There is a kind of laughter that isn't quite right.

The picts start out innocently enough. Cute animals, people in Guard uniforms performing tricks, Skitarii dancing. Hagar moves through the space of the Factorium, illuminated only by the flickering lights and happy images and the wheezing groans of tech-priests and menials who lie drooling on the floor before them. Turning the screens off is easy enough for Hagar, at which point everyone else is free to follow into the rooms. The process is slow, almost numbing, as room after room, console after console passes by.

A flash of interest shows up in some of the picts. Green and white giants from the Jade Lancers chapter move through the background of some of the screens, weapons armed and raised. The shock of their vivid colours is enough to break the trance and make you realize that cute little puppy you've been watching is dead and rotted, and the friends who keep playing with it are two little lords; daemonic gremlins with single eyes and gap-tooth smiles. A moment later both of them evaporate into a greenish mist as mass-reactives detonate inside them and the feed seamlessly cuts through to another video. The playful stomping horse that you had started to look forwards to seeing is a vast sluglike creature, maw dripping saliva, and it claps its flippers together before body-slamming another Astartes against a wall so hard the ferrocrete cracks. It's not something you laugh at. It's just a little chuckle, a corrupted little lazy twist of your mouth, before the next video plays showing a pair of skitarii doing a sword kata demonstration.

The work is so monotonous that even without the compulsion of the screens you might have missed it when that vast white-armoured warrior lurches out of the darkness. It is a Jade Lancer, helmet cracked, one lens flickering, the other bright with the corrupting patterns of the picts playing across its surface. Its armour is rusted and worn and caked in blood and gore. Its twitching fingers holds an empty pistol. It lurches into the room with a violence not even undeath could dim, pushing past Hagar roughly. It is heading for Vael and Geron, a small crowd of blankly inert magi and guardsmen following in its wake.