Episode 49 - The Talons of the Emperor pt 2 - The Sisters of Silence

On today’s episode, we dive into the Sisters of Silence.  We start with an in depth dive into the Pariah gene.  From there we talk about the mysterious rise of the sisters from the unification wars into the great crusade with the daughters of the Crow.  We then talk about what a sister of silence is and how they function as an organization.  We then move onto their growth during the great crusade and their “disappearance” after the fall of the emperor.  We then close on their resurgence since the return of Guilliman. 

Transcript

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Welcome to the 40 K lore cast. Welcome to the 40 K lore cast with me, John Barsotti and Brad Chester. This guy today's cast. We're going to continue our dive into the towns of the emperor with the focus on the sisters of silence. Scary people. Yeah. As always, before we begin, Let's please follow and comment on the cast. It helps us. It really is helping us reach a much wider audience. Everybody like I might not seem to be anything to you. It does help our algorithms a lot, which then makes a streaming services, push us to more people. Comment helps so much. I have no idea why, but it just does. Well, it does because bots don't comment. That's why it's, it's, it's what happens is the softwares are able to look at like, Oh, something, these 8, 000 random accounts from the Korea listened to you because you paid them to, you know, on this episode, I'm going to ask for a comment. And I want the comment to be a comment for the algorithm gods, or just say, Hey, this is really good. Or, Hey, it's not any good. You guys are idiots. I don't care. Either way. Don't ruin it, John. I mean, you can write a negative comment. Just give us five stars also, or you could give us a negative comment. And join our discord and give us constructive criticism so that we can change the thing that you wanted to comment negatively about. Exactly. So we actually do have, for those of you who like what we're doing, we, we have a discord. I know not everyone uses discord. Discord is kind of just a controlled message board. It's really well done. You've got little individual channels in there. So we have stuff in there. So we can comment, you can give us feedback on the cast. You can ask for more information about some of the episodes. You can, a big one people do is they request topics of coverage. So some of the stuff we do, like our random ones are like, you know, weapons of the Imperium, what makes a space Marine? This stuff all comes out of discord. To be honest with you, every single weapon episode we've done is because of people asking about that. And we follow that. We have a hundred thousand episodes. We have to figure out what we're going to do. And I'll be honest, night Lords have moved their, their way. So it's way up the list because I keep getting, can you do night Lords episode? And in my head, I'm like, I didn't actually have them written down. Like we first started this thing. It's like, even in the top 20, like they're now like, Ooh. So anyway, yeah, but also the night hunters novel. That's what it is. I realized it's just the novels are just so good. Everyone wants to do it. So if you're looking for a place to come, interact, ask more questions about lore, jump in, I spend a lot of time in there. Brad just lurks on it. It's like a creep. Cause he's an old man. It's like, he's just an old person who just stares at the internet. He can't, he can't actually interact with it. How are you working? Yeah, you get these random, you know, Brad, I think it's Brad 305 is your title, 3, 005, 3, 005. Does anyone know how to open a PDF? I mean, it's a little bit later, but last night we did a YouTube episode and, uh, I couldn't figure out how to make it happen. Yeah. I had to press this. He had to hit the start button anyway. Um, We also to help us with technology, have a link to our Patreon. If you like what we're doing and want to help us out, it's completely optional. You can jump into our Patreon where you can commit to giving us some money every month. We use that money for equipment, for audio, editing, et cetera. You probably heard some improvements in the quality. That's because of our Patreons. You guys have donated money. One of you did dictate, had to go to the dogs. The bulldog did get a whole big box of treats. She likes you a lot. By the way, verified. Yeah. Oh yeah. She likes you a lot, but for the rest of you who are contributing, it does help us a lot. It helps us just afford some of this stuff. Cause it's just a labor of love. And it's nice when it's not all my money could be my money. If I had any money. Yeah. Well, here's how we can get Matt Brad, some money. Brad is available for coaching. This is the last thing we always talk about. Brad's in playing the game for over 25 years and not just like playing it, playing it successfully for most of those 25 years. So if you guys, the cool thing about Brad though, is what I will say, and I'm going to insult him now in a positive way. If you spend any time around Brad, you realize he's not a prodigy by any stretch of imagination when it comes to, when it comes to this type of stuff, it's just pretty evident. He's not Brad's got a 40 K cause he's taken the time and really put the effort. I'm a grinder and I understand that. Most people are grinders and I know that a little bit of preparation goes a really long way. He really understands the game and he's a really, really great asset for you guys. So if you're looking for help within 40k, you're new to the game and playing the game for a while, you're welcome to do it. He's, if you want to reach him. Old man Brad. 40 K at gmail. com at some point, he's going to make a website. And I realized that we're at episode 49 and I'm not going to reedit them. So once you make sites being made right now, once you make a website, you're going to have 50 something episodes of people trying to email you off of. You're fault anyway, sisters of silence. All right. So let's talk about the sisters of silence. So before we jump into them, sisters are kind of, of science are kind of a weird one to me because their lore is epic level. Awesome. And they're just lost in the table. It's it's a horror movie. Their power level. The things that they can do the only time that they were actually power level where they should be scary level with they should be is in the dark times of 7th edition at the end of 7th. No, because they shut off all those broken. I know, but I'm putting you guys can see my I threw my arms in the air there. Seventh edition, and we're going to do a cast on this. Maybe like our 52nd cast will be like our one year anniversary. It'd be us just bitching about 40k on the tabletop. Seventh edition sucked a tornado. Yes, anything that was good in seventh edition was also bad because everything that was good in seventh edition is a bad thing for the game. Sisters at least shut that shit down. I think I saw a statistic where I think the player base in by the midpoint of 8th edition was four or five hundred percent above where it was in 7th edition, because so many people quit the game. Yeah, because it was terrible. If you're playing in 7th, I'm sorry. It was awful. I played since 2nd. 2nd is when I came into the game. Yeah. Seventh edition is laughably the worst time. Yeah. We can't do a cast on what's the worst edition of 40 K because it's a three minute cast. It's seventh edition. And both of us go, yeah, it's seventh edition. Have a nice night. Like first round knockout close. So, and we probably will do a cast on why it sucked. Cause that'll be fun. But anyway, so we're going to the sister. So we'll start off with, we're just doing this whole cast today. It's going to be really on just the history of the sisters, because it's not really much else you can do. We're just kind of go start from the beginning and then finish with modern. So. We'll start with the rise and the rise of sisters is pretty cool to me.'cause their origins actually go back even beyond that of the custodes. Let's, let's talk about what the, let's set up the world though. Yeah. Because we're getting more and more psyches. Okay. But we're also getting I guess, the opposite of that. Yeah. Which is going to be the Sisters of Silence. Let's, yeah, let's do the pariah gene. You know what? Let's just jump straight in because we can't talk about the sister. I'll talk about the pariah gene. The pariah gene is one of the most important parts, honestly, of, of 40 K in a sense of like, it does things that change. They break the game. Yeah, they break. Well, they break the, they break the galaxy. Yeah. They break the galaxy. So no one knows where the pariah gene came from, but we do know that it's a mankind only thing. Um, other species have, Ooh, I didn't actually, I, I looked it up to be honest with you. I forgot though. I, I knew, but I didn't realize. Obviously it's not an eldar thing. Nope. Yeah.'cause the eldar, the, the harlequins have, are soulless, but they're not blanks. And the only thing that's close to the pariah are the nephron pariahs, which are actually made from captured human pariahs. Yeah. So the pariah gene, and they're, they're made by. Necron technology, which emulates what that is. Exactly. So the pariah gene, we don't know when it came in from mankind. I'll dive into that in a little bit here, but the expectation is that as the warp grew, the pariah gene probably grew a little bit with it. And it has been, it's the way as the eye of terror, it happened. Yeah. Well, no, it predates that by a long margin. Exploded though. Cause we had very few people, maybe that's, well, that's, that's the problem is it's also possible. The prior gene may have been man manufactured before I was saying that I was about to pause them. Like, yeah, but I still think that, yes, that might've been, that, that is a theory, but also I think that even if that is true. The fact that the eye of terror expanded. Oh, they expanded psychic powers everywhere. So the odds are the odds of a project. That's I'm saying the prior gene exploded because of that. So let's talk about the project a little bit. So all mortal things create a presence in the warp, even the necrons. We discussed with that frontier created a presence of the warpage in the towel. They're, they don't interact with the warp, but they do have, you don't have to be aware of the warp to create a presence in the war. Exactly. Right. Now there is an acceptance on, you know, Episode 36, which was our, our, our cast on the black ship and astronomic icon. We talked about this a little. It was such a scary, it's a terrifying thing about how like the more powerful the psychic power, the more presence they have within the warp. The pariah gene is the inverse of this. They're the black hole of the warp. So a par a person with a, with a pariah gene doesn't appear within the warp, however. They can become more and more powerful with that pariah gene to the point where they actually become negative void. They become basically a negative number. And that number has been a lot negative. A lot. It can go exponentially more. Exactly. And it's a big thing on this because it is disconcerting. It is also shows up as a, when you're searching, it is legit. Like if a psychic. A psyker. Yeah. Tygarius. He's like, I need to find something and he looks out into the warp. He will actually find people writing because it is, it's a black hole, black hole in the search where it's really cool is that they actually can hide those. We talk about the black ships. If I put someone with the prior gene, which was also as a blank. Next to a psyker, I can't see the psyker, depending which one of those more powerful one will either psyker down like a light candle, or could you actually make them completely gone? And if you do it perfectly, which we, the black ship and other people designed to do, they designed to do is they, they pair blanks with powerful psykers. Exactly in the same level. So no one knows they're there. It's a really cool thing. And this is, again, this is why we call them blanks. So you're going to hear us. They mostly call blanks because it's easier than saying pariah gene anyway. They're blanks to the word. Yeah. And so the sisters of silence are made up entirely. Of blanks, every sister, and not just a like mild blank, like a mild blank might be like a negative one or a negative two. These are negative a thousand in some cases, a couple more notes on blanks. So, 1 of the big ones is that a blank, a lot of psychers where the blanks become really powerful and we talked about this again on the black ships psychers can see with their eyes. But they also can see what the warp I'm going to do a thing on this because I'm such a huge Star Wars fan, which is force users use the force accidentally all of the time. People that use the, the warp high level psychers, Eldar, things of that nature, they use the, their psychic powers. Accidentally all the time. Well, it would make sense because the difference is like with your eyes, you can see kind of whatever's unobstructed for the most part, straight in front of you, right? They haven't given Tao eyes on the sides of their heads yet, but with psychers, they can actually see in 360 and ignoring walls, et cetera. So they tend to use that. They also psychic when they do psychic awareness, they're looking at emotions and stuff. So they see something that's hostile to me. The blanks, the blanks, they can't see. And so there's some cool stories. This is why it again, black shifts, but a lot of stories that a blank can walk right up next to a psycher and the sucker won't see them the end. Cause they're mainly using, cause they go. Why would I, I know I'm using my eyes, but like, why am I really bother with my eyes? They don't realize that there's an assassin who are going to cover right next to me. Yeah. Why would I bother? Because psychics are so much better than my eyes are. And what makes, you know, is you guys could probably foreshadow the sisters of silence. This would include demons, chaos, gods, you know, any corrupted being also Eldar to a point like there, you could, you know, I'm actually surprised that they don't send more assassins after farseers, but whatever, because you could just cruise up because yeah, talk about people that use the, their psychic powers as a day to day. They could walk up and just eliminate an elder farseer and just leave. No one would even notice. What the hell happened. Yeah. I don't know. So once the other thing too is sisters though, take this. To a little bit higher of a level. And by a little bit, I mean, an extreme, I would say a little bit. So a blank, as we just said, can't really be seen in the warp. If you have warped sense, you may not see them, but if we take that like negative one, negative 10, we make it a negative 10, 000. They actually suck the life effectively out of you if you are a, you know, it's not even just a psycho though. If you're a war beating, it's not even warping though because regular people, everyone has a psychic presence. Yeah. Even if you have no, you, that's fair. Yeah. Yeah. I see where you're going with this. You, you don't know it all. You don't even know the warp exists. Yeah. If a blank, a powerful blank. Comes next to you. It is disconcerting. You you're, you don't even understand why you're horrified, why you feel terrible. We'll cover this in a little bit. Some of the stories and the sisters, but effectively, if you were a powerful psycher and a couple sisters are around you, you actually can just. You'll just collapse being in their presence because your, your body stops functioning because they take out all of the power that's, that's moving through you. And we don't really, I guess we only talk about warp enough, like we thought an elder, a good example, a powerful warp being the warp energy is not like something that they're just like shooting mind bullets with. It's seeding through all of their, their body, all their muscles, the ology, their whole body. And so you put a blank, that's a negative force on that pulls it out of you. Their body will just shut down and they collapse into the ground, which you can imagine if you're a powerful warp being makes them really good. Those of you who play great nights are asking, well, wait, wouldn't that be better than what we have? Yes, yes, but not the tabletop. Yeah, but not the also we're going to come to this a little bit later on, but you have to keep the the blanks. Away from other people because of the fact that you ruin everybody else. Yeah. Let's talk about that a little bit. Cause let's talk about the downside. So the, so this sounds like all upside, like, Oh, you take a blank. They can shut down psychers. They can shut down all this stuff except for their life is terrible. And if you've read the Eisenhorn novels, you already know this, but if you haven't read them, read them. But on top of that blanks have Because as we just said, every living being touches the warp in a certain way and the blank, whether they want to or not sucks that warp out of you. So when you're around them, they make you unhappy. That's just wildly. Well, depending on, depending on your level of connection to the warp, it can be a, as simple as a, like, yeah, whenever I'm around person X, I'm sad all the way up through, like, Yeah, I actually get suicidal and like my stomach doesn't work like a GI issues being around that person. And what this makes is that the blanks live this kind of really depressing life of solitude where no one will ever befriend them. Yeah. Wildly. You're like your presence. That's best case. Yeah. I would say that's best case scenario because the, I mean to say the mildest of the blanks cause wild distress. Yeah. The most powerful of blanks. Have people just drop dead next to them. And then, so this of course leads to kind of, you know, going back to the Salem witch trials, they also get murdered a lot because, because it's not hard to say, Hey, everyone agrees when we're around, Eric, we are all sad. So there's something wrong with Eric. Why don't we just kill Eric? And everyone goes, yeah, let's go kill Eric. Especially when Eric was born on a random hive world. Yeah. Who's everything sucks. And you make everything suck. You actually made my life on a hive world worse. Yeah, we're, you know, you're getting murky. So this is where this is the downside of the psyker. So hopefully that gives us enough background on them. So we can dive into the sisters of silence because now they know where the prior gene is and how it affects people. It's easy to tell the story. So. We'll start with the origins of them, which is well before the great crusade. We actually don't before. Yeah, this is basically don't give it a number on this. We'll continue. Yeah, we have no idea. We just know that. So as we, this might have been happening for thousands of years. All we know is that at some point during the wars on Tara, Tara split. Into different, you know, warlords. And so you had these fiefdoms run by techno barbarian warlords. These techno barbarian warlords were called that because they used technology and they were barbarians. So they were not less the first, less the second word, more of the first one, you know, like, And the big one that, that they use at this time was genetic augmentation. As we said, as I said before, the Emperor using genetic augmentation on the custodes and space. Yeah. It was like, this was well established technology. The Thunder Warriors were the best ones ever, but there was another warlord who. Did have quite a lot of power, and he actually ran the section of the world, which is about where England is because of course, that's where it was probably in Nottingham. Yeah, exactly. It's because it's where all the best people are from. No one, no one Nottingham. In fact, our knowledge of it are primarily Robin hood and number one, then a very distant second place is GW. He goes very, very, I'm going with Disney Robin Hood, the Fox. I don't know. I kind of liked the, um, no, God damn it with Kevin Costner. Yeah, well, I was actually, I was going to go with men in tights, but Kevin Costner also works, um, whatever, man. It's a very early Dave Chappelle, but I digress. So there was a King there, Nick called the unspeakable King, figure out why. And he was. Brutal, but he used a special force of war warriors who were known as the hollow ones. It's never confirmed, but it's implied that these weren't, this was an entire army of blanks that he used. It, you know, real, a random side note. A lot of the armies didn't even realize that they were using a shit ton of psychers. They were just juicing up their warriors. They didn't know how they were just, the unspeakable king and his hollow ones. Warriors were exceptionally successful, especially in the battlefront. And Oh yeah. Weird. We should mention, I have no idea why this is the case, but it's written down. So I'm going to say it. It was a lot of hand to hand combat, and I think they're copying Dune here, where the whole idea was like, well, everyone has shields. Everyone had void shields. And so you couldn't shoot them. So you had to stab each other. I mean, this isn't even, look guys, there's intellectual property violations. And there's some of the stuff GW did with early GW was Dune did where you're like, look, man, we did the same thing in Kodor. So we're all, when, when did Kodor come out? 90 something. Right. Probably slightly after do you think it may have a bad with time, but I think the decades might've been, yeah, so anyway. Uh, so everything was this hand to hand combat. So if you had an army of blanks, which as we just said, you get close to them, they make you uncomfortable. They're unnerving. It was a pretty good army. Uh, the Emperor kicked this guy's ass. So anyway, um, As which we talked about in the last cast for whatever, even though we were talking about that, we talked about that in three different casts when the Emperor conquered Tara, holy God, he was. 700 and zero, he was only first round knockouts like at this, at this moment. So he then fast forward a little bit and we're going to cover these guys in a little bit, become the daughters of the crow. After the emperor defeats this army, he actually folds the hollow ones into his army. Now, we're going to, I'm going to jump you guys ahead a little bit because this is, this is how the cannon's written. So there's a silence. There's nothing really there. We're going to jump ahead into the early part of the, of the great crusade. There was a hive world in full rebellion. It's an all psyker rebellion. Numerous imperial ships are sent to this planet and it just, and they just get wrecked an entire entire fleet. Arrives in orbit of imperial psychers and disappears. Well, they do huge rituals. Yeah. I mean, they don't even say it, but this is clearly cast. Oh, yeah, exactly. They're at the same time and all female part of the Imperial Guard. It's this again before Imperial Guard called the daughters of the crow were deployed. We don't know that much about it. We know that, that we know that this is a precursor to the sisters because of what happened. The daughters of the crow are deployed this hive world and effectively everyone up this point lost. They just land planet side and the rebellion stance. Yeah. Because people are on the ground screaming and grabbing their heads. Because the presence of the daughters of the crow is a nightmare. Yeah, they are all the, it just shut to the point where the Imperium was about to exterminate this, this hive world. And they left with captors. They actually, the daughters of the crow landed, walked around, just were picking the psychers up and putting them on black ships. Probably didn't end well for those psychers. I'm going to be honest. No, they probably, they were, they were like, I really wish someone would shot me. And so this is the doors grow after this. That is the last mention we ever have of the daughters of the crow. And a few years later, this citrus of silence just appear weird. It might have a couple of the people that were in the, it's entirely possible that there might be some overlap in these two. No one knows anything about this. They just appear one day. We go from daughters of the crow winning a battle. And then, oh, there's another army here called the sisters of silence. No notes. I mean, Valdor knows, but no one else knows because the entire Imperium, as we said before, is on a need to know basis. And it's always, you don't need to know. So that's kind of the origin story of the sisters of silence from there. Let's dive into what is. A sister of silence because, you know, we'll start with the basics. They don't talk a lot. This is weirdly not addressed enough and it's copper and that compromised it's contradicted a little bit of why they don't talk. Because they talk about what could happen and whatnot. But in the end, yeah, the sisters do not speak. They have a vow of sons. They can speak. This is not something where like it's bred out of them. So the example I use is Monty Python, life of Brian, the guy who has all the Juniper bushes, ow, my foot, that should be enough for the rest that gets to the rest of you off on a memory, uh, So instead of communicating with their voice, they use sign language, which only them and the custodes know, so they can speak to each other. It's a specific sign language on that. And the thing about, again, with their silence, they don't make enough of why. Yeah, my I'm saying in a couple of the stories, they said that because of the fact that they're blanks and when they speak, people get anxiety and terrifying, but they don't continue with that. I think it's, I think it's a bad ass thing. That's always my opinion. I think it's just awesome. Yeah, this is just terrifying. What if a bunch of women show up with a really dumb haircut? And a bunch of power armor, and they never say a word to you, but they actually do has dumb thing. They have to communicate. So they have a Vox, which is a GW for speaker on them. And if they do their sign language, this, the speaker will speak, which just say, it's just dumb. I know it's just objectively stupid. It's it's fine. They're also holding two weapons, but continue. That's not important anyway. I mean, it seems fairly important when I want to tell you to go attack. I Hill and I'm holding a pistol and he Bolter. Oh yeah. I mean, there's, there's no Canon story of this backfiring horribly, but it definitely has backfired. Yeah. You're like the person that's trying to do sign language, holding a sword and a gun. You're like, yeah. The reason I think it's kind of bad ass is what you get is, and we talked about the rates with the Eldar. What you get is an entire group of warriors who don't make it because they don't make a sound. They don't just not speak. They don't yell. Don't scream. Nothing, nothing. So when they're fighting in combat, you just get the sound of their bolter and their footsteps. That's all you get out of them. And again, this isn't doing it justice, John, because What you have to understand is the voices in your head, the voice, everything are alluded to be the warp connection. You're, you're feeling of being in connection, I guess, with the universe that's cut off. So not only is that not happening, you can't hear anything. They're not saying anything. You're like, what the hell is going on right now? Well, yeah, I, so I had a theory on this and I forgot, I forgot I had the theory on this cause I wrote these notes about a week ago, but anyway, my theory on this is that blanks, a psycher can't reach into their mind to read their mind. Right. So the only way that you could know what they're saying to each other, if you're a psycher and you're trying to spy on them would be to listen to them and they don't speak. And he was a sign language, unless you're a sister of some sort, because you don't know they effectively can move anywhere and do their thing. And no one knows what their purposes undetected by psychers. Yeah. So I'm like, that's actually kind of bad ass interesting thing about them is. Where they fit within the Imperium is a little bit goofy. This is trash. I'm sorry, but it, you know what? You know, you usually are the person that yells this out. The Sisters of Silence are technically part of the Astra Telepathica? No! Well, they are sure, but they report to the emperor. Yeah, they are. They are 100 percent under the Astra telepathica, except they do not listen to the Astra telepathica in any way, shape or form there. It doesn't even make any sense. Oh, it gets worse. I mean, if we really went dive into where the sisters actually feel about the Astra telepathica and some other elements of the Imperium, they make whatever. Yeah. It's. It's like if you went, Hey. The U. S. track and field is underneath the Department of Shuffleboard. I feel like we don't belong here, guys. You're there. Yeah. I mean, and that is important. The, the sisters are completely independent of the as a telepathic, they can do whatever they want. They choose to do things that align with, with Ash telepathic. So like they actually, they choose to be on the black ships. They love hunting down rogue psychers. So they're doing stuff for that as telepathic. And they tend to kind of be pretty close to the inquisition for this reason, quite often. Also the sisters of silence may or not be kind of psychos, but they're out of their damn minds. Yeah. I mean, like they will really, I mean, the stuff they do in the black ships is creepy, crazy, and wildly tortured. They are signing up for it, by the way. They are true believers. I mean, it's, we haven't, uh, a sisters of battle cast yet. The sisters of battle believe the emperor is a God. But very much, a hundred percent, right? So much so that they get powers. The sisters of silence believe the emperor is correct. And it's a very different powerhouse they get from this, but this is a battle or trying to do right by the emperor. The sisters of silence are a different level of crazy. It it's just crazy that they, they have a sign up board and half the things are, you should torture people until they die. And they're like, I'm in, I'm in, put me on the top of the board. You're like, you have problems. One of the weird things about them, and I say it's weird because Laura standpoint, so there's not a lot of stuff on the sisters. So I get a little bit confused by some of this and correct me if I'm wrong. So according to the codexes. It's only been three of them, so I don't have a lot to work off here. They, and the custodes are the only ones who have access to the imperial palace. They do not have full access. I don't care what you're going to throw. Right. That's that's a problem. It doesn't say limited. It says that they can wander the imperial palace kind of at their own discretion, which would mean chance. Cause they got too close to the emperor. Bad things would happen. And people should, the customs would cut them down in a moment. That's what I'm trying to figure out. Like, well, they allowed, are they allowed to the Imperial archives either? Cause there's probably some weird psychic crap down there. They would just make not work ever again. They would literally break protections down. Yeah. I mean, yeah, you're right. Imagine like three sisters accidentally stumble into the Astronomicon and that thing goes black. And then three sisters walk into the fact that they still have a portal to the abyss in the fucking basement. Well, that might be a good thing. Like to be fair, they could close it. Yeah. Maybe you should, they do have a lot of wards around it. Yeah. Maybe we should just shove a bunch of scissors. Hey, just stand here for how long eternity. Yeah. Sorry, girls. We're going to tie you to this chair. You saw this coming. So With their creation, which is more just kind of sudden appearance, they form a base on Luna, which is the moon in case you couldn't follow. I don't know why the GW does this crap and they name it the Somnus Citadel, which I also just, which is weird to me because Luna is already. A giant military. It is basically a bunch of guns pointed in all directions. Yeah. So I was kind of like, where are you even putting this? It's just somewhere there. It comes up in the flight of the Eisenstein. So, I mean, yes, it's cool. And that, and sorry, I try to use logic and sci fi. I don't know what the hell it is. Cause Brad's right. We all can look up and see how big the moon is. It's not that big. Okay. It's just not. And so apparently the moon is a giant fortress of guns. It's also the Citadel that all the sisters and sons are from. And it's where every black ship departs and arrives at constantly, because you don't want to bring the psychers all the way to Tara. You do a stop first. It's also Thunderdome. Yeah. It's a little bit odd. Um, I will say that some of those are going to come up a lot and we call it about gray nights because it's where they come from. It's well, originally it's where the formation of them, but so sisters had this, this is, and this is right around the end of this is during the great crusades is pre heresy. They've got this fortress there. They're probably less than a thousand of them at this time. It's never written down. But it's, there's less than there's, there's more of them than custodes and a lot less than everything else, because they're easier to make the custode. Yes, but they're also harder to control. They also just die a lot. Yeah, that was the downside because they are mortal, but they also were well protected. So they're attrition. It's hard to figure because you've got a high recruitment rate because well. Genetic engineering, and you've got a low attrition rate because they only get deployed against low ish. Yeah. Comparatively. Yeah. Cause well, you're only going to deploy them into like, oh, has a bunch of psychers here. Okay. What happens when we get there? Oh, they can't do shit. Okay. Well, that makes it easier. So let's dive into kind of the next chunk of them though, which is where the sisters really, their original heyday, which was during the great crusade up into the Horace Harris, every single engagement was chaos. Yeah. Chaos had, let's go before then because the bigger one is the great crusade. Well, sorry, because even in the great crusade, most of the places we're going had some, some level of psychic, some letter of psychic. Yeah. The biggest problems that Imperium has during the great crusade are the psychic races, either humans where you've got, you've got psychic warlords who've taken over a system during the dark, the dark age of technology. Because people, we basically left these planets alone and people with psychic powers went. I can blow people's heads up. I am a God. Yeah. I'm a God. You can't do anything to stop me. And they took care of, they took control. And the sisters could just land there and go, yeah, you're done. You're now Dave. Yeah. You also worked on Xeno species. Like the rag dams we discovered are heavily psychic powered. Orcs. They use the scissors against the orcs quite a bit. Cause it would actually shut it down. These guys all utilize sucking powers massively and you just bring some sisters of silence and they go, Oh, nothing works anymore. Yeah, this, this sucks. So having this level of force really helps it out. And the cool thing about this is as we covered earlier, this is a human gene. No other species has ever seen this. So when you deploy the sisters of silence to some of these It's the Xeno species, or even some of the humans have been well removed. They've never encountered this power before. You know what? I'm going to go into the completely the hold on everyone. This is the Brad and John randomly like wild theories about 40 K. Did we completely engineer this chain? Cause they allude to this several times. Yeah. Make this, is this a thing that we just made? I don't think. So only because the knowledge of the warp doesn't appear to have been there and it predates because, because it's dating back to the warlords before the five tariffs, I could see it being something where, so let me say differently, my expectation. Or my belief, my belief is that it was a trait that was detected and then it was cloned. That's what I think it is. I think some warriors had this, they identified the gene and they cloned the ever living hell out of it. When I think about Sisters of Silence, it feels like a wildly convenient coincidence. That I found the perfect counter. Yeah. And to my main adversary, GW hints a lot of times at, you know, using cloning technology. We're talking about like the creeks, like, like the, the, the, the, that course creek, they were in the under, they were in the underground. They were using cloning technology to increase their numbers. Right. I wouldn't be surprised if that's what the sisters are, because there's also all female force. They also look identical. So it's the odds are pretty good. This is actually a cloned force. I can see that more so than because it, like I said, it felt very, wow, you just happened to stumble upon the exact counter to my army. Yeah. Okay, the sisters are, that's my, that's my, my belief is that they're, they're a cloned force heavily. Oh, that changes. Uh, we'll get there later. So the fun thing about sisters, though, I do like is that they're just humans, which if you listen to our last cast, the very end of our last cast, where I pointed out that all of the, uh, custode models are the same size. So they were human. They're actually think about the same size of the sisters. It's just so great. And this, this is our humans, sorry, oopsies. But anyway, the sisters with the girl humans. Yeah, my love of the sisters is that they're in power armor, but they don't really have to do very much. They just show up and the power armor is really to just. Yeah. Don't get shot. Yeah. Don't lose the sisters. You land them on the planet. Yeah. And because they embody the tenants of my space wolves, almost none of them wear helmets because it would interfere with their psychic powers. They got masks. They wear a mask. They don't get poisoned. No. Scream. He's just, their head is exposed, which is just dumb. The models are stupid. You got to make sure everybody's got that Bob. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But this does lead to during great crusade, some of the most powerful beings in the galaxy were brought to heel by the sisters of silence. Just showing up and saying, what's your job stand fairly close to the dude. Should I engage him? Oh God. No, you will lose terribly. Just stand like in his general area and then we will go take care of it. This is screw it. We're jumping ahead a little bit. When they sacked Prospero, they brought them and all of the thousands of psychos, just Power just went just like, just wet noodled, uh, out of the lightning bolts out of their fingers. You're like, you guys kind of suck at everything else, right? You're like, sadly. Yes, sadly. Yes. But if we stand kind of near these guys, watch this and then space holes just went, so they can't hit me with a mind bullet. No. And I can hit it with my sword. Yeah. And I'm really good with the sword. And I really like hitting things with that sword, too. I'm so much better than this guy. This is going to not go well for them. Around the same time, though, Malkador and the Emperor decide that the Astronomicon needs to be powered by a bunch of psychers. And the sisters happily, uh, well, actually, no, sorry, I'm jumping ahead. They start off without the sisters on the black ships and shit goes, turns out this is not a great idea to take just thousands, thousands of, of unsanctioned psychers. Put them on a ship, have that ship do warp jumps. I just assumed that Chaos went, This has to be a trick. There's no way. There's no way they're this stupid. They cannot be this stupid. Um, so yeah, needless to say. All of a sudden the sisters get deployed in the black ships and the astronomical gets a much more consistent, uh, flow of soldiers have problems. Cause again, they sign up willingly. They're excited about doing this. It's going to be fun. What are you talking about? I can hop on this ship, which is basically a slave ship, and we're going to move around the galaxy. I'm sorry. You just said slave. I meant to say torture slave ship. You're right. It is torture slave ship. Yeah, slave is. Only would be a step up. It would be a step up like a cruise ship compared to what this actually is. Yeah. And the, the sisters, uh, it's a little dark. I'll admit it's a little dark. However, then we get the outbreak of the Horace heresy, which does. Significantly shift this because as much as the Imperium doesn't want to admit that demons are a thing, the Emperor, the custodes are well aware that they're 100 percent a thing and they need to shift over the sisters. We discussed that they use them to. Wreck Magnus is day. They're also better. They can fight warp beings. Um, they actually just placed them around the galaxy, which also helped for Dorne. Well, they also didn't just place them on the galaxy when the Horus Heresy, they just placed them whether they wanted to be or not around the palace and around Tara itself. Because they didn't want warp gay scrying. Yeah. They didn't. Yeah. Dorne used them, Dorne and Valdor used them to actually shield off soul from the, the visions of chaos. They also didn't treat them right all the time. They kind of did a. Rick and Morty, I'm going to line my walls with Morty's. Yeah. And they kind of did that with a lot of the sisters. Yeah, but it worked. I mean, the good, I mean, it did work and this is why, and the truth is when Horace came into the, into soul, he kind of had to creep his way in because he didn't know what was waiting for him because he couldn't see it. Correct. Sort of not really you read the books. It's not it was gruesome though. They did some real weird shit. Oh, yeah They just strapped them to a ship and flew the ship around in a circle. That's what it was Yeah sisters of silence when you have a really good power And I don't care about you. That happened. Wait, one carry every time. Now the, the part of the story of the sisters and the heresy and the last part of the history of the heresy, which I found incredibly stupid is at one point, I love that we had to go with. Where are we going to go with John's shits on stuff? Yes. Okay. So you've got an army of blanks. They can shut down any psychic power and we've got an invasion of chaos, which is full of psychic. God, who are we against? There's one. So what? So we should put him against the Legion. Great. Which Legion? How about the world eaters? You mean the ones who killed all their psychers and have no psychic powers whatsoever? And also, they murder the shit out of them. It gets worse. So we're taking regular humans, whose only ability is to fight psychic powers, and we're putting them against superhumans. With no psychic powers, but a real solid joy in chopping things in half. Also loving killing psychics. Yeah. So anyway, didn't go great. I feel like slight understatement. Didn't go great. Magnus attacked. Like there was a thousand places they could have used them. And they went with, Hey, how about you go fight the world eaters? This is, I remember the demonic incursion that happened, you know, I'm a call it I'm six foot four. I'm almost 220 pounds. Me too. Yeah, sure. This is like taking like me and saying, you know, you go fight the big guy, but your five year old son, we're going to go have him fight Magnus for Magnuson. If you don't have that references. And it's like, but I, I could probably fight Magnus. I might, I might not win, but at least it's a fight. No, your five year old son's the one who should go fight. The physical guy. Yeah. He's got this. What, what the ass anyway. So that ends, uh, not great. And the sisters post heresy just kind of fall into disarray. I mean, this could be because again, murdered by world leaders, strapped the ships, strapped the walls in the ships, thrown at things to make sure that people couldn't do things. So like shit is going also, wow. They stay wildly loyal. Well, only in one spot. They stay watching. You're right. While they talk. So the first thing they do is so as a whole, yes. Yeah. So they can, so we're going to kind of talk about this. Out of both sides of our mouth a little bit. Unfortunately, the sisters disappear from the galaxy, except for those crewing the black ships who are totally still there and active and nothing. And they keep like making more of them. So like the, the, this is called the chamber Astra, the sisters who are part of chamber Astra. Are just kind of good to go. They make more of them. They keep crewing the ships as the ships increase as more sisters. So we're going to not talk about them for a little bit because that's what GW chose to do. A very small group. And actually no one knew about this until fairly recently in the lore, um, seven edition Yes. Stayed actually in the Imperial Palace. No one knew they were there. They also made them into fighting groups. And this, this is the seventh edition. Mm-Hmm. at the end of seventh edition, by the way. Cause we had all the broken Gilman. Yeah. That that's later. I'm saying, but what I'm saying is that there were a small true. I'm saying they didn't, they didn't organize them that and do something. Yeah. There was just a small little section within the Imperial palace, which were obviously being used by the custodes to shield, you know, the, basically those were like, they're still really good at stopping chaos from looking into stuff. Yeah. All right. We'll keep some of them here. And so, which is fine, but for the most part, they just scattered. To the stars and this interest, this story, I actually find interesting because the sisters were really abject believers in the emperor and his teachings, namely chaos is bad and deities are bad. Yep. The ecclesiarchy starts rising and they don't like the sisters of silence because they're straight up saying that there shouldn't be. Yeah. God, guys are wrong there. Yeah. Religion. Yes, exactly. Powers of the basically organized religion, which they consider chaos are wrong. And this is where kind of, we can all see this coming. If you understand the concept, as we said before, the sisters. Have a pariah gene. The pariah gene means everyone around them is uncomfortable and doesn't like being in their presence. So the Ecclesiarchy, they never officially call them witches. They completely Inquisition Salem trial. Yeah. And they begin pursuing them. And so the sisters of sons have to disappear. No one steps in and goes, We should help all these poor people, including the custodes. I want to point out because let's have a bunch of them in their palace. Well, I guess they're not really out of the palace, but still they're like, Hey, we're murdering girls out here. And I mean, I got another stuff going on. I guess we got some in here and I got my black coat. It's bingo night on Tuesday. I'm going through my goth phase right now. I don't, I don't, I don't have time. I don't, I don't really have time for this. I got a black robot. Yeah. And you heard that? Yeah. The cure is released on their album. I mean, this is where I'm going to be. I'm just going to sit here and listen to the Smiths all day long. Man, those are so long references. We are old. Yeah. And I'm actually there before my time. I'm just, I was just trying to make you feel like you're a part of something. I might still have the Smiths album in my house. Sure. You have a record in your house and not, not in the, not in a hipster fashion. They like, yeah, I, this is how I had to buy music when I was young. Dude, I like vinyl. Screw you. It's a pain in the ass. Spotify is so much better. You're not wrong. What do you want to listen to this song when now, so I don't have to get up and go find a sleeve and then put it in a thing and press these, but my brother's a hipster. So I'm shit talking right now. He doesn't listen to the podcast so I can, I can make fun of him, but he's got a collection of vinyl records. He's tried to explain how it's better than Spotify. And I'm like, it's not, it was, well, the quality is better. And I was like, you don't listen to classical music. How the hell would you know, like, like shut up, rage against the machine. Sound the same anyway. So the sisters scatter. It was a long diatribe. The sisters scatter all around the galaxy. And the challenge they have is because of the pariah gene, they're actually pretty easy to detect and more easy to detect in groups. So a lot of them end up becoming almost solo. You kind of two things happen. They either become solo living on like a hive world, usually an agro world. So there's less people there. Or there actually are little like kind of bastions of them where they, they form like fortresses on a random planet. Yeah. Oh, that's good. Yeah. It's good. That's a great way to describe it all around the galaxy. And the expectation is that, you know, they were on the brink of extinction. And then because they scattered, they actually, you know, start to grow in number again, because they. Partner up with rogue traders, which allows them to move all around the galaxy. Well, the thing is, is that people that know, especially rogue traders that are, see a lot of value. Hey, I know that, you know, that I know that, you know, that when you, they do the princess bride with it and just go, come on, here's money. And you're. How about this? I'll make your life not suck. And I'm going to go ahead and call it out and say what is life in space is lonely and they're all female. So anyway, thanks for making it weird, brother. But I'm just saying like, yeah, you make me physically uncomfortable. But anyway, uh, the pariah gene carries on because it's a dominant gene. It's a 50. Yeah. So 50 percent of all offspring that a sister, a former sister has will have the gene, all of those offspring, 50%. So the gene Doesn't actually extinguish and it carries on. Thanks largely to these rogue traders where they're being spread around the galaxy because they're not in large enough groups. They're harder to persecute. And I want to throw something out. You actually put this out before I did when John does write the notes. And by the way, multiple people have said this. Yes, there is zero chance that I would ever stay on topic, but when I was looking at this, there is zero chance they continue their vow of silence, or it would be just really weird and it would never have continued. Yeah. I I, they never mention it, but they, they had to broken. They just passed. Yeah. So they, they just, there's so many stories of them being on road traders. Yeah. You know what I mean? I mean, it's, it's where they spend a, I mean, almost all the stories of them in this time, they're on road trader ships. Right. That's, yeah. You have to be able to speak or everyone knew your. Sign language that only existed for you in customs. I mean, let's just call it Eisen. I, I've forgotten her name and I don't feel like Googling it right now, but his, his com? Yeah. Eisen Whon novels. His compatriot is a blank. She didn't even know she was a blank until Eisen Whon founder and then trains her up, and that's what that would be a result of. Well, Eisen also didn't just find her Eisner search her. No, no, that she, he found her cause she was when it was the very first, it was Eisenhorn one. He did the, he found her. Yeah. It was right. He finds her, but he also, yeah, she was a prostitute. So that's why we added all this out. Yeah. Let's y'all read that fucking shit in your own. But anyway, so he knows right away what's going on. Oh yeah. Instantly. So to this end, the sister silence, the official numbers of the sisters of silence dwindle to the point of basically extinction, but the pariah gene actually is growing within the Imperium because the, the Imperial population is actually expanding at this point. So it's this weird kind of dichotomy. We're also carrying them out a little bit because of the road traders. We're carrying this prior gene to areas that never were encountered the impregnate. Now, the funny story that we're going to cover in future recasts is this pariah gene. It starts getting farmed by the Imperium, not for sisters of silence, but for the official assassin norm to make, I don't know, is it the second worst, the third worst of the assassins to be one. They're nightmares. Well, no, cause the worst is the ever sore to be the worst one that they make is the ever soar for sure. But the, of the callitis and the, it's ever sore, Colossus callitis vindicator in order. I, in my opinion, so there we go. That's where. They get used for that a lot. Like, holy shit. Like, the Evisaur, they go, have you successively created an Evisaur? Yes, I have broken the mind of someone and they destroy everything in their area. We'll cover that in a couple episodes, guys. Give me a minute. Give me a hot minute and we'll do assassins. Um, because I love them. Alright, so, anyway, now we're going to fast forward to kind of right about the edge of the Sisters coming back. Into the lore, which is Gilliam. So we're like, this is merits to do at some point Gilliam and gets revived. And he went on a chewing bubble gum and chaos asking for us. I'm going to give the people that I'm going to give the ultramarine fans a little bit of a, a little, a carrot here because G Man comes back and effectively absorbs 10, 000 years of history in about a day and a half. Yeah. And decides instantly says. All of this is jacked. Also, I need this, this, this, and this, and I'm going to go whoops some ass and I'm going to figure out, you guys are ruining everything. I'm going to use all of this shit. And he grabs. Well, yeah, but first for, before he grabs sisters, he fights his way back. Cause as we said, he gets stuck on Luna and gets attacked by Magnus and is losing a psychic battle. And just as he's about to die. Out pops custos and a bunch of sisters of silence, which Magnus has, I mean, again, Magnus is what the most powerful psyker in the galaxy top, top three for sure. Easy. Yeah, and it says, shut him down. Yeah. And then I was saying, why are we not using that? Exactly. The time. It looks at this and goes. Yeah. You know, it had been super cool as if I would have known about this while I was fighting chaos for the last, I don't know, since I got revived since eight seconds after I got up. Yeah. It would be nice to have these people who just, they just shut it down completely. Yeah. Okay. Fair enough. Let's use more of them. So Bobby G sends out the call. And says, all right, we're bringing the sister of silence back. And it's, this story is kind of weird, but it's funny. I guess there's been about like two or three dozen sisters who are still at that temple on Luna. They've been keeping these teachings around for the last 10, 000 years, just doing their thing. Within a couple months, we've got third, we got about 3000 sisters because they're cloning the shit out of them. No, they put a call out and they all showed back up. Right? There is no chance of that happening. They have the Rick lab in the basement where they're just stamping. There's a 0 percent chance of that being, I mean, you basically, I'm just assuming that it looks that call is Rick from Rick and Morty. He's just. Just like what? Oh, don't, don't look around here. I swear to God, I'm not an evil scientist making stuff. So then we'll go all the way into what is modern 40 K I'm making a side because I'm about to get sad if we mentioned the tabletop for a second. So in theory. Sisters are the greatest asset to the Imperial war complex that you're going to get me started on this. Okay. So let's, let's go through all the things sisters can do. They, uh, they stop demonic incursions because they go away. Yeah. Tyrannid Hive fleets can't function because they, they, the synapse doesn't work. Correct. Also Tyrannid should also stop the, uh, demon incursions, but we're not talking about that. It's not important. That's not important. Yeah. All right. Eldar, Farseers, and Warlocks just don't work. Well, they don't work. Matter of fact, they just die because they no longer have invulns. Entire chaos legions would just not function because most, almost all chaos have had some sort of like boon that comes out of the warp. They turn off. Yeah. I mean, to be fair, think about the fact that, oh yeah, all those demonic engines inside things. If you cut them off from the warp wouldn't exist. So they would just stop working. Cal no help needed instead of going, they don't have suckers. You just went. Nah, no help needed. It's fine. We don't have to deploy them. The sisters will actually beat them in hand to hand. Yeah, exactly. Sisters walk up and slap them. Stop it. Stop it. Also, give us your plasma technology. It's so much better. Yeah. So they end up getting deployed to war zones all around the galaxy. But what's cool about them is that, as we said, there's about 3, 000 of them. Yeah. They can be deployed as like ones and twos, maybe a dozen because just their presence is enough to turn off the, the opposition. You know, we don't do a good enough job in the game. I mean, there's a ton of stuff that we don't do a good enough job. The sisters of silence blank powers. Are wildly different. Like some of the sisters have a, if you're a couple feet away from me, you feel bad. And I said, things start to go right. They should be doing things like reducing strength and toughness. They should have a level of them though, because some of these sisters. We'll just turn off psychic powers, but they also have a huge aura. Wasn't there a time in eighth edition where like, I think it was custodians, like you couldn't cast powers around them. Seventh edition is the end. Yeah. Seventh edition when they came out with sister at the end of seventh edition, the beginning of eighth edition, sisters of silence had a 12 inch aura that would wipe all your psychic powers. And you couldn't cast psyche powers. That's what I'm saying. Like some of the sisters were so powerful. That rule makes a lot more sense. Instead of what they are today, where they're cheap chaff used by custom players. That's what I'm saying. But back in the day, you, you would just shut off. Yeah. Period. And a huge aura because some of these sisters. Oh, like the, um, it's the Cladius, Calexis. I make Calexis. So then the Calexis should do that. Yeah. Ninth. Right. It doesn't do it now, but it used to be able to just turn off like you had to target him. And yeah, you couldn't target it. You couldn't target and you couldn't target them with psychic powers. You couldn't cast that. They were within a certain distance of you. Yeah, it was in. The thing is, is that they should be, they do a bad job about going. Some of these sisters are wildly free. I guess more powerful in their or is, I mean, you couldn't do it on the game completely. Cause it'd be on. Yeah, this is, this is the difference. This is the only positive on seventh edition. And this is literally the only one is they did make a lot more faction specific rules that where you were like GW used to have a thing in 40 K for those who's been playing for a while, where like certain armies effectively always beat other armies. But then that army would always be a different armies was kind of that. And then people hated that. So they got rid of it. And I, I actually liked it. I like identity. Exactly. It made it better, but the sisters. So we talked about kind of something they did. There's other stuff that they actually do do though. The sisters of silence are also, they work with work with the Inquisition help root out rogue psychers. Cause Eisenhorn is a big piece of this. They're actually attuned to the pariah gene to help them detect psychers. This is one of my favorite things in the lore. And there's some, it's some good stories about this where. A heretic psyker, for example, can hide themselves, you know, they can, they can, they can hide their powers. So if you want to kind of scry in and find them, you can't, but a sister can just walk around and sense. Yeah. And so they, they actually will just have it. Yeah. They will wander the halls of Imperial cruisers. And just if they're like Spidey sense goes off, they can either report it or just slaughter the thing in front of them right away. You can deploy them to hide. Most of the psychics get incapacitated and they can deploy them to hive worlds. It's a really cool trick about them that they can just wander on and. Hunt down passively, uh, psychers, which would in theory work, by the way, for jeans dealer cult. Yes. You would actually be able to find, it would only be the pariahs, but you could detect a jeans dealer cult infection by just having a sister of silence on the planet. Yeah. If you, if you found the patriarch, you're probably okay though. Yeah, well, not really, because he found a patriarch and then here come 2 million. Look, man, it's better than just having everybody shoot you in the face. Oh, yeah, you get to determine when they're attacking, but they're not going to be like, Oh, you killed a patriarch. We surrender. Um, yeah, the other one that the last one they do, though, that, which is really cool is they also can find, they can recruit and find blanks. So, as we, as we were discussing earlier, there's the blanks are spread throughout the galaxy, a couple of weird stories about that too, because they can apparently just sense in you. Have the potential to birth a blank. Yeah, they can recruit you. And it's, I like this idea though, because if you think about it, blanks are all social outcasts, you're being recruited by a social outcast. The downside is that's a great story. If you're female, it's kind of a shitty story. If you're male, cause you're about to become a colexus. Yeah. Maybe there's a couple of randos in the Imperial guard. You're going to be a colexus. I know we're at the end of the sisters thing, but I am so psyched up for the assassin cast because I, let's, you know, we'll do it live. I was going to do assassins next or we're doing this. All right. Fine. All right. So next week we're doing assassins. There we go. You guys welcome to how we figure this out. They wear big hats for a reason. And they are awful, awful, awful reasons. Yeah. Next week, we're done in the end. Next week. We're doing a two part part. One is going to be assassins. Part two is also assassins because it's going to go deep. If you think our story on the black ships had some kind of really sad depressing moments. Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Everything that happens in the assassins, by the way, is Vindicare, Vindicare spine. Vindicare is just a really, really, really good shot. You can sit really, really still. That's the only one you want to be. Every other thing in the assassins you could be is a nightmare story. Yeah. Oh, so I'm going to. Ooh. Yeah, we'll get it. Ooh. Anyway, it's not. So with that, this has been John Barsotti and Brad Chester. This guy. See you guys next week.