The "Best" RPG Ever-19

 First / Previous / Next / Latest

---

"Uh..I think, somewhere around here?" Mika pointed at a spot next to the castle's outer wall.
Thankful for at least this one feature of the body he was stuck in, Zack knelt over in that spot, closed his eyes, and sniffed a few times. He stood up, eyes still closed, and took a few steps, following Nora's scent, which it seemed he'd managed to learn at some point without specifically trying to.

"...Well, she didn't go back to the castle," he said, starting with the good news. "I don't think she left willingly. There's a bunch of other scents. A lot of beer, whiskey, other things on someone's breath."

"So she's been kidnapped," said Katherine.

"Likely."
"Why? She doesn't even look like a rich person or anything," said Mika.

Zack continued following the trail of scents, opening his eyes so he wouldn't trip over something like an idiot. "I did mention the alcohol, right?"

Before long, they came upon a bunch of small holes in the ground. It looked as if someone had taken a small shovel to each individual spot in a very clumsy effort to form a line. "What do you make of it?" said Zack.

"Nora's smart," said the Psion. "We can follow this a lot faster than her scent."

Mika tilted her head slightly, thinking about it for a good long moment. "...Oooh, you think she's picking up the dirt with—hey wait up!" She got on her broom and followed the two animal girls who had decided to start trying to run at breakneck speed again not five minutes after escaping a murderous suit of armor. It looked like it might be up to her to actually fight the...whoever, if they did catch up this way.

---

The sun was setting by the time Aria found her quarry. She spotted a man growing animal ears, and chased him down as quickly as she could without clumsily falling over, which seemed to be a general problem for her 'unenhanced' self. "Hey! Hey, uh guy!"

Thankfully, the correct person responded to her yelling and waving and stopped, turning to fully face her. "...What do you want."

"Uh, you're a uh, shapeshifty person right?"
He replied with an unamused face and started to turn around.

"Wait wait, I'm one too! Look." She gave herself cat ears again.

He turned back toward her, crossing his arms. "Well, what do you want?" His tone wasn't any more pleased than the first time.

"Um, due to some..magic stuff recently, I lost a lot of my memory! Like, I can remember how to talk and walk (mostly) and stuff but I forgot some kinda basic important stuff I probably knew about since birth. Could you, uh, I mean would you mind answering a few questions for me?"
"...Fine. Don't take too long, I got a roast waiting."

"Okay, I'll be quick I promise! Um, first of all, how do you pronounce, what we're actually called? Like, I saw it written down somewhere, but I'm not really sure how you say it..?"
He made a sound that was not entirely comprehensible.

"Er..come again?"

He repeated the same sound. "We're the only ones who can pronounce it. It involves changing your tongue mid-word. So everyone calls us shifters or whatever their favorite synonym is."

"Oh.

"Uhm..so after losing my memories I found out the clothes I'm wearing kinda change shape with me? Is that uh, a power, or just enchanted clothes?"
"It's an enchantment. Very standard, any place that sells clothes can do it if you ask. For a price. Armor's more expensive."

"Okay, cool! Just, one other question I think. Can we, like, do anything that makes us better at anything by shapeshifting?"

"Well, we can sense things better by changing noses or ears. Balance is better with a tail if you're used to it, I'm not so great at that. Not really anything else major. I guess you can reach a top shelf easier by making yourself taller. We can grow wings but we're too heavy to actually fly."

"All right. Thank you!" she said, giving her best winning smile.

The stranger shrugged. "No big deal."

Aria had to credit this game for doing something many a DM had attempted and tried: Made roleplaying feel a little bit worth it, and reward her for doing it. Well, now she needed to go back to the inn...or whatever it was. The others were probably starting to wonder where she'd gone, right?

---

"I r-really, get the impression you haven't thought this through." Nora was being pushed along by one guy's sword while three or four others surrounded her. It was a little hard to count people in the rush of having something sharp up against her neck briefly and now at her back. "I'm not exactly, w-worth anything to anyone rich."

"Nonsense," said one of them, "yer the spittin' image of that elf priestess what went missin' a few months back. Anyway, I can think o' a few other uses for ya if they ain't interested."
"Shut up, Newt," said another.

That didn't sound good. The Weaver thought about letting on the fact that she wasn't exactly helpless, but it might make it harder to leave breadcrumbs without their knowing. "Y-you should know. The people who, d-do care about me are a whole lot be-better at tracking down and killing than th-they are at making money." It would be nice if she could turn off her stutter every once in a while, she thought. It made it hard to say anything intimidating.

"Har!" said a third one, who hadn't spoken before. "I don't buy it." Apparently whoever told 'Newt' to shut up was enough in charge for him to stay shut up.

The sun was well on its way down, and it looked like they were about to enter a forest. Probably they aimed to camp inside for the night, which would be a good time to escape. Hopefully the others were following her by now, and hopefully they didn't get lost in the woods. She didn't have any doubt that Zack and Katherine had made it out of the castle.

---

Rob wasn't totally sure what to make of an annonymous disk promising to be a good RPG. He wasn't even sure what kind of RPG it was! Was it a western or an eastern one, for starters—because there was only one of those he tended to actually like. Well, it raised his hopes a little when the file on the disk was called "Begin.exe". No self-respecting western RPG would give itself a weird and/or generic-sounding title like "Begin", right? So he had done what any other JRPG fan would do in his situation, and started up that unknown game to see if it could be some kind of buried gem...

Of course, he was not so confident about his decision after doing so resulted in him actually standing in a white room and clearly not in his house anymore.

"Helloo? Anybody there? Is this, like, a VR thing or..? Can I quit or what?" He yelled things like that for a minute or so, with only a slight echo for a response, before looking at the message box.

It had a spiderweb of cracks near the middle at the bottom, which was a little odd. But otherwise it seemed perfectly informative, suggesting he pick a class.

"Aw man, this ain't, like, an MMO, is it?" No one herad him whining, of course. To be perfectly honest, Rob was thinking of it like a regular game, pretending he could quit at any time, to keep himself from freaking out. And in the interest of doing that, he started swiping around, looking for a class to pick.

"Man..why are all these cool classes taken? I mean, like, a knight could totally get all the chicks..or an illusionist could, I dunno, look buff as heck all the time? Hmm.."

He flipped through a few more classes, some taken and some not, before stopping at this one:

"Draconian: A rarely-seen, supposedly reclusive race known for their impressive strength and toughness. Said to be the descendants of dragons, each one has a strong affinity for a particular element. This is both a blessing and a curse, granting a breath power and strong magic in that element in exchange for a severe weakness to its opposite."

"Hmm..strength and magic, huh? I wonder why none of whatever other dorks are playing took this one." Draconian was represented by a big wheel with wedges sliced out that seemingly represented various elements, such as a flame for fire, a droplet for water, and a bunch of other things. The instructions were to either pick a wedge or spin the wheel to confirm his choice of class, as well as to select an element.

Rob didn't feel like carefully weighing the advantages and disadvantages of any particular element, so he spun the wheel. It whizzed around and eventually stopped with a green wedge showing a stylized picture of a leaf on it. The selected wedge glowed faintly, and a small, pink rose came out of it as if being gently fed through a door, floating in front of the wheel.

"Are you sure? Yes I'm sure, yeesh." Rob grabbed the flower by its stem and pulled it close for one final confirmation. "Ow!" Its thorns dug into his palm, and he carefully pulled it off with his other hand, examining the cut to see how deep it was. But there was no cut. In fact, the spots where the thorns had been didn't hurt anymore, and had some kind of yellow scales on them.

He watched, blinking a couple of times, as the scales spread along his skin, covering the rest of his palm. He turned around his hand, watching it spread along to the back, up his fingers and down toward the wrist. His fingernails grew into sharp little black claws as the scales closed around his fingertips, and the scales continued to make their way down his arm.

"W-well, I guess, bein' part dragon means having scales?" he said, looking at his other hand to find that it was undergoing the same change now. "Hopefully not on all of me..though..." It was getting harder to concentrate somehow. He was starting to feel a little...hazy. It was a pleasant, floaty feeling; Rob had never done any drugs but he wondered if this was a taste of what some of them felt like.

"Uh..." He had the sense that he was getting a little smaller somehow; what little there was in this room to guage his size by seemed to be moving upward slowly. His arms, now both scaly nearly to the elbows, started to get slimmer, his clawed hands smaller, and he looked around to see his shoulders narrowing, his frame visibly slimming. "Wh...whaat is..?"

Rob's pants felt rather loose, and his shirt was starting to seem a little overlong in addition to being baggy. The scales on each arm stopped right at the forearms, and then there was a tingling sensation starting there and passing up to his face, and around his chest and slowly downward. "Uhh..ahmm.." He shifted his arms up and down a bit uncomfortably. His voice didn't sound exactly right..it was a little on the high side. This felt..kinda good, though? Somewhere in the back of his mind, he had started to suspect what was happening, but the haze made it hard to concentrate or get upset about it.

There was a push from a point on each side of his lower back, and heard parts of his shirt tear as something pushed its way out from each point and stretched, spreading out for the first time. Somehow Rob knew what they were without looking: My wings. They felt distinctly his, as if he'd had them for a long time. And then, in similar fashion, a push from his lower back signaled the beginning of the growth of a tail. It was much slower than the wings, but Rob turned around to see its yellow-scaled tip poking out from under his shirt.

Rob's pants fell off, advertising just how much slimmer he'd become, but his underwear hung on. In fact, it seemed to be holding a little closer to his hips and legs than before. The tingling sensation moved down to his hips and legs, and grew very strong between his legs. "Hmm..nn.." Rob's voice sounded like a young boy trying unsuccessfully to imitate his previous self. He pulled his legs together, trying to make sense of what he was feeling through the haze.

His blonde hair slid down along his cheeks, his bangs growing down along his forehead, and he started to feel a slight push from the top corners of his head. "Mmh..?" He reached a hand up and felt the thing growing there, finding a sharp tip pushing its way upward. The feeling through the scales was a little different from normal; he was aware how sharp it was but the pain that would normally be there from something that sharp poking him was muted almost out of existence.

His underwear pulled uncomfortably close between his legs, highlighting the tingling down there again. "Nnhh..ah..!" Rob's voice was decidedly a girl's now, and he was having a harder time thinking of himself as male somehow. The tingling had stopped everywhere else, and more scales had formed at his thighs and were slowly spreading downward, already at his knees.

His shirt suddenly shrank now, losing its sleeves entirely, part of the collar dipping down the front of his chest while the rest pulled close around his much smaller neck. A bit farther down, it pulled close against a flat stomach with a gentle inward curve toward the middle.

Soon the tingling between his legs subsided, and the underwear, now devoid of leggings and little more than a string on the sides of his hips, pulled close between Rob's legs one last time. But this time it didn't feel uncomfortable at all. "...Mmnh?" Rob became aware of the new feeling between her legs. Her hips gently pushed outward, complimenting the inward curve to her stomach, and she ran a scaly hand down her new curves, finding them very...pleasant. Despite herself, she found herself hoping she'd end up with a nice big pair of breasts to complete this lovely figure.

She looked down, and found that at some point her pants, and her socks and shoes, had disappeared, and now the scales were wrapping their way around her feet. She warpped her tail around a leg to get a better look at it; it was now very long, and very thick toward its top, tapering to a little point at the end. Like the wings, it felt somehow very...natural to her. And then her chest finally started to grow.

"Aahh...." She sighed happily at the feeling of two little bumps forming, pushing the material of what was now a short white dress clinging to her body out with them. She was starting to come out of the haze, but the sense of pleasure that had come with it only seemed to sharpen. In fact, her new equipment downstairs was starting to feel rather nice as her body completed itself.

"Mh..Mnh..W-wow, I.." she muttered incoherently, unable to think straight as the feeling started to overwhelm her. "Oooh..." Rose slowly and carefully sank to her knees, afraid she wouldn't be able to keep herself standing much longer. Her breasts, however, finally finished growing, settling at a nice, big size.

She closed her eyes, taking a couple of deep breaths and trying to calm down. Her hands found the rose she'd pulled out earlier and gently pulled it upward, causing it to grow into a longer, vine-like form, and bloom with a few new flowers and buds. The motion lead her arms to gently press against the sides of her new breasts, which felt nice.

Rose opened her eyes again, giggling in some mixture of relief from and enjoyment of the recent rush of feelings, her mind still not entirely sorted out from them. The main thing she was aware of was how good she felt right now, how strong and powerful and...beautiful she was? Yes, definitely, maybe even especially that.

She looked around, finding herself in a grove full of flowers, surrounded by thick trees. It was night, but this felt and smelled a lot like home. The dragon-girl stood up, and gently cupped one of her hands around her chest, trying to get used to the feeling of having them. "Heehee, wow..and I thought just getting to be with pretty girls would be good...Hnm?"

She closed her eyes, having become aware of something in the forest...her forest? Sure. This place definitely felt like hers. And her powers gave her a sense of what was happening to every plant in a rather wide radius, but most of it felt like regular noise that she could easily tune out. But this thing was not regular noise, it was the distinct stepping-on-and-through things that only a group of people could be doing.

Rose paused. Did she...dislike people? Well, no, not in general. She did dislike it..when they messed up her forest. When they brought...fire, for example. It made her at least a bit suspicious of visitors unless she knew who they were and that they were coming beforehand.

She began to walk in the direction of the people. After all, it would be unreasonable to assume everyone knew at a glance that this was her forest, and downright impolite not to let them know.

---

Commentary:

There were going to be more actual events in this part, but this change came out to be one of the longest in this story and I'm pleased with the way it flows if I put the between-parts split here. I've been thinking about how exactly this one should go for a long while, almost since finding the picture for it. Rose isn't planned to be another regular party member like the first seven. I have to be careful to use the word "planned" because I never really know exactly how a part of any of my stories is going to go until I've finished writing it.

Speaking of commentary, I noticed some of my recent posts don't have many comments? You don't have to, but if you can think of something to say I do appreciate them. Having opinions and thoughts come in the form of comments feels to me like a more real measure of who's reading what I write than a bunch of statistics and numbers.