AGP- Poker Room from Hell

As the door swung open, we all lowered our weapons. Twitch whimpered, Aimy and Doc swore, Tink set Spot to "record", Sarge facepalmed, and Nubby cheerily waved at the smoldering, bearded skeleton at the head of the poker table, who laughed and waved back.

Our arrival didn't go unnoticed by the other players at the poker table. The charred skeleton with a chainsword at his side, turned and waved as well, and the exit-wound-faced man on the far side raised his beer to us before messily dumping it into the approximate area of his mouth. This caught the attention of the last man at the table, a massive angry-looking fellow in Scout armor, who looked surprisingly normal if you ignored the telephone-pole sized tyranid talon lodged in his chest. He turned towards the door, knocking drinks and chips everywhere with his chest-talon, then went wide-eyed as he saw us. The man immediately leapt to his feet and began striding towards the door while ranting about cowards, scavengers, and heretics.

We automatically raised our weapons again, but before the ranting scout marine got much closer, the sword-bearing skeleton and nearly-headless guardsman shared an exasperated look, got up, and grabbed him by the elbows. They didn't actually have enough strength to stop the scout, but then the bearded skeleton came over and pulled down on the talon sticking out of the large man's back, causing him to topple backwards. The scout marine was dragged back to the table, screaming at us the whole way, mostly about his sergeant. Specifically how our incompetence had gotten him cut in half, the way we'd lost, stolen, or sold most of his gear and his legs, and how we'd finally left him, alone and dying, in a daemonically tainted hole. This annoyed Doc, who thought he'd done a pretty good job keeping Gravis sort-of alive all things considered, and said so.

On the list of sane things to do, arguing with a dead Scout Marine is pretty close to the bottom, but that didn't stop Doc; or Nubby and Tink for that matter. All three of them started throwing excuses, explanations, and insults at the impaled Scout, who expanded his list of grievances to include: being too cowardly or stupid to shoot down a flyrant, abandoning a shuttle full of his battle-brothers in a xenos-filled backwater, and getting him stuck in some shitty poker room for all eternity. Nubby responded by calling his Primarch fat.

The bearded skeleton, who'd been snickering at the exchange and Sarge's pained reaction to it, fell over laughing at that remark, and the argument petered out. Once he'd regained his breath, the skeleton apologized for the new guy's complete lack of perspective, and then immediately went on to congratulate us for finally doing something about "Frank". Since he gestured towards our pallet when he said that, we assumed that he meant the Deamonthrope, and didn't ask why it had a name. Sarge adopted his best poker face, thanked the skeleton for his praise, suggested that it time we got moving again, and began to shut the door. The bearded skeleton held up a finger, and suggested we take the lift all the way up to level 39. Tink, ever the pedant, pointed out that the lift only went to level 26.5, which prompted yet another bout of knee slapping laughter from the skeleton.

Acting as if we'd said the most hilariously stupid thing he'd ever heard, the bearded skeleton repeated Tink's statement to his three companions, two of which joined him in laughing. After a few seconds, the faceless guardsman gurgled something, which prompted the spokes-skeleton to make a "get a load of this guy" gesture at him, and ask us if we minded. Without even thinking, Sarge responded with shrug, then flinched backwards as the head-shot corpse suddenly appeared at the doorway, and began to lean out into the lift.

Talking to the familiar denizens of the poker room was one thing, but one of them coming out was quite another. Most of us raised our weapons, and Sarge tried to slam the door, but Twitch grabbed his arm, and gestured at the rest of us to put the guns away and back up. The nearly-headless guardsman gave Twitch an appreciative sounding gurgle, and reached an arm out towards the lift-control panel.

As the corpse's arm passed over the threshold its flesh on it began to rot and bubble, and the lights on the drones and our armor began to flicker. With a cracking pop, the annoying lift music cut out, and was replaced by immensely creepy children's songs, which the blood-faces on the shaft's walls began singing along to. Twitch began rocking back and forth and singing along as well, and for some reason Fio joined in too. Aimy told them both to stop being crazy; prompting Twitch to start giggling and Fio to complain about how he was just trying to fit in, and we really needed to document what was and wasn't considered crazy in our backwards culture.

When its rotting arm reached the control-panel, the head-shot guardsman began leaning his head out to get a look at what he was doing. We all reflexively looked away, and didn't see exactly what happened next, but there was an indescribably foul smell, and a layer of frost formed on everything in the lift except for the Daemonthope's stasis unit. Then the frost and smell abruptly vanished, the singing stopped, and we looked back to see the guardsman lumbering back into the poker room, looking as normal as anyone with a massive crater in their head can.

The charred spokes-skeleton laughed at us, gestured towards the button labeled "39" that had appeared at the top of the control panel, asked if that was better, and told us to have fun. Behind him, the sword-bearing skeleton paused from restraining the Scout and waved, then told us not to fuck up because he had money on us.

The last thing we saw before Sarge closed the door was the two skeletons levering the Scout up, and the head-shot guardsman sitting down at the bar next to a vague ghostly shape that hadn't been there earlier. We noted the absence of Doc's recently-expired armsman, and unanimously agreed to never speak of him again.