After Danika finished writing the message, her little default bird messenger carried it away. Apparently the king of cats hadn't deemed it worthy, and nothing about the wording or destination had caused the butterfly, hedgehog, or one of the other messengers she'd collected to be selected.

She gazed at the spot where the shards of Durandel had lain thoughtfully. ShinZing had been putting it through a lot that might have destroyed a lesser sword at any time, but it was supposed to be indestructible and had stayed with him even through his reincarnation as a pixie. It felt a bit like a storyline event had been triggered, but the timing was strange.

She pushed through the protective curl of the bush that they had hidden beneath and turned her attention toward the horizon. The storm was already nothing but a smudge at the edge of the sky. A plushy grey cat walked around the bush as though it had been waiting just out of sight, and dropped the message it carried.

MatchlessMinion's reply read: "No problem, I'll log in. Meet me at the guild hall? I want to pick up a few things."

"We're leaving," she told Hikaru, and the firefly circled her once before vanishing between her wings.

Danika stuffed a candy into her mouth before teleporting to her mark on Shrubbery's tree. Three startled faces greeted her appearance, and Hikaru reappeared. Danika wasn't too surprised to find both Shrubbery and Kit standing beside the dryad's tree, but she looked at Lin Hao's character Magna Silvam questioningly.

Silvam pointed to something behind her, and Danika turned around to see Jade's character. "Jade?" she asked.

It was her first time seeing his character through VR, and it looked less like him than she expected. In some respects Silvam's feminine form resembled the Jade Emperor more closely than Jade's character did. It was similar, but not identical. Of course, it wouldn't have a full body scan of him since he didn't have a body, even though all of the data was there in his server.

"Yes," Jade agreed. He appeared to be looking around curiously but he must have been using his auto targeting system, because Hikaru suddenly went berserk.

Jade was almost impossibly high level for the number of days he'd had a character in the original 'Living Jade Empire', but Hikaru was not a harmless little bug that couldn't do any damage anymore. Jade was both bleeding and on fire before she managed to command Hikaru, "Stop!"

"Oh my," Shrubbery said softly.

Kit swiftly used her repair skill which both put out the fire and restored Jade's clothes, while Silvam used a healing skill. Jade stood frozen as though he were in shock.

Danika wondered what Kit thought of Jade's character, and what Lin Hao had decided to tell her. "You changed your mind and brought him to the guild?" she asked Silvam curiously.

The elf almost spluttered as she protested vehemently, "He insisted that the merchant told him to come here so that he could help a dragon!"

"Do you think he meant me, or the one we want to make vomit?" she asked thoughtfully. Everyone stared at her.

"Um, what exactly are you up to tonight?" Shrubbery asked doubtfully, just in time for MatchlessMinion to bounce past.

"Be right back!" he shouted as he dashed into the guild hall tree, which was taller than ever, and no longer appeared to be in a separate lot. Shrubbery had been reworking the border of her garden and the two spaces now blended together.

"Rescuing the First Dwarven Smith," Danika replied. She waved her arms expressively and had just begun to explain the situation when the Smith's messenger appeared.

She stopped talking as she read: "Not to rush you or anything, but it looks like your health is almost full again, and I think the cabin is starting to melt."

"Sorry, I don't have time to explain," she apologized.

"Can I move now?" Jade asked.

Danika blinked at him, and then agreed, "Yeah." She glanced at Hikaru. Jade had been still ever since she'd commanded the firefly to stop.

"If you're coming along, you'll need to enter my stone space," she instructed the group generally, and turned her back on them.

One after another said, "dragonheart" without asking anything else. It made Danika obscurely happy. It felt like a small display of the trust and friendship between them. Even Hikaru returned to the garden space without any sign of reluctance.

MatchlessMinion scurried back to her, without stopping to ask where everyone had gone. He just waved a little hand and demanded, "Come down where I can reach, and use the mirror so I can see when we're there!"

Danika grinned at him and zipped downward to meet him.

--

It almost didn't work in time.

The Smith said with amazement, as they stood on the ground outside the slimy, deflated airship, "I owe the girls an apology. If they hadn't insisted on all that decorative inlay your thief skill would only have had the rivets to work with."

"Why does it look like the balloon is made from dragon skin?" Danika asked a little warily.

"Wyvern hide," the Smith corrected.

Unlike the faceless metal ovoid of the airship that the cloud cat had exploded, with a small cabin held inside of the body, the Smith's airship looked like it had come from a historical illustration. The cabin still appeared to be mostly metal of some kind, but when the balloon was inflated, it would hang below it. It was also shaped more like a waterborne vessel, with multiple round windows and round door hatches. The glass looked ancient, all rippled and wavering, and the surface was pitted and corroded beneath the layer of sticky slime.

"A real dragon would not be fooled," Jade commented knowledgeably.

Kit looked at him curiously, but she didn't say anything.

"Well… it is pretty much impervious to most breath attacks though," the Smith replied. "Stomach acid too, apparently."

"And strong enough to resist most casual attacks," Jade agreed cheerfully, making the Smith cast another curious glance in his direction.

"Jade knows a lot about the game, even though he hasn't had this character long," Danika said quickly.

"Silvam said earlier that he works with the two of you," Kit replied. She glanced at Jade again, and then at Silvam who was nodding in agreement.

"Ah, yeah," Danika agreed with surprise. Somehow she hadn't thought of it that way, but Jade did work with them. Maybe there was no need to explain who, or what, he was.

"Even though the cabin is pretty small, it looks like the balloon should have been way too big for that dragon to swallow?" MatchlessMinion questioned.

"It's not that small," Danika objected.

"I can't stand up straight inside of it," Shrubbery pointed out.

"It is as small as we could reasonably make it," the Smith agreed. "But most of the goods that it would need to transport can't be carried inside a spacial enchantment, so if we have to actually miniaturize it as ZipZing suggested it will have very limited applications. The balloon was pierced when we reached the elevation of the twelfth Jade step, that dragon snapped us up on the way down."

"So… actually it sort of rescued you?" Danika asked.

"No… maybe?" the Smith replied doubtfully.

"It would kind of explain why two Jade Hands were guided to meet up with us so that they could heal those poor dragons," Shrubbery suggested cheerfully. "Dragons are servants of the Emperor too, right?" she glanced at Kit.

"I was not guided," Silvam objected. "I was just trying to…" she glanced at Kit too, and then finished awkwardly with, "keep track of something."

Kit gazed back at Silvam curiously, but she didn't ask.