Chapter 49: 49: Inside the Dark Heart

Danika hurriedly wrote another message: "I ate the apple I got from the wizard in the beginner's vale. I think this is temporary? His spells had a pretty long duration though."

Aishin reached out and took the message as soon as the bird appeared this time. He read it and then asked with a frown, "What injured you enough that you needed to eat it?"

Danika cringed, and Aishin petted her again. His hand was comfortingly warm against her back and she wanted to just lay there and be petted instead of answering, after a moment his hand stopped though. He set her on the ground and she looked up at him quizzically. 

"Sorry," he said apologetically, "it's just habit to pet a cat. Somehow I kept expecting you to purr."

Danika laughed ruefully, but the sound was silenced. "I wish I'd been purring then," she admitted. Now that she knew he was hearing everything as meows, she could hear the echo beneath her words.

"What happened?" he repeated.

She wrote it out for him as a message again: "The pet store shopkeeper tried to tame me, and when I ran away a player shot me. I logged out for an hour and ate dinner, and when I came back their guild was waiting to 'take revenge' for the PVP flag she triggered on herself." 

"Who were they?" Aishin questioned sharply after reading it.

Danika shrugged. 

"This is surprisingly frustrating," he said with a laugh. 

"Sorry," she replied. 

"Meow," he responded dryly. He dropped the dark stone on the ground against the wall and then bent and scooped her up. He stepped on the stone, whispered, "darkheart," and vanished.  

Danika fell back to the ground beside the stone, landing neatly on her feet to her own surprise. Aishin reappeared and complained, "I can't take you into it?" 

Danika looked up at him and then she touched her paw to the stone and repeated, "darkheart?" 

The inside of Aishin's stone room was perfectly round. It didn't match the shape of the outer stone at all. It was like the inside of a sphere, with a flat floor laid about ⅓ of the way up, so that the walls curved out a bit before closing in again overhead. A very similar stone was embedded in the center of the floor, and a brightly glowing gem shone down from the center of the ceiling.

Aishin appeared beside her and asked, "You're curious about why we're coming in here aren't you?"  

Danika nodded. The space had seemed quite large, but with Aishin standing in it, she could tell that it was probably only about 4 meters in diameter. 

"That looks so wrong, cats don't nod," he said laughingly and plopped down to sit beside her. "That gnome is seriously undercharging for these. He should be selling them for a quarter million instead of twenty-five thousand. If some guild is trying to track you, they will have a hard time finding us in here. None of my location skills work inside this space, so I'm fairly sure that no one else's will be able to locate us while we're inside it," he explained.

Danika's eyes widened in surprise. She'd known that the gnome was probably not making a lot of profit, but Aishin was suggesting a huge difference in price. The stone was obviously like her storage ring and was storing them somewhere else. She assumed the pose and swiped at her menus with her furry paw. She sent a quick note to Logical Heart repeating what Aishin had just told her, and then composed a longer message to Aishin: "I don't know who they were, how do you see guild membership? I can't see yours either? The elven archer's name was Callie Kyo, she's the only one I got a look at through my lens. Why does it matter who they were? You don't seem to be hunting the guild that's killed you 3 times already, and they didn't even manage to kill me." 

Her little bird snatched the message and pointedly circled the room three times before finally dropping the message into Aishin's hand. Aishin laughed and then read it. He pursed his lips and then replied to the last question first. "I'm the one who started the fight with the guild that wanted revenge for their guild leader, so as long as they stop hunting me, I don't mind letting it go." He narrowed his eyes and added, "If they attack me again though, I'm going to start hunting them again."

"Ah," Danika replied. 

Aishin eyed her, but didn't ask what her short "mew" had meant. "Also, I'm just playing an ordinary human, I won't lose much if I'm forced to reincarnate, just skills really."

Danika wanted to object that he'd also lose his expensive avatar design, but maybe it hadn't seemed expensive to him. She started another message while he continued.

"But you'd lose all the Karma you spent creating a half dragon character. That would be really difficult to rebuild," Aishin added sharply, "and besides, that's a really stupid reason for them to be attacking you!" Danika nodded her agreement and Aishin laughed, and finished with, "I have my guild flag hidden, it's optional whether to show it or not. Here, I'll turn it on so you can see." He brought up his own menus and gestured toward himself.

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Danika swiped over to look at him and could see "Blood Hunters" right beneath his green PVP flag. She swiped back and finished the message. 

Aishin said thoughtfully, "you must have hit them back, since you've got a green PVP flag up."

Danika's message read: "I saw someone with the same avatar as you today! It was kind of creepy… I don't know how many of them that I hit, but I threw my spark at their eyes as I fled." Her bird eyed her and kicked the message out of her hand toward Aishin and flitted off again. She giggled, which came out as a strange purr instead of being silenced like her laugh had been. 

Aishin read it, laughed and replied, "Ouch, eyes are critical damage. I feel the same way every time I see someone wearing my avatar." 

"Why do you keep it then?" she asked curiously, and then copied the question into a message. 

Aishin snatched it as soon as it appeared, and the bird vanished as quickly as it had appeared. "It's good for picking up girls?" he suggested with a wink.

Danika didn't reply immediately. Every reply she could think of sounded either insulting or derogatory, and besides, he was probably joking and he wasn't entirely wrong. Even she would have to admit that she really liked the face he wore. Finally she wrote dryly: "Says the guy who had an empty friend list on purpose?"

The bird swooped through the room with a bored expression as Aishin grabbed the message and read it. He stuck his tongue out and said lightly, "You don't have to keep someone on your friend list if all you want to do is play around."

Danika stared at him disbelievingly.  

After a minute of uncomfortable silence he asked, "Was that too much?" 

"Were you just joking?" Danika asked in a scandalized tone. 

Aishin didn't wait for her to write that down. He shrugged and told her, "I've tried playing around some. Doesn't everybody?" He looked her in the eyes and added, "but only with NPCs here." 

She wondered if that meant he played around with people outside of the game and wrote a quick sharp reply: "NPCs don't care what you look like, and people aren't toys."

He replied dryly after he read it, "No one has ever begged you to make them your toy. Lucky. And you can just stop at NPCs don't care." 

Danika wrote quickly after a moment of shocked silence. Aishin snatched up her message, but sighed and ran his hand through his hair like he was preparing himself before reading it. It read: "They have friendship levels?"

He answered with an odd bitterness, "Sure, and they'll even tell you that they love you, but if you don't see them for a week, they forget they cared and act like you abandoned them for five years."  

Danika wasn't entirely sure why he cared how NPCs reacted, but maybe they reminded him of someone real. She wrote uncertainly: "Even real girls might get mad if they didn't hear from you for a month, if you mean a week in real time."

Aishin read her reply with less hesitation this time and then pointed out, "But sometimes real people will tell you they still love you after you've been separated for half a lifetime won't they? No NPC will ever do that."

"Would you really want that…?" she wrote, but then hesitated before sending it. After a moment she sent it without adding anything. 

"No," he said firmly after reading the question. "I really was just playing around with how far the system will go." 

"How far will it go?" she asked curiously. 

"Meow meow meow?" Aishin teased. 

Danika messaged it to him, but Aishin just grinned at her. He closed one eye and touched his finger to his lips in a gesture of 'secret', and didn't say anything.

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