Has anyone suggested Ciaphas Cain, Blood Axe Warboss as a Ciaphas Cain AU yet?

If not…

Ciaphas Cain and the Orks in the Webway (with annotations by Amberly Vail, Ordo Xenos)

There are a few advantages to regularly shacking up with an inquisitor, and one of those appeared to be that she preferred to laugh herself sick at my misadventures rather than shooting me for treason, and she had the resources to bury all tales of the miserable affair.

The laughter stung, of course, but I was far to experienced a dissembler to let a hint of it it show (1)

(1) he wasn't. As I recall, he pouted rather adorably the rest of the evening.

"So you're saying you diverted a whole Waaaagh away from imperial territory, and into an eternal war with the Dark Eldar- because the warboss made you his Commessar?"

"Not exactly his Commessar." I corrected. "They don't use the term 'sir' They think it's pretentious. And they think the 'Sar' in Commessar is a 'sir.'

"So they called you Pinko Humie Commie Nob." Her face was suffused, and I was able to set aside my own offense to watch her own face flush in an attempt to stifle giggles as she wound down the debriefing.

Upon reflection, it was far more attractive company than the green tide I had been leading around like a trainer leading an ambull around with a fresh bucket of meats, so I set aside my offense in favor of making her laugh again, even if she was laughing at me.

I prefer my embarrassments to be little things- fumbling my words a bit around a pretty, blond inquisitor. Getting my head handed to me on the regicide board. Tripping on a rock- that sort of thing.

Getting captured by Orks had not been a little thing.

Fortunately, my overweening survival instinct is more than healthy enough to survive these embarrassments.

Based on my experiences at Perlia, I would have judged my survival unlikely when the underhive expedition I had been using as an excuse to stash myself away from whatever the Dark Eldar had up their psychopathic sleeves this time had been ambushed by orks.

When fifty or so Ork Kommandos rather neatly sprung a pit trap, which got the rest of my current crop of PDF meatshields and which my reflexes I avoided quite well. (2)

(2.) Interestingly, the PDF unit all survived their fall, and the after-action reports are full of 'the heroic Commessar bravely risking his own life to distract the mob and lead them away, 'with flourishing chainsword' and 'a battlecry of 'The Emperor Protects!'

Then I managed to fall into one of the fifteen backup pit-traps the Kommandos had explained they'd dug while giggling with hilarity, and filled with psychedelic mushroom beer.

After I'd gotten done being high as a kite, I found myself presented as a prize to the orkish leader.

The leader of the Ork mob who had captured me, a blood Ax who rejoiced in the title Da Genrul, had a terrifyingly robust grasp of strategy and tactics. I would say 'for an Ork,' but in all honestly I think he might be a match for Zyvan, and certainly smarter than my old drinking buddy General Lorgar. Even more terrifyingly, he knew how to get his subordinates to care about strategy and tactics as well, mostly by framing all of them as somehow 'hilarious.'

And he knew how to use the Eldar webway.

I began to have regrets that I'd allowed Amberly to wander off with my aide, not that when an inquisitor shows up with a menacing trill of 'can you do me a favor, dear?' I could have exactly said 'no.'

And I couldn't exactly have said 'no' to the hulking creature, either, especially since his particular sense of humor was odd, even for an Ork, and he thought it would be "funny as 'ell" to get a 'Com-pry-hennn-siv grasp of Hum-per-ial stra-ta-geeze'

Somewhere along the line, Da General gotten into the habit of picking up human officers and picking their brains for 'da sneaky bits' and I was the latest in his collection.

He'd also gotten into the habit of knowing what to feed a human so it didn't die, and to allow it proper exercise, and I had to develop a taste for mushroom beer in sheer self-defense. It was a bit like Tanna, which lead me to wonder about whether that particular brew had originated before or after the orkish invasion of Valhalla.

What was far more humiliating was how neatly my old job as commissar to a human regiment transferred to…pretty much exactly the same thing for the Orks.

'Do I have to keep going over this?" I asked, 'it's all in Da Book.'

And Amberly said no, she'd got it all for her records. The night passed more than pleasurably after that and I supposed there are worse things than an inquisitor giggling in hilarity about making use of 'her favorite Nob.'

Annotated Extracts from Amberly Vail's notes on 'Da Book'

(Translated from the orkish', since most of it is like this:

Da Pinko Humie CommiNob's job iz ta find us boyz da biiiig krump

Which, roughly translates to

'The commessar's job is to find his men the biggest fight'

the Commessar will help you make a better fist of it*. (The orcs, apparently pounced on this phrase, not understanding that 'a better fist of it' meant 'more competently' instead of a literal 'better fist' If the commissar tells you not to fight, it's because there's going to be a bigger fight soon. If you have a big book of strategies, you can throw the book at them. (Apparently, Da Genrul threw Da Book at a dark Eldar, and it was big enough to squish it. Every Ork in the Waaag started carrying a book after that, though most of them were predictably blank.) Morale is to physical as many is to 1 When you're bored, follow the Commessar to a bigger fight (I confess to using this strategy myself, since Cain reliably finds the biggest trouble when he's most desperately trying to avoid it) Grots make better cannon fodder if you give them better cannons (I'm actually rather displeased at this, since Cain rather more than tripled the effectiveness of Da General's forces with this gem, but after he explained that those particular grots were planning to overthrow Da General at the earliest opportunity, I began to see what he was driving at. ) It's far more fun to fight enemies that want to fight back. That's why dark Eldar are a bigger, better fight than humans. You can do anything when you believe (literally true for the orks) If you piss off the Commessar, he'll use human magic to make the fight boring (apparently, the most effective threat to an Ork, short of killing them, is to bore them. (Apparently Cain used his experience with sororitas prayer meetings to pull off this miracle, and I'm still quite unsure about how he made defending himself with a chainsword somehow boring. The man is full of surprises.) Never play tarot with the Commessar unless you want to lose all your teeth. (I am unsure what the bigger miracle is- that Cain got the orks interested in Tarot, or that he survived winning against them. His talent for finding a card game anywhere he goes is as reliable as his talent for finding trouble.) Scrapping is more fun when everyone lives to scrap again. (As ever, Cain is reluctant to spend more lives than he has to, even if they are ork lives. Emperor help us if he ever actually turned traitor)