“Try to take a new Skill,” Cassy suggested to Danielle. “It’ll let you see your list even if you don’t have the mana for it. I’ve tried it already, because we did not have enough time in the Dome to go over things properly.”

  “That is so true,” Danielle said distractedly. “Oh, wow, OK. Yeah. I’ve got a few new options in each category, I think? Ooh. I wish I’d gone over this when I was leveling up, I’d have taken Trait: Sensory Tuning from the Observation Trait pool, instead of Planner. I think if and when I get together the mana to take it, it’ll let me do things like turning down the intensity of Sense Mana Source so I’m not blinded when I look at a Ranger, and then turn it back up later so I can see trees and rabbits and things better! It might let me do some of that for my normal senses, too? The description isn’t entirely clear on that, but even if it’s just for the other Observation Skills, that would make it feel so much safer to take a bunch of them!”

  “Do you have a bunch of Observation Skills on your short list?” Cassy asked.

  “Well, not on the short list maybe,” Danielle said, “but I’ve already got Sense Mana Source, and I wasn’t joking about the Rangers being blinding. I kind of want to be able to use it with my eyes closed, too, and maybe in a way that lets me sense sources behind me, but if I can’t block out a strong signal like that, I’d be in trouble, so being able to turn it down another way would open up possibilities, you know?”

  “Huh. I’ve heard of that – unlocking variants of Skills you already have, because you’re trying to use them just a little differently, I mean,” Cassy said. “Not sure about making visual Skills act like – what would that even be, more like sound?”

  “I don’t know,” Danielle admitted, “but the Skill isn’t called see mana source, it’s called sense mana source, and the description uses ‘sense’ instead of ‘see’ too, so there have to be options. Besides, it’s not like I ever saw mana before, but I could always sense it, at least if it was happening to me or right around me.”

  “Wait, you could? Always? Before your youth level, even?” Cassy asked, startled.

  “She says she can,” Heather said, rolling her eyes.

  “I can! I don’t know why people don’t believe me,” Danielle complained. “Lots of people can. I know it’s not everyone, but plenty of people can tell when Skills are activated around them.”

  “Well yeah, but that’s a Skill,” Cassy said. “Like, a System Skill, not just a talent. My parents never believed me when I was little either – they said it was just my imagination acting up when I knew someone was using Skills, but the real way I knew was by watching. And then when I got my youth level, and it got a lot more clear and obvious, they said I’d talked about it so much I’d talked the System into making it my youth Trait.”

  “I thought you said your youth Trait was Improved Hearing,” Sadie said.

  “It is! So yeah, that was a hole in their idea, but then they said sometimes mana Traits and even mana Skills can come in hidden in youth, and even in kids that don’t have their youth level yet, and not show up on the status until they’re more fully formed; but they can still be activated when the kid is worked up enough. So their theory was that I had Sense Skill or something as a hidden Skill or Trait, and it might be enough of a base for me to get Sense Mana faster,” Cassy replied. “It was actually really annoying, because I really wanted Mana Sight, the normal visual version, so I could see what the Mana I was already ‘sensing’ actually was, you know? But they gave me Musician for my second Career instead of anything even slightly mana related, and I ended up with stinking Tempo Sense instead of Mana Sight. And I can play flute and piano.”

  “What’s wrong with Piano?” Akari asked.

  “Do you see any pianos out here?” Cassy asked rhetorically.

  “Oh. I guess you can at least make a wooden flute, or maybe Sadie can, but a piano would be pretty over the top,” Akari admitted.

  “OK, but back up a minute,” Danielle said. “Do you think they were right, or do you think this is part of Mana Improvement?”

  “Oh – wow, I hadn’t thought of that, but maybe it could be?” Cassy said. “I mean, that would make them half-right, because it was a hidden mana Trait.”

  “So they weren’t crazy, just half-wrong; and you and I also weren’t crazy, because it was a hidden Trait that could very well have been forming pre-youth, like Body and Mind do,” Danielle said.

  “Wait, for real?” Heather said, pausing her work in startlement. “All the teachers that said Danielle couldn’t possibly be really feeling Skills activate without a specialized Trait for it were wrong?”

  “Obviously they were wrong, there were like five people just in our grade at school who could do it,” Danielle said crossly. “We all proved it multiple times.”

  “Nathan could too, from math class,” Akari added. “The teachers said about what Cassy’s parents did, though; that he was really getting the information from subconsciously noticing people’s activation tells, and the goosebumps feeling he described was a response to that awareness, not where it came from.”

  “You might have to introduce me to this Nathan,” Cassy said. “I’m feeling a sudden urge to ask him if he’s ever heard of Trait: Mana Improvement.”

  “I guess I could, if I see him around,” Akari said. “He wasn’t a close friend or anything – I wasn’t very popular, anyway – but he seemed like a nice guy. I could at least point him out so you could ask.”

  “I would like to remind everyone that we were supposed to be getting the full report on Danielle’s level-up,” Sadie pointed out. “Now that this tangent seems to have run its course.”

  “Oh, right. Um, we were talking about unlocking level 2 stuff that would otherwise already be unlocked,” Danielle said. “So the next message is that I have unlocked level 2 general access Skills and Traits – I don’t know which ones those are, let’s see if the message has an expansion. Oh! OK, it does, and there are five things: Skill: See System Info – Creatures (Tier 1), Skill: See System Info – Persons (Tier 2), Skill: Mana Diagnostics (Tier 2), Skill: Identify Foreign Skill (Tier 1) and Trait: Scouting Skills (Tier 1). That one sounds weird, let me see what it does.”

  “Does it just unlock a Skill tree?” Akari asked.

  “No, you can’t just buy Skill unlocks like that,” Cassy said. “Except by taking extra Classes.”

  “Oh, weird. It says ‘Scouting Skills’ are Skills that actively look for and report situations where you can use them,” Danielle reported. “The Trait is required in order to use the Skills, it says because the Trait stores the information that the Skills actually use? Identify Foreign Skill is used as an example in the description, let me go read that one too.”

  “Huh. Skills that are scouts. Never heard of that one, Inside,” Sadie commented.

  “Oh, I get it! Identify Foreign Skill would tell you what Skill was just used on you, but without the Scouting trait, you’d have to already activate the Skill before the thing happened that you want to use the Skill on,” Danielle said.

  “So wait, you’re saying the Scouting Skills Trait would ‘notice’ whenever a Skill was used on you, and store information about it, so you can retroactively use Identify Foreign Skill on the Skill that was already used?” Heather asked. “I feel like I’m talking in circles, did that question even make sense?”

  “It did, and you’re right,” Danielle said. “It means you have to take two unlocks to get one result, but it’s like the intensity tuning Skill I was talking about before – right now, if I take it, it’ll only affect one other Skill; but then I’ll also be able to take other Skills it would work on, knowing I’m already prepared for them.”

  “Or if you were higher level, and had a few of those tier 1 and 2 Skills that you passed up because you weren’t prepared, you could take them all at once,” Akari suggested.

  “Or if you’re like Danielle and me, having extra mana but wanting to hide it, you could take some of those support Traits or Skills on the quiet, because who would even know you were using them? They act on yourself, and the effect comes from a different Skill, so you can actually take two Skills but people will only ever notice one,” Cassy said thoughtfully.

  “Until they level up See System Info, presumably,” Sadie countered.

  “Oh, yeah. I’m kind of shocked that’s a general level 2 thing,” Cassy said. “I mean, I know a lot of people end up taking it eventually, and my parents definitely told me it was common, but I didn’t think it was this common!”

  “It’s only an unlock,” Danielle reminded her. “I bet a lot of people wait to actually advance it.”

  “It’ll be common around here,” Heather said. “As much as I want a lot of other things, right now the ability to read people’s tags seems pretty important. Most of camp has nothing to go on but the Outlaw aura, and anybody who can handle camping for a few days can just wait it out.”

  “Some people don’t even have that,” Cassy said seriously. “You have to have some kind of sensory Skill to see it – anything will do, pretty much, but there’s got to be something. You would have it from Hostility Sense, so you don’t have to worry about that – ”

  “I’ve seen what it looks like,” Heather said.

  “I haven’t, though,” Sadie said. “Do you think Trait: Longsighted would do it? It improves my natural vision.”

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  “I’m not sure about that one, but how does Find Material work?” Cassy asked.

  “When it’s active, it puts an overlay on my vision, like a pointer towards the nearest source of what I’m looking for – oh, the overlay is more what you meant by a sensory Skill, isn’t it?”

  “Yeah, anything that can do something like that. You should be good. Wait, how did you not see someone with Outlaw, and Heather did?” Cassy asked. “You guys go everywhere together.”

  “We didn’t go to the healing thing,” Sadie reminded her. “I’m guessing it was there.”

  “Yeah,” Heather said. “It doesn’t show up when they attack, it only appears when the other person actually dies. I healed Tom, and then the third guy died and the one Danielle was working on suddenly burst out in that red aura and went crazy.”

  “I hope that was just him being already crazy and then feeling energized, or something,” Danielle said, “and not the mana burst itself actually driving him crazy. Did your parents tell you anything about that, Cassy?”

  “They said some people got kind of addicted to it,” Cassy said, “so it must feel like something.”

  “I don’t know what it felt like to Arny,” Danielle said, “but to me, it hurt. Like, a burning sensation, kind of. I’ll stick to fish and vine-things.”

  “OK, you have got to tell me about this vine-thing,” Cassy said.

  “Oh, it was so crazy,” Akari said. “Danielle and Heather had been working on the fish trap while Sadie and I worked on the rabbit, and when they came back on shore, Danielle suddenly goes ‘I think something’s trying to sneak up on you! It looks like a coil of rope!' ”

  “Its mana source was coil shaped, or spring shaped,” Danielle explained. “And that’s how I was seeing it, with Sense Mana Source.”

  “Right, so I looked where she was saying she saw it, and what I saw was like a cluster of vines, flopped all over around the base of this big rock we were sitting on. Then I realized, a bunch of them were moving – slow, like someone sneaking around, but still way too fast for a plant!”

  Akari gave an enthusiastic account of the fight, describing how she and Sadie had struggled to damage the vines until they learned to pin them, how Danielle had chopped at the root “like an absolute machine, she was so fast!” and how Heather was caught furthest away and without a blade, but still managed to get in two good blows with her staff and do some real damage. Sadie got in a few comments about rescuing the rabbit meat, which drew the conversation on to the topic of how to cook the rabbit.

  The discussion about how to cook wild game, in turn, transitioned to a discussion of their Skills and how they worked. It started with Sadie talking about the feedback she got from her Purify Food Skill – it turned out that she got a general indicator in her Interface of how ‘impure’ the food was to begin with, and whether one activation had been enough, or whether she needed to activate the Skill again to finish the job. That led to everyone talking about the feedback from other Skills. Akari said her Sword Apprentice Skill didn’t have any noticeable feedback, and Danielle agreed that Staff Apprentice didn’t either; it was unclear what the Skills actually did, except that Danielle was pretty sure she’d seen Akari activate the Skill during the vine fight, and she had been fighting more effectively after that.

  Everyone agreed that it had been noticeable when Danielle activated Combat Medic during the fight – because, according to them, she’d gone from fast to faster. Danielle thought Combat Medic’s contribution to fighting was more about recognizing where you needed to hit, but she had to admit it was hard to gauge her own speed increases; Trait: Speed Improvement didn’t make her feel faster either – that was why she had so much trouble slowing back down when she wanted to. Akari said more or less the same; she didn’t feel faster, it was just easier to keep up. Sadie added that her vision enhancements were also like that, in that it didn’t feel like anything had changed unless she was specifically trying to focus on something that she knew would have been too far away, or else too small, to see clearly before.

  Sadie held up her work by way of talking about examples of how much detail she could see up close that she wasn’t sure she could have seen before Advancing, and the others got a good look at her drying rack design for the first time. She had notched the sticks for the frames, then tied a length of knotted cord along each one with the knots holding the straight sections close to the wood, diverting the cord to an X-shaped wrap around each joint to hold the frame together. Now she was weaving the cord into a surface between the sticks for the tomato pieces to rest on while still getting some airflow below them.

  That sent the conversation on a tangent about drying food, and how many racks they would need, and what materials they would need to make permanent racks if they wanted to take these back apart for the manufactured cordage. Sadie was being fairly clever about not cutting the cord until absolutely necessary, but drying racks seemed likely to be tools they would want long-term. Heather reminded them that their room guide (Ranger Miriam) had advised them to prioritize making cordage, and Sadie told them what she’d learned about it in the reference books that came with the room.

  They continued talking and eating tomatoes and cutting tomatoes and, in Sadie’s case, weaving the drying racks. Akari reminded them all to drink water. Heather kept the plate of snacking tomatoes full. Cassy berated them for only reading their three favorite books from the shelf and not getting into any of the others, and talked about how useful the guide to Mana Casting was and how many little hints about the System she found while reading it. A Survivor’s Reference to Classes, which none of the girls from 6024 had even noticed, apparently also had some real eye-opening passages, which she annoyed everyone by insisting they read for themselves.

  That brought the discussion back around to techniques for unlocking Skills, and the value of speaking aloud to others or even just directly to the System. Danielle mentioned again that she wanted a Skill for reducing the amount of moisture in an object, pointing out that it would be as useful for preserving tomatoes as it would for drying wet clothes. Heather brought up how much she wanted Trait: Speed Improvement, and asked Cassy if she knew how to unlock that one (sadly, she didn’t). Cassy said she desperately wanted some proper defensive Skills, but unlike the students at the schools, she hadn’t even unlocked the sword Skill tree – she had staff, sling, and spear as her options. Her parents hadn’t pushed her on any of them, since they didn’t expect her to ever need them, but since the curriculum guidelines called for a bladed weapon, a blunt weapon, and a ranged weapon, they had chosen something easy to construct in the wild for each category. “For me to teach their grandkids someday, they always said,” Cassy added sadly.

  Meanwhile, the hours flew by, and the pots filled up with cherry tomato pieces. The gooey centers were going into the extra mugs and the pieces for drying were going into pots, and all four containers were getting pretty full (arguably overfull in the case of one of the pots) when Sadie finished the second drying rack, and said “Let’s stop talking about Skills and go work on a few. I’ve used up this whole ball of twine, and I think we need to get some of these tomatoes dry before we cut any more.”

  Danielle checked her watch and found that it was after two o’clock. “The rain had stopped by this time yesterday,” she said. “Let’s have a peek outside and see if it’s cleared up again, and decide what to do for a break.” Danielle activated her Detect Mana Source Skill and looked through the door – nothing. Then she looked up and around, examining the mana sources in the building above them. “I don’t see any mana sources nearby outside,” she reported, “but I think practically everyone in the building is in the building right now.”

  “Can you see the whole building?” Cassy asked in surprise.

  “No, only the near half, or maybe the near third,” Danielle said. “But all the rooms I can see seem to have four people, and I don’t see any big gaps in the pattern.”

  “Ah. My roommates decided if it was going to be wet everywhere, they might as well try fishing,” Cassy said. “So they’re definitely out.”

  “Well, they were when you came over,” Akari said, “but it’s been a while. They could be back by now.”

  “Not if they made it all the way to the river and seriously tried to fish,” Danielle said. “Unless they left way before Cassy did to come over here. We’ve been working for about five hours, but even if they go to a closer part of the river, that doesn’t leave them much time to do something there and get back.”

  “Well, it doesn’t matter that much as long as Danielle wasn’t seeing all the way to my room and misinterpreting something,” Cassy said. “I’m just saying, even if most people stayed in, there are a few who went out, too.”

  “That’s a fair point. There’s nobody in the walkway within range either way, though. I’m opening the door,” Danielle said.

  The view out the door was pretty much identical to what it had been when Cassy arrived. The sky was a dim and depressing gray, and rain was still pouring down. The others gathered behind Danielle to look out.

  “I can’t believe it’s still pouring rain so hard,” Heather said. “Do you think it’s going to flood?”

  “I don’t think so,” Sadie said uncertainly. “There doesn’t seem to be that much water collecting anywhere – not even down here in the walkway, and that’s the lowest spot around, right?”

  “Well. What now, then?” Cassy asked. “We can’t sun-dry anything with no sun, soooo, fire building next?”

  “Actually, I kind of hate to say it, but we should probably go check the snares next,” Akari said.

  “Are you kidding me?” Heather exclaimed. “That would be walking. We are taking the day off from walking!”

  “OK, but if the snares catch anything, and we don’t show up to kill it, the animal might chew apart the snares to get away and ruin them and we won’t have any meat for tomorrow,” Akari said. “Animals need food every day, the same as we do, so they can’t all just stay in their burrows because of the rain. Not to mention that we need firewood, and we left a bunch near the snares. Let’s just do one quick trip to the snare area, see if there’s any meat, and maybe collect the snares for safety. We can tie them back again next time we go to the tomato patch, and check them at the end of the day after we pick tomatoes, and not leave them overnight when we aren’t coming back in the morning.”

  “How about you four go check the snares, and I’ll stay here,” Heather suggested mulishly.

  “Do you want to unlock a Speed Improvement or not?” Cassy asked. “The System doesn’t give us Skills we just wish for, it gives us Skills to help do what we’re already doing.”

  “So you’re saying, when we get back, I should wring out and fan all the damp blue jeans?” Danielle said resignedly.

  “Ah, yeah, that would make sense. And then load the drying racks and get them set up by the fire, probably, while the rest of us work on the rabbit,” Cassy suggested.

  “OK, I’m on clothes drying duty then,” Danielle said. “And poncho wiping duty, and tomato drying duty.” She turned back to face into the room. “Well, come on, let’s get our ponchos.”

  The girls all moved back into the room, and everyone got ponchos on, even Heather and Cassy.

  “You don’t have to come,” Sadie told Cassy. “We’re not even setting new snares today, and we’re not going to the tomato patch, so there’s no point.”

  “Well, except I want to get fit to keep up with the group,” Cassy said, “and maybe unlock Speed Improvement too. That means I have to get used to walking with you all, and I haven’t already done two mega-hikes with you, so I figure this is my best chance to start small.”

  “I get it, you don’t have to keep beating the same drum,” Heather complained. “I’m coming already.”

  “I wasn’t – I really meant that about getting fit!” Cassy objected. “You guys have been doing a lot of hiking, and you’re probably starting to build stamina and stuff, and I haven’t yet! I have to get in shape to keep up with the party!”

  “If you really want to work on Speed Improvement, we should let Danielle lead, you know,” Sadie said.

  “Oh no you don’t,” Danielle replied. “If you want to work on Speed Improvement, let Akari lead – tomorrow, not right now. This is supposed to be the rest and recovery day, we’re only walking a little now because we kind of need to, and because we don’t want to leave anyone out of a chance to pick up hunting mana.”

  “And maybe a little because a good walk will warm up our muscles for some serious stretching afterward,” Akari added. “Stretching helps reduce pain. If we were just trying to do that, I wouldn’t suggest walking all the way out to the snares though – just around the building a couple times, or something like that.”

  “OK, OK, I get it,” Sadie said. “We can practice our finding Skills, too. Maybe it’ll even give us an excuse to take a rest break part way there.”

  “But Sadie, the people with the finding Skills are the ones who don’t have Speed Improvement and therefore the ones who need the rest break,” Heather practically whined.

  “If you find edible plants along the road, you can rest and I’ll harvest them for you,” Danielle said. “Everyone got their weapons? Bags? Ponchos? Boot Covers? Canteen? All right, Sadie, set our pace for us.”

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