The Scientist's End
Dr. Henry Wu died thinking he was a god.
In his final moments—crushed beneath a crumbling biotech tower of his own design, choking on the gases of a hybrid experiment gone wrong—he saw the world he tried to perfect rot before his eyes. The perfected creatures rebelled. The gene-sequenced utopias collapsed. His legacy drowned in gore.
And yet, in that moment of death, he was not taken by oblivion.
No. The Warp had seen him. It had studied him. Admired him.
Because even gods die, but architects? Architects reshape forever.
The Garden of Disease and Discovery
He awoke in a laboratory that was also a swamp.
Tubes hung from weeping trees. Petri dishes grew from the sides of bloated mushrooms. Bacteria pulsed like jellyfish through the air. The ceiling was a glass dome that showed impossible constellations, each pattern forming blueprints that shifted and merged.
Dr. Wu sat up, perfectly calm.
He was dead, he reasoned. Or dreaming. Or both.
But the environment was… alive.
He didn't panic.
He cataloged.
A Voice in the Mold
"You are method," a voice gurgled. "You are design. You are evolution without conscience."
The swamp rustled.
From the mud rose a being both putrid and vast, its bloated form clad in filth and blossoms, insects and tumors crawling from its every pore.
A Great Unclean One, servant of Nurgle.
"But your creations fail because they resist decay," it said, grinning with cracked lips. "They do not embrace it."
Wu stood, watching the creature's pus-dripping form with detached fascination.
"You want my mind," he said. "But you misunderstand it."
"No," said the daemon, lovingly stroking a fungal beast born from rot. "We want to complete it."
The Library of Impossible Futures
Before Wu could respond, the swamp rippled.
The sky above cracked open like glass, and a staircase of shifting runes spiraled down. From it descended a being of impossibly precise geometry, a swirl of colors too complex to exist, wearing a mask of eyes that blinked in a rhythm no mortal could follow.
A Lord of Change, servant of Tzeentch.
Where Nurgle's voice was rot, this voice was fire, wind, and whisper. A symphony of calculus and poetry.
"You alter life to dominate nature," it said. "But imagine altering reality to transcend it."
It floated before him, offering a scroll that folded into itself endlessly.
"Your DNA is primitive compared to the strings of fate."
Wu narrowed his eyes.
One promised permanence through decay. The other, immortality through mutation.
He was not offered peace.
He was offered data.
And that intrigued him more than anything.
Trial One: The Flesh
The Great Unclean One took Wu to a chamber beneath the swamp—a womb of meat and pus.
"You made monsters to control," it said. "Now, make one to coexist."
Wu was handed a dozen samples: rotting organs, viral strains, mutating genomes from extinct plagues.
With a scalpel forged from bone and a lab table formed of rotting wood, he worked.
Days passed—or centuries.
He created a creature not to conquer, but to adapt.
It pulsed with life, fed on decay, and glowed with resilience.
The daemon smiled. "You understand. Life that fights death fails. Life that partners with it thrives."
Nurgle left a mark upon Wu's lungs, filling them with spores that filtered poison into insight.
Trial Two: The Pattern
Tzeentch pulled him into the sky.
Above the swamp lay a palace of crystal and paradox. Corridors looped into themselves. Doors opened to moments. Time was liquid.
Here, Wu was shown possibilities. A world where dinosaurs ruled the stars. A version of himself who merged with his own creation. A future where humanity became a single hive-mind.
Tzeentch demanded more than invention.
It demanded vision.
"You think in genomes," the daemon said. "Think in timelines."
Wu, on a hovering chalkboard made of memory, began to sketch futures. Ecosystems that evolved in minutes. Wars won by altering the birth of generals. Breeding programs that weaponized hope.
Tzeentch was pleased.
It seared its mark into Wu's mind—a fractal spiral that never ended.
Between the Blessings
Alone again in a pocket of balanced rot and magic, Wu finally reflected.
He wasn't humbled.
He was validated.
He had always believed nature was flawed. That humanity needed a guiding hand to improve itself. In Chaos, he had found tools that went beyond even his wildest arrogance.
But there was still one name, always whispered in background static. A name he didn't yet understand but couldn't escape.
"The Joker."
Wu had never met him. But in every whisper of Chaos, in every ripple of the Warp, that name echoed.
"A clown," Wu muttered, examining a data-scroll laced with raw memory. "Yet his presence disturbs even gods."
That bothered him.
He knew that kind of man—agents of unpredictability. Corrupting results. Spoiling sequences.
He made a note in his mind: Study the Joker. Assess threat. Neutralize if necessary.
The Offer
Both daemons appeared again—rot and light, entropy and change.
"You will not kneel," said Nurgle. "But you will serve, through action."
"You will not worship," said Tzeentch. "But you will understand."
They reached out.
From one, gifted resilience: a body that healed not by rejecting disease, but by restructuring itself to accommodate it.
From the other, gifted vision: the ability to glimpse fragments of cause and effect, reading fate as a scientist reads a genome.
And to both, Wu gave a smile—not of gratitude, but of acknowledgment.
"You're tools," he said. "Not gods."
They laughed.
For that was exactly what they wanted from him.
Emergence
Wu was returned not to realspace, but to a new Warp-born facility—his own floating research vessel, alive with thought and plague. There, he continued his work. Breeding. Testing. Plotting.
One day, he would release something into the material universe that would force evolution through suffering.
He would not fight battles.
He would reshape the battlefield.
And one day, he would meet the Joker.
Not in hatred.
Not in fear.
But in clinical curiosity.
Because in all the whispers of his name, there was one thing Dr. Wu wanted to dissect most:
Why do the gods laugh when they say his name?