The "Best" RPG Ever-72

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Nora entered Zack's room to find him sitting up on the side of the bed, facing her. "Uh..hey."
"Zack," she nodded, trying not to pay attention to the loud thumping of his tail against the bed from the moment he'd seen her; it was far too distractingly cute and she'd just braced herself to ask about something serious. "Um..a-are you, okay?" she asked with a concerned look.
"Hmn?"

"I mean, what you talked about today. Th-the, your 'past' here," she clarified, moving closer and then slowly sitting next to him. "I mean—tonight Fazren t-told me that I was rescued from human—uh, p-people traffickers, probably. Whatever happened to 'me' before then, I d-don't remember at all because of how young I was. Probably a-any unconscious effects from that trauma have mostly smoothed over from the years I was raised at the t-temple, aside from a slight speech impediment. But your memories...p-people you cared about died. A lot of them. You were there, you s-saw it happen."

Zack nodded.

"It's just..th-that's the kind of thing someone never gets completely past. And it's, j-just been forced in a-as something you remember, something real..."

"Are you sure you're okay?"

"I'm fine," he said, a little too quickly. Then, after a short pause: "No, I guess I'm not totally over it. It's, just that the memories come with a lot of experience ignoring them, too. If anything it...reminds me how easy it is for people to die. Not just here, but back on Earth—prolly any other world, too." He shook his head slightly. "It's good to have friends again, with all of you here. Sometimes..the others can get kind of annoying, but I really like all of them, honestly. But I guess I'm terrified I'll lose you all, too. Really, that's...something I always had trouble with. Maybe it's a little worse with it feeling justified somehow..."

"Zack..." It seemed like an awfully cruel set of memories to saddle someone with. Nora leaned over to offer him a hug, and he returned it, gently pushing her over onto her back after a moment.

"I just try not to think about it," he said quietly. "Maybe it doesn't make anything better, but it feels like it helps. Anyway...it makes me want to appreciate the time we do have together more." He smiled ever so slightly, and Nora's heart practically melted from seeing that. Then the wolf-girl leaned her head in and nuzzled her cheek a bit, letting out a soft "Mrrh." She changed to her own wolfish form and returned the gesture, gently curling her tail around Zack's. Maybe..sometimes it was better to just forget about all of it for a while.

The wolf-girl pulled back slightly after a short while. "..You won't tell everyone I said I like them, will ya?"
"Hmn? Uh..th-that's. No," she said.

"Good..."

But they already know it...

---

Mira popped out of her room when Rayna came out of the stairwell, Lynn behind her. "Soo~, do you wanna come to my room tonight?"

"Uhhhh." The fox-girl blushed furiously, getting some very conflicting internal signals. "No, I'm. I think I can only take so much 'affection' at a time, okay? I-I'm still kinda weirded out by the way I reacted last night, and uh.."
"Awh. That's okay," the witch nodded. "I'll leave you alone so you can sort things out."

"Maybe try Kath tonight?" she suggested, half-jokingly, with a vague gesture in her room's direction. Lynn was busy quietly and slowly fleeing to her room in a clear attempt to stay completely out of the present conversation, and she had no particular interest in pulling her into it.
"I don't think that's gonna happen," she said, crossing her arms. Then she raised her hand in a quick peace sign. "No biggie. See you in the morning~." After that, the witch quickly slid back into her room and shut the door quietly.

Lynn, now standing in front of her door, looked at Rayna. "Hey, your face is redder than your hair."

"Have you looked at her lately?" the illusionist said, striding up toward her own door—and closer to Lynn at the same time. "She has like an, effective charisma bonus toward girls. I'm pretty sure it's not intentional." Then, in a much quieter voice: "And somehow knowing about it makes it that much worse..."

"Incubus powers, huh." Lynn nodded. "You should tell her in the morning, that's really not the kind of thing someone should not know about themselves. Maybe it's weaker for me 'cause I'm already interested in someone else?"

"I really can't say. It could be stronger on me for..some other reason. For all I know, I mean. Anyway I'm gonna go try not to think about it for the next three hours and maybe get to sleep after that," she said, ducking into her room immediately after.

---

It was difficult not to concede Tsaron's point about conversation efficiency, at least a little bit, when someone planned to say something so well and so far in advance that Katherine could probably predict the entire conversation before it ever happened—all in loud, basic surface thought. Clera just didn't want to interrupt the conversation that raged all the way through dinner, and then elected to go scrounge the library for a spellbook that might contain a spell the extra soul didn't already know, and then didn't want to disturb her while her guest was still there, which was nice, and so kept on reading. Then she was so distracted by the reading that she was only now getting up from the chair to go see whether Katherine was still awake.

But of course she was still awake. Sitting up on her bed and trying to be patient, waiting for a conversation which even now the winged girl was busy reciting again in her head, in case she forgot something. It was two sentences long! There was nothing extaordinary to be said! What kind of obsessive, neurotic thought pattern required that much preparation for this?

She took a deep breath and reminded herself that she was a mind reader, not a mind critic. Anyway, it's not like she didn't have an answer for that. It could even be answered be another question: What do you get when you cross a surgeon who triple-checks everything for the slightest risk to a patient with a mage who understands deeply the importance of specific, careful thinking and precise ritual in spellcasting? How can someone like that not let the careful, methodical way of thinking spill out into the rest of the mind, rather than risk casual carelessness leaking into the 'important' parts?

Imagine yourself in her shoes. Clera had no reason to think her behavior was irritating. If anything, she was acting (or failing to act—rather failing to speak) entirely out of concern for others. Katherine was being unreasonable in a way that her powers alone permitted someone to be. It was not normal to demand other people have surface thoughts in a way that would be convenient for her. She couldn't demand that people treat her more or less like a normal person not privy to their thoughts and then fail to act like one in return. Right?

A hand was raised to knock gently on the door. The psion bit back a slight urge to open it right away, waited for two soft raps and the hand to be dropped. "Come in," she said, now pulling it open.

"I hope I haven't disturbed you," she said.

"No, I'm still awake. What do you need?"

"Ah...I was wondering if you'd allow me—us, whatever you desire to call it to join you tonight." Sentence one. Followed by suddenly remembering another detail: "Although, I suppose it is Aria's mind."
"She put up an open invitation two or three days ago, and hasn't revoked it yet. Remember her dreams are in real time and immensely boring, possibly insanity inducing too, without other minds to interact with."

"Of course."
"Anyway, yeah. No problem. Soon as you're asleep if you want," she gave a quick thumbs-up.

"To be clear—this isn't something I want you to keep doing after tonight—but in case I ever get tired of conversing with, myself, I would at least like to know what the alternative is." Sentence two.

"Yep. Noted." Katherine nodded. There, now can we both go to sleep please? She mentally flicked a metaphorical wrist for the impatient thought. Stop that, Me.

"Alright. Good night," she said, "although I suppose I'll see you again before long."

"Sure."

---

Aria tried meditating for a little while. It was quite clear that doing something like this was simply against her nature, even sans demon-mind-link. She was much better at running around doing things—or at least thinking them—than sitting still thinking of nothing at all. Every minute she sat there seemed palpable, until she 'felt' the presence of another person behind her.

The shifter popped up, turning around. "Ah! Finally."
"Yeah, sorry, you fell asleep pretty early and I was up a little later than usual," she said. "Now to get everyone else in—right?"
It sounded like she was asking permission—as if she even needed to. "Yep, let's get this started!" Aria said with a small fist-pump.

"Right, well..." She first pulled Mira in; her dream landscape this time was apparently a big dark forest with bright Halloween decorations strewn around. "Hi, Mira. Looks like your first dream here again?"
The witch looked around, only now seeming to really take the forest in. "A little yeah! I guess this is just what the head-space looks like when I'm not being fed new memories, or something. We should go exploring around again!"

"Maybe—we'll see. It's not like I can't be in two places at once here anyway."

The right edge of Aria's vision gained a dusky level of light, transitioning to a more normal, non-decorated forest in the afternoon, and particularly a path cutting through it. Rayna and Lynn, in somewhat flashier clothes than they usually wore while awake, walked into view from seemingly the location of the cliff that Aria and the catgirl were on, continuing a conversation seemingly about the city they had just left for a moment before both noticed something had happened, and looked around.

"Oh. Uh. Hi," Rayna said, seeing Mira. She looked toward Lynn for a second: "I kinda forgot about this."

"Yeah, me too," the witch said. "I guess it's just still weird to say I'll see somebody in my dreams, even if I know I will."
"I can put you back if you want," Katherine offered to Rayna, waving.
"No, nope. This works fine for me," she said, shaking her head. Lynn nodded, indicating she wanted to stay too.

"You forgot to say something?" Mira prompted, head tilting slightly.

"Well, no. I just noticed something I thought you might better know about," said the fox-girl, walking through the strip of dusk into Mira's more festive woods. "My 'sight' is showing a, uh, pretty substantial passive charisma boost toward girls. Aaand its effects are pretty obvious now that I'm aware of it."

"Oh, yeah, that skill," the witch said, crossing her arms and shaking her head slightly. "On the 'incubus' part of the tree. It's on the way to some stuff I want for other reasons. I only bought it once, but it's passive, so I can't exactly turn it off either."

"Maybe the real problem is the way you always talk turning the charm up to eleven anyway," Rayna said.

"Aw~wh, I'm glad you think that," she said with a light blush, which made the fox-girl blush a little more brightly and back away slightly.
"L-like that! Stop it.."

Mira put her arms up to the sides in surrender. "I can't help who I am."

"A-hem." Katherine cleared her imaginary throat to get everyone's attention. "Clera also asked to join us just for tonight. Since she seems to be aware of her dreams as long as she wants to be, I'll try something a little different..."

With a slight wave of her hand, the psion made a door rise up out of the ground on the border between the forest and cliff face. Then she knocked on it. After a moment it was opened from the inside by a very androgynous-looking person with long brown hair and a very pretty face, wearing a suit that seemed a little loose on the shoulders and tight on the hips. Behind was a mid-sized living room, a woman strongly resembling the Clera they knew but with white wings and dark hair was sitting in a chair.

"Clera, Dr. Kellen," she said. "Would you like to join us or should we join you?"
The person at the door—Ian Kellen—leaned his head out the door to look around. "I don't think there's room in my living room for all of you. Not that that actually means anything, but.." The voice sounded pretty feminine—a low alto, maybe. He stepped outside, and Clera rose and followed him out.

"So you really are two separate people in your dreams, huh," Aria said, coming a little closer to the doctor. "I mean—I knew that, not that I didn't believe you, but it's somethin' else to actually see it."
"I imagine so." He nodded.

Lynn came up. "I guess you've technically been a male mind, at least in dreams, but it's..what, wearing off?"

He sighed. "It makes little difference to me, so the longer I stay in that body and the more comfortable I become with it, the more I think of myself as female." As if in response to his saying that, his height visibly sank slightly. "I, appear to be in the final throes of that change, as well..."

Clera made her way over toward Mira as soon as she was out of the door, and stared at her for a long moment.

"What?" the witch said, giving a confused expression.
"I don't really know. I've read a lot about witches and warlocks, but never thought I'd meet one anywhere besides combat. From seeing you in the waking world, you seem nothing like the characterizations I've read of the type."

"Well, I'm committed to being nice," she said.
"Exactly. That." She pointed at Mira for effect. "By definition a witch is a person willing to give up their original self, their reputation—maybe their very soul—for power. That kind of desperation or power-hunger just doesn't seem compatible with being nice."

"You got her history at the same time as the rest of us," Rayna said. "Besides not really being from this world at all, so her nature is different just from that, the backstory here says she wanted to be a witch so young she didn't even understand the price—and for reasons that had nothing to do with desperation or greed. Right?"

"Heheh, yeah...I guess in both versions of events I just thought it was cool. For, different reasons though." Mira shrank into her 'original' appearance, not much taller than Clera. "Remember: My first experience on this world of a witch was a kind lady who was nice to us orphans and beat up the mean bullies sometimes."

Clera backed up slightly. "Yeegh. It's unsettling to see you change forms so fast..."

The witch tilted her head. "You're not bothered by shifters, are you?"

"Most shifters can only change a tiny bit at a time. Aria is a freakish talent who can do things in seconds that would take most shifters days to a month," she said.

"Woohoo, I'm a freak!" Aria had moved steadily closer to their conversation, and chose this moment to interrupt from a foot or so behind Clera, making the winged girl jump so high it seemed like she was going to fly away.
"Don't, DO that!" she said, glaring.
"Oh. Uh, sorry." Aria put a hand behind her head for a second or two, then dropped it again.

Lynn came over, too. "Hey Clera. Maybe there's something you can help us clear up."

"And, what is that?" she said.

With just a look from the human, Rayna realized what the subject was, and tried to get her map out of her inventory again. Even though they were dreaming, this caused a reasonable fascimile of what she could remember of it to appear, already unfolded, in her hand. "Take a look at this."

The winged girl leaned in a bit. "Some kind of map..?"

"The whole map. Well, as much of the world as Lynn and I have been to plus some; pretty much everything but the frontier." Rayna turned toward where Katherine was still speaking to Dr. Kellen. "Table please?" A slight wave of the catgirl's hand produced a long table and a bunch of chairs, too; she placed the map on the table.

"So, have you seen something like this before?" Lynn asked, pointing at the map. "Like, at magic college?"

"Only in passing. My interest wasn't really in geography.."

"What about history? Do you know much of that?"
"A fair bit, yes," she said with a slight nod.
"Has anyone ever tried to go all the way around the world? In any vehicle? Or—even flying themselves?"
"Of course," she said. "Not very many are successful, but some Avians see trying to get around the world under one's own power as a sort of rite of passage. It usually takes a whole year or more to do it, though, and of course the route tends to meander a bit..."
"Do they ever fly over the frontier?" Rayna asked.

"Not unless they're suicidal!" Clera's wings flared out a bit. "That big bird we met you fighting is the tip of the iceberg. One of us tries flying out that way very far, we'll get snapped up and fed to the chicks of something two or three times that size. Even landing for a short break too close to monster lands can be fatal."

"So there's not somebody who's flown deep enough into the frontier to see what's in the middle of it and lived to tell the tale," Lynn said.
"The middle?" Clera appeared unfamliar with this concept.

"Yeah. There's only one frontier," Rayna said. "You can see it on the map, there's just one fuzzy border. I mean, it's pretty big but—"

"It seems logical that this thing has a center, more or less. And something might be there," Lynn finished.
"Well. Nobody'd be foolish enough to try to look for it," the winged girl said with a nod. "The monsters even as far out as we are now are frequently capable of crushing entire armies." She leaned over, pointing to the dot indicating the city they'd spent much of their time in. "Having an actual city here, that's survived more than one generation, is nothing short of an anomaly. The blessing of the gods, a more superstitious person might say."

"Or it could be the work of one ancient, overpowered jill-of-all-trades with some very well-trained guards," Rayna said.

"One army alone's not enough," Lynn said. "I think it's more the constant flow of adventurers willing to go take risky hunts probably helps quite a bit as well."

"I still can't believe we killed a fire giant today," Clera said. "Even with significant heat resistance, the best strategy for dealing with one of those is to pray to the gods that you're not on its path and it'll burn itself out elsewhere."

Mira wandered away from the conversation not long after Rayna pulled out the map, much more interested in Ian Kellen. "You know, you say it makes no difference but you look a bit uncomfortable," she said.
He shifted on his feet slightly. "Well, it's simply that it 'feels' uncomfortable. Especially for how long it's dragged out by now."
"Well—why not just, y'know, finish it?" she suggested. "You know you're in a dream, so just think that you'd like the changeover to hurry up and finish now and it should happen. I mean—Aria was able to grow wings and fly in here, even though shifters are usually too heavy to do that."

"You're mentally strong enough to turn into an elephant if you want to," Katherine said, putting a hand out toward him for a second.

"Hmph. Well, I suppose it is worth a try. Not the elephant—" he clarified after a brief instant. "Just, ending this."

Dr. Kellen focused on completing the transformation, such as it was. Just hurry up and be female, and whatever else you're turning into, he told his body (which was imaginary anyway). Right away he felt a mildly familiar tug between his legs, and let out a soft "Oh.." A faint blush crossed his face as it became hers; she shrank only a tiny bit more, but her body visibly reshaped as she did so: Hips widening more, shoulders and stomach narrowing further, and a pair of mid-sized breasts rapidly growing into place, making the suit extremely ill-fitting on her. She opened her eyes, frowned at the attire briefly, and it blew about as if in the wind briefly, reorganizing itself. The pants changed into a blue pleated skirt and dark stockings, the tie into a bowtie; the jacket outside and the white shirt inside simply shrank to fit a little better while the outer vest changed into a tan sweater top. After that, she looked up and actually smiled.

"Well, this is much more comfortable," she said. Her voice hadn't actually changed further, but her inflection seemed more feminine now, clearly willing to emphasize its higher range. "Thanks, Mira."

"Heheh, don't mention it," the witch nodded. "I dunno how much your thoughts influenced it exactly, but that's a cute look on you~."
"Thank you," she nodded. The smile faded to Dr. Kellen's more serious expression, but was still clearly present in her eyes.

Clera ran over. "Hey, did I miss something?!" Now that she was looking, the answer was fairly obvious. "I could feel that. I guess you're through?" she said, looking her body-mate over.

"It would appear so. This won't likely have much effect on our behavior, aside from the body being marginally more comfortable."
"Still, I'm glad it's over with. You did seem a bit uncomfortable with it."
"Indeed." She put out a hand toward the witch. "Mira was astute enough to notice."
"Awwh, you're just trying to make me blush now," she said.

Aria, having followed, came up behind the 'new' girl, and put a hand on her head to ruffle her hair a bit. "Hey, you turned out really cute!"
"Aack!" Ian whirled and backed off, visibly blushing. "S-stop that at once!"
"Quit approaching us from behind, would you?!" Clera added.

"Well, that's just no fun," the shifter said.

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Please ignore the text on the image there. I have no idea what it says but it's not (intentionally) relevant, nor was it really feasible for me to remove.