"...No, don't move," [Ford] added as Arthur began to uncurl himself, "you'd better be prepared for the jump into hyperspace. It's unpleasantly like being drunk."
"What's so unpleasant about being drunk?"
"Traveling through hyperspace ain't like dusting crops, boy! Without precise calculations we could fly right through a star or bounce too close to a supernova, and that'd end your trip real quick, wouldn't it?"
For the warp is a strange and terrible place. You might as well throw a traveler into a sea of sharks and tell him to swim home as send him through the warp unprotected. Better it is not to let common man travel through the stars. Better still, let him not know such a thing is feasible.
—Fra Safrane, 5th aide to Navigator Da'el. Comment made prior to the departure of the second mission to search for the missing freighter Pride of Angelos
--
It is forbidden to speak of what I see in the Great Beyond. I could hint at impossible, half-seen castles in the distance, or rivers of pure vibrance flowing to where they fall upon themselves forever, of mothers' love and children' hate given form. But nothing could give you the vaguest notion of what it is truly like.
—Varentias Jugold of the Navilis Nobilite
--
Our thoughts light the Darkness that others may cross space
We are one with the Emperor, ours souls are joined in his will.
Praise the Emperor whose sacrifice is life as ours is death.
Hail his name the Master of Mankind.
—Credo Astronomicon
Let me take you through the average Warp travel procedure.
The Captain calls down to prep the ship for translation into the Warp. At that time, 12000 slaves who have never seen the outside of the work galley begin shovelling the dead bodies of previous workers into massive furnaces along with whatever hard source of fuel they have in storage, like a brutal Mr. Fusion. A pure field of psychic FUCK YOU is generated around the ship. Meanwhile, a blinded mentally traumatized man inside a metal egg begins screaming unendingly as he charts a course through the warp, which is basically a giant ocean of pure emotion in which Unnamed Ones lounge around fuck with humanity, just because they simply exist and have the luxury of doing so. The ship then ploughs through the miasma of what you could call Hell if you lacked imagination. Pray to the Holy Throne that the Navigator doesn't accidentally get you lost, get possessed by a Daemon, or just explode like a squishy human pinata from the mental stress of being surrounded by so much CANNOT BE. If the Gellar field even flickers on the 8000 year old vessel (which no one understands completely how it works) Daemons made of RAPE and LEMON JUICE and do things you literally cannot imagine to every soul onboard. I mean that. The very notion of understanding the completeness of the horror the human victims would be witness to would shatter your perception of reality and cause your head to explode.
When the ship finally exits this realm of mind rape that makes Salvador Dali's nightmares seem like a children's book, the mission clock says they were only in the Warp for 5 days. It was 17 months for everyone onboard. They also missed their destination by a couple light years and 8/10ths of the crew is dead or criminally insane
The Captain turns to his bridge crew and pops the cork on his finest bottle of 100 year old Amasec and salutes them on another successful Warp jump.
