Siege of Hollowguard - Crossroads Campaign - Sessions 26-29

I am writing now from within our quarters in the Center, the investigation has proven that there are certainly outsiders at work within the world of Sharron. The town of Hollowguard had been taken in the past by the effort of a necromancer and now that necromancer had reached out to the outer powers for greater power. Apparently there is a coalition of sorts of necromancers within the world and this one had felt constrained by their restrictions and so he sought extra power to defy them. When we arrived the initial necromancer had already been slain by a one of the members of this coalition who was now engaged in a half of a siege.

Aki Satou - Chosen Scion of Ama-no-Uzume

Scions of the Second Refinement

D&D version of her, the scion version has no tail.

Background: Aki's conception was problematic to say the least in that she was certainly conceived after her supposed father died. Her mother, Kimun, reported that her husband came home from a position abroad one night and they celebrated as long parted lovers do. He left out the door the next day saying that he would return and the next she heard from him was a report that he had died in a car accident on another continent on the same day that he supposedly returned home.

At first Kimun and others assumed that the tryst was a matter of a ghost saying a final farewell and she sought a purification from the touch of the dead. Then she discovered that she was pregnant. She carried the child to term and gave birth to a daughter she named Aki. Aki was prone to sudden shifts of mood but was mostly well meaning just unfocused. Kimun sought help and learned that the apparition that had come to her was actually an oni with unknown intentions. Which is when she received a message to expect the creature soon and make his daughter ready for him.

Terrified for herself and her daughter, Kimun enacted a desperate plan. She set out a tea ceremony for her visitor who decided to appear in her husband's form, unaged from the last time he had appeared. Over the course of the meeting, she worked in subtle appeals to the Kami hoping against hope that they would help a simple woman such as herself. Luckily for her the Kami, or at least a Kami, heard and by the time the oni realized there was real power working against him, it was too late for him to act. He was forced to relinquish all his claim and influence over the child.

Unfortunately, Aki had snuck into a nearby room and witnessed the event and so she was present during the confrontation. As such while she was purified of the oni nature, it still left its mark on her. She had horns and her skin would range from shades of blue and red depending on her mood. Her mother worried that she would be shunned wherever they went. They'd already had to move from their first home due to the stigma of Aki being a cursed child, but there was no where to go where they could escape her cursed appearance. Fortunately, a cheerful woman stopped by their isolated house one day and asked for a chance to rest her feet. As she "just happened to chance" upon seeing Aki, she thanked her hostess by teaching Kimun a simple tea brew to help Aki conceal her curse.

It is the only tea that Aki finds very distasteful.