Danika and Shinichi turned in unison to look at each other. And then Danika looked at her phone and asked her assistant, "How is that even possible? Kit and I couldn't even fly up to the celestial palace."
"There were birds and animals there," Shinichi pointed out.
At the same time her assistant replied helpfully, "Cranes can fly very high, but the stone was swept off the palace grounds by the groundskeeper, and landed on one of the new stepping stones."
"Should it be able to tell you all of that? It really does sound like a cheat," Shinichi murmured.
"Actually, I could have put myself to sleep and asked the Sandman to show me, I think," Danika told him. "But yeah, it does feel like cheating. I don't play on my phone where I can ask my assistant things at the same time very often though?"
"It's alright, I wasn't scolding you," he replied with amusement.
He glanced back at the computer screen. "Should I revive and come get you out?" He didn't mention the threat, if he dared to revive again, that the immortal goddess had just made.
"You don't need to," she said swiftly. "If it's just a crane, it'll probably die if I pop out in its gizzard. And I could leave any time, since I have Shrubbery's tree marked to teleport to, it would just be really wasteful."
"Alright," Shinichi replied and settled back in front of the screen to click the response that would change everything.
An idea occurred to her, "Hey, haven't Logical Heart's stone spaces always placed us very close to the stone, but not always touching it when we come out? And none of us have ever appeared partway in anything or anyone."
"Yeah?" he agreed questioningly as he selected the next option.
"I'm going to try just exiting the space and placing a Mark on the crane," Danika announced as she put the words into action.
"Okay," he agreed.
ZipZing exited the stone, and as Danika had predicted, appeared in the air beside the crane. She cursed as she spun the little fairy dragon's view around, and then scrambled through her menu screens, to send a Mark zinging after the crane that was flying far faster than she'd imagined.
"Geeze," she complained. "How fast do cranes fly?"
"I don't know," Shinichi replied in a distracted tone.
"CD?" Danika asked.
"About 55 kilometers per hour," her assistant replied helpfully.
"That doesn't sound like that much," Danika complained, "how fast can fairy dragons fly?"
"About 38 kilometres per hour, or about the same as an unladen swallow," the LJE CD informed her.
Shinichi huffed a laugh.
"I must need to learn more speed buffing type skills," Danika muttered.
"Pixies can only fly about 30 kilometers per hour," her assistant added.
"Okay," Danika replied doubtfully. "That's enough on flight speeds." Her assistant was usually not inclined to add extra information like that.
"Close enough," Shinichi commented.
Danika flew after the crane, which was rapidly becoming a silver sliver in the distance. She wouldn't be able to follow it in a minute without using the mark's location. A moment later she sat up from her position against Shinichi's back, destabilizing him. She scooted up beside him and stared at his screen.
"Have ZipZing keep following that crane," Danika instructed her assistant as she stared at Shinichi's character.
"A pixie?" she asked.
"You object?" he questioned in return.
"No, it's just…" she couldn't think of a polite way to say 'too cute for you' and a moment later she thought of his room with the neat row of plushies. The first thing he'd told ZipZing, after threatening to kill her, was that she was really cute. "…cuter than I expected," she admitted.
Shinichi grinned at her. "I wanted to be able to fly with you. And I'll be able to hug you for as long as I want, if I have VR," he explained.
"I'll still be a dragon," she pointed out.
"Or a cat, or a human, or whatever else you've learned to turn yourself into," he replied laughingly.
"What path are you going to… hey! Your starter village is a pixie pod!?" Danika exclaimed.
"Isn't that normal?" he asked.
"Mine was full of all kinds of races, but it was mostly human, there definitely weren't any fairy dragons," Danika complained.
"That's what you get for being the first of your kind," he teased. "The traveling merchant is still human though."
"Yeah," Danika agreed. Shinichi pulled up his character sheet and she saw his new name, ShinZing. "You could have kept the same name?" she pointed out questioningly.
"I could have," he agreed neutrally.
"Okay," she acknowledged.
"I thought ZipShin and AiZing sounded awkward," he explained.
Danika grinned at him. "It's fine. You're really cute. And I'm sorry I'm not as possessive of you as you wish I was?"
Shinichi didn't deny it, but he glanced at her where she leaned against his side to see the screen and said softly, "I'm happy just like this."
A moment later he opened his inventory, pulled out the sword that waited there, and equipped it.
"Woah, what?" Danika exclaimed. "Did you choose to bring an item with you?"
"Nope, I chose a skill. I don't think I had any NPC relationships that I'll regret having to rebuild, and I didn't have anything small enough to be useful to a pixie… I thought," Aishin replied. "The legendary swords must be bound to the account and not the character, like pets."
"What about Sea Song Tione? Or even the Jade Emperor?" Danika asked.
Shinichi hesitated and then shrugged. "Maybe now that NPCs can reincarnate and we have a chance of meeting ones that remember us from their old lives, we'll be able to convince our old friends that we remember them?"
"What skill did you keep?" she asked.
He opened his skill list and showed her. "Meditation, maybe it doesn't seem like it does much, and you could have taught it to me again, but it's probably the skill that I put the most time into. With my old level in it, my health and energy are already as high as they were when I reached proficient on Aishin."
"Hmm," she made the noise as she considered it. "Very practical for a combat path?"
"I think it's practical for any path, even pure craftsmen would want the energy capacity," he protested.
