“Will you be OK taking your onions back to your room?” Danielle asked Cassy as they started cleaning up. “No risk of involuntary ‘contributions’ or anything now that you’ve got your understanding, right?”

  “Actually, I’d be more comfortable leaving them here overnight, if that’s OK,” Cassy said. “They’re kind of in your spare pot anyway, and the ABCs don’t have anything even vaguely like cookware. I’d be as worried about the pot disappearing as the onions.”

  “Did you bring anything like cookware?” Danielle asked curiously.

  “The best I could find were some heat-proof glass dishes that were meant for lunch boxes, and a package of foil baking pans,” Cassy said. “And a picnic basket. I felt ridiculous carrying a picnic basket to the Rooms, but it was lightweight and had some carrying capacity and it kept the foil pans from getting crushed.”

  “That was clever, though!” Danielle said. “I bet it’ll be great for collecting wild onions and stuff, too. And the foil pans might not be a match for cast iron, or even our own cheap aluminum stuff, but it’s still fireproof and a lot better than the nothing your roommates have!”

  “That was basically what I was thinking, too. That it was better than nothing, I mean,” Cassy said. “My mom said I should save up and get cast iron at the first Fall Fair, so that’s what I’m really banking on. If I’m really lucky, maybe it’ll even be in the un-Fair catalog!”

  “Ooh, that would be great,” Danielle said. “These darn pots of ours might be better than nothing, but they’re really too small for doing whole rabbits in.”

  Cassy nodded. “Even those of us who are doing pretty well are still just making do with stuff that wasn’t meant for what we need it to be,” she said. “I used my spy skills more than I’d like to admit today, and frankly, I think there are a lot of people that are still in campout mode, and just starting to realize that they can’t just go home now that the weekend’s over, and they’re going to be in trouble in a few weeks if they don’t figure out how to live a completely different life. I don’t think more than a quarter of the camp has started working yet, like you four have.”

  “Working as in, the opposite of broken?” Danielle asked, “or working as in the opposite of vacationing?”

  “I meant the second one. The System says we’re adults, and everyone’s all excited about that, but I think that’s because it hasn’t sunk in yet that adults work for a living,” Cassy explained. “My dad was real serious about that with me. He said, ‘Cassy, don’t be afraid to take a few days at the beginning to read the reference books they give you and make a plan; but promise me you won’t take too many days off. As a Sent, you have to work for your living, and expect to work long hours, especially at the beginning.’ I took off Sunday afternoon with you guys, but even then we did some reading in the evening. I stayed in on Saturday, too, but I spent most of that day reading the book on mana casting from the shelf in my room.

  “Today I spent looking for a group, and yeah also some food, but mostly a group so I wouldn’t be trying to do it all alone. I haven’t walked however far it is, but I’m working on survival, just like the four of you. In spite of how many fights there’ve been about snares and trapping territory already, I think half the town is still mostly trying to act like it’s summer vacation. When they realize they’ve eaten a third of their emergency rations and don’t know where their food will be coming from on week four, it’s going to get worse than it already is.”

  “That’s a sobering thought,” Danielle said. “For now, though, all I know for the four – or five – of us to do is keep doing the best we can for ourselves, and try to be good neighbors to whoever else we cross paths with.”

  “Yeah. For one thing, we can’t keep anyone else alive unless we first keep ourselves alive,” Cassy said. “My parents hammered that one in, too. Trading food is good; giving food away when we don’t have any reserves to keep us from being the ones needing charity tomorrow? Not so good.”

  “There might be some stuff we can do that will help others without hurting us,” Danielle said. “Remind me to tell you about this clinic-room idea I had last night. I definitely understand what you’re saying though.”

  “Tell me tomorrow,” Cassy said. “It’s been a long day. I should just come here in the morning, right?”

  “Yeah,” Danielle said, “bring your stool if you can, and your knife of course. We can talk about Skills and plans and stuff while we work tomorrow. Come at – well, you don’t have a clock, so I guess come whenever you’re awake and ready and it’s light out, and if we don’t answer the door, you’ll know you came too early.”

  Cassy laughed. “I’ll bring a book in case I have to sit outside your room and read for a while! You guys are probably going to sleep in. Oh! Here’s some advice that’ll be useful to you, maybe. Mom said if you have plenty of pain relievers, you shouldn’t be afraid to use them; if you know you overdid it and you’re going to be sore the next day, take one at night, and it will help keep you from getting as sore as you otherwise would.”

  “Oh, really? That is good to know,” Danielle said. “Though to be honest, it’s easy to worry that if we use them now we’ll end up regretting it when we need them later.”

  “Mom said, they have expiration dates, and they’re available at the fairs, so I should get the biggest bottle I could find but then use it, not just hoard it,” Cassy sad. “I can’t see the future, but that’s advice from someone who’s been in one of these camps herself. Take it how you will.”

  “All right, thanks for passing it on,” Danielle said. “Good night.”

  “Good night,” Cassy said, and walked to the door. She paused there and acted like she was looking through a peep hole. Danielle belatedly remembered that was the name of one of her youth-Career Skills. After looking around for a moment, Cassy stepped outside and closed the door. Danielle stepped up to the door in turn, and opened it to watch Cassy walk down to her own room. She relaxed when Cassy opened her own door, and they both went back inside.

  From there, the night closed quickly. Danielle passed on the advice from Casssy’s mom about pain medicines, and in the end, everyone took a dose. Heather got her quick shower and went to bed, while Danielle washed everyone’s dishes. Akari got the rabbit into the cold box, and Sadie rearranged the tomato piles and filled a clean frying pan with fresh tomatoes for eating at breakfast. She went for a rather longer shower after that, but she carefully laid out her bed before locking herself into the bathroom so Danielle and Akari could turn off the lights in the main room and go to bed. Akari asked Danielle for the time, and wound and set the alarm clock. It was almost 11pm. After that, Akari helped Danielle arrange the plates and other dishes to dry, and then they took advantage of Sadie’s preparations. Danielle was asleep before Sadie got out of the shower.

  The alarm clock went off at 7:30. Danielle begrudgingly admitted to herself that it was eight hours of sleep, but she felt that she could have used another hour or two of blissful unawareness of her aching muscles. Akari got up and turned it off quickly, which was some consolation; better yet, she promptly got into the shower without bothering anyone else, and Danielle drifted back to sleep.

  About 8:30, she woke back up to the smell of sizzling meat, and found Akari cooking something over the camp stove. That was enough to get her out of bed. She took a quick shower, and came back out to see what breakfast was looking like. It turned out to be a plate of some sort of odd-looking sausage patties, set next to the pan of cherry tomatoes they’d declared breakfast food the night before. Heather was still asleep, but Sadie was up munching on tomatoes in the kitchen.

  “What is this?” Danielle asked Akari, gesturing to the possible-sausage.

  “Fried pemmican patties,” Akari said. “From that open tube, you know. Heather can give hers to Cassy if she doesn’t want it; I just want to use it up, and anyway, we need plenty of protein to build muscle and stuff, right?”

  “Ah, right,” Danielle said. “Thanks for frying it up.” She took a fork and speared a patty, eating around it until she could fit the piece on the fork into her mouth. Then she switched to tomatoes.

  “When do we wake Heather up?” Sadie asked. “Cassy could show any time now, you know?”

  “I’ll wake her,” Danielle said. “Before Cassy does show up, and before the hot food gets cold.” She got up and walked over to Heather’s bed, and gently shook her shoulder. “Heather, it’s morning,” she said.

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  “Five more minutes,” Heather mumbled sleepily.

  “You had five minutes,” Danielle said. “And then a whole hour. Akari cooked breakfast, and it’s getting cold.”

  “Thought we were having tomatoes,” Heather said.

  “We’re having that too, but even if all you want is tomatoes and cold jerky, you still need to get up before Cassy shows up, right?” Danielle said. “It’s been ten hours since she left, and it’s been light out for more than three hours, so she could show up any time.”

  “Oh, all right,” Heather muttered, sitting up. She stood, then sat back on the bed with a groan. “Can I have more aspirin?” she asked plaintively.

  “Hey, the bottle in your footlocker belongs to you,” Danielle said with a shrug. “Would you like me to bring you some water?”

  “Yes please,” Heather said, reaching over to her footlocker without properly getting out of bed. It was an awkward position, and Danielle didn’t think she’d really be able to get into it properly that way, but she took the canteen bottle from Heather’s Decision Day bag, which was draped over her footboard, and filled it from the sink.

  Sure enough, by the time she came back, Heather had given up on staying in bed and was walking toward the kitchen with an aspirin in hand. Danielle gave her the water, and she swallowed the pill, then climbed up on a stool to frown at the last pemmican patty on the serving plate. Danielle bypassed the kitchen to get her own dose of aspirin, for the aching muscles and for the spots where the vine had whipped her hard enough to leave marks.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Heather asked unhappily, staring at the plate.

  “Do you think it’s protein for your muscles to repair themselves with, and calories for the day’s work?” Akari asked a bit pointedly.

  Heather frowned more deeply, but after a long moment, she took the plate and the last fork and ate the pemmican, adding a side of tomatoes to the plate. “It fries up pretty good,” she said.

  “It does,” Akari agreed.

  “My mana’s almost full,” Heather said, changing the subject. “I banked a point to Payment Plan last night, or I’d be actually full. I might want to go out before we start cutting tomatoes and actually use my Find Edible Plants Skill; see how it’s different from Cassy’s, and stuff.”

  “Not a bad idea,” Akari said.

  “We could get our own onions, too,” Sadie suggested.

  “It’d mean walking though,” Danielle countered. “Any place that doesn’t require walking has got to be getting picked over already. I think Cassy undersold how far she went yesterday, a little.”

  “Or maybe nobody is looking really close, and I’ll find something everyone is overlooking right under the eaves of the building,” Heather said. “It’ll be a good Skill test even if I only find something small,” she added.

  “I think the balconies and our walkway are what’s under the eaves,” Sadie said, “but it won’t hurt to test the Skill, if you’re OK to walk a little. Do you have any other Skills you need to test while you can afford the mana?”

  “Well, there’s Fire Starter, but I figure that’ll be for tonight,” Heather said. “You know, when we cook the rabbit.”

  A knock on the door interrupted the conversation. “Do you want to be the one to use Hostility Sense?” Akari asked.

  “Oh, that might be good too,” Heather said. “OK, let me see.” She looked at the door, then up and around – at the building, Danielle supposed, like she would do with Detect Mana Source. Heather frowned in the direction of, presumably, a room on the upper floor of their end of the building, probably on the other side judging by the angle. Then she looked back at the door. “There’s someone hostile upstairs,” she reported, “but not outside the door.”

  “That’s news,” Danielle said. “I’ll let Cassy in.”

  She opened the door cautiously all the same, but it was indeed Cassy, carrying a stool with a picnic basket sitting on its seat. Behind her, Danielle saw that it was pouring rain under a dim and dreary sky.

  “Come on in,” Danielle said. “Looks like a lousy day for a picnic!”

  “Good thing we had plans to stay in,” Cassy said with a grin.

  “I’ve decided that practicing Skills can wait,” Heather said as they came into the kitchen and Cassy set her stool down.

  “Until it’s not pouring water out of the sky where you want to use your Skills?” Cassy asked.

  “Yep. I can’t believe how dark it looks out there!” Heather said. “Weather showers Inside never blocked the light that way.”

  “Well of course not,” Danielle said. “They didn’t come from real clouds, and they didn’t last half the day.”

  “It’s a lot darker than it was yesterday,” Cassy said. “If the darkness level shows how thick the clouds are, we might have rain for the whole day, today. Maybe even longer.”

  “Longer than a whole day?” Heather asked, horrified.

  “It can happen. Less in summer, more in spring and fall,” Cassy said.

  “It’s fine,” Danielle said. “If we have to start the tomatoes next to a fire, we’ll do that instead. At least we know the well will be fine if there’s plenty of rain, right?”

  “That’s one way of looking at it,” Sadie said.

  “But what if it doesn’t stop and we have to go out in it tomorrow?” Heather asked in dismay.

  “Then we’ll get wet,” Danielle said. “It won’t kill us.”

  “If it’s a cold rain with wind, it can give us hypothermia,” Akari said. “The ponchos will help with that, though. If we take them off to work on something and get wet underneath, we can still put them back on to block the wind. I learned that one from a camping trip.”

  “OK, well, it won’t kill us if we take care of ourselves,” Danielle amended herself. “We worked in the rain yesterday morning, if we have to do it again, we’ll manage. For now, we have an inside task, so let’s get to it!”

  “Are you going to cut more onions, or help with tomatoes?” Sadie asked Cassy.

  “I don’t have more onions, I cut them all last night,” Cassy said. “I’m going to help with tomatoes. Maybe you can pay me with some dry tomatoes after they’re done?”

  “I was thinking about that,” Akari said. “I propose we make ten shares, when we’re done. Two for each of us who picked and helped process, one for Cassy who only helped process, and one for that clinic Danielle and Heather were talking about.”

  “Oh, you were going to tell me about that today,” Cassy reminded Danielle.

  “Sure, let’s get set up for the cutting and then we can talk while we work,” Danielle said. “Are you good with the plan Akari just said?”

  “Oh, yeah, that sounds fair,” Cassy agreed. “But when I start helping pick, I get a full share of those.”

  “Yeah, of course,” Akari said.

  “I’m good with that,” Sadie said. “And we’re agreed I’m going to work on the drying racks instead of cutting, but that’s still contributing to the processing, right?”

  “Yeah, because we can’t do the next step without some way to carry the cut tomato bits to the sun or the fire,” Danielle said.

  “I’m good with that,” Heather said, popping the last of her breakfast tomatoes in her mouth. “I’m going to wash the breakfast dishes, be right back.” She took the plate and the frying pan Akari had used and went to the sink.

  Sadie took her sticks and twine to her bed to work, while everyone else arranged stools around the end of the counter and set out piles of tomatoes and empty pots to receive the cut pieces. They set out some of the bruised fruit on a plate for eating while they worked, but stuck to cutting only the undamaged fruit for drying, in hopes that it would handle the process better.

  Sadie started whittling notches into the sticks, and the others started cutting the tomatoes. They weren’t entirely in agreement on the best way to cut them; Sadie and Akari thought they should cut them in half, scoop out the seedy goo in the middle, then cut the firmer outside in half again. Danielle and Cassy thought that the sundried tomatoes they’d seen in bags Inside were thinner strips than that, probably made by taking thin slices, and wanted to do the same; Heather agreed that the Inside dried tomato salad toppings were probably made from slices, but also thought they were made from bigger tomatoes, and ended up abstaining from the vote on which way to cut their own tomatoes, so in the end, they agreed to try slicing some and quartering others.

  That settled, they got to work, and to chatting while they worked. At first, the subjects were deep. Everyone took turns telling Cassy as much of their status as they were willing to share. Then Cassy talked about how to unlock Mana Sight. Her parents had taught her several known paths to getting it as a Skill and one more (besides taking the Basic Mana Caster class) to get it as a Trait.

  “The basic principle, though, is pretty general,” Cassy explained after going through the known Skill paths. “You can start with any Skill or Trait that gives you any mana or mana-adjacent sensory information at all, and you can get several of those from the Observation Skill tree, or you can get Traits that do the same kind of thing from the Observation Trait pool. Then you use it in ways that go a little beyond the core idea of the Skill (or Trait) and really push it, and the whole ‘helping you do what you’re already doing, but better’ feature of the System kicks in. If you want the Trait instead of the Skill, then use the Skill as much as you can, make it look like you want it on all the time.”

  “Oh – so like, I have Sense Mana Source as a Skill,” Danielle said. “If I just let it tell me where things are, but I’m constantly using it, I might unlock a Trait – maybe See Mana Sources or something. If I use it only once or twice a day, but I really observe and try to figure out what stuff means, like trying to interpret the meaning of the movements in people’s sources, or trying to figure out where vital organs are by aiming for the source, or even just taking notice of how trees have their sources spread through their bark but people have their source concentrated in one spot in their torso – that’s how to get Skill: Mana Sense?”

  “Yes. Also, interestingly specific examples there,” Cassy said with a chuckle.

  “I might have been really interested in the way the vine monster’s source was its spirally bit, and I could see the spiral entirely in mana sense. Source. Mana source sense? I need the proper Trait (or Skill at least) just so I can know what to call it!” Danielle joked.

  Everyone had a chuckle at that, and then Sadie made a joke about only Danielle being rich enough to take a new Trait just for that, and Heather said she’d rather take a Trait that enhanced the senses she had, and Cassy mentioned that the automatic Skill unlocks for base level 4 included improvement Skills for all the senses, and Danielle remembered that she’d never properly gone over her level up – not even in her own interface, let alone with everyone else. She paused and took a few minutes to go through her archived System notices a bit more thoroughly.

  “OK, so I got a Trait choice and a Skill choice for leveling up, and I took Trait: Planner, and Skill: Lesser Expand Volume, both of which are Tier 1. My only Tier 2 Skill is still Combat Medic,” Danielle reported. “It says I unlocked tier 2 Skills in my unlocked Skill trees and tier 2 Traits in my unlocked Trait pools, which seems kind of redundant?”

  “You couldn’t take them before, though,” Akari said. “It’s probably just a funny way of saying you’re high enough level to actually take them now.”

  “Well, and high enough level to see them. Can you?” Heather asked.

  Danielle gave Heather a rather blank look. “I’m not sure how I’d even know,” she admitted.

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