Data Dragon Danika

MatchlessMinion had been proven correct. Endless Song was quickly accumulating coin as they completed the sudden influx of mostly player submitted resource gathering quests. With the demands created by the game's expansion, they would soon complete the purchase of their new guild hall space beside Shrubbery's garden.

The members of Underneath were actively participating, despite the fact that the band was still on tour and wouldn't return home for another couple of weeks. Saaki currently had possession of ZipZing's stone space, so that he could transport things in and out of the buried dwarven capital whenever he had time.

Edwardian took his guild title as treasurer seriously and created a guild treasury out of the rented rooms that were their current official hall. He found sources for many of the items that were being requested repeatedly, and had the other members collect them whenever they had time, so that new guild quests for those items could be instantly completed.

Nao1 and Aishin completed quest after quest, despite only logging in for a few minutes at a time throughout the day. ZipZing and Ryullusion often completed the longer quests together in the evenings after her shift ended each day.

Kit Tay and Shrubbery usually joined in during Kit's scheduled hour of play time. Kit would always collect her NPC baby from his NPC father and carry him along, for all but the most dangerous expeditions.

In fact, the only member of Endless Song who was currently inactive was Magna Silvam. Lin Hao, the head of the seventh division, had apparently been serious about sleeping for a week after the expansion was successfully launched.

--

Danika had assumed that things would slow down after the new entrance to the buried dwarven racial capital of Nabataea had been completed. But as soon as the bulk of the players who'd stayed beneath the desert (instead of paying the expensive courier fees to be transported out early) were free to explore, a new city was founded.

Her little fairy dragon character zipped through the sky above the new settlement, easily dodging the gryphons who carried heavy loads in, and empty containers back out. ZipZing's pet firefly Hikaru danced along behind her, and occasionally blinked out of existence as the little beetle was automatically teleported back into ZipZing's proximity.

Since Saaki had the enchanted pebble that held her garden, ZipZing's pet couldn't just hide away when it didn't approve of the current weather conditions. Fortunately, its mood seemed to be generally cheerful unless they got caught in one of the winter storms that occasionally whipped the desert with brief spates of torrential rain.

Danika had thought that the storms of the new desert in 'Living Jade Empire' were unrealistic, until she'd looked up the monsoon seasons that swept some of the real deserts on Earth every year. She spotted Kit and zipped down to her.

Kit stood beside the travelling merchant in the unfinished town square and held her baby up to ZipZing as she approached. "Zip! Look!" Kit called out happily.

Danika blinked and came to a halt. She examined the baby for any obvious changes, like a cute new outfit or something, but couldn't see anything different. The dark haired infant was already a month old, since the game had four days elapsing for every day in real time, and he was plump, pink cheeked and cheerful.

"Cute as usual?" Danika suggested tentatively.

Kit grinned at her and explained, "I advanced to the next set of druid quests, since I reached master with all the new boundary setting quests! And I thought I'd have to submit a bug report as usual to get my next quest item from the traveling merchant, but I didn't have to! He can pull them out of his father's pockets or something!"

Kit Tay's marriage prevented her from interacting with the merchant normally as a customer. Danika looked at him and the traveling merchant corrected gently, "He provided the item with his own resources."

Kit hugged her baby and grinned. "Such a good boy," she cooed. She looked at her NPC husband and reached out and touched his cheek fondly, and then asked ZipZing a little wryly, "They are both such good children aren't they?"

Danika stared at her. Kit had never pretended that she hadn't understood that her NPC husband was an artificial character who was only a couple of years old himself, but she'd never joked about it either.

Kit said softly, "The more I get my own life stabilized, the more I can pay attention to the subtler things. But it's OK, because we're all still learning new things every day, right?"

"Of course my love," the traveling merchant agreed with his wife affectionately.

Danika smiled and agreed, "Yeah." But then she looked at the baby again and her smile faltered.

"Zip? What's wrong?" Kit questioned.

"I'm sorry Kit," Danika said unhappily.

"About what?" Kit asked a little anxiously, and she handed the baby back to the traveling merchant.

The merchant held his son with practiced ease, and the baby laughed happily, as Danika said soberly, "I think we need to file a bug report anyway. I don't think he should be able to create your quest items for you as if he were the traveling merchant."

The traveling merchant looked at her and said clearly, "He didn't do it as if he were me, he fulfilled the request as himself."

Kit glanced between them worriedly. After a moment she asked, "Do you really need to? Does it hurt anything?"

"We're not allowed to copy the traveling merchant into our test areas because it can overload the system, and the system load has been unusually crowded since just before the expansion launched," Danika explained worriedly.

"You think my baby is overloading the game?" Kit asked a little incredulously.

Danika grimaced and shrugged. "I don't know," she admitted, "but if he can do things that only the traveling merchant should be able to, it's possible?" She didn't want to say so for certain, but she felt fairly sure that the baby's ability to create system quest items was a bug. "I just think that we should probably report it to Lin Hao?"

"I guess you're probably right," Kit agreed regretfully.

Danika filed the bug report that would be forwarded to Lin Hao, and then she helped Kit set the next building's boundary up.

They had to clear the building site area of all creatures and plants that would not be allowed to occupy it, and then Kit could lay the new boundary line around the area. Someday when her skill had grown even more, Kit would be able to push the animals and plants out with the boundary itself.

A druidic boundary wasn't required to construct a building of course, but even the gods would recognize it as a claimed territory if it was set by a druid. They were basically writing it into the system, so that the new buildings would have the same ownership protections available as the existing buildings within the preset cities of 'Living Jade Empire'.

All of the new city's infrastructure buildings were being built upon druid marked boundaries, so there was a lot of work for druids in the new settlement. The boundary for the city itself had required a druid with such high boundary setting skill level that they'd had to convince an NPC Sage to perform it. The rumors about how much that had cost were completely wild.

The thing that amazed Danika most about the new settlement was that even though the city boundary had been marked out by one of the oldest and most powerful guilds in the game, they welcomed all players of all guilds to settle there.