Quest to guard NPC doesn't seem to work properly.

[Oldamar999]

I was doing a quest that I got from a tavern in The Dancing Porcupine Inn where I have to protect an NPC in their residence for a night from assassins, and kill the assassins that come from 9 to midnight. This quest should have been pretty easy and simple to do, but the problem is that for some reason this quest did not work.
I killed the assassin that came into the house, but I could not talk to the quest NPC, so I decided to loiter for a few more hours (i'd say around 14 hours?) and when I tried to talk to her again I got this message with a placeholder image telling me to "tell mark now". I went back to the tavern where I got the quest and she got mad at me as if I failed the quest.
If it matters, I was guarding her at the Wickston residence in The Dancing Porcupine Inn. This residence already has 2 nonhostile NPCs living within it, so I do wonder if that has anything to do with why this quest didn't work, probably not. images are in attachments cuz I don't know how to put in images in the post lol.

[Jay_H]

Hello The quest is The Bodyguard:

If the attackers show up, there will be two of them.

If you only killed one, the quest isn't yet complete. I don't know what would've happened to the other enemy; you can try the console command killall in case they spawned in an inaccessible location or something. Not sure what else to offer in this case.

[Ralzar]

I can remeber running into this problem a couple of times withthis quest. The second enemy often seems to have problems spawning. Once I solved it by editing the quest data to just need one enemy killed, loaded the save and then… both spawned

[Oldamar999]

So it looks like I am just getting unlucky then, pain!
thanks though

[13thsyndicate]

Also, the OOps! Tell Mark Now is a placeholder image that shows when a villager sprite doesn't load properly; it's a dev message and quite infamous in the community by now.

[Tamalak]

Same issue with me. Her house (in my instance) was small, so maybe that's why only one enemy spawned. Anyway, she got beaten up

[MrFlibble]

I can confirm this as well with 0.14.5. I got this quest twice and both times it picked a very small residence as the target house. I'm confident that the assailants were spawned in some inaccessible place, as I could not loiter while inside the house. I could only get one of the attackers spawned in a way I could interact with them if I waited outside, but apparently the quest requires that you enter the building. However, if you exit it, no more enemies spawn outside.

[BUTTFACEiodfuvg]

Incidentally I also encountered this bug on 0.14.5, but I was still able to loiter until dawn, so I am not sure that another enemy spawned nearby. I encountered the same placeholder image in conversation.

In my case, a mummy (the mummy finger curse) spawned in after the first assassin. Unsure if related. The 2nd assassin either never spawned or spawned far enough away that I was still able to loiter until dawn.