The "Best" RPG Ever-58

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Aria went back up to her own room after breakfast; she'd taken a book of meditation tips up there the night before and thought she might read a little more of it. Only a few minutes later, Mira poked her head in the door. "Hey!"

She pointed at the witch. "Knock first! Respect the privacy!"
"You're just reading a book."
"You wouldn't know that if you'd bothered to knock." The shifter crossed her arms.
The witch gave an annoyed expression, leaned back out of the doorway and knocked sarcastically on the door.

"Ye~s?"

"I—or rather Katherine—just thought you should know that Rose is coming in, and has a guest you specifically invited here with her."

"Huh?" She didn't recall inviting anyone in particular. Unless... "Wait, Loren?! Why didn't you say so earlier!?"

Aria jumped off of the bed, shook her head to try and dispel the tiny bit of dizziness still left over, and then made her way past the witch (who was still busy rolling her eyes at the whole exchange) to run down the stairs. Carefully run down the stairs. With the help of the banister. She didn't particularly want to faceplant half of the way down. She gave herself temporary cat-ears to be able to hear whatever was going on down there.

Rose seemed to have come through the door first. "Whoaa, it's way bigger than it looks. Oh, hey Nora!"

"Uh, h-hi."

"Where's everyone else?"
"I'm here!" Wait—Mira's voice? "Welcome to our humble new abode~." There was only one set of stairs and the witch hadn't passed her on them.

By this point she got to the foot of the stairs, and stepped around to where the "front" door to town was."Hey Aria!" the dragon-girl waved, so she waved back with her free hand. "Um.." She bounced around slightly, looking behind her. "C'mon, don't be shy!" she tried to wave someone in.

"And shut the door please!" Mira added. Glancing over at the witch, she had her broom in one hand and was standing next to an open window, which together answered the question of how she got down here. The person outside entered and shut the door behind him, Rose stepping to one side so Aria could see him—or maybe the other way around. She gestured excitedly toward the shifter and said, "So, so—is this who you were looking for?"

"Uh.." He took a few steps closer.

"Hi," she said a little quietly, feeling inordinately shy for no immediately obvious reason. They stood in front of each other quietly for a moment.

"Hey, uh, Zack's out in the front yard if you wanna say hello!" said Mira, practically pulling Rose away. Nora seemed to have also fled the scene at some point, for the same purpose of leaving them alone.

Loren was watching her face intently. She had a go at breaking the silence. "Heheh...it's a little weird. I don't know whether to say 'it's good to see you again' or 'it's nice to meet you'," she said.

He frowned slightly. "You don't..remember me?"
"Well, I do. I mean—you look familiar, the first thing I thought when I saw you was that I'd really missed you," she said. "But I can't—not much of anything specific."

"It's really you, huh..." He seemed like he was going to continue that train of thought before it was violently interrupted. "Wait, was that a witch?!"
"Oh, Mira? Yeah, she's nice," she nodded.

"I think that's convincing evidence for sure," he said, putting a hand up to his face to adjust his glasses in a way that registered as 'exasperated'. "In the span of a year, while suffering from severe memory loss, you've managed to befriend a dragon, a witch, a psion—anything else I should know about? Like, did I spot someone wearing the traditional garb of a priestess of Haestra a moment ago?"
"A year? I've only been around here for about a week," she said.

"But—then what were you doing before that?!"

She crossed her arms. "Look, the last thing I remember is having that sword in my hand, and then being..somewhere, and then landing on the ground like five or six days ago? I almost killed some people and then killed a big ogre attacking them instead, and then I wound up here. I mean, in this town in general."

"But it's been a year since you pulled the sword out of the stone," Loren insisted.
"Well, you...my memory of it is fuzzy, but you like teleported me out here somehow right? Is there some way that could've delayed my arrival?"

"There shouldn't be, not if I did my calculations right," he shook his head. "Unless—well, the ward spells on the sword might have still been active, and interacted in some unexpected way...what kind of place were you in before landing? Any idea?"
"I dunno, but—actually, where I landed is just out in the front yard here. It's where Mira's been using to summon demons to eat."
"Uhh—" He shook his head, visibly resisting an urge to say something about that. "That would involve a portal to the demon realm. I suppose it's possible the interaction slipped you somewhere in between, until eventually tearing that portal open weakened the space..."

"I think this conversation's officially jumped the rails," said Aria.
"Huh?" He didn't seem to understand the expression; maybe this world never had trains.
"Um—we got a little off topic," she said. "Or way off topic. You're convinced I'm the same person you knew as Ares?"

"Well, there is a lot of evidence for it. Although I don't see that sword anywhere," he said.

"Oh, this sword?" She pulled it out of her inventory, and he jumped back several steps on seeing it.
"Where did that come from!? Put it away!"
"Relax, I don't go berserk unless I take it out of the sheath," she said, putting it away again. Explaining where it had come from raised an interesting problem if "having an inventory" wasn't actually a normal thing in this world. "It's just...with me, and I can put it away or take it out whenever," she said with a shrug.

"W-well, it's certainly the same sword. I could feel the demon's power pulsing from it," he said, with a touch of fear. "You..how much is it affecting you? Or the wards—I mean, using a different name?"
"I didn't remember the 'real' one right away," she said, crossing her arms. "Anyway, do I look like an Ares to you?"

Having attention brought to her appearance caused him to stare for a second, blush slightly, and cough. "No, I suppose not..."

"Anyway, I can 'feel' the demon's hunger for blood, and it makes my dreams weird but Kath—uh, the psion you mentioned has been helping me with that, and it's perfectly happy eating monster blood. It can put me on edge if I don't 'eat' often enough, but I've been getting better at managing it. I have no idea what the wards did or were supposed to do, did we know much about them in the first place?"

"I uh...just that they were there, and very powerful. Prodding a complicated magic trap like that is a good way to have it explode in your face," he said. "I was spot-on with the memory loss guess however; it's a pretty logical thing to do if you're worried someone will want the sword for something specific. Drastically changing someone's appearance so that others can't remind them what they wanted it for makes sense too...perhaps in your case the wards 'saw' your skills at shapeshifting and resorted to changing the one thing our natural powers can't change back?"

"...We should sit down if we're gonna keep talking for a while," said Aria, starting toward a couch. "I got hit in the head pretty hard a couple days ago, and the vertigo's only mostly gone. I actually started to remember things while I was unconscious from that," she added.

"...I was just about to ask about the cane," he said, moving toward a chair opposite her planned seat. "So—" He was interrupted by a loud growling, and yelped, jumping away from the source. The wolf had been lying next to the chair (Zack had sat down there a short while ago), and all the talking seemed to have woken him up. "I-is that a dire wolf!?"

"Um, that's just Zack's—familiar? Pack-mate? Whatever. Hey, calm down," she said, waving the cane at him from her seat. The wolf barked disapprovingly at her, and then made a run for the front door (to the front yard) in a huff, pointedly avoiding Loren although he was already very interested in staying out of its way himself.

"H-how can you be so calm!? That's a literal monster! It's almost as tall as I am! Or—at least as tall as you are now!"

"He's on our side?" she said in a tone that suggested this was obvious.

"Is this Zack some kind of monster tamer?" he said, half-turning toward the door the wolf had gone out. "I've never even heard of a docile monster before. The prevailing theory is that chaotic magic causes them to attack people and normal animals on sight."

"He's just a knight. As I remember, they were fighting a big pack of dire wolves that kept blocking the road from time to time, and the pack's big alpha challenged him to a fight, and joined Zack's 'pack' when he won." She leaned forward slightly, and half-whispered, "he doesn't like being called a P-E-T, but that's more what we're looking at here if you ask me."

"A knight you say. What order?"
"Order? I dunno," she shrugged, glad she'd at least resisted the urge to say 'burger and fries' in response his question. "He wears armor and uses swords and a shield, some light magic stuff, soooo: A knight. Or is the right word paladin?"

"Paladins are warrior-clerics devoted to a specific god," Loren said, slowly moving back to the chair and sitting down slowly and cautiously, as if expecting another giant wolf monster to interrupt him. "This memory loss is going to turn into me explaining a lot of things most people know to you, isn't it?"

"Maybe. You or someone else, anyway," she said.

"So...you said 'him'? Zack, lives here too?" said Loren.
"Riiight?"
"Is he...I don't know how else to put this...the only male, living here?"
"You know what, you should meet him before I answer that question," she said. And immediately yelled: "HEY ZACK, YOUR WOLF NEARLY SCARED LOREN AWAY!"

Loren winced, covering his ears from the sudden yelling, and then protested: "It did not. I was just spooked, is all."

Outside, the wolf started barking angrily again. "Aria, I just got him to calm down!" Zack called back. "And I can hear you from out here anyway." He came inside after that, the wolf firmly against one of his legs and giving a low growl. "Would you be quiet already?" The animal made a sort of grunting noise that indicated he would, but would not be happy about it.

Loren, of course, was staring at Zack from the moment he appeared in the doorway. "...What?" Zack's response was to cross his arms and glare at Loren, his ears folding down slightly in annoyance. Aria leaned to one side so she could enjoy every bit of this exchange.

The shifter cleared his throat. "Um. Just so that I'm not mistaking anything, you are Zack, right?"
"Yeees?"
"Okay. Good. Yes." He nodded repeatedly as he said this. "That's all cleared up. I think I understand now," he said, nodding.

"Understand what?"

"Well, it's—I mean, I don't really want to pry, but if you are who I think you are then I certainly don't blame you at all, seeing you...ahh. Just, seeing you."

The knight took a few steps into the room, still not looking pleased. "Could you explain who you think I am, exactly? Instead of talking circles around it?"

"I-it's just that, about half a year ago I remember an article in the newspaper about an order of knights wiped out by a powerful witch using an army of demons, while trying to apprehend her. Only—the witch was dead, and one of the bodies wasn't accounted for. And her body was alone in the top room of that tower, clearly having been run through by the blade of a member of that order. I don't, presume to know exactly what happened that day, but I'm sure by now they must have stopped sending out search parties, believing that if the missing member of the order did survive then he must have just fallen from his injuries later, somewhere very difficult to find," he said.

"Yeah..sure," Zack noncommittally agreed. Halfway turning toward Aria he said, "I'm gonna go back outside now. Don't yell so loud if you need me for something else." And then he walked back out the door, the wolf following as closely as ever.

"Anyway, the answer to your question is yes, as much as it even applies in the first place," Aria said. "I'm perfectly happy being a girl, personally, but we're different people in pretty different circumstances."

"I might have guessed this wouldn't even faze you," said Loren, shaking his head slightly. She then saw his expression change, something else occurring to him. "Wait..you don't. You're. Um. You're living with three different beastfolk here?"
"Yeah. Well—four actually. Clera's a, um, half-avian, but she went out flying for a bit to be sure there aren't any monsters coming toward the house. Why, are you some kinda racist?"
"No! Just—look, do you remember...about beastfolk," he said quietly. "The uh...um."
"Maybe you should just tell me and then I can find out whether or not I remember," she suggested.

"Okaay. Well—aside from Avians, beastfolk tend to have certain...instincts, toward people they're close with," he said, decreasing his volume even more. "Um, what I'm trying to say is that they like to express affection, even just toward good friends, very uh, physically?"

"You mean like petting," she said. Rayna's sudden urge to get someone to touch her tail made a lot more sense with this information in mind. It made sense that nobody would've discovered this from a book either, as it seemed to be common enough knowledge for people without memory loss to have no reason to point it out specifically. This would be good information to let everyone else know about too, she thought.
"Right, exactly. In regular beastfolk society, like in towns where they're most of the population, it's—well, there's a lot more tolerance for public displays of..a-around this town, there's such a variety of people they probably wouldn't do that kind of thing in public. But, living in a house with three of them..."

"I get what you're saying," she said, nodding. "It doesn't seem like that big a deal, though?"

"It would be for me," he said. "Isn't it, don't you find it a little strange you might walk in here to find one of them on top of another, doing—that?"

"A little, maybe? Can't uh, shapeshifters like us get animal ears or tails of our own too?" she said, forming a fox-tail from her back to demonstrate.
"What you just did...would take me three hours to get right," he said, a touch of annoyance in his voice. "Er—putting aside your ridiculous talent, yes, in fact some of us prefer to keep parts like that around when they're handy and the average shifter can't swap them out rapid-fire like that. Which is why, it's just, dangerous around beastfolk, because they tend to get the wrong idea and start thinking of us like members of their race and..."

"Well, that doesn't sound all that bad either," she said.
"Y-you have no idea," Loren said. "Just—try to imagine keeping a tail around for balance while climbing all over a narrow platform around the focus crystal to repair it, and next thing you know someone's trying to touch it with theirs while they're thanking you..ugh." He shuddered slightly.

"I suppose it's a little worse if it's a stranger who thinks they're just expressing gratitude," she said. "Well, I don't think I have too much to worry about here. They're all pretty respectful of other people's personal space, if not outright wanting people out of theirs."

---

Mira had managed to distract Rose with the idea of flying around in some kind of race, leaving Zack alone in the yard again. The dragon-girl was concerningly easy to distract, he thought; it could be a problem if they ever faced a clever enemy of some sort. He went back outside, the wolf following him closely, and after going a short way out into the yard he knelt over on one knee to be about at the same level as the animal; the wolf sat in front of him, sensing he wanted to talk. "Look, you can't just keep barking and growling forever at every stranger who comes into our house," he said.

The wolf replied with a brief fit of whining.

"What, he startled you? That's fine, I get making a little noise in that case or if you don't think we know the stranger's here. But I think you scared him worse than he did you. And, just in general, once we all know what's going on, you should quiet down again."

The wolf growled, but seemed willing to obey this order.

"Good." Zack nodded, reaching a hand to hover over the wolf's head. When the wolf didn't move away, he ran it down its back a couple of times before standing up. The animal looked off to one side and made a small kind of "Hmph" noise under his breath, but his tail wagged in a way that suggested he was enjoying the attention.

He stood up and turned back toward the training dummy out in the yard. The knight had come out here in the first place to try and think through some movements to more effectively use the dark-form shield as a weapon. It just didn't seem to come naturally to him, but it was logical that a big, sturdy magic-shield-thing should be a nice source of close-range blunt damage, and he was sure he could get used to it with some more practice.

A little later, his ears picked up a flapping sound, and he turned to find Clera in the process of landing. "Hey. See anything?"
"No, all clear." She looked around. "I noticed Rose flying around here with Mira on the way back."
He nodded. "Loren showed up with her. Uh—Aria's backstory friend or whatever. I guess we can start getting rid of all those notes now."
"Right...we were under the impression it would take him longer than one day to respond," she said, heading toward the house.

---

"So...what do you plan to do now?" said Aria.
"Hmn?"
"I mean—you found me, I'm here. I probably need to stay out here in the frontier to kill monsters for blood for, at least a long while, and I've got a pretty good gig here specifically. Now that you know that, do you plan to go back tooo...whatever you were doing before?"
"Well...I don't know, really." He shrugged. "I didn't honestly think all that far ahead. I mean—I didn't know for sure if you were still alive after I sent you off. I made a habit of checking to see whether that Beacon had been activated that lasted a whole year, even when I thought surely you must be dead or have no interest in your lost memories once a few months had gone by. And now...here we are just, talking the same way we used to, except you don't remember it which makes it even stranger that you act pretty much exactly the same way. I guess not even widespread amnesia can change some things...but..."

Loren took a moment to adjust his glasses. "Well, I was between jobs anyway, to be honest. Something would've probably come through in the next few days or so, but now I've spent quite a bit of magic coming out here. I probably need to rest for a day or two if I did want to go back. But on the way here, one of the town guard conveniently mentioned a possible job for me here, and anyway the captain of the guard here seemed...happy?...to see me, at least as much as the term applies to her. I do have the means to stay here for a little while at least, and might be rewarded for doing so, and..."

He hesitated to say the next part for a moment, but Aria leaned forward, her tail swishing back and forth slowly, to indicate she did want to hear it. "Well, I would like to stick around and see if I could help you remember some things," he said. "I don't expect a complete recovery anytime soon since the wards are still as fresh as a week for you, but...well, if it's alright with you, that is."

"That's okay by me," she said. "Even if I don't remember the specifics, you're fun to be around, which is plenty as far as I'm concerned. You couldn't stay here, though, for reasons I think are pretty obvious. Plus we're all out of beds."

"R-right. I'm sure there are some inns back in town," he nodded.

The front (to outside) door opened, and Clera walked inside. "Hey, how'd the scouting mission go?" said Aria, popping back to sitting up again.
"No major issues." She turned to the guest. "My name is Clera."
"Oh, pleased to meet you," he replied, turning toward her as much as he could in the chair. "Loren Sigrith."

The winged girl nodded to him, and turned toward Aria. "I hope you've been careful while I was away."
"Duh, I haven't fallen over once even! I'm pretty close to normal anyway."
"You won't fight anything until I clear you," she said bluntly. "We can rely on animal blood if we have to to keep you sane."

"Yeah, well, you can check on me this afternoon and see," said Aria, crossing her arms. "I guarantee I'll be great by then."
"We'll see." Clera nodded toward Loren again, and went on toward the library.

"Is she a...healer?" he said.

"Yeah, an Empath," Aria nodded.
He was surprised by that last word. "Are you, sure you have the right term?"

"Pretty sure. I wasn't wrong about Zack being a knight, was I? She has like a second soul tied to her main one, and magic that lets her heal herself quickly and 'absorb' injuries from other people...that sound about right to you?"
He shook his head. "Unbelievable...but yes, it does. Is there anyone else I should know about living here too? Any exiled duchesses or famous performers or something?"
"Hmm, I think the only person you haven't met yet is Lynn. She and Rayna used to work as traveling performers; I dunno about 'famous' though. She's busy getting ready for a date, so I don't really wanna yell her down here."

"I'd really appreciate it if you didn't."

---

"Well...we have successfully acquired a sheep," Katherine said, pointing out the obvious. It was following behind them on a leash. "That was astoundingly easy compared to what I was prepared for."
"Buying livestock is a perfectly normal thing," said Rayna. "Restaurants might do that instead of buying meat, for example." All we had to do was avoid blurting out that we wanted it for a demon summoning ritual, she added mentally, like Aria or Rose probably would.

Yeah, charisma is weird in this stat system. Seems to translate partially to 'basic verbal impulse control' from what I can tell.

"So, what are we gonna do with this guy once we get him back to the house?" she said aloud. "I mean...I guess we could just let him graze in the yard, as long as Zack keeps the wolf away from 'im."
"Yeah, we do have a fence, after all." We should probably keep Rose away from him too; a dragon seems likely to spook any herbivore, and he'll be no good as a sacrifice if he dies of a heart attack first. I could stun him if he started to run away tonight.

So...Lynn and I came up with a theory yesterday, Katherine said mentally. She relayed her memory of the conversation about Aphera being a "matchmaker in the sky".

"Hmm..." So you think we'll return to see Aria grabbing Loren for a kiss?

I doubt it'd go that fast. I mean, the transition from 'male friend I haven't seen in a while' to 'girlfriend' is a pretty big one and Loren seemed like a relatively 'normal' person from his surface thoughts. But if they blush at each other once or twice then there's certainly a possibility.

The fox-girl thought, You think we should be cheering for that kind of thing, or trying to prevent it? I mean, if you run into someone and you're just starstruck do you want me to try to snap you out of it?

My opinion is, as long as they're happy and it's not clearly an unhealthy relationship, there's no real reason to interfere. I would think you felt the same way, since you don't seem too interested in disturbing Lynn's plans...

I guess so, yeah, she shrugged. It's fun to tease her about it, but ultimately I'm happy for her.

In my case, if it seems like I'm going really fast with someone I would like to be reminded to think rationally about my choices and at least make sure I really know them before doing anything too extreme, Katherine thought. But that just seems like the obvious thing to do?

Pretty sensible to me, too. Let's make an agreement to remind each other of that if something should happen.

The catgirl nodded.