Friction

It all began with an obscure academician's text. Occult symbolists working under Kidinu Bārûm discovered semantic-metaphoric resonances between rage fuelled violence and the internal operations of piston engines. There was much to be said on how forcefully compressed energies may be given explosive output. Upon reading Bārûm's dark tome on the matter, a team of Urukite enginseers had realised this meant even devices without machine-spirits could be improved by Khornite ritual. They'd thus developed a rage-treatment gel which drastically reduced thermodynamic inefficiencies by creating a rage/heat sink that reabsorbed and immediately redeployed physical energies that might otherwise dissipate. The Carnot cycle conquered for Khorne! Even entropy bends before the Mighty will!

However, problems arose in producing the gel. The gel's primary ingredient required continual anti-blessings during transport to the central production hub on Nidaba. Normally, the Church of the Burning Massacre's ritual forms were enough to subdue any tendencies towards inefficient bouts of apoplectic rage that Khornite invocations might bring about. However, they were not proving enough here, because the material was being shipped from Erēni.

Nidabites hold Erēnii in contempt. In the days of the Imperium's rule Nidaba had justified Erēni exploitation with an elaborated mythos of Erēnii inferiority. Naturally enough, this meant most Erēnii's feelings re Nidabites were likewise hardly warm. Of course, absorption into the Sanguinary Utnapishtim had brought the Mighty on both worlds liberation and equality, and revealed that similar proportions on either planet were natural wardum. But centuries of discrimination and economic exploitation were not so easily overcome. So it was that even the Church's ritual was not enough to contain warp-amplified hatred when they met, and the rate of incidents of mass shootings at ports wherein the goods were handed over fell well outside acceptable parameters.

Fortunately this sort of thing is precisely why C.O.P.P.E.R had developed the Delivering Inclusive Evisceration initiative! So it was they rolled out their new campaign: "Slaughter Has No Borders". Each port and transport vessel would have one C.O.P.P.E.R representative who, before they met their counter-part from Nidabite or Erēni respectively would give a lecture on the importance of Respecting one's fellow Mighty, and go through some exercises on the do's and don't's of intercultural exchange.

Or, at least, such was the plan. In fact, every single lecturer was slaughtered before they finished the group exercises. In security-pict footage from one of the ships' holds where one such lecture took place, one could just about discern the words "incredibly condescending" and "patronising bastards!" between howls of inchoate rage.

However, here's the thing. None of those crews then went on to murder each other at the handover. They'd got it out of their system! C.O.P.P.E.R. soon realised that if they simply reclassified the lecturer as a designated sacrifice to appease Khorne they could plausibly argue they'd successfully resolved the issue.

Privately, logisticians admitted this was perhaps not entirely what they'd initially envisioned. But, as the old saying goes, the Blood Lord's legions are tactically versatile.