11 – Where?!

11 – Where?!Words are hard. Surprisingly the scroll isn't too long, barely the size of four A4 pages and from what I gathered only contains a very brief summary of the history of the planet called Follax 4 which I'm assuming is this one. Several of the previous scrolls containing the transportation data also had 'Follax IV' next to the date at the bottom so I'm quite sure of that assumption. Rediscovered during the great crusade, settled soon after and transformed into a hive world nine thousand years ago. Ever since then, it has mostly been here without any apocalypse grade even happening to it surprisingly. The described history only goes up to two thousand years ago, so it didn't give me any cue about what has happened here in the end but it also fits snugly into the Warhammer setting, making me both irritated and relieved. Humans like the known even if it's dangerous above the mystery of the unknown, I'd rather know some of the dangers out there than none even if there weren't any in reality. My alien instincts would also be pleased with more knowledge about my potential prey and competition. It writes about minor rebellions, cults and even a minor xenos invasion that have 'All been vanquished by the grace of the Emperor with little effort'. It doesn't go into too much detail about either, go figure. I was surprised it even mentioned anything about these at all but I guess you need to tell about your victories to your population for them to obediently become meat shields in the Imperial Guard. This also contains more than three-fourths of random bullshit for a historical document. The writer talks more about how important it is to keep information for later generations for the good of the Imperium than the damned history he is supposed to. Like I get it but this is ridiculous. After gleaning through it once more to make sure I didn't miss any part that might hide something informative I put this scroll away too and stare gloomily at the remaining shelf full of other scrolls. I don't know what I suspected to find here but it was more than this, I couldn't even manage to figure out where in the galaxy this planet is supposed to be. That shouldn't be confidential information even though 99% of Imperials in Warhammer never leave their birth-planet and thus don't need to know anything about galactic geography or stuff like that. Do they even call that geography or is that astrology at that point? I began searching for something like that, this was a small library but it seemed to have one or two scrolls on most major topics like politics, history and planetary geography being among the ones I've noticed the title of among the rest. I began throwing any useless-sounding ones behind me and gathered the previously mentioned ones plus any that caught my interest. In the end, I managed to find a few that might help me find out where I was. Jumping back onto the couch, kicking my feet up onto its armrest and got back into the tedious world of translating and reading. My enthusiasm lasted until I was half a scroll into my binge but I battelled through the boredom and managed to find some actually useful information after finishing up with all of them. Could have been worse, is the only positive thing that I manage to come up with. After all, I could have been transported straight into the Ghoul Stars or the Eye of Terror, not that I think any self-respecting Imperial wouldn't try to burn me to death if they saw my eldritch form. Not the most fitting name but I'm keeping it that for now, it's much better than the tentacle-y form or white form. Xenoform sound cool too but it reminds me of the Alien movies and their Xenomorphs, not that those are too creative, it literally means 'alien form' in English. Whatever. I pushed myself off the couch and sent a last annoyed look at the room before making my way out of it, this took far too much time for how little information I got but I guess even that was worth it from a pragmatic standpoint. One of the scrolls contained a crude galactic map with a few important planets plus this one depicted on it which was much better than I'd hoped. The map showed both Ultramar and Terra so I could kind of place the location of this planet in my head even though I wasn't much of a Warhammer lore nerd my brain was always annoyingly good at remembering random trivia I found interesting while I forgot anything I learned for my exams right after I was done with them. So I knew that above Ultramar, towards the Galactic north was the Tau empire and a bit northwest of that was the Sautek Dynasty of the Necrons. I think Follax IV happened to be a bit to the east from where the two empires bordered each other, when the whole galaxy is depicted on a map that I can cover with my two palms it can't exactly be accurate. I'm hundreds if not thousands of light years away from either but it's not those two that I'm worried about at the moment. If I remember correctly sometime in the late 41st millennium a huge ass Tyranid hive fleet decided that this section of the galaxy looked tasty and went on a taste test, only being fragmented when it split and the Smurf marines messed up one splinter fleet while the space elves got the other. Unfortunately for me, the word 'fragmented' is important here as there were still small splinter fleets popping up by the time Papa Smurf woke up, which should also be around now. Alright, enough thinking let's get back to exploring. I still have four floors of this building left to walk through before going back to my sci-fi parkour on the rooftops. I left the small library behind me with a spring in my steps and turned down the hallway, away from the direction I came from before. After a few twists and turns, I found myself in a larger room with something that looked like an elevator at the other end of it but that wasn't the most important now as the floor was painted red with dried blood. Not as much as the ritual room but I don't think even three humans had that much blood in them combined if you drained it all. Wish I had something like a dog here to eat so I could get a good enough nose to follow the trail of blood to where the corpses were taken from here. The room wasn't even too scorched, so they didn't use the flame weapons here just massacred a few people. I wasn't even surprised by now that I only thought about finding where the corpses had gone for some easy energy. I still felt sympathetic towards whoever probably got bisected here based on the amount of blood but that paled in comparison to my need to survive and gather more energy. Still, it's comforting for my human self to feel even that much, I'm not a total monster yet. I shook my head and tried to find out whether I could see any blood trail going from the dried pool but I couldn't, did they wait with transporting the corpses until the blood has dried up? I frowned, how did they paint the ritual circles with them then? I shook my head again, doesn't matter. I wasn't anything close to a doctor so fuck me if I knew how blood worked and dried, plus space wizards are supposedly a thing here. I consciously didn't think about the infinite dark sea my soul was languidly levitating above and decided that this conveniently placed elevator might as well be my way down to the next floor. I already had more than enough things to get used to and make my peace with.