Saaki appeared beside the little stone at the center of the garden, startling them all. Danika fumbled with the phone controls, but had ZipZing back to the stone and shouting 'exit' as she smacked her little clawed hand against it, a moment later.

She snatched the harness out of the air beside her and zipped upward before trying to get her bearings. As soon as her flight stabilized, she looked around and then farther upward. A very plushy rodent balanced on one foot in the middle of the open sky. A small celestial dragon hovered worriedly beside it.

She was able to fly upward without even using her featherweight spell, and a glance downward told her that MatchlessMinion was a lot less than a kilometer from the ground. They were still high enough to be above the lowest layers of clouds though.

ShinZing popped out of the stone into the air beside her. Shinichi laughed at her startled expression and reminded her, "I can fly too!"

"Yeah!" she agreed happily and they zipped upward together until they reached Kit and MatchlessMinion.

"Look!" MatchlessMinion complained, pointing down and to the left. "That's the next 'platform'!"

Danika turned her view to look where he was pointing, but she didn't see anything at first.

"I'll show her," Kit said quickly. She nodded to ShinZing on her way past and added, "You look really cute as a pixie, and it makes it more obvious that Zip is a half pixie dragon."

Kit flew downward and hovered beside the next step, if you could refer to a tiny slab of nearly transparent jade, barely six centimeters wide, as a step. "This," she explained, as she pointed with one clawed hand.

Danika considered the distance between MatchlessMinion and that step, and then looked upward to see that the next highest was nearly as far away and barely bigger. "I'm really impressed that you made it this far alive," she told the chinchillamin admiringly.

He crossed his little arms and lifted his chin. "Of course I did," he added with wry honesty, "thanks to Kit and those health potions." He commanded, "Now let me into your stone space and let's go dissect this thieving crane."

Shinichi laughed and interrupted Danika's automatic protest with, "She actually considered dissection, but decided to get your help instead."

Danika zipped closer and held the stone's harness out to MatchlessMinion while demanding, "Just steal it back, without injuring the bird please."

MatchlessMinion didn't argue, he just reached out and said 'dragonheart' before vanishing.

Danika landed Zip on the little jade piece that he'd been standing on and put the harness on, before launching ZipZing back into the air beside Kit and ShinZing. "You two should enter as well, so that I can teleport to the mark."

"Alright," Shinichi agreed, and zipped his pixie over to her. He didn't just touch the stone though, he hugged her to do it.

When Danika turned her head to look up at him where he sat beside her, he just grinned and moved his arm around to hug her for real. She laughed and zipped over to Kit.

"Will I be helpful?" Kit asked. "I'm not very good at stealing things."

Danika blinked in surprise, and then admitted, "I don't know. Do you want to stay here?"

Kit shrugged, which produced a ripple that ran down the length of her celestial dragon form. "I kind of want to finish learning to hide the Empress flag before I go wandering around much," she admitted. "The Jade Emperor," she blushed as she explained, "said that I should be able to manage it before I have to log out if we keep practicing."

Danika wondered why the Emperor couldn't or wouldn't just give his wife a skill point in it, but what she asked was, "How will you get back up? Are they close enough to climb up, up where you stop being able to fly?"

Kit's blush intensified, and she shook her head. "I just have to message," she explained. She assumed the pose to call up her menus, which somehow looked less silly and more noble on a celestial dragon than when ZipZing did it.

A little white mouse wearing paper wings appeared to glide away with her message, and a moment later the Jade Emperor stood on the jade step beside them. He smiled gently at his wife and held out his arms. She flew closer and then shifted back into her human form, which he caught neatly and held gently in a princess carry.

The Emperor and his Empress disappeared a moment later, and Shinichi murmured against her hair, "Saaki and Match can't see anything, and neither of them wait very patiently."

Danika glanced over at his screen and saw the genie waving his arms while the chinchillamin jumped neatly from stone seat to stone seat around her apple tree.

"Right," she replied, and triggered the teleport to mark.

--

ZipZing appeared suddenly in the middle of a thousand cranes, and went invisible a second later. A ripple of disturbance still spread outward across the vast flock, but those closest to her only looked around suspiciously for a minute and then returned their attention back to the shallow water that they stood in.

A thousand might be an exaggeration, Danika decided after a moment, but there were hundreds at least. If she hadn't had an assassin's mark on it, it might have been nearly impossible to locate the crane who had swallowed the stone space.

That particularly nervous individual looked around warily and muttered quietly, "I know you're here, you thief."

The other cranes nearby looked at the mutterer and shifted away from it just a little. They didn't seem to be comfortable with it speaking in the common tongue. Either that, or they thought that it was a little crazy since it was muttering to itself.

Danika asked Shinichi, "Can you describe the situation for them? It seems a little dangerous."

"I can, but first recover your own health," Shinichi replied a little critically.

She didn't argue, she just zipped silently over to a patch of reeds and activated her color cantrip to blend in before her invisibility wore off.

She rummaged through her two inventories for more candy, but she seemed to be completely out. She hurriedly ate an elderly piece of cheese, and a stray thought crossed her mind. She wondered if the repeatable quest mice would ever get close to completing the infinite cheese stone. Her contract with them had never activated.