The "Best" RPG Ever-99

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Tsaron burst into place next to Bimorphaeus, looking somehow completely out of place in the setting next to his younger self at first. "Finally! Ezra, I noticed somebody walking your dream and thought, 'that doesn't look normal'. So..I.." His focus shifted slowly to the other him at this point; the deity was looking at him with a neutral expression. "Ah, hello there."
"I got tired of holding you," Bimorphaeus stated. "Well—it's all right; eventually I'd have asked her to relay some of this to you anyway. You've both got some of the same questions, after all." Tsaron looked dazed and stumbled back a step or two as he was suddenly hit with the entire mental recording of their conversation—since the point where Ezra realized it was a dream—at once. "Now, one of us is going to have to change, or this will quickly become confusing."

In a fluid, incomprehensible motion, Bimorphaeus changed his appearance, the entire concept of his being within the dream, to that of a tall, white-haired Canis woman in gleaming armor, swords sheathed on either side and a spear hanging from her back. "..How's that?"
"You just had to pick another of us, eh?" Ron complained.

"What happened to her, anyway?" Ezra asked.
"You didn't hear?" he said. "She fell leading some of her order's finest in taking down a particular gigantic, blood-hungry demon...? One which some clerics had to seal away afterward? She even gave some particularly inspired suggestions for what the seal should do to whoever draws the blade before that battle, you know."

"When was this?" Tsaron gave her the year. "Oh. I was busy weeding out corruption in a kingdom half the world away at the time. Though I'm surprised I didn't hear about it afterward."

"The less famous a sealed blade is, the less likely it is to be drawn," Tsaron said.

Bimorphaeus cleared her throat, getting both of their attention again. "That answer your question well enough? Although I might add she had many children before her passing, who went on to be parts of many noble lines...you may have met one or two of her descendants since then, and not even realized."
"Oh."
"...Of course," Tsaron agreed. "You all do seem to love your coincidences."

"Not everything's on purpose," she said with a slight shake of her head. "Now, as I was saying before you interrupted...we had no choice but to go looking for a new group of heroes, and fast."

"So, that bunch? They're your new heroes," Ron said. "Why kidnap a bunch of live people from the same world again, if dead are so much easier and other worlds might have, I don't know, stronger or otherwise better people?"
"There are a number of reasons," the goddess said. "Young people are more positive and hopeful than those who've recently died, for one. For another, all the best candidates for our new criteria—which I will go into in a moment—were alive at the time, as that concept applies. This, can be a bit confusing to the uninitiated: We can look upon your world in a manner which allows us to keep it 'in stasis' relative to us, or in a manner which moves it forward in time at any gradient we like. But we cannot affect your world in any way which would amount to time travel; once we've seen past a certain point we can only interact with that point or later. Whether those we selected would still be what we wanted by the time they died, we were uncertain, so we chose not to risk it. As for why we chose not to seek help from another world..."

"Well, we considered it," she said with a small nod. "Yours is not the only one we found in the initial search with a similar language group to ours, and there were a few candidates with people openly wielding magic, which would make them more adaptable to our world and likely more initially powerful as well. But as we were making our plans, a particular traveler of worlds approached us. This being..what we are to you, she is to those who are that to us," she said, "at least in terms of power and age. She advised us that the more worlds one seeks help from, the more visible one becomes to other worlds. And there are things waiting among those other worlds which would make our current difficulties seem like a fly to be swatted by comparison. She also...

"Well, are you aware of what happened to Valorum?"
"He got killed," Ezra said bluntly.
"Ceres said it was 'more than that', but didn't exactly have time to elaborate," Ron added.
"Right. His...soul was damaged, a feat we hardly considered possible. 'Damaged' is an understatement, really; you saw the way his body was shredded by that hit he took, so you should imagine something similar done to the soul. Amidst everything else we were trying to do, Demaeus was desperately trying to put him back together again. Being somewhat more of an expert with that kind of thing, she offered to take that soul off of our hands to find a way to heal him, in exchange for giving us some help constructing the vessels needed to bring people between your world and ours alive and unharmed. Given that healing him was our goal in the first place, the deal was clearly, intentionally lopsided. We did not argue."

Neither of them said anything for a moment, simply taking this in. She continued: "I should explain what was so difficult about that in the first place. In your world—between your planet and others, you have 'space'. Space is dangerous, more or less, because it is empty. But the way between your world and ours is not through 'space'; if you can imagine a direction other than the three usual ones, traversing between the two requires going that way. If you go that direction, the region between worlds is often called 'Void'.

"Unlike space, Void—or at least the part of it surrounding both of our worlds—is dangerous because it is full. Anything trying to traverse the Void must contend with a constant, neverending torrent of immensely powerful, undirected magical energy whose full force annihilates most things, and even small amounts of which can twist and warp living creatures. This energy is called 'Breach' by most everyone with languages similar to ours; its presence around a world tends to protect it from certain kinds of threats, so it isn't entirely a bad thing.

"Souls are bound together tightly enough to withstand Breach untouched, which is why bringing the dead through is so much easier. We needed to create vessels which would be essentially 'airtight' against Breach in order to bring our new candidates through safely. As I said, the traveler gave us some information on how to build them, but we needed a dry run to ensure that everything was working properly. For that, we chose a dog whose owner had recently died, which would have probably suffered afterward regardless. Our first attempt at the seals...were not perfect," she said. "What resulted looked no different from a beast monster—a dire wolf, to be exact—so we left it with other dire wolves, deep in the frontier, not expecting to see it again."

"You're talking about Zack's little pet, aren't you," Ron said; Bimorphaeus nodded.

"Somehow that intense concentration of magic eventually resulted in the formation of a unique soul, with beneficial properties that even Sophol didn't predict. When he wanted personification, we jumped at the chance to grant the same kind of power we had the rest of the new group of heroes."
"...Which you still haven't explained," Ezra pointed out. "What about this group makes them worth the trouble?"

"Well, as I said before, you were chosen for your demonstrated abilites—what you had thoroughly proven yourselves capable of throughout your lives. This, we imagined, would make you fine heroes. It did not," she said flatly. "When you go looking for power and skill, you find people willing to wield it in all kinds of ways. For our second try, we needed something else—and ultimately settled on your model." With this, she pointed at Ezra in particular.

"Mine." It was half a question.

"Not—just you, of course. But certainly not him," she said, without being clear which 'him' she meant. "Ceres and Valorum, and the one whose appearance I take now, all similarly demonstrated the kind of qualities our heroes would really need to have. We are fortunate to have more or less accidentally selected so many; otherwise things would have exploded in our faces with far more force than it already did.

"What we realized—and it sounds terribly idiotic to have to point it out—is that heroism is a trait of one's character, not of one's power."

"So, what," Ron said, "This bunch of self-absorbed kids have better character than me? Because they are willing to rush into all sorts of danger for no good reason?"

"You've got the order backwards," Bimorphaeus said, "and you're missing some pieces besides. Each one was chosen for a different reason, to suit a certain purpose. That is why keeping all of them alive, for as long as possible, is vital to our current plan. To explain what those are...hmm.

"Mortals tell tales that I am a poor communicator, but the truth is, I am the best of the lot. The other gods have no idea what it is like to be one of you, much less the best way to make a mortal understand something. Divested of any physical form, the very thing I continue to exist in is the collective thought of every being on our world," she said. "Nonetheless, words are sometimes simply inadequate. I would prefer, with your permission, to simply show you what we saw in each of them."

"I have no objection to that," Ron said; Ezra nodded agreement curtly.
"All right. Come with me." She gestured to follow her along the path from Ezra's memory to somewhere—symbolically and mentally—else, and began to walk. The two of them followed into a more dreamlike experience than the relatively rational conversation of the past several subjective moments.

First there was Zack—as they knew her, a Canis woman in the armor and equipment of a knight. "In" him was a vision of a single defining event: A child standing obliviously on a road, facing away from an oncoming car just cresting a hill—just now coming into view, moving too quickly and seeing too late to brake to a complete stop. From one side, a figure suddenly ran in, grabbed the child and dove back-first out of the way, tumbling along the concrete as the car zoomed by, brakes screeching.

The figure stood up, becoming a bit clearer—an average-looking, dark-haired man helped the child onto its feet, and after making sure they weren't hurt yelled something about being careful and keeping off the road. At this point some other figures approached, including the car's driver, and—noticing this—he turned and ran before anyone could find out who he was. The incident was reported on the news, some witnesses being interviewed on a TV set in the front office of a warehouse. The same man from before came into a nearby door, some of the workers noticing some damage to his clothes and scratches on his arms—and laughed when he told them flatly that he'd tripped in the parking lot on the way there.
"Hey, if it was on the property, you should see if you can get anything outta worker's comp, Zack!"

The second was Katherine. A tall, broad-shouldered man sat behind a DM's screen (and although the "audience" might not have understood what that was, for the purposes of the dream they did now) with a crowd of people sitting at the table before him. He was describing worlds, people, and creatures, putting the players into one situation after another that forced them as well as their characters to work together and get to know each other better.

He stood up, going into a neighboring room where two or three of the indistinct players followed or already waited. There were introductions, calm discussions, outright fights—in each situation he was doing the same thing: helping them understand each other. With his aid, strangers became friends, bitter feuds were defused and dissolved, and relationships were patched together that might have otherwise fallen apart. Perhaps he wasn't even aware of what he was doing, motivated only by wanting everyone to have a good time and relax instead of carrying the weight of the rest of the world into the game with them.

Everyone was welcome at Vinny's on game night, and one way or other, he made them feel welcome, too.

Mika, or Mira—whatever her name was, the witch appeared in both of her available appearances at once. Her explanation was different from the previous two, showing not a person in a location but simply an avalanche of words. Conversations, one after another, flooded by. It was clear that the same person who had become the witch was party in each of them, giving words of encouragement and support to people dealing with all kinds of situations—and one very important kind of help in particular.

The friendships visible through those conversations were strong, in fact enough so that when someone was thinking of hurting themselves—fed up with the world, terrified, or just off their meds—somehow it always came out in a private conversation to him. The shield of anonymity made them feel free to discuss their darkest thoughts without fear of someone "reporting" them. Every time, he encouraged people whose faces he'd never seen and—usually—whose voices he'd never heard to seek help, with frequent but not totally perfect success.

Whoever they met him as, whatever false representation by a virtual avatar they saw, the person behind that mask was always a shoulder to cry on, somebody to lean on...someone to talk to, if nothing else was needed.

For the tall elf girl Nora, a young man could be seen growing up in casts and crutches, both his parents and himself terrified of the slightest jolt or trip. With each injury came hospital visits, and sometimes long stays in the same buildings as families whose kids were at even greater risk. As he came to be one of the older patients, he became known to the younger ones as a source of knowledge, wisdom, and hugs—if you were slow and careful about it, anyway. To them it seemed like he knew a little bit of everything; whenever a child had questions, they'd come to Norrin first, before the adults, because he always seemed to explain it better. He would be sitting there, nose in a book, and then set it aside as soon as anyone came near to talk to him.

To all of them, he was just like an elder brother; he'd been here before, knew the routines and would happily help anyone new introduce themselves to the group. He even helped out with the work now and then, when it was deemed unlikely to risk harm to his ever-fragile bones. More than anything, Norrin was a frequent source of calm and stability to children and families facing upheaval and turmoil.

Lynn and Rayna were together, as they always seemed to be. The two of them had worked together for a long time before, too, hosting a show focused around examination and careful thought. They could be seen questioning every assumption, reasoning through any problem that faced them. Careful discussion and contemplation led them to the truth of many matters—admittedly, often trivial ones, but these were mere practice for the occasional speck of insight into more serious matters.

Ray and Lyle argued and researched and pondered until they found the truth, no matter how ugly that truth was. Once or twice they uncovered real corruption and exposed it to the world at large, and when they found some truly worthy of help, they sought to help them however they could.

"Don't give up!" a man's voice came from behind Aria. "Never give you. You can do it." Will's power lay in a boundless supply of determination, spilled out in words of encouragement and expressed and demonstrated publicly for all who cared to look and see. He gave of his time, effort, and self to see that others could survive, and simply watching and listening to him was enough to give some a fighting chance.

Two scenes at once played for Dr. Ian Kellen: In the first, he was enraged, furiously upbraiding a fellow doctor for his carelessness with another person's life, which—whether it had or not—could very well have cost that life. In the other, his hand was on a shoulder of a young surgeon who'd failed, telling him that he'd done all he could and not to let this turn him away from the practice for good. In both the doctor's essence was revealed: An absolute, uncompromising ethic when it came to the value of human life, a passionate drive to see that others took lives under their care just as seriously, and a gentle kindness toward those whose attitudes proved worthy of the vital occupation they had taken up.

At the end of this was Rose, the dragon. A shy, mildly overweight young man was seen sitting alone at home, quietly working a job behind a computer with nobody talking to him, or walking through the streets deliberately looking away from everyone around him. Yet, also, he quietly handed in donation after donation: Food, clothes, bedding, whatever was needed. He stood behind a counter, ladling out soup to hungry people; he followed instructions meticulously to help build shelter for the homeless. For every opportunity to give, to do good or help others, he seemed to take it and throw the full weight of his efforts and resources behind it. Hardly anyone he helped knew his name, but their gratitude for what he gave spoke volumes all the same.

The dream took on a more solid, coherent appearance again, as they came to the end of the symbolic "road" to be standing out in the backyard of the house Ezra had recently had built for the group. Bimorphaeus stopped just in front of the door inside and turned around to face the two old heroes, letting out a small sigh from the effort of expressing all of this so efficiently. "Does that answer your question?"
"I suppose it does," Tsaron said, "although I believe we both have just a few follow-ups."

"I see it's true that every one of them was male," Ezra said. "Is there a reason for that?"
The goddess shrugged. "For the most part, that just happens to be who fit our needs best. Apart from that, Aphera thought it would be best to have everyone the same sex to..avoid romantic attachments among each other, and encourage them to get to know the people of this world instead."
"So why did you turn all of them into girls?" Ron asked right away.

She sighed again, this time in annoyance. "I refuse to be held responsible for that.

"It began this way: The only person we trusted to be a 'mentor' to a possible witch or warlock would not accept a male apprentice, but would be willing to change one into a witch instead. So we put in only 'witch' as an option...which wound up being chosen. Then, the same witch who was her mentor was also going to do the same thing to the knight, during an event which was deemed necessary to send someone who would otherwise be tied to an order somewhere deep inland out into the frontier. Then there was that ward on the blade which would change the sex of whoever pulled it and then seal off their memories, and one of them chose that too. The empathic soul most compatible with Ian also happened to have stray fire magic wandering the world, and we knew we could only take advantage of that if the soul was in a sufficiently familiar body, so the merging ritual also molded him to an appearance similar to hers.

"So with nearly half of them being changed one way or another, Aphera suggested we should do the same to all of them, to give them a predicament in common and draw them together somewhat. Also, I believe she had her eye on potential 'matches' for all of them—which she argued would give them further motivation to carry out our task beyond their natural inclination—and those of highest compatibility, who would also be conveniently helpful for other reasons, turned out to mostly be male. I was against the idea; Sophol sided with his wife of course; and Haestra and Dimaeus both said 'do what you want'. So here we are." She put up her hands helplessly for a second, then dropped them again.

"That brings me to something else," Ron said. "Why...more importantly how, do they have traceable history and memories of hailing from here, being that they, like us, are from Earth? You did no such thing for us."
"For why: Another matter of giving them more attachment to this world—motivation. This part I somewhat agreed with," Bimorphaeus said. "While they were in transit from your world to ours, we put them in a kind of stasis and attached their minds to some very convincing simulacra. At each juncture we asked the original mind what it would do, to determine the simulacrum's reactions and behavior to various events. At the end, we did a kind of merging to give their bodies the appearance and memories they should have if they had always been what the simulacra presented—but I was careful not to privelege the 'new' memories over their original ones. Essentially, the memories refer to events that really happened, and their actual minds are the ones which made the decisions leading to those events. It was a careful balancing act, but appears to have worked out reasonably well.

"This is true of all of them but two exceptions: It was determined that Clera's soul provided enough 'attachment' to this world without the added help of more memories, and that juggling three 'minds' at once would be too confusing for the resulting person; and the age Rose needed in order to have the level of power we wanted stretched back to before we had made the decision to bring in the new heroes, so we just set her simulacrum in her forest slightly before your town was founded and layered several copies of memory of 'doing nothing in her forest' over that of her past experience with people and hid her and the forest from perception until she was actually present."

"I thought her head looked a lot more muddled than the others," Tsaron commented. "You're aware she's a bit unstable, aren't you?"

"Well..some things are bound to get a little twisted when you try to turn a complete introvert into an extrovert," she said with a slight shrug, "as was deemed absolutely necessary for their success. At this very moment, some of that 'twisting' is in the process of being healed, so you needn't worry too much about her."

"Now hold on," Ezra interrupted.

"Yes?"
"When you said all that just now, you talked about everything that happened in the lives of their 'simulacra' as though it was inevitable. How were you able to guarantee things would turn out the way you wanted if you're not the ones calling the shots?"

"Ah. That would be Sophol's department," she nodded, shifting to Rayna's appearance. "There exists scrying magic to see how relatively minor and imminent events will turn out, but such things are incredibly unwise to rely on. Soph, though, he sees everything in the greatest of detail. He has watched the world for a very long time, long enough to produce highly accurate models of how people will behave in certain situations; how battles and conversations will turn out—so on, so forth. Put enough of those models together and he can tell you—to an astonishing degree of accuracy—how likely almost any arbitrary event is."

"Really?" Ron crossed his arms. "So how likely is it that these new heroes succeed at...whatever it is you wanted us to do?"

Bimorphaeus cleared her throat. "There are some unknown factors which are difficult to fully account for, I'm told. If everything goes exactly according to our present plan, it's around seventy percent that things go the way we want them to."
"That low, eh?"
She nodded. "It was more like sixty-five before Lupa's unique traits were understood. And bear in mind, too, there are...parts of said plan which you or they may not agree with. We're taking on some serious risks along the way to even having that high a chance of success in the first place. Even given the success of all the intended preparation, it's only, mmn...twenty-seven or so that all the heroes make it out alive? To say nothing of the other people expected to be involved."

Ezra and Ron exchanged a glance, both thinking the same thing—and the goddess surely knew it: This sounded like a battle. Perhaps there were other tasks with a high likelihood of claiming lives, but the insistent use of the term "hero" and the consistent choice of giving every person, even those entirely disinterested in or outright opposed to it, some measure of ability and experience in combat made it almost certain that some sort of fight was on the horizon.

"...So you gave each of them—plus Lupa—the same kind of potential you did us," Ezra stated. "How and why are they filling it so quickly, then?"

"I believe you have an idea of why," Bimorphaeus said, switching forms again—this time to look like Randall. "We are desperate. We're running out of bloomin' time. We need them to be as strong as possible when the time comes. As for how, well, we're simply dumping our own power onto each of them, using their experience in battle and other means of self-improvement—such as the little witch's demon-eating—as catalysts. Conveniently, all of them except the doctor already had a good semantic conceptualization for these sudden jumps in power and skill, so we simply adopted that as our way of allowing them to choose the direction of that growth. We're in no danger of dying or fading away, mind you, but by the time we're done it will be a little difficult to achieve other miracles for a long while."

"If you're willing to dump yourselves into others to do this, then why not just take care of it yourself?" Ron said, his annoyance at the god visibly piqued by the latest form.

"Because we can't. Nothing from, or intrinsically of, this world can achieve what needs doing. And that's as much as I can say on the matter for now."
"Painful information, is it?" he said.

"Who...do you think it is that makes certain information painful?" Bimorphaeus said. "Again, you've got the cause and effect reversed. A long time ago, we tried to get mortals to help us understand something related to your task, and simply knowing the truth was enough to drive some—though not all—mad. Sufficiently prepared minds will have a low risk of this, and there is reason to believe you all from Earth will be totally immune to it, but there is no reason to risk all of you knowing too soon in case that isn't correct. Anyway, I've been busy preparing their minds and steadily easing the pain off of related information for you and them. Please be patient; it's easy enough to add or remove pain to certain knowledge for everyone but incredibly delicate to do it for just a small group of people."

"Now, I think that about covers it. Do you have anything else to ask?"
"...Is there anything else you're keeping from us that you don't 'have to'?" Ezra said.

"Hmm. There is one thing I could tell you which I think would upset you some," he said, indicating her in particular. "Then again, you've always been difficult to predict."
"Well, what is it then?"
"I admit, I...don't really want to say it. It feels unfair for me to be the one who tells you, actually. Look, I'm absolutely certain you'll figure it out for yourself whenever you're ready to tell them you're from Earth," he said, holding out his hands.
"...Fine." If he was so reluctant to share it, then at least it couldn't be something important to their survival or success. "I suppose that's it, for now. But one of you had better find a way to answer anything else important we need to know. None of this 'silence for centuries' nonsense again," she said with a severe expression.
"I think I can get the others to agree with that," he said. "It shouldn't be such a jolt for you if one of them comes in rather than me, although..don't expect them to be quite as eloquent as I am."