It looked like Hikaru had just exited the garden. The hard s.h.i.+ny surface separated them from each other, and from the dark desert scene beyond. After another moment Danika decided that the substance they were trapped in must be gla.s.s. Hikaru blinked its light and landed on the surface in its bubble of gla.s.s.

Beyond the gla.s.s toward the desert, messenger animals began to appear. SaltySiamese's cat that never waited for her to accept the messages stuck its head through the gla.s.s as though it didn't exist and dropped the message. It read: "Woah, this is awesome! Where are you? It says your location is 'preserved'. We're at the southernmost edge!"

The other messenger animals waited just out of reach. A horrible drawn out tone began to s.h.i.+ver through the gla.s.s that contained them. Below her, Hikaru circled faster and faster, its tiny feet blurring as though the little firefly were becoming frantic. The sound grew louder, as though a giant were rubbing its fingers around an enormous wine gla.s.s.

The noise suddenly stopped, and the circle on the gla.s.s that Hikaru had been running, separated and dropped into its bubble. Danika stared as the little firefly glowed happily and flew through the hole.

"That was you cutting the gla.s.s?" she asked incredulously.

The firefly didn't answer of course, it just circled her happily. After a moment she fished the pebble out of the smaller gla.s.s bubble, and turned to look out toward the desert.

Ais.h.i.+n flashed into existence right in front of her eyes, and she gasped. After a moment she realized that he had teleported to her, and that he'd simply appeared in the nearest clear area. He didn't seem to see her at first, as he spun slowly, in the center of the waiting messenger animals, but after a moment he moved forward and peered into the gla.s.s at her.

Danika asked Hikaru, "Can you cut an opening big enough for me to pa.s.s through?"

The little firefly's light dimmed in response.

Danika slipped off the harness and set the pebble into its usual place before instructing, "Go back in the garden then, and I'll try my skills."

Hikaru circled her twice more before obeying, and Danika used the random teleport she'd gained from Ais.h.i.+n as soon as the little beetle was stored. She got lucky and didn't simply wind up inside another gla.s.s bubble deeper beneath the surface. She appeared outside of the gla.s.s on the slope above Ais.h.i.+n.

The messenger animals s.h.i.+fted and made a beeline for her, and Ais.h.i.+n followed them a moment later. "How did you get in there?" he asked after a moment, in the flat tones that indicated he was communicating by text on his phone. His feet kept sliding down so that he had to walk upward continuously to keep his place.

Danika gazed around for a moment before answering. "I'm not sure, I was underneath the hill, in a gla.s.s bubble when I logged back in," she said finally.

Ais.h.i.+n stopped walking and slid back to the sands at the bottom. Danika followed him down while checking messages, which were all similar to SaltySiamese's, and then said, "Just a minute."

She removed the pebble's harness and entered her garden. The worried villagers greeted her with varying degrees of alarm. One of the players demanded angrily, "Let us out! You can't keep us here!"

"Did it give you an error message when you tried to leave?" she questioned. "Or did you just not figure out how to exit?"

"How do we exit?" one of the NPCs questioned.

"Touch the little center stone and say 'exit'," Danika instructed.

She demonstrated, and within a few minutes all of the villagers followed her out. The players avoided her questioning gaze, but Ais.h.i.+n said, "Wow! How did you get so many people in there?"

She watched the disoriented villagers wander the foot of the gla.s.s hill in the desert beneath the night sky while she replied, "It was really crowded, but the mountain was about to be destroyed."

One of the NPCs suddenly gasped and pressed his face against the surface of the gla.s.s. "I can see my house!"

The other villagers dashed over and peered into the hill. "Are you sure?" another asked. "It's so dark that I can't see clearly."

Danika summoned her light cantrip and sent the particles into the gla.s.s. The entire hill lit up as the light reflected from one bubble to the next. The villagers gasped and Ais.h.i.+n pointed and asked, "Isn't that MatchlessMinion?"

MatchlessMinion's little grey cat messenger appeared beside her feet a moment later. His message read, "I'm ok! But I'm trapped."

A flicker of movement caught Danika's eye just as her cantrip expired. MatchlessMinion pulled a light stone out of his inventory, which illuminated his own bubble and several nearby. Danika saw that Little Tortoise had logged back in, and appeared in a bubble even closer to the surface than hers had been. His stone actually projected from the gla.s.s.

Shrubbery appeared a moment later, filling a larger bubble that had seemed empty. She gazed through the gla.s.s at MatchlessMinion, and then pulled the sunstone out of her own inventory. The brighter stone illuminated the entire gla.s.s hill more brightly than even Danika's cantrip had.

Not all of the small village had been preserved, only about a 12 meter oval of the section that had contained the players when they'd logged out. Danika was confused by the gla.s.s preservation. Players within the destruction radius were supposed to have been randomly positioned around the edge of the new desert.

Lin Hao's work avatar appeared beside her, and he said, "Good work," before looking around, and then he asked, "what did you do?"

Danika turned and stared at him blankly.

"D' er, ZipZing?" Lin Hao questioned.

Ais.h.i.+n asked for her, "Why do you think she did something?"

Lin Hao froze them into the imprisoned celestial contact mode, but he included Ais.h.i.+n, so Danika didn't complain. "Obviously she did something," Lin Hao said laughingly. "G.o.d, I'm tired. I was just popping over to say thanks for notifying me that the NPCs complaining the world might end might be related to when we had to reset it during the beta."

"For some reason the system is under more load than expected," he explained. "I haven't managed to track down why, and it's running at about ninety percent of capacity at the moment with five times as many players logged in as usual. But it could have been pushed over the edge by the processing as things were rewritten while the world changed, so I just booted everyone and recorded it instead. It's good enough for now. I'll try to figure out what's really up with it after I sleep for a week."

"Okay," Danika replied uncertainly and then repeated Ais.h.i.+n's question, "but why do you think I did something here?"

Lin Hao pointed to the gla.s.s hill and said succinctly, "The King of Cats made that somehow."

"Since you're here, can you teleport the people out of it?" Danika questioned without denying that she was probably at fault in that case.