Parson's attack on the Rainlords

Parson's attack on the Rainlords was a false flag operation planned and executed by Parson Miles intended to turn the Rainlords against the Vanguard and thus away from its poor leadership.

### Leverage over House Blackburn

Long before the planned attack, Parson arranged for a soul transfusion to be secretly performed on Nere, causing her to be infertile until a child was conceived that had two copies of the reaper gene, who would become an aberration. The eventual result was a child known as Ibai. When they asked about him, Parson advised the Blackburns to keep his existence secret, since Vanguard would insist on having him killed.

Ibai was carefully raised to teach him compassion, honor and respect for life, despite his naturally callous instincts. If he misbehaved, they would punish him with isolation in an empty room with nothing to do, since corporal punishment seemed counterproductive.

When he set his plans into motion, Parson forced Ismael to assist him under threat of making his secret common knowledge. Initially, he ordered that they relax their border guards for a day, during which time he arranged for an Abolish attack that nearly wiped out House Elroy, leaving only two members alive. When the group of Abolishers is hunted down, it is discovered that they had already been killed and their heads mounted on spikes. They privately assume that it was Parson's doing to keep them from explaining where their information came from, but it was actually Gohvis avenging the murder of his family.

Years later, after the Elroys had begun to rebuild, Parson again forced the Blackburns to help him, this time by kidnapping children of the other houses. Because of this, the Blackburns were forced to defend themselves against the other houses or explain the truth. They also assumed that the others would act far more vengefully than they actually did and would execute at least all of the servants and reapers and prevented any of the humans from holding any public office. This conflict distracted both them and the other houses while Parson continued with his plans.

Eventually, the truth was discovered by the other houses following a battle during which Ibai used his power to escape his room and introduce himself.

### Kidnapping of Family Heirs

A number of agents were sent to different families claiming that their children, as the most junior servants around, were in great danger. When requests that they be turned over supposedly for their own protection were refused, those agents attacked, kidnapping the children sucessfully everywhere except the Elroy residence, where Mariana was able to capture and jar all of the attacking servants but was not able to stop Marcos from being killed in the fighting. When it became apparent that a reaper could not be found for Marcos, she told Shenado to release her and take Marcos.

At the same time, Zeff was called in to report to general Xavier Lawrence. He was then interrogated for information he was known not to have relating to the whereabouts of his daughter Gema and then captured and frozen following a fight. Zeff was barely captured, and Axiolis was able to escape and tell everyone what he knew of what was going on.

### Release of Zeff

A short time later, Parson arranged a distraction at the keep where Zeff was being kept prisoner and had a subordinate destroy Zeff's head. When pressed by Durgoz, he admitted that he had done so, and explained that he was the real leader of the Traitor Vanguard and that he had freed Zeff because he needed the Rainlords to press an offensive aggressively in a manner that Zeff would urge for, and that he was on a schedule that did not allow for the delays that would come from waiting for Sanko to arrive.

### Misdirection of Sanko

After Parson's treachery, the Rainlords requested help from the Vanguard, which they replied to by sending Field Marshal Sanko. When Sanko arrived, she immediately demanded a full explanation from Parson, who claimed that he had reason to suspect that Zeff was in league with Gema and with Juliana Salazar, showing an image of Zeff talking with Salazar as evidence. This did not entirely persuade Sanko, but it did cast doubt on the Rainlords' claims, and Sanko demanded that both parties submit to an investigation to discover the truth. The Rainlords refused, citing the previous untrustworthiness of Vanguard agents. In response Sanko attacked them. During the battle Octavia Redwater revealed that she had a bone item made from the most powerful Aberration ever to live, and Zeff achieved emergence, allowing him to create a repeatedly firing ice cannon using Pan-Forma.

In the chaos, Parson captured Zeff, along with Socorro and Evangelina, along with each or their reapers. He then killed Socorro and her reaper, partially to provoke Zeff to the point of achieving emergence for the second time that day and partly out of concern that she would become vengeful and use her platinum materialization to crash the economy just out of spite. He was then forced to throw away Evangelina when she was about to create an explosion strong enough to kill Parson, leaving only Zeff. He then admitted that Gema worked for him and claimed that the reason why he had fabricated the incident was as an excuse to kill Zeff's children, since he claimed that Zeff had "wicked blood" and that although he knew that Zeff was a decent person he was worried that his children would become a problem later on. However, this was merely a ruse to make Zeff so angry that he achieved emergence for a third time and was finally able to break free of Parson's hold and escape.

### Aftermath

A number of key Rainlords escaped from the battle with Sanko and were given refuge by Asad. The exact results within Rainlord territory are presently unclear, but Sanko did not drop the investigation and seems to have taken a number of Parson and Lawrence's subordinates for questioning. Along the way back into Vanguard territory her plane was shot down and she was attacked by an unknown party, likely working for Damian Rofal. The results of this attack are unknown except that he managed to capture Dunstan Rofal. Damien said that he was gathering up all of the members he could find of the Rofal family.

### Objectives

Parson had a number of objectives in planning this operation. The primary one was to turn the Rainlords against Vanguard, since he believed that the current leadership was not fighting Abolish as effectively as it should have been and the Rainlords would do better on their own. As a minor secondary objective, he wanted to make Zeff stronger by causing him to have emergence as many times as possible. He also provoked Gohvis to kill members of Abolish, providing useful information about his thoughts and taking a step down the road to ultimately convincing him to abandon Abolish.