The "Best" RPG Ever-100

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Katherine woke herself and Zack up at the same time—after jolting Aria awake, after everyone said their general goodbyes. That time was fairly deep into the morning; after all, they'd all had a rather long night. While she had already had the experience of..mutually petting someone before with Nora, it was a bit different to fall asleep that way and wake up still clinging to someone else. Not...bad, but different. She carefully peeled herself off of Zack and pulled up onto her knees on the bed, while he swung around so he was facing the same way she was, his legs hanging off the side.

"Morrr-ning~," the catgirl said, and received a groggy but not unfriendly grunt in repsonse. Her head tilted slightly as she caught sight of some thin metal links across the back of his neck. She reached forward and prodded them slightly. "You're still wearing the abstinence charm thing? I'm pretty sure that stuff's worn off by now."
"Yeah." The wolf-girl stood up and stretched. "I still don't like the idea of being attracted to guys, so..whatever of that the stupid curse gave me, this should cancel out, right?"
"I'm sure it's helping," she shrugged. "Well, I need to get back to my room before everyone else wakes up enough to be witnesses."
"Mmnh. See you 't breakfast."
"Yep!" Hopping off the bed, Katherine headed out the door and made quick work of the short distance back to her own bedroom. It was almost a shame they were going to let this secret out soon, as it gave her an opportunity to feel sneaky, slipping thorugh the upstairs hallway unnoticed by all.

"Mnnh?" Almost as soon as she was gone, Lupa woke up. "Nnh...yah!" She pulled at the covers over her and threw them violently away—actually, directly at him.

"..Morning, Lupa." Zack carefully picked it off of himself and set it in a pile on his own bed for now.
"Ack! Sorry, Master!" She sat up, cross-legged, on top of the bed. "This one didn't know what the weight was and threw it off quick in case it was an attack!"

"It's just covers. People usually sleep under blankets and stuff to keep them warm," he said. "...I hope Katherine taught you how to clean yourself in a shower."
"Um..?" Given the light headtilt, she didn't know the word.

"The thing in the bathroom that spits water at you from above."

"Oh! This one thought that was skywater," she said, and then nodded. "That makes more sense now."

"Your tail's almost as bad as mine, so it probably needs more attention than hers does," he said.

"Bad?"
"Gigantic. Fluffy," he clarified. "More fur is more to wash."
"Oh," she nodded cheerfully again.

"Same goes for hair."

"Um...people do this every day?" she said, pulling herself down onto her feet and standing up.

"Usually. Especially after a workout or a battle. No one I've met likes being covered in yesterday's sweat. Well—you don't have to wash all your hair and fur every day, but it gets kind of rough and tangled if it's not groomed often enough."

"Hmmn." Lupa held her own tail forward with a hand, considering this point. "This one will try it," she said.

"Alright. Nora's still asleep," (which his hearing informed him of) "so you can have first go in there. I guess..tell me if you have any questions," he shrugged.

"Okay! Thank you, Master!" she said excitedly, heading inside.

Lynn was awakened by a knock from her bathroom door. "Pssst! Lynn," Rayna's voice came through. "Are you up yet?"
"I guess..?" She sat up and took a look out the window—the sun was up, but it was still morning. "I'm surprised you are, after that late a night."

"I slept enough. More importantly, I have exciting news. Can I come in?"
"Sure."

The fox-girl was still in her bedclothes, which implied whatever news it was had come up immediately after she woke. "Okay okay. Check this out," she said excitedly. After holding up one hand and making a few tapping and sweeping motions with the other, her hair appeared to turn blue.
"Uh..I guess that's no normal illusion if you're so excited about it," the human said.
"Yeah! My hair is actually blue now. And I can do this." With a further motion of her hand, the color of her hair shifted around through various hues like someone was dragging their mouse around in a color picker for it.

"So..you got up to that 'reality bending' skill or whatever?" she said, pulling around to hang her legs off the side of the bed.

"Mm-hm!" The fox-girl left her hair at a bright neon pink.

"Can it do anything...useful?"
"Uhh...some?"

"For one thing, this is technically an enchantment I'm applying to myself. With the skill level I have, it'll wear off or can get dispelled, but little cosmetic things like this are very high efficiency and can stick around for months with no maintenance, which is totally different from constantly maintining a visual illusion. New-grown hair will keep the new color unless I specifically set it not to. Forrr the moment the only, I guess, useful things I can do is some stat buffing, and that's way lower efficiency; without upkeep it won't last more than a few minutes. But! All of that can be leveled up. I can make everything more permanent by leveling the main skill, raise the efficiency of specific effects much more with skills that focus on them, and some of the higher-up skills really do allow for indefinite no-upkeep effects and true reality alteration—as opposed to the dispellable stuff—at the highest levels," she rattled off quickly.

"That's great and all, but I think you might have to repeat all that to everyone else," Lynn said. "Still, I'm happy for you."

"Yeah, I don't mind explaining something twice. I—when we were fighting the weird tentacle starfish thing, I felt sorta useless," she said, her ears drooping slightly. "But now I can finally do something other than illusions! If someone needs a little extra strength or intelligence, or..like, I can change a blade of grass into something that looks in every way like a person or animal for a brief moment to pull the attention of even something like that demon. Eventually I might be able to manipulate almost every attribute that I can 'see' with the HUD-vision stuff, since that's how what I can already do basically works and with the new skill I can see a lot of the options future skills will give me grayed out, waiting to be unlocked."

"Could you give yourself a temporary copy of someone else's abilities?" she suggested, standing up.
"Maybe! Probablyyy, at least a lesser proportion of them. The possibilities look endless!"

About halfway through making breakfast, Katherine picked up a pair of minds in the nearby sky—both of which she recognized, and one of which seemed somehow...less hazy than before. For now she went with the one she knew could easily be reached. Mira.

Yoo, Kath.

How..is she?

Pretty good. Way better than last night. We'll fill you in once we get there.

Not long after, they came into the kitchen. "Good morning," the catgirl said cheerfully, and received just a sheepish nod from the dragon-girl in response.

"Mornin'. You the only one awake?" the witch asked.

"No, but everyone else is still upstairs getting ready for the day."

"Mmnh..." Rose fidgeted, looking very much like she wanted to say something.
Katherine paused—at least physically; her telekinesis was still doing the work of cooking—to look at her. "You have something important to say?"

"Um, yeah, uh.."
"You should say it at breakfast. Especially if you want everyone to hear it."
"Oh. Uh..okay."

"Besides," she said, turning around to look at something. "People take shocking or awkward news a lot better in the middle of a meal."
"Really?"
"Sure! For one thing, there's something in people's instincts about eating. Anyone you're eating with is a member of yourrrr, tribe, or pack, or whatever. So they're automatically friends, even when they're not. But especially when they are. For another, if you don't like what you're hearing then your options are to listen anyway or miss out on the food."

"Heheh...I-I guess so," she said nervously.
"Maybe more importantly, everyone will be here, and you don't have to say it...what, seven different times, worst-case? Unless you didn't already tell her...whatever it is?"

"Um. Right. I-I mean I did," she said. After a gentle wave in the direction of one of the kitchen table chair from the catgirl, she nervously skittered over there, Mira gracefully floating over to sit next to her.

"I'd offer to help, but it seems like you've got a good rhythm going," the witch said.
"Indeed I do. You can pick it up some other time."

Someone—maybe the Captain of the guard, or maybe the people in charge of the house's construction—had ensured that the table had space enough, and chairs enough, for no less than four extra people beyond the expected eight (after accounting for the fact that the entire house was outfitted for twice as many people as it was originally going to be for in the first place). So once the telepathic call went up and everyone was seated, it still wasn't overly crowded—even with Rose and Lupa added to the lot. Nearly everyone took note of the dragon-girl's presence in particular, Zack and Aria both asking if she was okay and receiving a positive, if a bit nervous, response, and the rest either witnessing one of those two or choosing to reserve such questioning for later.

After they were all seated, but before touching any of her own food, Rose gave an uncharacteristically reserved throat-clearing to try and get everyone's attention, before realizing she basically already had it—except for Lupa, who seemed content enough with the dragon-girl's earlier assurance she was okay to start tearing at her food like nothing had ever been wrong.

"Um...so...a-about last night," she started. "I was uh..the..like, the demon-thing...it um..." She trailed off and shrugged, giving up on trying to explain this. "I-I'm just sorry if I worried everyone. I'm..okay, really, and I...sorta was throwing a tantrum at myself because...stuff...um." Rose turned slightly in Mira's direction, and giggled nervously when the witch gave her an enthusiastic thumbs-up.

"W-well, I guess most of you might already know this, or a-at least had a guess..uh. I'mmmm, from Earth too," she said slowly. "Annnnd, I've known all of you are for..a while. A few days, at least. That's it, I guess."

While those of the group who'd been less privy to the earlier 'investigation' took a moment to process this, Aria—sitting next to her—reached over to put a hand on her shoulder. "Welcome to the party," she said. Several of the others echoed the general sentiment of this right after, with someone saying "This whole thing is crazy, right?" Rose just nervously giggled in response to all this, and most of the table quickly turned to general, casual chatter as though nothing too unusual had just been said.

Among this, Lupa paused in her eating, pulling some food the rest of the way into her mouth with her tongue, and turned to Zack with a questioning look—it read to him as 'asking permission to ask a question'.

"What?"
"Um..what's 'Earth'?"

"That's..going to be a lengthy explanation for you," he said. "Look, it's where we're from—everyone here in the house but you I guess—as opposed to, where we are now. I think that's the best I can do without help."

"Okay," she nodded, accepting this explanation completely. Zack just shook his head as she tore back into her food again, unsure how to take a complete lack of follow-up questions. At least it meant he could keep eating too.

"Hey, you have a skill tree too, right?" Aria said after waiting what she presumed to be long enough to distance the question from Rose's announcement somewhat.

"Hmn? Oh, yeah! It's a literal tree too, heehee!"

"What've you been buying? Actually, I'll just have you draw it for me like everyone else has."

"Uhh..okay? But like, a bunch of skills were just already there for me when I got here," she said, immediately concerned with the sudden interest in this topic.

"I guess that explains why you were so powerful already as soon as we met..."

"Hey, speaking of skills!" Rayna said. "Did anyone notice anything diffent about my haaaiir~?"
"You're making it look pink?" Zack said.

"Yes, but—it's not an illusion. I finally got that skill that lets me do other stuff, too," she said.
"How exactly do you know it's not an illusion?"

"Because I'm not spending any energy maintaining it," she replied. "I'm using that skill to actually change the color attribute of my hair. It's a long-lasting enchantment, technically."
"Okaay..so how do we know it's not just a long-lasting illusion you can make now?"

"My Sight tells me otherwise," she said, in a tone that indicated this settled the matter in her mind.

"No, no, I think he's onto something," Lynn said, drawing a very 'not you too' expression from the fox-girl. "How can you trust that your Sight thing isn't just telling you it's meaningfully distinct from an illusion? I mean, you can already fool almost every normal sense we have, so those can't very well be trusted to tell us whether it's real or not."
"It wouldn't make any sense for my power to try to fool me about how it works."
"Yeah, but you could be misinterpreting what it's telling you," Katherine joined in.

"Well—I can do stuff like buff other people's stats with it too," she said, changing tack. "You can't fake making someone stronger or smarter or...whatever. And that's the same skill and spell, so by extension..."

"You told me yourself this morning that you can only do small boosts, though," Lynn countered. "Isn't it pretty easy to boost someone's confidence by making them feel a tiny bit stronger, and then that confidence gives them what they perceive to be the same results as a real boost of strength?"

"W—maybe, but I can level those same skills up to increase the boosts past any kind of placebo effect," Rayna said.

"I don't remember anything in those skills' descriptions that suggest their exact method of achieving that effect won't change when you level them up," Aria said. "Maybe it really is just an illusion now, and it's a 'fake it till you make it' thing?"

"But that's not how anyone else's skills work, right?" Lynn asked—not so much changing sides as obeying her own 'devil's advocate' urges. "You don't start out, like, casting 'fireball' by throwing lit matches and then suddenly the exact same skill becomes the ability to magically create fire from thin air."

"Yeah," the fox-girl said.

"That doesn't settle the issue about the hair, though," she continued, swinging back the other way. "I mean, a skill with so many different effects at once could plausibly achieve them differently."

The illusionist put a hand up to her forehead, starting to get something resembling a headache. "Aria, you're the one who told me what this skill does. You told me it 'makes my illusions real' or something, right? I didn't even get that it did that. So, what, do you think you read it wrong the first time? Let me.." As her eyes were already closed in frustration by now, she consulted her skill tree and tried to read through the skill's description again for herself, and actually understand it this time.

"Wait, no..okay. Yeah." Everyone waited in anticipation of her results—except for Lupa, who was just being quiet because everyone else was. Rayna opened her eyes again, and they displayed the faint glow they had a few times before. "I get it. It's fake and it's real."

Lynn supplied the quickly-spoken "What?"

"My class is like one of those Zen riddle things," she said, gesturing to try and explain it. "You remember how the description went: An illusionist is someone who has 'pierced the veil', which implies seeing the truth. The very first thing I started to be able to do after picking it was to see truth—the way things really, objectively are. But the name of the class is 'illusionist', someone who hides the truth. I can hide the truth from the senses of everyone else because I can see it. If I couldn't see it, I'd be no good at hiding it because I wouldn't know what to hide."

"Okaay," Lynn said, "but how does that..?"
"Hold up, I'm not done," she said, holding out a hand before dropping it again. "I get powers that affect reality because at some level, reality is an illusion. The 'reality' every person experiences is the sum total of all the senses they have—sight, sound, magic, instinct, whatever, and it's not exactly the same for different people—like, I can smell stuff you can't, and probably Zack or Lupa can smell things I can't. For example. If I can change the reality a person is experiencing by affecting every sense they have with a super convincing illusion, then I'm changing that one person's reality, even if I'm not technically doing anything but making an illusion that fools them. But my perception is slightly special because I really do see the truth somehow, at least a tiny little window into it. So if I want to change reality, all I really have to do is make an illusion good enough to fool that. Sight-with-a-capital-S. If I can change what I see when I'm looking at the 'truth', then somehow or other I must be changing that truth itself. Obviously making that level of illusion is really hard, which is why I have to know how to make all kinds of 'normal' illusions first."

"You got all that from the skill description?" Aria said after a pause long enough to process the rant.

"Not exactly. It's..I dunno, it feels like reading it was the straw that broke the camel's back. That skill," she said to inform everyone who wasn't Aria or a mind-reader, "is called 'Fool Truth'. Its description just says 'Illusions gain the power to affect truesight.' Truesight being..the name of the base skill that gives me all the HUD stuff, which I started out with a couple levels in....what?" Aria was giving her a bit of a look.
"That's, not the description you wrote down on the paper," she said. "It was way longer and more technical than that, and I think I'd have to re-read it to even..."
The fox-girl sighed. "Someone's messing with us, then? We can look over it again after we're done eating. At least I understand now, though."

"So..is your hair color an illusion or not?" Zack said—since he didn't exactly grasp the earlier explanation.
"Yes. I am an illusion, so naturally everything about my hair is," Rayna said. "But I'm obviously real, so..so is my hair color." She grinned at him long enough for him to give a thoroughly confused look for a couple of seconds and then just shake his head, resuming eating rather than trying to point out the logical problems with that pair of statements.

Rose looked a little dazed from this entire conversation, so Lynn made an effort to include her in the new topic. "Hey."
"Um..yeah?"
"Were you a guy too? I mean, before—on Earth."
"Y-yeah.." She was obviously wondering how Lynn had guessed this before picking up on a particular word: "Wait, 'too'?"

"Oh, yeah," Katherine said. "Every single one of us was male before. Just another weird aspect of the whole situation."
"Oh! Um, I-I didn't know that part," she said. "Thought it was just me and Mira..an' maybe Zack."

"Anyway," the catgirl continued, smoothly changing the subject. "There's an extra door in the front hallway. Since we know about each other now, maybe we could get someone to put a door in your forest and link it to that one—just like the one we've got that links us to town. Then it wouldn't be as much of a hassle to get back and forth."

"Ooh. That'd be great!" Rose said, nodding.

"Ah, right," Nora said. "A-as long as we're..saying stuff, th-there's something..." She trailed off almost as soon as she realized she had everyone's attention. "It's..."

Are you still okay talking about this now? Katherine asked her privately. We can put it off a little longer...

No, no. I'm just nervous saying something with this many people's eyes on me.

I'll say it, Zack thought—not having heard this bit of conversation but easily guessed its content.

"Look, we weren't exactly honest about how her 'spirit weave' power works," he said. "Because it's..embarrassing. To get the beastfolk form, she has to.." He was blushing a bit, and waved his hands as though this explainedi t.
"She has to pet that kind of beastfolk," Katherine finished for him. "So, yeah, the three of us have all done that thing with each other." She shrugged, mostly just feeling relieved to have it out in the open.

Everyone was quiet for a second or two: Rayna had her arms crossed and was nodding slightly; Lupa, whose plate had been clean since before the whole discussion of Rayna's new power started, just looked on with a blank stare of mild confusion; Rose was looking away from the three of them but obviously blushing and grinning slightly.

Aria broke the tension by fistpumping and yelling "Woohoo Nora!" Clera glared at her, quickly rolling up a napkin and hit her forearm with it. "Ow—heyy, what's that for?"

"I was pretty sure that was it," the fox-girl said, ignoring the silent argument the winged girl was still having with the shifter. "I mean—not only can I hear things, but y'know, my Sight tells me a lot about how any effect I'm looking at works, and I've certainly looked at it. At least now that it's out in the open you can complete the collection, riiight?" She said with a toothy smile in Nora's direction.
"Uh. Um.." The elf just blushed and slid down in her chair in a vain attempt to appear smaller.

"Why is everyone acting funny, Master?" Lupa asked quietly—not that the table couldn't hear her anyway. "Petting, weird?"

"Well—no, I guess not. For beastfolk, at least, it's normal. But we're all originally human, so it is weird for us," he tried to explain.

"Human?"
"You know, like Lynn?"

Lupa fixed her with a long stare, as though attempting to identify what difference this made. "No ears or tail," she concluded. "But then, humans used to pet this one all the time," she said, and Zack sighed in despair of ever explaining this in a way she'd understand.

"You were a dog then, right?" Lynn said, "Since you said something about having a previous master." Lupa nodded. "Well, see, it's normal for a person to pet a dog. And it's normal for beastfolk to pet each other. But humans kind of see it as weird for people to pet each other. Beastfolk are more like animals, so it's more normal to them to show affection that way."

"But, tall one pets people too," she said, pointing to Nora and prompting a deep blush from her.

"Just because people find something weird at first doesn't mean they can't get over that and do it anyway," Mira said. "I know I did," she added with a grin in Rayna's direction which went over the small wolf-girl's head. "If you already like the idea, then once you understand that beastfolk like it, and see it as a sign of affection, you can give yourself permission to enjoy it. But that doesn't mean it's for everyone. So you shouldn't expect everyone to be comfortable with petting you, either, any more than you would've been comfortable with someone petting you when you were a big, strong wolf."

"Ohh. Okay," Lupa nodded again, thoughtfully. This at least got through to her a little bit.

When everyone was about finished, Katherine said, "Look, we've had a stressful few days lately. There's plenty of literal money in the metaphorical bank. I'd suggest we take a day off today, unless someone objects orr, like, the Captain or someone comes bursting through our door with some new distaster to deal with."

"Yeah, I agree," Lynn said. "I didn't see Rast at all yesterday, kinda like to know what happened with him..." While Rayna teased her about this, everyone else started chiming in their own agreement to this plan.

"All right, I think it's settled then," the psion said, starting to pick up plates to move them toward the kitchen. Mira winked at Rose before sprouting some shadow-tendrils from her back and using them to pick up some of the dishes not already floating in the air.
"New demon powers," she said by way of explanation.
"Uh-huh..are you sure those things are able to keep dishes balanced on them?" the catgirl said with a look of concern. "They don't exactly have all the features that hands do to keep something fragile held up."

"I have very fine control over them, even all at once," the witch said, standing up and starting toward the sink with it all in tow. "And they're stronger than they look. Or are you just annoyed someone else can pick up a lot at the same time too?"

"Not particularly," Katherine said, refusing to take the bait.

"Anyway, you cooked, so I'll take care of the cleaning," she said, using her actual hands to transfer her load of dishes from the tentacles to the sink.

"Okay. Just remember you volunteered," she shrugged, setting her own load carefully down before leaving the kitchen.

As soon as the table was clear, Aria rolled out a big piece of paper and got out some pens, offering one to Rose—who took it cautiously, clearly afraid she was just going to snap it in two. "All right, so just make a copy on paper of what your skill tree looks like in your head. Then I can look through it and help you come up with an effective build for future leveling."
"Okay," she nodded, at least trusting in the shifter's obvious confidence in her own ability to do this sort of thing.

"Yeah okay, someone is definitely messing with us," Rayna said, having unrolled the record of her own skill tree. "Look." Aria came around to do so, and headtilted hard at what she saw.

The lower half of the tree, and the upper half, were both present, but there was a blank space where the name and description of the skill that bridged the two should have been—the description which Aria had read before and taken as reason to advise the illusionist to rush and get one of everything below in order to quickly afford it.

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."

The "Best" RPG Ever-98

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Ezra knew that he was dying, and was more or less at peace with it—at least as much so as any man could be. There had been a time in his life when he feared death, hated it, railed against it...but in his present condition he couldn't help but see it as something of a relief. Spending another year in a hospital bed wasn't his idea of living anyway, and he was weary of worrying and taxing his family at this point. He had lived a long, full life, watched the world go through one upheaval after another, and his children were so old now that they were beginning to have grandkids of their own. Not many of his peers, he understood, retained their minds as long or as well as he had, so he could only feel fortunate and grateful when his eldest daughter held his hand, telling him about the boy her son had had recently, and drifted off into a sleep he would likely not awake from.

Yet that wasn't exactly the way of things, it seemed. He did awake, just not where or how he might have expected. He was lying on his back, the surface beneath him hard, and cool, but not freezing. Opening his eyes slowly, there was a glaring light from above whose source seemed impossible to correctly place. More importantly, however—it didn't seem that he was in any pain. He didn't feel weak, or tired, just...normal. Healthy? At the very least, he had no trouble sitting up and looking around; he was still in his hospital gown, and the only other object of interest in the strange, white room he found himself in was a pedestal cast in the same color with a thick, hardcover tome laying closed on the right half of its top. Shrugging to himself, Ezra slowly pushed himself up off of the floor—which was far easier than he thought it should have been—and walked over to the pedestal.

"Read this," he read aloud from the cover. Unusual though it was, his throat and voice working properly was hardly a surprise against everything else at this point. "A'right..." Turning the cover open, he found a message seemingly handwritten in careful, rigid letters across the book's first two pages:

Welcome!

We regret to inform you that you have died. However, this is no afterlife. Our world has need of people from yours, and you are among those we have selected to ask for help as a result of your existing skills and experience. We are willing to grant you a new life and a limitless potential to supplement these.

If you prefer to remain deceased in your own world, you may take the doors behind you.

Ezra paused reading a second, turning to look behind him. There were indeed a pair of doors faintly visible on the wall back there, although he was fairly sure they hadn't been there a moment ago. He resumed reading:

Otherwise, the remaining pages of this tome contain descriptions of the varieties of potential we can provide you with, in order from what we believe to be the most compatible with you to the least. If you wish to help, and have found the potential which you feel suits you best, please place your hands palms-down onto the pages describing that potential in order to receive it and move forward.

"'Potential', eh?" The idea of other worlds had occurred to him before, but being contacted—much less somehow posthumously "borrowed" by one—was far from his range of possibilities. However, if he doubted that whoever wrote the message had the power to do what it was they were suggesting, he needed only look to the current health of his body compared to how it had been before. It was hard not to believe, with that, that they would be capable of more—whoever 'they' were.

Did he want to go back, and stay dead? It wasn't a choice he'd been offered before, so it was one he was thoroughly unprepared for. He had already made his peace with his death back on Earth, so receiving a new life on this new world was only a gain for him—the rest of what he might hope for in a new life lost already. More importantly...they needed his help.

It was difficult to place, but reading the carefully written, dryly worded text gave Ezra a distinct sense of desperation—of dread from the writer. If whoever it was had the power to bring people back to life and from another world, no less, and yet were unable to handle whatever it was they needed him for themselves...it had to be important. It might be something that impacted a lot of people of this other world—and, no matter the world, people were people. If there was one ethic or code that Ezra had always lived his life by, and tried his best to teach in his children or any other young person he encountered, it was that when you see someone in need, you try your best to help them. If this really was an entire world of people who needed his help...then, reward of a new life or not, he needed to help them.

Turning to the next pair of pages, he found the left page to say “War” in large letters, with depictions of all manner of medieval weaponry adorning it besides. The opposite page appeared to have a more detailed description, but Ezra slowly shook his head and moved on to the next two pages rather than reading it through. “I've had enough of war in one life,” he said quietly to himself. The next pair of pages depicted the potential of “Speech”—the imagery on the left including a silhouetted noble and jester, someone whispering in an ear, and a few musical instruments besides. This one's description Ezra elected to read:

The power over expression and communication of all forms. The ability to inspire, demoralize, or deceive. The capacity to understand the hearts and minds of others, and to bend them to one's own ends.

Ezra considered this a long moment, but turned the page to see the next few options before making his mind up. These were “Light”, then “Mind”, “Sight”...none of their descriptions seemed as good to him as “Speech” had been. Finally he returned to those pages, staring at them a moment longer. “Solomon chose wisdom,” he said to himself, and then carefully pressed his hands onto the pages. He thought perhaps this would cause some observer watching through a one-way window or camera of some sort to take note and reveal or open a new door in a different direction; what he didn't expect was for the book to glow bright blue and send spirals of that same light snaking upward along his arms, up his neck and down his body.

"Whoa, there!" Ezra stumbled back in surprise a couple of steps, taking his hands off of the book. This didn't seem to stop whatever was happening, as the spirals of light constricted themselves around his body, palpably squeezing him briefly before seeming to sink into his skin. "..Ah." Holding up a hand, he could see that his body itself seemed to be glowing the same shade, joined by a not unpleasant tingling which appeared to be signalling the fading of wrinkles, sores and other blemishes from his body—not that he could see most of that, but it was easy enough to guess it was happening from his arms and the exposed parts of his legs.

He next felt something like a hand running through his hair...more hair than he ought to have. Reaching his own hands upward, he found much longer, fuller hair than he was supposed to have floating up around his head; it felt soft and well-groomed, not at all the scraggly mess of a year's worth of hospital bed-head it would have remained if left alone. Moving a hand down as the tingling faded off, he traced the contour of his chin and found it covered in soft, smooth skin, cleaner shaven than he thought he had been in his entire life.

Whatever was making his hair float up in the air like that began to give up at this point; long locks in the same dark brown he'd had as a younger man slid down through the air and fell across his forehead as bangs, then down his cheeks and onto his shoulders before continuing to fall down along his back. He couldn't help running a hand through it again, pulling one of the longest locks around from the back to examine it. Why were they making it so long, he wondered—whoever or whatever 'they' were.

The blue glow had gradually brightened as his hair fell downward, and now Ezra felt a pressing, squeezing sensation all across his body; it covered more of him and seemed somehow deeper than when the spiraling light had first constricted around him, and it had a visible effect almost right away. "Hm...shrinking," he muttered, the pedastal being the only clear reference point for his rapid loss of height. He'd always been pretty well on the tall side before, but...this felt like an overcorrection. Besides that, looking down and patting along the sides of his gown he could see that he was getting thinner and narrower, his arms and legs slimming down as well, rather than merely shorter.

This was about the point where he noticed the pressure getting a little bit sharper in one particular area. "...Ah. 'New life', eh..?" he muttered, sensing something he'd had all his life starting to withdraw itself away in preparation to disappear entirely. Well—while he'd always enjoyed being a man, who didn't wonder what it was like on the other side from time to time? As long as he was being—what, reincarnated?—there were certainly far worse possible results.

Something cold seemed to run across Ezra's neck. "Aah!" He jerked back slightly, startled; the coolness faded to a slight tingling as the shrinking down there continued. "Mmm~mm. Oh, I see." His voice was changing, the masculinity fading out and the pitch rising ever so slowly. "Awful strange feelin'..mm~mmh," he hummed, listening to the change continue. His voice slid steadily over to a dark, mature alto as his body's shrinking finally tapered off; even with very little to refer to, he couldn't help feeling he was going to end up extremely, almost unreasonably short. Then..

"Hhhh!" Ezra gasped at a sudden motion between the legs. "...Ah," she muttered, feeling an unusual tingling down there along with a mild upward motion toward the pit of her stomach. "Yep..there it goes." Her face felt a little warm as she tried to get used to the sensation of being..."flat". It wasn't unpleasant or even particularly uncomfortable...just very unfamiliar. Looking forward, she could see that her height had finally stabilized, too, but the feeling of her body starting to press outward much the same way it had inward during the shrinking made it clear this wasn't quite the end of the change.

"Hmmn." She put one hand on her chest and the other against the side of her hips, feeling each start to press itself outward. The feeling of curves steadily filling themselves into place was strangely pleasant, as her hips spread apart, steadily shifting her body's stance and balance, and her chest gained two small, soft fleshy bumps for the beginning of a pair of breasts. "That's...something.." she muttered, feeling the mammaries spread out larger and larger, new, sensitive skin moving across the material of the hospital gown and feeling the slight press of her hand against it as it needed to cup out more and more to fit the growing globes. It became increasingly clear she was due to carry quite a load, but it was hard not to enjoy the feeling a bit—even as the warmth of a slight blush on her face steadily intensified into the heat of a blazing fire.

"Mh—mmn~nh." Finally, Ezra's body finished changing, leaving her with a voluptuous figure indeed; her hand slowly drew away from the enormous pair of globes adorning her chest to slide down the sharp inward curve of the side of her waist and beyond that to her wide, womanly hips. She realized she was panting, and tried to catch her breath, dropping her hands to the sides and looking down to assess her new appearance more..calmly, if it was possible. Even through the gown—which was starting to glow blue itself—it was clear: When she was a younger, unattached man, she might have killed to get with a girl this pretty. At least with all that talk of 'potential' they hadn't reduced her to a child or anything; she felt young again, full of energy and even ambition—though what sort exactly it was hard to put her finger on—but was clearly still an adult.

No more time for that now, as her clothes began to reform. The gown's sleeves and lower portion both tore off, pulling away and turning entirely to blue light before returning, wrapping themselves around her arms and legs and changing into armored leggings and gauntlets with long cloth gloves and gartered stockings beneath. The central mass turned to light on her body before reforming into a tight-fitting top with a detached collar and a deep cut between that and the bit around her generous chest, a very short skirt that revealed a bit of her thighs above the armored leggings, undergarments appropriate for her body's newfound sex and figure, and even a sort of cape flapping itself out behind her back. Last of all, she saw that the book on the pedestal had turned entirely into the same bright blue light, and now it quickly flowed over to her, placing itself on her left side as a long sheath attached to her clothes, complete with the hilt of a sword sticking out of the top and all the expected weight for such a hunk of metal.

Despite being aware of the weight of metal on her arms and legs—and from that sword as well—Ezra found it all terribly light to her new form, as though she'd been carrying the likes of it for years. She drew the sword, holding it upright and regarding it suspiciously. Its balance and weight felt comfortable to her; although she had never handled one before she immediately felt she understood the basics of using the weapon effectively. “Guess there ain't no escaping some war after all,” she muttered to herself, watching the reflection of the fair, young, altogether unfamiliar face in the lustrous metal of the flat of the blade. Her eyes were most unusual now—one green and the other red.

Well—she had already made her decision, and seemingly received the benefit for it. Ezra sighed, putting the weapon away as she strode forth toward a new set of doors in the wall before her, mentally preparing herself to see what sort of world it was that required her help, and to contend with this strange body she'd been given...

Days and weeks—as much as a month or two—blurred by, before stopping abruptly again. She was walking on a path, next to a tall elvish psion named Ron, in the middle of a conversation. "I just don't see no sense, in changin' our names," she was saying. "With our bodies so altered, they're all we have left of our old selves."
"Well, sure," the tall elf said, putting up his arms. "But at the same time, it's an opportunity to name ourselves, to something that suits us or fits our new identities here a bit better. Our astronomer friend is still honoring Earth, or at least something reasonably close by..though she hasn't decided which one to go with quite yet. I'm pretty sure Randall agrees with you, or at least doesn't care to put in the effort so long as the—ahem—other ladies still like him."

"Is he still obsessin' over that?"

"Heheheh. You should've seen the look on his face, Ezra. Maybe I'll just show it to you sometime we're not busy walking. At least it got him to stop flirting, right?"
"Didn't do much for the other two ladies."

"I could tell him they're the same way if you want. Not sure he'd buy it, though."

"What about you, then? Thinkin' of some other name?"

"Well, everyone likes to call me some variant of 'Ron', so I figure something that can still be shortened to that would be best. Maybe 'Tsaron'."
"Ron." Ezra stopped in her tracks to glance up at him. "That sounds ridiculous."

"Hahah, that's just what I thought you'd say! But ridiculous is the flavor of things for all of us now, in my opinion. Besides, it sounds nice and mystical. As for the surgeon.."

"What do you want?" she cut him off.

"Hmm?" Ron was (understandably?) confused, stopping instead of resuming the walk and prompting her to take a few quick steps to keep up, like how this was supposed to go.

"You heard me. How much of this do you intend to force me to relive?" Ezra demanded, taking a couple of steps back and giving a far less friendly glare. "What is your purpose for this? To torment me like you did Randall? Am I going to have to watch him tear Valorum to shreds again!? Or Ceres bleeding out?" Even though it meant very little, Ezra drew her sword and pointed it up at his neck. "I'll ask you again: What do you want?" she said, her voice flat and dead-serious.
"...Oh." Something about Ron's face changed; the confusion was gone, as though he had just realized something. There was no fear either, instead a sort of organized, self-assured calm that surpassed that of even the real one's usual demeanor.

"I am terribly sorry to have distressed you," he said, dropping his hands to his sides. "I needed to come in myself, you see, to speak in person. I have no body, you know. When I am outside, I can see a dream for what it is, and shape its experience and meaning as needed. But with no 'real self' to keep me tethered, entering a dream means taking on whatever role it gives me. I chose some deeply familiar memories for you in hopes of catching your attention quickly...which it would seem I did," he continued, placing a palm on the top blade of her sword and pressing down to lower it, suffering no injury in the process.
Ezra sighed, letting go of the weapon entirely and crossing her hands. "Do I have to repeat myself again?"
"Well—I wanted to talk. You...wanted to talk," he corrected, pointing. "Right? You have questions, and I can answerrr...some of them," he said. "Not that I don't know the answer to all of them, but..there is some information which—while I believe you are ready for—the others won't allow me to tell you. They don't want that knowledge getting out into other minds yet, and for as much as I don't believe you would, they fear you telling the wrong person the right thing too soon."

"Fine," she nodded slowly. "Fine. So: What are you gathering the others to my town for?"

"To complete the mission we set you on long ago, with the aid of some new heroes," Bimorphaeus responded. "...The mission I still cannot tell you the details of, for the reasons I just outlined."

"So we failed."
"I don't think that's fair to say," he said. "It is...our failure. Mine. I volunteered to be the one to contact you, despite the added difficulty, so that I could at least try to apologize. That man..." The god wearing Ron's skin shook his head and sighed. "I saw all of his mind, as I did everyone's, before we chose you. He had some dark, sick, twisted fantasies in there, but never in his entire life had he acted upon them. I convinced...myself first, and then the others, that he never would. We needed...we thought we needed somebody with medical experience, to be a healer for you. We offered him the Potential of Light, or Empathy, or...a number of other things, all of which he turned down in favor of that one. It was concluded that pairing his old skills with the new ones of that sort would make for a versatile member, so we let him do it. The fact that he would grow much faster than the rest of you was known, but Sophol estimated it at a very low risk—based on the evidence of my, erroneous, conclusions."

"You didn't kill him. Or try to stop him," Ezra said. "Strike him down where he stood, once it was clear what he was doing. How long did you know before we did?"
"Not...long," Bimorphaeus said evasively. "We helped where we could, but he was already extremely powerful, enough that intervening ourselves was a high-risk option. We thought we would try to help you take him out, keeping as many as possible alive, and then...plan B."

"Plan B," she questioned by way of repeating.

"When we chose you, we thought we were selecting heroes from Earth. People with exceptional skill, ability, and/or intellect, who would be able to put Potential to its greatest use. We assumed a transactional way of doing things was best—a new life and great power in exchange for what we needed done," he said. "It was our first try, getting help from another world. We chose to claim the souls of people who were dying, and bring them here, as this was by far the easiest and safest way, and seemingly the least obtrusive to your world as well. We chose to do it a long time before you would be needed, in order to minimize the power we would spend granting you that Potential and maximize its chances to grow. And...to hedge our bets. We thought..." Bimorphaeus shook his head slightly, "we thought, if you didn't work out, we could buy ourselves all the time we needed to get new heroes. About this, we were wrong.

"Sophol perceived new information which...you understand, I cannot go into much detail, but...our 'plan B' to buy ourselves new time? It wouldn't work; at least, not sustainably. We would be spending more power than we could afford to delay things nowhere near enough to build that power back up again. And we had never thought up a 'plan C' because we were always supposed to have more time..." For a deity, he looked suddenly very tired and worried for a second or two. "This was right after you took him down. Our best-laid schemes were shattered, and while your group was tearing itself apart we were still trying to pick up the pieces and work out what to do about it."

---

Well, this one's been a long time coming. This image has been in the folder for this story since I started it, although it was a little while before I worked out all the details. I had planned on placing this whole thing at part 100, but simply ran out of things for everyone to do before getting here. And of course this came out to be far too long to even fit reasonably in a single "part", so it's been split. At any rate, we can consider 98-99 to be a sort of "end of a season" thing at least, before things crank up again at 100, which is at least something. Stay turned for 99 tomorrow.