The "Best" RPG Ever-15

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"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.