#oc: kenneth kipling

[chaoticpanenergy]

god. god. okay. so. im in a dnd campaign. yes? yes. im going to rant about my character's plotline. the campaign's theme (vaguely) is political intrigue. also fair warning there are going to be a number of sex mentions because the players are all horny college students (except technically i just graduated). also lots of morally questionable and straight up morally bad choices from various characters, all done in the name of entertainment.

relevant characters to what im abt to talk about:

kaede kipling (pc) (ze/hir, fae/they/she): my character, heir apparent (second heir in line) to House Kipling, an extremely rich and powerful family of professional assassins.

min (pc) (she/they/fae): played by one of the humans who i make out with (M, any pronouns); is a changeling (shapeshifter) noble seeking to form political alliances to benefit her family.

kenneth kipling (npc) (he/him): kaede’s uncle, heir to House Kipling (first in line), extremely cruel and also extremely hot and flamboyant; is. like. a vampire weeb (veeb) and has body modded fangs (is actually a half elf); seduces all his victims before killing them; decided kaede was his arch nemesis when kaede was about six (and he was like 22) and has personally made faer life a living hell since then.

santino (npc) (he/him i think? or he/any, most npcs use a variety): an aasimar (angel) healer who has a preexisting political alliance and close personal friendship with min

yersis (npc) (she/her or she/they i think): a powerful political leader in the country we live in (although not at the top of the government hierarchy). very hot. a lot of "yes mommy" jokes get made ooc anytime she does anything. vaguely allied with min, mostly because min wants to ally faerself with her and yersis doesn't object to this. tolerates but dislikes kenneth.

also!! the dm (R, they/them) is the other human i make out with, and is dating min’s player. they are both so cool :)

okay okay okay SO. M and i are the two players who are the most deeply invested in the Complicated Plot part of the campaign (the whole campaign was actually a birthday present for M from R, it was rlly cute). so M and i have a ton of lore that we've created together. and a ton of plot. in this post i am mostly talking about just the plot that directly impacts my character. there is a ton more i am not touching on in this post. here we go, buckle up:

so! the whole party met each other upon being summoned by a deity of chaos and anarchy to do some quest that he won't actually tell us the details of. we were sent to a party, which we are given to understand various important political things are happening at, and we each have different goals in attending. however, before gaining entrance to said party, we had to pass a series of tests. while working on these tests, min came up with the bright idea of barganing with the deity who summoned us all (we refer to him as Sexy Deity, since we do not yet know his name and R makes all the npcs so hot. it's amazing. we're all super gay.)

so min bargained with the deity. she came up with a proposal to sell him the souls of the rest of our party in exchange for herself becoming a warlock (and the more souls from the party she gets for him, the more additional perks she gets). she can keep her soul under this bargain also. it's very much a ton of perks for faer at the expense of the rest of the party. we refer to this bargain, and her attempts to deliver on it, as Min's Villain Arc. the party is not thrilled when she suggests we should all sell our souls, so she drops it for a while and we keep doing our fancy magical tests.

now. kaede's backstory is that they went to assassin school in their late teens, and had an extremely codependent relationship with their roommate, sorra, a changeling who used he/she/they pronouns. they had 0 boundaries with each other, never defined what their relationship was, and also had a lot of sex. it was very unhealthy. neither of them was aware of any of these many issues. after graduating, kaede panicked over the fact that she missed sorra (not being used to caring about other people this much), had an identity crisis, and ran away from home. kaede's parents hired sorra to go after kaede and bring them back, and kaede panicked again and killed sorra. this was about 2 weeks before the campaign started, and kaede has been dealing with significant amounts of trauma, grief, and guilt since then.

that context established, skipping back to the plot of the campaign! min goes through kaede's belongings (for reasons that actually were not super nefarious and did make sense at the time) and finds a locket with a portrait of sorra. curious about this, she shapeshifts into sorra and lures kaede off to a separate room. they proceed to sleep together, even though kaede knows this is some kind of ruse and not the real sorra. afterwards, kaede starts crying and traumadumps to min about having killed sorra and regretting it.

min has a bright idea. fae suggests to kaede that fae have the ability to take kaede's grief and pain away. kaede, who is not fully out of subspace at this point, and who has just experienced Having Some Serotonin And Endorphins for the first time in several months and associates min as being the cause of this, is distinctly more suggestible and open to this than ze would normally be. ze probably is not in a state where ze can truly consent to things. min is not fully aware of this fact, and also is on her villain arc, so continues with her proposal. (all of the really horrifying aspects of this situation were my idea btw, i enjoy traumatizing kaede. M helped me make it worse and more fun, but it was not her idea to do all the really horrible questionable parts of this lol.)

min explains that if kaede agrees to sell min their soul, for min to then immediately transfer to Sexy Deity, min would be willing to temporarily erase all of kaede's traumatic memories about killing sorra, with the goal of getting kaede into therapy and then slowly giving the memories back as kaede becomes better able to process and healthily deal with them. kaede, due to their extremely suggestible state and the fact that they are so tired of hurting so much all the time, agrees to this, and promptly signs away faer soul to min. min passes the soul on to Sexy Deity and gains her first level in warlock. kaede forgets all about killing sorra, for the time being, and switches their alignment from chaotic evil to neutral evil.

the problem with this bargain, that neither kaede nor min anticipated, is that kaede traumadumping about killing sorra to min directly before the "selling their soul" conversation made their memory of selling min their soul one of the memories that gets temporarily erased as part of this deal. due to this, kaede now 1) doesn't know they don't have a soul anymore 2) falsely believes that sorra is alive, and most importantly 3) believes that min is sorra in disguise.

min does not know this miscommunication has taken place. we continue on with our magical tests, pass them all, and gain entrance to the political event; it's a masquerade ball.

now!! we need the info about the npcs that i mentioned up at the top of this post. remember them? they're important now. they're all attending the ball.

midway through the ball, kenneth attempts to assassinate yersis (although he does not do this personally, instead sending some goons to do it for him, and is likely using the assassination attempt as cover to perform other nefarious deeds while everyone is distracted with yersis almost dying). yersis survives, thanks to magical healing from various sources (remember santino? he is here; he can restore anyone to full health regardless of injury level), but it does appear that people with various political agendas are attempting to do different things under the cover of the chaos.

because of the assassination attempt, the palace that we are all in is put on magical lockdown, with a magical barrier surrounding it to prevent any of us from leaving until Things Have Been Gotten To The Bottom Of. around this point, due to a conversation with yersis, min officially ends her Villain Arc, because yersis reveals that she does not trust Sexy Deity and does not believe he should be allowed to own more souls. and again, yersis is hot, so most of the pcs want to do what she says, including min.

kaede and kenneth run into each other. kenneth insults kaede and then orders them to do another assassination for him. kaede tries to blackmail their way out of this, threatening to tell their grandmother (his mother and the head of the family) about a time he killed someone off the family's Do Not Kill list. he counter-blackmails kaede with a piece of information kaede didn't know he knew about them. kaede grumblingly agrees to do the job for him. he gives them some poison to coat their knives in and tells them to kill santino; he then goes off to distract min (the only party member both powerful enough to stop kaede and politically savvy enough to notice what kaede is doing in time to stop it) by having an orgy with min and several other party members (kenneth is aware kaede believes min is sorra, although he is also aware that min is not actually sorra, so he makes sure kaede knows about the orgy, because of the thing where he enjoys viciously tormenting kaede). (side note: earlier during the masquerade ball, min figured out that kaede thinks fae is sorra, and has been silently panicking over what to do about that since then.)

kaede, fuming and devastated, goes off to kill santino. NOW. a relevant piece of information here is that kaede is kalashtar; ze has a little bit of essentially angel ancestry, and this ancestor has a spiritual connection to them (which kaede mostly attempts to ignore) and is supposed to guide them in the pursuit of good deeds. (kaede was adopted on purpose because of this, to give faer parents a power trip about overcoming the influence of this celestial being by raising kaede to very much Not Pursue Good Deeds.) (none of kaede's family are good people lol.)

so!! kaede gets santino (the angel) alone by claiming to have been stabbed and need to be healed, and implying that it was kenneth and that ze is very scared and innocent and needs help escaping from him. (all of which is a ruse.) kaede then proceeds to stab santino several times with the poisoned knives, saying "it's not personal" (which kaede believes is the "no homo" of killing people ajksdhksfh). in between getting stabbed, santino starts crying and apologizes for "not being able to save kaede," presumably meaning save kaede from kaede's own family, presumably relating to him being an aasimar and kaede being kalashtar. he also hints at kaede not having their soul (although not outright saying so) and says he hopes they get it back someday. he then sends a magical cry for help to some of the other pcs, but he also tells them "it's not kaede's fault" (which. lmao yes it is my guy, you are actively being murdered on purpose by kaede at this exact second). (he had a lot of hp, it took several stabs to kill him, so he had time to say/do all this lol.) then he dies and i steal his cool magic angel sword to keep. >:)

however! some of the other pcs show up, because of santino's call for help, in time to cast Revivify on him and bring him back to life. this is Not Good News for kaede, since she wasn't killing him for her own goals, but rather for kenneth, and so now ze is in trouble with kenneth. especially because the newly-alive santino got immediately rushed to a safe house to hide so that he will be safe from future assassination attempts, so now kenneth cannot just go kill him himself.

kenneth immediately denies all involvement in any of this, but, to protect the family reputation, begins negotiating with yersis on kaede's behalf. he manages to finagle out an agreement that kaede will be tried for murder under the laws of House Kipling, who are powerful enough to count as a city-state, and not under the laws of the city-state we are currently physically in. this is good news for me since yknow i have the funniest feeling the laws of House Kipling, The Famous Assassins, will not be particularly unfriendly to me doing murder, and will be deeply in my favor since i am a prized member of the family and my grandmother's favorite. in the meantime, though, yersis does arrest me. (which i am deeply offended by; how dare she act like she has any authority over me just because she is a government authority of the country i live in?? how dare she try and impose consequences on me for my actions????? this is just insulting.)

also! kenneth tells kaede that min is not sorra, and helps them realize that some of hir memories are missing. he does not tell them that sorra is dead, or that they killed sorra, or that they sold their soul to min, even though all of this is information he has. meanwhile, min confesses everything about the "kaede's soul" debacle to yersis, who is horrified for many reasons.

min is also now giving kaede a cold shoulder, because of the thing where she has a preexisting close friendship with santino, and is therefore very angry that kaede would try to kill him (even though kaede has disavowed all personal responsibility in this many times by saying that 1) it wasn't personal and 2) kenneth made them. so kaede is very annoyed that everyone is still for some reason blaming them for being a grown adult who attempted murder).

this is approximately where we are currently in the campaign. kaede has been observing min's behavior, and has satisfied themself that kenneth was telling the truth when he said min wasn't sorra, but kaede hasn't realized how significant what's going on actually is; kaede's current theory is that min somehow found out about kaede's relationship with sorra, and intentionally tricked kaede into thinking she is sorra in order to be able to utilize kaede's assassin services without paying them. kaede has no idea how many of their memories are missing, or that sorra is dead, or that their soul is gone.

now. the thing is. next session. i want to confront min over this. and confuse her very much because she will have no idea what i'm talking about when i'm all "why are you so mad over me killing someone for kenneth when you literally were going to do the exact same thing as he did" because yknow. she had no intention of doing the same thing. because i am Incorrect about what is happening. all of which will be very fun. HOWEVER. it would be super in character for kaede to bluff and say "kenneth told me Everything" while saying all this. BUT if i do that i am Almost Certain that min would take it at face value, go "oh cool, so i don't need to figure out how to break it to you that i took your soul and memories" and proceed to immediately give back all my memories of killing sorra. which would be Very Bad because kaede would 1) have a huge breakdown and 2) want min dead, and both try to kill her themself and also sic kenneth on them (which would be Very Very Very Bad because kenneth is 6 levels above us, and has a blackrazor sword, which kills you dead and eats your soul when he stabs you with it). so probably i should not say that even though it would be super in character.

so the goal rn for me personally is for kaede to Not Yet figure out that ze sold hir soul to min, or that sorra is dead, for at least another few sessions. ideally not finding any of it out before kaede's Going On Trial For Murder arc concludes. which will be Difficult because min has already almost given back all my memories Twice and will definitely do so if given the Slightest actual reason to. but as soon as she does, kaede will try and kill her, which is. not ideal since we are both player characters and need to remain on non-murdery terms in the long term lol. so. all of this is going to be So entertaining but also will take a lot of figuring out as we get closer and closer to everything about kaede and min's soul deal exploding in our faces (which we have known was coming for a long time and have been looking forward to, lol). i don't yet know how all of this is going to resolve but i do know i am going to have a Great time.

okay. rant concluded for the time being. i love this campaign so much. it's incredibly chaotic and every single time i have a bad (read: extremely entertaining) idea, R lets me add it in, and it's the best thing ever.