"Wait, you'd have another path to the Jade Palace? I mean, other than flying?" Danika asked Jade curiously.

"There should be an entrance to the heart of the tree," Jade explained.

"What tree?" Kit asked.

"The Emperor is always at the heart of the world tree, just like the sun is always at the heart of the world dragon," Jade replied calmly.

Shrubbery asked, "Do you mean where you meet him at the beginning of the game?"

"Yes," Jade agreed. "All player incarnations in the Empire take place in the world tree."

Danika blinked and then questioned, "Then why didn't you ask what you wanted to while you were making your character? He shouldn't be too limited there, since he was able to answer a lot of things that I asked him."

"The Emperor must redirect any conversation not related to character creation, if the character is there to create an incarnation," Jade replied patiently.

"But there's a way in besides death?" Kit prompted.

Jade hesitated. "There was once," he said finally.

"Where was it?" Danika asked when he didn't add anything else.

"Where the roots of the world touch the sky," Jade replied.

"Are you following your instruction not to tell us more than the traveling merchant would?" Danika asked suspiciously.

"I think so," Jade agreed. "That identity has been modified, and the trade consoles are not the same as the merchant was."

His answer was not something the merchant would tell anyone except a celestial servant, but Danika didn't quibble with it. "Can you take us there?" she asked instead. "Maybe it was still there but you couldn't see it through this interface."

"Sure," Jade agreed, and started walking.

The three girls caught up with him a moment later. They followed Jade away from their guild hall tree, through the busy streets, and out of Fogton. He took them out the main road that ran East toward the dragon mountains.

Zipping along through the farmland and passing through the small towns near the human capital was a bit nostalgic for Danika. She had visited specific places for quests, but she hadn't simply traveled due East without using portals or teleporting to a target since the last time she had visited Windbur, where the tree branch that had been set as her home was. The little vale full of fairy folk was just a beginner village and not large enough to have a portal.

After awhile, Shrubbery asked, "How far is it? I have a paper that I should be working on, should I ask ZipZing to carry me in her garden?"

"It will take many hours at this speed, since we must travel to the highest peak in the Dragon's territory," Jade explained.

Danika glanced back toward the city that was hidden behind a gently rolling landscape and asked doubtfully, "Shouldn't we have taken a portal then? The elven capital would have been a closer starting point, even if there's not a better one?"

"This path is more suitable for humans," Jade explained. "But I guess you could have carried me in your garden too. You asked me to take you there, so I thought that you meant that I should lead," he complained.

"Don't worry about it," Kit said quickly. "This isn't a quest that would have a timer going, it's just something we are interested in seeing."

Danika eyed Jade doubtfully without saying anything. She knew that he had been compressed as small as Lin Hao could manage while he'd been in storage, but sometimes the person who should have known the most about the game was the one who used the fewest shortcuts. Not that his predecessors weren't inclined to direct routes, but Danika's impression of both cat and emperor was more… sly.

After a moment she shrugged and suggested to Jade, "Why don't you carry my stone space, and then we can come and go as we please while you travel?"

"Okay," Jade replied agreeably.

The road dwindled into a path, but Jade walked onward with no sign of doubt about his route. The traveling merchant would lead with the same assurance, but the inhabitants of the Empire did not make way for Jade, so once in awhile they were forced to fight an aggressive animal or wait for a wagon to pass. Jade continued to walk forward steadily, and eventually the path dwindled into a trail.

Danika received a message from ShinZing, and immediately checked to see if he had logged in, but he was just messaging from the first layer of the mobile application. It asked: "Have you been out to look at the snow?"

"I'll be back in a bit," she announced and zipped over to where her pebble's harness was attached to Jade's shoulder strap. "Dragonheart."

She was just reaching for the log out, when she noticed that Hikaru was glowing red on her apple tree's branch. She zipped over to her firefly and asked it, "Are you mad because I told you to stay in here?"

It blinked its light at her.

She pulled out one of the sweets that it seemed to like and told it, "You've done well. Thank you. I'm glad that I can always rely on you to listen to me."

She didn't think that game pets required command reinforcements in order to stay obedient, but Hikaru always seemed to respond well when she remembered to be polite and acknowledge its efforts. She thought that it was actually her that the game was training. It was probably still trying to get her to ask for help and say thank you.

--

Danika gazed out of the bedroom window and saw the thin layer of snow that coated everything between it and the dark water of the canal that ran past them. The tall buildings beyond the canal seemed to shrug off the snow's attempt to lighten their visages, and let the sky touch the Earth for a moment.

She felt a little shocked that Shinichi had been the one to tell her that it was snowing. She watched the small flakes drift on a lazy breeze, and wondered if going out to catch a snowflake counted as an outing that she needed an escort for.

It was almost strange to think that ZipZing and Aishin had still been collecting materials for their original Bond with Familiar spell during the previous year's first snow. In some ways it felt like she and Shinichi had been together much longer than a single year, but in other ways it was difficult to believe that it had already been a year.

She looked down at her phone and then messaged Shinichi: "It really is snowing here, how did you know?"

A wistful little fantasy where he'd say something like, 'It's been snowing since I got off the plane,' played through her mind until her phone played another message notification. She shook her head and smiled. Shinichi wasn't about to walk through the door, because he said: "Akito's mom mentioned it."

It was such a simple, ordinary, way to hear about the weather at home. She could only laugh at herself, and admit that she missed him, even though they saw each other through the game at least every other day. She moved over to her closet and rummaged for something warm to pull on.

Danika stopped at Ryuske's workroom on her way to the door, and knocked lightly over the melody that drifted through the gap.

The music stopped, and Ryuske asked, "What's up?"

"It's snowing, so I…" Danika began.

"Just let me grab a coat!" Ryuske replied cheerfully.

Sometimes it was nice to be a little bit spoiled by people who understood you. They followed the walkway along the canal down to the tea shop and stayed there for awhile, sipping at warm cups and watching small white flakes vanish into the dark water.