Chaos Space Marines: 2500 pts

Abaddon the Despoiler: 275 pts

Daemon Prince Zyzlaxen: 155 pts
-Mark of Slaaneesh
-Wings
-Lash of Submission

10 Chaos Space Marines: 275 pts
-Icon of Khorne
-2x Flamers
-Champion Zai-barax w/ Combi-Flamer & Power Fist
-Chaos Rhino

10 Chaos Space Marines: 285 pts
-Icon of Khorne
-2x Meltaguns
-Champion G’hul w/ Combi-Melta & Power Fist
-Chaos Rhino

10 Khorne Berserkers: 285 pts
-Skull Champion Kygak w/ Power Fist
-Chaos Rhino

10 Khorne Berserkers: 285 pts
-Skull Champion Rakalaz w/ Power Fist
-Chaos Rhino

8 Chaos Raptors: 240 pts
-Icon of Khorne
-2x Flamers
-Raptor Champion Zapaz w/ Power Fist

8 Chaos Raptors: 250 pts
-Icon of Khorne
-2x Meltaguns
-Raptor Champion Yraiok w/ Power Fist

2 Obliterators: 150 pts

2 Obliterators: 150 pts

Defiler Xrmwt: 150 pts
-3x Dreadnought CCWs
-Reaper Autocannon

You're looking at the winning list of the Games Workshop (SUBJECT HOMETOWN HERE) Battle Bunker's Warhammer 40,000 Special Character Tournament! Kinda'. While I did finally pull off an actual win at a tournament, technically I got "Best General", which is pretty much the tournament organizers' way of saying "Well played, now go paint your freaking army already." I'll take it. It's the highest honor my Night Lords were ever gonna' get at this rate. (I just learned a week ago that Citadel discontinued the Midnight Blue paint. Which is what I've been spending quite some time repainting all my Night Lords to. I'm almost out, and the store has one "public" pot of Midnight Blue left.) Besides, I won a Planetstrike Bastion. The guy who got "Best Overall" won a Landing Pad and a Planetstrike Rulebook. Anyway, this win gives me some serious cred for using Chaos Raptors in a winning tournament list, as Chaos Raptors are generally regarded as a pretty lousy unit. They're still the best Fast Attack unit Chaos Marines have (though, compared to Bikes and (*shudder*) Spawn, that's not much to write home about) and speed kills in this game. 12" movement and an effective 18" threat range (not including Lash) lets them pretty much pick apart anybody I wanted, so long as my Raptors were still alive. Using them to pick off the stragglers that escaped my footslogging units, I picked up three wipeout victories in a row, which is about as dominating as you can fare in any tournament.

This modified my 2250 pt list by adding a Defiler (+150) and swapping out Prince Krag (-175) for Abaddon (+275). Since named "Special Characters" were mandatory in this tournament, and because I needed some quick way to get to 2500 pts without fielding dumb stuff, I fielded quite possibly the toughest character in the game: Abaddon, Warmaster of the Black Legion and clone son (*cough*Syaoran*cough*) of the former Warmaster Horus. Part of me expected some caveat to the tournament to feature this character having to get into fights with the enemy character (it didn't though), so the last thing I wanted was somebody who just took a Powerfist to the jaw and collapsed. Instead, I'd rather take a guy with as many as 11 Init6 Powerfist attacks on the charge, capable of single-handedly smothering anything with a Toughness value. Abby sausaged my fair share of characters, going 2-1-1, spanking Vulkanis Hestanius, letting his grunts kill off Pedrius Kantorius, and a match against his literal double (another Abaddon) in which they both killed each other at the exact same time.

When I got home with the bastion kit, I immediately started at building and "corrupting" it to Chaos. And, as Warhammer players are want to do with special projects, I even named it. The bastion will be called Semper Nihil, a Latin approximation of "Eternal Destruction". (The gamer karma on that thing is gonna' suck. It's just like that time I painted "KICK ME" on the bumper of my first Land Raider...) I spent the majority of last night customizing my bastion from Imperial to Chaos Marine. Conveniently, Chaos sprues always come with trophy racks that I just about never use because they're such a pain to store without breaking. The plan is also to convert hanging corpses of the characters that I killed during the tournament. (Except for Abaddon #2, of course.) Adds a little flare. Fortunately, as Chaos uses largely Imperial templates for their weapons and constructs, the conversion basically amounted to gluing crap to it until I ran out of either bits or ideas.

Speaking of running out of ideas, C3S. Yeah, I bet that's the last juxtaposition you wanted to hear after all this time. Well, the inspiration I got from generous birthday fanart has worn off, maybe even backfiring wholesale. It had been so long since I last wrote for C3S in any serious, plot influencing way. So I started to think for a while that I had set up plot coat hangers in places where I hadn't. Having forgotten so much of what I had written, apparently, I figured it was probably better that I go back and reread what I wrote so that it actually does work out in the end. Not a good idea. Maybe it's because I'm just too close to it, or because I'm my own toughest critic by intent, but the older chapters just feel incredibly juvenile, like I was sky-high on fanboy crack when I wrote them. (Now I know how it must feel to be a Twilight-obsessed fangirl. Because you just can't spell "fangirl" without "fang".) Looking back on C3S, the only things I have to show for my work on it are a couple of unpublished half-chapters and a bunch of clunky, kick-the-plot-to-make-it-go kinds of writing. I sure hope it's just me, because I refuse to believe that I wasted so much time on this entire endeavor. At this point, WinxC1ub will have added more to the C3S canon in a few months than I've added in a few years.

A further blow involves recent Science and Sorcery events. Let's just say that the Omniverse exploding doesn't quite make first page news. This doesn't necessarily impact C3S itself (not directly anyway), but it does greatly impact how far I'll be taking Science and Sorcery when I publish it. Gin stopped being a central character pretty quickly (though it wasn't his fault; omnicidal Voidwalkers tend to steal the spotlight a lot), and even after the Omniverse reassembled itself, it's being progressively annihilated again. Only this time, most of the "good guy" Voidwalkers are either dead, missing, or they just plain don't care. The only factions of characters who both know and care are at each other's throats, threatening to tear the Omniverse asunder long before its true assailant can destroy it all. And yet, though destruction abounds across the Omniverse... nobody is the wiser! (I remember the good old days when it took the longest time to burn through a single dimension. Now, razing the entire Omniverse is a very real possibility.)

The most recent nail in the coffin was that I was somehow compelled to watch the TRC "Shunraiki" OAVs that my brother downloaded. Thought it would be good for a tickle, and maybe it might embolden me to finish C3S. Or if nothing else, I could count on it to have a catchy opening and/or ending theme. (Plus, my brother killed our bandwidth for a week downloading this stuff. I at least wanted something out of it.) Unfortunately, what I didn't know is that Shunraiki is about the events leading up to the biggest screw-you in CLAMP history. Yes, bigger than FLEIJA. I'm talking about C! Sakura. To refresh everyone's memory on my opinion of Tsubasa, C! Syaoran was a cool plot device. C! Sakura was a gut-punch. "Yeah, y'know that cute princess that you haven't seen on TV since you were in 4th grade? The one that everybody has been sacrificing life and limb in order to rescue her all series? Well she never really mattered. Have a nice day." I think I just found the reason why I unleash such unadulterated wrath against the Omniverse.

I thought about plans that could re-inspire me, such as a Scisorc Prose contest, but subjecting my fellow deviants to what basically amounts to jumping through hoops for my amusement just doesn’t feel right. (Particularly considering that some of you are in rather taxing college semesters.) If I'm gonna' get out of this thing, I'll have to do it myself. As it stands, my brain is like my bedroom: riddled with the "corpses" of "cool ideas" that "I'll get around to eventually".