Paul replied first, "Because it's never come up on my a.s.signment list and I've never played a cat, why do you ask?"

"Not you," Lin Hao said dismissively, and pointed at Danika.

"I don't understand," she admitted. "What's wrong with them? I thought that they were meant to slowly unlock as you advanced as a cat?"

Lin Hao blinked at her and agreed, "Well, yes." He pointed at her again and questioned, "But it looks like you haven't had ZipZing leveling her poise and agility because you don't understand what they do?"

"I only just learned to transform into a cat," she objected, "and I've been leveling them ever since."

Paul looked at Lin Hao's incredulous expression and suggested, "Display them for us so we can see what you're talking about? You're making me curious."

"I already changed the initial descriptions," Lin Hao complained, but he brought up a display screen and set it so that they could all see it.

Danika looked at the description of Poise and frowned. Instead of: "The maintenance of grace, balance, and equilibrium can boost status." It now read: "Grace, balance and equilibrium. Practice communication with efficiency, precise movement, and relaxed style. Maintaining poise can boost status when interacting with cats." The new description hinted at the actions that had seemingly raised her Poise skill at random.

"I don't see why you would need to be a cat to practice those?" Paul questioned.

"You shouldn't need to be," Lin Hao agreed.

"Well, I guess that my answer to why I didn't fix the description is that I didn't understand it well enough to realize what was wrong," Danika said a bit dryly.

"How long have you had these skills?" Paul asked with interest.

"A few months," she admitted with some embarra.s.sment.

--

Utter chagrin was the only description Danika could find for the feeling she had two days later when SaltySiamese messaged her: "Yes! I have unlocked the skill that lets me a.s.sume my cat form on my own! Guess what it's called!?"

In three days SaltySiamese had accomplished what Danika hadn't in almost three months. Even with her a.s.sistant's help in leveling ZipZing's skills while she worked, her character still needed one more point in Flexibility before she had three of the subpath skills mastered to unlock the next set.

Once she'd understood what the skill required to level, she could kind of understand why she hadn't accidently gained a point or two along the way, like she had in Poise. She always moved around pretty simply. And it turned out that it was probably related to why her flight skill tended to level so slowly too, since she rarely pushed her ability to perform difficult maneuvers.

Danika sent back a short message: "I don't know, what?"

SaltySiamese's messenger cat came back so swiftly that Danika would have bet that the message had already been waiting for her to hit send. It said: "Purrfection! I'm guessing if you're already a cat it just increases your natural beauty! But if you're not a cat it'll let you change to your cat form! Isn't it so awesome?! And so cat-like!"

Danika wrote back with a wry smile. "Yeah, that's pretty awesome and very cat-like." She felt like the snow leopard cub's cute little messenger form carried the message away with a cat-like smirk on its furry little face.

--

When Ais.h.i.+n joined her later for the quick looking guild quest that she'd messaged him about, he asked with concern, "What's wrong?"

"What do you mean?" Danika asked blankly. She'd been running what felt like a tiny dragon parkour course while trying to gain one more point in Flexibility, it had been arduous, but she'd been successful.

"Your sparkles are dim and have flashes of blue," he replied as he held his hands out to her.

She craned her head around to look at her wings as she landed on Ais.h.i.+n's palms. Even though she knew that he was only holding his phone and tapping out his actions, his warmth was just as comforting as usual. He flashed a smile at her as her sparkles visibly brightened.

"I'm OK, and I have even unlocked my next set of skills in my sub path," Danika told him.

"But you're not completely happy about it?" Ais.h.i.+n questioned.

"SaltySiamese did it in only three days," she explained with chagrin.

Ais.h.i.+n flashed several emotes in quick succession, ranging from shock to curiosity and back. "Wow," he said quietly. "This is a new side of you."

"What is?" she questioned uncertainly.

"Well, maybe it's not really," he replied thoughtfully.

"Ais.h.i.+n!" Danika demanded laughingly.

He flashed a grin at her and said, "I guess I haven't seen you lose often, but you actually do get kind of compet.i.tive about odd things once in awhile."

"I didn't lose!" she objected immediately.

"Didn't you? Your rival accomplished it in only three days though?" Ais.h.i.+n teased.

"What did Zippy fail at?" a voice asked faintly in the background. Now that Danika was more familiar with everyone she could identify the speaker as Saaki. She checked, but Ais.h.i.+n and Nao1 were the only ones logged in at the moment.

"She didn't fail," Ais.h.i.+n said confidently, "she was just a little slower."

"A lot slower," Danika corrected wryly.

In the background another voice commented tiredly, "That's nothing new. Hurry up and finish your quest so we can all sleep."

"That was SilentSky?" Danika identified him. "Are you all sleeping in the same room?"

"I see, you imagine us in luxury accommodations with a huge room to ourselves at each stop," Ais.h.i.+n teased laughingly.

"No," she objected, but then she conceded, "OK, maybe before I thought about it, but I really wouldn't expect you to usually be crammed into one room?"

"We have two rooms tonight and eight people, so we're split four to a room," he explained.

"Who are the other three?" she asked curiously.

"Our manager and two techs who are doubling as general a.s.sistants," Ais.h.i.+n explained just as Nao1 caught up to them.

"Woah, you got new gear!" Danika exclaimed as she caught sight of Naoki's small, cute, female avatar.

Nao1 posed for a moment and then agreed laughingly, "Yup! I saw a girl wearing a red set like this and asked where she got it. I had to collect hair from a unicorn's tail for the embroidery, but it's as st.u.r.dy as chainmail!"

Nao1's voice didn't create an echo through Ais.h.i.+n's headset so Danika guessed that he was in the other room. As she had predicted, it didn't take them long to complete the quest to kill off the wasps that were interfering with a gardener's bees. Any of them probably could have completed it alone without too much trouble, but not only was ZipZing much more deadly than she had been back when she'd first encountered wasps in the game, but even Nao1 had reached Proficient in her path and was becoming pretty deadly.

When Danika commented on it, Nao1 complained, "Yeah, but as soon as I reached Proficient, you shot up to Master!"

"Ah, a lot of that is because I was grinding my subpath skills and unlocked the next set," Danika explained.

"Ais.h.i.+n told me about how you get to cheat and have a bot level skills for you," Nao1 accused.

"I didn't say it that way," Ais.h.i.+n objected.

"I guess it's true though," Danika agreed. "Although I can only do that safely because I have my garden s.p.a.ce."

"You could rent a room in an inn if you didn't have that," Ais.h.i.+n pointed out logically, "or practice in the guild hall if you couldn't afford that."

"You should put those a.s.sistants up for sale. People would buy them even if they were really expensive," Nao1 advised.

Danika laughed and protested that it wasn't up to her, but she kind of agreed. Her celestial dragon a.s.sistant was surprisingly un.o.btrusive as far as a.s.sistant apps went, and far more capable.