The "Best" RPG Ever-103

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---

Lynn wasn't a block away from the door to the house when she nearly walked into Rast, both of them backing up awkwardly in the aftermath. "Uhh...hey."

"Hey there, pretty miss," he said, giving his best effort at a reassuring smile. "I was just comin' to see you."
"Heh. I was on my way to see if anyone in the guardhouse knew where you were. Didn't see you at all yesterday."

The wolf-man put a hand behind his head for a second. "Aah, since Pirr was finally all put together again she was itchin' for a more serious assignment, so we took on a patrol rovin' pretty far outta town. Got a little...complicated, an' we had to camp out last night."

"Neither of you got hurt, right?" On closer examination, he looked a little tired, but not injured.

"Nah. We ran into someone...err, I ain't sure how much of it's supposed to be secret or not."
"Well, we can talk about something else, then. I've already eaten, but—you had breakfast?"
"Sorta. Been a trip back to town and a nap since then."
"Alright. I could use some coffee," she said, leading the way.

"I, guess things got a little weird night before last."
"It was fun," Rast said. "Though—yep, I'd say 'weird' is applicable too."

"I'm serious about meeting your family sometime soon. I mean—" She paused in her walk for a second to abruptly sigh. "I actually, don't know how serious I am, or this is? It seems like every time I try to think about it I get distracted and it slides off. Maybe, I'm hoping it's still too early to worry about it."
"I ain't in any rush, at least," he said. "But if ya do want to meet 'em, I'd be happy to introduce you anyhow."

"Yeah. At least in the sense of it only being fair, anyway."

"Well, I reckon they'll both be around tonight, and that oughta be long enough to give fair warning. Not that I...gave you much, come to think of it."

"Not one of them cared to be warned, frankly; I live in a house of crazy. Not that I'm complaining, mind you." Rast laughed; the one evening around all of them was enough to get what she meant.

"Speaking of crazy...oh, hang on, we're here." Lynn waved Rast into the cafe and waited until they were seated to complete her thought. "Anyway. Remember the wolf?"
"Sure. That ain't the kind of thing a body forgets after a day."
"Well..."

---

Aria and Rose returned to the living room in time to encounter Mira carrying a stack of mail inside. Most of it she was in the process of setting onto a coffee table for everyone else to sort through, apart from what looked to be a sizable packet of papers tied together with some thick string. "Hey, mail's here," she said. "On an unrelated note, I think I'm gonna need to go study something up in my room for a while for...reasons."

"Very convincing," Katherine retorted, already floating the envelopes over where she could look through them.

"Ookay?" Rose said, not having any of the context for said 'reasons'. "See you later, then?"
"Sure!" The witch hurried upstairs after that.

"Yeah, I'm feeling inspired since yesterday. Wanna go see if I can find someone willing to do a Thing for me in town," Aria said. "I don't mind any tagalongs."
"Eheh, that's okay," the dragon-girl nodded, appreciating the effort to at least be included. "I sorta agreed to a strength contest yesterday. So, like, maybe I'll get that over with."

"Hey, this one's for you." The psion sent another letter from Vaedin Rose's way, and she started to reach out for it before dropping her hand again.

"Can you uh..open it? Sorry."

"No problem." The envelope came off, and the letter opened itself up where she could read it.

"Uhh..hmm. She's awfully...formal and stuff. Just an 'official confirmation' thingy—so like, we agreed yesterday I could use my cart thing to bring her to my forest tomorrow."
"Hey, if we get the door installed by then, that'd be quicker," Katherine pointed out, hopping to her feet. "I think I know who to ask for a job like that, if you're alright with it."

"Mm-hm!" Rose nod-nodded, cradling the letter carefully into her hands before sticking it into her inventory.

"Guess I'm off too, then," she said, swinging the door open ahead of the shifter, and following her out into the town.

"Now, I'd like to maintain some normalcy and ask what your inspiration's about, but you've been thinking it loudly for too long," the catgirl said.
"Eh, I don't care," Aria shrugged, shrinking herself down to Katherine's height and taking on a similarly feline form. "It's efficient."
"'Kay. You really think a magic-based circuit board is possible?"
"Just the most basic of circuits for now, and not tiny—big enough to physically test switches and connections. If it works, a batch of slightly smaller ones to try some basic binary additions. Then I wanna make a small, simple display and see about putting basic graphics up on it."

"Who do you think is gonna understand what you want, much less be willing to try to build it?"
The shifter shrugged. "They don't need to understand how it works or what it's for as long as they can make the connections do what I say they should. Anyway, this is the frontier, right? Home of the adventurous and crazy! I doubt it'll be in the top twenty weirdest requests this week, and my pay will be generous, even if the first attempt fails."

"Don't break our bank on a vanity project," the psion admonished, pointing at her briefly.

"Please, I've thought about this. What I'm after is something made with common materials that does a single, basic thing. Expensive enchantments do many things, or big, complex things, and those in turn seem to require 'better' base materials to function. Plus I get the impression that the cost of any magic usually scales as a factor of how much the effect breaks normal physics, chemistry, etcetera, and what I'm after should be possible with minimal physics-breaking. Plus, starting with big versions and then asking them to go progressively smaller is a great way to get them used to making the designs, which should wear down the sense of novelty and turn it into something 'normal' to make, which should drive price per unit down even more if I start wanting big batches."

"That's pretty insidious," Katherine said, nodding slightly. "If it works, that is. And you don't announce your plans straight to whoever you're commissioning your circuits from."

"Hey, if I'm super successful and a legit computing industry takes off—then I'm doing them a favor. They'll be the experts on making magic-circuits, and other people will come to them. I dunno if patents are a thing in this universe, but there's certainly an advantage to being the first and best at making something super-specialized right when it starts building demand, regardless."

"But you're planning to ask multiple shops to build these things, if you can," the psion pointed out.

"Yeah. I don't know the first thing about what kind of magic will work best, so hopefully different perspectives will lead to different conclusions. Hence, my instructions are vague: I just need a 'source' and 'flows' that have the designated properties."

Now in the cluster of shops they'd been headed for, Katherine stopped off in front of one. "Well, good luck with all that. I'm gonna see a guy about a door."
"Yep! Seeya!" Aria flashed a sideways peace sign across her forehead and waved it away before running off, resuming her usual proportions in the process.

...I wonder which one of us is going to disrupt this world's society more, the psion mused as she headed inside—thinking about Mira's current efforts, Zack's...situation, the excessively friendly dragon-girl, Rayna's impending burst of reality-warping powers...then the witch again, with her 'niceness' agenda and the spell she'd tested on Loren and Rast, not to mention the level of power she was set to attain. Okay, it would probably be Mira. But maybe Aria would tie, if enough of her plan worked.

---

Lupa threw her new axe in a high arc, watched it peak and start to fall, then held her hand up; the crystal on the glove glowed faintly, and the weapon slowed its forward motion, twisting impossibly in the air until it was swinging back her way. She giggled, waving her hand back and forth and seeing this guide the axe until it finally came in reach, and she caught it easily despite its still-considerable momentum. "Look at that, Master!"
"Hmmh." Zack nodded. "It doesn't just come back, it's guided. We ever run into something that's only weak from the back, use that."

"Yep! So this can work with the big axes, too?"

The knight shrugged. "I'm sure we can see about it. At least having a few spares would be good in case that one gets stuck in something, or you break it."

"Heey!" Rose was on her way out to them, and waved when the two wolf-girls looked her way. "Hi."

"Flower lizard!" Lupa ran over to her (still carrying the axe by her side). "Strong contest time?"
The dragon-girl headtilted. "Flower lizard?"

"Master said 'big lizard' was rude."
Zack sighed. "I said it might be rude to call you a lizard at all."
"Pfssh, I don't care," Rose said, holding her hand up and dropping it at the wrist dismissively. "I am named after a flower, anyway. But yeah! I thought we could do that now. You wanna judge?" she asked Zack.

"Not really, but I don't see anyone else volunteering.

"How're you gonna compare strengths, anyway?"
Both managed to "Uuuuhhhmm" in chorus; Zack facepalmed and sighed, shaking his head afterward for good measure.
"Look, unless you want to go rent out a gym we don't have a bunch of heavy stuff for you to both lift. Why don't you just see who can throw the same thing the farthest?"

"Ahh, that could work!" Rose said, lighting up eagerly, which Lupa imitated in agreement. "What'll we throw?" Both of them looked around for a moment, until the wolf-girl encountered a rock half-buried into the ground which was maybe half her own height and fairly wide besides. After bending over to get her hands on either side of it, she managed to yank it out of the ground in one motion and hold it up over her head.

"This! Heavy, but easy to throw," she said.

"Yeah, I think that'll work," Rose agreed. "You go first?"

"'Kay!"

Before she could wind up, Zack put a hand on her shoulder. "Away from the house," he said. "Try not to mess up Mira's spell circle either. So.." Zack pointed in a direction perpendicular to the line between the two. "I guess it's fine if we break our own fence, but you can probably throw over it, right?"

"Yep!"

"Okay, great."

Lupa went about her throw by whirling in a few circles first before giving the big rock a hard shove upward with her hands as it left her arms in the specified direction. The oversized projectile sailed over the fence and well into the horizon before landing into the ground with a distant, dull thunk.

Zack crossed his arms. "That's terrifying. You realize I was the 'strong one' in my group before you two came along."

"Heheh, jealous?" Rose said. "I'll go get it back." She leapt into the air and flew out in the direction of the rock.

A moment later, her voice carried on the wind. "Uuhm, can you hear me? The rock kindaaa, like, broke a little bit?"

Zack sighed and walked out to the fence line. "Just bring the biggest pieces you can carry or something."

"Oh, wait! I got an idea!" The knight shook his head, wondering why he'd thought his input necessary in the first place. A moment later, Rose came running back with what appeared to be a giant plant bulb in her arms, stopping on the other side of the fence. "Uhhmm..."
"Just drop it over," Zack said, having already backed away in case she decided to chuck it instead.
"Oh, right!" After it dropped, she vaulted over herself, and picked the bulb up again. "Now uh..where'd you throw it from exactly?"

"Here!" Lupa said, waving. "This one didn't move!"
"Ooh, smart!" Rose ran over, and set the bulb down, carefully opening it at the top a bit where the wolf-girls could look inside. The rock had, in fact, broken into no less than seven pieces, with several other smaller bits rattling around when she carried it around earlier. Then she took Lupa's spot and closed the bulb again before picking it up.

"Heere we gooo!" She gripped the top of the bulb, where it had been open before, and simply pulled her arm back before pitching it like a baseball, at a slight upward angle. Her throw wasn't entirely straight, veering off to one side and audibly failing to quite clear the top of the fence on its way out. This also tore the bulb open and sent the pieces of the rock scattering out in a wide arc from the point it hit the fence, several of them skipping or bouncing across the ground on their way out to the horizon.

"Uhm...it...wasn't s'posed to do that," Rose said, awkwardly scratching the side of her forehead with a claw. "How can we even tell how far the rock went if it like, scattered all over the place?"

"I'm not counting steps out that far," the knight said. "Did you even mark where her throw landed?"
"Of course! I put a purple flower right on the spot, since uhm, the landing sorta uprooted the plants that'd been there before."

"Call it a tie?" Lupa suggested. "This one broke it, Rose put it back together again and carried it back and still threw it." The dragon-girl consulted Zack for this, who shrugged, already on his way to inspect the damaged bit of fence.

"If you're happy, I..don't really care," he stated.

"Okay! Tie it is!" She held out a hand for a careful shake, which Lupa grabbed with both hers to enthusiastically reciprocate. "We'll think of something less likely to break on us next time."
"Yes! Next time!" the wolf-girl echoed, her tail wagging excitedly at the prospect.

Once Zack was satisfied that the damage was largely cosmetic, the three of them started back toward the house. "Uuhm..sorry for kinda dragging you into that," Rose said, rubbing the back of her head briefly. "Err—draggin' rather? Dragon? Eh? Mmmnn.." She shook her head at her own belated pun.

"No big deal."

"Hey...do I make you nervous?"

Rose paused in her step for a second to headtilt at him. "Eh?"
Zack shrugged. "Sometimes you just seem really nervous when you talk. Like you're not sure about what you're saying, or if you ought to be speaking at all."

"Oh! Well um, that's not just you. I talk the way I talk with pretty much everybody!" Rose said. "I guess it's, um..liiike...you know how I was before?"

"Not really."

Well, I was, pretty quiet. Reeeaal shy. Like, I was terrified to talk to anyone I didn't know sometimes, and there weren't too many people I did know."
"But you're not like that now," he said, in a tone that suggested an implied question.

"Yeah! Uh, when I...this happened," she said, waving to her present form, "I felt this rush of..I dunno. I just really wanted to talk to people, and couldn't stand the idea of being alone once I knew there were people I could talk to. It was really weird at first, like I didn't really know myself."
"Weird. Most of us seemed to be mostly the same, mentally," he said. "Like, the 'new lives' were based on the personalities we already had, rather than getting 'new' ones that were wildly different."

"I don't mind it, though! I mean, like, really I've always wished I could be the kinda person who wouldn't be afraid to speak out anywhere, about anything, and go out and meet new people all the time...so I leaned hard into it. But, uh...to tell the truth I'm still not exactly like that. See, I do speak out everywhere, but I'm still terrified! Eheheh..."

"You feel like you're gonna say the wrong thing and make everyone hate you," Zack stated, and Rose nodded a little sadly. "I guarantee that won't happen with this crowd."
"I know! Kinda, I mean. It's a feeling though, so like, I can't just switch off even if I know it's wrong. I just...have to deal, y'know?"

"That's fine."

---

"Soo, in theory it's possible you could spar with her and even teach her a thing or two, if you know anything about using axes," Lynn said. "Then again, I'd be careful. Rayna said she was stupid strong, and I've seen enough of her fighting to believe it."
Rast twiddled the tip of an ear for a moment. "This wouldn't be the girl I heard showed up during trainin' drills yesterday and yanked the Cap's sword right outta her grip to throw it into the sky, would it?"
"Mmmaybe? The rumor might be exaggerating a bit, but I heard she did a brief 'test' to see if it was okay for us to bring her out on quests."
"Short, with white fur? Same red eyes as before?"

"Yeah."
"Yep, I don't think I wanna spar that one anytime soon," he said, shaking his head slightly.

"Well, you should at least meet her some time. I guarantee she's a lot less scary to talk to now."