It was a difference in flight skill levels, Danika decided. She and Kit had a lot of flight experience built up, but Penname and Thimblepot were still beginners, and they were both struggling to maintain their positions by force instead of tilting into the wind and not getting as much help from the game.

The flashes of the NPC lightning elementals in the clouds around them increased rapidly, and Xing Xing reported doubtfully, "My tribe is shouting that they want to meet the great bard before he loses his mantle, since he has just bound himself to mortal affairs?"

"What?" Danika asked blankly.

"I'm not sure what it means either," Xing Xing complained.

"Oh no!" Thimblepot exclaimed and suddenly seemed to fall out of the air.

Danika dove after the little pig and used a featherweight spell on him, which slowed his dive.

"I must warn the great bard of this cost for joining our guild!" the little pig insisted.

The waves below them were getting closer as they descended, but the clouds above them were also drawing closer in a disorienting manner. After a moment Danika realized that the storm itself, with its many occupants, was descending toward the ocean as well. The sail on the little boat that had carried them out to meet Sea Song Tione whipped in the rising wind as the storm blew downward, and the faces of Jade and the boatman turned upward.

Thimblepot missed the edge of the boat and plonked into the ocean, but before Danika could react, Sea Song Tione flicked his tail and vanished into the water. A moment later the dolphin boosted the little pig out of the water with his head.

"Great bard!" Thimblepot spluttered. "You will lose your divine title by joining Endless Song!"

"I know! It will be so much fun! I will get to sing with so many new bards when they come to challenge me!" the dolphin replied excitedly.

Danika felt as confused as Thimblepot looked, but she decided that reassuring the boatman needed to come first and zipped over to where he and Jade waited. "The storm isn't, I mean, it's just the dragon coming down so that the lightning elementals can talk to the dolphin," Danika explained hurriedly.

She stared at the boatman who reacted by quickly grabbing a bucket, and sloshing water into the boat. "Um…" she began worriedly.

Jade flashed a smile, held up both of his hands, and to all appearances activated the same Dazzling skill that ZipZing used. His dark hair gleamed and the light seemed to brighten around him even as the rest of the world seemed to darken with the storm's descent. After a moment Danika realized that the effect was just a visual representation of his prayer, as a bubble of calm rippled outward from him and the boat steadied as the waves around it settled.

Dozens of lightning elementals flashed into the calm bright area around Jade as the boatman stood motionless in shock, still holding half a bucket of sea water. Kit zipped down to hover beside ZipZing and told the boatman kindly, "You don't need to do that, even if your ship catches fire, I'll mend it and it'll be as good as new."

"Right, you're a Mender, I forgot. It's not a path that I'm familiar with," the boatman chattered nervously.

--

At first, listening to a dolphin tell singsong stories to a crowd of tiny bolts of electricity, that snapped like an enormous dryer full of static was amusing. But after a while Danika got bored and drifted to the edge of Jade's calm space where the full blooded dragon player hovered. If Jade hadn't been an NPC himself, she might have worried about the strain of maintaining his prayer space for so long, but for him it would literally be as easy as breathing.

Kit was already there and the two of them were talking quietly. Kit said, "That sounds so similar to my path! Uh, I mean…"

"How did you get the path of Mender? Do you like sewing?" Venerable Sky Dragon asked.

"I can't sew well and I don't want to learn to do it any better," Kit replied with surprising firmness. She seemed to realize that her reply was odd and added quickly but evasively, "I um, I received my path from the Jade Empress."

"Oh! No wonder it's so rare and so similar to a dragon's path then! I had no idea before I became a full blooded dragon that dragons couldn't have a profession path. All of our path quests come directly from the Dragon and we all owe the Jade Emperor a hundred years of service, right from birth! Er, or from hatching," the dragon replied.

"A hundred years?" Danika asked incredulously.

"Yeah, but it's not as bad as it sounds!" Venerable Sky Dragon replied quickly. "We get to choose from lists of different quests every day, and they are almost all about helping people out. If you don't take a quest you don't get punished, your time of service just doesn't get reduced. I actually think it's kind of cool."

"This game seems to be built to help people," Kit agreed. "There's a kid who comes to use the free network where I work who told me that there is actually a hidden set of quest lines for teaching people real world skills that will help them get jobs. But my, I mean um, the traveling merchant says that those quests are actually designed to raise people's contentment levels."

"I've heard that rumor!" the dragon replied enthusiastically before Danika could comment. "And I think both are true, being able to get a better job or any job at all really improves a person's general happiness doesn't it?"

Kit went silent, but she didn't look unhappy, just very thoughtful, so Danika asked the dragon something she'd been wondering about, "Hey, is Endless Song's reputation really that bad? I think most of our members are actually pretty nice."

"Ah," Venerable Sky Dragon replied nervously, "I wouldn't say it's bad exactly…"

"You shouted, 'do I look like I'm crazy,' and acted like we were here to steal from you," Danika pointed out a little dryly.

"Yeah, well," he said defensively, "you guys might be new, but your guild is full of insanely powerful old players right? I've heard the enchantments on your Guild Hall are strong enough that it's practically as invincible as the Jade Palace. And that you've got a battle support contract with EmeraldHearts, which is one of the oldest guilds in the game."

"That's one way," Danika explained quickly. "We have to support them because we owe them. And even that's limited to a certain number of times!"

The dragon looked at her for a long moment with a slightly disbelieving expression. "You…" he muttered.

Kit rejoined the conversation with, "We have just as many new players as old ones I think." She glanced at Jade and then at ZipZing and added, "But we do have some people who know practically everything about the game. Although that's not always an advantage! They get bogged down by their own expectations sometimes."

Danika was guiltily certain that she was one of the people Kit was talking about, but not sure how to respond.

"Both of you really have no idea do you?" Venerable Sky Dragon asked with an expression of complete disbelief now. "Listen to what you're saying? Your guild is actually a weapon for one of the oldest and most powerful guilds to call on a limited number of times? You really have people who know almost everything about the game? So, like you've got some of the developers? Gods, the rumors about you guys are barely scratching the surface are they?"

Danika and Kit exchanged a helpless glance, neither the game designer nor the Jade Empress could respond. Danika glanced at the character being played by a copy of the Jade Emperor. They really had no way to argue any of his speculations.

The dragon wasn't daunted by their silence as he added, "I've heard that your leaders even have some big connections in the entertainment industry, because you actually got two different pop groups to launch your entertainment dome in the City of Sand. So maybe you don't just have developers, but like… maybe this innocent looking fairy dragon is actually the CEO of Starcraft Technologies?"

"Now you're totally just dreaming things up!" Danika insisted laughingly.