Waaaay out in rural Wisconsin...
If the road that Joe's humble house sat on had a name, he didn't know it. He'd never seen a sign along its entire length, and it didn't even appear on any map he'd ever seen. It didn't really matter; anyone who needed to know where Joe's place was knew how to get there. For generations, his family had possessed a reputation as the best taxidermists in the county, and the local hunters and trappers brought them enough income that they we able to get by, supplementing their meager income with knowledge that only those who had laregly lived off the land for generations possessed. They weren't survivalists or anything of that sort, really; they'd just found a place that suited them well, and had seen little reason to fix what was, to their minds at least, not broken.
Joe was a little different. While he was as skilled a taxidermist as his late parents, it had never been his real passion. What Joe had loved, from a young age, was looking at the stars, and his intensely rural environment provided him with an unparalleled view of the celestial spread on dark nights. What little disposable income he had was spent on a good telescope, and whatever books on astronomy he could get his hands on. Once his parents had passed, Joe had lived largely alone and in isolation, which had suited him just fine. He didn't dislike people, as such; he had no qualms about chatting with his occasional visitors and any familiar faces he encountered on his rare forays to the nearest town (which was a good thirty miles away). He just didn't feel much need for them, and his solitary lifestyle left him with amply opportunity to pursue his own interests, gazing at the night sky and assiduously recording his observations in his accurate, if not overly scientific journals.
It was this unusual lifestyle that allowed him to be the first to notice the meteorite. He'd seen plenty of them, of course, but never one that seemed on course to land anywhere near him. By his own rough calculations, however, the one he was observing actually looked like it was going to strike less than ten miles away. Pulling on his coat and boots, Joe grabbed his trusty flashlight and dove into the woods. For as bookish as he was, this was his family's land, and he knew it in the dark as well as he knew his own bedroom. It didn't take him long to find the impact point.
The space rock had blasted a new clearing a good couple of hundred yards across in the middle of the woods, and once he'd found that, it wasn't hard to find the meteorite itself, where it sat at the center of its newly created crater. As he approached, Joe noted a few things that he was quite certain made this extraterrestrial missile unusual: it was larger than it should be, for the size of the impact crater, almost as it it had somehow decelerated as it plummeted through the atmosphere, and it was...glowing green.
As Joe was mulling over the risks of some kind of space radiation, the meteorite itself suddenly shimmered and seemed to melt, it's surface liquefying and running into the ground like water into dry soil. Joe's brain was stunned by this for but a moment before it had to wrestle with another shock: the melt had revealed a large, humanoid figure. Before he could fully process this new observation, however, an arm shot forward and a hand locked on his throat with impossible strength. Joe's own hands reflexively locked futilely on the limb as the large man was lifted into the air as though he was a pillow. He hung suspended for what felt like an eternity but was really only a fraction of a second, and then something in his neck snapped and he was left nothing more to ponder about the mysteries of the night sky.
Erinys dropped the still-twitching body to the ravaged earth, gazing down on it with what could only be described as disappointment. Her mission here was not one of wholesale slaughter, but violence was her only true passion, and she dearly hoped she'd have ample opportunity to engage in it. Consoling herself with the knowledge that more than one powerful Imperium agent had been caught off-guard by the inhabitants of this world, she slung a wicked-looking axe over her shoulder as she stalked into the woods. The dead man was just one, after all. Many more would follow.
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