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Aecra knew who it was before the hooded aarakocra had even stepped out of the shadows. She'd have to be a fool not to recognize the Raven by her cloaked appearance and the amulet about her neck.

Hang on. Did the Raven just call her by name?

Aecra blinked and gave another look. She saw the dark aarakocra's grey beak, her soft features, her sparkling green eyes. Aecra remembered those eyes. She knew her. But... from where? The answer was right on the tip of her tongue...

"Who..." she started, and then she remembered. One of her many nights spent at the Shining Plate Tavern, back when she'd acted as a protector of Hallowpen, the human city. One of the many nights she'd found herself unalone. Her eyes glanced over the black aarakocra's cloak again, and Aecra blushed, smiling as she remembered what was beneath.

"It's you..." she said. "The thief from Hallowpen."

The smile this answer brought to the dark one's beak was a rewarding sight.

"Forgive me," Aecra said, "I've forgotten your name."

The cloaked aarakocra waved a claw in dismissal.

"Just as well," she said. "I probably gave you a fake name anyway. The real one's Ven."

"You two... know each other?" came the voice of the tall paladin from her right. There was no doubt from his tone he'd guessed what had transpired between them.

"Briefly," the hooded thief said, giving Aecra a smirk as she stepped past to retrieve her two throwing knives from the flesh of the lemure.

"We should get going," Aecra said, straightening. "There may be more."

There would be time for reunions later.

"The crew may need our help," Karik said with a nod.

He seemed to have gotten over the nauseating odor of the lemure's decaying flesh. Good—maybe he'd be prepared for the next one. Not that she blamed him for missing the fight; his kind's strong sense of smell seemed as much a weakness as it was a boon. As they stepped onward, down the wooden corridors, Aecra had the thought that these enemies might have been chosen specifically to fight the paladin himself. And besides, even she'd had trouble landing a hit once she got close enough to smell the thing.

"Because you two were doing an excellent job on your own," the black aarakocra said at her side, her daggers cleaned of the demon's blood.

"Lucky you happened along when you did," Aecra said.

"Yes," the thief said, the smirk at the edge of her beak lifting slightly. "'Happened along'. Definitely not 'following you from the shadows, waiting for you to get into trouble.'"

Aecra let out a giggle.

"You were stalking me?" she asked.

"Affectionately!" the thief insisted.

Aecra started to respond, but Ven cut her off suddenly—and she heard it too. Feet coming down the hall, creeping quietly. Maybe it was one of the crew? But Ven wasn't about to take chances, Aecra saw, the thief drawing two throwing knives, keeping her green eyes on the corner. She raised a blade to toss it, but never let it fly.

The first one who came around the corner was a tabaxi; the captain of the ship. That wouldn't have gone well if Ven had decided to throw the knife. But after the tabaxi came a familiar face, with a more recent familiarity than Ven's. It was the handsome dark wolf from the docks—Ryka, the mysterious mercenary.

"You might want to keep quieter company, Captain," Ven said, lowering her blades. "I could hear your lupine friend here before you made it below deck."

The black-furred wolfkin frowned, and Aecra saw the arcane dagger in his grip pulse red. But the tabaxi's short little muzzle showed teeth in a grin, her dark fur lighting with a soft blush.

"Are you offering, your company my stealthy friend?" she asked, giving her own curved daggers a spin.

"Hey, just 'cuz I'm—" the wolfkin started to retort, but stopped as his eyes wandered Ven's form. The gaze wasn't like how he'd examined Aecra or the paladin earlier with an appreciation gleaming in them, but instead with an awe and surprise. "Holy shit. You're—"

"Yes, yes," Ven sighed, emerald eyes rolling. Aecra couldn't help a smile at Ven's ruffled feathers, although she sympathized. It must have been annoying for a thief to be constantly recognized.

"I didn't see you get on," Ryka said, and this time his eyes were wandering Ven's form openly, at which Aecra felt a pang of jealousy—but one she quickly subdued with a practiced willpower.

"That was the goal," Ven said.

"Ummm, hello?" came the slightly irritated voice of the towering paladin. "Demonic infestation still crawling the ship? Can we...?"?

He gestured forward. The other three snapped to it as quickly as Aecra did.

"I counted four lemures," Ryka said, turning to head down to the lower decks. "We took care of two."

"So did we," Aecra said. "So that's them taken care of."

"'We'?" Ven asked, arching an eyebrow.

"Ven took care of them," Aecra corrected, chuckling.

"Great," Ryka said with little enthusiasm and a generous helping of sarcasm. "So just the two spine devils and the bone devil."

Ryka took it upon himself to take the lead, and the others let him, the tabaxi captain Shay Darkfur falling in behind him, her feet making no noise as she stepped. This mattered little, though, since behind her was Karik, who couldn't have stepped anywhere without the floorboards creaking, and even without this, was easily recognized by the clinks and clanks of his armor. Aecra followed behind him, the others leading the way to the stairs that lead down into the cargo hold, and when she glanced back over her shoulder, she saw nothing, but knew without a doubt that Ven was watching, keeping an eye on her. Aecra would guard the back of the group, and Ven would watch her back, unseen.

They hadn't made it fully down the stairs before there was a grunt from Ryka in the front, a hiss from the tabaxi captain, and past the mountain of white fur and muscle that was Karik's form, Aecra saw a glimpse of purple, leathery, spine-covered wings. There was a dull metal thud, like a blade striking wood, and another, and a growl from Ryka. Aecra couldn't tell if it was a growl of pain or just the sound of someone confronted by their sworn enemy.

While Karik was still drawing his sword, she slipped past him and leapt over the rail of the stairs, slashing with her talons extended. She narrowly missed being grazed by the thing's sharp spines with her first attack, but her second hit its mark, her claws tearing into its spineless skin just near the underarm. The little demonic creature was tougher than she expected, though, its flesh firm and sinewy. Her monk sense told her it must be resistant to slashing attacks. She silently cursed herself for not using her Hand of Harm ability, but then there was a chance it was resistant to necrotic damage too.

She turned back at the sound of Karik's heavy footsteps, seeing him run down the stairs and protectively shove Ryka back out of the way—she'd heard of the innate loyalty of the wolfkin, of course. In another second, the paladin's shining blade swung down toward the winged devil, divine light radiating from the weapon. The spine devil let out an unholy shriek as it was cleaved nearly in half, a long vertical slash going down its front from neck to belly. The edges of the wound sizzled and burned from the radiant power of divine energy. It scrambled back, wings fluttering like tattered cloth, but the Hallowed Blade turned in the paladin's grip and slashed horizontally this time. The spine devil was incinerated with that single swipe.

"Holy shit." Ryka's blurted curse was the first thing to break the stunned silence that followed. "Chosen One is right."

Karik looked back with a small, bashful smile.

"The others won't be far behind," Ven said, and Aecra looked up to see her step out of the shadows a few feet from where the pile of ash that had once been the spine devil now lay. She must've snuck around the thing in anticipation of attacking it from behind before Karik disintegrated it with his holy blade.

"She's not wrong," Ryka said, his voice dropping from humorous and awed to grim and serious. "And there'll be more after them if we can't stop them."

"Does anyone else... smell seawater?" Captain Darkhide asked, eyes narrowing.

"It's... the sea..." Ryka said helpfully.

"No, I mean it's stronger than it should be," the captain hissed. Her ears twitched and her grip tightened on her twin daggers. "They're trying to sink us."

"It'd make more sense than attacking outright," Aecra said.

"Move," the captain said, running for the stairs down into the cargo hold. "Now."

Below decks, they found the cargo hold, a familiar sight from back when Aecra had helped the crew carry the crates down these very steps. And she recognized some of the crew—what remained of them—who were desperately trying to patch holes that had been blasted into the ship, now gushing water. In one corner of the hold, a tan-furred and feminine-looking male tabaxi dressed in robes was tending to a wounded crewmate leaned against a crate; a cleric—Aecra recognized the golden light of divine magic. She'd been to more than a few healers in her time. But some of the tabaxi crew she saw behind bars, locked in the ship's brig, and in various and disturbing states.

Many were bloody and wounded, scrabbling at the bars with an anger in their eyes like she had never seen, rattling the doors to their cells as if they were convinced they could rip them from the hinges. A pair had their own cell and were currently met in a passionate tangle of limbs and fur, a black-fur with ample breasts and a barbed feline cock bent over by a lithe brown-furred male. The intensity was breathtaking; even as many nights as Aecra had spent in inn bedrooms or brothels, that kind of fervor was rare. They grasped at each other, fingers curling into fur, every thrust shoving the black-furred one up against the bars, every movement pushed to the extent of what their muscles could do.

Another tabaxi lay passed out on a cot, their sea garb covered in crumbs and whiskey and rum stains, belly swollen. And in another sat a lone gray-furred male with black stripes, cackling madly and rolling in a pile of coins. It clicked quickly—they'd been consumed by their own sins: wrath, lust, gluttony, greed. Not everyone had been strong enough to resist the hellish influence that had passed over them before all this chaos began.

"What the hells happened here?" the captain said to the nearest crew, a muscled black tabaxi holding a large plank of wood in place while others frantically nailed it into place.

"Don't know, Captain," the big tabaxi grunted. "The crew, they just—"

"The infernal wave," Ryka cut in, moving up to the wall and placing a palm against the splintered hole in the ship. "Sometimes, opening a portal to the infernal planes can carry their influence with them. It takes a lot of willpower to overcome it."

The crew stepped back as his touch seemed to pull the broken planks back together with a groaning and splintering of wood, stopping the flow of seawater.

"Mending spell," he said quickly, donning a glimpse of a smirk. "My mother is an artificer."

"Many thanks," the big tabaxi said with a nod before turning to the captain. "We killed one o' the bloody things, but the other spiny one escaped somewhere, and there were four o' these melty, fleshy... I dunno, Cap'n, but they smelled—"

"They're taken care of," Darkhide said, nodding. "Help with the other repairs."

"Aye, Captain," the tabaxi said, the others who'd been fixing the hole scurrying off. "But there's a big one, down in the lockhold."

"The what?" Ryka asked.

"Secret passage where we keep... hidden valuables," Darkhide said, sharing a meaningful glance with Ven. Right—so the sea captain was a thief herself.

"We'll take care of the big one," Ryka said. "Stay with your crew."

One with less perceptive eyes than Aecra's might have mistaken this for Ryka's bravado pushing his old flame out of the fight so that she'd be safe, but she caught the glimpse of familiarity between him and the tabaxi captain and knew this is what she would have chosen to do anyway. Strong as their bond was, she was loyal to her crew, and this was something he understood.

"Try not to die," she said.

Ryka spun his blood red dagger expertly in his hand with a flourish that brought a gleam of admiration even from Ven.

"Good advice," he replied. From the way they said the words to each other, Aecra guessed this was their old way of bidding one another ado.

"A pleasure meeting all of you," Captain Darkhide said, regarding the rest of them.

"Captain," Karik said with a slight nod. Ven gave a small nod herself, but one that carried plenty of meaning between the two thieves. Aecra's nod was low enough to almost be a bow.

With this, the tabaxi captain tapped a foot thrice against the floorboards, and the deck opened up beneath them, a set of stairs leading down into the darkness.