Chapter 414: 56: The Game is Rigged

By the time Danika returned to 'Living Jade Empire' Jade was no longer following any kind of visible path through the trees.

"Welcome back ZipZing," Jade said cheerfully.

"Thanks," she replied, while looking around curiously.

The trees here were not quite like any she recognized. The broad shiny green leaves made them seem more tropical than something she'd expect to find here, although they'd look fairly ordinary if you found them in the southern mountains. The name her plant identification gave them was odd too, "Three King's Tree". She couldn't see anything kingly or any obvious pattern of three about them.

Jade walked straight into a small goblin village and stopped suddenly. "This shouldn't be here," he complained after turning to scan his surroundings.

Danika blinked and looked around, but it seemed like a fairly standard settlement. The goblins were eyeing them warily, but making no immediate objections to their presence. "The village?" she questioned after a moment

"Yes," he agreed.

"Why not?" she asked curiously. It seemed odd that he hadn't said that it was new, but that it shouldn't be here.

"There is no habitat seed at this location," Jade explained.

"Maybe it was started by a player, or the Turtle decided that a new settlement was needed, and added a seed since you were copied," Danika suggested.

"Maybe," he agreed doubtfully.

"Is it in the way?" she asked. The goblins were starting to point and whisper, and she was sure that she heard them mention their guild name, 'Endless Song'.

"No," Jade replied, but as he stepped forward again, a goblin nervously approached, and he stopped again.

"Noble adventurers, please don't destroy our homes," the goblin begged quickly. "The pig has nothing to do with us! We'll even help you hunt it down if you'll leave without damaging anything!"

"What pig?" Danika and Jade asked in unison.

"What pig… haha, no pig, sorry, you must have misheard me. Rig, that rig… um, the one that uh…" the goblin protested nervously.

His neighbor came to his assistance and said brusquely, "There's no need to go telling people about what the rig does. Hush now, and let them go about their business."

"But usually their business is destroying places," the first goblin hissed.

"Then they'd get along great with it," the other muttered back.

"We are not planning to destroy anything today," Jade promised. "We are just traveling to the root of the world."

The goblins didn't look particularly convinced, but one suggested,"Maybe they think the pig can help them find the roots?"

"Rig," the other goblin corrected uncertainly.

"Ordinary ones are good with sniffing up roots," the goblin continued.

Danika was beginning to imagine that there was some kind of robot pig on the loose, but she suspected that the game was trying to introduce Jade to someone or something that could help them find the entrance in the root of the world that he could no longer see. "Show us where to find this rigged pig then?" she suggested.

"Haha," the goblin who had offered to help them find it if they'd leave the settlement intact pretended to laugh, but stepped forward with a resigned look, as though this were the expected decision.

The charred remains of a building at the upper edge of the settlement made Danika pause and ask more sympathetically, "Did someone else come along and destroy your homes recently?"

"It was an accident," the goblin said tiredly.

"What was an accident?" Kit asked, after suddenly popping out of the stone space.

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Danika hadn't noticed when she had logged back in, but Jade answered cheerfully as though he'd been expecting her, "The remains of the building here, and the conversation of the goblins, indicate that something was destroyed by the pig that ZipZing has decided to find, before we continue on to where the entrance would have been."

The Jade Empress, disguised as a druid, waved a hand casually. Her energy dropped like a stone in the party menu, but the burnt house shivered and then rebuilt itself before their eyes.

The goblins who had trailed after them stared with open mouths and their guide's head whipped back and forth between the house and Kit several times.

One of the goblins asked quietly, "Are you sure they are from the same Endless Song?"

Their guide bowed to Kit with a huge smile on his face, while Danika commented, "That's really looking like a truly god-level skill these days."

Kit just grinned at her and nodded.

They followed their reenergized guide uphill in pretty much the same direction that they had been going. It made Danika feel even more certain that this was a bit of story that had been generated because they had decided to seek the entrance where the roots of the world touched the sky, whatever that turned out to be.

Visible signs that something large, or perhaps that something large and careless, had come this way let them know that their guide was on the right path. In one place a boulder as tall as Jade was cracked clear in half. In another, a tree had been uprooted.

Kit kept looking around them with a puzzled expression, as she described the scenes considerately to Jade, which Danika hadn't thought to do. "Zip?" she questioned.

"What?" Danika asked.

"Have you seen any footprints?" Kit asked in return.

Danika stopped and turned slowly, looking for any sign of prints along their path. There were a few traces of Jade and Kit's passage, less from their half earth elemental goblin guide. "I don't see any, and don't remember noticing any along the way," Danika told her.

"My skills do not reveal any footprints nearby from any large or unusual creatures," Jade added.

"Ha," the goblin gave a short laugh, but didn't explain how the large destructive creature that they were following could move without a trace. Instead, he pointed to a wisp of cloud that rose from the forest ahead of them, and said, "That dust is still rising, it has probably recovered again and is just ahead."

The goblin didn't move forward after making its statement, and Kit asked, "Are you coming with us?"

"Do I have a choice?" the goblin questioned almost hopefully.

"Of course," Jade spoke up in reply.

"I'll just go back then," the goblin said quickly, and put action to his words with his feet as he almost scurried away.

Danika could have objected, but she didn't see any reason to expose the poor NPC to something it obviously regarded as dangerous. It was clear that they were about to learn what they'd been following, so instead she volunteered, "I'll go invisible and take a look at it. If it's a full blooded animal then Shrubbery will be able to understand it, and maybe we can figure out how to persuade it to help us."

"Oh, so that's what you're thinking!" Kit exclaimed.

Danika paused and asked a little blankly, "What?"

"Kit did not hear them saying that the pig is good at finding roots, but we don't need help finding the roots of the world," Jade scolded. "I know where they are."

"I thought maybe we were supposed to kill it, because it attacked those villagers," Kit explained.

Danika looked at the dark haired woman that her guild mates described as gentle and sighed. The goblin's conviction that members of Endless Song would destroy everything they ran across was actually kind of understandable.

"I'll just go take a look at it, and then we can decide what to do?" she suggested again.

"Yeah!" Kit agreed cheerfully.

"I am a little curious about what kind of pig it is," Jade admitted. "There aren't any pig variants in my memory that should be able to destroy trees and boulders without leaving traces of footprints."

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