The "Best" RPG Ever-124

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"So...how's your project been going?" Aria was sitting across from Loren in a restaurant booth. He'd already insisted that he'd take the bill in the process of ordering their food.
"Oh, to make a computer? Pretty great~! I got a first batch of samples in, gave some feedback, and expect the next one anytime now. It's not exactly surprising to find that people will make whatever nonensical toy I want if I throw enough money at 'em."

"I guess that's one advantage of having to feed your sword monster blood all the time," he said. "How is..that, by the way? Any uh..do you feel any more or less, uh, insane from it?"
"Maybe less? I've learned to..control my dreams, to some extent."

Loren gave her a questioning look, and she realized that this aspect of her 'cursed sword' hadn't come up in conversation with him before. "Well, it's just that when I sleep, I have a completely lucid dream that happens in perfect lockstep with real time, and the demon...I guess what its body would look like if it was alive? Is just kinda chilling way off in the distance, this like ten-story-tall guy chained up and asleep. I used to be just kinda stuck on a 'cliff' place with nothing to see but this...incomprehensible visual fuzz behind me, and him in front of me. But Kath helped me 'craft' that fuzz into some actual, like, imaginary rooms or landscapes or whatever a few times, and now I can kinda do it myself. And I've learned how to meditate to pass the time, too. So, overall, it's not nearly as maddeningly boring as it was at first."
"I...see. Well, I guess that's good?"
"Yep!"

"A-anyway," he said, changing the subject away from one he found moderately uncomfortable, "I had some correspondence recently with one of the cryptomancers who helped me with that dragon's teleport crystal. Just expressing some, you know, professional curiosity about the basics of how her area of expertise works. I got back an excited essay about 'logical chains' and 'code sequences'. Entirely different diagrams and terminology from yours, but some of it felt quite similar anyway. Maybe you'd be interested in a read?"
"Heck yeah!" Aria grinned big.
He gave a slightly confused look. "'Heck'?"
"Uh—don't worry about that," she said. "Just an emphatic...adverb, I guess is what it is in this case?"

"I'll take your word for it."

---

Rose led the way through the door to the house, then quickly around to her own door—not wanting the Felis's awful breath to stink up her friends' home any more than necessary. "Well—here we are!" she said with a sweeping gesture. "Um, what do you think of my forest?"
Randall took a moment to actually look around before answering. "Pleasant place. Bit strong on the nose, but a pretty unusual look to my eyes—inna good way. Never seen something so close to a jungle and a garden all at the same time."

"Heheh..well, I try. Have you..ever been to another nature dragon's place?"
"Can't say I have. Most dragons aren't keen to show off their hoards to anyone."

"Well, that's just a shame," she said, putting her hands on her hips. "What's even the point of making a place pretty if you can't show it off to anyone?"
"Hah. You really are an odd one for a dragon," he half-slurred, starting to step forward. "I don't feel much activity directly below us, which is prolly good news for you. Lezss go a little further out."
"Sure." Rose started off toward the east, making sure to take the less direct, more clear route rather than risk him stumbling over something.

"I s'pose you've shown your friends around the place before," he said after a moment, seeming to hope to make conversation. "Not to mention miss Vaedin, eh?"

"Yep! Uhm, actually Vae's seen more than anyone else, I think."

"I be' she has."

Rose stopped in her tracks, turning around to glare. "Uh, rude."

"Bad joke, I suppose. Sorry," he shrugged.

"Hmph." The dragon-girl just turned around and continued leading the way.

"Ahh, you are sweet on her, aren't you? I applaud your tastes—she's really a f..fine looking young woman."

"There's way more to her than her looks! Just like most people!"

"Oi, I know that.

"After hearing her name, you know, I though' she sounded sorta familiar. It came back to me a little later...I happened to be in the country around the time Vaedin's experiment supposedly caused an explosion."

"I'm well aware of her history, you know."

"Sure. But anyway—knowing full well herbalists usually don't make explosives, I had a look around the ruins myself. Curiosity, an' all that."
"Uh-huh? You find anything?"
"No' as such. No structural sabotage or anything like that. Though—I also went by the healer's afterward, upon hearin' the old fox was still alive, and even recovering. Bumped into an unusual young woman there. Big cloak over a fancy-looking dress. No one else there seemed to notice 'er tail."

When he didn't continue his story for several more steps, she said, "Lots of people have tails, right? I mean, like—I've got a tail, you've got a tail."
"Sure, but most folks haven' got that sort of tail these days. Your witch friend's the only one that comes to mind right now."

"Oh. Sooo, you noticed she was a witch." Remembering the entire thing with Ezra's old party, she asked, "Did you...kill her?"
"Nah. Sure, I followed her out of town, we fought for a bit. She liked to throw a bunch of knives and daggers around, but—didn't bother using her magic. I think she'd noticed I wasn't playing for keeps.

"Anyway. After we'd spoken for a bit, I let her go. Seems she just wanted to 'reward' the old fox for something or other. Errh...it was...helping cure a fever her apprentice had, some years back. I though': If her aim was to help him, funny way to go about it. But at leas', she didn't seem so bad. Not worth the effort to really try to kill."

"Did yoouuu..catch her name?"
"Sure. Grizzle...uh...something." He paused, then snapped a finger. "Griselda! Tha's what it was."

---

Katherine used Lynn's mind for the dream meeting once again, this time bringing in Zack first in hopes of cutting off any nightmares he was having right away. His dream actually seemed less distressing than the night before, although it might have just been because she caught him so early. After that it was Rayna's turn, and then she 'invited' Clera's two minds in, again making a door linked to one in Ian's house for them to step through whenever they were ready. Their dreamspace was about as coherent as she could usually make anyone else's, only without her help, so just yanking them in felt kind of rude when this was an option.

While they waited, the wolfgirl strode up to a couple of feet in front of Rayna. She paused, confused by this behavior. "...Yes?" He reached across, taking one of her ears in each hand, and gave just strong enough of a tug to be painful. "Oww!" She recoiled, stumbling back a couple of steps and putting her hands over the 'injured' ears. "What was that for?!"

"Like you don't know." He walked away with no further elaboration.

"Wait—how'd that hurt here anyway?" she asked, Katherine's way. "Shouldn't I just, wake up?"

"Not if I don't want you to," the catgirl said with a slightly mean grin. "Especially while you're in someone else's dream."

Before this conversation could continue, Clera's door opened, and the winged girl stepped through, followed by Ian. Looking around briefly, the former said, "Am I interrupting something?"
"Nothing important," Zack said, going to a couch Katherine had 'spawned in' to sit down.

"So, what did you..remember? Or—did you remember something?" the catgirl asked.
"I—or we—had a feeling that something was familiar about the events described in the letter from town," Ian started. "But it was too distant to grasp. We suspected it was in Clera's memory, and would be easier to bring up while separated."
The winged girl nodded. "That turned out to be right. But, it's not something I have a lot of detail on; just something I heard about from one of my professors back at magic college. An echo of a rumor used as a cautionary tale, if anything.

"It was...regarding a small group of mages trying to research chaos magic..some of Jacob's predecessors, you could say, but much less careful in their methods. They set up a small base not even very far into the frontier, with a few soldiers to keep them safe. Their research was seemingly uneventful for a few years, but at some point, something went..wrong. It's uncertain what happened, but most of them—including all of the soldiers—were later found dead in ways that suggested the use of rather powerful and...creative magic. Those who did return, well...
"It's not that they were completely mad—at least, not in the usual way. They seemed to possess all of their faculties, I mean. They could cast the same magic as before—if not a bit more powerful. And they spoke in complete sentences, but there was something unhinged and panicked about their tone of voice, and nobody could quite make sense of what they were saying. The concepts would just—slide off one's mind, or else thinking about what they were saying too much would hurt...which sounds to me like how 'dangerous information' behaves. They also tried to lock eyes with anyone they could, and some of those who they succeeded with became...suddenly violent. Others just said their eyes looked 'wrong' and wouldn't elaborate. The whole group was eventually killed off by those who didn't go mad from looking in their eyes—and others who managed to avoid doing so at all."

She shook her head lightly. "Sorry—now that I've recalled it, it really doesn't seem as useful as I'd hoped it would be."
"Hmmn...It still tells us something," Lynn said. "This kind of thing has happened before. It's a thing chaos magic can do, just in general. But it usually doesn't?"

"And dangerous information is involved!" Rayna added. "That means dangerous information is tied in with chaos magic in some way. Maybe it's 'dangerous' because it can make people crazy like that!"

"That would seem like a good reason for knowledge to be locked away," Clera said.

"But none of them turned into actual monsters, like that Donovan guy?" Katherine asked. "Do you know what their races were?"
"Hmmh...the country this professor was from was largely populated by humans," she recalled. "It's a fair bet that's what they were, or at least the majority."

"Beastfolk are genuinely part animal, and chaos magic can turn animals into monsters," Rayna mused. "Maybe humans are so non-animal that its 'way' of turning them into monsters is..different?"

"Where does that leave elves, then?" Ian asked. "Then again—I suppose we had better hope to not find out."

---

After a moment of quiet, Randall rolled the subject of conversation back slightly. ''Abou' miss Vaedin, though...what's she think of her whole situation? Being stuck as a lady, and all?"
"Well—she told me it was a pretty low price for basically getting to stay permanently young and healthy," Rose said. "What, have you seriously never, like, tried being a girl? There's totally magic that can make that change, at least temporarily."
"Oh, I've tried it. It just felt..unnatural, and off, to me," Randall said. "Never really wanted a second taste."

He sighed. "Immortality, eh? I suppose it's no' so bad for dragons 'r elves. Maybe Vaedin's early enough in on the experience to not feel any downsides yet. But I've long since felt like it was more of a burden than a blessing."

"Huh. The, uh, Captain said something like that once," Rose said. "Like—she said she was 'cursed with an inability to grow old', and how it's not in a human's nature to live forever. Or, like, not forever I guess—no one really lives forever."

"I s'pose not. Hmm." He seemed to be thinking about something, but she didn't feel much like asking what.

"I don't really feel like there's anything special about me, though. I just feel like, as long as I'm happy with my life now, how long the future or past is for me doesn't really matter?

"..Ah, here we are!" She gestured outward. The border between her forest and the land beyond in this direction wasn't especially sharp. There were still plenty of plants around; they just weren't quite as bright and vibrant. But Rose could feel the difference. "D'you feel anything underground around here?"

"Hmmh. Not right here," he said. "I do feel something faint off...that way." He pointed in a mostly-north, slightly-east direction. "Allow me to lead the way forra moment."
"Sure!"

---

Being guided by the gods, in the completest sense of the phrase, required a certain frame of mind—or else was bound to cause a great deal of frustration. It was fairly often that one would be led to do something that appeared inconsequential, nonsencial, or even counterproductive, and it was only when one was lucky that the reasons came to light at all, even if it took a decade before they did. Sometimes one would have to deliver a message, or answer a question, without even knowing any of what was being said. The tasks varied in difficulty and risk to one's health in a fairly random pattern, requiring one to always be on one's toes.

This frame of mind began with understanding that they weren't being capricious on purpose. They simply don't think the way mortals do, and every mortal in the world is their collective concern, rather than any particular one. With so much on their plate, it was understandable that they wouldn't have time to sit each person they needed something from down and fully explain the details. Perhaps their plans even required such secrecy that even most of those carrying it out needed to be ignorant in order for it to succeed.

At any rate, Fazren was long since used to taking on such a frame of mind. The reasons didn't matter; the consequences weren't his to know. He attributed his peculiar longevity first to healthy living, and second to this attitude—which, even if it went unnoticed and so failed to garner him any particular favor with the gods, at least prevented a great deal of life-shortening stress he might otherwise experience.

He found himself in the garden he'd been meditating in that afternoon, stirring as though from the same unintentional nap. The general idea was there, and the details matched completely in a small area close enough to his position for his mind to have remembered well, but farther out things were fuzzier. The garden seemed to stretch out beyond its boundaries in the real world, enough that the rest of the town appeared as some distant shadows of structures obscured by fog. Recognizing this, as well as a strange sort of awareness that he was supposed to have been awoken by a splash of water at this moment but had instead awoken naturally, led him to the conclusion that he was in a dream. Furthermore, it was one that appeared orchestrated to make him aware of this—to ensure he would be lucid.

Fazren stood up, looking around, and soon picked up on a figure walking in from what would have been behind him a moment ago. He could tell that the figure was female, and sported canine-like features, athough whether they were those of a fox or a wolf—a Canis or a Vulpin—was less clear. Somehow her figure wavered between being quite tall (almost his height) and slender (even a bit lanky), and quite short with some deep curves.

He squinted his eyes at the figure as she came closer, yet didn't seem to grow any more distinct. "What's the matter?" she teased. "Can't decide what you like?"

"I've long since learned to appreciate beauty in many forms," he said pleasantly. "Then—I suppose I ought to feel honored."
"Hmhm...there's no need for that." She drew close enough to reach her hand...up, maybe?...and lightly touch his half-missing ear. "You should do what you like, you know? You deserve that much for putting up with us for so long." She ran her fingers across it briefly, touching the healed nub where it should've attached to the missing bit, before dropping the hand. Her fingers through his fur was an unusually pleasant feeling, but the old fox restrained himself.

"...I'm not sure whether I should take that to mean it's what you want," he said. "I don't suppose you have any hints for me to pass along to a more talented weaver?"

"Not my area of expertise, I'm afraid. No worries, my husband is sure the two of you will figure it out soon enough. I'm just here to give you something she already has—for later."

She opened her arms out toward him, physically asking for a hug. "Shall we?"
Fazren smiled. "By all means."

---

Randall's right ear twitched, and he stopped, turning that way to look at whatever he'd heard. "..Oi! You need—"
Rose caught up enough to look in the same direction, at about the same time as the person he was talking to turned around. It was a fairly small, thin Felis girl with bright pink hair, wearing some badly-damaged light armor, but what had made him stop mid-question was the fact that her face—now turned their way—was covered with a splatter of blood, some dried and some still warm enough to be wet. By her position now, she seemed to have been crouched over the dead body of a deer, which looked less like an animal had killed and begun to eat it, and more like someone had spared extra effort to tear it apart and mutilate it. The claws of her blood-covered hands and her bare feet were all fully extended, and now that she saw the two of them, she'd started hissing threateningly.

"What in the..?" Judging by his reaction, Randall probably hadn't had a clear view of what she'd been doing before she turned around.

It took the dragon-girl a moment to process the sight herself, but after that she started to think she recognized the girl's face. That, and she perceived something distinctly...wrong...with her eyes. "Wait, that's..!"

"Hey!" The hissing Felis pounced in their direction, claws out; Randall reacted blindingly fast, raising a chunk of dirt diagonally upward with enough force to violently swat her away to one side and send her rolling off along the ground. He remained facing her as she recovered, raising more ground up into the air to join with what he'd already taken hold of, splitting and compacting it all into a number of spikes all in a half-circle in front of and slightly above her. His hand was raised threateningly, ready to throw them all at her as soon as she made another move. "You stay away from me...!"

"W-wait, don't kill her!"
"Crazy woman don' look interested in a truce to me!" She had pulled herself into a posture very much like a normal feline getting ready to pounce at something.

"B-but that's Mia!" Rose said quickly. "One of Hyacinth's, um, friends. They're only crazy because of the chaos magic stuff, and we know how to fix that!"

When Mia tensed to jump at them again, Randall settled for smacking her with the flat end of one of the spikes, sending her rolling sideways for a second. "Can you fix it?"

"Well—no. But Mira can! O-or the Captain, or Jacob. We'd just need to get her back to town."

"And how do you propose we do that?" As soon as she'd caught herself, the hostile Felis was again standing on all fours and hissing at the two of them.

"Knock her out?" Rose suggested, although they'd tried that with Donovan without much success. She tried pulling up some of the plants around Mia into some vines to restrain her, but she reacted unnaturally fast, jumping to one side and out of range before any of them could grab her.

"That first or second hit should've done that!" Randall said, keeping his spikes between Mia and them as she moved. "And now what's she..?"

"RrrRROOOOWWRRH!" Mia made a sound like an angry wildcat (or maybe one experiencing extreme pain) as she convulsed. From her back erupted some ten or more...well, they looked a lot like her tail, except they were coming out of random spots across her back, and they were longer and thicker than normal Felis tails were supposed to be.
"Uh, she must be turning into some kinda super-monster form! Th-this happened with Donovan, too!" Some of the 'tails' seemed to violently split apart from about halfway down onward, fanning apart with webbing between to turn into something resembling insect wings. Others had just their ends erupt out with white spikes that looked like they might be made entirely out of bone. Mia's body had grown slightly in size—though not nearly as much as the Canis man's had—and was fully covered in matted fur, her head changing to look like that of an actual wildcat as she continued to painfully howl.

Rose finally noticed that Randall had raised up and compacted together two big walls of earth on either side of the transforming Felis, and was spreading his hands out in preparation to slam them inward. "No good reason to wait for her to finish—"

"No, don't—!" She couldn't get her objection out before he slammed his hands inward, clapping them, and in the same motion brought the earth-walls in on the monstrous girl with surely enough force to squash anything flat.

The dragon-girl stared at the unnatural column of dirt resulting from this moment, now starting to crumble under its own weight without the earth mage's help, for a moment in silence. Then, without warning, she picked him up by his neck, her hand-claws tearing into his shirt. "I said DON'T KILL HER!!!"

He put his hands on her arm, not pushing to get free but putting his weight on something other than his neck, and he yelled back as angrily as she had: "That thing was not a 'her' anymore, Rose! It was obviously getting ready to kill both of us!"

She was crying uncontrollably at this point. "But I could've—!"

The argument was interrupted by the noise of a bunch of the dirt being thrown aside from near the top of the mound. Both of their heads turned to find Mia, seemingly unharmed by the impact, just finished digging her way out with the bizarre spiked claw-tail-things, and shaking off some leftover dirt like an animal would some water.

Rose dropped Randall and raised some vines to grab her again, but Mia leapt into the air and—unexpectedly—used the wing-like appendages from her back to fly. She flew toward them briefly, while ascending, before making a sudden midair 180 to start flying away. The vines couldn't reach her in the air, and it didn't look like she was coming back.

Without a word, the dragon-girl took off after the feline monster. But Mia had a head start for one thing, and she flew surprisingly fast, with an amount of maneuverability Rose's gigantic wings couldn't quite match. Mia wasn't flying particularly high, and soon found a collection of trees to dart around and between; Rose had no choice but to fly above the treeline, and after a minute or two, she no longer had any idea where Mia had gone. After some more searching—which included even landing on the ground and trying to 'feel' for the monstrous Felis's presence between the trees—she gave up and flew back.

"Well?" Randall was waiting, arms crossed and obviously displeased—but Rose still felt much angrier than he looked.
"I lost her."
"You should've torn that thing's bloody throat out before it turned into an invincible beast!" he said.

"Well—I didn't, and I won't. You go back to town and report what's happened, I'm staying with my forest. If she comes anywhere near it, I'll wrap her up in vines so tight she can't move, and then I'll take her back to Mira and we'll fix her."

"Works for me. I ought to at least be safe back there."