yippee

The two primary flavors of Bhenu: Bhenu the Deathmark (he/they): A pretty normal necron! Liked to clown it up to attempt to comfort/entertain people he liked, bit of a goofy flirt when he wasn't in murder mode. Zero concept of personal space. Worked with a coterie of other deathmarks assigned to guard their local cryptek conclave. Bhenu the Flayer (it/its): The thing Bhenu becomes! Creepy bug in charge of the night time, head empty no thoughts. Mentally has the Mii Channel Theme on loop at all times. Mute, blind, gangly. Always ice cold from hanging around in the ghostwinds/flayer dimension for years at a time. Excitable under-socialized shelter dog when it isn't sitting perfectly still for decades. Still no concept of personal space. Let it lick you o>~ Both incarnations wear earrings (2 for OG Bhenu, 1 for Flayermode) made from tiles taken from their assigned cryptek, a technomancer named Nen! They theoretically allow Bhenu to track her wherever she goes by resonating with the rest of her tiles, and was standard practice in their dynasty -- one deathmark assigned to 'observe' one cryptek, linked by tiles, in an arrangement established after a significant attempted uprising within the Thanakar crypteks shortly before biotransference. Bhenu and Nen were friends from before their eventual roles, but his job was ultimately to shoot her in the head if she ever stepped out of line. The Thanakar were internally-scheming assassins broadly considered to lack a sense of honor by their neighbors and had several potential heirs to the dynasty jockeying for position, so it wasn't a huge surprise to anyone when there were overlapping coup attempts during the Great Sleep. The resulting tomb sabotage meant Bhenu woke unexpectedly early and promptly took a couple synaptic disintegrator blasts to the head while attempting to defend his assigned cryptek.

The damage scrambled his neurals pretty terribly, blew off his lower faceplate, and shattered his ocular. The ones responsible cut him off from the recall/repair/resurrection protocols and dumped him down into their tombworld catacombs to presumably die.

Bhenu survived, but ended up warping into a flayed one pretty rapidly after that with most of the damage never repairing properly. It doesn't remember much of its previous life/identity now beyond 'gotta find my cryptek and watch them.' Without a faceplate to work with it ended up mutating a necrodermal tongue as the curse drove them to 'feed,' and spending a lot of time in the ghostwinds (oubliette…2!!!) away from other flayers accelerated its changes beyond the 'norm' for flayed ones.