The "Best" RPG Ever-33

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---

The wolf followed them out of town. Zack paused, kneeling over to speak with him for a moment. "Are you planning to come with us today?" The wolf barked what seemed like an affirmative. "We're fighting undead. I don't know if you were listening to what the Captain said, but they don't die like normal monsters. They're not natural." The wolf made a slight grunting noise.
"He says he doesn't care," translated Katherine. "The pack's going out to fight, so as a part of the pack, he's going out to fight."
"Well, okay then. Just wanted to be sure," said the knight, nodding at the wolf before standing up again. "I guess we're going west," he said. "Who has the compass?"

"Oh, I got it!" said Mika, holding up the navigational implement. "We should be going...that-a-way!" She pointed enthusiastically in the direction of west with her free hand, and they started off that way.

"By the way, the new armor looks great~," said the witch.

"It really does," said Katherine with a nod. "Sells the whole 'knight' look a lot better than the default stuff you started out with."

"Yeah, well..I'm just glad it actually has pants instead of a skirt," said Zack. The others, however, could easily see him blushing slightly and his tail wagging a bit more from the compliment.

"How'd you find one that fits so well, though?" said the catgirl. "I mean, it looks like someone tailored it to you or something."
"Some kind of magic with the gem of brightness thing," he said. "The shopkeep used some kind of pearl thing to make it adjust its size some."

"Well, no wonder it shows off your mmffg mgh mmn!" Katherine started to say, but Nora put a hand over her mouth, preventing the rest of it from coming out.

The psion glared, pulling herself out of the elf's grip. What? she telepathed privately.

I don't have to read your mind to know you were going to bring up the curves, she responded. Just let him have this.

Okay, okay...

Before long they encountered a few walking corpses—more skeleton than person in their looks—shambling in the general direction of town. They were still a short ways off, and hadn't noticed the party as far as they could tell. Katherine sorted through her collection of daggers to find the one decorated with red, and fiddled with it briefly until it gained a wreath of fire around its blade. Zack drew his weapon and muttered some sounds he understood to be his new spell; a kind of white fire-like aura appeared around the blade, which he readied for attack.

The knight moved forward first, enough to be in whatever equivalent the undead had to sight. They made some kind of rattling noise and started running toward him. "Whoa, fast undead!" he said, dodging out of a clumy swipe by one of them and bashing another's side with the enchanted blade as it arrived. The bones that took the hit turned into ash right away and fell to the ground, causing the rest of the body they had been attached to to crumple over and lean nearly at a right angle to that side, but still continue standing somehow.

Katherine sent her blade toward the third one, and as soon as it was close Nora pulled out and amplified the fire into a ball of fire big enough to encompass the entire walking corpse. With some effort she kept it going for several seconds before it died out, leaving behind a badly burned skeleton, but still a mobile one. It started to run at the psion, but the wolf tackled it onto the ground, cracking most of the still-intact bones on it into pieces under his weight. When the animal jumped back off of it, it flailed ineffectually, no longer able to get back up.

Meanwhile, Zack continued to duck around the assaults of the other two skeletons; swipes with bony fingers and efforts to bite him were met with more swipes from his sword, some of which they dodged while others caught bits of their body and dismembered them further. When he took off one of their arms it writhed on the ground and nearly grabbed him by the ankle before he jumped back.

Mika moved in closer as he backed away and shot a gout of dark fire from the tip of her broom at the pair. To her surprise, they kept moving, shambling quickly toward her despite clearly burning up, and she took several steps backwards before losing her footing and tumbling over onto her back. "Waah!"

Zack stepped between the walking corpses and the witch and gave a low sweep with his sword, clearing most of the still-living bits on the ground and knocking out what was left of the skeletal legs, causing the remainder of both to tumble onto the ground as a tangled pile of half-burned bones, still trying to move themselves around in a disorganized fashion that just made the entire pile rattle disconcertingly.

While the elf and psion had another go at incinerating what remained of their opponent, Zack offered Mika a hand to help her back onto her feet before stabbing and hacking at the pile of bones until it was a pile of unmoving ash. He kicked at it a few times to be sure there weren't any intact bits left and then sighed, sheathing his weapon and releasing the spell on it.

"This doesn't really seem like it's gonna be as hard as it is just tedious," he said.

"I dunno, the real problem with undead is numbers," said Katherine. "How many d'you think there are closer to the source?"
"I guess we'll find out."

---

Breakfast done, the party split up, the two friends taking on the tougher task of looking for some kind of rentable office space while Aria and Clera looked for paper and writing utensils to buy. "So you're like..a fusion of two people now?"
"To...some extent," she said, thinking carefully. "But I don't seem to have conscious access to Clera-from-here's memories or thoughts while awake, not counting the ones that were communicated to me in the dream. It seems more like...her impulses just arise as my own occasionally."

"It sounds a little like my relationship with the sword demon. Except that in my case the impulses are murderous and get harder to say no to the longer I go without feeding it blood, and if I draw the sword they just take over completely for the most part, and...yeah, I guess it's pretty different actually."

"Do you know of any way to alleviate that?"

"Well...there's a section of my skill tree dedicated to control and suppression, that kind of thing. I'm sure whatever build we get will require dumping a lot of points there since I can't exactly help execute a plan when I'm...you know, totally crazy. Heyy!"

The shifter snapped her head to the side, abruptly halted in place, and backed up, requiring Dr. Kellen to turn around and backtrack a few steps to see what she was looking at. "What?"
"Office supply store!" She pointed dramatically at the sign above the door. "Didn't fail my spot check this time!"

"Your what?"
"Um..sorry, gamer joke. It's like...if you're playing a tabletop game sometimes you roll a die to see if your character notices something in the envirnoment, and if you fail it you don't see it at all."

"So you are using jargon to describe the experience of noticing something that is there," said Clera flatly.

"Well, it's—it sounds dumb when you put it that way."

The winged girl tilted her head slightly. "I did not mean to insult you."
"'S fiiine," she shrugged. "Let's just go inside." Her chipper manner returned as if it had never left. "You look for big paper and pushpins, and I'll see if they have a pack of colored pens or something."

---

The answer to Katherine's question: Lots. The first few clumps of undead weren't much larger than the first one, but as Zack led the way over a hill his head first poked over it to see some twenty or so walking corpses milling around each other, and then immediately ducked back out of sight before they could 'look' his way (or however it was things with half-rotten or nonexistent eyes saw).

"..That's too many to just rush at," he said. "We need some kind of plan."

Mika spoke up: "Well, are there lots in a small area? As long as we have the element of surprise I could use a pumpkin fire-bomb to probably knock over a lot of them."

"...You can make a pumpkin fire-bomb?" said the knight.
"Sure! I've been learning new skills too. It's like a combination of stuff from both of the demons I've absorbed so far."

"Hmm..how much delay can you put on it?" asked Katherine.
"Well, it's more like a...nitro glycer-thing. It explodes when the pumpkin bursts."

"Which means you could make a number of them...and I could probably float them around so they'll come from different directions and the ones that survive will go looking for us in all the wrong places."

"And then we can just chase them down in small groups, and clear out the rest," said Zack, nodding. "Good."

Mika poofed one of the explosive fruits into her hands and carefully lay it down on the ground. Then she did the same thing another four times, each one seeming more difficult than the last until she nearly toppled over from the weight of the last one, and as soon as that was safely on the ground she tumbled back onto her butt, panting. "Phew...that's...really tiring. I'm just gonna sit this fight out if you don' mind."

"Hopefully your luck will keep us from accidentally driving them this way," said the catgirl, nodding. "I'll keep track of them just in case." She made a gesture toward one of the pumpkins and lifted it into the air. It was heavier than the knives she was used to, but she'd taken a few more points in this skill and really just needed to concentrate to bring it a decent range around. Eventually she had a supply of two on either side of the crowd of undead and one directly opposite the party's hill.

Lifting one of the ones on the left in preparation to throw, she looked to Zack and Nora. "Ready?" They nodded, and she threw that one. It crashed through one of the skeletal heads on the way to the ground, shattered and exploded in a gout of dark fire like a magical grenade. The walking corpses, as expected, turned toward the direction it had come from and began to give chase. Then another bomb hit them from the other side, and they scattered in collective confusion.

Once most of their backs were turned, Zack charged up the hill, re-enchanting his blade again on its way out of its sheath, and ran after the largest group, hacking through them from behind. The wolf followed after him, tackling one of the back-row ones to the ground with its weight and then hopping out of the way of an attack straight on top of another, and continuing this pattern with anything in range. The psion lent her fire-dagger to Nora as a source and she moved to the top of the hill, spinning it out into a giant fireball to engulf anything that had been knocked down but not taken out by the first bomb.

The undead on Zack's side began to turn around toward him, but he kept slashing. When they started to get too numerous to fight he turned around and fled in the direction opposite the hill. Those on the other side reached the bomb stored there and Katherine flung it directly upward into the air; it quickly fell and landed directly on one of their heads, exploding in another black fireball. Nora followed this up with another flamethrower-like stream in their general direction, intensifying it enough to reduce them to a pile of ash and wriggling bones.

The knight made it to the pumpkin opposite the hill and picked it up one-handed by the stem before quickly tossing it backwards into the crowd following him. Before the smoke from its explosion cleared he was charging back through them again, slicing mostly at intact legs, arms, and torsos to keep them from moving around too much. Another explosion sounded from the last of Mika's creations as those undead which hadn't noticed him reached it, and he went that way to start clearing out anything still moving while Nora arrived to clear his group out.

Soon there was nothing but partially-charred, barely moving bones in any of the piles, and Zack began the work of tracking those down and smiting them the rest of the way to ash. The wolf followed him, sniffing at and kicking around some of the dust in an effort to expose anything the knight missed. Nora methodically concentrated fire in small sections of another pile until it seemed like there was nothing left, and then blew a gust of wind across the ash to reveal what really was left, and repeated this until they really were all gone. Eventually they had eridacted the whole group, and met (Mika joining as well) in the middle, roughly where the crowd of undead had been in the first place.

"Hey, we're not bad when we work together, yeah?" said Katherine, grinning.

"I'll still be glad when this is over. I feel more like an exterminator than any kind of hero," said Zack, crossing his arms.

"I helped!" chriped Mika.

"Yep!" the catgirl nodded, and patted the small witch on the head a couple of times. "If we can catch them off guard making a bunch of pumpkin bombs to set off like this is probably the best plan we've got in absence of some kind of cleric with a real 'turn undead' spell."

Nora smiled with the group, but once they had turned to continue toward the source of the trouble she frowned slightly, thinking. Those men who had kidnapped her had said something about her being a priestess...if only that were true, maybe she could have some sort of anti-undead power. But it seemed like everything she had was specifically natural in nature (for want of a better phrasing), and not at all tuned to combat the unnatural. Well, at least the fire magic was working for them.

---

"How do you rent office space in a fantasy world?" said Lynn. The two friends were walking along the streets in hopes of finding such a thing.
"How do you rent office space in our world?" replied Rayna. "I have no idea. We never did that kind of thing."

"Nope, never were in that kind of business. Illusion-veil-whatever sense telling you anything?"
"Not particularly. For this I think we'd have to ask around. Maybe some kind of businessperson?"
"What's a businessperson look like in a fantasy world?"
"What's one look like in our world?"

"Suit and tie, or maybe a dress. Formal clothes," Lynn shrugged.

"Or it's casual Friday and they're literally indistinguishable from normal people."

"Is it Friday?"

"I dunno. I'm not sure if this world even has the concept of a week."
"Can't you just sense what day it is or whatever?"

The foxgirl looked up in the sky, shielding her eyes with a hand over her brow. "...Theraday. Whatever that means."

"I feel like we're getting off track."

"We are getting off track."

Rayna approached the next stranger she saw. "Excuse me, do you know anything about how someone would rent some office space? Like, one office?"

"Uhh..there's a community center over on Foxview," he said after a second of thought, pointing a vague direction. "They have rooms people can use for stuff like that, I think."

"Ah, thanks," she nodded.

A couple of seconds later, Lynn asked: "Do you have any idea where Foxview is?"

"Sure, this way. I can see street names if I focus just right."

As she led the way to their latest destination, the foxgirl hmmed to herself. "Say Lynn."
"Yeah?"
"Have you ever—I mean, since we got here and this stuff happened to us," she said, gesturing vaguely at her body's present state, "—have you ever wanted to...y'know...touch fluffy tail?"
"No," she said flatly.
"Aww, why not?"
"Because you're my best friend, and I respect you way too much to think of you like a stuffed animal. Or a real animal, or whatever."
"I wouldn't mind, though, really. It really is remarkably fluffy and soft," she said, bringing it in front so she could hug it briefly before letting it go back to its duty of helping her balance or whatever.

"I really don't want to," she shook her head. "Do you have weird new instincts that want to be petted or something?"
"Nooo, but I am a little curious what it feels like. I guess it's not fair to ask it of you, though. You've already found someone to pet, right?" She stuck out her tongue.

"Oh, come on! You gotta make it about that?" she said, looking away in annoyance. "I also respect him too much, for your information."

"I get it, I get it. Your relationship's not to that level yet. I'm sure it will be in three, maybe four more dates."

Lynn was blushing furiously by this point. "Can we just change the subject please?"

"Okay, okay. Anyway, I'm sure Rose wouldn't mind helping me out with this at all."

"The weird dragon girl? Isn't she kind of a pervert?"
"You've barely even met her."
"Well, I listened to what you guys said she acted like, and I think we're dealing with a perv here."

"If she is, she's the nicest one I've ever met," said Rayna, "maybe not including myself. Hey, we can do a trade! She lets me see what her scales feel like in exchange..."

"Oh wow, you're serious." Lynn frowned. "Are you sure your mind hasn't been screwed with on the way to looking like that?"

"Mn..maybe it has? Not nearly enough to stop being the same person, but I feel a little curious about things I didn't care about before, maybe, or didn't have available to be curious about. Anyway, I like it. Don't you like the way being with Rast makes you feel?"
"I...yeah, I guess so," she said, blushing again. And then snapped: "Hey, I thought you said you'd change the subject!"

"I did, it just looped back around on us. Your new boyfriend is like a conversational boomerang."

"I'll make your face like a boomerang in a minute."

---

After clearing out a few increasingly large groups of undead, what awaited the party over the next hill was a strangely barren-looking patch of land. There was grass and occasional trees everywhere before, but this area was just dust, dirt and rocks. Zack instinctively stopped shy of the sharp border between nature and not as soon as he saw it, leading the rest of the party to pause behind him. "..What is this?"
"I don't..i-it looks like.." Nora stepped a little closer, and kneeled next to the border. "Th-there's nothing there...the elements related to life are gone here."

"It looks like dark magic to me," said Mika. "Nothing tasty like a demon, but..."
"I would guess our necromancer. Or whatever is making the undead," finished Katherine. "I don't sense a mind anywhere over there, so it's probably an artifact like the captain said."

There was suddenly a kind of...pulse. All of them felt it, and instinctively stepped back; about an inch's thickness of grass out from the previous border suddenly withered and died, expanding the dead land out further. "I think we've got more problems from it than making undead," said Zack, fighting that instinct to step up onto the dead land. There wasn't any immediate harm to doing so; it was just dirt after all.
The catgirl nodded. "Either way, we already signed up to deal with this."

"I would guess that pulse meant it just summoned more skeletons," said Mika, "should I start..uh..."

"What?"

The knight followed Mika's eyse forward again. A whirl of bones and body parts was coming up from the ground, rising up past a hill opposite them, quickly placing and knitting itself together into a gigantic body.
"Yes, make a bomb. Soon as possible," said Katherine. "Keep some energy for running or flying."

"This should at least be a more interesting fight," said Zack, unsheathing and re-enchanting the sword again. "I hope you're ready, I don't see any way to keep that from noticing us."

The towering mass of misshapen, rotting body parts finally formed a head, complete with a pair of big curved horns fitted together out of a bunch of smaller fragments of bones. There was what looked like a handle of a weapon glowing a deep purple color lodged into its chest, the rest of whatever it was buried deep inside its body. As soon as the whirlwind of forming parts concluded, dropping a few unneeded bits and pieces unceremoniously to the ground, it opened its "mouth" and somehow generated a loud, rumbling roar from it, before beginning to charge straight at them.