When Strix made a flourish at the wall it started to change. A stage slowly extended from the bottom, and a man suddenly appeared on it in a puff of smoke. I could tell it was just a rudimentary jump but I had to give him points for style. The man on stage took off his top hat and gave an elegant low bow. After a second he straightened back up and placed his hat over his raven black hair. His face was covered by a slightly cracked madly smiling porcelain mask, and he wore a pitch-black suit with a red vest.

“Welcome, welcome, I’m so glad you could make it,” he said with a slightly chipper voice, “please sit down as we are about to begin.” He waited a second, “Most of you are new faces so I will introduce you to what we do here. Our group is sort of an alliance, we scratch your back and hopefully, you scratch ours. We set up meeting places, markets, and auctions. We can also fabricate papers and identification if needed. We even can make cover-ups or get you out of trouble. Everything comes at a price though, but ours is on the cheaper side. To get these benefits you need to help us, of course, you don’t really have to, but if you don’t most of our benefits won’t be available that to you. It’s not like we will need you to work constantly, all we need you to do is help us in our activities, and of course, we will also pay you along with the benefits for your help. It’s nothing much, it’s just we need help with setting up most of our benefits, cover-ups are hard after all.” He waited for his audience to absorb his words before resuming, “Now, I know you guys are getting fed up with my rambling so I decided it would be best to show you our power.”

With those words, Buckferd clapped and a spirit rift ripped open behind him sending out a wave of the familiar bloody aura.

“Please, join me.”

With the rift opened jump sites in the back rooms busted with activity, it looked like the raid had begun. The half breed that was standing silently by the wall suddenly tossed out a small glowing sphere at the portal but before it could reach it was smacked out of the air by Buckferd. Though it failed to reach its destination it was close enough to do what it was designed for, lock the rift down. Once a rift is locked it's incredibly difficult to close it unless you’re significantly stronger than the one who locked it, it seems whatever the wolves wanted was at the portal's destination.

The room erupted into commotion at the sudden turn of events and it was certainly not helped by half the wall by the bar being knocked down by the strike force, apparently, they didn’t notice the perfectly functional door, but I guess I can’t really say anything because I frequently do it. The sudden intrusion caused the snake in front of me to let out a surprised hiss and an indignant glare. I sent over a wave of calmness and told her to relax, she looked at me in curiosity before turning back to the wolves.

The three staff bearers led the charge and tossed out balls of smoking incense causing many of the inhuman guests to erupt into hacking coughs, including Buckferd, the trio, the gnome, and the bald man, though the snake and I were unaffected. Interestingly the hyenas were also unaffected by the normally poisonous incense. My attention was quickly brought back to Buckferd by a large influx of magic gathering by his hand, but it was soon stopped by three powerful enchanted iron javelins. All of them missed but it was a large enough distraction for the masked man to lose his progress, which allowed the staff bearers to form a semicircle in front of him. They lifted their signature staffs and pointed them at the man, the surrounding incense began to become turbulent and soon it surged forth. It began to quickly swirl around Buckferd and soon he was quickly encased in the smoke. He wasn’t just sitting still and letting this happen though, he was quickly forming a magic cocoon and trying to retreat back to the rift.

Despite the staff bearers best efforts Buckferd barely held off the incense and arrived at the rift, but instead of jumping through he reached in with his magic and started frantically absorbing the bloody aura. Soon he had enough energy to break the staff bearers control of the incense causing it to quickly calm. His eyes now glowed an eerie red and black mist started to exit from the rift, with a deeper voice than before he said,

“HaaAAhHAaa, you almost had me there, but no matter, you will all die here.”

I could sense a rift preparing to open behind me which I promptly stopped but I could not say that about the other corners.

Three rifts opened simultaneously and a horde of grotesque creatures exited. A feeling of rage quickly welled up within me as I identified the creatures, they were corpse dwellers, horrid creatures that have a lizard-like head, spider-like legs, and what looks like a human torso with a huge gaping mouth running through the middle of it, but they have many other forms depending on their prey and environment. They will appear anywhere that has a significant body count, which they will add to. The room descended into chaos as the corpse dwellers attacked everything in sight.