Danika kept checking her mobile screen while she worked. Currently their virtual workspace resembled a room full of cubicles. No matter how much space was actually available, humans surrounded by screens were effectively blind to each other.

The only reason they still hadn't divided up and created personal spaces like they usually worked in, was because they had a running conversation going. Not that it was a conversation exactly. There were long silences, and sudden spates of argument in their working dialogue.

Somehow Danika hadn't expected the design of a new game to involve so much mundane research. When she muttered something along those lines after awhile, Lin Hao snickered, but didn't comment verbally. That irritated her enough to say more loudly, "Seriously, it feels like we're doing something wrong when we have to spend so much time moving digital data from one computer system to another. Wouldn't it be faster to have Jade collect everything himself?"

"He's not really designed to sort this sort of data," Lin Hao pointed out.

"You underestimate your own processing power Danika," Takahashi added suddenly. "Look at the top ten results of your next search. Consider how many of those that you really want Jade to read, and how much information you use to decide?"

Danika could understand what Takahashi meant without waiting until she'd started a new search, but she still objected mildly, "He talks to millions of people everyday, I'm sure there wouldn't be much that could surprise him."

Jade complained, "I can only talk to the members of this team now."

Danika corrected herself, "Used to." She glanced at the mobile game where ZipZing hovered again.

Her assistant was playing the game for her in a typical bot fashion. It would follow ShinZing and attack whatever he was attacking, unless he instructed ZipZing to stop, and then it would stay in place and use her stealth skill. The arrangement let her follow the quest storyline, more or less. Especially since the mobile version would let you scroll back through the chat log.

The "cloud" that had hired Endless Song to destroy the airship wasn't a dragon, an albatross, or a vampire, or any of Danika's guesses. It was literally a small cloud. And it was also a cat. Identify animal told them that it was half clouded leopard and half nadia.

It hadn't sought them out on its own either, it had been directed to do so by a mouse. Dame Mouse the Courageous and Merciful to be specific. An intrepid adventurer, purveyor of good deeds, and garrulous talker.

Danika had asked Jade to combine a clouded leopard and a nadia to see if he would also come up with a cat made of mist, but he had asked, "Do you mean the anadia genus of lizards or the moth, ethmia nadia?"

A case of content theft: this narrative is not rightfully on Amazon; if you spot it, report the violation.

His response had made Danika ask Lin Hao, "Will any game that includes mythical and elemental creatures have to have them all imported all over again?"

Devon Yu was the one who answered her though, he'd told her, "Of course. Those races and their data belong to Living Jade Empire. Not that we couldn't build a spin-off game that used their data, but the point of this is to show what else can be done."

Her mobile screen conversation log moved almost as quickly as a busy chat room, as Dame Mouse told ShinZing and the others about the dangers of airships, the detrimental effect they could have on the nascent shipping industry, and the voracious pirates that were bound to take to the skies if the airships were successful. All of this seemed to be incidental to the reason that she and the cloud cat wanted the ship blown up, so Danika ignored it and turned back to her screens full of data.

"You could still talk to a lot of other people with your character in 'Living Jade Empire'," Danika told Jade suddenly. "You could even talk to the other Jade Emperor couldn't you?"

"I think it might be interesting to talk to the Emperor, but my character doesn't have enough skill to climb the Jade Path yet. I already tried talking to the Traveling Merchant, but he is too limited in his responses," Jade replied.

Danika wondered what he'd tried to talk about. She hesitated and then suggested, "You could talk to Kit and ask her to bring you to the Emperor?"

"Kit Tay?" Jade questioned.

"No," Lin Hao interrupted suddenly.

"No?" Danika and Jade questioned in unison.

"I think it's a bad idea to have Jade talk to Kit Tay," Lin Hao said firmly.

"Why?" Danika asked.

At the same time Jade replied, "Okay."

Lin Hao dismissed the screens that hid her from his view and chided, "Think about why she was so against having a copy as her husband. I know that one of you would let slip that Jade is a copy, and even though Jade doesn't have any connection to her anymore, it will confuse her."

Since Danika had been planning to explain to Kit that Jade was a copy, she wasn't sure how to reply. "He didn't forget her though," she pointed out.

"But he's not," Lin Hao hesitated and ran his hands through his hair. "He removed the marriage from himself far more thoroughly than Myles ever did, when he was reordering his own routines and compressing the Empire to fit in that little server they had him in."

"Myles did what?" Myles Blue asked from his own virtual cubicle of screens.

"Deleted the marriage between the Traveling Merchant and the player, Kit Tay," Lin Hao said mildly.

Myles stood up and peered over his screens as though they were immoveable. He looked confused, which irritated Danika. "What does that have to do with the Emperor?" he asked.

The question seemed to irritate Lin Hao, and he dismissed his own screens on that side, but Dalma spoke first. "Woah!" she exclaimed. "You really don't keep track of anything outside of your own projects do you?" Myles turned toward her with an even more confused look, and she explained, "That's the player that married the Emperor right before the copy was stolen, and after the Merchant's interface wormed its way into the Emperor's identity."

"It's not a worm," Myles complained.

"Basically," Dalma argued.

"The interface didn't copy itself into a different system," Myles argued, and then his expression shifted. "Wait, the Jade Empress is a player? The same player? Has someone checked into her identity?"

Everyone stared at him wordlessly for a long silent moment.

"Yeah, we checked," Devon said calmly.

"I don't think that I was a worm either," Jade volunteered.

Weirdly, the entire confused discussion calmed Danika's irritation instead of letting it flame up into anger, so she just laughed when Devon turned to her and asked brightly, "Is it time for the duel?"