The "Best" RPG Ever-68

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I'd like to give a small content warning here, about a certain paragraph in the section involving Mira. It isn't particularly graphic or detailed in description, but what it describes is sort of graphic in nature (think "fantasy world serial killer"). It begins after "Let me tell you what he'd been doing." I knew I couldn't avoid some description of this kind somewhere in this story, but hopefully this is sufficient warning to brace yourself, or skip over the paragraph, if you're particularly sensitive to this kind of thing.

 

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The rain steadily died off over the early afternoon, and was nearly gone by the time Katherine left the library and returned to the house. Everyone had gone their separate ways, it seemed, with only Zack (and the wolf, on the floor next to the couch) left in the living room. His ears twitched slightly when the door opened, and he looked up from what seemed to be a book on sword techniques, complete with several drawings and diagrams. "Hey, welcome back."
"Hi."
"Guess you found whatever you were after?"
"Yeah! Sure." He looked back at the book, almost broadcasting an unwillingness to pry or ask anything more.

The psion came the rest of the way in, closing the door and sitting across from him, leaning forward slightly. Say—can you get our friend there to sit still for a stranger?

Zack looked up at her for a second, and back down again. He'll sit still if I tell him to. Easier if someone introduces him, so they're not a 'stranger'. I mean, he's not barking at Loren anymore, is he? Why?

I met someone who's...researching something I think we have reason to be interested in. It's complex to explain why that is, but—anyway, he wants to do some kind of magic scan on a monster. And I thought, well, we conveniently have a friendly one right here. More or less.

This 'scan' won't hurt him or anything?

No, it's just a passive reading from what I could tell.

Zack shrugged. Shouldn't be a problem, then.

Great! I already..invited him to show up tonight. The knight turned his eyes off the book for a couple of seconds to give her a half-lidded 'of course' look, and then went back to reading. He had something else to say, but waited until he was finished with the current paragraph and turned the page past it.

"So, Aria wants to go visit Tsaron now."

"Yeah?"
"She came up with the idea that he might be able to 'fix' the broken memories or something, and she's dragging Loren along too. About half an hour from now. Mira's coming too."
"Okay..." She nodded.
"I said I'd go with them."

"Why?"

"Well, he seems pretty old. From what you told me, it seems like he's been all over. Maybe he knows something about.." Zack mentally communicated the idea of his 'curse' to save some effort explaining.
"Oh, yeah. He might...although, being a psion he probably doesn't have any actual magic power himself."

"Yeah, but, also.."
"Also, you don't trust him," she finished for him. "I don't, either, to be honest. I guess I should go too, since I'm the only one of us who might be able to tell if he tries to do something weird."

"Lynn announced she was coming with us, too."
"Did she say why?"
"No, but I'm pretty sure there's something she has in mind to ask him about. And Rayna's coming with her because..."

"They're joined at the hip?" Katherine joked.
"I wouldn't put it that way, but..."

"But yes. And I suppose Clera found some excuse to come along, too?"
Zack shrugged. "Maybe a powerful psion can help sort out the whole two-minds-one-body thing."

"I can't tell the difference, it just looks like one mind unless she's asleep," the catgirl protested.
"Maybe he can't either, but she seems to think it's worth a shot."

"So..."
"Nine people, I guess. And a wolf. Does he have space for all of us?"
"I...don't know. We only saw the little kitchen area he has up front, the meditation room, and one hallway. His house is part of a bigger building so there's no telling how much of that building is his. There were a bunch of other doors in that hallway, though, so, maybe? Either way, he brought it on himself."
"He did?"
"He said to bring all our friends when he invited us. So...he's lucky Rose isn't in town, is what I say."

---

Tsaron felt them coming from a few blocks off. As they came into his passive range, he counted them—up to nine, but only eight he was really interested in. More than he was expecting, but he had cleared out a fair-sized storage room already, just in case. The table unfolded itself and another few chairs floated in through the hallway while he personally made his way to the kitchen and up to the front door, waiting for somebody to be about to knock. After a brief discussion which they probably imagined he wasn't listening in on, Katherine took the lead, with Zack behind her. Perfect; he wouldn't have to contrive anything to get her to the front.

"I still don't know why I'm here," Loren said, Aria all but physically dragging him along.
"Well, call it moral support," she said. "Come on, the best way to get rid of a fear is to confront it head-on!"

"Maybe for you..."

About this point, Katherine walked up the two steps to the door and raised a hand to knock, whereupon it immediately swung open, Tsaron standing just inside. From that alone, Loren could guess which kind of psion this was going to be. "Hello there," he said, leaning forward slightly to take in the small crowd gathered. "I'm glad to see so many of you accept my invitation. Please, come on in." He turned and started inside, the door still hanging open behind him. After a brief exchange of looks with Zack, the catgirl walked in, and everyone else followed behind.

"For this many of you, the kitchen won't really do," the old elf continued, heading for the hallway. "I've got a more spacious room set up, although—well, there may be competition for the better chairs." After going past a couple of closed doors, he came to a doorway without a door and strolled through, the others following one by one. Loren wound up coming in last, and looked around for an empty space.

When he did, he had the distinct sense that the mood of the room had very abruptly changed. There was Tsaron, sitting on a dining-room styled chair and looking serene as ever. But the others sitting around the room had very different expressions to before—Katherine looked annoyed, Zack agitated; Mira he caught very briefly with an enraged look, though not toward anyone in particular, before she caught him looking and flashed a smile that was probably supposed to be reassuring. At this point Aria distracted him by waving, and he went to a seat she indicated next to her, while still wondering what exactly had just happened.

---

Katherine stepped through the doorway, and immediately felt a pull on her mind. She stopped, seeing Tsaron standing in front of her in the room and knowing at the same time that he was not standing up but sitting, and that while standing still she was also walking toward a couch. She crossed her arms, glaring at him. "What are you doing?"

"Ahh, you are getting better by leaps and bounds," he said, smiling like a grandfather seeing a child learn a new word. "Well, I wanted to have a private conversation with most of you, and this seems like the most efficient way to do it. Get it all out of the way, and we could have some relaxing tea afterward. But in your case," he said with a small wave, "I also wanted to explain what I'm doing and reassure you so you wouldn't try to prevent me from discussing a few things with the others."
"..Not that I could stop you anyway," she said, expecting that to be what he'd say next.

"I don't know. You are pretty talented, I'm sure you could at least make it difficult."

"And this is supposed to be reassuring?" she said.

"Well, no—let's see. I have no intention of harming any of you, or altering the way any of you think—directly, I mean. There are a few things I might like to convince some of you of, but not by way of forcing it into anyone's head."

"Riiight. And I'm supposed to just take your word for it," she said.

"There's not that much else I can give you in this medium. But you know your friends' minds, and you're good enough to tell what I'm doing to yours right now, to some extent at least. You'd be able to tell if someone 'broke' something. Ah, there is one other thing," he said, appearing (pretending, she thought) to remember something. "I can assure you that I have a keen interest in self-preservation. There is one person in this town who might be able to kill me—surely you know who I'm talking about?" Even if she didn't, he was mentally projecting an image of Ezra, so she just nodded for him to continue. "I don't exactly want to test that out, and the lot of you have her protection—for reasons I hope are obvious independent of my word. And believe me, she would know if I messed with any of your heads, too."

"That's a little better, I guess. You're still asking forgiveness instead of permission."

"I can't help that," he said. "After all, you do a lot of monster hunting. Who knows if you'd all be around, if I just asked this time to do it on a later visit?"

"Fine." Her mental-body-language, or whatever it was to be called, suggested it was not entirely fine, but at least she'd accepted it for now. "So, you want to talk to me about something?"

"Sure. It's not often two psions run into each other out in the wild," he said. "Surely you have a few questions. Or at least something you're wondering about? Especially since it seems like you're the first of your family to be one."

"What's that have to do with anything?"

"Well. Psions are capable of experiencing a lot of things lesser minds don't," Tsaron said.

The catgirl crossed her arms. "'Lesser minds'?"
Tsaron shrugged. "Aren't they? It's not disparaging, just calling something for what it is. Anyway, I say that because you're confused, or at least a little concerned about one of those, and I don't think you would be if someone had ever given you 'the talk'. Not the usual one—the one psions need."

"And I guess you feel like it's your job to give me that."

"Well, since I'm here, and I'd hate for you to miss out on any happiness you could have," he said. "It's really fairly simple. You've experienced attraction to someone else's mind, haven't you?"

"That's kind of a personal question, but you wouldn't be asking if you didn't know the answer anyway."
"I just want you to know that's normal. Lesser minds—oh, there I go again." He had obviously done it on purpose. "'Normal' people are attracted to bodies because their brains are tuned to notice a lot of details in bodies, building up some sort of aesthetic sense of 'beauty' that appeals to them. Our minds can notice just as many details about other minds, and build up a similar aesthetic sense. There's certainly nothing wrong with enjoying it."

"And, I suppose you've had that experience at some point?" she said. It was personal, but since he had already preemptively pried into her mind it only seemed fair to do as much of the same back as possible.
"Oh, sure," Tsaron said with a small smile. "Now, you seem to have a thing for open, uncomplicated minds. Not—dumb or simple, just honest. Or...also particularly well-organized ones—and especially a combination of the two. My tastes are a bit different—I like to have a lot of layers of experience and wisdom to dig through. Something too big to understand all at once is just right for me." He looked slightly to the side, wistfully. "For a short while, I had the chance to be around a mind like that, and admire its form as much as I liked, but it has been denied me ever since." Then, turning to face her again: "Just enjoy what you have while it's there, is my advice."

"Now, there's not much else I had to say to you for the moment," he said. "Another seven are waiting, so I'd like to get on to them if you don't have any follow-up questions."
"I guess you're not 'talking' to Loren like this?" she said.
"Nope. He isn't as interesting to me, at least not at the moment. He'll probably appreciate not being pulled into a conversation of this kind, anyway."

"I guess so."

---

Zack entered the room, and immediately noticed that Katherine had apparently disappeared. Looking to the elf, he started "What—"
"Not to worry, we're communicating mentally right now," he interrupted. "I desired a moment of private chat with each of you, and this is the most efficient way to manage it."

After looking around for a second, he also saw that the wolf had disappeared from next to him; and the door he'd just gone through had disappeared, as though this room was everything there was. In a way, it kind of made sense—to give the illusion of being physically somewhere, making that place fairly small also made it easier to maintain. "Okay. What do you want, then?"

"Well, let's see—I thought I might first point out that, even your 'mental avatar' appears to be female," he said, pointing. Zack looked down, realizing this was true, and glared back up at Tsaron. "It's not my fault," the elf protested. "Although, to be fair, the way I set this up makes you take on whatever appearance you think you're already in, so it doesn't really mean much. It's difficult to live in a body for a while without beginning to think of it as 'what you are'."

Zack took a deep breath, trying to think of what he should look like. He was able to make his 'mental form' shift to the one that the person he'd dreamed the memories of was supposed to have—still the wolf ears and tail, but at least male. "...There."
"Indeed. But do you feel that?" Tsaron said. He did; there was something pushing back against his present appearance, trying to return it to what it had been a moment ago. "It's not me; it's been there for quite a while. You're so used to pushing against it that you hardly notice it."

"..What is it?" Zack also remembered how, even in his dreams, it was rare to remain physically male for long.

"Unfortunately for us psions, magic can affect the mind as well as the body," he said. "Judging by the evidence, the curse you're under really wants you to be as female as possible. I wouldn't be surprised if it's responding to your stubborn resistance to the mental part by pushing back in other ways. I believe it affects the way others perceive you, for instance, and even lashed out slightly into the minds of some hairdressers once..."

Zack gave a confused look for a second, before remembering what had happened when he tried to get his hair cut short.

"And I guess there isn't anything you can do about this," he said.
"Not much, I'm afraid. Let's see—I could do the curse's work for it and override your thoughts of being male; neither you nor your friends would appreciate that, I think. I could fool you into thinking that the curse has already been lifted and you're back to your old self again. You might enjoy that, but the others wouldn't like the end results much. In theory, I could bolster your mind in some way, but it's difficult to predict how mind-altering magic will interact with something like that, and anyway your base stubbornness is doing a pretty good job as-is."

"So you wanted to talk to me to tell me that there isn't anything you can do about this," Zack summarized.
"Oh, of course not. I wanted to see your reaction to hearing the bad news," Tsaron said, with a wide grin. The knight glared back at him. "I do suspect it would practically disappear if you accepted its effects completely, but we both know that isn't likely to happen. Your best bet, then, is to find some way to either pass it on to somebody else or to find someone or something with as much power as the curse itself to break or alter it for you. The latter seems unlikely judging by the event that precipitated that curse, but stranger things have happened."

"You think it can just be passed to someone else?" he said; this was a new one.
"Well sure. Say, someone with a lot of demonic power—since that's the type of magic it came from—should be able to channel it around, at least on a temporary basis, even if they can't break or alter it."

"Great."
"Anyway, I don't have much else to say to you in particular. But I have enjoyed our chat."

---

The witch paused once she had entered the room, taking note of the absence of anyone else who should be there but Tsaron. Looking at him, she said: "I'm guessing..this is a more 'advanced' version of whatever Kath does to link people's minds."
"Well, you're a sharp one," he said, nodding.
"...And since we're alone here, you have something you want to say to me in private, hmn?"

"Right again."

"Well, what is it then?" She waved for him to get on with it.

To her surprise, his expression turned serious, somewhat dark. "..You should stop consuming demons," he said after what seemed to be an intentional dramatic pause.
"...No." The witch crossed her arms. "Also, why?"

"I knew a warlock once," he said. "You're on, what, your fifth or sixth?"

"I count four so far. As if you can't," she said.

"Around his seventh, he went bad. Real bad. Let me tell you what he'd been doing."

Instead of telling her verbally, he sent along some images: Bodies, over a dozen, in a basement. Carefully placed, like pieces in an art museum. Some were dismembered, some mutilated; one looked to have been torn in half. A few showed signs of careful, almost surgical cuts, and others were visibly unhealthy, as though they had been starved before death. The images were laced with a strong sense of disgust and rage that seemed to be Tsaron's own; he knew much more of what had happened to those people than just how their corpses had looked then.

After taking a moment to digest what he was communicating, she fixed him with a look. "You were with Ezra. Right? The same warlock this was made for," she said, bringing out (or at least mentally presenting) the scythe they'd found animating the dead.
"That's correct."

"Well, she suggested I should run away from anyone who thought the demons made him go bad, but I guess it's a little late for that."
"You don't have anything to fear right now," he said. "She has asked me not to do you any harm, and I respect that since it is her town, after all. But I can try to convince you to stop, the same way anyone else could."

"You really think just eating some demons can make someone do that?" she said, dismissing the scythe again so her hands could gesture freely. "The way it works, the demon's soul doesn't have a mind when it's consumed. It's literally just its power that's left after it dies. If you're concerned about a demon corrupting someone's mind you should worry about Aria, not me."

"I can see what influence it's having on her. You, I can't really tell. I couldn't tell with him, either. His mind looked no different from the first time I met him, on the day he killed four of my friends."

"And you don't think he could hide what he was really thinking from you? I think there's a person or three whose minds Kath can't read so well, and she can't be much worse at it than you were then."

"She's better, actually, but a little less imaginative..."

Tsaron seemed to realize he was getting off track, and changed tactics: "What about your master, hm?"

"What, she went bad, so it's automatically the demons?" Mira said, rolling her eyes. "You didn't know her. Griselda believed she was doing the right thing because it was exactly what she'd always believed in. That was just the time she finally pushed too far, 'punished' the wrong person, and it blew up in her face. She was only insane in the way of ignoring the fact that actions have consequences, and even if someone deserves what you do to them it might hurt a lot of other people who don't deserve it.

"And what about the man who had her killed? You know what he was doing? He didn't take a single demon's power, or enter into some kind of evil blood pact. All it took for him to grab girls off the street and do whatever he wanted to them was enough money and privelege to believe he'd never be held accountable for it!"

Mira paused for a second, calming herself down a bit. "..How old are you, anyway?"
"Well, I haven't exactly been counting, but—pretty old."
"I envy you, really." The witch grinned viciously. "Wish I could live that long and still believe that people only go bad because of magic. Truth is, the most horrible things you can think of are just what someone out there wants to do, and will if you give them the power to. It doesn't matter where that power comes from."

"I know that," he protested. "But you didn't..you didn't know that man, what he was like before..." Tsaron seemed to realize he'd been put on the defensive, and tried once more: "How can you be sure that power won't corrupt you? That there isn't something you want or believe to be right, that'll hurt a lot of people?"

"Well, nobody can ever know that for sure," she shrugged. "All you can do is keep trying to find the right thing to do, and do it. Isn't that right?" Mister centuries-old psion who could mind crush a city block if he wanted to?

Tsaron gave her a look, realizing that she knew he'd read that out of her mind. "...Well. At least I can see that I'm not going to convince you of anything today. But at least you should know—"

"Wait, lemme guess: If I turn evil and Ezra doesn't kill me, you will. Right?"

"You realize I'm supposed to be the mind reader here," he said with a wry smile. "Well, I wouldn't say that I'd kill you myself, but I'd make sure you were dead, anyway. Even if you're corrupt deep down, maybe knowing a few bigger fish are out to eat you if you act on it is enough to keep you out of trouble for a while."

"I'll certainly keep it in mind, anyway. Can we get on with the tea party now?"

---

After Nora walked into the room, she discovered that the three who had come ahead of her were missing. "Where are the..." she started to ask, turning toward Tsaron. "..Oh, I'm not stuttering. So this is mental."

"It would be entirely too much trouble to simulate that when you'd just figure it out anyway," he said. "There's something I've picked up that I thought you might like to know."

Her head tilted ever so slightly. "..And what is that?"
"Well, an old priest of Haestra from your temple showed up in town a few days ago, chasing a rumor that you went this way," he said.
"What does he want?"
"I haven't exactly done a deep search of his mind, but I can tell you for certain that he doesn't mean to drag you back to the temple. After all, he came alone, hasn't gone to the guard at any point, and without their permission, taking someone out of here against their will would be viewed as an attempted kidnapping and responded to with some severity. Besides that serious worshipers of Haestra are generally peaceful in disposition, so smash and grab is hardly in the repertoire."

"...So," Tsaron continued, leaning toward her a tiny bit, "do you want him to buzz off? I could always 'convince' him you're not here. Or I could have him conveniently find directions to your house, if you're interested in seeing what he wants for yourself."

"You speak very casually about manipulating other people's minds," Nora observed. "If those are my choices, I'd rather let him visit. It's...been a long time since I heard news from there."

"I don't see what other choice would be preferable. You want to run into him on the street, unprepared for the encounter? At least if I tell you he'll show up tonight you can take some time to brace yourself for whatever conversation you expect to have," Tsaron said.

"I suppose that's true."

"Well then, you aren't busy tonight, are you?"

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