Event handlers: Are some inherently delayed?

[Asterra]

I have been making use of the "OnDeath" event handler, and have recently noticed that functions tied to the event are triggering several countable seconds after the event has taken place. In fact the delay is suspiciously similar to the default delay of quests (up to 5 seconds). In evidence of this suspicion, if I spawn in several NPCs and kill each one on the same frame, the usual several-second delay proceeds normally, but once the delay is over, every instance of the OnDeath function processes at the same exact moment.

 

Since the scripts for such events are not directly linked to a quest, and should be processing only and immediately when the event occurs, I am finding it difficult to account for this behavior. Just to be sure, I defined the delay of all quests to be only a fraction of a second, but this made no difference.