“What would you hope to unlock?” Dana asked. “Do you think it’s been long enough for new Classes?”

  That was the perfect question to turn the discussion more general; everyone was prepared to talk about what they were trying to work on, or hoping for later. They speculated about how long various types of unlocks might take. Dana turned out to have been reading the Survivor’s Reference to Classes, and actually knew some of the prerequisites for some options that were a step above the “Basic” tier.

  “You really should read it,” she told Danielle. “These Basics that everyone got? They’re essentially tier zero. Practically all Classes give you the same number of abilities at level one, but basics don’t give you any more than that at higher levels – sometimes less! They can unlock higher tier Classes they’re related to, though – like, if I actually wanted to, I could probably unlock Staff Fighter, right? I’d have to do more active training with my staff than I have, but it wouldn’t be complicated. It’s even tier 1, so I could take it any time (if I had the mana). Cynthia, with her Basic Element Shaper, she could pick an element and unlock the first or even second tier Class for that element specifically. She only has to have her base level at 2 to take it, she wouldn’t have to level Basic Element Shaper to take, say, Stone Shaper or Wood Shaper or whatever she decided to go for.”

  “You know it’s neither of those!” Cynthia said, sticking her tongue out at Dana.

  Dana laughed. “Don’t mind that, it’s an in-joke,” she told Danielle. “The more interesting stuff is obviously the stuff that doesn’t have basic versions, or at least, that isn’t as common in basic tier. Basic Hunter is actually kind of awesome for a basic Class, because it can go towards bow hunting, fishing, trapping, tracking, it even has some Skills that relate to animal taming! It’s hard for Insiders to get before we come out and start hunting our own food – I figure Lauren got it because of her parents training her and her brother to fish and stuff on their campouts. The book says a lot of Sent unlock it their first year, even though not very many have it at the Dome of Decision. Basic Scout has a lot of overlap, but even harder unlocks for us Insiders. Medic, though? There is no ‘Basic Medic.’ If you want that Class, you have to take related Skills first. It’s another tier 2 Class, too, but it overlaps with Healer. You could unlock it from Basic Herbalist – they actually gave us a Class guide for it, but it’s even rarer than Basic Scout. Who studies ancient medicines if they have access to modern medicines?”

  “Does the book give a reason to do that?” Danielle asked.

  “Besides the possibility of not having the medicines you need out here, and your next trip to a Necessities Store possibly being entire months away?” Dana asked rhetorically. “Herbalist can get you some Skills that overlap with food preservation – like those tomatoes you’re drying? How would you like to be able to System-dry them, same as hunters can System-tan animal hides?”

  “Yes,” Danielle said. “That is totally something I want. You say that’s a Class Skill for Herbalists?”

  “It is,” Dana said with a grin. “They need it for preserving their herbs. They also get some stuff about making food healthier and stuff – basically, they can make chicken soup into actual medicine, if they take the right Skills at level 2; and starting at level 5 they can make some infusions that do some cool buffs, which I think might be the part that doesn’t overlap with Medic or Healer.”

  “Interesting,” Danielle said.

  “I might want that one, if I end up needing an extra safety Class,” Heather said.

  “Read the guide for it, then, it has suggestions for unlocking it,” Dana told them. “I’m thinking of going for a crafting Class, myself. I hadn’t unlocked the Basic one yet on Decision Day, but now I’m liking the idea of maybe making stuff that’s practical but also beautiful. Maybe pottery! Clay is supposed to be pretty easy to find, and everyone needs pots and stuff. I mean, just look how bad practically everyone needs cooking pots right now! I’m hoping the big deer-or-something hunt can also include some clay hunting, and I can make some super-basic pots to just make all of this,” she gestured to the meat roasting at the fire, “a little easier and more cleanable and stuff. I think there’s enough info in Crafting for Skill and Trade to get going on the basics, and if I unlock a Ceramic Crafter Class? Perfect, you know?”

  “Definitely. Between you and me, though, if you don’t unlock that first thing? Consider taking Basic Crafter and picking up bone carving – or just carving I guess, if ‘bone’ isn’t its own thing,” Danielle suggested. “Bone’s just a material we’re going to keep having a lot of, you know? Maybe not a ton of large bones, depending on the hunting party and the time of year and stuff, but I’m guessing your party will have more than most.”

  “Don’t you think that’s kind of, well, icky?” Dana said, wrinkling her nose.

  “Maybe, but when we had all those cougar bones in front of us, I remembered this virtual museum tour my parents got me into once – the museum was in a different state, but it was a live event, so – never mind, that doesn’t matter. The point is, they showed us all these bone tools, from all different parts of history – you can make so many tools with bone. During the worst parts of the mana apocalypse, there was bone lying around all over, and people used it because it was easier than recycling metal. Knives, saws, arrowheads, sewing needles. If Sadie doesn’t go for it, that might end up being my craft – tool making. It doesn’t even matter if I ever get a Career or Class or anything for it, I’m convinced everyone out here is going to need a craft.” Danielle nodded firmly to emphasize her point.

  “I’ll stick to helping Dana with the pottery,” Cynthia said jokingly.

  “I’m sure the town will need more than one or two potters,” Akari said. “We probably do need 1200 cookpots. Or at least one per room, so, um, 300-ish? It’s a lot of pots, is what I’m saying, and that’s before we even talk about storage.”

  “Storage can be made with wood, though,” Sadie said. “It’s not going to be over fires, and wood can be used right away when you find it.”

  “Isn’t drying the wood a thing, though?” Reggie asked, and the other Reggie chimed in, “I heard it has to dry for a long time to really be ready for serious woodworking.”

  “Pots have to dry too, and I suspect bones will need at least some of that. At least wood can be used wet,” Danielle argued.

  “Green,” Sadie said. “When it isn’t dry all the way through, it’s called green, not ‘wet’ – wet is for when it’s got water on the outside.”

  “Heh, I was thinking that wet didn’t seem like quite the right word for it,” Dana said.

  “Do you know what you want to go for, Reggie?” Danielle asked. “If you’re still thinking you don’t want to go further with Basic Body Enhancer?”

  “Right now I’m honestly leaning towards Basic Weapon Fighter. I already have it unlocked, and I still want my Class to be something physical, just not something that makes the food situation even worse for me,” Reggie-the-boy said. “Although I guess if I got something that made finding food easier, like Hunter, the two Classes could work together.”

  “Speaking of food,” Lauren said. “I think our food is done.”

  “Ours is ready for the next step, too,” Akari said. “It’s probably getting kind of dry, even, but I did want to be thorough, and I think the tomatoes will make up for that anyway.”

  All other conversation paused while both groups worked on their food. For the Lemonade Party that meant trying to evenly divide two rabbits and a small game bird between eight people. For the SHAD party, it meant shredding the marmot meat and dividing it between two pots along with even shares of cut tomatoes and onions. It started cooking down while the other party ate, and after a while Sadie and Akari went back into the room and came back with two biscuits of hardtack and the spice shakers. Sadie broke up the hardtack and stirred it in, one biscuit’s-worth per pot, as a thickener. Akari added spices, waited a few minutes, smelled and taste-tested each pot, then added more.

  The other party ate their dinner, then hung around the fire chatting. The SHAD party finished cooking their hot-pot, and divided up one pot’s worth for their own dinner. Cassy rolled the larger logs off of the fire to cool down, sprinkling a little water to finish the job that rolling them along the dusty concrete of the walkway started and put them out. The “marmot glop” wasn’t bad, and had a distinctly different taste from the rabbit version, but needed more salt. Fortunately, Akari had brought the whole shaker set, so that wasn’t hard to remedy, even if it would have been better if it was properly cooked-in. Overall, it was “still kind of gamey,” as Heather put it, “but at least not too same-y.”

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  By that time, Danielle was starting to wonder what the other party was waiting for; it was getting distinctly darker out, for one thing. It was nice to have a relaxed evening and different people to talk to, though. The fire was dying fast enough that she was getting a little worried about light to get inside safely by; it wasn’t as if the outsides of the Rooms were lit, and a bad tumble down the retaining wall could be dangerous in ways Heather and Nathan couldn’t deal with.

  Finally, she reluctantly spoke up. “Guys, I hate to break up a nice evening, but it’s getting dark and we might want to get inside unless someone has a flashlight and they’re willing to spend the battery time on getting to the stairs.”

  “I thought Cassy was going to make a light for us!” Cynthia said with a grin.

  “Besides, you need to see the moon, remember?” Akari reminded her with a matching grin.

  “Oh, right. Cool, I can practice squinting in the dark and pretending to have infravision, then,” Danielle joked.

  Everyone laughed, but as they waited for full dark to settle in, Danielle really did make a point of trying to look and listen and generally try to figure out where everything was in the gloom, instead of just giving up. She had her bow, too, and after warning the others, brought it out without any arrows and started playing with the enhancement. She found that the bow didn’t even have to be strung; just holding the bowstave was enough to activate it, and anything alive and moving that crossed her line of sight would be highlighted. Danielle alternated between using it and not using it.

  The sky went black, but there was a surprising amount of light remaining as long as she kept her eyes off the coals so they stayed adjusted. Danielle was surprised by how much she actually could make out, even without the bow enhancement’s help. She was so engrossed in her experiments that she lost track of time until Akari suddenly looked up and pointed to the east over the trees. “Look, there’s the moon!” she exclaimed.

  The moon was a bright half-circle of cool, mottled silver. Danielle realized that it must have been the source of some of the light all along, but it was distinctly brighter between the building and the trees now that its light could shine into the space directly. It was beautiful, in a way, but Danielle found it hard to really absorb the idea that it was so far overhead that it was bigger than all of Firmitatem. Paradoxically, it looked both too close and too far away to make proper sense of. Really, it looked like the night-lights young children kept in their rooms – or the night-lights looked like it, she supposed. It could just be a sticker on the ceiling of the cave. Except that there was no cave, and supposedly no ceiling at all; easy to say, but hard to really grasp, she thought.

  Then she realized that the moon was moving. The moment she thought of it, another part of her wanted to scoff, because of course it was moving; that’s why it was visible now but not before. Still, she hadn’t thought about the fact that a person could see it moving. It was subtle, certainly, but it had changed position relative to the trees just in the time she’d been paying attention to it. Stickers didn’t do that! Day-lamps did, but they had their tracks to crawl across; you could see the tracks if you looked at a different part of the ceiling, where the lamp didn’t wash out your vision. There were no tracks on the sky, though.

  “So, uh. So check the moon every few days, and it’s safe to level when it looks like this again?” Lauren said after a few more minutes. She sounded like she was trying to shake off a daze.

  “Yeah. I guess it’s supposed to get bigger and then completely round, and then get smaller again and go dark, and then come back to here?” Danielle said uncertainly. “I don’t actually remember the phases of the moon unit from science all that well.”

  “Sounds about right to me,” Akari said.

  “Look at all the stars,” someone else whispered in awe. Danielle thought it was Cynthia.

  “Aren’t they supposed to be, you know, star-shaped?” Gonzo asked.

  Lauren scoffed. “Did your dad seriously not have a conspiracy theory for that, with all the other stuff he believed the government was trying to keep secret? Stars are just suns that are further away, they’re round, like our sun,” she said.

  Gronzo made an annoyed sound. “My dad thought camping was a conspiracy, all right? This is the first time I’ve ever seen the Outside sky at night. I mean, we were outside late enough to get dark yesterday, but I didn’t just stand around and look up, we were walking, I looked at my feet!”

  That got some chuckles.

  “Well, we’ve seen the moon, I guess it’s time to test my scroll now,” Cassy said. “You might want to cover your eyes though.”

  She stood up and held out her scroll on her hand. Danielle activated Detect Mana Source, and realized with a start that the scroll was actually appearing as a weak source; she hadn’t noticed with daylight in the background. It only lasted a moment, though, as Cassy’s source fluttered, and the mana in the scroll elongated as if being stretched and then disappeared from her Skill-based perception. In the direction it had “stretched” towards, however, a tree suddenly burst into brilliant light.

  It took a minute or three for Danielle’s eyes to adjust enough to properly see the tree, and even then, the light was too bright to make out details on it. It was a warmer color than the moonlight, but not exactly yellow. It glowed like a beacon from every inch of the tree’s bark, but for some reason didn’t affect the leaves, which meant it gave off a tangle of long shadows from the branches and leaves of its canopy. The trunk shed bright light across the back of the building, though; nobody was in danger of missing the edge of the walkway due to darkness.

  “Woo-hoo!” Cynthia cheered like they were at a sports field, and several others joined in.

  “Great job, Cassy!” Danielle said. “I think we’ll be able to get to our rooms safely tonight!”

  Everyone laughed at that, and started collecting up their things and moving toward the building. Danielle checked the time, at Cassy’s request, and found that it was after ten o’clock.

  Back at 6024, Cassy stood in the doorway, watching to see how long the light lasted, while everyone else bustled around putting things away. Akari made a mana token, and then claimed her share of the purple tomatoes (that the other roommates had gotten at the river); Sadie put away the second pot of hot-pot; Danielle washed the pot they’d eaten out of. She also made her own ten-point mana token, and put another ten into Payment Plan, because she hadn’t been lying to Dana. In spite of the mana from selling Skill tokens to the two Ranger Healers, she was starting to feel like her System wish list was a lot larger than her mana resources, and she wasn’t sure which felt more urgent anymore – saving up for the Catalog Un-Fair, or saving up for a new Class and Skills.

  When the light outside finally went out, it had been 15 minutes. Cassy finally came in and everyone congratulated her again. They agreed to meet a little later in the morning, to give everyone time to wash their clothes before heading out to the tomato patch – unless it rained, in which case the plan was to stay in and eat fish.

  Cassy was about to head out to go to her room when Akari suddenly said, “Hostile by the tree line.” Cassy froze, her hand hovering over the door handle. “Let me,” Akari said. “Sadie, can I borrow your bow?”

  Sadie handed over her bow and an arrow without a word, and Akari walked up to the door and opened it. Without stepping out, she called out, “I see you there by the treeline! You better move along, or I’m going to borrow my friend’s enhanced bow and come after you!”

  Danielle could hear someone curse “Rotstink!” and go crashing through the brush. Akari followed the movement with her Skill, ‘looking’ through the walls. “Whoever it is, they’re booking it for the road,” she said, after a moment. “Either it’s someone from building 5 or 7, or they think coming in from the road will be less suspicious.”

  “Is the person you and Heather usually see in the mornings already in her room?” Danielle asked.

  Akari turned and looked up and to the side, scanning for the usual spot. “Yeah,” she said after a minute, “whoever that is, she’s already in for the night. This was someone else.”

  “Did you do all that with your new Trait?” Heather asked.

  “What? No, I don’t think Hostility Highlighting shows me anyone I can’t physically see,” Akari said. “I activated my Skill when Cassy was about to leave.”

  “Oh. Good thing you did, thanks,” Cassy said.

  “No problem,” Akari said. “Sadie, you wanna come with me to walk her home?”

  “Yeah, give my bow back and let’s go,” Sadie said.

  The three of them stepped out, and practically jogged down the walkway. Akari and Sadie were back quickly. “We told her we’d come get her in the morning,” Akari said. “Rain or shine.”

  “Good idea. Who knows what that guy was up to,” Danielle said. “Could be Class jealousy or something.”

  “Because of the light scroll, do you think?” Heather asked.

  “I don’t know, but maybe,” Danielle said. “It was pretty noticeable and all. On the other hand, it could just be one of those Wolf guys.”

  “We’re all in safe for now,” Sadie said. “Let’s just get some sleep.”

  “I call first turn at the sink!” Danielle said. She got her face washed and teeth brushed, then wrote her journal entry for the day while everyone else took their turns. She copied it into the Planner journal as well, then started a Reference Notebook in her Planner as well, and started copying in some of the general information in the introduction of A Compendium of Mana Enhancement Skills. Besides reading through it to make Planner pick up the words, she was also looking for something she’d been reminded of when Cassy was freaking out about her illusion of the light symbol suddenly turning into a light spell instead.

  Sadie was rummaging for something in the kitchen when Danielle finally found the passage she’d been looking for: “While mana casting Skills are by no means required for mana enhancing, the two disciplines can synergize, as a better understanding of mana structures and their effects can allow for more efficient enhancing, and skilled practitioners may even use such lore in creating tweaked or variant enhancements.”

  “Are you ready for lights-out yet, Danielle?” Sadie asked. “Also, give me a time for the wind-up clock.”

  “It’s 11:08,” Danielle said. “And give me two minutes to finish my paragraph here, please.” She quickly finished scanning down to the bottom of the section while Sadie wound and set the alarm clock, then closed the book and her Trait interface alike. “I’m ready when you are; thanks for waiting,” she said.

  Sadie turned the lights out, and soon enough everyone was asleep. Danielle’s dreams were filled with illuminated symbols dancing around bright crystals, and for once, neither blood nor cats. “I’m sure this means something,” she muttered, trying to read the capering symbols. An amused voice answered, “You’ll get there. Give yourselves some time.” The voice of the System replied, “There is only one of me listening – but who are you?”

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