Chapter 155: 70: Layers and Scales

Danika's identify skills couldn't identify the scale either, which made her remember how Justin had guessed that she might hatch into a dragon half when Terri's skill couldn't identify her. She also wondered which skill the Paladin had that had identified the species halfs, since her identify animal didn't always include that information.

"Living Jade Empire" really had so many skills available, even though many of them overlapped, that Danika suddenly wondered if the game system itself could auto generate skills the way it apparently could races. It would even make sense, the way path skills were set up, where each 'discovery' lead to the next.

Aishin used his life detection skill on their way back down the mountain, and they attempted to locate and identify each signature. They kept up the effort even though they had already collected from each of the species they located. At this point Danika had samples from almost 800 species. She was a little worried that maybe the elf had actually instructed her to collect a sample from every qualifying species within the game.

She thought of the flying pig breeding program that seemed to be going on somewhere within the Empire and wondered if maybe there were already magic path people who were attempting to breed new species that she could contact. She landed on Aishin's shoulder and searched the forums. After awhile she decided that either she wasn't finding the correct search term, or that there weren't many players trying to breed animals.

When she closed her menus Aishin asked with amusement, "Identify this one? It's something I've never seen before."

He pointed to a strange creature foraging in the underbrush for insects. It had large scales all over it, but on close inspection it also had hair between its scales. Danika was immediately certain that she'd never seen one before either. It reached out with the sticky tongue that extended from its narrow head and slurped up another ant as she watched.

Her Identify Animal skill reported it as a Pangolin, and its description made it sound like a scaly anteater. A soft skill chime announced that Aishin had learned Identify Animal this time when she'd targeted him with her impartation. It hadn't taken nearly as many attempts as it had with Kit. It made her wonder if maybe it was easier to teach a skill that you'd taught before.

She cast her invisibility and zipped over to the Pangolin. She huffed her dragon breath into the Pangolin's little face and after a moment it fell over. Her breath was becoming more effective as it gained levels too.

She looked at the Pangolin's neat rows of wide layered scales that were at least as big as her little dragon hand and plucked some of its hair instead. The Pangolin jolted awake as the pain hit it and curled itself protectively into a ball.

Aishin snickered and reached over her to poke it, and it rolled a little. "It's a really cute little critter," he said. "It didn't even try to bite you."

Danika didn't think that the Pangolin was especially cute, but it was pretty interesting. Aishin even took a screenshot of it though.

The Pangolin was the only new creature they found that evening, but playing together in VR was fun all by itself. Danika thought that every little bit of physical contact seemed a little more intimate when they could both feel the touches, even though really there was almost no difference.

From how often Aishin paused to pet her once in awhile, she thought that he probably also felt the difficult-to-define difference in the weight of their small interactions.

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The next morning they learned why the petition to keep complex mechanical constructions in the game had been taken down. The news wasn't given to only their department either, the company had issued a public statement that "All of our players are equally important to us. We hope that 'Living Jade Empire' will continue to encourage the kinds of creative and constructive thinking that have continued to bring us technological advances in the real world."

It went on to describe how a young man had created a more efficient and durable battery for devices deployed in space, and what this would mean for several of Starcraft Technologies active projects. The young man profiled by the article claimed that working with complex layered spacial enchantments in 'Living Jade Empire' had inspired his energy storage idea.

Danika realized with shock that it was entirely possible that the young genius described in the article was Logical Heart. Or at least, the small excerpt from his battery design description really sounded like something Logical Heart might have written.

When she took her lunch break, the cafeteria was crowded and filled with a celebratory atmosphere. Not only were the group of people from the sixth and the seventh bursting with happiness, but there were a lot more people from other departments and they all seemed equally happy. Obviously most of the employees who worked with "Living Jade Empire" loved the open ended design of its crafting skills.

--

That afternoon she got to begin designing a new repeatable quest that would produce a useful storage item. Apparently ZipZing was not alone in her inventory struggle and there were many pack rats playing the game. She got really involved in creating a quest that would produce a customized item for the player, much the way Ironstone had given her a different storage equipment that suited her character.

She tried to design it so that there was a logical reason for the quest to be repeatable, and so that it was actually possible for the same character to acquire different varieties of the storage item depending on their choices and how well they completed various stages of the quest. She also called up the traveling merchant and quizzed him about existing storage options and costs, so that she could make the effort the quest required similar to the effort required to obtain existing items.

Even thinking that the merchant was based off of Lin Hao didn't make them seem very similar to Danika. Although physically they could easily be close relatives, the merchant didn't look like a clone of Lin Hao, and the way they spoke and held themselves was very different.

Talking to the merchant as a celestial servant was also quite different than talking to him as ZipZing. He almost never told her, "I cannot tell you more than that." He really seemed like a God of the game this way too. He knew everything. Things that her dragon assistant would answer with, "I don't know," the merchant could and would answer. Although some of her more obscure questions occasionally made him go into his 'thinking overload' mode where he stopped displaying his breathing animation.

She was shocked when her assistant dragon appeared at the end of her scheduled VR-medi pod time and informed her cheerfully, "Apprentice Belova, it is time to quit for the day! Do not worry, your space will be preserved in its current state until tomorrow."

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