Blood Party

source: lilgreenfox

### Results

Yannos is defeated, Kris loses a leg. A portion of the Body of Silence is destroyed, as is Kissander Fortress.

### Involved Parties

The BrigadeKAKIA

Body of Silence

### Connected Events

Corpse PartyHalintar: Respite of the Gods

## IRL Data

### PCs

Kris NifetonPhelyx

Zetaruul

Albi Rose

### Log Author(s)

Zetaruul

**Blood Party** was a brigade oneshot following the travels of Kris Nifeton, Phelyx, and Sarnai as they traveled through The Battlefield with the remnants of KAKIA after Madeon's teleportation deposited them far from the rest of the party.

## Character Developments

		- Zetaruul
		- Albi Rose
	+ NPCs:
		- Shang Mofuay
	+ All characters would later join The Brigade
* Other developments
	+ Kris is separated from the demon Yannos, The Watchdog of Silence, which had been using her as a host.
	+ Kris loses a leg during the ensuing battle with Yannos. Using part of her own body, Albi crafts a prosthetic leg to replace it for her.

## Opener

Kris:

"The horizon's sun bleeds into the ground and welcomes the night, even as a dark blue devours the sky. As the last bit of light plunges itself into the earth, you twitch and grab ahold of your arm. It feels as if a blade had hit the bone, and a ringing sings. You are surrounded by people, but no one seems to hear a thing. As you grip your arm, the contact howls and a haze of red and orange supercedes your vision. Off in the distance, you see a silhouette of *something* before the noise drowns out all other senses."

Phelyx:

"Contact ends for you, and returning to casual conversation is comfortable. Rhyn's conspirators, the ones you've been traveling with--she's told you a thing or two about them before--stand nearby, and before you would have never thought you would appreciate their company. Now, it seems that things have changed."

"You all are at the edge of the Battlefield right now, avoiding the Troops of F.I.R.E. by standing at more than arm's reach from the craggy borders of the Mantel. The landscape itself looks overgrown with grass, and the roads and pathways have been few and far between, as is the nature of where you are. What would you like to do?"

## Summary

Following an attack by wolves the previous night that had left the KAKIA member Myrinne badly wounded, the party began to travel through the Battlefield in search of somewhere to rest and tend to her wounds. As fate would have it, they had been deposited not far from what appeared to be an abandoned fortress, and the party moved to set up camp in one of the abandoned buildings.

Within that same fortress, both Zetaruul and Albi were attending to their own separate tasks, initially unaware of the new arrivals to Kissander Fortress. In fact, it appeared that none of the settlement's inhabitants had seen or noticed the traveling group, nor had they noticed anyone else. As the group each took their rests, the demon Yannos, a passenger in Kris' body, began to influence her dreams, causing her the emotional stress she needed to be under in order for it to manifest within the shadows of the group's building of residence.

During this time, Zetaruul was drawn towards the same building by Phelyx's psychic presence. Tenatively reaching out to the aasimar, the thri-kreen spoke in his mind, trying to understand what exactly was this strange aura that had drawn him here, and after an initial shock at briefly seeing the insectoid appearance of the individual, Phelyx entered into discussion with him, explaining some of how his telepathic connection to his twin sister worked. As they spoke, the KAKIA member Kopis could hear a scratching noise at the door, and got up to investigate what they had thought was an abandoned fortress.

No sooner had he opened the door, however, did Yannos, manifested from the shadows, leap forward and attack Kopis, pinning him to the back wall of the room and after a moment of struggling he ripped Kopis' throat out, leaving him to die before turning towards the rest of the party. The shock of this violence awoke everyone who had been sleeping before with a jolt, and as lights began to wink on in the room, Yannos' form slinked back to the shadows and demanifested, leaving the party with just the fresh corpse of their friend's body. In the search for what caused this, another KAKIA member named Rodi spotted Zetaruul through the hole in the ceiling he'd been watching the group from and began to rush up the stairs, certain that the thri-kreen was somehow to blame for Kopis' demise. It was only after Phelyx's words that he backed down from this course of action, and after a few more tense minutes between the party and this newcomer, they allowed him to approach and sit with them in the room. After formally introducing himself to the party, Zetaruul gave them a brief rundown of what purpose Kissander served--as a settlement for veterans and inhabitants of the Battlefield with no other place to turn to. He agreed to show them around the settlement the next day, and helped them keep watch for the evening.

As the next day dawned, Zetaruul (having been given the nickname "Zet" by Sarnai) began to lead the party through the settlement, pointing out areas of interest and places that could be used to help the party on the travels out of Kissander. During this tour they met the plantfolk gardener Albi Rose, who took a liking to Kris as the two interacted. They also were introduced to Shang Mofuay, captain of the watch and organizer of military matters in Kissander.  During this time, a group unknown to the party began to make moves once one of their number spotted Kris among the new arrivals. The Body of Silence, led by the tengu Kelkraw, were remnants of an Orcus-worshiping cult previously led by Myguel Nifeton and they had begun to convert Kissander into a sanctuary for their dark rituals, already outnumbering the non-cultists in the Fortress. Only a few people had an inkling of what was happening, with Shang, Zet, and Albi all remembering that there had been an influx of new people arriving at the fortress within the past several weeks. As Kris moved about the town, events conspired around her to put her in just the right position and mental state to fulfill the cult's plans.

Still on edge from the evening before, Kris' temper was short as the cultists began to pester her here and there, veiling their innocuous conversation with phrases meant to harm her emotionally, a technique that only she could notice and wasn't even sure if it was paranoia or a legitimate danger. The final straw was a cultist who said just the wrong thing to her and the young Nifeton lashed out, beating him senseless in the middle of the street. The guards rushed over to the brawl, and had little choice but to put Kris in jail for the rest of the day in hopes that she would have time to calm down. The party spoke with Kris and they all agreed to meet back up with her at the defense stockade in the evening, when she would be released.

Of course, this was all part of Kelkraw's plan. Now separated from the rest of her companions Kris was vulnerable, both emotionally and physically. With several cultists playing the parts of guards, Kris was escorted up to a tower in the center of Kissander and realized--too late-- what was happening as she was strapped to a ritual table in the center of the rune-inscribed room. Tina Rodriguez, an alchemist in service to the Body of Silence, injected her with hallucinogenic extracts and the cultists began a ceremony designed to stress, scare, and anger the affected Kris in an attempt to fully bond Yannos to Kris' body and give it more control over the mortal form it inhabited.

While this was happening, the rest of the party had begun to notice several inhabitants of Kissander acting oddly, and they catch one who was in the process of carving a bloody "7" symbol into a pumpkin in the garden. With her massive frame, Albi intimidated the cultist, who told them how they were already too late to stop the ritual that was being done to Kris in the middle tower. Springing into action, the party rushed towards the center of town, but were confronted by the remaining cultists in the town square, each revealing their true colors in order to prevent them from disrupting the ritual. In total, there were about seventeen others that stood arrayed against the party with a myriad of weapons and spells. The party rushed into battle all the same, and Albi activated her bloodhunter abilities, ripping through cultists and charging the middle tower itself.

Inside the tower, Kris' condition worsened as the ritual continued. Suffering from the drugs in her system as well as the mental and emotional tortures thrust upon her by the cult, she finally managed to break free of her restraints and summoned a halberd to her hands, lashing out at the cultists and cutting them down. Their blood only served to further the ritual, however, and Yannos' mangy dark orange hide began to rise from the floor around her as Kris confronted Kelkraw, who had been explaining his aspirations for this ritual to her while it had been happening. As the two met in battle, however, the tower shook and slowly began to tilt to one side, abruptly ending the ritual...

Albi's strikes at the base of the tower had their intended effect, and with a rumble of splintering wood and crumbling stonework, the tower collapsed like a felled tree, tipping forward and landing right on top of the square where the cultists and the rest of the party were fighting. Zet managed to teleport Phelyx and a few others away from the area of impact, but none of the cultists had such an opportunity to escape and the they all were slain. As the party began to sift through the rubble, calling out for Kris, she rose from the wreckage not much worse for wear. However, she wasn't the only thing that came out of the rubble.

Yannos' malformed half-body rose along with Kris and swiped out at her, leaving massive gashes in her as its talons raked her flesh. The rest of the party intervened and fought against the partially-summoned creature, avoiding snapping bites from its many-toothed maw and strikes from its dangerously sharp talons. Each of the party members struck with intense ferocity while Phelyx helped keep the party healed, but a brutal combination of particularly damaging swipes and bites from Yannos left Kris unconscious and bleeding profusely as the demon bit her left leg off above the knee. Luckily for her, Yannos was not far behind her and with one final blow from Zet's gythka the last bit of the beast's life ebbed away, the body slowly sinking into the earth as the party rushed to Kris' side.

Phelyx's quick action after he managed to calm his nerves kept Kris from bleeding out as he healed the stump of her leg, but they could not figure out what to do after that until Albi stepped forward. Tearing off a chunk of her own tree body, she reshaped the wood into a leg (the foot bearing a similar resemblance to Yannos' head) and pressed it up against Kris' lost one, the wood magically binding with her body and giving her full control over it. Kris leaned against Phelyx's shoulder as she tested her new leg, and the tension in all the party members slowly flowed away.

With Kissander in ruins, Kris and Phelyx extended the offer to anyone in the fortress to go to Nadir's Zenith and join the Brigade. Those that did take up the offer were Shang, Zet, and Albi, and a few others who had been blind to the cult's infiltration of their home. With a weight off their chests and a much larger traveling party now, the group set off back towards their base.