The shopkeeper of the elven pet shop haggled with Aishin in elvish until Danika heard the soft chime of a skill ring. She assumed the pose and tapped over to her skill list. "Elven Language," was different from any of her previous skills, it had a passive mode for understanding and an active mode for speaking.

While it was a zero point skill only about one word in 10 was translated, and most of those were words like "the" and "and", but it was enough for Danika to understand what the elven player had meant by the faint echo beneath the words. It reminded her a bit of the hum beneath the pixies' words, only if she focused on it, she could tell that the echo was an elvish word.

By the time they had come to an agreement, her new skill had gained its first point, and she could understand, "fairy", "mice", "mouse", "coin", and a few other often repeated words. She thought she was learning it unrealistically quickly, but she wasn't inclined to complain.

Aishin vanished into his new stone room and returned a moment later with the cage, which he handed over to the shopkeeper in exchange for a surprisingly large pile of coin. Then he turned and grinned at Danika, and said, "Sorry, that took longer than I expected, but we did well."

Aishin carefully chose 3 of the larger coins and handed them to ZipZing. Danika used her featherweight spell to hold them up without immediately placing them into her inventory. "This is more than half," she protested.

Aishin nodded. "But it's not more than half if you include the coin from catching them," he explained.

"We really collected over a thousand per fairy mouse in the end?" Danika asked.

He grinned and nodded, and then almost immediately frowned and said, "I can't right now, I'm busy. We just finished the quest I told you about this morning."

Danika blinked and asked, "What?"

"Sorry," Aishin said quickly, "my dad is asking me to go eat with him."

"You can go if you need to. We're already done with this quest, and since this is a racial capital I should be fine on my own?" Danika replied. It had been a long time since she'd had a parent around to care when she ate. "Eating with your family when you can is not a bad thing."

Aishin laughed. "Fine," he agreed with a grin. He winked and added, "since you are both saying similar things, I'll log off and go eat." He warned her, "I might not be back for a couple of hours, so be careful. Even though the racial capitals are pretty safe for their own race, sometimes they can be more dangerous for visitors."

"I'll be ok," Danika promised, and Aishin smiled and logged out. She thought a bit guiltily that maybe she ought to message her family when she logged out; it had been awhile since she'd seen any of them in person.

She swiftly dropped to the floor of the pet shop and stowed the large coin hearts in the sack that held the remaining coin from the frog's tooth. Her inventory was feeling a bit difficult to shuffle, with bags layered inside of bags, since even if they couldn't hold other bags of holding, her pouches of holding were capable of holding the ordinary salt sacks. The embroidered one was still filled with radishes though.

A system notification popped up and asked: "Accept taming and become the shopkeeper's pet?"

Danika hit reject and activated her wings. She zipped out of the pet shop at her top speed, as the shopkeeper shouted something in elvish behind her. The nearest elves turned and looked at her with startled faces, and one of them raised her bow and took a shot at ZipZing.

Her evasion was good enough that the first shot missed her entirely, but the next shot grazed her. Even though it only grazed her and she was able to keep flying, it felt like she'd been slashed along her whole body. Red orange sparkles streamed off her wings. Her brain finally kicked in out of self defense and she remembered to cast her invisibility.

Danika streaked away from the pet shop in the direction of the leafiest tree in sight. She landed hard on the branch she'd been aiming for and activated her color cantrip. She felt cold, and brought up her menu. Her health was surprisingly low and dropping. She looked down at herself and saw that she really had effectively been sliced along her entire body.

She hurriedly tapped her wrist and withdrew Justin's apple from her pouch of holding. She took a bite. Her health stopped dropping, but she didn't immediately start healing and gaining health the way she had after she'd burned her hands. She quickly ate the rest of the apple, but there was only a small effect. Her health bar was rising very slowly.

Below her, people were shouting in elven, but then more and more of them began to repeat, "carni-PVP!"

Danika's curiosity was too strong and she crawled along the branch until she could peek through the leaves with her lens. The person who'd shot her was a proficient archer, with more than twice her level and had been tagged with a red PVP flag. She was protesting with a stream of quick elven words to the shocked crowd and pointing in the direction of the pet shop.

Danika checked her health again to make sure that it was still rising slowly, and logged out.

--

As Danika disconnected herself from the VR-medi pod, her stomach growled loudly, and she laughed. Apparently Aishin's father hadn't been wrong to badger him into stopping to eat together.

She'd been having so much fun that she hadn't paid any attention to the time, and only now realized that she'd skipped lunch by hurrying home from the mini quest and diving straight into the game. She pulled herself over the edge and dropped to the floor.

She was a little surprised to realize how few options she had left for food as she prepared a quick dinner. She'd been keeping really busy lately between holding a regular shift and playing "Living Jade Empire." She submitted a new grocery order as she ate, and marked it for delivery in the morning.

She also sent a quick message to the group of people she had labeled family: "I am doing well. Just finished up a big contract job with one of the game studios I work for now and then. I've been playing "Living Jade Empire" a lot, that new game I mentioned that can be played on almost any system. I've been playing mostly through my VR-medi pod. My character is called "ZipZing" if any of you want to add me there."

Danika cleaned up after her quick meal and gazed out at the sky for awhile. She wondered what made this sky seen through glass feel more real than the sky she could fly freely beneath. Honestly, her eyes couldn't tell any difference between the quality of the two views. Maybe it was simply that she knew this one was real.

She waited until the rest of an hour had passed before pulling herself back over the edge of the VR-medi pod. She hoped that ZipZing would be fully healed. It would just be too embarrassing to have to admit that she'd almost died as soon as Aishin had logged off.