Chapter 58: 58: Status Games

When Danika finally returned to her little apartment, she was very tired. She looked at the view from her doorway and decided that it was probably just as well that her aunt had met her at a restaurant instead of coming to see her place. She'd probably have been shocked by how small the room was, the lack of chairs, and how much of that space the VR-medi pod was taking up.

A few minutes later she slid into her tub and took another bath to wash off the strange fragrances that seemed to cling to her skin. There had been food odors at the restaurant, smokers at the stops, and all of the perfumes and colognes that other people seemed to drench themselves in.

After her bath she debated between logging in to "Living Jade Empire" and watching an episode. After a minute she decided to watch the episode with the game open on her phone.

She paused the episode at the end of the intro, and had ZipZing follow a sort of rising path that she found, where raised flower beds beside the street conveniently butted up against a low entry way that was close enough to a balcony to jump from. From the balcony she could use her claws to climb a decorative banner, and from there she could reach the rooftops. Danika positioned ZipZing's little cat form so that she was looking out across the street like a decorative figure mounted atop the gable.

She started the meditation skill and resumed her episode. After a bit of practice Danika found that she didn't need to spend as much attention on the meditation mini game as it had seemed at first. It was very rhythmic and she was able to focus most of her attention on the story. She had the sound on her phone turned down and didn't really notice the two soft skill chimes that rang out a while later.

When her episode finished Danika turned off the screen and looked down at her phone. Two other cats had appeared within her view while she hadn't been paying attention. One lounged on the edge of the balcony, and the other was seated on the step in front of the building across the street.

Danika moved ZipZing down to the balcony. Navigating the world as a cat was much easier than flying through the mobile interface. It used the same simple controls as walking, but ZipZing would neatly leap obstacles and seemed to be able to balance safely on anything big enough to target as a destination.

The balcony cat shifted its gaze to watch her as she approached, but otherwise maintained an air of indifference. Danika initiated a dialogue with it and said, "Hi?"

A notification popped up and then vanished on its own a moment later. It had read: "Status dropped to zero."

Danika blinked and the cat replied grudgingly, "What do you want?"

The two suggested responses were: "To be the king!" or "To learn how to increase my flexibility?" Danika actually hesitated before choosing to ask how to increase ZipZing's flexibility. She was really curious about whether or not there was really a king of cats in the game now.

The cat got to its feet and stretched without answering. It turned and gracefully leapt up onto a nearby window ledge, and then, like Aishin bouncing off of one of his throwing stars, bounded neatly over to a decorative projection that Danika wouldn't have dared to consider a landing spot and across the gap to the lowest edge of the next roof. It turned back, flicked an ear at her, and trotted off.

Danika belatedly realized that maybe she was supposed to have been following it. She jumped ZipZing over to the window ledge. No matter how she zoomed in she couldn't seem to target the little decoration that the cat had used as the intermediate point between the window ledge and the roof. She thought that the cat across the street looked like it was laughing at her.

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Danika scrunched up her face in thought. After a minute she cast her featherweight on herself and simply leapt straight for the roof edge. ZipZing landed neatly on the edge of the roof, but then slid backward on the slick tile. Danika gasped and pressed ZipZing forward. Her little cat avatar scrabbled for purchase until Danika activated her claw attack in her frantic tapping. Her claws caught in the edges of the tiles and she was able to climb up to the flat line of the roof peak.

Danika shifted her view to look back. The other cat was definitely laughing at her. The cat from the balcony was nowhere in sight. She glanced at the time and hesitated, but then resisted the temptation to keep playing, and logged off.

--

In the morning Danika found an evening shift available with the place she'd worked on the 20 accounts with, so she rushed through her morning routine and pulled herself back into the VR-medi pod to play for a few hours before the shift started.

ZipZing was still perched at the peak of the slick tiled roof. After looking around for a moment Danika sighed and activated her wings. It wasn't that she wasn't glad to be a fairy dragon again, but she felt like she'd been interrupted in the middle of something.

She calculated, and decided that she'd probably been a cat for about 13 of the game's days. Somehow a 13 year old magical tree hybrid sounded appropriate for that elven wizard's garden. A little golden mouse scampered along the roof peak carrying a message strapped across its back.

Danika felt a twinge of disappointment that she didn't want to admit to when she saw that the message was from Shrubbery. It read a bit like one of SaltySiamese's messages with an exclamation mark on every sentence: "Wow! It didn't seem like you even played yesterday! But now this morning you're already higher level than I am!"

Danika blinked and tapped over to her character sheet. She'd gained a point in 'Meditation Enhancement' and also one in the previously zero point skill called 'Poise'. She tapped it and discovered that it had also gained a short description: "The maintenance of grace, balance, and equilibrium can boost status."

She tapped the 0 point Status skill, but it remained silent. She remembered the notification that had flashed up about it dropping to zero, which implied that at some point it had been above zero. It made her feel very curious.

After a moment she swiped back over to her messages and sent: "Yeah, I played for a bit on my phone at the end of the night. I'm surprised to see you so early, no school?"

Her own little golden mouse carried the message off and vanished over the edge of the roof, and Danika suddenly missed the little default bird with its sarcastic deliveries. She searched the menu to see where the setting was, since she was pretty sure that she should at least also have a white mouse available.

A reply from Shrubbery arrived, delivered by her little golden mouse with a sharp scolding squeak. Danika blinked at the mouse and then read the message: "None of your business."

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