The "Best" RPG Ever-23

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There had been a few minutes of general silence since the party of three headed out to kill a giant bird, with Rayna taking the lead thanks to being a living compass. Eventually, Lynn (who was in back, as a ranged fighter) said, "Hey. Sooo...Aria."
"Yeah?"
"Look, me and Rayna, we've been friends a long time. Each of us can usually tell if the other is stressed or is just normal, or like whether they're angry or just messing around..that kind of thing."
"Uh-huh?" Aria nodded, not seeing the point yet.

"Well, it's just—and this is totally not your fault, it's just how things are at the moment—we don't know you that well. Neither of us. So..."

"It seems like you're a little more stressed today than you were yesterday," finished the fox-girl in front. "And we don't know whether you're actually acting like your usual self now, maybe because you get some kind of actual contact high from your sword drinking enough blood, or were just kind of going off the excitement from everything that's happened...or if something bad has happened since then."

"Also, whether or not one of us did the bad thing," added Lynn. "Or if it's just the blood hunger getting at you more or sooner than you thought it would."

"Oh." The shifter thought about it for a moment.

"Well...I guess I probably should tell you anyway. The blood hunger is, well it's there, but I can manage it. What's eating at me is, last night when I went to sleep I found out another wonderful side effect of having the cursed sword on me. My dream was...well, I was standing on a tiny cliff. I couldn't go back to whatever land the cliff was supposed to be attached to, and I couldn't exactly see it, either. The cliff dropped to a huge black void, and way off in the distance was a huge demon which I think is actually the one that's sealed in the sword.
"But...the thing is, like, you know how normally you have a dream and it feels like you were there for five, ten minutes when you were asleep all night?"
"Yeah," Rayna nodded.
"I didn't get that.

"I was stuck in that spot, maybe a square yard or so total, for the entire however-many-hours I was asleep. I couldn't will myself awake, either, and I felt terrified at the idea of jumping off the cliff. The entire place smelled like blood, and I could hear what I think was my own blood going through my veins the entire time. And—and I was having trouble differentiating my own thoughts from other ones, which I think were the demon's. If this—" she cut herself off and took a deep breath, calming herself down from the brink of a panic. "If this is what's gonna happen every night I'm scared to death I'm gonna go to bed one night and wake up already totally insane."

"Oh. That's, uh..that's pretty bad," said Lynn.

"Yeah. I feel like I might understand just a little better what it's like to be stuck in solitary confinement. It's like...there was interesting stuff there to look at, like the huge demon in the distance, sure, but after a while it was all just things I'd seen before. I'd memorized everything there was to see before I think even an hour had passed, and I got bored. It's..you don't think of boredom as really being all that bad, but when you're bored and you literally can't do anything for hours, it's awful. Knowing—feeling like I was trapped, and might be there just forever was probably the worst part. I...tried to sort of meditate for a while. I've never done that before, and the demon's thoughts kept interrupting me, but it helped a little."

"Hmm." Rayna thought for a moment. "Do you think it would help more if you actually knew how to meditate right?"
"Maybe? I dunno."
"Well, it seems like it's worth a shot. Since probably there are some some magic classes that can use meditation to their advantage, there's gotta be a few teachers in town. We could look for some once we get back from this hunt."

"Yeah, I kinda like that idea," said Aria. "Anyway, even if it doesn't help I'll get to make one more person's life a little more surreal when I explain why exactly I want to learn."

---

The guard captain's room was not made to house six people, but managed it anyway. The captain herself regarded Rose for a long moment, long enough to make her a bit nervous despite being on the winning side of a severe difference in size. "So..you have a forest to the east," she said.
"Uh, yeah, uh-huh. Like I told them, I didn't even know there was a town here."
"I'm guessing you're a nature draconian, then? You collect plants rather than gold or jewels?"
"Well, I guess that's right," she said, blinking a couple of times. "I brought some gifts to show I'm friendly!" Having retrieved the leaf basket from Nora, she held it out at the captain.

"That's very kind of you, besides helping these four out. But I wouldn't really know what to do with them myself. Perhaps you should sell or trade them in town, if there's anything you'd like to have here. Your existence also explains why we get fewer monsters coming from that direction, doesn't it?"

"I guess so? They learned to keep out of my land a long time ago."

"So we've already benefited from your presence anyway," she said with a nod. "We'd be more than happy to have you as a more official ally. I'll make sure my guards don't steal from or set fire to your forest. But since nobody much has bothered you yet, I think telling everyone where your forest is, even in the middle of a law saying to keep out of it and not bother you, would be counterproductive. It would be best if only those of us in this room, and a small number of trusted people, know where it is in case of emergency. If word gets out another way, I'll have a no-trespass law waiting."

"Aww, that's really kind of you," said the dragon-girl. For being a scary lady, she also seemed awfully friendly.

"I need to speak to these four alone for a while. Please, take a look around our town."

"Okay! See you girls, uh, and guy, later!" she waved.

"Bye," said Mika, waving; Zack and Katherine nodded.
"F-farewell," said Nora.

Once the door was shut again, the captain leaned forward a bit, looking at Mika. There was a long enough moment of silence to make the witch a bit nervous. "Um..."

"I need to know whether or not I should worry about something," she said immediately. "Some of my guards reported something unusual outside of town, so I sent another party out to investigate. Based on their report, I concluded that the place in question must be a singular demon summoning ritual site. The kind of place that only a witch or warlock would be likely to set up. Is it yours?"

"Er—well, yes. I—w-we tried to go far enough out of town not to bother people," said Mika, starting to fear for her life a bit.

"Our patrols go pretty far out so we'll have enough advance warning of major monster attacks. As I understand it, it's much easier to use the same site multiple times than to go somewhere different, which I imagine is why you didn't do much cleanup."
She was right, but Mika hadn't actually thought about that. "Um...yeah, probably that."

"Actually, we didn't even think about cleaning it up," said Zack. "I thought that ash would just blow away in a couple hours anyway."
"Well, it doesn't do that because of the magic involved," said the captain. "The problem is that it looks an awful lot like a place to summon demons, and people—even my guards—don't like the idea of that. Anyone who doesn't know a fair amount about this sort of thing is going to assume someone is setting up to attack the town with a demon army. And we can't not protect that side of town, you understand?"

"So, you want us to go out there and clean it up," said the psion.

"Actually, I had something else in mind. You've been staying at the tavern since your arrival, right?"
"Yes," said Zack.
"Well, in light of the work you've done—especially today's work, not only the report on that castle but catching those thieves and discovering a powerful new ally for our town—I think I could arrange to give you a plot of land around the ritual site, and have a fence around the area and a house built there for you."

Since all four of them just stared either at her or each other for the next several seconds, she continued: "You'd be responsible for protecting your own property from monsters and alerting town if anything really serious is coming; guards would go around the fence so they wouldn't see the ritual site at all. We have this kind of arrangement with a few other people who were interested in having a larger plot of land rather than a cramped space in town somewhere, in exchange for the somewhat higher risk. The legal side isn't much trouble since all of that land officially belongs to the crown, and our local government represents the crown; I'd just need to sort through a bit of red tape that I've already seen several times before."

"Um..." Zack looked at the others for a moment and then back to the guard captain. "Could we, uh, take some time to discuss this?"
"Sure," she said, "it's a fairly big decision. Get back to me by midafternoon tomorrow. If your answer is no I will expect you to clean up the summoning site."
"Right, of course."

---

The alchemists were just as impressed with Rose's offerings as she had thought they would be, and offered to pay her even more if she could give him seeds for some of the rarer plants next time. The dragon-girl left that place quite a bit richer, and very happy that she valued plants rather than normal treasures. After all, a dragon who sat on a giant pile of gold would have to permanently lose some of that gold to get other stuff, while her hoard of treasure was self-renewing, requiring only a little patience to have just as much as before after spending some of it up.

Since she was still very hungry at that point, she went to a restaurant that smelled good and ordered their biggest portion of meat, a big steak. But when it came, she paused for a long moment, staring at the silverware next to it. How did these things work again? She sneaked a few looks around at the other patrons, seeing them cut and pick up their food so easily, but it still seemed...difficult to understand somehow.

Rose shook her head. This didn't make any sense; Rob certainly knew how to use knives and forks and things! She could remember using them as him, but not...quite...how. This was more than a little worrying. Had her mind been messed with in taking on a "character" and a "class", and just how much? She'd been acting weird ever since starting this..."game", hadn't she? Blurting things aloud that never should have come out of her mouth around real people, moving a bit more like an animal than a person at times, and just acting strangely in general...

Could she...overcome that? Rose was sure she ought to be able to keep herself quiet, and learn to use silverware, and all sorts of things like that. But it felt..unnatural somehow, like it was going to take a lot of effort to keep up. Besides, people seemed...relatively okay with how she was acting now, right? Or at least...the girls she'd met in the forest had willingly enough put up with her. Maybe they were just being nice, though; obviously the way she was acting was weird.

Speaking of things that were hard and took effort...this thinking was one of them. Rose was getting an increasingly strong urge to tear into the steak and forget all about this for a while. But...for the sake of making a good impression, she awkwardly picked up a random fork and the sharpest-looking knife and started trying to re-teach herself how to eat a steak properly. Eventually she managed to get a large chunk of it cut up and more or less skewered on the fork, still much too big for her mouth, but she quietly tore that off with her teeth, hoping that was less conspicuous than just picking up the whole thing with her hands. Nobody really seemed to notice or stare, that was good, but she couldn't shake the feeling she was holding the fork wrong..backwards or sideways or upside-down or something. Still, this much was enough to get to eating, and before too long the meat was gone and she didn't need to worry about it anymore.

After remembering to pay and tip the waiter, and doing that, the dragon-girl left the restaurant feeling reasonably satisfied, for now at least. The next thing she thought she might do is buy a few new sets of clothes. If she wasn't mistaken, the ones she was wearing right now were the only ones she had that could be reasonably called 'intact'...

---

Outside the guardhouse, Mika reached into her inventory (wherever that was) and pulled out a map of town, looking at it only briefly before pointing at a spot on it with a grin and nodding, turning to the others. "Alright you two, we have a wager to settle."

Nora gave her a confused look.

"We made a bet on the way to the dragon-girl's forest," she explained. "They didn't think you'd get free on your own."
"W-well, I mean technically I d-didn't though?"

The witch shook her head. "No, the way Rose told you were definitely out of the ropes before she even did anything. That's good enough for me!"

"I thought you were just trying to consciously use your high luck stat." said Katherine.
"Technically?" Mika shrugged, "but that doesn't work unless it's an actual bet with consequences. Anyway, I figured out the perfect thing on the way here. Sooo, follow me!" She started off down the street, the others following after.

"S-so, uh, what exactly did you win?" said the elf.
"We have to do 'something embarassing'," said the psion. "Not so much her win as our loss," she added with a shrug.

"You also promised it wouldn't be too embarassing," added Zack. "And we need to talk about this house thing."

"Uh-huh, we can do that at the same time," said Mika. "Here we are!" She raised her hands emphatically at the front of a bathhouse before turning around to the rest of the group.

Katherine said, "Um.."
Zack finished, "No." His ears were folded flat against his head and his arms were crossed.
"Oh come on, this is perfect!" said the witch, hopping up and down a bit. "It's kinda embarassing, yeah, but it's also private. We can rent a room just for us for an hour and talk about the house thing while we relax and get clean. Anyway, you lost a bet," she said, glaring up at him. "The only person who gets a choice in this is Nora."

"You'll just have to find something else for me," he said.

"Not that I'm complaining," said the cat-girl, "but why did you think of this in the first place?"

"Well, just, first of all have any of you actually bathed since we got here, like, how many days ago?" she said. While they were busy looking at each other in response to that she added, "I have no idea how you haven't noticed but there's burrs and dirt and junk all over your fur. I'm actually grateful all the hairs on my extra parts are short enough to just shake stuff off of, seeing all that. I mean, come on, Zack, you can just hide under a towle, or—or I'll buy you the most conservative swimsuit we can find if it helps. We've been trusting each other with our lives for sheesh's sake, what's—" Mika paused, realizing that she'd been getting louder and louder during this rant and also waving her hands almost nonstop. She took a deep breath and said much more quietly, "What's being naked around each other for half an hour, huh?"

The knight sighed, his expression softening a bit. "..Fine. I guess something like this was gonna happen eventually."

"Okaay, great. What d'you wanna do, Nora?"

The weaver shrugged. "T-to be honest, I've gotten used to f-feeling exposed. I'm b-barely even wearing anything to begin with."

"Cool! Then we can all be together to talk about the house thing." Mika's usual grin returned and she turned around, gesturing for the others to follow her inside.