The next two days were remarkable for their blandness, considering the circumstances. Friday morning, everyone took the time to shower, and they had jerky and tomatoes for breakfast. Then they all washed their clothes as best they could in the bathtub, and Danielle did all the wringing out for the four in 6024. They got some reading done during each other’s turns with the bathtub. Then they picked up Cassy, who had also washed her clothes and gotten some reading done, as agreed; Sadie delivered a portion of the jerky and a double handful of tomatoes for Cassy’s breakfast, and she ate while they walked.

  They took their usual precautions to avoid their direction being observed, and got to the tomato patch in the late morning. Nobody forgot their sunscreen or their water, Akari’s latrine was still in completely usable condition, and there were plenty of ripe cherry tomatoes to pick, including purple ones. They even found a good sunny spot on top of an old wall to finish drying the cut tomatoes. Knowing they had fish in the cold box for the evening meal, they took their time and ate plenty of vine-fresh tomatoes as they went. Cassy and Heather both thought it was possible to eat too many mana tomatoes, but they thought it would be safe to eat at least as many as your daily mana generation, so Danielle helped herself to a few fresh purple tomatoes while picking them, too.

  In the afternoon, they did some weapon training in the clearings made by the old roads, and Cassy got to embarrass everyone a little and show off a lot as she taught them to use the sling. It was just a little dangerous, because an errant sling stone could easily be dangerous to bystanders, but they basically started with gravel from the rubble and worked their way up as they started getting the hang of things. Sadie vowed to carve some wooden sling bullets for practice; they wouldn’t exactly be safe but they at least sounded less dangerous. That was the highlight of the training session, but they also did bow training with Sadie’s helpfully enhanced bow, and put the rubber bumpers back on the tips of their staves to do some actual sparring with them. For swords, they stuck to training forms, since they hadn’t yet figured out a good way to make sparring with sharpened swords safe.

  As evening approached, they went out to their usual spot to set snares for overnight activity. Danielle picked a different area to scan for small mana sources, not wanting to snatch two animals from the same burrow in the same season (not something she would have considered before Cassy’s lesson a few days before, but it was easy to see the sense in it). She tied two snares over what looked like game trails to her, and hoped the little feral cat had moved on after its failure with the marmot and the absence of helpful snares the last few days. The others also spread out a little further, and Cassy set her own pair of snares this time, but they were still all pretty close to the marker at the side of the road.

  When they returned to the Rooms, although they were a couple of hours earlier than the day before, they found all the fire corners in use again – even the ones on the empty buildings. It seemed everyone else was getting the hang of catching food and cooking over the braziers! There was no answer to a knock on door 6011, so the SHAD Party girls decided to go ahead and reheat the fish on the camp stove. By itself, the fish was bland and overly salty, and with tomatoes and onions it was better except for being something with tomatoes and onions again.

  Then Sadie proposed roasting five of the older purple tomatoes to see if they kept their mana through cooking. That proved to be the most exciting event of the day.

  Cassy pointed out the moment when the tomatoes started losing their mana, and Danielle could just barely see it happening with her own Skill if she blocked out other lights and focused entirely on the tomato. That was disappointing, at first, but the logic of making the attempt had been that the purple tomatoes wouldn’t last forever anyway, and they needed to know how it worked out. The Party was disappointed but not too worked up about it, since they had plenty of fresh tomatoes. Sadie kept cooking the ones in the pan after the mana left them, because they weren’t very well done at that point, but when they were she passed out one to each person and they each started blowing on them to cool them down. By that time, they weren’t even noticeably purple anymore; whatever had been blue about them had turned brown, leaving them merely a rather dark and slightly orangey red.

  Akari was the first one to pop one of the tomatoes in her mouth, and the look on her face was priceless. Danielle quickly brought up her Planner and asked it to save the image of what she was seeing; disappointingly, the Interface replied, “Trait level insufficient for requested function.” Still, that was hopeful for the future! For now, though, she needed to find out why Akari had made that face, and so she cautiously put her own tomato in her mouth while the others were trying to ask Akari what was going on, and Akari was trying to clear her mouth enough to talk.

  Danielle was pretty sure she made a priceless face as well.

  “It’s Magic Chef Spicy Tomato Sauce!” Akari blurted.

  “What?” Heather asked, flummoxed.

  “That’s what it tastes like! I’m not kidding, try it!” Akari insisted

  Sadie frowned at hers, and Danielle suspected she was activating Purify Food – which she basically confirmed a moment later by saying, “There’s nothing dangerous in it, anyway,” before popping her own into her mouth. Cassy and Heather followed suit.

  After a moment to stare at each other in shock, chew, and swallow, everyone had a good freak out over it.

  “I can’t believe it! Could the sauce actually be made of these things?!” Heather exclaimed.

  “Maybe – didn’t you say your mom said that mana plants absorbed mana so you didn’t have to?” Akari asked. “Maybe they grow them in the mana reduction plants? Haha, plant-based plants!”

  “Ooh, that could actually be true,” Cassy said. “They could grow them in the right places to be one stage of the mana-density control system, then ship them to the surface to cook the mana out of them, removing it from the Inside; and then they’d want to do something useful with all the cooked tomatoes, and if they always taste like this when they’re cooked – “

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  “They sell them to Magic Chef and make pizza sauce?! Really? You really think that’s what happens, really?” Heather exclaimed.

  “It makes enough sense to be a possibility!” Cassy said. “I mean what’s the other possibility, that Magic Chef Spicy Tomato Sauces are so popular that a patch of Outside tomatoes picked up the flavor as a, what’s the word, cultivation attractor?”

  “Is that a thing?” Danielle asked. “Plants getting tastier so people will cultivate them?”

  “Oh, um, yeah actually. I bet that’s a thing you’d study in science next year,” Cassy said.

  “Yeah, we did cover that,” Akari said. “Chocolate-cow milk is another one like that – it’s a mana trait the cows can get. It’s a catching one too, like what the Ranger was saying about mutations that aren’t really mutations.”

  “Wait, really? Cows that give chocolate milk have, what’s the word, non-System mana traits for that?” Danielle asked.

  “Yeah, there’s a bunch of things like that – some are spreading traits, and others seem to be normal System traits that just pop up in animals that deal with humans, because being attractive to humans turns out to be a great survival trait,” Cassy said. “Oh, Outsider pets can even get language Skills! Heh, they say it’s called Speak to Humans – doesn’t matter what language the humans around them speak, translate the name of the Skill the pets get, and it’ll translate as Speak to Humans.”

  “They showed us a video of a dog with that Skill when we covered this stuff in class!” Akari said. “It was so hilarious. The dog could kind of talk, but it was so distractable, and it would say stuff like ‘I thought I saw a bird. Can I have a treat?’ and the handler would be like, ‘You’ll get a treat later,’ and it’d go ‘OK. I am being very good. I will get a treat!’ “

  Cassy laughed. “Yeah, that sounds about like the one I met.”

  “You met one?!” Akari exclaimed.

  “Yeah, the Rangers have a dog with incredible tracking Skills, and my parents took me to the Ranger station as one stop on my Youth Travel thing – did you guys do that?”

  “I went to Ranier and saw an art gallery, nothing like a talking dog,” Heather replied.

  “Well, we didn’t actually get much further than that, geographically,” Cassy said. “We might have gone someplace I’m still not exactly supposed to talk about, but ask me again after Fall Fair. Oh, but Scout the dog lives at North Post, that’s somewhere we Sent could theoretically go if we wanted to do a long hiking trip!”

  “That’s amazing, but what do we do about the fact that we just maybe discovered the secret of Magic Chef Spicy Tomato Sauce?” Sadie asked.

  “Roast a lot more purple tomatoes?” Akari suggested.

  “We learn how to can tomatoes, and make sauce for the winter and also maybe for selling, depending on how many tomatoes we can pick and whether or not we can actually get enough canning stuff made to give some up,” Danielle said.

  “No drying for these?” Cassy asked.

  “I dunno, we can try a few and see how it goes, but I’m betting that mid-winter, a nostalgic flavor will be really valuable,” Danielle said. “Either for staving off the ‘first winter as exiles’ blues, or for selling to other people who want to use it for that. There’s really just no possible way we’re going to get enough tomatoes out of that patch for as much use as this camp – town, whatever, would make of them if everyone could.”

  “Especially since we don’t have the material to make cans,” Akari said dryly.

  “You can do it in pottery jars, especially if you have a purifying spell like Sadie’s,” Danielle said. “We’d need more wax, but that’s supposedly something you can find if you go about it right, so it’s possible.”

  “Maybe more possible next year,” Cassy said. “Mom told me they sell canning stuff at the trade fairs; she said, they sell a lot of stuff that isn’t much use in winter but would’ve been real nice to have in summer and fall, and the first Fall Fair you kind of just want to burn down half the fair, but ‘be a good patient citizen and you’ll get the benefits come Spring Fair’ she said.” Cassy snorted.

  “Well, maybe that’s why they agreed to the Un-Fair for us?” Heather said. “Maybe they’re hoping that being able to get more tools will make up for not being able to get more preparation?”

  “Huh. You know, they might not be all wrong,” Cassy said. “Taking a lot of the tool-making steps out of some stuff might stunt people’s Systems a little, but if it also keeps half the camp alive – well, maybe they’d go for it.”

  “Why would it stunt our Systems?” Sadie asked.

  “Because if you have to struggle to do something without tools, the System is more likely to give you System tools for it,” Danielle guessed.

  “Exactly,” Cassy confirmed. “In fact, Mom thinks that’s even why they’re so stingy with information – she said, they can give us an hour’s lecture, or they can encourage us to get a lore Skill that will keep providing information all five-to-ten years; which one is more useful in the long run?”

  “Easy to say when they’re staying Inside and getting their information from libraries,” Heather groused. “We’re the ones playing sink or swim with our lives out here!”

  “Hence the catalog thing,” Akari said thoughtfully. “Normally, they expected most Sent to survive just fine until Fall Fair, and they figure the long-term benefits outweigh the short-term pains; but this time they’re worried that short-term survival is actually at stake, so they’re sacrificing some long-term benefits to get more of us past the first hurdles.”

  “Ugh, that makes way too much sense,” Sadie said. “What are we supposed to do now that we know it, though? Do we just not buy any tools or anything?”

  “No, for sure no,” Danielle said. “We have to survive our first winter just like everyone else, and even with Cassy helping out, we have no way of knowing what gaps in our collective knowledge are still waiting to bite us. We get as many tools as we can figure out how to use, and when we’re all warm and well fed this winter, then we work on expanding our Skills by figuring out how to make our own equipment.”

  “Yeah – like Danielle staring into the dark even though she already has that bow,” Cassy joked.

  Akari laughed. “Yeah, but seriously; because now that we’ve figured out the point of doing things the hard way, we can choose when to do them the hard way.”

  With plenty of purple tomatoes on hand, everyone donated 5 mana to the party’s healing stash again after dinner; even Heather donated this time, and Cassy and Danielle each made a ten-point mana token and traded it for one of the smaller ones. Danielle squirreled away another ten points in Payment Plan while she was at it.

  That evening, they had time to sit outside on the grass and read the reference books. Heather spent some time reading the Class guide for Herbalists, while Cassy read more of the guide to her own Class. Akari stuck to A Firmitatem Ranger’s Guide to the Outside. Sadie took notes on Food Preservation for Your First Winter. Danielle continued her study of the general information on Mana Enhancing, and copied the entries for Lesser Weight Reduction and a few other enhancement Skills she thought she would do well to look into.

  At one point Danielle looked up and saw a boy leaning out and staring at their group from around the corner of the building. She frowned thoughtfully, trying to recall where he seemed familiar from. After a long minute, she placed his face: it was Vince, from school. She didn’t know him well; they hadn’t had many classes together. She was about to call out and ask him what he was doing, when their eyes met and he seemed to realize only that moment that he’d been seen. His own eyes widened, and he promptly retreated back behind the building.

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