The "Best" RPG Ever-63

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---

"Well, it's definitely not me so it has to be you." Clera sat on the other side of the kitchen table. They were sipping imaginary tea in a dreamed-up afternoon.
"What makes you so certain that it isn't you?" he asked. Ian didn't really look or sound male anymore, but his appearance in this dream remained essentially androgynous, and besides—he still didn't feel precisely female here.
"Well—because! I mean, she's nice and all, but I can't stand people touching me. Ever!" She looked away, and then back at him. "Look, that thing her friend said about beastfolk is basically true, but you recall he said specifically 'other than avians'. It's just base instincts—birds don't like being touched very much, at least not the ones that turned into avians. For full avians it's usually only extremely close relations like parent-child, husband-wife that have any physical contact at all. Among half-avians like me, well, the same instinct is there. Some get over it over time, and become about as comfortable with people touching them as your average human; some don't. I'm the latter. I mean, I tried—on the last day of my life I had to force myself to let some of the kids I knew hug me..." Her voice wavered a bit, and she cut off, sniffing and squinting her eyes to prevent some tears from fully forming.

"...Hmn. This seems more traumatic to you than it did before," he observed.

"What?"
"You were more detached from your old life and particularly your death when we first met, when you 'explained' it to me."
"Oh..." She bit her lip, thinking. "You're right. A Soul of Empathy is supposed to be peaceful, okay with being dead but serving the greater good now. I've been feeling less peaceful over time...I've accepted that I've died and I am happy to be helping people, but it feels like it's all my own will, not..whatever it was before." Then she shook her head. "I'm starting to wonder if something went uniquely wrong with the empath-making ritual, with it being wrapped up inside of an already overcomplicated summoning spell. That level of complexity could be too much for even Sophol himself to sort out completely."

"Do we have anything to worry about?" he said. Even without additional words to clarify, both of them understood immediately that he meant in terms of their present magic tie going haywire and/or becoming dangerous.

"I don't think so. Nothing feels off when we—when you're using your power. You were able to tell when you were straining your magic, just as well as any experienced mage, which means you'd also be able to 'feel it' if the magic was going unstable or something like that. I think the problem is just, some kind of imbalance between our wills..."

"Or more accurately, balance instead of the expected imbalance," he suggested.

"Right, right..."

She shook her head after thinking through the implications a little more. "I, I don't want to take over someone else's life. I had my own life already; I don't want another chance at someone else's expense! If there's anything you want that I don't, then, you should go for it."
"The problem with thinking that way," he said, "is when we're awake there's no way to tell the difference. If you're uncomfortable then the one person we experience being is uncomfortable. If you don't like something but I do then it comes across as a confusing, but entirely internal conflict. Like it or not, we're better off making decisions together."

"I guess you're right," she said with a sigh of resignation. "But what if we disagree on something so strongly, so...fundamentally, that it locks up that combined person's brain?"

"We don't know whether that's even possible," he said. "But perhaps we should agree to put aside any disagreement that strong until we are here again, and can actually separate which thoughts are whose and hash it out. Try to come up with some sort of compromise we're at least both equally unhappy with."

"Fair enough..."

---

"Zack?" Probably about halfway to sleep, there was a quiet, nervous voice from right in front of him.

"Hmmn." Well, from her tone of voice—something was bothering her.
"What are we doing..?" This one was even quieter, almost to herself. It's hard to say something just to yourself with someone else in such close proximity, but maybe she took the noise to mean he was already asleep.

"Think that's obvious..." She jumped slightly when he muttered that. But now that she knew he was awake, it seemed like she actually did want an answer.

"B-but I mean...why? Th-this is..."
He pulled back just enough to face her with half-lidded eyes, instead of their faces continuing to overlap. "Well, I'm doing this because it feels good. 'Cause it's easier to give in to these instincts I barely understand than to constantly fight with my own body, and this battleground just isn't worth it. I need to relax and get my head straight, and this is an easy shortcut."

Nora didn't move, looking a little stunned by the blunt answer. He pressed on: "You..? I dunno, but I can guess. Maybe neither of us know why you want it in the first place, but you get tired of thinking through every single thing, so here's something you can just choose not to think about and enjoy, becuase you don't think there's any way you'll ever really understand it anyway."

"Uh, um.." She blushed in..possibly embarrassment from a correct guess, or maybe just consciously remembering the relative position of their bodies. Right now, Zack didn't much care. He just leaned back in, rubbing her ears some, and nuzzled her a bit.

"Mrrn..."

A little later, she had finally processed what he said, and picked something out of it: "G-get your head straight?" she asked.

"I get mad when someone I care about gets hurt. 'R almost hurt. It's not..healthy. Doesn't always make sense. Gets pointed at the wrong people and sticks around way too long. Screwed up before 'cause of it."

"Oh.." She probably understood what he meant by now, good.

"J'st be quiet, lemme sleep."

"S-sorry."

"Don't be..."

---

Nora found herself standing before Haestra's statue once again. She stared up at the goddess's visage for only a moment before feeling a kind of "pull" from behind her, and turning around quickly. The temple floor had a clean cut in it not far behind her, and was stitched there to other terrain: One one side, the yellowed grass of winter, and on the other an entirely different floor with a semi-circular wall coming up from it at the edge. Katherine, and everyone else who had agreed to be pulled into a common dream, were waiting behind that, most of them sitting on some couches that didn't appear to belong to any particular one of the environments, but the psion herself floating in place a few feet off from the cut, right about where the elf had felt the "pull" coming from in the first place.

"..There. Took you long enough to fall asleep," said the catgirl.

"Well, I was up reading fairly late," Nora replied.

"Yo, welcome!" Aria's hand waved backwards from a couch she seemed to be lying down on. "Take a seat if you want." And...beyond the other terrain and the couches was a cliff, a distant void, and a gigantic chained demon.

She took a few steps forward. "I...suppose that's the demon in your sword?"

"Yep."

"Oh, right!" Mira sat up and turned to look at it. "Man, I get so used to looking the other way I forget it's there sometimes. Surprising what a person can get used to."

"I think that applies to quite a bit of our situation," Rayna pointed out. "Soo, what were you reading?"

"Historical...well I'm not really certain whether it qualifies as fiction or not."

Nora finally made it over, and sat at an empty couch; the catgirl floated over next to her and took the opposite side of it. "It seems like the author believed the events actually happened, but it was written more like a work of fiction."

"Hey, wait a second," Lynn said, sitting up and fixing the elf with a stare.

"Hmn?"

"You're not stuttering. Right?"
"Um...no, I don't seem to be," she said, only realizing it herself after it was pointed out.

"Remember none of us are physically speaking here," the catgirl said. "This is really mental communication dressed up to look like talking, in a way. Your mental voice has never had trouble, either."

"I suppose this means that whatever is wrong with my speech is a purely physical problem," Nora said, putting a finger to her chin in thought. "A plausible location would be somewhere in the connection between my brain and mouth. But then, isn't the brain a physical part of a person also?"

"I believe here, at least, the brain is not the mind," said Mira. "It houses it to some extent, sure, but I seriously doubt that what Katherine is doing right now is boosting and transmitting a bunch of electromagnetic signals between everyone's heads."

"Yeah...yeah!" Aria nodded in agreement. "There should be a lot of interference from any metal present. You'd be able to feel it. It'd matter if a person was as much as a foot farther away. But everyone in the house is about equally easy to reach regardless of their location, right?"

"More or less."

"The power's supposed to be a gift from Bimorphaeus," Lynn said. "So..it must be at least sort of magical in nature, even if it's not exactly what other people call magic."

"It's supernatural, but it cannot possibly be magic in the same way that it can't be electromagnetic," said Nora. "Psions' powers are completely unaffected by magic draining, amplifying, and nullifying effects. And psions, no matter how powerful, almost never have any spellcasting capability."

"I think we're running into a problem of terms at this point," said Rayna. "'Magic' to people of this world means a specific kind of supernatural activity, in the same way that uh, say 'magnetism' to our world means a specific kind of natural activity. But usually when someone on Earth talks about magic they often just mean supernatural activity in general—or, well, at least a much broader category of it. So even if it's not 'magic', it's still magic."

"It's magic B instead of magic A," Lynn suggested.

"Oh, speaking of the gods," said Mira. "I guess that's a statue of Haestra?" She pointed toward where Nora had come from.

"Right. I was dreaming of the temple again...but nothing specific, I think."

"D'you know whether that's an accurate portrayal or not?"
"I don't think that the version of me who lived in this world her whole life ever saw the goddess in person to compare it to," she said, "but I suspect they would go to whatever lengths were necessary to make it 'accurate' as an effective focus of worship."

"I just wonder why a deity whose appearance seems designed to portray the beauty of nature would insist on being depicted with a giant ugly scar in her side."

"Nearly all of the gods are depicted with some sort of permanent injury," said Lynn. "The only logical conclusion is that those injuries are really there and whoever was first told how to depict them was given the truth—they want people to know that they are physically flawed. Maybe even want to be reminded of it themselves in their worship. So...did they all fight for control of the world early on, before deciding to cooperate?"

"Siblings, husband and wife, a willing messenger...what would the factions be between relations like that?" said Rayna. "All of their domains are basically peaceful in nature. No god of war, and literally no 'holy wars' between followers of one god and those of another throughout history. If they really did that to each other then there's no way their relationship would be so cordial for such a long time."

"That leaves the possibility that all of them were injured fighting something else," said Nora. "Perhaps there are no 'evil' gods because they killed all of them early on."

"Well, sure, but why would they want to remember it then?" said Lynn. "For that matter, why give us obvious, visible evidence of a battle with those evil gods but no information about who or what they were?"

"Knowing something about the evil gods could lead to some nutjobs worshiping them, and for all we know deities work in such a way that that'd actually revive them," said Katherine. "But then the same nutjobs would probably just make up other evil gods to worship, and we've never heard of any new ones popping up."

"I think we are missing vital information," said Nora. "This information seems important, but we can do little more than speculate wildly without more evidence."

"Maybe you're right. We should find some kinda expert on the gods somewhere," said Rayna. "Like...maybe a priest at one of the temples in town, or some kind of researcher of history?"

"I'll try the library for books on the subject sometime tomorrow, perhaps," said Katherine. "If you guys want to go pester some clergy that's up to you."

---

Ezra woke with a sudden start, sitting up with her heart racing by the time she was fully conscious, and not at all sleepy by the time she understood that she was awake. Faint sunlight through the narrow privacy windows of the bedroom informed her that it was early morning, the sun just beginning to rise. She took a deep breath and counted out fifteen individual seconds; she was physically calm by the end of it, but the memory persisted, just as stark and vivid as it had been upon awakening. After that, she arose and rushed to prepare to leave the house, knowing it could only mean one thing.

The guards who saw her on the way to the guardhouse that morning tensed instinctively, as if they could feel a sense of urgency radiating off of her. When she barked a strange order at one, he didn't stop to question or even pause to wonder what it was about, but set off as if his own life depended on its swift execution—half convinced that in fact it did. She arrived before long, only to audibly throw some things around in her office, retrieve one object, and leave again. The guard at the front desk heard her mutter, "—drought. Of course not. It always has to be some big, dramatic disaster, doesn't it—" cut off by her half-slamming the guardhouse door.

Loren was waiting by the time she arrived at the door to the recently-constructed house, and he was still sleepy but just irritable enough from the rude awakening to cross her. "I don't suppose the reason you provided me lodging was just so you'd have a transporter on call," he said—not an entirely wrong accusation, though she'd hoped to wait longer to take advantage of it.

"There is a fire giant coming from the east," she said.

That woke him up. "A fi—how do you know?!"

"The forest you appeared in yesterday is in that direction," she stated. "I've never been, but I recognized it immediately in a dream last night, despite it being mostly on fire." While he was busy processing that, she raised a fist and banged loudly, three times, on the door.

"You get dreams from the gods often?! Wh—are you some sort of prophet?" he demanded: Annoyance to confusion to amazement, about as predicted.

"Nothing so pretentious. Anyone important enough who lives long enough is bound to be contected once or twice," she said matter-of-factly.

"Lives long enough? You look younger than I do!"

"This isn't really the time for flattery," she said, deadpan with a slight hint of annoyance to drive him off of the subject for now. He was an inquisitive enough person that it would probably come up again later.

She needn't have bothered, really, since the door opened at this point to show Rose, visibly half-asleep and in a state of dress that was bound to provide plenty of distraction by itself. "Uhm, hi?"

"Rose, I'm glad you're here," she said with a serious, earnest tone. "Your forest is in danger."

She jumped awake. "Wha—"
"Loren can get us there faster," she continued, moving gracefully around the dragon-girl to get inside. "I want to enlist the help of the others here first."

"Oh, okay, umm. HEY—" she half turned around, starting to yell; Ezra interrupted her with a hand on her wrist.

"Allow me to explain, please." Most of them were likely already on their way down by now anyway; that shout primarily set Zack's wolf barking again just after he'd been calmed down.
"O-okay. Uh." She fidgeted nervously for a second. "I'lljustgetreadytogothen!" she said, running to one of the downstairs bathrooms.

"You can get eleven people and an animal out that far, right?" she asked, turning to Loren, who'd followed her inside by now and was slowly closing the door. He looked away quickly, his face still a bit red.
"You should've asked me that before making plans. But yes," he said with a small, quick nod. His sense of professional pride would see to it that they got there, even if he had to burn his magic out to do it. Good.

The door to the stairwell opened, Katherine coming out first and the others soon afterward. Ezra waited until the living room was full to start explaining. By then Rose was also back, fully dressed this time and visibly agitated. Hoard instinct would do that to a dragon.

"The gods warned me in a dream last night of a fire giant headed straight toward the city from the east," she said, accompanying the words 'fire giant' with some loud thought for the psion to pick up on, detailing what they were dealing with. The catgirl was briefly stunned by the sudden, condensed blast of information, but nodded, indicating she got it, while Ezra continued: "It will hit Rose's forest first if we don't stop it. I would appreciate your help taking it down, if you are willing."

There was a chorus of general agreement to this: "Sure"; "Of course!"; "Yeah"; a few nods.

Ezra looked around once it quieted down. "Meet us outside when you are ready, then." She waved Loren to follow and made for the front yard. Rose also followed, already quite ready to defend her home and treasure.

She seemed nervous, a little jumpy, and more worried still since the mention of fire. In fact she was wringing her clawed hands together hard enough to have drawn blood if it weren't for their armored scales. Loren eyed her movements warily, obviously concerned that the dragon could lash out dangerously under these conditions.

"I don't want to give the impression that this is entirely charitable," Ezra said, drawing Rose's attention and curiosity somewhat. "Fire giants gain power by setting fires and then consuming them—more fire means more power. A blaze the size of your forest would give the thing too much power to contend with by the time it reached the city. I'd be looking at evacuating a lost cause and merely stalling it in the meantime."

"Oh, wow...um.." she muttered, more afraid than before.

"That said, the gods wouldn't have warned me the way they did if its reaching your forest was inevitable. It is likely just weak enough now for the rest of us to take it down first. Once we get there, you could remain in your forest and prepare to defend it your own way on the off chance we should fail."

The dragon-girl nodded, her expression still quite fearful. But from her eyes, she was clearly thinking. Slowly the look changed, her body language calming from terror to resolve. "No, I..." she started, seeming to only just realize what she was about to say herself. "I-if everyone else is gonna fight it then I, I should too. Um, if you think I can help, I mean." There it was. Ezra had read her correctly; unless there was no chance of success she wouldn't be caught dead letting her new friends fight a risky battle for her. Once the situation was clear, that won out over her natural instincts and fears.

"Your help should be invaluable," Ezra replied. "I will need to focus more on channeling a spell of heat resistance, so I will be little help in the fight itself."

Rose's eyes lit up a bit once she understood the meaning of that. Loren, who'd been watching the exchange with nervous confusion from its start, was now some mixture of impressed and terrified. He had a very specific idea of how dragons behaved, and in his view she had just convinced one to leave its hoard alone and stand rather than flee against its own natural weakness—both of which were out of the scope of "normal" behavior. That was fine; it would only work in her favor for him to perceive her as extremely persuasive.