After I stopped feeling sorry for myself, I moved on to the other doors connected to the room with the benches and the desk. I moved with a limp, my foot bound tightly in rags to stop the bleeding. It was a shallow but concerning wound, as I didn't have any means to clean it, and I didn't know what kind of diseases or infections the cut could bring. I briefly considered taking the boon from the plague god, not worrying about common illnesses would be a godsend but I had time enough to carefully consider that so long as I kept at least 100 XP saved up.

Entering the next door, I found myself in a long hallway designed for people rather than vehicles, with several doors on either side. Heavy security metal doors, equipped with the same sort of keypad that had secured the door to the waiting room, lined the corridor. I moved towards the final door and found it led to a small office fit for around eight or so people. Inside, several desks and chairs were pushed up against one side of the room. Every container appeared to have been opened and searched, with refuse such as paper or broken electronic tablets scattered about. Undoubtedly, anything of value had been taken long ago, or at least as long ago as things seemed to have fallen apart around here. I had little doubt that until recently, this was a functional facility. The destruction and decay was relatively recent.

With little hesitation, I moved into the room and began to search around. It struck me as curious that many of the desks and chairs were wooden, while others were made of metal or plastic. I expected some degree of consistency in a facility such as this, some expectation of efficiency. However, I had little grounds to believe that there would be consistency, except for what I had seen in 40K artwork depicting the furnishing of various Imperial facilities, assuming this was one—an assumption I had no reason to doubt. The skulls on the walls were a bit of a giveaway.

I found that I could read many of the documents scattered around the place. While others were utter gibberish. I assumed this was the distinction between low and high gothic. With low gothic simply looking like english. They weren't particularly interesting, mostly just lists of cargo and inventories of various supplies: stationary, iron and steel ingots, equipment, and very little indication of what the work itself actually entailed. Or at least, I didn't understand the strange jargon that didn't seem to mesh well with what I understood to be the Low Gothic dialect of the 41st Millennium.

Growing frustrated and pained by my wound, I limped back to the hallway designed for people, not vehicles. I had no way of opening the various doors on my left or right. By the standards of this facility so far it was positively cramped in here, even if it was still tall and wide enough for a space marine to walk though comfortably. It was only in comparison to the rest of the facility that this hallway felt claustrophobic, or perhaps it was merely that this was a new place where I did not have quite as much warning about what would be around the next corner.

Not that I had a good chance of running away in the other hallway...

The earthquake was still groaning out across the facility, with metal screeching and creaking in the distance. I shouldn't have been terribly surprised when I turned the corner only to find a corpse at my feet. My heart quickened, my pulse thundering in my arms. It felt like there was a rushing river in my veins. It seems I wasn't quite desensitised to finding corpses blocking my path. Still, I simply looked about, found nothing amiss, nothing that I could identify as a threat in this place, and settled down next to the body to turn it over and put my hands into its pockets almost immediately.

This man was not dressed in rags but actual clothes. I considered taking them, but they were soiled in blood, half rotten like the rest of him and the man had been here for a good while. The smell had long dissipated. It was how I didn't notice I'd be walking into a body like this. This man had died long before the people at the ritual site, the altar with the Chaos symbol. He'd been stabbed in the neck, long enough ago to become desiccated, dehydrated. I considered taking his boots, but they were obscenely large compared to my own feet. And quite frankly, I didn't feel like putting a dead man's boots on. Unsurprisingly, I didn't find much on his body. Anything he would have had was looted long ago. There was a holster on his hip, empty of whatever weapon it once carried. But I undid the belt and put it on myself, stuffing one of my canteens into the holster.

I felt a guilty sort of satisfaction that I had at least gained something from this encounter, that I had not merely encountered a dead man and walked away with nothing but trauma and a sickening sense that his death had certainly not been deserved. I continued down the hallway, lamenting over the fact that there was very little in the way of signage, even in Low Gothic, something I could apparently read. I didn't know why the Imperium thought that colour-coded lines indicating where you were and regular maps showing you where you were in relation to everything were mere suggestions rather than vital elements of any sort of large building.

Like the door to the waiting room, the final door in the hallway had been pried open and held up by a box, one that seemed like it would have fit together nicely with the metal sheet holding up the other door. Crate and lid identified at last. Whoever had pried these doors open had no doubt used the route I was now travelling along for something, I assumed. I moved onto my hands and knees again and crawled through the opening, underneath the pried-open door.

It was raining, a faint pitter-patter on my face, wind pushing the rain in my direction. But I wasn't outside. Instead, I was in a truly colossal chamber, rounded, though I couldn't see the sides to be sure. The walls were colossal to my left and right, with walkways that connected and interconnected in intricate ways that didn't seem to follow any sort of rhyme or reason but nevertheless extended up to a ceiling obscured by clouds. Great bulbs, dozens of metres across, were set into the walls at regular intervals. All of this grandeur, all of this colossal design, for a warehouse—or at least that's what I assumed it to be. There were stacked crates like cargo containers, reaching up on top of each other for what I could only assume for miles. It was breath-taking in a mundane sort of way, as if something like this should not be so grand or so large it was obscene. But I suppose that was the universe I now resided within.

Great cranes sat hunched over the innumerable containers, still despite the power still being on in the facility, giving credence to the idea that whatever purpose this palace had was stopped by some sort of chaos incursion. 

In the distance, I noted plumes of smoke reaching up towards the clouds. There were fires in this grand chamber too far away for me to smell, and I couldn't quite see the other side of the chamber, given that so many of these cargo containers were stacked next to each other like a maze. I'm not sure how long I spent transfixed with the incredible scale of the warehouse room, or perhaps warehouse chamber would be more appropriate. But after a while, the cold winds and rain pushed me to move towards the stacked-up cargo containers. Some of them had been pried open, their contents spilled about or looted, while improvised platforms had been erected between them.

There was a vehicle not too far away from me, but it had been gutted, with its wheels pulled off and its engine removed. Seemingly looted for parts. I had not forgotten the bestial roars I heard when I first arrived, I kept my head on a swivel, carefully listening and looking for movement. The mission a certain blood God had offered me, involving killing a sapient, something that weighed heavily on my mind. I very much doubted I would have such a mission if there were no creatures other than humans here, wherever "here" was.

I contented myself with reasoning that if there were man-eating creatures in this place, surely they would have eaten the desiccated man I had found before, with the holster. He would not have been left to rot if he were food. At least I hoped this was the case.

I moved carefully between the cargo crates, searching for one that hadn't been pried open and looted. Occasionally, I would sift through the refuse left by whoever had looted them in the past but found little of value. As I looked up at the seemingly endless stacks of containers, I noted that a great deal of the higher up cargo containers had not been opened at all. I imagined the difficulty of reaching them was the primary reason why. However, there were various cranes scattered about the large chamber. Perhaps the current occupants simply didn't know how to operate the cranes.

I smelled something rank before I observed it. One of the cargo containers had been emptied, and was being used as a cesspit. A lonely part of me wondered if I should try to make contact with whoever had been using this place. But chaos was present in this facility, and the chances of anything I encountered here being hostile were high. I did not consider myself a capable combatant in the slightest at this point. 

I heard the beat of a drum ring out from somewhere in front of me, past a large wall of cargo containers that extended for hundreds of metres in both directions. It was followed by roaring and shouting, unfocused and imprecise. The sound of rage and battle, the sort of battle that had no place in advanced facilities like this one, a technological marvel. I could only imagine, as I couldn't see directly, but the drum beating, shouting, and clashing of steel against each other indicated a battle going on very close to me, a tribal savage battle, very similar to the fight between the loyalists and the Chaos worshippers at the altar that brought me to this place.

Sensible logic would have turned me back, searching other parts of this room or perhaps returning to the hallway and finding other side rooms to explore and scavenge. But hunger drove me forward. Perhaps once the battle had finished, there would be loot to pick from the bodies. It was hardly a respectable thought process, too desperate to consider. But I quite frankly was desperate. I needed food, clothes, and weapons. I needed anything I could find.

I limped along the side of the Great Wall of cargo containers until the sounds of battle grew distant and quiet. There seemed to be little reason to the layout of the cargo containers; they were stacked in a maze-like array. I was turning this way and that to find a way around the Great Wall of cargo containers. A quick glance up told me that I had barely moved into the room, despite feeling like I had been exploring this maze of containers for hours. The cut on my foot became a low, painful throb, not a good sign, though I had little to clean it with.

I encountered a clearing. Cargo containers had been pushed together into a sort of semi circle. Some of them had been cut open and used for shelter, while others have been pushed up to make walls around an encampment. A currently abandoned encampment. There was a fire pit in the middle of the settlement with metal racks with indistinct leather pulled over them. I tried not to think about where exactly whoever had made this settlement had acquired the leather. It was empty. Perhaps this was one of the groups taking part in the battle I've heard. Perhaps they would be returning very soon.

It was, in a word, tribal. I briefly weighed my options but fatigue cautioned me against trying to loot anything here. I resolved to return to the bathroom to get more water and eat what little food I had left before resting in that office. It was only as I began to limp away from the settlement, not willing to risk getting caught out that I noticed one of the cargo containers at the edge of the encampment. Was ajar with a small face cast in shadow looking out directly at me.

Despite the pain, I found the strength to run. To dart away out of the settlement. Just as the shouting began. I spared a glance back. The container door had been thrown open and several figures had appeared. They were slim, beastial figures. Covered in pale white fur and some of them had horns above their heads. There was little doubt about what they resembled. Beastmen. Or in this case, the lithe form of Beastwomen. Chasing me, shouting. Not in any language I understood. They were bouncing, as they leapt. towards me, waving Spears and clubs.

(Mission added: Escape the Blood Grounds, Reward 25 XP) 

FallQM

I hope everyone is enjoying the story so far. I am very interested if commentors have Boon and Mission ideas. These can be tricky to come up with! Thank you!