Honesty

Sequel to Duplicity.

The "Best" RPG Ever-17

 First / Previous / Next / Latest

---

The castle was really starting to show its age now: The corridor the party of four was trying to follow their target through was full of rubble, requiring all of them to climb around carefully, and take the occasional pause so Zack could push some of it around to make more room.

"So, theories. What do you think this thing is?" said Katherine.

"You're the one who said 'boggart' earlier," Mika chimed in.

"Well yes, but..that doesn't quite make sense. I didn't feel particularly afraid of what I saw, and neither did Zack. Or, did you?"

"No," he said flatly.

The psion thought a little more. "Was it acting in self-defense? Does it think this place belongs to it and we're intruding?"

"It was taunting me to attack it," said the knight.

"It was taunting you to attack me. If it doesn't like all of us being here, killing off one or two like that would be a quick way to get the rest to run away. In theory, at least."

"Are you..sure it was really taunting you?" said Nora.

"Yes."

"Well, I mean, w-what did it say?"

"None of your business."

Katherine sighed. "Let me put it this way. It looked like you. Did it say something you could imagine yourself saying?"
"No. Never."

"So, it said something you'd hate yourself if you said."

"Why is this about me all of a sudden?"

"It's not about you, it's about the monster! Or whatever we're dealing with. We can't get a clear picture of how it works without more information about what it did to make you so angry."

Zack dropped the rock he'd been moving, and sighed. "It looked like me in a wedding gown."

"So?" said Mika. "You'd look pretty good in a gown."
"It implied I was marrying someone. A guy."
Katherine nodded. "Mhm..And you think of yourself as a guy. You might not be afraid exactly of acting like a girl so much you decide to marry a man, but the idea is at least very upsetting. Right?"

He shrugged. "I guess so."

---

After an hour or so of walking and resting, Aria said, "So hey, you know, what this party really needs is a healer. Like, a dedicated healer to keep everyone else alive and stuff."

"No, ya think?" said Rayna.
"Mnghf," grunted Lynn. "No argument here."

"Any idea how far off we are now?"

Rayna looked up, turned around in a circle, then looked down at the ground, then forward again. "I'd say..we're a little more than halfway there."

---

Katherine said, "Saaay, you looked really worried about me getting hurt. I didn't know you liked me that much!"

He stopped, turned around to face her, crossed his arms, glared. "I don't like you. I dislike you. There's a slight chance I hate you. But I dislike seeing people get hurt more." And then turned back around and continued, ears folded completely back against his head.

"Uh.." Nora said, "..A-are you sure your mind hasn't been rewritten some to match the 'knight' class when it changed your body?"

"Hmph. Not unless it rewrote most of my memories, too. And I don't wanna even think about that."

Mika stopped in her tracks, her head forming an idea too rapidly to concentrate on anything else. And then she had to scramble over some of the rocks saying, "Hey! Heey!" to catch up.

The others turned around, and Katherine said, "What?"

"I think I get it. It's a troll."

"A troll." said Zack. "Last time I checked, trolls don't do anything this thing does."
"No no," she said, shaking her head, "not a fantasy troll. Like, a person who's a troll? It doesn't care what happens as long as it gets a reaction out of people. It didn't do anything but look like a spider for a second to Nora because she screamed at that right away, and I think it tried to scare me with an angel because I look kinda like a demon to it? It kept looking like you in a wedding dress when you reacted to that," she said, turning to Zack, "and got a reaction out of her" (here pointing at the cat-girl) "by getting you to attack her!"

Katherine scratched her head. "That...makes sense. It didn't kill anyone based on the report we got. But why make the guards not remember it before sending them back? And more concerningly, how?"

"If it sent back guards with some clue of what was here, there wouldn't be any reason for more people to come around other than to try and get rid of it," said Zack. "A mystery means people would keep coming here to figure out what it is, without a clear idea on how to get rid of it.

"..I'm as worried about how as you are. Why don't you write down what we've figured out so far, in case that happens?" He got out the notebook and handed it to Katherine.

"Why don't I? Why don't you?"

"I have to move rocks," he said flatly, and started on the way forward again.

---

"Hey, could you open your mouth for a sec?" said Lynn at another rest.
Aria did as requested. "Aaaah. How come?"

"Well, when you first showed up, your teeth were huge and sharp-looking, like you were some kinda horror-movie monster or something."

"That's weird. They've never been sharp before. Maybe it's a demon sword thing?"
"Hmm..I dunno," said Rayna, staring at her. "Your race isn't listed as human. It's..I'm not sure how to pronounce that row of letters. Maybe you're some kind of shapeshifter?"

"Well, how would I be able to tell?"

The fox-girl shrugged. "Try to have sharp teeth?"
"I'll try, I guess. Hnngh." Aria had closed her eyes and clenched her mouth, expecting it to be difficult, but as soon as she thought about her teeth growing big and sharp, she could feel them moving around. She opened her eyes again, halfway opened her mouth and probed with her tongue a bit to find they had changed just as imagined. "Well, lookit that," she said with a bit of difficulty thanks to the altered shape of her mouth, and then shifted them back. "I wonder what else I can change?"

"What if you can turn back into a guy?" suggested Lynn.

"Yeah, I'll try that!" Aria stood up and tried to turn back to how she'd looked before entering the game. She could feel her hair sliding up her back as it shortened, her chest pulling in slightly, and her figure becoming steadily less pronounced, but the change stopped at just a more androgynous female, well short of a truly male appearance, much less actually turning her into a man.

"Wow. That's..a pretty dramatic change," said Rayna, noticing her hair and eye colors had even shifted around. "Does it feel like you're straining anything to stay like that?"
"No," said Aria, and paused to note that her voice had deepened somewhat, almost enough to mistake for a man's. "It didn't take any more effort than the teeth did, either. But it does feel...I dunno, unnatural? Like I don't think I could get used to this very quickly." She quickly shifted back to her earlier appearance: long white hair, green eyes, bigger chest, so on. She was now exactly as she had started, despite not really having thought of what she was shifting to in any more detail than 'turn back'.

"Say...your clothes changed to fit you, too," said Lynn.

"I didn't tell them to do that. I mean, not the way I told my body to change. Maybe they're enchanted to do that or something?"

"If you buy some more clothes and shift in them we'll find out," said Rayna. "What about fuzzy parts? Like, I grew this tail and furry ears when I picked a class.."

"Let's see!" said Aria excitedly, and tried to give herself fox parts like the illusionist's. Her ears visibly grew in size, became covered in fuzz that progressed into fur, and soon began wiggling around; at the same time, a thick-furred tail slowly pushed its way out from her back. Her fur was white like her hair, except at the tips, where it was black. "Wow, this is neat!" she said, pulling the tail around to her front and hugging it.

"Does that feel unnatural?" said Rayna.

"Kinda? A lot less so." She let go of the tail and tried walking around a bit. "I'm not having any trouble balancing with this. Hey, I wonder if I can change my stats like this!" She tried changing again, focusing specifically on making her muscles stronger, but it just felt like she was tensing all of them normally, and she relaxed after a few seconds.

"I'm not seeing any difference," said Rayna.
"Aww."

---

"H-hold on!" Nora stopped at a door, and the others stopped to turn and look at what she was doing. She closed her eyes and walked forward a couple of steps, then back to the door, turning to face it. "It..doesn't go past here. And it's a-a lot stronger through this door than most of the trail was."

"So, you think the troll-ghost-whatever is through there?" said Katherine.

"It's..l-likely. Should we go in?"
"The door opens out, and there's too much junk in the way. I'd have to break it," said Zack, "so no element of surprise if we do."

"Wait-wait-wait, I thought we already figured out what is," said Mika, "shouldn't we just leave?"
"Correction: We figured out what it wants," said Katherine, "or at least we think we did. We still don't understand its nature well enough for someone to get rid of it, or decide whether they should."

"Can you tell there's something in there?" said Zack, looking at the psion.

She closed her eyes as if to think for a few seconds, and then opened them. "No. I'm sure I could sense it if it had a physical brain, so it must not."

"Then..neither of us can do anything to it, if it isn't physical. So I'll break the door, and you two start throwing fire in," he said, waving the witch and weaver closer.

"I'm not sure I can throw fire.." said Nora.

"Well, do some kind of magic attack. We need to know if it can be hit by those."

After giving them a moment to get ready, Zack smashed in the door with his sword, and pointedly stepped back, not looking inside. Mika stepped forward and threw a fireball in, lighting up what seemed to be a storage room for banners with a big barrel labelled 'TNT' in the middle. Nora held off while the witch made her fire float above the ground and circle around the room. "Where is it?" she said.

"I-it's, uh--" Nora closed her eyes, reaching out to pinpoint the location of the thing, and pointed straight at the barrel. "It's either inside of that or it is that," she said.

"Hang on!" Zack quickly switched to Dark Form and held up his magic-shield between the doorway and the rest of the party. "Okay, try it."

Mika nodded and waved the fire right toward the barrel, which hopped sideways away from it; the fire continued on its course toward the doorway and hit the knight's shield before he could get out of the way, which put it out.

"Hmmnp!" Nora tried pulling some of the stone bricks out of the wall next to the thing with enough force to hit it, and they passed straight through it. There was a giggling sound, and the barrel seemed to fall straight down through the floor.

"Where'd it go?" said Katherine, looking around.

"I..I think it's still below us. But it's leaving..that way?" said Nora, pointing at a nearby wall. "I'm sorry, I don't think I can track it.."

"It's okay," said the psion. "At least now we know it doesn't like magic demon fire. And it's definitely immune to physical attacks."

"So, should we go report about it now?" said Mika.

Zack thought about it for a moment and then nodded. "We should at least try and head toward the exit, see if it does anything to stop us."

---

Rayna looked ahead at the town's walls and gates, the guards standing outside of them. "Ah, finally, civilization!"

"Mmh, yeah." Lynn nodded. "For as medieval-looking as it does, it's surpisingly comforting to see."

One of the guards ran up to the three girls as they got closer. "Are you hurt?" she said to the archer.

"Yeah. Big brute clubbed me in the side. They're not, though."

"Well, I could use a nice bath after all this," said the fox-girl; the guard ignored her and yelled for some more to come over.

"It'll have to wait. Tell the captain what we found." The guards were getting ready to outright carry her inside. "And you—" She pointed to Aria. "—No murdering in town."

"What about out of town?" asked the shifter just as Lynn was about to be out of earshot.
"Probably not!" she shouted back.

They had to wait outside the captain's office for a few minutes. Rayna had an attentive look, her ears turned partially toward the door.

"What? Can you hear what's going on in there?" asked Aria.
"Not with you talking two inches away."

"Well, I expect you to tell me."
"Why don't you just get your own ears?"
"I can't—oh, wait."

She went with cat ears this time. It wasn't entirely clear how she knew the difference, but it worked well enough. It seemed the captain was scolding a guard who had been in a drunken brawl the night before. Her voice was very quiet but not pleasant, instead sounding like there was such an overload of rage that it wrapped back around to seeming calm. This, Aria decided, would not be a smart person to provoke.

After a while, the guard walked out of the office looking nearly distraught, and the captain stuck her head out the door, looking at the illusionist. "Good, you're back. Where's your partner?"

"She's getting a wound fixed. Also, this is Aria, she's..well, we'd better explain in private."
The captain nodded. "Come in."

Rayna handed over the sketchbook and went through an explaination of her findings, ending with the tear and explaining that Aria had come out of it. The captain occasionally asked for clarification, and turned to the white-haired girl at this last point. "So where did you come from?"
"Um..I can't exactly remember," said Aria. "I mean, I remember being somewhere with a sword stuck in the ground and pulling it out, and then cutting a hole and jumping through it, but most of before that is a blur."

"You still have this sword? Show it to me."
"Okay." She brought out the sword, still in its sheath, and leaned it against the captain's desk. "I, uh, it wouldn't be a good idea to unsheathe it."

The captain picked up the sword and examined it, and Aria found herself having to push back against an urge to punch the small woman and take it back immediately. After a moment, though, it was handed back, the captain giving a face somehow even more serious than usual.

"This is a demon blade. For a while, dangerously powerful demons were sealed into physical forms like this one and bound to their masters. The problem is that the demon influences whoever owns the blade, and tends to drive the master insane. The loophole for keeping the problem truly at bay was to kill the masters and seal them in a way that made it very difficult for anyone to claim it, so that it had no master to influence. Do you remember why you took this out?"

Aria put the sword back in her 'inventory' once it was in her hands. "Not really? I'm sure I knew it was powerful, and wanted it for something, but I can't remember what."

"It may be an effect of the wards on the blade. If you went to all the trouble of finding it you would've known it had them, and been willing to pay the price. What does the blade want?"

"Blood." And then, realizing how sudden and blunt the answer had been: "Err, I mean it seems like it does.."

The captain nodded. "The blade answered before you could even think about it. That's..not the worst appetite you could have ended up with. If you intend to work here and feed it the blood of monsters, I have no objections. But if I even think you're sating its hunger with innocent people, I will kill you."

Aria blinked a couple of times, and nodded. "Yeah. Okay. I'll keep that in mind."

Rayna decided to try and change the subject. "So, uh, if you don't mind me asking, and since we're both sworn to secrecy on it anyway, do you know what the stuff I looked at is, exactly?"
"Demon summoning ritual," said the captain. "Tears a hole for one to come through, then closes it right away. The space will heal with time, but it was very fresh to be weak enough for her sword to cut through it."

"Demon? Like what's in my sword?"
"Same category of beast, but much weaker. If something like what's in your sword came through we would know about it."
"You think someone's trying to make a demon army and attack the town or something?" asked Rayna.

She shook her head. "It's a much more difficult ritual to seal it after just one comes through. This is classic witch or warlock work. To the end of becoming an archdemon—which, despite the name, are not necessarily hostile—a witch or a warlock summons, kills, and eats demons to take their power. One at a time is usually the way, since being stronger attracts stronger demons and it's much easier to kill just one at a time."
"So, is this a danger to the town or not?" said Aria.

"I don't know yet. I need to talk with some people first.

"At any rate, your job is done. I'll make sure your compensation is taken care of."

Shooting Star

Wolfbite

Happy Halloween!

Have a werewolf caption.

Fox's Beach

I don't know why so many foxes lately. I have like 3 or 4 more fox images with captions in the works for them, too. If you don't like the foxes I'm sorry, I can't help it.

Winds of Change

In addition to posting this caption up, I'd like to call everyone's attention to the "Writing Status" up in the top-right area of this blog. I've changed what information it gives from "vague idea of my current ability to write" to "information on how far along various projects are in hopes of giving some clue as to how long until a new thing is posted".

Included is a note on how many of The Witch's Friend pages already posted up actually need more suggestions before I can continue; if you want to help with that issue, look for pages with just 1 or 2 comments on them.

Midas Journal 16

 First / Previous / Next / Latest

---

Entry: May 1

Yesterday night, after suppertime, Lue called me. She opened with, “Kael! Uuh, we have a problem. Or, I have a problem but you're involved. Or..”

“What is it?” I said.

“Weeelll, you know how I introduced you—or Kayla—to someone, uh, about a week ago?”

“Yes. Brian. We had a talk about that.”

“And! In light of that talk I'm willing to call this situation my problem. But as a friend I'd like to ask for your help even though it totally isn't your problem, and it's definitely, completely not your fault.”

“What. Is the problem.”

“Uh. So uh. The problem is, Brian's been getting kinda, well, he asked me if I had seen you since last Friday. Seen Kayla, I mean. I may remind you that I have a lot more experience of the world than I look or sound like I do, and judging by his behavior I think he likes you. Likes Kayla, that is.”

I didn't say anything for a few seconds, and she added. “Umm, yeah, I know, this is bad. In keeping with my promise of not playing matchmaker I haven't given him a straight answer, which I find harder to do than you'd believe.”

“So, what do you want me to do about it?”

“Well, I generally believe the truth is the best option for an awkward situation. But if I told him that you're a recently-awakened reality warper who can change between being a boy and girl nearly at will, and are therefore not interested in any relationship at all right now he'll probably think I'm deflecting his questions by saying crazy things. I do that sometimes, it wouldn't be an unfair assumption.”
“So you want me to..”
“I could point you in the direction of his house, arrange it as a meeting between you two, and you could show him what the deal is so he'll believe it. Anyway, hearing you're not romantically interested in general from someone else's mouth is a lot less effective than hearing it from yours. Or—”

“Or from Kayla's, yes. You can stop doing that please.”

“Sorry. But you see what I mean? I know, I'm asking you to fix my mess and all. If you don't want to it's fine, I can just say Kayla moved or something? He might not buy it but a straight lie like that would send a message anyway.”
“No, it's..”

I sighed, I thought for a minute about how being around him as Kayla had made me feel. I thought about what Threa had suggested. I thought about how Lue was my friend, like it or not. It felt like about five minutes' worth of thinking but it must have been only a few seconds because it wasn't interrupted by the other end of the line. Finally I said, “It's fine. I'll talk to him. Soon as possible. When is that?”

“Hmm, I'll have to check with him but probably tomorrow. I'll text you the details after I get in touch with him. And, um, Kael.”

“Uh-huh?”

“Thanks. I don't know if you understand how bad lying and dodging around questions like I have been makes me feel. And I'm glad you trust me enough to not accuse me of playing matchmaker again.”

“Well, if you were, it would blow open as soon as I talked with Brian again anyway.”
“Heh, yeah, there's that.”

The next person to call me was Adena. She said, “Hey! Kael, guess what!”
“What?”
“Uugh, you're supposed to actually guess something when someone says that. Whatever, anyway, I figured out some more cool stuff I can do with my magic and I wanna show you! Like, tomorrow sometime?”
“I'm, uh, not sure when I won't be busy tomorrow. Long, annoying story.”
“That's fine, day after?”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Okay, so meet me at the ice cream place a little after lunchtime maybe?”
“Sure.” So I can bet I'll have to write another entry for whatever insanity happens tomorrow, too.

But anyway, the reason I'm writing this entry is what happened today. This afternoon I went over to the address Lue sent me as Kayla and rang the doorbell. After I waited outside for a minute or so Brian opened up. In the time between I had been careful to focus on what I was going to say in an effort to keep myself from getting nervous, but I did feel nervous once he showed up, thanks largely to the same sort of feelings as before. This meant it hadn't been a fluke, which was, well, bad, I thought.

“Hey,” he said, “uh, Lue said you wanted to talk to me about something?” Well that was good, he seemed nervous too. For possibly reasons that might make him more upset about what I had to say, which was bad. After however long it took me to ping-pong that through my head he said, “Err, I mean, not out here of course. Come on in.”

He led the way into his living room, which was thankfully empty, and offered me a seat on a couch before taking one across from it. “Soo, uh, what's up?”

I had been thinking about how to introduce the topic since deciding to meet with him about it, and I was still pretty sure a good way to do that didn't exist, and if it did I probably didn't have it, but I had decided on what to do anyway, no matter how bad an idea it turned out to be, because stalling an hour while there trying to come up with a better way was worse than anything else, I figured. “I, uh, need to show you something, and then I need to explain all about it. It'll really be easier if you don't interrupt me, okay?” I said.

“Okay, sure,” he said, nodding.

“Good.” I decided to poke my own shoulder with the opposite hand even though I was using the 'built-in' turn-into-Kael power because I figured it was very important he know that my power usually was involved touching from the get-go. Once I had turned completely back into myself (with Brian looking surprised and confused, but keeping my 'don't interrupt' rule very well), I took a deep breath, and then poked my other shoulder with the opposite hand and shifted back into Kayla, wearing slightly different clothes because I hadn't concentrated on that detail at all.

“I was born as the guy you saw me turn into,” I said first, “named Kael. The morning after my eighteenth birthday, about two months ago, I suddenly became able to change people by touching them. S-specifically, turn guys into girls? With some kind of strange wish-fulfillment angle to it that I'm still not sure I completely understand. At points after that I figured out how to use my power on myself, I unwillingly or accidentally changed five or six different people. Err, I met Lue that way too.” (She had given me permission to mention that, I'd asked her.) “The way my powers work is kind of ridiculous, it doesn't just change a person's body, it moves reality around so that most people think they've always been that way, and even people who know they weren't can remember both what it was like when they weren't and a 'new' version of things where they were.”

There were a few seconds of silence before I realized he wasn't sure whether or not talking at this point would be interrupting. “So, uh, there's a lot more details than that but if you ask me what you want to know I'll know which ones are actually important,” I said a little awkwardly.

“Lue and I have been friends for at least a couple of years,” he said, “are you saying some..most of that, is...fake?”
“Not really? I don't understand how my powers work, but your memory of things is probably more real now than a version where she wasn't around.”

“So, you're not usually, uh, you don't usually look how you do now.”
“I, um, usually like to stay as my original self, yeah. I turn into Kayla to...well, for a bunch of reasons, but it still feels weird and I have a hard time thinking of it as really me most of the time...”

He looked up at a corner of the ceiling for a few seconds. “Err..this is kind of awkward then. I, uh, I guess Lue told you as much, but I might sort of like you.”

“...I..hope you can understand how weird that is for me.”
“Sorta?”
“But,” I could feel some heat on my cheeks as I tried to spit this out, “since we first met I think I might, sort of like you too? I'm, just not sure what to do with that because I definitely don't want to stay as a girl for, I mean I don't know how to deal with the idea of dating a guy, and I don't know how to make sense of, uh..” I trailed off, not sure what I was even trying to say at this point.

“..And you said your power could change anyone? Like, you could turn me into a girl if you wanted to?”

“Well..I-I could, but I mean I don't want to do that to anyone who doesn't want me to, and I'm not totally sure my power doesn't mess around with people's minds, which I am really not okay with and trying to figure out how to be sure about...”
“But, what if...” He stopped, and looked like he was thinking.

“What if what?”
“Well, uh, my first idea was that maybe you could turn me into a girl and I could try dating you as a guy? I mean, you being the guy. If we still think we like each other after you did that. Y-you could turn me back if you wanted to too, right?”
“I..think so. My power has a weird bias, but at the least I think I've figured out how to give someone a power to shift back and forth like I just did without my help.”

“But then when you started talking about messing with people's minds..it sounds like you'd need someone to help you make sense of that, right? If you turned me into a girl and then put everything back the way it was maybe I could tell you if it seemed like you messed anything up with my head.”

I briefly wondered if he had somehow talked to Threa before I got there.

“Uh..are you sure you'd be okay with all that?”
“I mean, your powers sound pretty powerful, but they didn't make Lue your love-slave or anything, so I know they wouldn't do that to me, either. And what you could do is just make me turn back to normal whether I want to or not, you know, if I got messed up so that I didn't want to change back. Maybe after giving it a week? And if I agree to that now then you know I'm definitely okay with it.”

“I don't...get it, why do you want to do all of this stuff for me?”
“Well, I mean, it's not totally for you. I'm a little curious what it's like on the other side of the fence, and uh, this is gonna sound a little weird I think but..I don't think I've ever wanted to go on a date with someone so badly in my life.”

“Y-you want to go on a date with me?”
“Yes. I mean, probably. I definitely feel that way right now. And, w-we could sort out the details after I'm a girl and you're a guy, if I still feel that way. Right?”
“S-sure.”

He stood up. “Okay, so, I'm ready to try it if you are.”
“Y-yeah,” I said, also standing up and turning myself back into Kael first.

“Er, how does this work exactly?” he said as I walked over in front of him.

“For whatever reason, my power works by touching whoever I want to change...or, really more often it works when I accidentally touch someone I didn't really want to change, and keeps working whether I want it to or not.”
“That's what you meant by accidents, huh?”
“Yeah,” I said, now standing in front of him. I could 'feel' that he was definitely going to change if I touched him. “Are you ready?”

He nodded, and I reached out my hand and gently poked his forehead. I tried to tell my power to only do what he wanted it to do, and not anything else.

Brian closed his eyes for some reason. From the point where I'd touched him, his skin started to shift, getting a little paler and visibly smoother. The stubble on his face shrank away, and he shuddered slightly after the change in his skin spread down past his neck, probably because the rest of his skin was changing the same way. He was barefoot, and after a second or two I could see it spread down through his feet.

As soon as that was over, Brian started shrinking. He had been a little taller than me (Kael) and as soon as I noticed he was shrinking he was already right at my height. The shrinking was more than height, with his clothes looking baggier on him by the second, and he quickly reached down as his jeans slipped off of his legs to grab his boxers before they did the same. His face and hands and feet all looked smaller, and his shoulders were visibly narrower; his exposed legs looked slimmer and, as I'd guessed, their hair was all gone, too.

Next, Brian's hair started to grow out. Its color looked like it was fading, like a picture left out in the sun too long, and it grew relatively slowly (compared to how mine tends to grow, at least). He made a small “Mmh” sound in a voice higher than usual, and then muttered “I feel..warm..” in a voice still rising in pitch. Then his ears grew out into wolf ears again, except that their fur was now completely white (which his hair was fast approaching). And then a tail sprouted from his back. It was big, bushy, and white like his ears, and I noticed it was swishing back and forth slowly.

He finally stopped getting shorter when the top of his head was at the bottom of my neck, and his hair stopped growing just short of his shoulders, now completely bleach-white like the fur on his ears. Next, his clothes started to change: The pants on the floor turned into a small pair of denim shorts, his shirt turned white and grew longer sleeves but otherwise shrank close to his body, and then started to split apart at the center, growing buttons and button holes but only leaving one button attached by the time it was done. He didn't have any curves yet, and just looked like a scrawny guy, but his underwear quickly shrank into a tiny pair of black panties anyway, and I made a point of not looking there even though his eyes were still closed.

With his shirt split apart like it was, I could see that despite being small and scrawny-looking Brian still had a six-pack...and then, about as soon as I'd noticed that, he didn't. His stomach seemed to turn softer and smoother, and then, with his shirt clinging close the whole time, his waist shrank inward and his hips pushed out and back. “A-aah, w-wow,” he said, his voice already sounding like a young boy trying to imitate an older guy. His cheeks were turning more and more red as his body shape changed, and then his mouth opened again with a surprised “Aaah!” in a high-pitched girl-voice. I risked a look downward and saw that the panties had pulled completely flat between Brian's legs: He had just become her.

Then, with another, shorter “Aah!” in the same voice her chest pushed out into breasts. They were small at first, but kept growing, cheered on by a small “Mmmm” from deep in her throat. I started to remember that her name was Brie, and all of a sudden I started feeling nervous. As her breasts filled out into what must be a C cup at least, I started getting the same kind of racing-heart jitters I had had when I first met Brian, as Kayla.

When the changes stopped completely, Bria opened her eyes one at a time, and I saw that they were now red. “Wow,” she said, “you didn't warn me it would feel this good.”

“Uh, e-everyone says it feels good but it never does for me, it just feels kinda weird and awkward,” I said, not sure why I was even talking at all.

She looked up at me for a few seconds, her tail still wagging and traces of the blush still on her cheeks. “Uh..what?”
Without any warning, Brie pounced up at me and threw her arms around my shoulders, and planted her lips directly on top of mine. I was too surprised to react for a second or two, and once my brain started to come back from its blue screen of death my first instinct was to put my arms around her and return the kiss for a few more seconds before finally coming slightly more to my senses and pulling my head away. I couldn't make myself let go of her, though.

“Arf!” (she actually made kind of a high-pitched bark) “Well, I definitely still wanna go on a date with you,” she said, grinning. Then she blushed slightly and said a little more nervously, “Th-that was my first kiss, by the way..”

“Um..” I knew I was blushing, too. It had just hit me all at once: She was so cute, and hot, and beautiful all at once. The feeling of her breasts up against my chest, and her arms around me, and her face so close to mine, was unlike anything I'd ever felt before, as a guy or a girl. “I-I uh, second for me. B-but my first one was kind of stolen, and short, and not—uh, I mean, that was..on a whole different level.”

“I'd never know,” said Brie, “You're a really good kisser, Kael.”

I thought about bringing up the subject of maybe putting her down for a good several quiet seconds and then said, “U-uh,” which she responded to by pulling her face up to mine and taking another kiss, slightly longer than the first one. Then, as if she'd sensed my thoughts, she let go of me and easily hopped back down to her feet, leaving me dazed for several more seconds.

“Um..are your, uh, parents around? You're a little indecent, I mean, uh, it's a good look for you but this may be hard to explain,” I said.

“Oh, they're out for another hour or so, Kael,” she said, grinning mischievously. “But I know, with all the stuff you're dealing with we should take it slow..” she stepped back a bit.

“Um..any idea why your ears and tail grew out like that?” I asked, a little desperate for something to talk about.

“Oh, uh, for some reason I have a lot more moonlight.” She must have seen that I didn't understand that, because she added, “Werewolves use moonlight as power to change forms, you know, and we change completely on the full moon whether we want to or not because we always absorb too much moonlight and have to burn it off. Some people—like me now, I guess—have bodies really good at absorbing the stuff, and have to keep some wolfy looks all the time to keep from randomly going full werewolf at inconvenient times. Why, do you not like it?”

“Oh, no, I uh..well I've never been in a position to think about it this way before but I think I like them. They're, kinda cute,” I said, my cheeks getting hotter again.

“Heehee. So, uh, how's Monday night?”

“How's—oh, the date. Yeah. Monday's, Monday night is fine. Like, for supper?”

“Mhm,” she said, nodding. “You can pick the place, as long as it has meat. And not stupid expensive fancy junk, either.”
“N-no, I don't think I could afford that anyway.”
“Casual dress.”
“Sure.”

So now I guess I'm going on a date Monday night, too. The first date I've been on with anyone. I don't feel all that nervous about it, honestly, but that probably just means that whatever controls panic in my brain is way too far behind to have even noticed it yet.

And then on the way home Lue called me. “Kael! Hey. Did you, uh..turn Brian into a girl?”

“Yyyyes. But it was, well he wanted me to because after I explained all the stuff—”
“That's fine, that's fine. I was just trying to figure out why I remembered two different versions of...well, everything about her all of a sudden. Ju~st like the way I remember two versions of events in my own history.”

“Yeah, that's..usually what happens when I, uh, change someone. But it's usually just me and the person who got changed that remember the two versions...”

“Maybe it's because I knew Brian so well?”
“No, that can't be it. Ad—er, at least..two other people I've changed only remember the original versions of each other, and had to tell each other about having been changed at all. It—ohh.”
“What?”
“I told my power to change Brian exactly how he wanted to be, or tried to at least. Maybe he wanted you to remember both versions so you wouldn't be confused, or so he wouldn't be confused.”

“Why would that be confusing?”
“We promised each other I'd turn..her, back after a week. She's helping me find out if my power actually screws up people's minds or not. Hopefully.”

“It didn't screw up my mind. Well, not too much anyway, just enough for everything to feel natural, you know.”

“That's the thing, I—I can't be sure if when people are convinced their own minds haven't been changed that that isn't just part of what was changed, you know? So, something like an actual test is, should be good. For that.”

“If you say so. But if you find out it does mess up one's identity the way you're worried about, can you handle wrecking people's consciousnesses again to fix it?”
“Uh..what do you mean? I, I'd just put back whatever I broke, right?”
“But to the person I am now—for example—that'd be just breaking what was still in working order.”

It seems like it's always Lue making everything more complicated to figure out. Why? But I didn't say that, I just stopped, leaned back slightly and made a sound like “Uugh” into the receiever.

“...Well, at least I could make my power not break things whenever it acts again. I'd know what to tell it not to do, I mean. It's really better if it isn't doing what I'm worried about in the first place and I can just know for sure.”

“Of course it is, that'd be the easiest thing. But you really should decide what your moral imperative actually is in the hard case before you find out. So you don't go around harmfully altering folk's minds on a crazy impulse.”

“Yeah, again. If I basically have already.”

And I just can't wait to see what Adena's deal is tomorrow. I think the best I can hope for is it not making more problems for me to deal with.

The "Best" RPG Ever-16

 First / Previous / Next / Latest

---

On the way down the long, dark corridor, Mika paused and looked around as if she'd lost something.

"What's wrong?" asked Nora.

"Oh, I was just wondering where our fluffy wolf friend went."

"I gave him the day off," said Zack.

"When did this happen?"

"He said he was hungry," said Katherine, "and we offered to buy him a steak or something and he acted insulted. So Zack said he could go hunt for food today, as long as he came back without it by tomorrow morning."

"I was very specific about that," added Zack, "I don't want to wake up tomorrow morning to the smell of a dead deer or something."

The hall finally opened up to a large theater, ruined in the same manner as the castle's antechamber, with an elevated stage up front. Standing in front of the curtains, there was...something.

Zack and Katherine entered at the same time, and both paused, half-jumping back.

"What?" said the cat-girl "That's--"

"me?" said Zack, stealing her line.

"No, it's..." The psion near-automatically took a peek at the knight's sensory input, and trailed off. They were each seeing it as themselves: "Zack" was in a wedding gown and very uncharacteristically giggling; "Katherine" was in some rags, knelt over and crying.

"Eeyaah!" Before she could say anything else, the others came in, and Nora stumbled backwards onto her butt on seeing it, while Mika just looked confused.

"What do you see?" said Katherine.
"G-giant s-s-spider," said the weaver, terrified.

"Some kind of..angel thing?"

The cat-girl crossed her arms and glared. "What is this, a boggart?"

"Well, it's not attacking us or anything," said Mika, holding out a hand to help the elf up. Zack growled, a low, deep animalistic rumbling.

"Then we probably shouldn't..Zack?" said Katherine. He raised his sword and started to charge forward at it. "Hey, wait, it's not--!"

---

Before Lynn's eyes, a vertical rip in space over the ash pile suddenly became quite visible. "Look out!" she said, at the same time as someone with a very large sword jumped through, landing with a deep chop through the air, and at the same time as Rayna said "Yipe!" and instinctively hopped aside.

The person—a white-haired woman, apparently human, taller than both of them—stood back up and looked between them with a bright-bordering-on-disturbing grin. Rayna turned fully around to face her, uneasily holding one of her fans.

There was a second or two of awkward silence. "Um...hello?" said the illusionist.

The stranger's grin widened a bit more, beyond what seemed like it should have been possible, as she readied her weapon, moving it as easily as if it was a knife, and then she said "Blooood," the act of which opened her mouth to show a row of absurdly long, sharp teeth.

The fox-girl's eyes visibly widened at this, and she gave a small sidelong glance of are you seeing this? to the archer.

She charged forward and slashed straight through Rayna—well, through an illusion, the real one ducking aside with an "Aah!" as soon as the woman had begun to move. She turned her run around, not missing a beat, and started running toward Lynn.

The archer drew and threw an arrow at her as a distraction, which she deflected—not that Lynn noticed as she had already about-faced and started running away. "Why are you attacking us?!" she yelled, partially in an effort to figure out how much distance there was, whether or not the stranger was closing.

"Mister sword is starving!" said the stranger, who was in fact very close, just before making another wild downward swing and forcing Lynn to quickly roll aside. She sprang back up, prepared to take a hit for the loss of time, but saw the swordwoman running in the opposite direction, toward another illusory Rayna. "You have so much blood, I just need a little bit!"

The real fox-girl appeared next to Lynn and gave a small finger-to-lips 'shh' expression while the woman sliced straight through the illusion and another one appeared a bit farther ahead of her.

The illusion said, "How much is a 'little bit'?"

She stopped in front of the illusion, holding the blade one-handed so she could gesticulate. "Okay, so I lied, I need like a lot of blood, like maybe a severed arm's worth or oh! brains are full of the stuff, right?" She turned around and started running at the real people again, and they scattered.

"Sorry, we kind of need that to live!" The archer half-looked over her shoulder to see that she was indeed the current target, and then just kept running forward, pushing herself as hard as she could. Maybe Rayna would think of something--

SLAM

Lynn was blind-sided by something very large, flat, and bumpy smashing against her right side with a cracking sound the human body shouldn't make, and went flying into the air, hitting the ground a couple of yards away, rolling to a crouched stop. She tried to get back up but barely managed to turn her head upward between gasping from air after the sprint. The thing that had hit her was a very long, thick, rough wooden club, which was in the hand of a gigantic, fat, miscolored muscular thing.

The stranger caught up with where she had just been (in front of the brute), it swung its club down at her and she met it with her sword. "Heey! That's such a lame weapon. Bruises don't bleed right at all!" After ducking aside, she stabbed it in the the leg, and it staggered backwards a couple of steps.

"Hey, are you okay?" Lynn turned to her right, where the fox-girl was.

"Hh...I uh," she tried to get up and her entire right side protested. "OW I don't think so."

Rayna turned toward the stranger with an angry look, but paused on noticing the brute actually responsible for the injury. "Is..is that an ogre?"
"Yeah, probably."

The swordswoman, meanwhile, was busy killing it. It was strong and durable, and had a big club, but she was apparently a match for it in strength and far faster, anticipating its movements long before they made any impact. Whenever her sword cut or stabbed through its flesh, it came back out with an unnatural flow of blood swirling into it in defiance of gravity or really any comprehensible physics at all. The sword wasn't stained at all by the blood, it seemed to just disappear on touching the blade. She was also laughing like a maniac.

"That's uh..we should probably get out of here."
"I agree but I think my broken rib would rather stay here." Lynn tried to stand up again, more carefully. "Nngh..ow, ow...aah!" Most of the way up, she twisted wrong and lost her balance, but Rayna caught her and helped her the rest of the way. "Look, if she's still berserk and blood-crazy after killing that thing and remembers we exist you're gonna have to make a break for it."

"Don't worry, we're invisible right now."
"I'm pretty sure that doesn't matter."

"Well, I'm not just gonna leave you to die."

"Better me than both of us."

"Whatever, just go for now."

"I was hoping you wouldn't say that." Lynn allowed herself to be led on a slow turn-around, and then start moving away from the noise of the fight.

---

The knight's blade went straight through the image of himself in a wedding dress, and it disappeared. He turned around, ready to block an attack, but heard its voice (which sounded like his) again, coming from the other side of the room. Giggling.
"It's true, it's true. I'm gonna marry a prince and live happily ever after!"

"Shut UP!"

"What? I-it's not what?" said Nora.

"It's not physically there. If he used his senses for half a second he would—hey!" Katherine jumped out of the way of Zack's lunging stab. "I know you don't like me but—HEY!" The second shout (in response to a follow-up chop, which she barely managed to duck under) was accompanied with a psionic shout in his mind, and the knight staggered backwards a couple of steps, eyes closed. When he opened them again he shook his head slightly and blinked at the cat-girl a couple of times. "What?"

"Stop attacking me!"

"I wasn't—oh. Oh." He sheathed his sword and put a hand on his forehead for a few seconds, and had a look of concern when it was removed. "I'm so sorry..a-are you okay?"
"I'm fine, you broadcast your moves like a mile off anyway."

He looked around a bit. "Where did the—it go?"
"No telling, it disappeared when you slashed at it."
"I thought it was—"
"Where I was, yeah. Whatever we're dealing with is using some kind of mental illusion or something, which is especially concerning since my powers should block that sort of thing for me and didn't."

"So wait, how are you so sure it wasn't there?" said Mika.

"I couldn't smell it. There wasn't any scent at all coming from where it looked like it was, and considering Zack is part wolf that should have been even more obvious to him."

"Look, I'm really sorry, okay? I didn't mean to—"

"Then just listen when someone's tryin' to tell you something next time. Sheesh."

"...Hmm." Nora had walked over next to the stage, with her eyes closed.

"What is it?" said the witch, coming closer.
"The unnatural..whatever it is..probably what we're dealing with. It was on the stage at some point very recently." She opened her eyes, looking slightly frustrated. "I'd know whether it was there when we entered if I'd been paying attention earlier, it's just—I've always been r-really afraid of spiders, it caught me off guard."

"Well, can you see where it went from there? Like, a stronger signal coming from some particular direction?"
"Uh..." Nora closed her eyes, turned her head around a bit, sniffed the air. "It's..the trail's a little stronger that way," she said, pointing toward a partially-blocked passage deeper into the castle.
"Then I guess we'll have to go that way," said Zack. "We still don't know enough about whatever this is to report about yet."

---

The blood feeling, the feeling she got whenever the blade made contact with her gigantic opponent and found more delicious hot red fluid to drink, was exhilirating beyond description. It was more than an emotional shift; she felt stronger and more capable somehow, and the world seemed to slow down around her, making the big oaf's clumsy moves even easier to dodge and counter than ever before.

Her sense of blood seemed stronger than ever, too, she could feel the two small ones leaving and tell just how much more this big one would take before it died and how long its blood would stay fresh after that. And while she thought fleetingly of not killing it, letting it heal and regain its blood to be drunk another day, there was a kind of irresistible momentum that kept her striking at it. Like a bunch of sharks, the blade had started a feeding frenzy and wouldn't—couldn't stop until it was all gone. So when the thing dropped its club and fell to its knees, dizzy from sheer blood loss, she couldn't help but stab it straight in the heart (she hadn't known where its heart was before, but it was clearly the biggest chunk of blood available), ending its life at once and feeding the blade another torrent of its blood in the process.

When it seemed empty, fully drained, she pulled the sword back. It was..satiated. Its hunger was unending, its need unlimited, but it felt considerably dulled by the recent feast. It could eat another bite, but it didn't so badly want to at the moment. So without really thinking about it—or knowing that she could beforehand—she had the sword sheathe itself. It seemed to simply grow a big black sheath around its blade at a whim.

So sheathed, the sword's hunger seemed much farther away. It was obvious its appetite had mostly taken over her thoughts since drawing it, and now the cloud was lifted. She shook her head to clear it, her hair waving around a bit, and let go of the hilt, as it seemed much heavier all of a sudden. The weapon seemingly disappeared then, but of course it was still there, she could reach out and take it at any time. She then realized she was panting fairly heavily, and took a few seconds to regain her breath before turning around. Nobody there.

That's weird, she thought, as the pair of women she'd met at first were definitely there a second ago, and not moving anywhere near fast enough to be out of sight in this terrain. Oh, right, they'd been invisible or whatever before.

"Hey!" she shouted, waving in the general direction she thought they were. "Uhm, I've stopped being crazy now! Sorry about uh.."

"Coming at us with a sword?" said a voice rather close to her right ear.
"Yeah, that," she said, turning toward the sound of her voice, and grinning and putting a hand behind her head awkwardly. It was the fox-girl. And then her reflexes caught up to the fact that a person had unexpectedly appeared that close and she stumbled backwards. "Aah!" Not feeling especially balanced at the moment, she tumbled over onto her back and flailed for a second or two before sitting up.

"How did you—?"
"It's just a projeciton, I'm not actually here."
"Oh, well that makes sense...I guess? I didn't really mean to threaten you two earlier, that was mostly the sword talking."
"Uh-huh, and where's your murderously insane sword now?"
"Um..I'm not sure how to describe it other than 'sheathed' and 'away'. The main point is I'm not going to chase you around with it anytime soon."

"And why should I believe you about that?"
"Well..I'm not doing it right now am I? I mean, I don't think the state of mind I was just in is capable of holding a conversation this long without at least trying to hit someone with the sword."

"Hmm..what do you think?" said the real Rayna, who had carefully turned Lynn around to see the conversation.

"Sounds truthful to me, but you're the charisma expert. Anyway, did you notice how clumsy she is now? The sword probably buffs her stats or something."

"Well, who are you anyway?"
"Me? Um, well, my name is ah.." She paused a moment, beginning to actually process for the first time that she was, in fact, completely female. "..Aria?" After a second of thought she nodded. "Yes, pretty sure, Aria."
"Well, I'm Rayna. You weren't sure before?" said the fox-girl, one of her ears sideways.
"Well," said Aria, standing up, "drawing that big sword from the stone messed with my head a bit. I'm having some trouble remembering what I was doing before that."

"Well, do you know where you drew the sword from? You jumped out of some kind of rip in space over..that way," said Rayna's illusion, pointing vaguely toward the summoning circle site.

"Uh.."

"It wouldn't happen to be a blank white room asking you to pick a class, would it?" said Lynn, ignoring Rayna's shusing.

"Err..y-yes? How did you know that?" said Aria, looking in the direction of the latest voice despite not seeing anyone there.

"Ray, I th—"

"Raynaaaa."

The archer glared at her companion, both now visible. "Rayna, I think we have another player here."

"Oh, so you're, uh, you're from Earth too?" said Aria.
"Yep," said Rayna, "originally at least. We both looked really different before coming here, though. Like, really different."
The tall woman cocked her head sideways slightly. "Different enough to have been boys before?"
"Yes, about that different," said Lynn. "You too?"
"Yep!"
The archer looked at the illusionist for a second or two, and then both nodded. "Then I guess you can join our party if you want. You're the first other player we've run into since starting the game together."

"Cool!"

"Just promise you won't attack us again," said Rayna, glaring.
"Well, yeah, I mean that'd be stupid. Unless there's some kind of exploit where everyone gains a bunch of money from it or something.."
The archer said, "Not that we know of—"
"—and you're not allowed to test it on either of us," added the fox-girl.

"Fair enough," said Aria, shrugging.

She walked up a bit closer to them. "So uh, you know where a town is around here?"
"Yeah, but it's gonna be slow going getting there. That ogre broke my entire right side," said Lynn.

"Which is mostly your fault," added Rayna, "so I'd appreciate it if you help out here."
"No problem," said Aria with another grin, and took Lynn's shoulder from her. "Unfh." She grunted from the effort of helping Lynn move.

"Hey, what gives? You were carrying that huge sword around before!" Rayna 'looked' at her to get her stats. "Actually...all of your stats look..well, below average at best."
"Stat buffs," said Lynn again. "You lose them when you're not in berserk mode, right?"
"A-apparently," said Aria. "I'll still help out, though! But how do you look at someone else's stats?"

"Illusionist thing. Not sure I can teach you..."
"Well, I'm willing to try and learn anyway!"

"Later."

Small Power

(Follows Great Power)

Arctic

The "Best" RPG Ever-15

 First / Previous / Next / Latest

---

"Hmm..." Rayna stared at the map for a good minute or so once the two girls got out of the restaurant they had had lunch in.

"What? Did you forget how to read maps all of a sudden?"
The fox-girl looked up in the sky for a few seconds rather than responded, and then said, "Hey, do you mind if we buy a compass?"
"..No, that seems like a perfectly reasonable purchase. Probably cheap, too." So they went to the nearest general store and bought a compass.

Back out on the street, Rayna glared at the compass for a few seconds and then glared up at the afternoon sun—not directly, but enough to see its location. "That don't make any sense, let me tell ya," she said.

"What? What doesn't make any sense?"
"Look, based on the way this compass is pointing and my internal weird sense of this world's information, the sun is in the..southwest. Straight southwest, not west and a little bit south. That doesn't make any sense."
"..Yeah, that doesn't make sense, I mean, if this world is supposed to be a planetary body. It would have to..we'd be..actually, what even would that mean?"

The fox-girl scratched her head and shrugged. "I dunno, but probably something bad. Maybe what they call 'north' isn't what we call north, like, it isn't actually aligned with the, uh, axis of rotation?"

Lynn crossed her arms, frowning. "Yeah, but...isn't magnetic north supposed to be based on the way the spin goes or something?"
"Aha!" Rayna snapped a finger, "That's gotta be it." To her friend's inquisitive look she explained, "North on a compass is based on which way a magnet points. This is a world with magic, including maybe electricity magic. What if, in the direction this compass says is north, there's something that magic is making really powerfully magnetic, so much that it overrides the usual planet's magnetic field?"

"That would make sense..I guess? But doesn't that do something to the, uh, atmosphere...?"

The illusionist put up her arms in surrender. "Well, that's the best I can come up with. Otherwise, I guess it's only a game after all and we should really just relax."

"Sure, let's go with that. Now, since you know which way is north maybe I should take the compass and you can lead us to wherever it is we're supposed to be looking around?"
Rayna nodded, "Yep."

---

Eventually, Zack's party found themselves standing before an open gate to an ancient castle. "So uh," said Katherine, "before we go in, do you sense anything from out here?"

"Hm..." Nora looked around and sniffed at the air a bit. "Th-there's something, but I can't..identify it with an element. It feels dark and unnatural...m-maybe it is a demon?"
Mika shook her head, "Nah, that's no demon."

"H-how are you so sure?"
"It's not..tasty."
"Tasty?" said Zack.

"Uhm...when I was around that fire demon there was a lot of stuff going on but at some level I got this sense of appetite, like what happens when someone's cooking a turkey dinner in the kitchen next door, you know? I don't have anything like that with this; actually I think I'm losing my appetite a little..like it's something gross I wouldn't even want to eat if I was starving." She frowned and stuck her tongue out a bit.

"Well," said the knight, "either way standing out here won't do us any good. Let's go."

The inside of the place was predictably dark, so the witch summoned her will o' the wisp again. The castle's antechamber had originally been as wide and tall as the gate leading into it, but the floor above had largely collapsed into it, leaving a few side halls and climbing up the rubble as the only options.

Katherine paused, concentrating. "Hey...did you hear that?"
"Hear what?" asked Mika.

"Ssh." Everyone quiet for a few seconds, Zack listened, his ears slowly homing in on what the catgirl was talking about. "...It sounds like a girl..laughing?"
"No, I think she's crying," said Katherine. Nora just looked confused. "It's pretty far, we can probably only hear it because animal ears."

"Well, whatever it is, it's..that way," said Zack, pointing down one of the halls. "I guess that's where we should start looking."

---

"Hmm..." Now at their destination, the archer and illusionist paused, the latter kneeling to get a better look. "This is..ash. And the ground right under it doesn't have any grass, as if this and only this burned up."

"Looks like..a big circle, and a star..a pentagram?" said Lynn.

Rayna stood up and looked around before agreeing. "Yeah, and more symbols in each of the triangles outside. And a bigger pile right in the center. But hey, if this is ash, why hasn't it blown away in the wind by now? It's not physically glued to the ground or anything..."

"Well, I guess we'd better start getting these symbols down.." Lynn produced the sketchbook and a pen and handed it to the other girl, who first drew about what the pentagram looked like and then got to work on the individual symbols.

"Hm..it looks like some of these got messed up. Like someone kicked them around after they were done drawing it."
"Yeah, and the pentagram's broken like that in a few places, too," said Lynn.

Eventually the illusionist stopped just in front of the pile in the center, and looked up, pausing a good several seconds. Her ears folded back and her tail drooped slightly.

"What? What's wrong?"
"I'm not...sure. Something about this area of space," she said, gesturing a straight vertical line about the height of a person above the pile of ash, "seems messed up. Like..I dunno, like something tore here. It's fixed now, but still not holding together as it did before."

"Maybe this is what the captain was talking about with you sensing the flow of magic or whatever."

"Could be," said Rayna, stepping back a bit before writing down some more notes and marking the position of the ash pile on the diagram. She shuddered slightly. "I don't like this..I think it's getting worse."
"Well, let's get out of here, then."

"Y-yeah." Rayna nodded and turned around, taking a few steps toward the other girl.

---

In the middle of the blank white room, a ghostly image of an absurdly large sword seemed to be stuck straight-down half into the ground. Above it, a message box said, "Blood Saber: A risky class for those willing to cut corners on the road to power. The blood saber uses an extremely powerful and versatile but cursed weapon whose thirst for blood compels them to kill whenever it is drawn. While they can learn more self-control while empowered by the blade, a blood saber will always be difficult to deploy in any strategy that requires them to do more than charge forth and strike."

"Ohoh, cut corners you say? Risky you say? Do you know who you're talkin' to?" The redheaded man in the room grinned wide and put his hand on the hilt, finding it more solid than it looked, and the message box instructed him to draw the sword if he was sure.

Pulling with just one hand didn't work, so he grabbed it with the other and pulled on it as hard as he could. For a few seconds the sword didn't budge, but it did start to look more and more solid, more...real. He had to take a few seconds' break when his arms got tired, but then pulled again with renewed purpose, and this time—this time it budged.

It didn't move much, but it somehow felt like it was enough. At first he wasn't sure what it was enough for, but suddenly there seemed to be an awful lot of wind blowing out from the sword, as if it was trying to push him away. As if it could, he thought, still tugging on the hilt as hard as he could, and didn't at first notice that he was starting to get more and more hair to get blown away by the wind.

It seemed as if the wind's force was pulling his hair out longer, and its color seemed to be blown away by the same, fading into a pure white by the time it was long enough for some of it to whip against his shoulders. A pair of black gloves seemed to grow out from the hilt onto his hands, and then it felt like his hands were being squeezed a bit by the gloves as they became a bit smaller, the fingers thinning out slightly.

His face became smaller and rounder, his eyes turning bright green, and the bits of stubble on it seemed to blow away in the wind. He could see and feel his arms slimming down, starting at the wrists, and similarly losing their hair, yet oddly enough they felt stronger the smaller they got. All of a sudden his jeans tore cleanly at the thighs, the top part whipping around as it spread out into a pleated yellow skirt, the belt that he'd been wearing slipping up over his shirt and pulling slightly tighter. Beneath that his boxers lost their leggings and his hips started to push out and back.

The changes spread up to his shoulders and down through his neck, and all at once his shoulders became narrower while his shirt detached from its collar and pulled down his neckline a bit, a red vest appearing over it at the same time. They spread up and down from the hips as the denim leggings cut off from his jeans turned into cloth and pulled tight on legs that were quickly slimming and smoothing to match his arms, and the shirt pulled tight against his waist as it flattened and curved inward, forming a smooth contour with his hips.

By now the sword was more than halfway out, and seemed to be gaining momentum; even though he noticed the changes and even somewhere made quick sense of what was happening, he couldn't bring himself to stop now that he was so close. And so he kept pulling, as his underwear pulled still tighter between his legs and he changed from a man into a woman, followed quickly by a bra appearing under her shirt and then the rapid growth of a pair of breasts to fill it.

Just as the changes finished, she yanked the sword the rest of the way out of the ground and accidentally sliced it up into the message box before bringing it around behind her shoulder easily, the thing seeming to weigh as much as a kitchen knife now. The wind died down and her hair gently flowed down to her hips as she grinned up at the first little bit of chaos wrought: The message box's display was glitching out and flickering as if it had actually been damaged by the sword.

But it didn't have any blood. The man-turned-woman quickly became acutely aware of her sword's mind: It had a rudimentary, animal-like intelligence, and it was starving. The blade's mind felt almost like an extension of her own, and she somehow knew immediately that the only food it could eat was blood. Whose blood didn't matter—just as long as there was blood, and a lot of it, then it would be happy.

There was nothing with blood here but her. She could feed it if she had to, but then it wouldn't have a wielder anymore, and that was no good. As she was thinking this, a small gap in space seemed to open before her, surely a way to go somewhere else. The girl giggled, feeling giddy at the thought of finding something with blood to feed the blade with, and readied her weapon before leaping through.