Chapter 214: 42: The Answer

When Danika checked her messages while making her breakfast the next morning, she had a lot more than the usual morning greeting from Shinichi.

He'd posted the pictures that he'd taken of her, and of them together, in a new album. He hadn't locked that album, and he'd tagged her on all of them. All of the cousins and old game friends that she'd been too lazy to sort through the night before had been notified not only that Dawnstar had finally joined the site, but of the new pictures. He'd taken more pictures of her than she'd realized.

SaltySiamese was one of those old game friends, and had posted: "Hah! You forgot to uncheck import photos didn't you? Except for the ones Aishin posted (Tangled is Aishin right?) they're all so old!? He totally looks exactly the same doesn't he!"

Danika frowned. Then she checked and saw that it really had imported her old profile photos from her main identity. It helpfully offered to import more photo albums too. She hadn't ever realized that this site was so picture oriented, she'd thought of it mainly as the global chat application associated with it. Salty was right though, she'd only posted three photos of herself in the last ten years, and the last one was already five years old.

She hovered over the delete option for the fourth photo in the old imported profile photos, but then read the three new comments under it, and left it there.  

One was SaltySiamese again with: "Who's this guy?"

One was from one of the cousins and said: "Oh, I remember aunty taking this one!" Danika's mother had taken it. 

The last one was from a username that she didn't recognize, but the phone number attached to it told her who it was. It was a little weird to know that that number had never been changed. It said: "Woah, a breath of ancient history! You look like you're doing great in your recent pics. I'm doing good too. My eldest is already six if you can believe that!"

-- 

A few hours later Danika, or rather ZipZing pulled herself out from underneath the sleeping platypus and dragged herself up out of the mud on the shore. Platypi looked so funny and awkward on land, she'd never guessed that they were as fast as lightning underwater. It had been really tough to catch one without hurting it.

She felt sorry for the cute little creature as she reached out and yanked three hairs from it, jolting it awake from its dragon breath induced sleep. It flipped itself back into the water and was gone. She carefully noted the acquisition on her forum page and saw that Aishin had come online.

She sent him a quick message: "Can we talk?" The snow leopard cub gave her muddy little dragon form a look of pure disdain as he carried the message away.

Aishin appeared beside her a moment later and gulped down a health potion before saying wryly, "Okay, that's not an ominous greeting at all, but maybe I deserve it." 

Danika gazed up at him blankly. "What's an ominous greeting?"

He looked down at the muddy little fairy dragon at his feet, and then he bent down and scooped her up. "Are you alright?" he asked a little worriedly. "When a girl says 'can we talk' it's usually bad?"

"Oh, I guess it might be bad," she agreed doubtfully. "You're on your phone, do you have long?"

He gave an exaggerated wince and replied, "An hour and a half? I might be able to push it to two hours."

"Oh, that's plenty of time," she said with relief.

"What do you want to talk about," he asked after a moment. "Is it because of the photos? I read your message, I just didn't reply yet. Yes, I did post them publicly on purpose..." his voice kind of trailed off.

"Oh. Why? But that's not what I wanted to talk about," she replied.

He laughed nervously and asked, "Then can we just skip to what you wanted to talk about?"

"Okay," she agreed. Now that he didn't want to talk about the photos she was a lot more curious about it. But she went ahead and asked the things that had been bothering her instead. "Why is breakfast tomorrow scheduled in black? And, I don't know how else to ask this, and I'm not saying it's not ok if that's how it is, but, did you tell me that it's good that I'm not your fan because you want me to stay separate from your work? I mean, I can kind of understand why you might, but it makes me feel a little unhappy."

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"Wow," Aishin said after a moment. He kissed her nose despite the mud, and she wondered if the mud even showed on the simplified icon that he'd be seeing.

"Wow?" she questioned doubtfully.

"I don't even know where to begin on the second part. The calendar color is black because it's my 'unless dead' appointment color. Red is the second level down on priority, yellow is normal, green is fun stuff," he explained.

"You have a lot of red in your calendar," she commented.

"Yeah," he agreed, "our jobs."

"Your work isn't normal?" she questioned.

"It's not usually something I could reschedule if I needed to, like a dentist appointment?" he explained.

"Oh." A silence fell between them, but Danika didn't move from his hands or stop gazing at his face. He didn't cover it as often anymore. 

After a bit he said hesitantly, "I don't want you to feel like you have to stay away when I'm working, but our manager just scolded me again last night with the reminder that we need to keep our personal relationships low profile."

Danika stiffened and drew a deep breath, even as she acknowledged that he had real reasons to want her to stay away from his career, but he wasn't finished.  

"And I definitely don't want you to feel like you have to attend things. I mean, you don't need to show me your support that way, the way we are now is good? And you can just ask me anything, so you don't have to collect information like fans do either?" Aishin told her questioningly. 

"Ok," she agreed. He was right, she didn't need to be his fan, and it might even be inconvenient for him. She sighed, but she was glad that at least he answered her worries honestly and didn't seem to think that she was being silly. 

"Danika?" he questioned.

She blinked at him in surprise. He'd never called her that in the game before. She glanced around, but there didn't seem to be anyone nearby. "What?" she asked a little nervously.

"I don't want to hide that we're dating. I want to be able to say I'm dating you, even if it's troublesome…" he told her quietly.

She grinned at him suddenly and asked teasingly, "Oh, is that why you made all the photos public? You know it felt like half my family commented on them this morning?"

"Sorry," he said contritely. "But I didn't make them entirely public, only our contacts should have been able to see them?"

She explained how she'd just linked her identity instead of properly creating an account to accept his request. "It just automatically added everyone." 

He kissed her again and said, "Sorry, I thought everyone had an account these days. And it's kind of a good thing I don't have VR right now. I bet you taste awful. What were you doing?"

Danika giggled and then explained her pursuit of the poor platypus.

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