The "Best" RPG Ever-22

 First / Previous / Next / Latest

---

Rose slowly opened her eyes to find that it was still dark out. For a few seconds or so she had a mental disconnect with the collection of odd feelings, namely: Being curled up on grass, having a tail, having wings, having horns (one of which had gotten buried in the soil slightly thanks to her sleeping position), being a woman and all the things that came with that. But it didn't take her long to adjust, calmly reminding herself what had happened yesterday.

She blinked a couple of times, seeing that, as promised, the cute witch girl...Mika, right?...was up keeping watch. Mika gave a cheerful wave when she sat up, and she waved back. Well, at least one person in their party didn't seem too suspicious of her. Would the entire town feel this way about a poor dragon-girl, or was it unique to these adventurers, she wondered. Maybe there was some way to get the town to like her right away, make a really good first impression or something? She thought about it for a moment, putting her index finger in her mouth near-unconsciously and then distracting herself by running her tongue along the weird scaly texture it had before pulling it back out to concentrate.

People...liked plants, right? Things like pretty flowers were nice, but there were other reasons to like plants. A town would have potion-maker-people, and they had uses for a lot of fairly rare, hard-to-find plants. She had entire groves full of such plants, Rose realized. All she needed to do was take some along and offer it as a gift! Easy. She skittered off eagerly, practically on all fours, to take care of that before the others could wake up and think she'd abandoned them, not considering just telling Mika what she was doing until she'd already gone what felt like too far off to bother coming back.

When Rose returned a little after sunrise, but before she came into view, she heard the wolf-girl..er, guy, berating Mika. "Why didn't you wake me up, then? This is kind of important!"
"Well, I disagree," said the witch. "She'd just woken up. I dunno about you, but there's some things I don't feel like I need to announce to every stranger that I do when I wake up in the morning."

The dragon-girl got in view of them in time to see Zack attempting to come up with an angry response, mouth entirely open, for a good several seconds before finally deciding he had been out-argued and closing it up again. Rose decided this was a pretty good time to show back up.

"Hello!" she said cheerfully, waving at the four girls (err, three and one guy...) with her free hand. In the other one was a closed, basket-like container she'd grown out of leaves that was now full of a collection of nice-looking flowers, herbs, and a few other plants she knew to be rare, useful, or both. "I just wanted to bring some of my forest's plants to your town," she said, "like, as a gift? Could one of you hold onto this while I carry those guys?" It was an idea she'd had only now, about simultaneously with realizing she'd need both hands to carry four vine-wrapped people, but the more she thought about it the it seemed like a good idea. If she trusted them with this precious cargo it meant she trusted them in general, so they should trust her. Right?

They looked at each other and Nora stepped forward, offering a hand. Rose passed over the handle and then walked up to the bandit-kidnapper guys, pleased that her vines had held all night. She pulled on a couple of them, her magic repairing any minor damage while checking to find that they were still just as strong as when they'd grown into place.

"I h-had to knock them out again last n-night," said the elf girl. "T-to be honest, I d-don't care that much if one of them gets a c-c-concussion."

"Hmm. I never knew you had such a vengeful streak," said Katherine with what seemed to be an approving tone.

"I-I'm not...th-they were...they," stammered Nora, but she failed to come up with any decent rebuttal and at this point just gave up.

"So, you're ready to leave?" the knight asked, and Rose nodded.

"Mhm." She extended the vines and combined them in pairs, so she had two "ropes" to drag a pair along in each. "Lead the way!" she pointed dramatically, and then after an awkward pause added, "Or, uh, I guess I could lead the way out of my forest."

As they headed through the relatively thorn-free path, Mika looked around. "This place is really pretty," she said. "Do you ever get monsters trying to trample on it?"
"Nope!" said the dragon-girl, nearly glowing with pride from the compliment. "Nasty monsters know better than to tread on my territory. Come to think of it, I wouldn't mind if folks from your town used it as a safe haven now and then. As long as they don't mess it up. You girls are always welcome, though." After a brief pause: "Uh...and you too, Zack."

"Thank you," he said flatly. It was hard to tell whether or not she'd offended him again.

Once they finally left the forest, everyone seemed a little more tense and alert. Rose didn't feel terribly worried, though; she felt confident that she could beat up any monster in the region and protect everyone! Or at least..she certainly felt like she wanted to do that, maybe get a chance to be their hero? Not quite enough to intentionally attract monsters, if she had a way to do that. No, she decided, that would be mean and dumb. And she really didn't have any way to do it anyhow.

---

The board out in town square seemed like the best place to look for an easy kill-something job. "Hmm..killing a bunch of dire wolves seems easy enough," said Aria, picking out one piece of paper.

Lynn took a closer look. "...Nope, see that stamp? Someone already took care of it."
"Oh. Then what's it still doing here?" Aria crumpled up the paper and then uncrumpled it again and started tearing it up nervously. She'd been unusually antsy all morning, and the others thought it was because the sword was hungry. That wasn't false, but...

"Uh...hmm. What's this, an old missing person request?" said the illusionist, pulling a paper mostly buried in other ones. It had a sketch of a female elf's face on it, along with some further description, noting that a priestess of some sort had gone missing. "I know I know," she said when the others looked at her, "we can't do this one now. But I'm gonna memorize this in case I just happen to run into her somewhere."

Lynn pulled on another request, looking over it. It was for a small band of men who'd started raiding supply caravans recently. Aria glanced over her shoulder. "Grrr, they want those guys alive if possible. I don't think taking human blood is a good precedent anyway." The archer nodded and put that one back on the board.

"Say, does this world have vampires?" asked Rayna. "If there are non-evil vampires, there might be some kind of black market for animal blood or something."
"I don't think a few blood bags will make much of a dent," said the shifter, shaking her head. "Besides, it's so much better fresh..."

"What if we just bought farm animals periodically? Or..you could take up a job slaughtering them! Just let your sword drink all the blood, and the meat would still be usable."
"That is disgusting," said Lynn. "Please stop."

"Hey, I'm just tryin' to be helpful here."

"Then look for a request we can take," said Aria, her teeth visibly sharpening.

"Okay, okay...hey, this looks good." The fox-girl pulled off another piece of paper from behind the others, showing it to her party-mates. "Some kind of giant bird swooped on town at night and killed some people, took the bodies with it. They've tracked down its nest but it'll notice a big raiding party coming and just fly away. I can make it not notice us at all, until it's too late," she said with a vicious grin.

"You're a little scary, you know that," said Lynn.

"Hey. It killed people. I'm allowed to be hateful toward things that kill people."

"Yeah, this looks great," said Aria with a nod. "I wonder if its blood tastes like chicken."

"..I'm going to go insane between the two of you," said the archer after a long stare. "Let's just go take this request so we can get it over with."

As they started toward the guardhouse, Aria looked over at the fox-girl and asked, "Hey, how come you kept noticing jobs that were behind a bunch of other ones?"

"Uh...more of the meta-data vision stuff. I was actually looking at a big list of job titles instead of the physical board itself. Once I decided I was interested in one by its title, I knew exactly where to find the paper it was on."

---

Somewhere in the middle of the trip, Zack and Katherine both stopped in their tracks, looking around and listening. "What?" said Mika, looking back and forth between them.

"..Buzzing," said the knight, turning in the direction it was coming from, and then tilting his head upward. He drew his weapon, and the others who had weapons followed suit. Seeing their behavior, Rose let go of the prisoners for now and produced from her own inventory a thorny rose, which had apparently been in there for a while now. It seemed like a natural choice to grow it out into a thick, spiky vine and use that as a longer-range weapon than her claws.

The others could hear the buzzing by now, as well as see what it was in the distance. Four of what looked to be gigantic wasps were coming straight down toward them. "I don't understand," said Katherine, "why giant bugs have to exist. Of all the things that could be around, why giant bugs?"

"Aww, don't worry," said Rose, "I can squish 'em." Once they came a little closer, she drew back her whip and struck forward with it, making it grow even more mid-strike, long enough to wrap its way around the main body of the bug it hit. She retracted the vine between herself and the captive wasp quickly before tossing it to one side, smashing it into the ground.

By now the other three had arrived, all three of them rushing at the dragon-girl. Zack moved in front of one, shifting back to dark form and drawing his shield in one motion and blocking a strike from its stinger. Mika tossed a regular pumpkin at another in a successful gambit to get its attention, while Katherine focused on what small bit of a mind the third one had, drawing its aggression toward herself.

Rose's bug slipped out of her whip's grasp, though not without cutting itself across its thorns along the way. It buzzed straight toward her; she leapt aside, her wings flapping and allowing her just enough air to land back on her feet and smack it with the whip again before it could change direction, knocking it farther away from her.

The witch waited for her opponent to get a little closer, and then summoned up some demonic fire right in its path, too close for it to correct around. It went straight through the flame, and Mika remembered why she didn't usually draw aggro. She hopped on her broom and flew in both senses of the word, the giant bug following her closely but unable to surpass her in speed.

Zack took a number of unsuccessful swipes with his sword, the giant bug agilely dodging each one. Nora moved a little closer and raised up a wall of earth in the way of its next dodge, allowing him a clean swipe through its side as it rammed into the wall. The bug flew up out of Zack's reach and down toward the elf, but the knight moved between them and bashed its stinger with his shield again, knocking it backwards. As it spun around in the air, trying to regain its equilibrium, Nora raised up a tall dome of rock and earth around it, pulled the entire thing closer in, compacting the dirt so it would be harder, and then collapsed the whole thing down on it. Zack followed this up with a quick stab to the mound of dirt, which he felt go straight through the bug's outer shell into softer flesh.

Katherine hopped and ducked around the wasp as it continuously tried to sting her, swiping at its wings from behind with her knives every opportunity she got. It seemed like her strikes were connecting, but the thing kept on flying anyway. Eventually she gave up on that and tried swinging around to the front and stabbing its eyes. This proved to be a little harder to do, as the bug saw the knives coming and flew to one side to dodge them. At least this gave her a reprieve from her own acrobatics.

Rose made short work of her opponent, wrapping it up more thoroughly when it came for her again and then squeezing her whip tight enough to crush its exoskeleton in on the rest of its body. Then she turned her attention to the one chasing Mika, watching the two of them fly around and looking for a good opportunity to attack. Soon she had one, as Mika came in for a dive directly to the right of the dragon-girl. Rose drew her weapon back and timed her strike carefully, swinging left against the wasp's momentum and catching it right where the fire from before had left its shell weakened; her whip crashed straight through its body and it went down. Mika flew back up into the air, still panicking and not looking back.

Katherine finally managed to get a small cut across one of the wasp's eyes before Zack showed up, chopping straight down and forcing the wasp to one side. The psion looked at him for a second, transmitting an idea much more quickly than the words required to describe it, and he nodded, beginning a few methodical strikes at it while Katherine moved her knives into place. He got the bug looking straight at him, and drove it from one side to another, and finally backwards, straight at a steady wall of four knives. The bug impaled itself, but the wounds were fairly shallow and it seemed about to free itself. However, this held it still just long enough for the knight to run it through with his own weapon, and finally the loud buzzing stopped.

Katherine looked up at Mika, who had been yelling into the air for the past minute or so. Hey, fight's over, you can shut up and land now.

Mika's flight slowed down; she turned her head around and finally noticed that her persuer was gone. Breathing a small sigh of relief, she floated carefully back to earth and got off of her broom. "Eheh...sorry about that," she said.

"It's fine, you lead him straight to me," said Rose, grinning.

"Hey, did I see you make fire earlier?"
"Uh..." The witch only just now remembered the bit about not mentioning fire to this woman.

"Can you control it or just summon it?" she asked eagerly.

"W-well, I mean it's not really a natural fire, it's like a demonic thing. So I can control it because of that, but like, not normal fire."

"Ohh, okay," she said, nodding, and went back over to check on the wrapped-up criminals. They were, predictably, still unconscious and still wrapped up.

Mika looked at Nora with some surprise; the weaver gave a simple 'I don't know' shrug. So instead she decided to get it from the source. "I uh...I thought you didn't like fire?" she said, moving closer to the dragon-girl, who was putting the vines together to drag the prisoners along a little more.

"Well, I don't like fire because it burns me, or my plants...but I'd love having a friend who can control it!" said Rose. "Because a person who can control fire can take it away from me and my plants, even better than a bunch of water."

"Ah, alright."

They started on their way again, Katherine leading the way with the map. After a short while, the psion looked back at Rose. "Hey, uh, I don't want to offend you or anything, but...you are part dragon, right?"

"Mhm!" she nodded cheerfully.

"So...do you have, a breath weapon?" She looked confused. "Like...something you can breathe out instead of normal air that does something magical? I guess not fire, since that wouldn't make any sense."

"Oh, yes! Well, I wouldn't call it a weapon exactly. I can breathe minty breath!" She huffed out a bit of aquamarine-colored smoky stuff as a demonstration. "It smells minty fresh, and it can heal people, animals and plants. It even makes bigger cuts and things not hurt as bad! But uh...it's really easy to set on fire, so I have to be careful with it."
"Huh." The catgirl thought for a moment. "If it's that flammable you could use it as a weapon. Breathe it over something you don't like and then just light a match under it."

"I guess so? I don't like being close to fire, or things that can make fire, uh, other than friendly people who have control over it and won't accidentally catch. I guess I could do it if I had a friend who'd light it after I got away from it."

"Hey, how...close are we to your town by now?" she asked a moment later. "I am really strong, but carrying these guys for much longer is gonna really tire me out."

"We're fairly close, should be there before noon," said Katherine.

"Oh, good! So lunch could be there! They're...not vegetarians there, are they?" she asked, looking at Zack. "I mean, I like fruit, but my sharp teeth aren't just for show."

"Yes, they have meat," he said flatly, briefly wondering why she'd asked him about this before remembering he was visibly part wolf.