Danika woke up the morning after her first date with Shinichi and smiled. Then she checked for messages. There was just his usual morning greeting, like nothing had changed. She replied as usual too, and then thought about it, and decided that this was also something to be happy about.
While it might have been nice if he'd sent something cute about 'our first day', it was also nice to be able to regard it as normal, as a simple fact. She grinned again and ate some of the cake that they'd never quite gotten to for breakfast.
When she logged in for the morning meeting of the sixth division, she had her celestial dragon assistant schedule a meeting with Lin Hao. She wondered again if it was ok for the newest member of Design Integration to occupy so much of the seventh division's head programmer's time, but her request went through right away, which seemed a little unusual since Lin Hao seemed to mostly work later in the day.
The outline for the expansion was firming up. Exactly which mountains would be destroyed had been defined, and a couple of members of the sixth had volunteered to begin relocating the unique species of plants and animals that lived there to other appropriate sites within the game. The exact extent of the new desert and the new coastline that would border the edge of the map, linking the northern ocean to the southwestern ocean directly, was being carefully designed to fit in with the image of the tiger that the original mountain range formed.
After a lot of discussion, they'd decided not to create the cities in the desert that they'd originally been planning. Takahashi had pointed out that this was the first opportunity in "Living Jade Empire" for player built cities, and had persuaded the rest of the team to design sites with suitable resources instead of premade towns and cities.
The pyramid design trio won a concession though, they would get an oasis in the center of the new desert to play with, and had settled on a pyramid style based on a temple design from the other side of the Arabian sea on Earth. The elaborate pyramid form of the Indian Shikhara would shelter a treasure trove of items famed in the westernized versions of Arabian tales, such as flying carpets and genie capturing lamps.
The most amusing part about that to Danika, was that the lamps were going to be based on the habitable spaces that Logical Heart had designed, although the design team was referring to the spaces as 'world fragments'. The interiors of the lamps would be elaborately decorated in a flamboyant version of typical Bedouin tent carpets and bolsters. Danika suspected, from what little she knew about the Bedouin tribes, that they'd have loved handheld portable tent substitutes.
After the meeting, Danika met with Lin Hao and presented the ideas she'd formed while doing the repeatable quests for using existing NPC reaction libraries and converting the quests from set scripts to something closer to event guidelines.
Lin Hao frowned at her and complained, "You realize that you're trying to mess with the fundamental structure of NPCs and asking the seventh to completely rewrite the way repeatable quests are added to the game?"
Danika flinched and replied meekly, "Um, no? I'm sorry, if it's not possible or not a good idea you can ignore it. It just sounded like it would fix all the existing quests at once and make a better foundation for new ones."
"Oh, I think it would," Lin Hao agreed with amusement. "Although the existing quests would each need to be reformatted to take advantage of the new modularized mode."
"Modularized?" Danika questioned.
"What you're describing sounds like the game would have a library of preset quest modules that would trigger under the right conditions?" Lin Hao replied questioningly.
"Oh, yeah, I guess so," she agreed.
Lin Hao stood there tapping his lip thoughtfully for awhile before speaking again. "This all really ties in to the changes required for NPC reincarnation, which Devon already got approval for. I'll have to consult with him and a few other people, but for now I'll give you a firm maybe!"
Danika laughed. "Thanks," she told him quickly.
"And now I'm going to go sleep, so don't expect to hear anything for at least a couple of days," he informed her.
His neat virtual appearance, in his elaborate robes with the well kept dark hair that was in such contrast to his normal messy real appearance, didn't show the exhaustion that his sentence implied. It answered the question of why he'd been available in the morning though, he'd been up all night.
"Okay, thank you, and rest well," she replied.
He simply nodded and vanished.
--
When she went to her blank white workspace and pulled up the list of current job requests, her dragon assistant popped up and informed her questioningly, "You are scheduled to have the rest of the day off and resume work tomorrow?"
Danika blinked at it and then realized that it was correct. She'd been home for two days, but only one of those had been a work day. She smiled and logged out of her work account and returned to "Living Jade Empire" as ZipZing the cute hedgehog. She checked her quest timer and saw that she only had a few more hours to go as a hedgehog.
Aishin logged on before an hour had passed and used his Teleport to Mark skill to join her in the rainbow clad fairy capital city, L'Arc En Ciel. The first thing he did, even before swallowing the usual health potion was ask, "Why are you a hedgepig? Please tell me that's not your first shapeshifting shape?"
Danika gave a chortle and asked teasingly, "Why not? You asked me to choose a human form because we hadn't met yet, and we've already met?"
He gave the exaggerated shrug of an emote, and replied, "I guess so, but why a hedgepig?"
"Why do you call it a hedgepig instead of a hedgehog?" she asked curiously. "And I'm this shape for this messenger animal quest, I still need 163 more animals to learn Weaving Moonlight."
"I had this book as a kid about the adventures of a hedgepig," Aishin explained. "And you don't have to, but I'd still like it if you could spend time here with me as a human."
She looked up at his character that looked so similar to reality and remembered what it had been like to hold his hand. As a hedgehog she didn't even have the little clawed hands she usually had as a fairy dragon. "Yeah," she agreed.
"Messenger animal quest?" he asked.
Danika explained about the fairy witch and the repeatable quest for the hedgehog messenger animal. "Apparently after the curse wears off you get to keep the shape as a messenger animal."
Aishin had her show him the fairy witch's treehouse with its surrounding garden, and stole a berry of his own. Danika used her invisibility and her color cantrip to hide under a bush and watch. He dropped the berry he'd stolen when he was transformed, and the witch managed to recover it, but otherwise his experience was the same.
Two cute little hedgehogs, on their first day as a couple, wandered around the rainbow city together for almost an hour before Aishin had to log off.
