“Change of plans?” Heather asked, hopefully.

  “You feel like eating jerky and snack food for your next three meals?” Akari asked.

  “Let’s get rain ponchos, though,” Sadie said. “Otherwise, our good bags’ll get soaked.”

  The four of them retreated to their footlockers and pulled out the rain gear from Decision Day, still tied in bundles with twine. Instead of the light plastic ponchos the necessities stores sold in the camping aisle, these were rubbery on one side, with canvas embedded on the other. The canvas was white with blue raindrops printed on it, but the rubber was an unpleasant shade of gray-green. Rubber boot covers in the same shade were tucked in between the folds. Everyone got their boots covered, then pulled the ponchos over all their other gear, and looked at each other.

  “We look like we’re already covered in mud,” Heather said.

  “It beats actually being covered in mud,” Sadie opined. “The boot covers might be useful around the river, too, and I didn’t actually realize they were in there, so I’m glad we found out so soon.”

  “OK, we’re unfashionable but we’ll stay dry,” Akari said. “The new plan is the old plan. Onward to the snare lines.”

  The ponchos made climbing the half-wall around the walkway more awkward, but they still opted to climb up and head into the woods rather than be seen heading north along the road. The trees overhead didn’t so much block the rain as change its texture, with fat drops gathering above and plopping down from the foliage at random intervals. The ground was less muddy than Danielle had expected; somehow, her nature studies units in science class had given her the impression that the forest floor would be bare dirt, but it was actually covered with dead leaves and pine needles and fallen twigs and smaller plants. Not that there wasn’t mud, or the occasional slippery spot to navigate!

  As before, they went north to the Dome road, then followed it east, looking for signs of the area they’d been in before. The marker they’d used the first day, the small pile of firewood, was of course gone. It took them at least an extra half hour before they found the hatchet mark Heather had made near the patch of mint. She dug up part of the patch, since that was in the plan anyway, and then they managed to navigate from there to the snares by memory. As before, Danielle gave everyone a length of twine, and they all spread out to find their own snare and place one or two new ones.

  Danielle’s snare was tangled in a bush again. She frowned at it in frustration. Was it really the wind doing this? She didn’t recall yesterday being particularly windy, and she thought the trees would offer more protection this close to the ground. It was hard to be sure of her judgement, though. The Inside wasn’t much beset by uncontrolled winds.

  Still, there might be other options. Could it be that something too big for the snare was using the clearer line in the brush that she was hoping was a game path? How would she even know? Frustrated at her lack of clues, she tried the only thing she could think of, and activated Sense Mana Source.

  The first thing she noticed was, naturally, Sadie; her mana glow bright but not too close as she slowly walked deeper into the forest from a few dozen paces further east along the road. There was a background of more subtle glows, though, that she hadn’t noticed when looking at people in and around the Rooms. Danielle turned away from Sadie to focus on what else she was seeing. It took her a few moments to properly bring it all into focus, and then she gave a small gasp of wonder.

  They had always been told that the System attached itself to all living things, giving each its own interface in whatever language or symbol it could handle, and its own connection to mana and mana-based abilities. Danielle had never really thought much about what that meant for the Outside, beyond common ideas like “there are lots of dangerous mutations.” Now, she realized that the trees were glowing in Sense Mana Source with a subtle light that seemed to rest just under their bark. More concentrated glows hid here and there in their branches. The ground was peppered with tiny mana stars, and larger glows that were nestled under bushes or sunk fully underground, tucked among the roots of the trees. Danielle turned in a circle, examining the whole area around her.

  A few moments after she came full circle, as she was trying to decide how to use this wealth of new information, she heard a shriek and jerked her eyes towards Sadie just in time to witness a mana burst through the trees. It was like a glowing bubble that expanded out of the dimness and then popped against Sadie’s glow. It wasn’t very bright in comparison to Sadie herself, but then, it presumably came from a rabbit or a squirrel or something. It had sounded pretty similar to Akari’s rabbit, she thought.

  “Please tell me that was a rabbit?!” Heather’s voice called anxiously from the other side of the road.

  “It was! It looks weird though!” Sadie called back.

  If you encounter this narrative on Amazon, note that it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.

  “Mine was empty, so give me a second to finish tying the new one, and I’ll bring you the cat bag,” Akari announced.

  “Does it look still-edible weird?” Heather called.

  “Probably? It has green fur, but maybe it’s from System camouflage? It’s definitely rabbit-shaped and everything!” Sadie replied.

  Danielle focused back on her task. Sense Mana Source did what the name implied – it told her where mana was now, defusing out of living things. It did not tell her where mana had been before, which limited its usefulness in figuring out what was happening to her snare. Sadie’s kill meant she had a meal coming tonight, though, which gave her a sense of confidence to experiment a little. Her Skill ended, but she continued her task with her regular vision. She moved the first snare just a few feet along the presumable game path, then moved a bit further from the road to set another near a spot where she’d noticed a burrow protected by a bush rather than a tree.

  When Danielle got back to the road, she found Heather pacing it anxiously. “Nervous about being alone?” she asked.

  “Nervous about letting members of the party out of sight,” Heather admitted quietly. “Why do rabbits have to scream like that?”

  “Maybe it’s a warning to other rabbits?” Danielle guessed. “Run away, predators nearby! Something like that?”

  “Maybe. Do me a favor and if you ever need to scream, use at least one word. Help, or flee, or – anything to give me a clue what’s going on,” Heather requested seriously.

  “Hm. I don’t know that I can make any promises about what I’ll do in a screaming kind of situation. If I had to guess how last night would’ve gone, I’d have guessed I’d be screaming and flailing, not – well, what I really did.” Danielle frowned into the woods in the general direction of where she’d seen Sadie kill the rabbit. “But I’ll at least try to keep it in mind.”

  “Thanks,” Heather said and continued pacing.

  The two of them could hear Sadie and Akari talking over in the woods, though they were far enough off that Danielle was catching tones of voice and the occasional syllable but not really words. Whatever they were doing was taking a while, but then, time always seemed to drag if you were just waiting, and even more so if you were nervous. Heather’s pacing was starting to get to her, Danielle realized. There was nothing to be afraid of, they were just gutting the rabbit. She needed something to do.

  “I don’t think the paint pens will work in the rain,” Danielle said. “I’m going to cut a stake and post it in near the side of the road for tomorrow.”

  “Oh – good idea,” Heather said. “I should be collecting sticks for the fish trap, myself. Let’s go look for some wood the right size, um, maybe on this side of the road.” She gestured toward the side her snares were on.

  “Sure, let’s just clue in the others,” Danielle said. Then she raised her voice and called, “Hey Akari! Sadie! We’re going back into the trees across the road a little to look for wood for this afternoon!”

  “OK, just don’t go too far!” Akari called back.

  Danielle nodded, then realized what she was doing and yelled back, “We won’t!”

  She and Heather started looking along the edge of the road, then moved into the trees. Heather chose any reasonably straight sticks, in sizes roughly finger-thick and as long as she could find. Danielle looked for a thicker stick, which took longer, but deeper in they found a fallen tree that hadn’t grown too large before it succumbed to whatever brought it down. Some of the wood was going a bit rotten, but Heather was able to harvest a fair few sticks from it, while Danielle chopped a large section out of one limb for her marker stake, and then started in on the 6” trunk. Chopping logs out of it with just her small hatchet was a chore, and the poncho didn’t help. Danielle finally took hers off, folding it around her bag and setting it aside while she worked on the logs.

  Heather started chopping the other branches into small logs and thick sticks, and eventually Sadie and Akari followed the sound of their hatchets over and joined in. Sadie had also reduced her poncho to a bag cover; now she consulted her notebook and started directing the work, apparently with some specific projects of her own in mind – not that she wasn’t also chopping logs herself. Heather started bundling up her cut sticks for easier carrying, while Danielle took her stake and pounded it into the ground on the south side of the road, then they started moving the various-sized logs out next to it.

  Danielle heard Sadie ask Heather, “Is it just me, or is Danielle really energetic today?” She missed most of Heather’s response as she moved to the log pile, but got back in time to hear her say “- just seems to be moving faster.”

  “How much of this wood are we going to try to move today?” Danielle asked, coming back up to the remains of the tree – besides the raggedly broken stump and the equally ragged end of the trunk, there weren’t many large sections left, and most of those were broken up from obvious rot.

  “All the sticks I bundled up, for sure,” Heather said. “They’re for the fish trap.”

  “And the logs you want me to try and make cutting stations from, and some of the thicker sticks for the whole drying rack idea, and maybe a little actual firewood,” Sadie added.

  “We’re still working on those Body Traits, huh?” Heather asked with a sigh.

  “At least you know you’re making progress, right?” Akari reminded her encouragingly. “When you level up, who knows what your Body number will be!”

  “I always said I wanted my high Trait to be Mind,” Heather said, securing her bundle of sticks to her satchel. “When are we going to work on that?”

  “Aren’t we working on it?” Danielle said. “I mean, we’re learning all kinds of stuff, even if it isn’t academic, and we’re planning and figuring out how to get stuff done and stay fed. We’re stretching our minds in new ways! We’re learning to interact with our Systems in new ways!”

  “Huh. I wouldn’t have thought about it that way, but I guess that’s true,” Sadie said. “Did your Mind Trait go up when you leveled? I heard a rumor that you always get at least one level in either Body or Mind when you level, but if you work hard on both, it can be both.”

  “Oh, um, yeah,” Danielle admitted, blushing. “We were going to talk about my level-up – um, let’s get hiking, and I’ll tell you all the details. Just remember it’s still a Party secret.”

  “OK, that works,” Sadie said. The other two nodded.

  https://discord.gg/u5dtzpShv2