The "Best" RPG Ever-67

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---

"Well, this is long enough," Katherine announced, standing up. "I'm goin' out. Probably be at the library if there's some other disaster in the next hour and a half."

"So, you took the shield skill?" Mira asked, grinning.
"Duh." A slight visible shimmer appeared around her as she brought the shield up, but there was no obvious difference afterward. "You know, maybe I'll buy some umbrellas, or like—a magic equivalent at least, while I'm at it." When she opened the door to town, the rain could be seen deflecting off of her on her way out.

After that, the witch observed: "So, Rayna's still asleep?"
"About normal," said Lynn. "I've always preferred to get up in what can be reasonably called 'the morning' when I can help it, but Ray always took pride in sleeping past noon when he could get away with it—which was most of the time back on Earth, with our job."
"Hmph."
"..What?" Lynn turned toward Zack, who still didn't look up from a book he was reading.

"Leeet's not drag that up again," the witch suggested. "Anyway, I guess lunch is on our own with the usual chef going off to the library. I mean—I'm not hungry yet since I basically just had breakfast, but I don't see any reason not to assume the kitchen's wide open." She stood up herself. "There's a few magic tomes in the library, it might help me to study some."
"And you want to see what Aria's up to, right?" Lynn said.
"Maybe."

---

This was stupid. It wasn't so much a bad plan, as a total absence of any kind of plan at all. Katherine was going to go to the library, and...check if the mind that had been there was still there? And then what? If he wasn't there—which was more than likely, by any reasonable guess at a normal person's behavior—then it was a wasted trip she would have to account for to the others somehow or other. If he was there—what, was she supposed to walk up to a complete stranger and say "I'm glad we're in a library because I'm checking your brain out"? Or something else equally stupid and nonsensical?

On reflection, the powers she'd gained since coming to this world created a number of experiences that would have been impossible to imagine before, and were even more impossible to convey in words to someone who hadn't had them: Thinking five different things at once, each in equal detail to a single fully-focused train of thought from before. Directing mental traffic back and forth between some ten plus other people effortlessly. Feeling the thoughts of every person in a nearby crowd at once and not being the least bit overwhelmed or confused by the influx of foreign information, some unconscious part of herself filtering it all and eagerly waiting to glean any desired metadata on request. More than anything else, there was this sensation of total control over her own mind and thoughts that transcended anything previously understood to be possible. In short, this was the first time since becoming a psion that she was still doing something and did not understand why. Two or three of the parallel processors making up her state of mind (one of which was currently busy deflecting raindrops off of her) concluded repeatedly that this behavior was nonsensical and purposeless, but her feet continued to carry her toward the library.

She entered the library with an outward appearance of purpose, dropping the shield while telekinetically pulling the door shut behind her and continuing past the front desk toward a random aisle as if she already knew of a book she wanted on that aisle. This continued until nobody's eyes were on her, and she stopped, taking a deep breath to calm an excited physical state she'd not quite managed to notice before now and mentally reaching out across the building—nothing more than the usual surface skimming.

Physically, her heart pounded in her ears for a second—the mind was here, easily identifiable and thinking similar thoughts to before! Katherine could feel her ears straightening and her tail moving much more rapidly than usual from an incommunicable thrill. He was in nearly the same place; intercepted physical feedback read him sitting at one of the library's desks hunched over, eyes focused closely on a book, whose contents were passing through his language center:

"I'm afraid I don't know what you mean," he said. "This is how I have always been. Have you never heard of infants born with feeble limbs? Broken eyes?"
"Yes, certainly," I said. Then, reading his analogy: "But gods are not born."

"Aren't we? When did you become an expert?" he said, quirking an eyebrow.

"Who bore you, then? Other gods you'd rather us not know of?"
He merely laughed. "I'm afraid this line of inquiry really isn't going to go anywhere for you. The others just don't think any of you are ready. Dear reader of the reader: You will get the truth he whom you seek seeks soon; please be patient.¹"

His eyes jumped down to the bottom of the page, quickly processing the related footnote:

¹I don't remember hearing, nor writing that last sentence, yet I can't bring myself to edit it out. Most curious.

Then, back to where he was again:
I was going to ask what he meant by that, but he interrupted before I could form the words.

"Perhaps there's another topic you'd like information about, while this moment of lucidity lasts?" When he said it, I was convinced of it; the image appeared before and around us—the concept of my next prepared query...

The mind she was looking at leaned away from the book at this point, stretching and shaking his head, his surface thought a complaint about 'another dead end'. Katherine had succeeded in physically calming herself by this point, although her curiousity was piqued as to the exact subject of the book, or the nature of whatever research he was trying to do.

That one odd sentence hitched in her mind when it really hit her: It was easy to interpret it as being addressed to the mind reader of the person reading the book, provided that person was seeking someone who was themselves seeking something, all of which matched the current situation. But surely, whatever book this was was old enough to have run upon this situation before? If it really was some kind of intentional message then it amounted to the first actual contact any of them had gotten from any of the gods who may or may not have summoned them to this world, and for...what? Reassuring her that a total stranger she was vaguely attracted to would learn the truth about...something, soon? It didn't seem like a sufficiently important or helpful message to necessitate such a convoluted way of sending it, especially if—as it seemed to be—it came from the god who could literally walk into anyone's dreams whenever he/she wanted to!

Putting that aside, Katherine decided that this was a good time to stop being a telepathic stalker and at least attempt to talk to this person. Just standing around listening to his thoughts was...creepy, and wrong; and if he wasn't interested at all in her company then it would be easy enough to avoid him.

For the moment he was looking idly around the library, gathering his thoughts and attempting to conjure up a new lead for...whatever it was he was after...from thin air. It meant walking up to say hello wouldn't particularly distract him from focusing on something, so it was a perfect opportunity. After reassuring herself of this five or six times, the catgirl went on past the shelves she'd been standing between, and over to where he was.

He was a tall, lean, blond-haired elf (those first two traits, she was starting to suspect, were simply a natural part of elven anatomy here). To her body he registered as not entirely unattractive, but not particularly stunning either. His clothes were some soft black slacks and a thick, long-sleeved plaid shirt. He didn't particularly take notice of her, until she had come to the opposite end of the desk he was stationed at. That was enough to bring him out of the deliberately-distracted state of seeking inspiration and into a social mindset.

"Hello there..can I help you?"

"Um.." Well, now that she was here it was a little hard to explain, wasn't it? "I guess I'm curious what you're researching," she said after only a brief pause—but her mind being stuck that long was equivalent to a normal one leaving the conversation hanging in an awkward silence of probably thirty seconds.

"Oh, really? I suppose you see enough monsters for yourself and start to wonder where they come from too, eh?" he said with a small chuckle. He put out a hand for a friendly shake: "I'm Jacob Kniris."

"Uh, Katherine," she said, returning the shake, but introductions on her part weren't really necessary.

"Pleased to meet you in person," he nodded once their hands had disengaged. It was easy to forget their party had been steadily gaining a reputation in this town; he had already identified her as the 'mind reader' already and was now actively assuming she knew exactly what his research was.

"So, monsters?" she said. "What's that have to do with...?"

"This?" he said, waving to the book. "Another dead end," he said disappointedly. "I spent and risked much more than was reasonable to come out this way because somehow a frontier town library is the only place with a fully intact copy of a lot of points of reference I've been trying to chase down, including this one. And of course the passage I was interested in here is mostly just a classic Bimorphaeus handwave, complete with a cryptic message to who-knows-whom."
"Handwave?" she questioned, quietly using her mind to pick up a chair next to her and pull it back, then slowly sitting down in it while he talked.

"You know. She or he says something like 'that's not for you to know, don't you want to talk about something else'? And as soon as he or she suggests it the target finds they do want to talk about something else. I'm sure it feels quite natural to change the subject in the moment, but it's downright infuriating to read or hear about it. Direct conversations with her or him are rare enough as it is."

"What were you hoping to find out?" Katherine asked.
"Surely you're humoring me," Jacob said, leaning back in his chair a bit.

"I like to respect people's privacy as much as my powers let me," she said. "You haven't actually said or thought loudly enough what exactly the topic of your research is since I walked up."

"Oh, really? You must be pretty young, right?"

"That's kind of a rude question," she said, dropping her ears slightly.
"I'm sorry, I just mean, older psions usually get tired of being 'nice' to 'normal' folk, and start making conversations as efficient as they possibly can. You, on the other hand..."

"I am not 'being nice', I just happen to enjoy relatively normal conversations," she said, crossing her arms. "So you were saying...?"

"I wasn't, but I guess I should've been," Jacob said. "Well, my area of research is monsters. Or more specifically, I'm trying to work out their origin, or their specific nature, or how chaos magic works...it's gone a lot of places because I keep ramming my head into dead ends. Most recently I developed a hypothesis regarding the wounds of the gods."

"You mean like how Sophol is missing an arm, and that scar on Haestra.."
"Right, right," he nodded. "Even Bimorphaeus has occasionally suggested that he or she is somehow damaged, but never specified the nature of the injury. The thought goes like this: The gods are well-known to be the source of magic, knowledge about magic, various other kinds of power...but they vehemently deny any connection to chaos magic. They are consistently well-pleased to assist people in the extermination of monsters, just as much as they usually profess neutrality in our wars against each other. Our magic is of them, but chaos magic is not. Its nature must be different somehow. Maybe even opposed."

The psion just nodded, not merely interested in what he was saying but somewhat entranced by the 'sensation' of the thoughts sliding out of the deeper recesses of his mind to be spoken, in a way that—as usual—would be impossible to explain or communicate to anyone who hadn't experienced it for themselves.

"There's no way the gods hurt each other that way; as much of their relationship as we mortals can work out has been friendly for all of recorded history. And anyway, there's reason to believe that any damage inflicted by 'normal' magic should heal by 'normal' magic too, which they would be more than capable of doing in all this time, rather than retaining a set of inconvenient injuries forever. So they must have been injured by chaotic magic somehow.

"The trouble with this idea is that—well—they're gods. The sheer amount of power necessary to permanently injure one of them isn't present in a thousand monsters. Besides that, surely their fighting prowess would outmatch such an army and prevent the injuries even if there was enough power technically present." He shrugged. "I'm not the first person to come up with the idea, either, but nobody has gotten around the hurdle of there simply being no evidence of anything sufficiently powerful."

"So, you were hoping to find an account of Bimorphaeus telling someone how they got hurt," she said, pointing toward the book.

"Right. But...handwave," he said, shaking his head. "At least this place seems ripe for more practical research into chaotic magic itself. The ambient levels are much higher here than inland, which I'm sure is correlated to the more frequent monster attacks somehow or other. It'd be helpful if I could study a monster's magic signature more closely; I've read accounts of that sort of thing before, but the level of detail I need just doesn't seem to exist in writing. But, well, I'm not really confident I'd survive an encounter of any kind with a monster. Or actually, to be more honest I think I'd be too terrified to carry out the kind of scans I need." He shook his head, disappointed somewhat in himself.

"Hmmn." Katherine had an idea. She leaned forward, grinning, her tail twitching back and forth eagerly behind her. "I think I know a monster you could look over very safely."
"Really?" He was confused and a little scared by the suggestion, and also by her shift in posture and expression. "Did you..actually, capture one or, something like that?"
"Something like it, sure," she said, nodding.

---

Aria sat up and turned to the witch as she walked in. "Hey there! ...What?"

"Aah, nothing." It was harder than expected to hide her disappointment that they were still just sitting across from each other like that, even if she had caught the shifter at least leaning forward some. "Just thought you might want to know Katherine stepped out, so lunch is prolly on our own if you're hungry."
"Didn't you just eat?" Loren said.

"Me? That was almost an hour ago, but yeah—that's why I'm here instead of the kitchen."
Aria said, "Wh—an hour?" Loren seemed equally surprised by this.

"Well, you know what they say about time and flying," Mira shrugged, heading to where she'd put the magic tomes.

However, Loren was confused. "No, what?"

"When you're having fun?" Aria attempted to prompt him. "How do I know that one and you don't?"
"Can you run the whole thing by me again?"
"Time flies when you're having fun. Is the saying."
"Oh." He shrugged. "I usually find there's not enough of it to get my work done, instead."
"Well, you have fun with your work, don't you?" Mira interjected.

"Would you have fun painstakingly redrawing poorly rendered sigils for six hours straight?" he said, "—for example."

"Well, there must be some part of it you like," Aria suggested.
"Sure, the pay. And it lets me travel all over, meet a lot of people."
She crossed her arms, giving a deeply skeptical look. "You don't find any satisfaction at all when everything snaps together and the thing finally just works like it's supposed to?"

"Well, I can't deny that...wait, how do you—"
"Just a guess," she deflected quickly. "Maybe some unconscious memory prompted it if it was that dead on?"

"Perhaps..."

After thinking about it for a second, he said, "So, this whole time you haven't consciously remembered anything new, have you?"
"Not..really?" Aria shrugged. "I mean, the way you describe me sounds 'right' somehow, it sounds like things I could imagine I actually did. But there aren't any new, like, memories of events, names, places, people...nothing like that."

"And Katherine hasn't been able to help you remember much, either."

"Um. Right," she said—not that they had specifically tried for much beyond his name. But then: "She can't actually get in my head when I'm awake, the demon just keeps chanting 'blood' at her. She's able to go into my dreams, but, umm, the one time we managed to pull a memory out it seemed to take a lot of effort with barely any results. There was...we basically got my brain to pull up what my name used to be, and I—felt something 'hearing' it, but it wasn't much, in the end."

"Hmn. I don't suppose—well, I hesitate to ask, but are there any, stronger, psions in town? Or, more telepathically gifted at least?"

"Katherine told me Tsaron was a psion," Mira said, looking up from her book.
"Really? What about—" Aria started to ask if he knew about them being from Earth, and particularly how he'd reacted, but stopped herself in time. "Um. She didn't say anything like that when we first met him."

"He fooled her. She thinks he was suppressing any thoughts leading to that conclusion your whole first visit, all without her even noticing."
"Weelll...I guess that qualifies as 'more powerful', yep," said the shifter, turning back to Loren. "He was super nice the first time. Helped me learn how to meditate so I wouldn't go insane from being stuck in blood-obsession-land every night. We should go visit him after the rain lets up!"

"You, uh, don't think he would mind. Your showing up unannounced?"
"He specifically invited us to come back for tea."

"When Zack and her were out to check out some books yesterday," Mira interjected again, "they ran into him and he said, I quote, 'Please drop by for tea sometime soon, and bring as many of your friends as you like'. I dunno if he knew that might include Loren, buuut."

"Yeah, you definitely count as a 'friend'!" Aria said, nodding encouragingly.

Loren sighed. "I—really didn't want to bring this up, but psions kind of unsettle me. The worst part is they know that almost right away, and about half are offended, and the other half tend to think it's funny and like to mess with me."
"Aww come on, it can't be that bad," said Aria. "You seemed okay around Katherine."
"Frankly, I'm not sure she's been paying special attention to my thoughts, and I'm grateful for it. Still, I've kept my interaction with her to a minimum..."

"You know she's gonna end up dragging you along whether you want to go or not," Mira commented.

"I just—there's no reason why I have to be there," Loren protested.

"Hey, Tsaron is a perfectly friendly old elf. Like a telepathic grandpa," Aria said. "Oh! And the last time we visited, he gave us gifts. Don't you want a piece of sweet enchanted weaponry for your very own?"

"Not...really?"