Chapter 121: 38: Reality Check

In the morning, Danika checked for messages first, and smiled when she read Aishin's greeting. He complained: "I woke up and realized that I'd told you that you could message me, and then I went right to sleep, but it didn't matter because you haven't messaged."

She replied quickly: "You should be happy! I took your advice and didn't think too much about it. I'll think about it today."

Then she switched over to the waiting email notification. The message was from "Living Jade Empire" tech support: "From the honorable celestial servant of the seventh class, Lin Hao, first among his rank, serving the Jade Emperor in the maintenance of the Living Jade Empire: What, no suggestion on how to solve it? It's because your pet is linked to you, and its location is being treated as a player location, it's deeply embedded in the pet structure, so I think you're just going to have to live with it, fortunately there's only one other player with both one of these new spaces and a pet at the moment. P.S. Watching them deconstruct your little bird scenario was hilarious!"

Danika gazed at the message for awhile. She'd bet money that the other player was Xander, and she didn't know whether to be happy or dismayed by the last line. After a minute she decided that she should be happy, it sounded like the other outcomes had been investigated, and if they'd spent more time on it, her application hadn't been immediately discarded.

After another moment she wrote a reply: "Thanks! If it only affects portable spaces and not houses, it's probably something that can be called a pet safety feature instead of a bug, I just wondered why. I bet it seemed pretty silly, I ran out of time on the scenario and didn't get what the golems were guarding and the plants were sealing put into it."

Aishin texted again in the middle of her exercises. Danika hesitated a moment and then decided to finish before reading his message. Her fingers left little sweaty prints on her screen when she read it, to scold her for not waiting until after she'd cooled down and cleaned up. His reply made her sigh too: "Oh, would it have been better if I hadn't mentioned it?"

She didn't reply until after she was finished with the rest of her morning tasks and seated in front of the login screen for her shift. But she had thought about the requests she'd been avoiding and her guilty feelings the night before while completing her tasks, so by the time she was ready to reply, she at least had sorted out what was bothering her.

She glanced at the time and wrote quickly: "No it's ok. You're Shrubbery's friend too, so maybe you'll have an opinion on both things, but it's alright if you don't. I feel guilty about having a VR-medi pod when her mother could really use one right now. And she asked that if I do start a guild, I let her mother be one of the founding members so that her record lasts."

She logged in and started her shift. Aishin didn't reply right away and she worried that she'd said too much. When he did reply she paused the older game and read it immediately. He wrote: "There's too much I want to say and ask. Want to talk about it over dinner?"

Danika laughed, and covered her face, even though there was no one there to see her. When she recovered her countenance she wrote: "Aishin…" but then she erased that and replaced it with "Shinichi…". Then she erased that and wrote, "No, I'm sorry."

She rubbed her face and resumed her progress on the old account. She had just finished unlocking this one from the horrible quest chain trap when Shinichi replied: "I'm not arguing, just asking. It's ok if you're only playing a girl in the game like Nao, it's ok if we can only be friends, whatever your reason is it will be ok, but can you tell me why not?"

Danika finished submitting the current account before replying: "I wish it was that simple, I don't know how to explain."

Shinichi replied a minute later: "None of those suggestions were simple, so whatever your reason is, it probably is that simple and you're just too caught up in it. :p Do you want me to start typing questions or would a call be ok? Or I can try to log in tonight when your shift ends and we can talk face to face that way?"

Danika stared at her phone. She blushed. Her heart was pounding as she swiped over to call instead of text. She glanced guiltily at her work screen which was offering her the next account to start on. After a moment she took a deep breath and pressed send, and then propped her phone up beside the screen where it often sat and clicked on the next account while the call tried to connect.

Danika jumped when Shinichi answered, "Hi. Where should I start?" He sounded so normal when she felt so nervous. He sounded like Aishin.

She laughed silently at herself and replied, "Um, hi?" She glanced at the phone and saw that the call was on voice only. "What questions?"

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"Why do you feel guilty about having your VR system?" he asked first.

"Because, um, I guess because for me it's a luxury?" she replied uncertainly. She could see where this account was stuck with only a glance after completing so many.

"Oh. Do you think I should feel guilty about planning to buy one?" he questioned.

"What? No!" she protested.

"Is your model that great?" he asked next.

Danika clicked through the next sequence and replied, "Yeah. It was ridiculously expensive, but it really is as comfortable as it claims. I don't use it that way, but it has full medical hookup capabilities so that you could stay connected for up to a week at a time if you got the medical release needed to use that mode. And while I was doubtful about the VR quality until I connected to 'Living Jade Empire' the first time, I'm pretty sure that it was just that the other games and applications are lower quality."

Shinichi laughed and suggested, "Well, they made the game to sell their own systems right? Maybe it's optimised for 'Living Jade Empire'?"

"I don't think so," Danika disagreed promptly. "I mean, as far as I can tell, every tree in 'Living Jade Empire' is different from every other tree. And everything is like that. It's amazingly real."

"I can see that much through the Visual Motion console," he pointed out. "But do little details like that really make such a big difference?"

"I don't know how to explain it," she complained.

"It's ok," he replied with amusement, "there are other things I'd rather have you try to explain."

"Like what?" she asked warily.

"If I answer that I feel like I'm pushing you…" Shinichi replied doubtfully.

"You want to know why I said no," Danika stated. She maneuvered the old game character into a good trap corner where it could grind for awhile with only a few taps needed to trigger its attacks.

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