WH40K: “Kal Jerico, Sinner’s Bounty” (part six)

Where last we left off, the plot was actually kicking off in a way that "here's a transcript of our Dark Heresy campaign" doesn't qualify as. Improvement! Anyway, Scabs is being held overboard by a crazy tweaker, and Amenute and/or Kal and Yolanda are going to have to intervene or we'll be down the party rogue.

Chapter 12: Rivals

Yolanda is enjoying a quiet-ish drink, sitting on her own at the prow of the ship and resolved to take a break from the party shenanigans. She tries to avoid introspection, so she's just keeping her mind on her share of the Zoom bounty. She has equipment she wants to buy, and also apparently some debts to pay off. She also, despite her best efforts, starts recalling her time among a gang called the Wildcats, which she seems to fear is better off without her.

Also, apparently Kal was at one point commissioned to capture and bring her back to her aristocratic family in the spires, before they decided "fuck that shit" and became underhive backbreakers together. Apparently, this had been part of some sort of attempted coup against the reigning Helmawr dynasty, Kal's own family. This is also what led to the wedding neither of them volunteered for, which had been interrupted by gunfire before anyone could be sure if the priest had finished announcing them married yet. Hence, their ambiguous marital status.

This is funny and all, but honestly, it sort of emphasizes how boring Kal and Yolanda are compared to the other characters. These are just a couple of bored rich pricks taking an action hero vacation in the underhive, and there's not a lot more to them beyond that. The characters like Scabs and Amenute who actually had this thrust upon them and had to adapt instead of just choosing to are much more interesting for me. Kal and Yolanda are funny sometimes, but not enough so to make up for the fundamental "meh" of them.

As she reminisces, Kal and his cyberdog meander up to her again. She asks him why he's bothering her, and he reports on the presence of Skullface, Ivers, and Pete, as well as the Goliaths. She whines at him for talking to her when she's clearly trying to stare into space, and he's quiet for a minute before changing the subject and asking her why she came to the underhive. Well, that's a coincidence alright, given what she had just been thinking about. She tells him that she was destined for broodmaredom up there, and that if she was going to be putting her body and mind at risk constantly it might as well be in a slightly more exciting and self-determining way. Fair enough.

Switch to Kal's POV. He's trying to comprehend the paradox of himself and Yolanda tolerating each other as if they were entities capable of affection or some other alien weirdness like that. Both of them seem to be taking comfort in the other treating their marriage as mostly a joke. God, this is some high school anime tsundere bullshit. Fortunately, this is interrupted by them hearing the shouting Goliaths and looking up to see the tweaking one holding Scabs over the railing.

Glad for the distraction, Kal steps up behind the tweaker and puts his laser pistol to the back of his head. The other two Goliaths aren't happy about this, but they're at least more willing to negotiate than Roid Rage over there. The leader of the trio, who names himself as Gril, confirms when asked that that Corg guy we met working with Beatram a while back sent them, and that they're not following Kal and his group. They're just after Desolation Zoom, and happen to have followed the same trail of clues. With a little prodding though, he confesses that he knew Scabs was part of Kal's group, and that he let Roid Rage assault him to get a message across. In addition to wanting the bounty for themselves, Gil says, Zoom spilled Goliath blood during several raids, including the guildhouse attack that he stole the Golden Sack in. He implies that some of these Goliaths were people he knew, and that he wants revenge. Kal tries to leverage his reputation, but the Goliaths don't seem to have heard of him: proof that he really does need to improve their reputations again.

Finally, Kal just tells Gril to tell his idiot to haul Scabs back onto the deck or he'll vaporize his head. Gril just shrugs and says go ahead, Roid Rage is an idiot who brought this on himself, but that if he does kill him now that will make him let go of Scabs, who will then fall into the toxic sump water. Well, at least Kal kinda sorta charmed the other two Goliaths into washing their hands of this; now it's just a matter of dealing with Roid Rage in a way that won't get Scabs killed.

The standoff is then interrupted by a warning cough from across the deck. Is Amenute about to threaten everyone with a half-open portal with visible demons behind it? Ah, no, it's the Evil League of Evil's contingent; Skullface, Wily Pete, and Ivers. I figured they would get involved in this chapter, going by the title. Roid Rage brings Scabs back aboard, not wanting to deal with too many enemies at a time.

Skullface addresses Jerico and asks him if the Goliaths are part of his entourage, and that if he's having them get rid of his old companions like Scabs then that just means he has good sense. They posture at each other for a while. Elstob gives each of the League of Evil the silliest voices, I swear. Skullface sounds like a Russian-accented zombie. Pete sounds like a Russian-accent Gollum. Ivers sounds like a seductive woman.

Willy Pete finally tries to torch Jerico for reasons I don't fully grasp, aside from the obvious "competition for the Zoom bounty" I guess. There is a good exchange here though:

Willy Pete: *raises his flamethrower cyberhands and turns on the igniters, pointing them both at Kal* "DO YOU KNOW WHAT I'M GOING TO DO TO YOU?"

Kal Jerico: "You're...going to burn me?"

Willy Pete: *pauses for a moment, frustrated and at a loss for words before shouting* "YES! I'M GOING TO BURN YOU!"

Most of the writer's attempts to write Jerico as a wisecracking comedic antihero are mediocre at best and make the character come across as a lame Han Solo wannabe rather than the real deal. This is one of the only times in the book so far where it actually landed for me.

Anyway, cue stupid three way firefight that doesn't really accomplish anything. My prediction is that the no-name Goliaths are all going to die, but no member of the other two parties will because they all have minis that Games Workshop wants to keep selling. Nothing keeps your immersion in a fictional world going strong quite like that, I tell you!

...

To head off a complaint that I know some readers are going to make about that last point: yes, I know that you could say the same thing about any protagonist in any single-protag-focused story. But there's a difference, at least for me.

When I read a book centered around a single protagonist, I know they're going to survive until at least the last chapter if not the very end. The way that I tend to look at it isn't that the hero survives because they're the protagonist, but rather that they get to be the protagonist of a book because they survive. When I can tell who's not allowed to live just based on how much they seem like a marketable figurine regardless of their importance to the story, it's more intrusive.

...

The fight is ended before the author has to think of some contrived way to not get the overpriced plastic toys killed by each other by a sudden thumping against the hull, accompanied by Amenute's eerie singing. All around them, crew run to their stations, many of them lugging heavy weapons. Either Amenute summoned something to make them stop being dumb, or (more likely) she's praying to appease whatever underhive monster just conveniently attacked the ship. Turns out it's something called a "sump devil." End chapter with everyone grudgingly realizing they should help deal with the sea monster first.

Think I've said everything I wanted to say about that chapter already. On to the next, which presumably will revolve around either repelling a giant tentacle monster or escaping from a sinking ship while a giant tentacle monster chews it up.

Chapter 13: Sump Devil

Giant scaly tentacles with squidlike hooked suction cups rise up. Sounds like sump horrors either evolved from introduced squid, or from a close native analogue. Literally a sewer kraken. Gril the Goliath has never seen one of these before, but team Jerico and team Skullface both have, so they don't freeze up like the goliaths do. Tentacles dent the upper deck, crushing passengers and crewmen into broken corpses and yank them overboard for consumption. Even with the armed passengers all shooting their small arms and the crew firing the mounted autocannons and harpoon launchers, the thing isn't discouraged by the loss of some of its tentacles. This is an exceptionally big one by the sound of things, and it's not guaranteed that the ship will survive.

I'm surprised that Pyromaniac Gollum isn't making a bigger difference in this fight. You'd think a flamethrower would be just the thing for discouraging this sort of creature. Maybe its limbs are heat resistant for some pseudoscientific reason.

Kal gets grabbed around the ankle by one of the thing's thinner, grasping tentacles (as opposed to the big spiky ones it uses for crushing), but his cyberdog tears him loose. Good cyberdog. Hacked, but good. Then it turns out that the other bounty hunters are STILL trying to kill Kal and Co, as well as each other, even as the tentacles come in from all sides. Why.

...okay, speaking of "why," there's a mention of the ship's mast breaking and falling down across the deck after being struck by the bigger tentacles. I literally did a double take there. Why does a powered ferryboat have a mast? Even if they didn't have motors, it's not like there's going to be any wind for them to catch down in this oversized septic tank. Seriously, it feels like the author was just in the headspace of "a kraken is attacking a ship, what are things that happen when krakens attack ships" and totally forgot that this was a futuristic urban setting rather than the usual for such scenarios. So, the ship just turns into the Black Pearl for a few sentences while Reynolds channels thoughtless "kraken stuff." In fact...oh FOR FUCK'S SAKE there are also bits that call attention to the kraken's foul breath blasting in Kal's face, and it having a toothy yonic mouth...this is literally just the Kraken fight from Pirates of the Caribbean II. It's not just the mast, it's the entire fucking Black Pearl.

The average SV fanfic writer wouldn't fuck up like this. They'd do other, even dumber things, fair enough, but not this.

Well, I was wrong about one thing at least. It turns out that Willy Pete, at least, wasn't a particularly valuable little plastic toy. He and Skullface stupidly try to attack them again, and the kraken gets Pete. Unmistakably dead. Crushed under a massive tentacle, and then has his flamethrower tanks blown up by bullet to injure the monster when it pulls his remains overboard. Skullface, for his part, gets badly injured by the cyberdog, but his skeletal body has some more extensive cybernetics than Kal realized. For a moment, Skullface seems like he's being more reasonable now that he's injured, saying that it was Pete's stupid advice that led to him trying to start shit with Jerico and the Goliaths. Only, once Jerico lets his guard down it turns out that he was playing him. Skullface actually isn't injured at all. He's not a chemical burn victim like he's led everyone to believe, but a full body replacement cyborg with some fake skin (and fake blood bags under it) wrapped around himself to make people underestimate him.

Okay, that's actually, legitimately clever.

For all his cunning at trickery, though, Skullface is pretty dumb when it comes to priorities. For instance, still trying to kill Jerico even when the sump devil is pulling the ship down and eating everyone on it. He gets the better of Kal, and forces him overboard right over the snapping jaws and flailing tentacles of the monster. Kal turns into an anime character and cuts off the first few tentacles in midair, runs along a few others, and then dives down its throat to drop his grenades into its stomach before being vomited out in the wake of the blasts and landing back on the deck of the ship with no injuries whatsoever.

-_-

If he could do this God Of War shit, why hasn't he been doing it throughout the story until now?

A bunch more people went overboard in the monster's thrashing explosion-stomachache wake, but the ship is still afloat. Limping and badly depopulated, but afloat. Skullface went over the railing, but nobody saw the body, and if anyone's likely to survive an extended walk across the toxic waste ocean floor it would be the full body cyborg with a defense-heavy build. No one saw what happened to the third guy with the goofy hairdo; he may have fallen overboard, or he may have just decided to retreat after losing his companions.

Still, I was surprised they killed Pete; he really had the feel of an untouchable marketable named character to him. If he was, then damn, I should be giving this book more credit for being willing to do that. If not, then the author at least wins a few points for creating a killable decoy character who convincingly imitates an untouchable plastic toy man.

Some helicopter type things reach the scene; apparently they were close enough to their destination for the attack to have been detected, and the town scrambled what passes for its air force to see what's up. The choppers are well armed enough to finish off the badly wounded sump devil, ensuring that the fairy can limp on to dock without further attack. Then Amenute crawls back out of her hidey-hole on the upper deck and judgily tells Kal that he didn't have to hurt the sump devil. She had already told it not to kill him when she called it in the first place.

Okay, so she is a psyker, and her singing did call the monster to attack. She has the higher level version of that power my Cadian guardsgirl took that let her summon rats and birds and stuff. I never got a chance to advance her psyker-ness after she got that mutation, but by the campaign's end she HAD drawn up plans for miniature Astartes armor to put the rats in, which I think is at least as good. Anyway, Amenute explains that she could tell that Skullface and the Goliaths were about to wipe the floor with him, and more importantly with Scabs, so she cast summon kraken and gave it a short list of people to not eat. I guess she was confident it wouldn't sink the ship just by knocking into it. Somehow.

And, um. The part where it grabbed Kal with one of its tentacles and only failed in pulling him overboard because his cyberdog chewed it off? Just a prank, bro? I was just pulling your leg, bro? Haha, get it bro, 'cause I made it grab your leg? No hard feelings bro?

I guess this would explain the part where he somehow ran along its tentacles without it flicking him off, and where he got in and out of its mouth without it gulping him down or biting him in half. But it also creates at least as many problems as it solves. Aside from the part where it actually DID attack Kal at first, and the issue of it likely sinking the ship just in the process of fighting with the crew, what the hell made Amenute think that the situation was dire enough to require this in the first place? Two groups of three enemies, both hostile to each other as well as to Team Jerico. That's not really worse odds than the last fight she saw them in, is it? I guess maybe she's just bad enough at tactical thinking to believe that "kraken falls, everyone (probably) dies" would be better luck than just letting the Mexican standoff happen, but...really?

You could maybe infer that she hadn't intended to summon that specific type of underhive monster, but instead issued a general attack beacon hoping that whatever answered it would create enough of a distraction, but her allegedly giving it specific instructions like "eat these people, but not this other person" makes that seem unlikely as well.

Also, why the hell is she getting pissy at Kal over hurting it when he had no way of knowing she was controlling it? She has ample reason to be pissy at him for other things, like how he keeps trashtalking Scabs for freeing her and going on about how she's going to get them in more trouble, but not for this.

I'm pretty sure that the author originally intended for this to have been her giving a general attack beacon, or to be influencing the mind of a sump devil that had already been inbound to make it not attack her companions, but forgot it during the writing. Cause, this just doesn't line up.

Everyone gets pissy at her for being a witch and also for almost killing everyone. She insists that she wasn't lying before; she's not a witch, she's a spirit-singer. That's probably true within the culture she was raised in, but she and them are operating under different definitions of "witch." For her, there are good psykers and bad psykers, and only the bad ones are witches. For them, witch and psyker are just synonyms. She's from a family line of spirit-singers. They seem to be a normal thing in the part of the Ratskin-dominated deep underhive that she comes from, and no one that she knows has ever called them witches.

...

I would just like to take this opportunity to remind everyone that the idiot fans who go on about how psyker-oppression is necessary because letting a bunch of them exist in close proximity for a long period of time will inevitably cause warp eruptions are, in fact, idiots. I'm not sure exactly what kind of brain damage it takes for a person to start swallowing the blatantly obvious propaganda of a cartoonishly evil fictional regime hook line and sinker, but it seems to be tragically prevalent in the 40K fandom. My working theory is that the paint thinner some people use has arsenic in it, but I'm still collecting data.

Then again, there are unironic Palpatine shills out there. So I guess this should barely even be a blip on the radar.

...

None of them are sure what to do with Amenute at this point. However, Kal ultimately decides that being a witch couldn't possibly make her worse than everyone else in the party, so he's fine with her continuing to travel with them at least for now. Well, he's self-aware and non-hypocritical, if nothing else. Yolanda isn't happy about this, because she isn't happy about anything, but she doesn't argue too much. Scabs is just sort of too bewildered to comment.

Kal briefly muses on the possibility of Amenute having psychically compelled Scabs to rescue her from that gibbet, but discards it. If she could do that, she wouldn't have been in that cage in the first place. Also astute.

The ferry approaches their downtown destination at the far end of the sump. End chapter.

That chapter was...something, alright. I don't know if it's something good, per se, but something certainly.