The "Best" RPG Ever-97

 First / Previous / Next / Latest

---

Once she was asleep, Katherine walked over into Aria's dream as usual. "Hey. You were up late," the shifter said, standing up from her usual meditation stance and stretching. "Is Zack all right?"
Taken slightly aback by the unexpected expression of concern—with that windup, Katherine was sure she was about to say something teasing—the psion nodded slowly. "He'll be just fine. In fact, he wanted to visit us here tonight. You ready to start pulling people in?"

"You know it!" The shifter gave an energetic thumbs-up.

First Katherine got Rayna and Lynn, letting each one acclamate while she set up a section of the dreamscape to have the seating of their house's living room, and then reached over toward Zack. Even though her own body was...right up against his, it just felt easier to start with whoever was nearer to Aria instead. Maybe that made sense, as she was the 'host mind'. Either way, she pulled at the wolf-girl's mind while the other three were on their way to the seats.

It wasn't a pleasant scene he brought with him. In the same shape as his waking body, wearing armor stained in places with blood, Zack was holding his sword up as if preparing to defend himself against a massive pile of fresh-looking corpses in front of him, at least twice as tall as he was. Aria made a face toward the psion which more or less said 'are you sure he's okay', while Rayna and Lynn paused to glance briefly at the nightmarish vision and then exchange a further glance with each other.

Katherine could swear one or two of those bodies looked entirely too familiar. "Zack!" she yelled to get his attention, floating closer to him.He jumped, turned around with his sword still raised, hands shaking, and looked back and forth in a quick, panicked motion before realizing where he was. "...Oh." He visibly calmed, lowering the weapon and then letting go of it, which caused the sword to disappear entirely. His armor began to melt and soften into cloth, transforming slowly into his usual sort of casual wear.

"Well, that's a new one," Aria said. "You okay?"
"Yeah," he nodded. "Better now that I know that's not real," he said while pointing back at the bodies but visibly refusing to turn and look at them again. "Can you, uh," he said toward the psion, "...get rid of that or something?"
"Sure, no problem." With a wave of her hand, Zack's "part" of the dream-space was overwritten by more of Lynn's, turning into a further length of grassy plains under bright sunlight. The wolf-girl visibly breathed a sigh of relief, able to feel the nightmare setting disappearing without even looking. "Thanks."

Now Zack had the mental focus to shift his body into a male Canis form—although, the others noted, still long-haired and rather on the short side, with a distinctly feminine face. Even Aria declined to comment on this aloud while he walked over to the others and slumped down onto a free seat of the couch. "FFFffff."

"I guess you were right about getting a nightmare," Katherine said while she got busy pulling Nora in also. "You wanna...talk about it?"

"Literally anything else," he shook his head. Rayna and Lynn exchanged a look: His voice was unchanged from the deeply womanly alto of his waking body. Again, nobody commented. "It's just the same stupid junk as before, anyway." Nora quietly walked over and took a chair, silently waving hello to everyone.

"Okay, here's something," Lynn said, sitting up to face Aria while the catgirl floated up to an empty space to join them, reclining herself in midair. "Where'd this whole 'never give up for anything'...thing you were yelling about come from?" she asked the shifter.

"Well...I dunno," she said with an arms-up shrug. "I've just...kinda, always been like this. For as long as I can remember, I've always had this, obsessive drive to not let anything beat me, or keep me down. That's...not a very satisfying answer, though, is it?"
"Well—it's fine if it's true," Zack stated. "Not every little thing has to have a great reason."

"I can still talk a little more about it though, I guess.

"Tell the truth, I've actually mellowed out quite a lot in recent years. It used to be kinda unhealthy. Like, I'd risk doing real, permanent harm to my body and/or livelihood just to get a better time or score or whatever. Eventually, I realized that was stupid, and I set some ground rules and forced myself to follow them. Y'know how I did that?"
Zack crossed his arms. "...You treated 'following the rules' as your new challenge."

"Yep! It's amazing, it really is. I had this, like, gradual epiphany that I am the one who decides what I am obsessively trying to accomplish. It turned this—thing—that I always used to feel had control over me, into a sort of power, a freedom to accomplish whatever I really wanted to. I set the goals," she said, pointing her hands up at her face. "Me. Nobody else. And then that unstoppable determination gets them done. From that point on, I won't let anything or anyone control me into doing something I don't wanna do. And I will never give up on doing something I really believe in."
"Yeah..." Zack nodded slowly. "I could feel that. When Kath sent your...that, to me. It's an amazing thought, but maybe too intense for me."

"Please, Zack," Katherine said. "You're at least as stubborn as she is."

"No one asked you."
"So anyway," Aria continued, "Once I had this—I dunno. Philosophy? Worldview? General...concept, thing, in my head. I started saying stuff like that in my streams. 'I can do this; we can do this.' 'You can do it'—anytime someone in chat talked about some goal of theirs I thought was a good thing. At first I was a little embarrassed when people pointed out how much I was saying stuff like that. Like—it's super cheesy, right? 'My name's Will and I'm all about willpower'," she said in a somewhat mocking tone. "That was about when, uh..."

Aria reached a finger up into her hair, twirling it around a bit in a sudden burst of apprehension. "Well, one of my regulars came in one day with some bad news: He'd just been diagnosed with cancer. I mean bad cancer—not that there's good cancer but like, on the scale between 'benigh spot we can remove in outpatient' and 'get your affairs in order, we'll try to make you comfortable,' it sounded closer to the latter. He uh...wasn't sure if the pain of treatment was gonna be worth it. You know what I had to say about that, though.

"Mayyybe it wasn't good advice, objectively speaking. I sure didn't try to argue logically. Just—every time he showed up I'd ask him if he was getting treatment yet, and tell him not to give up. The whole chat got in on it, too. I feel a little bad, I think we might've bullied the poor guy into agreeing to some kinda experimental treatment. But I mean, he did keep showing up in chat while we were doing that every singe time. Eventually he disappeared for like a...month or two, and when he came back they were still trying to get it out of him. Coulda gone either way at that point, but as of the time I came here—years after he was supposed to have died even with treatment—he was fine. Bad stuff all gone and not come back yet."

"Sooo, I made it my cause after that. Did lots of charity streams on the weekends, have people donate to give me ridiculous challenges to try. Took some time off work to go to the big marathons they had raising money for charity research and stuff. I, honestly just couldn't believe my stupid obsession that used to be all about winning was getting passed on to other people and maybe even saving lives somehow."

"...What?" Lynn looked like she wanted to say or ask something, which Rayna was plainly waving at her not to. "Hey, come on, I can take it," Aria said, pointing a thumb to her chest. "There's a massive demon in my head over there—" she waved vaguely toward the cliffside "—constantly sharing his wonderful addiction to blood with me with an intensity that would drive lots of other people insane. I can handle an awkward question or two."

Rayna crossed her arms, glaring at her friend with her ears lowered in annoyance, but shook her head 'go for it, I guess'.

"I don't want to cast any doubt on the good you're saying you were doing," she started.
"...Not that that's going to stop you..." the fox-girl interjected.
"Just—if you want to give money to stuff like that, why go through an extra three steps for it? Technically, you could spend the same amount of time working to earn more money and everyone donating through you could just donate themselves instead. Right?"
"Ah. I've had this one before," the shifter nodded with a smirk. "First of all: Technically yes, but no. A human isn't an economic machine that can put endless hours in and get the same money out for each one. You need downtime to be effective at whatever you actually make money from, and that's what streaming is for me; always has been. So whatever time I'm donating is being more productive, not less. Second: Obviously I donate out of what I do make. Third: You have no idea how many people would never just give money but would donate to something special like that. Even people with charitable dispositions need an incentive or excuse to get started sometimes, and then there's just people with disposable income who wouldn't donate a cent to the charity normally but are willing to pay to get to make me do something silly on-stream and watch the results. And if you think of it that way, what I'm doing already is working for the donation money, and probably getting a lot more than I could with a 'real job'.

"Now, why were you so scared of that one?" she said to Rayna. "If I couldn't answer something like that I would've quit a long time ago."

"Because we had this argument ourselves at one point. Not for the exact same reasons, but..."
"Our audience was giving us more money than we actually needed," Lynn said. "Not to brag or anything, just a fact. We decided to do a thing where we'd have them help us pick out from a list of thoroughly vetted charities to give some of that extra to."

"Vetting done by our personal crack team of researchers, AKA ourselves," the fox-girl added. "We caught some stuff nobody else had. But first we had an argument that lasted about two months about every little detail of the setup and our motivations for it."

"I guess even you get tired of arguing with her about something after long enough," Zack said.

"We don't argue, we discuss," Rayna said. "But usually the topic changes a lot more often. Not her coming up with new objections to the same thing, or repeating old ones every time we got together for a recording session."

"Well, this was important," Lynn said. "I just didn't want anything left out when we went public with the idea."

"Anyway," Katherine said, "enough of this heavy stuff. We almost got some SNES" (she pronounced a single word rather than letters) "games similuated accurately last time."

"Uh—simulated?" The tension between the two evaporated instantly as they and Aria began excitedly explaining this to Zack, who looked Nora's way briefly and received a slight shrug in return.

---

Rose took the suggestion of staring at the stars somewhat seriously, slowly lying onto her back with her head up toward the clear night sky. Mira shrugged to herself and quietly took up much the same position, waiting patiently for either the sound of her friend talking or falling asleep.

"They have stars here," she said after a long while, as though just realizing it. "Other planets too, maybe? I dunno much about that stuff."
"In principle, this 'universe' could be very different from ours," the witch said. "Their 'stars' could be something other than the supermassive fusion reactors we're used to seeing from Earth. But I doubt it. The sun seems like a pretty ordinary main-sequence star; moon looks like a round moon; the maps and charts I've seen seem like they belong to a roughly spherical planet rather than some crazy discworld thing."

"You think it's the same space? Is Earth in one of the galaxies out there?" she pointed vaguely upward.

"Couldn't say."

"...Wonder if, like, anyone's ever tried going into space here. Or if that's even a concept they have," Rose said.

"Nothing I've heard of—the 'me' from here, I mean. It would be much easier with magic, but a lot of the same huge physical challenges of making a body survive in space probably exist here, too. Society has to really want to go to space to do it. Helps if there's a couple of big, wealthy nations in a cold war with military motivations, too."

"Hmmh."

After a while longer, she sat up again, and Mira joined her, getting to a cross-legged position facing Rose. "Hey..you ate that demon and stuff, right?"
"Mm-hm. Turns out it was two of them somehow, too, which brings my grand total to six."
"What kinda powers did they give you?"
"Weelll. It's mostly potential for powers—expansion of the skill tree and some free points to spend in it, none of which I have just yet. I can control the tentacle thing's 'ink magic' at least as far as dispelling it where it already exists, but I'd have to put some points into a new skill to be able to make it myself. Don't think I want that particular power, though. Oh, but—I can do this," the witch said, holding her arms out to the side. Four shadowy, partially-translucent tendrils starting a bit thicker than her arms and tapering to rounded tips flowed out from between her shoulder blades, near where her wings were based, and wriggled around above and below each of her arms. "Think I can stretch and fine-control them, pick up stuff...nothing too heavy at their base level, though. If I put effort in—or buy some levels—I can have more of them, too."

"Neat," Rose said, grinning. It was clear she would've had a more enthusiastic reaction, but she was tired, and yawned loudly.

"Mngh. I'm like, super tired all of a sudden."
"Adrenaline finally wore off, I guess." The witch dismissed the shadow-tentacles. "Using magic is physically taxing, and I think even a dragon has her limits," Mira pointed out. "I guarantee you'll feel better after you get some sleep."

"Yeah..prolly." She yawned again, more quietly. "I jus'...don't really want to face tomorrow yet. I dunno."

"You're under no obligation to tell everyone else you're from Earth right away. Or even talk to them. I can head back and tell them you're okay if you just wanna stay here a little longer."
"Mm..noo. They already know anyway, right? A-and, I want to tell them. I wanna show them I'm okay." Rose shook her head. "'m just...not sure if I am, yet."

"That's just the exhaustion speaking," Mira said kindly. "You don't have to make any decisions until you've had that rest, and then we can go from there, okay?"
"Alright, alright." Rose shook her head. "Sheesh, mom." She flopped forward into the grass. "I'll go to bed already iiif that's wha..." She yawned again. "Y'rilly wan'..."

Almost as soon as she closed her eyes, the dragon-girl was fast asleep, steadily curling herself together into a comfortable ball on the ground. Mira shook her head with a slight grin, then shrugged and lay herself down on her side, carefully tugging a wing out of the way before it could be under her. While not nearly as tired—especially after absorbing the energy of two demons that night—she never had been the sort to have difficulty falling asleep.