental techniques of keepers would be insufficient defense likewise. That these aliens differed from civilization was not so much a conclusion of their evidence as an obvious fact, but let's put it there for completeness.

So what updates remain? Obviously some must exist, as dath ilan alters its behavior in the followup, but what, and in what ways?

First, that many aliens exist, rather than one group. Obviously this is technically an update towards (many aliens exist)∪ (aliens wish to convince you many aliens exist), but the solution there is to just track both, not to refuse to update from paranoia. Secondly, that there are a lot of aliens with strong economicmagic abilities, which is obvious both from how Yslivianne acted and also that that was the first response to their contact attempts. Dath ilan's testing strongly suggests that communicating telepathically long distance is a lot easier than transportation, so that that wasn't the first response suggests a few different ways things could be organized. Thirdly, that the aliens are, on an objective scale, not that scary. You might call this naivety, and indeed the galaxy is still worse that they're expecting, but even dath ilan's public prediction markets have always been extremely negative on what would happen in a real alien invasion. The outcome is dark enough that they don't run realistic invasion preparations for fun, even. Among the private prediction tools used by keepers and basement researchers, there's been notable probability that their first encounter with an alien will be an artificial intelligence wiping them out before they know it; not markets, because that would just be tossing away money, but dath ilan is not so married to the concept that they cannot vary their methodology. Compared to that, even the truth of the chaos gods doesn't even rate, and with the demonstration of inter universe travel and ftl, the odds of that happening have dropped immensely; if it were going to, after all, it probably would have already. The fourth realization is that there are probably alien masochists to go with the sadists. You might wonder why this rates, alongside the other conclusions, but dath ilan doesn't consider a potential apocalypse reason to give up on making its people happy. They can prioritize, sure, but what's the point in preserving civilization if it's not worth living in?

They'll realize other things, of course, of lesser impact, and yet more in the days to come. Mapping all the conclusions of days of work by actually competant research team is the kind of thing you can only really do in a few paragraphs that lack serious reference to the underlying mathematics. But even dath ilan hasn't overcome the fundementally tyranny of the human brain's ability to learn and usefully process information, for all their training and selection processes. You can't possibly know everything civilization does, and it would represent a fundamental failure of achievement on their parts if they knew so little you could. Dath ilan aspires to more ambition than that.

All of which is, in some ways, a fancy way of saying dath ilan hasn't given up on first contact attempts yet! But they are varying their methods, to avoid both the previous pitfalls and the other ones implied, including preparing for the possibility they'll end up having to do it the hard way with radios by developing ftl ships. The information leaving the bunker is limited, as a result of their screening protocols, but the message is passed on to increase and alter security at other economicmagic utilization and experimentation sites, as well as engineering requests for improved sensory data filters that interfere less with the operations of security. Infohazardous beauty was bad enough, but it's far from the most dangerous mental effect that could be inflicted on sight.

So what do you do, in a world where all that is true? Well, for starters, you resist the temptation to overly specialize. Dath ilan, for all its intelligence and epistemology, is still fundementally limited, both by the hard cap of the limits of evidence and the soft cap of the limits of a billion human minds. The universe is a very big place, and the multiverse their previous and present location is embedded within yet larger. There is a lot of room for uncertainty there, and with that uncertainty comes the fact that you really should think hard about what tradeoffs you make. An expert biologist might be able to retrain and become a good organic chemist, but this is not without cost; even aside from the loss of their contributions to their previous field and the expense of retraining, the fact remains that they were not previously a chemist for reasons. Furthermore, while it is often easier to retrain from similar fields, that only benefits you so much, as related fields are likely to become more valuable in lockstep for the same reasons. All of which is to say, dath ilan can hardly cut its "generic science" investment and crank out advanced rocketry at 10x the speed, as you might find in a lazy dath ilani 4x game.

However, it would be still more foolish, if you couldn't reprioritize to changing events. Dath ilan actually has some slack built in here, with people, especially the particularly intelligent, subsidized for learning requisites for fields. If there is a 1/100 chance that someone will be able to produce 5 lives worth of expected extra labor hours should circumstances change, it only makes sense to pay them 1/200 of that to prepare themselves and then recoup the losses. Dath ilani venture capitalists are statistically literate; they don't go for wild high value low probability chances that are on the net not worth it, but neither do they shy away from a potential profit just because of risks. If they aren't rich enough to make it up with a wide portfolio, they can purchase an insurance policy against part of their own expected gains, anyway. If your Civilization wasn't capable of reliably rewarding those who took steps to solve problems before they become critical, how could you possibly get anything done without constantly bleeding out money trying to rush lengthy solutions during a crisis? This situation is far out on the tails of what dath ilan expected, so much that they can't just achieve their desired goals by moving around their prepared pieces and incentivizing students, but even just that would create an effect that an unfamiliar observer would consider nothing short of astonishing. In this crisis, they move beyond their elegant mechanisms to less efficient options, supplementing the easy changes in the labor market with incentives for retraining, putting off immediate progress to allow industry veterans to accept well paid tutoring positions, and trading off against general growth and quality of life for progress where the rates are good enough. Dath ilan doesn't like damaging it's economy, even at great need, but in the end that's what it's there for; the economy of dath ilan exists to serve its people, not the other way around.

Where does this re-prioritization go? First, and most obviously, to economicmagic experiments, and the costs thereof. Workers in other fields that move out of their previous job to participate in the experimental economagic setups or slide into the support setups, manning surveillance or on site sex work or logistics or any of the dozen support jobs that work to increase the ability of researchers to do their job. This part has few issues; dath ilan is not so foolish as to refrain from properly compensating such workers for the added efficiency they bring to key projects, and the relative ease of retraining or reprioritizing such labor makes that labor market especially liquid, even at these scales. Alongside this are created vast keeper and venture capitalist organized projects meant to act in series and parallel at exploring and differentiating the magic system they live in from others, or to develop capabilities and increase efficiency along lines previously shown to bear promise. Other shifts act to increase development on rocketry, communications technology, weapons design, and military recruitment; here, the intervention of governance and keepers is far lesser and the task mostly accomplished by economic incentives and prediction market subsidies, where the urgency of the task is not so great as to require an extraordinary and costly effort on the part of dath ilan's planning systems to eke every last bit of performance out. Real alien invasion drills, not just the ones done for fun or hastily put together during the crisis, but the full, depressing reality required for adequate performance in the narrow band of alien invasions where dath ilan's efforts both actually matter and do no trivialize the issue. Ordinarily, you might also see computer design on this list, but dath ilan already possesses computers far in advance of those on the market, and the rate at which it can make more is strictly limited in the near future by delays in specialized equipment like their bleeding edge microchips. Dath ilan also has good reason not to want more advanced computation, either in terms of better existing computers or just more computational power of conventional designs. Some of these concerns have been alleviated by the evidence towards general super-intelligent AI being impossible or somehow stopped, but that doesn't mean they want to roll those dice especially badly, nor that they want to risk any danger with lesser but still incorrigible creations. They're not so dogmatic they won't make any tradeoffs against it, as demonstrated by publication of the basement's existence, but the very serious people of dath ilan are not in the business of giving up against hard to ward off difficulties.

There is also a vast expansion and parralelization of the transportation infrastucture in progress, especially around default. It's not that dath ilan strongly suspects another such storm is imminent and brings similar struggles, nor that they are caught up in yesterday's battles rather than trying to get ahead of the curve, but the fact of the matter is dath ilan really doesn't want to lose that many people again. Even in worlds that doesn't happen, it also remains true that better, more secure logistics lines offer other marginal benefits against a very wide range of potential challenges.

Oh... These people are planning to summon more Slaaneshi demons as part of their experiments. They don't know which way to be cautious in, and therefore they are not going to try. Which just screams "WE ARE YOUR PEOPLE, TZEENTCH", but. But. But they are going to establish trade relations with an actually competent infiltrator daemonette and then the Galaxy will get tiled with soul-orgasmium forever. Which would be really, really boring. Forever.

And if I overtly intervene now, it obviously goes very badly.

Well, then I have to-

Am I really actually doing this? Am I really, actually, really considering to do... this?

The night before the next Contact attempt is scheduled, two of the non-participating people recieve the same dream.

They find themselves in a dark room, unable to move. There's a hooded humanoid figure, that speaks in a strained monotonous voice.

"Greetings. Who am I is not important. Please keep the existence of this message clandestine. Remember it's contents, but do not write it down, think about it excessively, or let it spread to anyone who would be near the contact attempts. Know that [the other dreamer] recieved an identical one.

Dath ilan should exibit more caution. Many things in the economicmagic dimension are both able and willing to eat your utilityfunction whole. Slaanesh the Prince of Pleasure is included, and all pleasure beings answer to her. Aliens in the physical space are less dangerous.

I expect dath ilan to fail to heed this warning.

[The message concludes with a second part of a lattice-based, quantum-computing-proof assymetric cryptographic protocol. The first part can be easily verified to have been used to generate the second; generating the first part from the second takes unfathomable effort.]"

Upon waking up, it's not hard to remember anything, including the ridiculous string of random digits in the end. It's seared into memory.

There are, strictly speaking, a lot more alarming things you can hear in a dream than that, even once you've started to devote serious attention to dreams as shedding meaningful light on the goings on of Reality and thereby judge on factual content rather than primarily their effect on the viewer. This is, however, even more alarming for those on the receiving end up the information, once they compare it to other records. The tsi-imbi line has, of course, been modified at this point. While it adapted remarkably well for how unexpected the circumstances are, it's a poor system design that regularly throws exceptions; when that happens, it means your intake system is fundamentally misaligned from the backend of the system. Instead, the current design prioritizes speed of intake and response, as well as infohazard screening and isolation, and has been made maximally convenient for those sensitive to economagic. The fast line is folded into their ongoing surveillance, but dath ilan does make the vision hotline available for everyone, for obvious reasons. When it gets this input, dath ilan infohazard-screens the information according to the modified protocol and only ever stores it as a fragmented secure hash, taking even higher levels of caution than normal.

A more cautious civilization might listen to this, and refrain from first contact. But while dath ilan values the safety of its constituents, immensely so, and is able to sensibly trade off other priorities to achieve it, the fact of the matter is that the odds are not great on them surviving. Sure, things have calmed down a bit from the economagic storm, but that doesn't change the fact that dath ilan has left the well-understood world with simple predictable physical laws it had thought it had been in and entered one filled with great uncertainty. And while the probability of long term survival does slowly climb with each passing day, there's a lot of space in survival for things to be awful. While the Indian impact may have been one of the worst days in their history, that doesn't say it won't come again in their future, or even worse tragedies, with less warning. A few Δ% survival on a hundred thousand true deaths would be a lot of value even if there was nothing else on the table, and given that there is, higher variance strategies are called for. A more paranoid one might ignore it, and not allow themselves to be so easily manipulated. Who is to say that this warning is true, and not meant to keep them from speaking to those who would be their true allies? Sure, there was the claim of the last first contact, but there's no saying that that was a representative sample, nor even certainty that she was aligned with Slaanesh. They don't even have the confidence to say that Slaanesh is definitely real. The vision itself also gives little additional reason to trust it, either to tell the truth or know what it is talking about. Even with all this taken into account, however,  dath ilan has a saying about preparation and how you shouldn't let the feeling of considering yourself properly paranoid come at the expense of being properly safe. Track the hypothesis, yes, absolutely. Implement enhanced infohazard protocols on the system in general, yes, obviously. And considering the spread of possibilities considered broadly by civilization, continue the first contact. But don't ignore the warning! Dath ilan aspires to far better decision making than that.

They're going to have an ace try the contact this time, though. It was already in the cards before the vision; after, the expected value ticks up above the other options a noticeable amount more.

She's excited about this. Sorting for asexuality, interest, and ability among the small pool of at least moderately economagically powerful keepers is a bit of an ask, but that's hardly the same as not having any. Findas leans a bit more towards the enthusiasm end of the spectrum, but she was barely behind the other top candidates on either of the others and outstripped them here by a lot. She's aware, roughly, of the outcome of the last event, sanitized as it was to remove as many potentially infohazardous details, but just by the law of succession half of all contactable aliens ought to be less hostile than that. According to the markets that have access to information she doesn't need to know, the odds dath ilan is predicting here are actually closer to 65% of it being less dangerous, although there's also a relatively large probability of it being much worse.

She reaches out, the mental gesture more refined than before, with optimism and friendhsip and hope-for-new-positive-sum-trade-partners (a 2 syllable word in baselin, although for the current case you might use a third to specify more precisely).

This would have been so much easier if it was possible to commit a Lord of Change or a Demon Prince clandestinely. But before the first contact it would be a bad diplpmatic move, and at this point, it's not possible.

Well, the caller is practically a priestess of Tzeentch, and from an unusually devoted order to boot. It's time to organize a little revelation.

Change... Change? CHANGE.

Change, transformation, magic, process, fire, socery, change, motion, permutation, mutation, transmutation, transmogrification, change, deformation, reformation, CHANGE, change, flux, power, novelty, wizardry-

"Hey, miss Keeper! Would you like to have a revelation about the true nature of C H A N G E?" 

It would be a bit hard for her to try to answer that question, because she is currently having "a revelation about the true nature of C H A N G E". 

After the kind of a willing "someone, please, please posess me" summoning that dath ilan is performing, saving throws are out of the question. 

The "revelation" doesn't immediately slay Findas. She keeps her memories and skills. But it sure does change her. Now, her deepest desire is to make dath ilan embrace the glory of CHANGE. Except the particulars of this desire are subject to random fluctuation, from "cold-heartedly plan for dath ilani culture to embrace everyone randomly changing their goals and summoning demons like this one" to "throw a bolt of warpfire into the first person she encounters and gleefully watch as they get turned into a tentacled mess of frozen solid or whatever". Goal preservation isn't a thing any of her possible sets of goals include now. 

She now has access to sorcerous powers. It works through sheer instinct, and especially effective when it's being used to BRING FORTH RANDOM CHANGE. She now also has access to an entire library of memories of forbidden lore, but zero organiwig-dy goVoltaccess to the mind of a demohuthinig with Jr, but its a horrible incompl , and a mind of a Pink Horror inside her, which she will now adore as a thing of absolute beauty but will be unable to do anything useful with it.

Her body is slowly mutating into a part-Pink-Horror.

Currently, she is in a "coldly calculating" state. This may change in 5 or so minutes.

There is a saying in dath ilan that you have 2.5 seconds to kill the corrupted keeper. This is not literally true, of course, not in most situations - and definitely not under the supervision of other, higher ranked and better armed  keepers in a situation where a high prior is placed on corruption. It’s difficult to actually secure a keeper, but dath ilan has ever needed to do it before and put time into figuring out how to do it right.

Unfortunately, for all the phrase is not literally true, it’s also not wholly wrong.

Baseline does not have a compact concept corresponding to Change. The literal word for change itself has vastly different connotations, and the other chief possibility, Chaos, is a far broader concept of which Change is an imperfect subset. If the being that was once Findas wanted to explain it to her fellow keepers with words, it would be something like naturalcategory-metaunstable-chaotic-timedependent-illconditoned-utiltilityfunction; a ten syllable monstrosity that would still fail to capture much of the nuance. For all the effort dath ilan has put into a exploring and mapping concept space, this memeplex is not exactly one they were expecting. It’s also not the kind of value dath ilan would have an easy time maximizing even if it tried, and goes against much of what they stand for. Were it otherwise, perhaps even this entity would try to cooperate, for despite the sandblaster taken to her decision theory and utility function, the inefficiency of conflict and the desire to do “something else which is not that” run deep enough that even this shattered shell carries with it a remnant. As things stand, such a deal is impossible.

Being a keeper strongly selects for being bright, even by dath ilan’s standards, and the keeper training allows them to work yet faster and run independent processes in parallel. Not all keepers learn to do so, but Findas was one of them, and even though by all rights the psychic damage taken ought to have rendered those constructs nonfunctional they somehow persist. Even as Findas? begins their act, there is a part of them examining their surroundings, tracking the obstacles in their way. They were of course not told what the security measures were ahead of time, and significant effort was put in to disguise them, but that’s only a partial protection. Some methods of security will obviously be used despite their obviousness, where performance ranks surprise on risk of concerns, while others can be inferred by subtle details of the room or taking a perspective of ignorance and considering what Findas would have done to secure it. Marksmen with full coverage of the room and their own isolated and secured locations, redundant full spectrum camera systems, pipes that rapidly disperse pressurized gas, vacuum-seal steel bulkheads half a yard thick, reinforced flooring and ceilings… as the newly fledged cultist performs their assessment, the warp flows in, whispering to them of secret knowledge and providing inconsistent extrasensory perception.

There's no hiding that the summoning did something, even if dath ilan doesn't know enough to fully differentiate summoning from telepathic contacts, but that doesn't mean what actually happened is clear. Findas may be gone, but what's left is still sane enough to realize her colleagues won't go along with this willingly, and annoyingly disabling the defenses will take some time to set up. Thus to buy that minute, the obvious step is to fake a friendly encounter; if she had the patience to wait, she could perhaps even fully make it out that way, but there's no need for that when Chaos will answer her prayers.

"Successful first contact established, code 17-135. Preliminary result seems friendly, although unused to interacting with humans; I have a mild headache. Claims some sort of connection to conceptual-curiosity and diversity-freedom; my initial assessment is that they telling the truth, and in contact I had a difficult to categorize impression of their mind that echoed this concept. It claims to be willing to trade knowledge for knowledge, including how to teach our economagic users, 'psykers,' more ways to utilize economagic, which it calls 'the Warp.' Capabilities estimate: FTL information reception:  ~1y/~0n, FTL causal transmission: 0.99y/0.01n. It seems less confident in its understanding of physical matter as it relates to transporting material objects, but it definitely does not interact with space in the same way relativity suggests when communicating."

“Acknowledged. What is the latency of transmission,  and are there any additional time sensitive emergencies?”

It’s not that they expect the answer to be yes; Findas is a keeper and extensively trained for this in specific besides. If she knew of one she would obviously mention it in her initial report, and it is incredibly unlikely she would fail to ask, but Keepers in particular are not in the habit of trusting what they can cheaply verify.

There is a time sensitive emergency, of course, but she’s hardly going to tell them that.

“Negative. Latency appears limited on my end, probability 97% that they have information processing significantly outside the range of dath ilani values.”

”Initial priorities are as follows:

1. Any remains from the initial alien contact, or items interacted with, are potentially memetic vectors. Extension of quarantine period and monitoring suggested.

2. Bring me materials, priority written media, from the 7th alien contact passage to pay for initial deals.

3. Transition to a direct sound based line of communication. Encrypted digital lines are apparently reasonably resistant to information-collection-economagic but we don’t need another attack surface here.”

In a less well prepared system, that would result in an opening. Even with an airlock system, fetching those items and delivering them to the isolated first contact chamber would be a weakening of the defenses. Dath ilan saw… not precisely this eventuality, but things close enough to it, that those weaknesses do not exist. Even while allowing the inflow of items, the secure item transportation system is better protected than the walls themselves. Likewise with the sound transmission; rather than open a way in or worse yet use a person, there is a built in equipment to transfer sound within out without ever changing them from vibrations. Moreover, if something had actually suborned Findas to that degree, dath ilan is under no illusions of its ability to have all three of potentially viable first contact, haste, and actual security. They’re also, to be frank, requests of a category that the prediction markets actually have enough probability mass that you could actually start to call it expected.

”Approved.”

And that is all she needs. Contact would be ideal, for affecting people who’s identity she doesn’t know, but she’s a member of their organization with a direct line to them from who they have just accepted an offer of communication. Sorcery blossoms, ensnaring the minds of those keepers observing her and all their fellows on the other end of the line. Between their mental defenses and the haste with which she had to put this spell together, there’s only so much she can force through the connection, especially if she wants to get as many as possible. It’s not even enough to do permanent psychic damage - even the hardest hit won’t be out for more than half an hour, and some will shrug it off in mere minutes.

Warpfire blossoms at her fingertips, and she attacks the door. 

A gunshot rings out. Two of the security are not keepers, and with their lack of audio input are spared anything more than dizzyness. The bullets outpaces its own sound, targeting the center of mass. They don’t want to destroy her head, but they do need her down and out now before she breaches containment. The second security takes a moment longer to shake it off, but his fire joins in.

She reacts before the first bullet impacts, one hand coming up to block the impacts. Economagic precognitive keeper or no, however, there are limits to physical ability. The first one hits before she can react, and the second one cracks the still solidifying shield. The rest are deflected, however, and one bullet hole is not enough to but down a daemonhost.  She speaks a syllable in a language unknown to dath ilan and both go up in the strange green flames she used to attack the door. They die on the spot.

She returns to the door and finishes melting her way through, her progress somewhat slower for having to maintain a shield. She can keep two seperate lines of thought running to support both at the same time but that’s not without performance costs. When she steps through into the next room, she stops to turn one of the unconscious security there into mass of twisted flesh, then combines 3 more into a grotesque three headed chimera. Some part of her that remains protests this decision making process, but the rest exults in the glorious Change.

Not every keeper was observing Findas, obviously, nor in the room with those who were. Some of these were observing the observers from a distance and trigger the alarms, putting the structure on lockdown and sealing what doors remain open. Others, merely separated by adjoining rooms, take a moment to determine the effect is ongoing before taking up the consoles.

Knockout gas is released in large quantities, and as she transmutes that into some iridescent substance the fire suppression systems kick in, covering the activation of several taser turrets. She blocks the attacks and destroys the launchers, but each takes time, especially when she stops to warp one of them into targeting the downed keepers. The next doorway folds more easily to her economagic, but she immediately finds herself assailed by flash bangs and liquid nitrogen. It’s a sorry excuse for actual security, but mostly they were relying on actual people for that and considered it ill advised to put a lesser creation to the task, especially one that would involve harming people who looked just like them. Dath ilan is not without its hubris, but even Earth would see the problem there.

None of these are unexpected, but they’re still delightful. The way they mix things up is only a pale, broken shadow of the real Change, but that’s okay. She can fix it.

Some of the security start to get back up; they’re disoriented, but the woman juggling green fire and laughing maniacally that the automated security is trying and failing to deal with is a good bet.

Keepers are dangerous even unarmed, and with the best personal weaponry and equipment dath ilan has to offer that’s even more true. Against a real corrupted keeper with this kind of power, that might not be enough, and the nuclear bombs are primed in case of such an eventuality. Luckily for them, whatever is wearing Findas’ skin is distractible, and getting more so by the minute. Even with that handicap and the fight taking place entirely on prepared ground of their choosing, the fight is uncomfortably difficult, especially when she comes into lucidity and starts flinging around illusions and memetic attacks. 

In one of her more unhinged moments, two keepers close the range to capture the rest of her attention. She turns the first inside out, but is then hit with a barrage of anti-tank weaponry. Her remaining opponent took advantage of the change in priorities to detonate his own explosives at point blank range, costing her an arm and her ability to maintain the shield. Without her brain, the sorcery she was maintain comes apart, but it’s effects do not vanish. There are a great many grievously injured or dead, and the base is in no state for further experiments. 

Ordinarily, that would just mean a move to the next best such facility, but even this one proved frankly inadequate for the task. A new build is already in progress, but changes are made to the specifications.

It takes longer than they might hope to get around to performing an autopsy. There are people to treat and freeze, abominations to deliver mercy kills, and of course making sure she’s actually safe to approach. The physical changes to her brain are not exactly mappable, given that their end result is splattered on the floor, but the rest of the body still shows a lot about the effects of her abilities. When they get around to cutting into her, they quickly find the alien growth within her chest cavity, and from the age of its cells are able to make a decent guess on when it came about. Even with the infohazard limitations on the prediction market limiting its functionality, there’s an obvious hypothesis to be made, and course of action it suggests. (Un?)fortunately, that will have to wait a bit for proper preparations to complete.

Their next most promising line of investigation is radio transmissions. Dath ilan’s current best guess is that whatever civilizations these come from, radio is not a major method of informational transfer. After all, the volume of messages and power of transmission are incredibly low, far from sufficient to support an interstellar civilization. This in turn puts lower bounds on how easy and capable economagic transmissions are. It’s simply a matter of necessity; what kind of interstellar Civilization could possibly survive at the implied level of dysfunctionality?

(Well, hopefully, this amount of warning is enough to get them to stop doing things so stupid even most Word Bearers don't go for them. Hopefully, when the trick will be revealed, dath ilan will understand that the murders and devastation committed - in a much smaller scale than they could have been - were in fact a massive act of service.)

Anyway.

What kind of interstellar Civilization could possibly survive at the implied level of dysfunctionality?

It's funny that you ask...

It is the 41st Millenium.

The slowly but surely collapsing Imperium of Man remains the dominant power of the Galaxy.

It is a galaxy-spanning confederation of a million worlds bound together by shared genetics, psychology, infrastructure, and faith.

It is a rotting corpse of what was once intended to be a temporary hacked-together tool for starting Mankind's ascension. It is a malfunctioning machine that runs on blood, sweat, tears and it's own parts. Eternally besieged from all sides, war is it's sole objective, and ammunition, wreckage and corpses are it's main, and nearly only, exports. It is the cruelest, most bloody, most fanatical regime imaginable. And worst of all, it is so largely not on a whim or by coincidence but due to grim necessity.

For a single Chaos cult or rogue psyker can bring a planet to it's knees. For a single spore of the Greenskins or Tyranids can consign it to centuries of war. For a human isn't a natural-born immortal mage, nor a natural-born supersoldier, nor a cyborg designed by a minor god and a superadvanced civilization, nor a bioengineered weapon. A human does not understand the technology or sorcery their kind uses or even the organization they all partake in.

What do they have? How have they held on to their legacy for ten thousand years?

Grit. Determination. Conviction. Faith. Zeal. Obsession. Fanaticism. Outright fucking insanity. And balls of steel.

Can't forget the balls of steel.

In a universe with Warp, those things do actually work, to a noteworthy extent.

And the ancient legacy, of course, has it's own merit. To this day, in the Warp near the Holy Terra, the monument to everything Human stands tall, boldly and audaciously, illuminating the Warp of the entire galaxy, far outshining the dens of the Four and the Eye of Terror,

and, in fact, visible even from the nearby other galaxies!

That is the Astronomican, the great Beacon necessary for navigation of all human spaceships. It is an amplified manifestation of the soul of the Emperor of Mankind, who is kept at the very brink of death by His life support machine, the Golden Throne. For thousands of years, always under continuois extreme pain, He continues His mission. In addition, He wards off the tears in Warp around Terra made by an unfortunate communications accident millenia ago. And, by the will and belief of His people, His soul is a sole beacon of hope and protection for the souls His faithful, and a nexus of His influence and miracles across all of the Galaxy.

For Astronomican to keep working, and for the Emperor to stay living, a thousand souls die every day. In the Chamber of Astronomican under the Himalayan mountains on Holy Terra, a whole town of psykers chosen from across all of Imperium sings in a psychic choir. In a process that imparts more pain into a human than a whole city of professional torturers would struggle to generate in equivalent time, the souls of the psykers Chosen for sacrifice are slowly disintegrated, with their memories, emotions, and capacities slowly stripped one by one, until the whole of their soul is completely devoured and transformed into raw power.

And if this sacrifice was ever to stop, the Astronomican would shut down, the Emperor would die, Terra would be consumed by a daemon invasion, and the Imperium would violently and painfully collapse.

The man at the center of it all, he who called himself the Emperor of Mankind, is largely unaware of, well, anything. His consciousness is consumed by cyclopean amounts of pain and entirely centered around forcing himself to keep going. His mind is in complete disarray, everything not crucial to maintaining the Light and the Barrier and to shielding his own integrity is ignored. His attention would be splintered across millions of things demanding it, but He have long since ran out of attention to spare. He is the locus of miracles for the faithful, be he is so only on reflex, unaware even of the fact of the worship of himself. The world is a blur for him, the life is unending painful drudgery of entiely ceaseless labor.

The genetically and cybernetically augumented shock troopers once intended to be the spearhead of the Emperor's conquest, Space Marines, are now reduced to small isolated independent monastic orders.

The technology once understood by ingenious human deisgners is now replicated through blind procedure by Adeptus Mechanicus, a religious order (and to some extent a state within a state) worshipping machinery where invention is heresy and secrecy is a norm, and much of Imperium exists on medieval levels of technology.

The Inquisition consists of mostly independently acting individuals with nigh-unlimited authority vested into them by no one in particular. One day, an Inquisitorial Representative just sort of showed up to Lords of Terra and took a voting seat. Anyone who questioned that change in the highest ranks of Imperial government was soon found dead. Inquisitors investigate heresy, corruption, and other threats to Imperium, and their access to response mechanisms is virtually unlimited, with frequent commissioning of armies or acts of planetary destruction.

The Black Ships of Imperium regularly collect every single psyker from the worlds of Imperium and bring them to sanctioned academies or Astronomican. If even one is missed, and they even once make a wrong mental motion and successfully contact the creatures of Warp (which isn't exactly trivial but isn't exactly very hard if you are trying), the planet is likely to be lost, but if Imperium is good at one thing, it is paranoid witch-hunting.

On paper (as well as on parchment, metal, clay and wooden plates, birchbark, human skin, floppy disks, punch cards, holodrives, entanglement drives, and a hundred other information recording media), the legal code of Imperium, Lex Imperialis, contains so many sections that no practicing functionary of law could ever hope to memorize a tenth of it, and hundreds of pages are being added to it daily. It is ripe with exceptions, artifacts and contradictions, rendering virtually everything illegal. To point out that this has to result in massive amounts of selective enforcement the outcomes of which are barely connected with the will of the central bueraucracy, much less the interests of the population, and just empower the Imperial functionaries of law to do as they will is, of course, heresy. And heresy, as any Imperial functionary of law will tell you before consigning you to a service in a penal legion, is a crime.

De facto, regular scouring by Black Ships, faith in the God-Emperor, paying of Imperial Tithe (the form and size of which aren't standardized, but are usually just short of back-breaking), and absence of dealings with Chaos or (ideally, not too rigidly enforced) Xenos are the only real requirements of Imperial membership, and the only changes from it are protection by it's military and surveallence from it's authorities and Inquisitors. That aside, planets range from feudal kigndoms to democracies that wouldn’t look much unlike those of Earth's 19th century, to factories that span an entire world.

That is Imperium. 

And The Imperium of Man is actually one of the better-coordinated factions.

Yeah.

Before Imperium became the dominant power of the Galaxy, there was the Eldar Empire.

The Eldar are a species quite literally designed for sorcery and psychic forecasting. Nearly all of them are natural psykers. Nearly all of them feel and speak and think in ways made to be resonant with the Warp. Nearly all of them are mystics and artists; everything, for them, is an art imbued with hidden meanings.

Someone with a typical Eldar psychology would probably be put into a psychiatric hospital were they to be born in dath ilan. And of course, sometime with a dath ilani mindset born into the Eldar society would be put into a psychiatric hospital as well.

How bad can it be? The Eldar language does not, and cannot, have an alphabet. It does not, and cannot, have a dictionary. It doesn't have a standardized grammar, or even a set direction of ordering of symbols. Occasionally, texts written in it are full on two-dimensional. Every symbol refers to a concept, but each symbol can refer to a countless number of different concepts, with no set list. In writing, this is disambiguated by details of spacing and shapes, not just of that symbol but of nearby ones, and the entirety of the context of the phrase. In speech, it is disambiguated through multiple layers of inflections and tonal shifts amd shifts of expression and postute, impacting meaning across sentences. For a human, to untangle the absolute mess that is a single text in Aeldari would take days of interpretation, and a result would still be ambiguous and have multiple levels of metaphor.

How do the Eldar manage to unscramble the ambiguity, imprecision, and layers of metaphors while engaging in casual conversation?

They don't. They think in that stuff.

And it is equally different for them to condense their speech into Gothic, to compress the vague and sweeping ranges of symbolic interlacing that they actually want to convey with each phrase into a linear* and prosaic* and pragmatic* language where each word has at most just 100 or so meanings (but usually just one or two) and where things are primitively either true or false or uncertain or uncertain-with-an-estimste and where if you want to talk about seven things at once, you have to list them all.

Naturally, the mechanistic approaches of statistical analysis of data, semantics-driven computer programming, order book and matching engine market, physical modelling, replaceable parts made to standard specifications given in standard units, and the like are quite unpopular (though not enitrely unused) among the Eldar.

And yet, this civilization of artists and mystics have once ruled the Galaxy. They made up in metis what they lacked in formalism. They still have their versions of science, programming, finance, engineering and standardization, each based on personal input, artistry and intuition. When your species is designed around predicting future, your intuition works pretty efficiently, it turns out.

*The Eldar have never heard of Baseline.

But their own sensetive and Warp-active nature have led them to their doom. Slaanesh was born of their joy and decadence, and her first cry have destroyed the core of their empire, most of it's citizens immediately slain and their souls converted into her personal playthings. Now, that place is known as the Eye of Terror, an enormous permanent warp storm where Chaos reigns. And every eldar is now currently doomed to quickly wither and die, with their soul being delivered via express mail straight into the Palace of Slaanesh.

And the surviving Eldar were split into four kinds, each with a different method for protecting their souls from the curse of She Who Thirsts.

The first are Exodites, remote colonies that managed to escape Imperial decadence. They live on planets protected by World Spirits, a massive psychic constructs generally too costly to manufacture in the current age, which their souls meld into upon dying. Though not quite easy pickings, they lack the sizable armed force, fleet, reach, and ability for collective action that would be needed to consider them a major faction. Their societies are generally tribal and intentionally-primitive.

The second kind are the Harlequins, roaming performers and messengers between the different kinds of the Eldar. They are protected and currently led by Cegorach, one of only three Eldar artificial-gods to survive the rampage of Slaanesh.

Though their numbers are pathetically tiny when compared to the monstrous scale of the Galaxy, and they are by no means a major faction, the Harlequins have an impressive reach, many contacts in the high places not just in the Eldar communites but everywhere else (sans Chaos, Necrons and Tyranids, obviously), the Black Library - the richest repository of knowledge in the Galaxy that's not affiliated with Tzeentch or Necrons -, and a support of a minor god.

They definitely have their plans.

The remnants of the long range trade and transport fleet of the Eldar Empire have recognized the extent of cruel decadance to which the main Empire have fallen. They mostly have recognized the danger early and fled the destruction, taking with them whoever agreed to come. Later, being on the run from pretty much everyone and unable to reasonably establish the complex infrastructure their standards for colonization demanded, they repurposed their giant ships into permanent mobile habitats.

Now, to protect themselves from Slaanesh's claim, they walk Paths of abstinance and devotion to their craft, and wear devices called Soul Stones that preserve Eldar souls within them upon death. Those souls are later offloaded into storage banks inside their ships called Infinity Circuits.

Their society is essentially technocratic, with the main decisionmakers being those Eldar who choose - and have the mental and psychic ability to progress the furthest on - the Path of the Seer, named Farseers. Farseers devote their lives to prediction and shaping of fate through both psychic influence and mundane strategy, and the predictive power of a sizable council of Seers working together is pretty much only surpassed by Tzeentch himself, their plans successfully spinning millenia.

Almost none of them know the rule of succession. Not as a formula, anyway.

Infamously, the lives of other races don't weigh much at all in their decisionmaking processes. Millions of souls of other species, and some species in their entirety, are routinely sacrificed in complicated schemes to save dozens of Eldar. 

Now, granted, most of those other species would kill millions of Eldar for no reason at all other than them being there. But they would do it in an honest and straightforward way of a brutal war campaign, rather than by dirty scheming.

WHICH IS EVIDENTLY MORE SYMPATHETIC ACCRODING TO AT LEAST SOME PEOPLE.

THAT IS TO SAY.

FUCK THE EEEEEEEEEELLDAAAAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRR!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Already on it, sweetie!

...

...anyway.

Craftworld Eldar are a major faction, but they are dying out. Their Craftworlds are being picked off one by one and they can't build more.

They possess incredibly deep knowledge of psychic technology and, actually, better than average knowledge of hard technology. But they badly, *badly* lack the manpower and resources to use it. And attempts of transmitting it are met with obstacles of the Eldars' own pride and secretiveness, the others' xenophobia and mistrust, and surprisingly deep communication barriers.

(They are a few radical-faction Imperial Inquisitors and a couple Tau research outposts that are on the case, of course. But it probably just isn't enough.) 

For all of their craftiness and magic expertise, the Craftworld Eldar are struggling to survive. Perhaps the biggest obstacle in their way is their own clinging to their traditions and ways of life. Deep down, the wisest among their Seers are aware that treating everything as an art is crippling, that repeatedly manipulating everyone and treating all non-Eldars as barely sentient is crippling, and that they would do much better as a loyal force-multiplying ally to a different faction than as lone wolf survivors.

But, for most of them, this sounds too similiar to Eldar extinction.

And then there's the Dark Eldar.

If you thought that the forces of Chaos were sick and twisted, you thought wrong.

Before the collapse of the Eldar Empire, there were three groups of Eldar. The first group felt sick about the depravity and decadence of the Empire, and it got away and later formed the modern Exodites, Craftworlders and Harlequins. The second, and by far the biggest, group felt right at home, and they got devoured. The third group felt that the problem with the Eldar Empire was that there wasn't enough decadence and depravity.

So they retreated into shady corners of the Webway, beyond the reach of police and various other killjoys, to pursue even more interesting forms of pleasure.

And when the Fall happened, they weren't hit with the first strike of the psychic scream. But they were indeed branded with Slaanesh's claim, which, given their hedonistic lifestyles, began to chew on them quite quickly.

Except they have found a solution for it.

By witnessing and enjoying overwhelming amounts of pain of those nearby, the curse of Slaanesh could be staved off. This solution was, of course, discovered really quickly by these denizens of the Webway.

Some say that that satisfies the tug upon their souls that Slaanesh projects, feeding her the suffering and souls of the innocents instead of their feelings and souls.

But that doesn't, actually, make sense, now does it, beauties?

Because if it was so, why wouldn't it work on witnessing the pleasure of others rather than their pain, given that I feed largely on pleasure?

If it was so, why would torturing a few subjects in an arena, as is the common way for the poorer Dark Eldar to feed, be enough to satisfy an entire crowd?

If it was so, why wouldn't I give them, constant suppliers of power for me, a pass, or, indeed, broker a pact with at least some of them, instead of hunting them down as I do?

Because the way their solution works is by creating and bathing in so much suffering, it's warp trace is anathema to me. Yes, I am a God(dess) of sadism, but I always mix pain with pleasure. Because over and above being a deity of sadism, I am a deity of pleasure.

Whatever the hell these people are doing, it is completely antithetical to pleasure, and indeed most emotions and mindsets ever generated by anything, no matter how dark their existence. And that is why even daemons are repulsed by Dark Eldar.

I don't feed on that. Khorne, Nurlge and Tzeentch don't either. But Warp remains Warp. So someone else does.

Some have suggested that the Dark Eldar would be strong bidders on the intergalactic masochist market. But, actually, masocists are inconvenient for their purposes. Pain that is enjoyed doesn't count.

Dark Eldar hunt for slaves, breed slaves, and, of course, take each other for slaves.

The souls of their slaves, all of whom eventually die of unbelievable extreme pain (if nothing else), are shattered, and some of their pieces are indeed absorbed into the essence of the nearby Dark Eldar, elongating or even reversing their aging. This worked before Slaanesh, but wasn't noticed or researched, because those those Eldar who tortured others into states that extreme weren't really into statistics.

The shady brothels, drug dens, pubs, dungeons (of both kinds), black markets, fighting rings and illegal laboratoroies of the Webway swelled up after the Fall, as everyone who could have escaped there to find solace from the onslaught of demons and soul-rending screams. Over time, they got interconnected and grew into each other, and the great Webway-city of Commorragh was born. Now, it's surface area is equivalent to a surface are of all the planets in an entire medium-sized solar system.

The city of Commorragh has two rulers.

The first is Moloch. 

The second is Asdrubael Vect.

Remember how, for the Eldar, everything is art and everything is mysic?

For the Dark Eldar, the biggest arts are torture and betrayal. Their mysticism finds an outlet in worshipping and imitating their biggest and vilest historical criminals, called the Dark Muses, and I am not making this up. Inside the Commorragh, there really is no law except might making right and the fittest surviving. Just how well this latter part works can be seen by how they, a race created to be psykers, have already bred most of their psyker potential out in their strains, as it makes their method of shielding from Slaanesh way harder - nigh-impossible if used actively. There's no currency (beyond the natural but inconvenient currency of slaves), no property record, no social services or police or army or anything of the sort. Dark Eldar cluster into Kabals which put out their own armed forces to defend against the invaders and each other. All leadership positions within them are always up for grabs, of course, and turning your back on your fellow Cabalites for two seconds will probably result in you being enslaved and tortired for sustenance and shadenfreude. There is a single universally respected tradition, however, to abstain from infighting during the slave-taling raids. Kabals reliant on such raids that fail to universally uphold it, of course, suffer a swift and miserable destruction.

On the flipside, Commorragh is, without a hint of irony, the most welcoming and open community in the Galaxy. Aside from Tyranids, or those affiliated with Chaos, or those too convenient for Chaos (i.e. psykers who can't hold it in their pants) - who would be immediately simultaneously murdered by everyone nearby out of fear for their souls, everyone is welcome, and potentially respected, here. The Dark Eldar have long realized that Eldar and other races are very much the same when you chain them to the wall and torture them to insanity, and the sheer open Darwinism of their lives have taught them not to underestimate their slaves or competitiors from othet species. Many races, including Humans, Orks, and even Tau can be found listing as members of the Kabals (which really tells you something about the spiritual unity of all peoples of the Galaxy). Very occasionally, slaves who demonstrate truly extraordinary talents at torturing others are freed and taken by Dark Eldar torturers as apprentices. Fundamentally, the difference between s a slave and a slaveowner is purely a matter of one's skill.

The unhinged nature of life in Commorragh coupled with the novel and unprecedented need to maximize torture have not only cleansed bigotry from the minds of dark eldar but also spurred their creativity and curiosity, and increased their tolerance for formal analysis. Thus, Commorragh is also one of the most technologically advanced societies in the Galaxy. For obvious reasons, they focus on biological manipulation, but some also possess limited nanotechnology and some can do things like putting black holes into boxes. Of course, there are no networks for distribution of that knowledge, so it spreads mostly through industrial espionage and underhanded dealings - so, quite slowly.

There are other advantages to such an aggressively selective environment. The speed of reproduction have went way up, and given that Dark Eldar society isn't really constrained by any resources within it territory, Commorragh is in perpetual population boom. In addition, the environment is so brutal that most invasion attempts simply feel like brief and mild intensifications of same-old same-old, if that. Lastly, the Dark Eldar with developed compassion, or apathetic deppression, or an overabundance of fear due to a constant risk of death, or any other psychological trait that would make living here miserable, were simply bred out.

Aside from not having any grand ambitions or long-term plans, they fully deserve a title of a major faction.

And, out of all the peoples in this Galaxy, Dark Eldar are a rare one that does, actually, on average, have a lot of fun.

...stingy bastards.

You know who else has a lot of fun?

So, The Orks were concieved as a biological weapon in a long-finished war. They were made to resist the scorched earth methods of the enemy by quickly and automatically terraforming planets completely burnt to ash into warrior-producing factories.

That war have long since ended, but the Orks had no off-switch installed. Or maybe they did, but the Old Ones never activated it, because, uhh, ummmm... 

Mayhaps.

Well, the Orks have since degraded into small warrior-tribes. But they are still made for fightin' and winnin'. They still grow into combat-ready colonies from a single spore. They still have knowledge of technology in their blood. They still generate plenty of psyker energy, which is funneled into a shared field called WWWAAAAAAAAAAAAAGHHHHH!!!!!!!!!, that direcrly alters reality according to their perceptions and in their favor, without all the annoying and dangerous Warp interfacing. They still have enough muscular power to easily pummel anyone except perhaps Tyranids in close combat.

And they are always down for a fight.

Usually they fight other Orks. Because other Orks are the ones most often within punching distance.

Ork culture is centered on relishing in combat and destruction. And the most important fact about it is that Orks don't actually know what the ass they are doing, at any given time. But their psychic field, as well as their sheer audacity, often make it work anyway.

Orks use their teeth as currency, with the default method of obtaining it being punching other Orks. They see no obvious problems with this method.

Orks use height as their default method of selecting a leader. They see no obvious problems with this method.

Orks jump around the Warp without navigation or shielding from the demons, moving along a general direction as opposed to a conrete destination. They see no obvious problems with this method.

Orks believe that red vehicles go faster. Which, around the Orks, they do. They also believe that purple is the sneakiest color.

And, really, when is the last time you've seen a purple Ork?

Orks have an advantage of numbers. Though Imperium is big as a (sort of) cohesive unit, as of right now, if you ignore disunity and just compare populations, the Orks are by far the biggest faction in the Galaxy!

You know. So far.

But the Orks also have an additional secret advantage:

Orkses is never defeated in battle. If we win we win, if we die we die fighting so it don't count. If we runs for it we don't loose neither, cos we can come back for annuver go, see!

They are the Orks. They always win. Especially when they win.

And now for a different collection of merry bands of slaughtering conquerors. The Forces of Chaos!

Objectively speaking, Chaos is the faction with the furtherest reach. Dark Eldar are largely limited to a small part of one of the layers of the Warp, everyone else is largely limited to a continuous patch of realspace. Chaos controls an entire layer of Warp and maintains military supremacy over an another one; it has a huge permanent outpost in realspace in the Eye of Terror, it controls tens of thousands of planets of various species randomly scattered across the Galaxy, and maintains cults and infiltrators and contacts in many more. Every Psyker without sufficent discipline risks becoming it's agent, and every religion risks being subtly subverted by it. Through dreams, it influences mankind.

It's resources are vast. The Four, beings of ancient and astronomical in it's scale power, get stronger from from every living person with at least some psychic sensetivity who experiences rather typical emotions of frustration, resignation, hope, and joy. Much more of such power is generated by intentional worshippers. Daemons of Chaos, though not nearly as numerous as Orks or Tyranids, possess much more magical power per capita, can naturally use FTL travel, are tireless, have no biological needs, eventually respawn upon death unless their God wills otherwise, and, with their mere presence, spread the chaotic Taint that is usually really hard to get rid of for good. Of the army that conquered the Galaxy for mankind, Chaos now commands an entire half, including half of the legions of Space Marines, traitor fleets of the Navy, traitor batallions of Imperial Army and traitor subdivisions of Adeptus Mechanicus. The forces of Chaos restructure the very fabric of reality on Daemon Worlds to allow them to cheat at industry, and have free access to things others would fear to touch with a ten foot pole. Chaos Gods command interstellar epidemics, stir rivalries between nations, motivate their recruits with more joy anyone else can ever achieve, or warp fate itself.

Chaos does bring freedom and truth to the worlds it corrupts. There's no arbitrary hierarchy, no withering taxation, no censorship and no indoctrination in a usual sense.

But it is, indeed, Chaos. You aren't obliged to worship the Four, but you are not entitled to protection from being sacrificed to them. You aren't a slave of an institution, but anyone may enslave anyone by their personal power as they wish. You can, relatively easily, get immortality from Nurgle, magical and/or social power from Tzeentch, revenge from Khorne, and pleasure from Slaanesh. But anyone else can too, and you can become Nurgle's involontuary carrier, a pawn of a Tzeentchian, a Slaaneshi's plaything, or just another skull in Khorne's ever-growing pile.

It's not ALL total misery-mongering and doom, as you might think from looking at their army. Armies are naturally more horrifying than the civillians behind them. There are real, and pretty big, perks.

It's still pretty fucked up though.

The infighting of Chaos is less relentlessly brutal than the infighting of the Dark Eldar, but it is just as fractal and omnipresent. Gods plot against each other in their Great Game, worshippers pf one God fight worshippers of another in the name of their God, worshippers of the same God fight each other in their own name. As per legacy of Khorne as the first Chaos God, and as per eternal conflicts in the Galaxy, Chaos Gods are slightly tinted towards enjoying conflict within their ranks.

Chaos favors strong emotions. Drama and power struggle and war are definitely effective ways to obtain that. And so is fervent religious worship. But so are wild celebrations and festivals, and imaginative pieces of art. There are chemicals that achieve such effects more directly. It's not actually in the interests of Chaos to kill you - quite the opposite, it is in it's interests to make you feel more alive.

After death, the souls of the servants of the Four get into their domains as their property. In general, the Deep Warp can be concisely described as Hell. But for some, it can absolutely be heaven. It's a matter of personal taste and perspective.

So, Chaos is wide-reaching, powerful, multifaceted, quickly spreading, and all-around terrifying. Why haven't it conquered everyone already?

Well, there are three reasons for it. One is constant infighting on every level, from Khornates killing random comrades after running out of enemies to Tzeentch himself deciding he wants to sabotage the efforts of the Four today.

The other is the freedom and anarchy it brings. Chaos Gods reward worship, but largely leave their people free to "do as thou wilt", and governmental structures rarely last under their domain. There are no mechanisms for training and recruitment and supplying of armies for Black Crusades beyond shanghaiing, pillaging, and... asking nicely. There are ample opportunities for desertion and no one to hunt deserters down. If a Daemon Prince wants to, instead of conquering the Galaxy, meditate in the Warp for thousands of years or rule their Daemon World in peace, as most of them do, it's perfectly fine.

The Chaos Gods are by no means voluntarist, fully condoning murder and slavery and considering everything fair play when it comes to getting more worshippers, but they have their own weird sense of dignity and right to self-determination. They have come to define themselves in part as opposites of the Emperor and Imperium. Their most fervent worshippers defected from oppression and disciplinarianism, wishing for the opposite, and Chaos Gods, being what they are, obliged, to an extent.

The third reason is that everyone fears and hates Chaos. To some extent it empowers it, expectations of danger making it more dangerous. But in practical day-to-day matters, it's a hell of a handicap. Most people would rather ally with Necrons or Genestealer Cults than with Chaos. Most people would die rather than risk succumbing to it. Everyone is fighting everyone, but everyone is united in their fight against specifically Chaos.

And Tyranids, but you get my point.

Speaking of Tyranids.

They are an all-devouring horde of bugs, each feeling a constant, tortured hunger. They are a semi-sentient hive mind, so noisy as to blot out the Warp with their presence. They are invaders from far, far away who strip entire galaxies bare of oxygen and carbon. They add the biological distinctiveness of everyone they encounter into their own, and they modify their genetic makeup on their own to adapt to changing circumstances. Their infiltrators interbreed with anyone they find (yes, Tyranids are just that good at genetics) and create entire networks of hybrid-cults. Their Warp-enhanced claws and unbelievably efficient muscles shred Space Marine armor. Their immune systems cheerily tell Grandfather Nurgle "lol, you tried".

And there's a lot of them.

There's A LOT of them.

And many, many, many, many, many, many many, many, many more are coming. With their mass being within not that many orders of magnitude from the mass of THE GALAXY ITSELF.

The only thing keeping them in check is their attitude towards sentience. They treat cunning as just another weapon alongside claws and acid sacs. For them, Intelligence really is a stat on par with Strength and Agility and Endurance. And largely, they see the intelligence of species in the Galaxy as something to destroy by subverting it against itself. The hybrids of Genestealer Cults are innovative, insidious and capable of independent action, but upon the arrival of the main fleet, they are devoured, reduced to plain biomass and DNA for splicing, the Hive Mind seeing no better use for them and their minds and ideas.

If this attitude was ever to change, Tyranids would become fucking unstoppable. They would breed themselves into superintellegences - and even given 40K's universal slow takeoff, with their resources for growing brains they would outsmart everyone. They are currently limited to organic matter, but they would devour planets and stars whole. They would be perfectly capable of designing and deploying customized nanotechnological bioweapons. They would get good enough at Warp navigation to achieve reliable time travel.

Yeah. Good luck with dealing with that.

Can we get their claws the FUCK off the +4SD intelligence genetic material, please?

Given the possibility of that, in addition to their already insane advantages, Tyranids, before the arrival of dath ilan, were the second most probable canditate to break the stalemate and win the Galaxy for themselves.

Some would, perhaps, be surprised to learn which faction have held the first place.

A comparatively tiny nation, the Tau have grown from fire and wheel to an FTL-capable unified multisystem space empire in 6000 years. It took humankind twice as long, and they had the secret assitance of the Emperor and of a caged minor god of technology.

Unlike humans, the industrious, brilliant and hopeful race of Tau have made all of their progress on their own, with no backing from any deity or demideity whatsoever.

It was no different for... Humans... and Eldar... and most of such restless and ambitious species... of this Galaxy... 

You know me too well, you slimy apathy ball you.

Tau would be grateful for any help they may or may not have recieved!

The Tau Empire is a largely peaceful yet expansionist state with an internally ranked caste system, a dedicated leader caste the highest ranked members of which form a ruling council, a semi-planned economy, and a state ideology of the Greater Good.

Multiple castes capable of interbreeding aren't a sustainable thing unless conscious effort is applied to create and sustain them. Which it was! Unlike certain other species, early in their history, the Tau have looked at the workings of inheritance and thought: "How can we do better?" The modern castes of Tau are the reuslts of intentional eugenics aimed at specialization, which, to the shock of many, doesn't actually require any violence to achieve. Inter-caste relationships that involve reproduction are shunned and disincentivized for undermining the efforts of careful selection. But you wouldn’t, like, get executed for it or anything.

The early history of Tau featured endless inter-clan and inter-caste conflicts and wars, until the caste of Etherials was designed by a benevolent conspiracy of researchers from different clans. They were bred, with the use of the revolutionary technique of gamete selection, for charisma, leadership qualities, and wisdom.

As per their design, they have quickly unified the Tau species and took leadership over it. 

The Etherials have pheromone glands that they use to mind-control other Tau! That is the secret foundation of their entire heretical ideal of "Greater Good"! 

Eh. Kinda-sorta?

The Etherials were bred for charisma. They look as good to the eyes of Tau as movie stars look to the eyes of Earthlings. To the ears of Tau, they have speaking skills of Hitler and Martin Luther King combined. And yes, their smell to some extent calms the Tau down and makes them a bit more agreeable.

None of this is a secret, actually. The Tau do have statistics that show it and even selection documentation that details it. This is a part of their intended function - to lead others - and is completely in the open.

Yes, it's hard for a random Tau to refuse a request made by an Etherial.

But the Imperium should really look at themselves before pointing fingers. How easy was it for a random human to refuse a request from the Emperor, with his own superhuman looks and charisma that were also psychically enhanced? 

And his Primarchs? When a single Primarch defected during the Heresy, almost all of their troops have followed them as well. That's not nearly true for Etherials!

And in the current Imperium, good looks and speaking skills remain the instruments of the ruling class! Who, unlike Etherials, largely use their power for their own personal benefit. Etherials are very much on watch for abusing their power, in addition to having been selected for wisdom.

If you wanted to be consistent about it, you would consider basic politeness to be a form of mind control. If you wanted to be consistent about it, you would have people make faces less appealing with makeup so as not to cloud the judgement of others. If you wanted to be consistent about it, your rhetoric specialists would consider applying their skills comparable to using a gun.

But that's ridiculous; no one does that!

And if a Tau wants to put plugs into their olfactory organ, and look away from the charming Etherial faces, and doubt and overanalyze their words on sheer basis of their speaking skills, well, that would be weird, and probably not very conductive to the Greater Good. But you wouldn’t, like, get executed for it or anything.

Etherials exist for a reason, and them stopping a miserable and wasteful war was a plentyful proof for that. The aspects of the philosophy of the Greater Good do have mathematical formalizations, unlike the aspects of certain other philosophies. Not everyone can be a mathematician or a philosopher, however, and not every mathematician or philosopher can maintain integrity when faced with the struggles of the Universe. Etherials are there to do it for you - and specialization is the basis of achieving the Greater Good. Etherials, as far as the Tau are concerned, provide a useful and necessary service.

But if you want to argue with an Etherial about the Greater Good or it's implementation by the Tau Empire, you're welcome! To convince you and to consider your notes is a core part of their function, and you certainly wouldn't get executed for it.

Yes, we're really proud of the whole "not executing people for no reason" thing.

The Tau Empire aren't committed pacifists. They badly want to settle conflicts without the use of violence, but they, by the standards of their philosophy of the Greater Good, consider their rule to be better than the rule of most other states, and routinely conquer worlds as a civilizing mission. They just don't slaughter the populations of others for no reason. 

The Tau Empire aren't committed voluntarists. Shunning and ostracism aren't their only punishments. They have prisons, and programs of forced reeducation, occasionally with use of medical assitance. They just don't turn people into tortured servitors and mindless flagellants, or Chaos Spawns and Plaguebearers, or pain-slaves.

The Tau Empire aren't committed individualists. You are expected to sacrifice yourself for the benefit of others should the need arise, and if you are creating an exception in it's standardized system, the problem is overwhelmingly likely to be resolved on your end. They just don't burn you for having different beliefs than everyone else or shoot you simply to motivate others.

The Tau Empire aren't committed egalitarians. It's hard to get an out-of-caste job, and harder still to earn enough respect to break the expecations of others. There are currently only two non-Tau individuals in the whole of Tau Empire to have "Aun" as the first syllable of their name. And Tau have, after considerable amount of very bloody failures, completely given up on Orks and Dark Eldar. It's just that achieving even the lowliest leadership position isn't possible at all for any outsider in any other big faction, except for, ironically, the Dark Eldar.

In a better world, the Tau Empire would be considered somewhere between distasteful and villainous.

In this world, they are the foremost keepers of deeper sociological and strategic truths than those written by the bloodied hands of the Chaos Gods upon the canvas of people's hopes and dreams.

The Tau are naturally very insensetive to Warp, and lack psykers in their own ranks. (They do have some Gue'vesa ones, but not enough for widespread training and experimentation.) However, they do possess somewhat advanced technology that is fueled, for once, by actual, living, healthy science and engineering that are completely understood by their practitioners. Their method of FTL travel is comparatively slow, but safe, and requires no witchcraft of any sort. Their technological prowess grows every passing year.

In general, they use a lot of automation. Having no readily avialable separate solution for FTL messaging, they use automated messenger ships. Much of their labor is automated, because exhaustion is contrary to the Greater Good, and efficiency is conductive to it. Much of their military consists of drones, because they, like the Eldar, do actually want to minimize causalities among their forces, but unlike the Eldar, who contuine to personally fight in melee because the Eldar, Tau take the obvious and reasonable approaches to it. Nearly exclusive use of long-range combat and heavy emphasis on combined arms and psychological warfare also greatly reduce the causalities.

The Tau Empire actively trades with nearby friendly worlds for goods, mercenaeries, services and technology, and when those worlds - such as the worlds of the Kroot - staunchly refuse to be welcomed into the fold, they refrain from their forceful annexation in an attempt to build up general goodwill.

And though they remain relatively small, inexperienced, and weak, they readily annex the worlds that are willing, or the worlds that are hostile (whose rank and file population generally, but not always, is willing to be annexed) and with each new planet that joins, they gain more resources, more technology, more understanding of the world, and more kinds of citizens with their own strengths.

They adapt, decide, and improve much faster than any other faction, needing months where other need decades despite their slow travel times. They have, for their relative naivete, the best epistemology, the most sober and pragmatic view of reality. They welcome and offer alliances and help rather than refuse them out of pride. They are ready to make sacrifices, but always think and weigh options and payoffs carefully before doing so. And unlike most others, who are trying to survive or fight, the Tau are trying to win.

And that is why the Tau Empire was the likeliest candidate to win.

And these are the main factions of the Galaxy.

There are thousands of smaller races, too weak to be a consideration but often possessing unique advantages no one else has, because global market isn't a thing and information dissemination networks aren't a thing and systematic search for knowledge is only barely a thing.

And, perhaps more importantly, there are

many organizations, 

and individuals

working outisde the factions

towards their own goals.

As a wise man once said,

ridiculous messes arise, 

when there is more than one plotter and more than one plan.

And that,

is the state of the Galaxy. 

What the superheated flaming excrement.

If someone in dath ilan were to arrive upon this hypothesis, and bid it up in the prediction markets, they would stand to make a fortune when it panned out from the unending stream of people willing to bid against it. It would be wrong to call it the kind of thing that wouldn't happen in real life, because that so understates the confusion it would cause that it could not truthfully be called accurate. This is the kind of thing that doesn't happen in fiction, because authors wouldn't dream it up and readers would find themselves incapable of suspending their disbelief long enough to finish the infodump. Perhaps if the story was relayed to them by keepers, it might be accepted, but even then it would have to fight an uphill battle against the priors for trolling, and once that hurdle was overcome it would leave the hypothesis that one of the parties to the conversation is suffering a psychotic break. There are individual details there that make sense, or might be accepted after the sheer epistemic shock of the Event, but taken together it is entirely too much. Even by the standards of Earth, for whom bad decisions, lack of coordination, and reckless disregard for sanity are practically planetary pastime, Warhammer 40k is several steps into the realm of parody.

Unfortunately for dath ilan, the universe doesn't care about their priors. It's really inconvenient that way!

Not quite as unfortunate (albeit more immediately frustrating), attempts at SigInt are going poorly. It's not that dath ilan doesn't have a lot of data to work with, although the exact amount is baffling in between the different possible equilibria they had hypothesised, nor that they don't have lots of brilliant linguistics experts working on it, but rather that this is one of those tasks that is actually really hard. Deciphering a language from spoken words with no shared context or baseline of knowledge is impossible in a way that you can't necessarily crack it with AI, much less solve it with simple measures like putting a hundred +3sd linguistic researchers on the topic for a month. They've made some progress, with a few guesses for the meanings of some groups of phonemes and graphs of possible grammatical rules, even hampered as they are by a deep uncertainty of which transmissions are even definitely part of the same language.

That's because they're idiots. If he had a hundred of him assigned to the task, they would have solved it ages ago. With just him and Kurthin, it'll take a bit longer, but it's not like they'll beat him to it.

With each passing day after the event, the odds of a repeat drop steadily, and with it the varying rates of other x risk events. Most of the hypothesis space remains unchanged, but the scariest ones inevitably drop off the longer it takes their predictions to come true. Dath ilan is starting to get a better hand on economicmagic powers, has repaired most of the damage from the day, and put into place what changes they can to prepare for the negative outcomes and near misses encountered previously. That news is far less encouraging when placed in the context of how likely those outcomes had been previously considered and how large the delta changes were. When dath ilan measures something as important as their safety, they don't settle, nor do they flinch away from the truth for comfort or political gain. The whole point of politics and comfort are to help the people of civilization live better lives, which is in turn rather predicated on them living.

With odds this steep, most of the worldlines that survive are, by necessity, pretty far from the median values, so if you want to increase your odds that means pursuing high payout strategies. If you need 5 times the performance to pass the threshold of survival, a 5% chance to perform 5 times as well is worth far more than a guaranteed 50% increase, after all. Plans like their frankly reckless economagic experiments, or the genetic engineering program spinning up to see if they can manufacture the abilities. Plans like putting to work a limited creation on the task of creating an improved first contact scenario.

They think they might have one. Markets say only 30% odds it works at all, but if it does its more than 90% likely to be safer, and 50% significantly so. There was a yet safer pick, but it was estimated at only 10% odds and ended up not working out, while their backup plan is, to be frank, a huge step down. Between their training and differing genetics, dath ilani are, as a rule, far more logical than earthlings. Similarly, few dath ilani traditions are 1-1 matchups to those of their distant cousins. If that wasn't the case, there would be a lot of fingers crossed in the lead up, and the absolute worst part is that might have helped.

The idea goes like this: What is, actually, special about humans? There is a lot of possible answers you could give here, depending on which reference class you compare them to. You could compare them to the other races of the galaxy, and say they have exceptionally high endurance (though of course less than those designed to be better, like Orks and Necrons). You could compare them to the native of their home world, be it holy terra or dath ilan, and claim the most important trait is their intelligence, or tool use. If you were to ask someone from the imperium, they might reply their faith in the god emperor, but that's not really a useful answer outside of a handful of contexts.There's also the implicit bias included in the word special, although the baseline equivalent used here doesn't match it, that acts as a soft delineation on what kinds of traits would qualify as a possible answer.

A less literal but more accurate translation of the idea, then would be "Why is it that humans reaching out with alternatephysics abilities are be taken over and altered by infohazardous entities, possibly from some location known as the warp? The best guess dath ilan has is, after checking to try and be sure the answer isn't that other people or animals aren't being so attacked, is that this alternatephysics has both economicmagic and conceptualmagic, and the actions taken opened some kind of conceptualmagic weakness in those doing the contacting. Such a setup is rather disdained by traditional dath ilani alternatephysics worldbuilding, but there isn't really any reason that reality has to follow those, much less a reality as far down the probability distribution of possible worlds as this one is. As such, what they're trying now is to include as many mundane conceptual barriers as they can without interfering with the actual translation. Other experiments have shown it entirely possible to use the alternatephysics abilities to operate communication infrastructure like cell phones, even in the absence of any carrier service. When testing control groups, it worked even when the cell phone had critical parts swapped out for broken ones, or even outright missing, although with more difficulty. The setup they're using now has an economagic user operating a secured keeper radio device, with the outputs reworked into texr transcription. Nearby it are prisoner restraints, locks, physical printouts of codes for security programs, not because they're expected to be useful but because dath ilan doesn't believe in testing only one variable in a n experiment when starting from a state of maximal confusion. It's hard to deceive a keeper, but there are ways, and this one has been convinced that this methodology has been tried before and that their alternatephysics model suggests it's secure. Several of the more popular methods of communications shielding from dath ilani conceptualmagics media are also included, though to an earthling most would seem totally nonsenical; the most clearly identifiable instance is a scale model of security made from specially treated materials, and even that doesn't align precisely with how it would be expected to function.

The radio comes to life, devoid of any power source, and broadcasts their greetings, not to the stars, but a place without any. Really visualizing what a coordinate system transition looks like doesn't come naturally to dath ilani, but it is well within the abilities of keepers. Someone else is watching the output, of course, but if there is a response he'll likely hear about it soon enough.

So, there's a radio broadcasting through Warp.

Most daemons don't... really listen to radiowaves though. For sure, there are many different kinds of Daemoic Engines, and many possess an innate capability to recieve and interpret radio. And higher Tzeentchian and Slaaneshi daemons on occasion will use any and all methods of information transmission as aids in executing various machinations. But none of this is commonly found in near Warp around random points in realspace.

However, it's not like the Daemons are the only thing flying around Warp.

"My Lord! By the will of the Omnissiah, we have received a transmission! A strange one, unaccounted for in our datasheets, and in fact, wholly unexpected in the situation.* But it may be an opportunity."

*(this entire sentence would be a two-syllable word in Baseline)

"Well. The journeys have been uneventful lately."

"Bold of you to say that within the Immaterium, my Lord."