Outcast Dead - The Petitioner's City: Asubha managed to crash-land the damaged air-cutter into the Petitioner's City, a huge, ramshackle city built in the shadow of the Imperial Palace intended to house the millions of people who travelled from all over Terra to pass into the Imperial Palace and see the Emperor. With a such huge influx of people to hold, the Imperial Palace could not sustain all the migrants and pilgrims, especially during the time when the Emperor was off-world fighting the Great Crusade. Because of this need, a mega-city had been rapidly built next to the Palace to hold all the immigrants. Built from any and all materials available, as quickly as had been possible, the entire city was an amalgamation of hundreds of different architectural styles and cultural preferences. Lacking any real economic support structure for its residents, the Petitioner's City was a rundown ghetto where most of its inhabitants lived in poverty, waiting for the day that might never come when they were finally called to have an audience with the Emperor of Mankind.The Petitioner's City was ruled by a particularly brutal criminal syndicate called the Dhakal Clan. The members of the Dhakal Clan were powerfully-built thugs who ran the Petitioner's City through a brutal combination of fear and savage violence. Many residents believed that even the warriors of the Legio Custodes refused to venture into the Petitioner's City, so the Dhakal Clan ruled as it willed without any challenge from Imperial law enforcement. The Dhakal Clan was led by its most feared member, the man named Babu Dhakal who was more physically imposing than even an Astartes. There was a reason for the man's unnatural size and preternatural fighting prowess. Babu Dhakal had once been a mighty genetically-engineered superhuman warrior who fought for the Emperor during the Unification Wars under his real name, Arik Taranis.In truth, Dhakal and his closest warriors were all surviving Thunder Warriors, the genetically-enhanced Imperial troops who had served the Emperor as the predecessors of the Astartes. Unfortunately for Dhakal and his men, their bodies had begun to physically degrade at a rapid rate, as the genetic templates used to create them in the early days of the Unification Wars were flawed and riddled with imperfections. It was these very flaws that had forced the Emperor to begin his work anew to create the perfect superhuman soldiers, work that had ultimately resulted in first the creation of the Primarchs and then the Space Marine Legions in the late 30th Millennium. In one of the darker moments in Imperial history, following the end of the Unification Wars, the Emperor had ordered the Imperial forces to hunt down and slay the remaining Thunder Warriors, as the Emperor believed that having fulfilled their purpose, their genetic imperfections would ultimately make them a threat to the new Imperium their sacrifices had helped to create. When the cull of the Thunder Warriors was completed, the Emperor let the Imperial propaganda machine spread the fabricated story that Arik Taranis and all of the remaining Thunder Warriors had been heroically slain at the final battle of the Unification Wars, the Battle of Mount Ararat.In truth, Taranis and some of his fellow survivors had fled the cull and been forced into the criminal underground to survive assuming new identities even as their flawed genetic matrixes caused their bodies to begin to deteriorate unlike their long-lived Astartes cousins. Taranis, hiding under the identity of Babu Dhakal, kept his remaining Thunder Warriors safe as the masters of the criminal elite within the Petitioner's City, even as they desperately sought for a way to halt the programmed decay of their bodies. Taranis had become nearly as skilled as any Magos of the Mechanicus in his knowledge of the genetic sciences, and he believed that if he could just get a sample of Astartes DNA, he might be able to reverse-engineer the Emperor's accomplishment and save the lives of the Thunder Warriors before their cellular decay had progressed too far.Following the crash of the Outcast Dead's air-cutter in the Petitioner's City, Kai Zulane awoke to find, to his great surprise, that he had survived the rough landing. One by one, each member of the Outcast Dead emerged from the air-cutter's wreckage bloody but alive. The only member to not survive serious harm was Gythua, who had been impaled through the back by a piece of the wreckage. After a short debate about whether or not to leave Gythua, the Outcast Dead freed him from the metal spar and set off into the Petitioner's City, carrying the injured form of Gythua between them.Unfortunately for the fugitive group, their presence within the Petitioner's City did not go unnoticed for very long. Shortly after leaving the wreckage of the air-cutter, Babu Dhakal learned of the fugitives' arrival and sent a group of Dhakal Clan Thunder Warriors after them, led by his right-hand man Ghota. The Custodian Nagasena and his Hunt Team also arrived at the wreckage shortly after the fugitives had already moved on. Astropath Athena Diyos was able to determine which way the Outcast Dead travelled by mentally detecting Zulane's psychic aura and its direction. While Nagasena wished to apprehend the Outcast Dead and imprison them within The Vault once again, Dhakal demanded that Ghota bring him back at least one live Astartes so that he could harvest the warrior's gene-seed and reverse-engineer it to create a new genetic template that was capable of prolonging the Thunder Warriors' lives.After traversing the maze-like warrens of the Petitioner's City for a short while, the Outcast Dead rested within a rundown, abandoned hab-block. With Severian and Kiron on watch, the remaining Astartes attempted to help the mortally injured Gythua, who was unlikely to survive the injuries he had sustained. At this point, Asubha realised that Nagasena and his Hunt Team are most likely able to see and hear them through a hack into Zulane's optic implants, a common cybernetic enhancement for Astropaths whose psychic abilities often burned out their retinas, leaving the blind. Asubha's knowledge came from his training with his Legion's Techmarines, and he proceeded to rip out Zulane's implants. With Zulane's many injuries, and their resting location probably already compromised by the Custodes hunters, Atharva forced the Outcast Dead to start moving again to find a chirurgeon (physician) who could treat Zulane and Gythua.The Outcast Dead eventually discovered the house of a chirurgeon named Antioch. After breaking into his house and convincing him that they did not work for the Dhakal Clan, Antioch proceeded to examine Kai Zulane. Antioch treated the wounds around Zulane's eye sockets where Asubha had ripped out his augmetic eyes and then wrapped a bandage around Zulane's head and provided him with painkillers. Despite knowing nothing about Astartes physiology, the Outcast Dead demanded that Antioch examine and aid Gythua. Antioch's diagnosis was that Gythua should not be able to survive the wounds he had already sustained and thus there was nothing he could do for the Death Guard Astartes.