>>763803
>>763805
It gets better.
They have upped the realpolitik and stalinism of the T'au big time.
With stuff like dissenters "dissapearing", and reeducation even for minor stuff like castes not being rigidly in their roles(water castes making statues, or fire castes doing vehicle repair).
They decided to base their expansion fleet's engine on Imperial warp tech, only without navigators and gellar fields.
That resulted in 100+ ships activating their warp drives it at the same time, which resulted in a huge ass Warp Rift devouring most of their army in vivid, daemonic detail, on live TV, in front of everyone.
Of course, they covered it up, but everyone knows what really happened.
After some shenanigans, they found out that the Rift turned into a stable route, and they are still alive on the other side, but being stuck in the Warp with more psychic auxilia made them have to kill them in self-defence when they got possessed, and that has turned the T'au colonists on the other side into PTSD'd Atomwaffen Division-types, with reports of xenophobic ethnic cleansing of humans and kroot, which of course, the Ethereals treated it with a slap on the wrist.
Oh, and they've invited the Dark Angels as deniable assets, to purge a human world of the Empire that had a psychic epidemic.
Also, it seems the minor border wars between them and the Imperium are a calculated resource sink for both sides, to get rid of commanders that are too uppity for the Ethereals.
Oh, and their leader got assassinated by an imperial assassin, so they made an AI simulacra as a puppet leader, propped by the Ethereal Council.
Oh, and this happened:
THE GREATER GOOD CORRUPTED
A lone Genestealer from Hive Fleet Gorgon reaches the Tau sept world of Ksi’m’yen. The creature is captured by the planet’s Earth caste scientists and subjected to extensive analysis, resulting in a lowly worker being implanted with a measure of germ-seed. The grotesque anatomies that spring up in the laboratories are seen as curios rather than blasphemous by the ever-inquisitive Earth caste, for the Tau approach to alien life forms is founded on the concept of acceptance and tolerance. When the research divisions experience a bloody schism twenty years later, the Fire caste are called in, only to find many subterranean research facilities overrun. Ksi’m’yen is consumed by war, and quarantined for almost ten years before the eccentric Ethereal Aun’ghol declares it productive and clean.