The party climbed the retaining wall, entered the woods, and sneaked north past the Rooms and into the ruined town, like they usually did. Then they took their favorite street parallel to the Rooms road until it reached the Dome road, and turned east.

  “Wait, isn’t this the road back to the gate?” Cassy asked as they stepped out onto the better-maintained surface.

  “Yep. Remember how we were scavenging on Saturday?” Danielle asked.

  “Well yeah, all those extra bags and stuff,” Cassy said.

  “Well, we set the snares on our way to the hill. It’s easy to find again,” Danielle explained.

  “Don’t worry,” Sadie puffed. “It’s not (huff) as far as the hill.”

  “Yeah, we’ve been saying it’s an hour, but really it’s an hour to the top of the hill; this is maybe ten minutes closer,” Akari added.

  When the marker stake and the pile of firewood were in sight, Danielle activated her Sense Mana Source Skill again, and reminded the others that they were going to try their Skills for detecting edible plants. She focused on Heather’s mana source, and sure enough, she could see it flutter and flex as Heather almost immediately activated the Skill. Cassy followed suit too quickly for Danielle to shift her focus, though she could tell by the way the other girl was looking around.

  “Mine is for materials, not edibles,” Sadie reminded her, which Danielle felt was unnecessarily pedantic, but it gave her time to focus on Sadie’s core before she also activated her Skill, and observe the flutter of Skill activation again.

  “I was just being over-general to save words, Sadie,” Danielle said. “But thanks for delaying a few seconds, I’m trying to watch everyone’s Skills go off with Sense Mana Source. I think if I’m actually looking, I can tell when someone’s activating a Skill, though I can’t see anything about what it does yet. Maybe when the Skill levels, the image will get clearer.”

  “This is weird,” Sadie said, less replying than changing the subject. “I think my detect materials Skill is pointing me to that tree we chopped up. Why is it doing that? It’s not pointing to the pile of firewood.”

  “Does it just detect any material you can use for crafting?” Akari asked. “Does it have to be dead, or could it point out the nearest tree because it’s made of wood?”

  “It points out materials for a craft I whisper when I activate – oh. Oh no. I said for tanning, and I completely forgot – one way to tan hides, from the book, it uses brains and half-rotted wood.” Sadie groaned. “It’s pointing to the parts of the tree we left because of rot, but it might not help, because I forgot to save the rabbit’s brain – we just buried the whole head.”

  “That sounds like the most disgusting thing ever,” Heather said.

  “Yeah, it’s nasty, but it seems like almost all the ways of tanning hides are nasty,” Sadie said. “At least this way uses stuff it’s not hard to find. We just have to stop throwing away brains when we catch something.”

  “And get them out of the heads,” Akari said unhappily. “And use them before they rot.”

  “I’m not saying it sounds fun or, or, good smelling,” Sadie said. “I’m saying, that’s how you do it. Do you want to have leather and fur and stuff to work with when winter comes?”

  “Well, I guess, yeah,” Akari reluctantly admitted.

  “Brains in warm water,” Sadie said. “That’s how you do it. Otherwise you just get rawhide, and that’s all hard. I mean, I guess it’s useful too, but not for the kind of stuff I really want to do with it. I think.”

  “We’re all new at this, maybe you can practice rawhide on the first couple of skins, and do the brain thing on any new ones?” Danielle suggested. “Then if rawhide turns out to be more useful than you expect, you’ll have a little practice.”

  “Yeah, I’m going to have to work on it next time we’re at the river. I need sand,” Sadie said. “The rotten wood is for the last stage, after the brains, to make a fire with lots of smoke and not much flame. We can get it tomorrow or something, since we want to carry good firewood today.”

  “So what you’re saying is, today keep any brains we catch, and tomorrow we carry lousy firewood around,” Akari said with a sigh.

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t invent the methods, all right? Do you maybe prefer the one where we have to pee on it??” Sadie complained. “Ugh, I probably forgot yesterday because I hate thinking about (ugh) mashed brains. I just – that’s how it’s done.”

  “OK, that’s fair; and at least animal skins are usually going to come with animal brains, so it works out that way. I’m going to go check my snares now,” Danielle said.

  “I have good news, at least,” Cassy said.

  “Me too,” Heather said from the side of the road. “Find Edible Plants pointed me at this bush, and I can see berries growing on it. I think it’s blueberries! I don’t think there are any ripe ones, though.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m seeing,” Cassy said. “There’s a bunch of them in the area. Mostly close to the road.”

  “You can see all of them at once? That’s so unfair,” Heather said. “My Skill only points me to the closest thing.”

  “Yeah, but it still does even if it’s not in plain sight, right?” Cassy said. “My dad said that was the difference between ‘find’ Skills and ‘notice’ Skills. Mine only works on things I can already see.”

  “Oh. I guess it’s less unfair and more of a trade-off, then,” Heather said.

  Cassy and Heather continued talking about their Skills and the blueberry bushes, but Danielle tuned them out and headed for her snares. Her first snare was tangled in the bushes to the side of the presumable game trail once again, so she felt no regret about untying it and shoving the cord in her bag for another day. She turned toward the place where she had placed the second snare, scanning with Sense Mana Source for the burrow she’d placed it near.

  To her surprise, the burrow (or anyway, its inhabitants) were readily visible, still underground; but there were also two mana sources aboveground, and one seemed to be circling the other. Danielle decided that in the spirit of testing out Skills, she might as well try one of her untouched Class Skills, and activated Skill: Active Camouflage. The Skill immediately expanded around her in a bubble. Like Bubble of Silence, she had a hard-to-describe feeling for where the boundary was, but unlike Bubble of Silence, the boundary didn’t mold itself to things around it. This bubble didn’t stretch around things, it simply ignored them; and when Danielle tried to walk up to the boundary, she found that this one easily moved with her.

  She couldn’t see any difference at the boundary, but since the Skill was called Camouflage, she hoped that meant the boundary was there to tell her how much space she could move around in without being seen. It was a much smaller bubble than her silence Skill, but since it moved with her, she would have had to use her staff to reach across the boundary. Stepping carefully and trusting to her Silent Steps trait to muffle the sound of her footsteps further, she sneaked towards the two Mana Sources in front of the bush with the burrow.

  Coming around the last intervening tree, she discovered a small drama in play. A fat, furry something – not a rabbit, it was a bit too large, had small round ears, and its chubby face was entirely the wrong shape – whatever it was, though, it had somehow gotten the snare caught all the way back around its hips but had not managed to claw or chew its way out. It was pulling against this awkward tether, which was holding in part because the creature had managed to wrap it around the bush several times. Circling the trapped creature, and possibly distracting it from more effective efforts to escape, was what looked for all the world like an orange tabby cat. However, it was also a notably larger specimen than what Danielle was used to seeing Inside, and its mana source was quite a bit brighter than the not-rabbit.

  The cat swiped at the animal in the snare, which batted at the offending paw with its own smaller but heavily clawed paw. The cat stalked around, trying to get behind it, but it circled – ah, that’s how it got the snare wrapped around the bush like that, – barking periodically at the cat, which hissed back. Danielle watch them ‘dance’ for a few minutes, fascinated. However, when the cat finally got a more solid hit in, she suddenly realized that that cat was trying to steal her dinner. Well, tomorrow’s dinner, but still. Her Detect Mana Source Skill winked out, leaving her an unaltered view of the cat trying to bite the neck of her own rightful prey.

  Danielle cancelled her stealth Skill and stepped forward with a wordless shout, sweeping forward with the lower end of her staff. The cat jumped literally twice its own height in startlement, hissed at her, then turned tail and fled. Danielle swung at the other creature, landing a glancing blow on one side of its head. It barked at her, and she couldn’t help wanting to laugh at how much it sounded like it was trying to curse her out.

  “Danielle?! Are you OK?”

  Heather’s anxious voice reminded her that she had promised to use words when she shouted. “I’m fine!” she called back. “I was just telling a cat to leave my rightful prey alone! Do you want to come stab it, though? I forgot about that for a minute, so I already smacked it one with my staff but it’s still alive.”

  “Oh, uh. I guess. My snares were empty,” Heather said.

  “You’re splitting the mana from game animals?” Cassy asked. “I know you guys share a lot of stuff, but that seems extreme.”

  “It’s more that since I’ve already leveled, I’m trying to help the others catch up a little,” Danielle said as Heather and Cassy walked up.

  The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

  “Oh, you caught the thing that’s making that sound!” Cassy exclaimed.

  “Yeah, any idea what it is?” Danielle asked.

  “Not a clue,” Cassy admitted.

  “Are you sure it’s good to eat?” Heather asked nervously.

  “I don’t see why not,” Danielle said, looking back at the animal. “I mean, it’s made of meat, right? Obviously we’ll have Sadie purify it just to be sure, but it’s not a weird color or an obvious mutant or anything like that.”

  “It’s yelling at me,” Heather said. She brought her sword out from under her poncho, unconsciously holding it in a low guard position, like she would have back in gym class. School-trained sword habits notwithstanding, every line of her body telegraphed reluctance.

  “It’s mad at me for hitting it on the head,” Danielle replied. “Do you want me to try and hold it down for you?”

  “I, um, please?” Heather asked.

  “All right.” Danielle crouched down and awkwardly brought her staff in from the side, bringing it down just behind the animal’s shoulders in a relatively light blow designed to knock it off its feet, then kept on the pressure so it couldn’t get back up. “OK, hurry!” Danielle said; the staff gave her some leverage, but the animal was strong for its size and understandably desperate to get free.

  Heather readied her sword, dithered for a moment with a reluctant groan, then swung awkwardly down at the animal. She hit a little forward of the neck and the blade slid down the skull, peeling pelt as it went, before mercifully hitting the neck hard enough to kill anyway. Danielle got a mana burst message, but it was only for ten points.

  “Ew, ew, ew, ew!” Heather exclaimed, backing up rapidly and almost running into Cassy.

  “Deep breath, Heather,” Danielle said, taking one of her own. “Remember, leveling with mana that doesn’t come from people! How much did you get?”

  “I – I got 40,” she answered after a moment.

  “Good. That’s a good hunting day, right?” Danielle asked.

  “Yeah, that’s a good solid day’s progress,” Cassy agreed.

  “You’re still gutting it though, right?” Heather pled.

  “Yes, fine, I’ll skin it. Let’s go find Akari and Sadie so they can make sure I’m doing it right,” Danielle agreed.

  Akari patiently oversaw Danielle’s gutting attempt, as did Cassy to her surprise. All she said about it was that her parents had taught her the theory, but she didn’t have much practice. Danielle joked that she now officially had two more practical experiences than she’d ever wanted, but she got the guts out and the hide off, and drained the blood, and wiped the blood off her knife, and somehow managed not to puke. By the time they had the carcass loaded into the bag Akari had brought for it (part of the set that the red cats bag had come from, evidently, since it featured the same cartoon cats on a black background), Danielle was silently but fervently thanking God for the rain that washed all the blood down the road embankment and away from her. She still had to bury the guts, but that was easier somehow, and then they were covered and out of sight, and the rain washed the dirt off the camping spade.

  No one else had caught anything, but one more day’s protein and the promise of blueberries was enough to raise the party’s spirits as they all gathered armloads of firewood and hiked back to the Rooms, following the same path they’d come by. The rain was still pouring, and most of them still had aching muscles, but Danielle, at least, couldn’t help feeling accomplished.

  They had food for supper, food for the next day’s supper, food they knew how to preserve (probably), and food to come pick later. Clothing was going to be a problem eventually, but it wasn’t a problem for the next few weeks (laundry issues aside) and shelter was handled by the Rooms, as was water. If they could keep alternating snares and the fish trap, it looked like they had a clear, reasonably safe path to both feeding themselves and leveling. It was not half bad for a roomful of 14 year old girls, Sent against all known rules and without any significant preparation, even if Danielle did say so herself!

  The morning’s work had even felt, well, normal. Sitting around the counter, working on something practical, letting the conversation follow this and that tangent; it wasn’t how she’d expected to spend her summer, but for a few hours, she’d been free of a lurking sense of desperation that had crept into the background of all her thinking almost without her noticing. It was nice. She felt like she was starting to get a feel for how she could live out here for enough years to reach level 10. She felt like she wouldn’t mind so much, spending a lot of her summer like that.

  Of course, they were still ‘sneaking’ back into the building – not Class-Skill sneaking, but staying out of sight for fear someone would notice their food and try to kill them for it. That was a feature of the new life Danielle could do without, but she hoped that as everyone else figured out that fishing and snaring and picking wild berries were all possible, people would calm down and stop trying for deadly shortcuts. After all, lots of people might want to get back Inside fast, but nobody wanted to end up like Arny.

  When they got back to the rooms, they put the black cat bag in the cold box and retrieved the red cat bag in its place, and Akari got Heather (very reluctantly) to help cut up the meat to go into the pot while Danielle made good on her plan to handle all the wet stuff. She wiped as much of the rain as possible off of everyone’s ponchos onto the ground outside the door, which was still damp but encouragingly un-flooded. She also collected their boot covers to shake off outside the Room, though they didn’t actually retain much water. Then she went into the bathroom to wring out the wet legs of her blue jeans into the bathtub, all the while muttering to the System about how nice it would be to have some better way of removing water from clothing. She offered to do the same for everyone else, but the others preferred to just dry their legs by the cooking fire – and fair enough, that was Danielle’s plan as well, because wringing the hems of her jeans didn’t exactly make them dry, just less damp.

  Instead, she washed her hands and started spreading tomato pieces from the less-full pot out on Sadie’s drying racks. The two frames were connected by cord Sadie didn’t want to cut, but she’d left enough length that they could be stacked and carried, rather than needing to be carried side by side. Meanwhile, the other four were having a debate about whether to cook Sadie’s rabbit by boiling in water and then roasting, as before, or by boiling it in the tomato goo from the mugs, or by roasting it and then shredding the meat and cooking the tomato goo with the shredded meat as a sort of casserole or ‘hot pot.’ Danielle decided that she didn’t need to get into that argument, and concentrated on spreading the tomato pieces evenly and not wasting any space.

  Sadie finally bowed out of the argument and announced her intention to go start the fire. That ended the argument altogether, because everyone agreed that the fire needed to get going first. They got together a pot full of rabbit pieces, a canteen of water, the bark and wood shavings from Sadie’s work on the drying frames, the one dry log that they’d brought inside the day before along with Sadie’s partially complete cutting and drying log-tools, and a selection of smaller branch segments that were damp from being out in the morning’s rain. Danielle quietly loaded her always empty-looking bag with their usual books, then followed along with the drying racks.

  They all trooped down to the corner with the fire spot, helpfully protected from the weather by the balcony above. Sadie piled her shavings into the big brazier and set the dry log on top of them. Heather used her Firestarter Skill to light the tinder, which Akari declared “cheating,” and Cassy declared “awesome cheating.” The dry log caught soon enough, and the other firewood was stacked over it to get dry in turn. That made the fire rather “smoky,” except as Danielle pointed out, it was obviously steam more than smoke.

  She pulled up one of the mismatched benches close to the brazier and set up the drying racks so they were leaning against the back of the bench, giving them as much exposure to the fire as she could manage. Then she pulled up a second bench between the drying racks and the walkway, where she could keep anyone from messing with them (she hoped), and pulled out Useful Crafts for Skill and Trade to read up on tanning.

  Once the fire got going, the others got back to debating how to prepare the rabbit. Roasting the pieces won when it was pointed out that the brazier didn’t offer a convenient flat surface to put the pot on. Heather and Sadie went back to the room and returned with the skewers, their canteens, and their notebooks. Danielle handed over both copies of A Firmitatem Ranger’s Guide to the Outside and they pulled up a bench on the other side of the drying racks to sit and study. Akari said she was going to work on her Skills, and started going through sword forms in the space between the brazier and the corner post of the balcony. Cassy said she was going to get her copy of Class Guide: Mana Casters, Basic and First Tiers, only for Danielle to pull room 6024’s copy triumphantly from her bag, so she sat down laughing on Danielle’s bench and read that for a while.

  When the fire started to burn down a little, they skewered the rabbit meat and propped the skewers between the brazier and the feet of the benches. Then Cassy proposed that she get her staff, and she and Akari could do staff forms together. Akari agreed, and when Cassy got back, Danielle also put aside her book and stepped around the fire to do staff exercises with the two of them.

  “You’re crazy,” Heather told her. “Akari has that Skill that makes her muscles recover faster, and Cassy didn’t do all the walking yesterday, but you? Speed Improvement or not, you’re crazy.”

  “I’m determined,” Danielle told her, even as she moved through the forms. “I even have the Determination Skill tree to prove it! I may be sore now, but I’m not so sore I can’t do what needs done, and I need to stay in training – there is no worse time than right now to lose my edge. Whatever edge I ever had, anyway.”

  Heather went back to her book with a non-committal “Hmm.” Sadie, however, put her book quietly aside, pulled her staff out from under the bench, and joined the exercises.

  Danielle didn’t want to rub it in to Heather, but she had a second reason for joining the staff training routine. Above them on the walkway, they were starting to hear people walking around and talking in low voices, in spite of the still-pouring rain. She hoped it was just some room groups using the fire corners of the upper floors to prepare their own dinners, but she was somewhat concerned that it might be people noticing the smoke and the smell of meat from their fire. A bunch of people doing staff forms would look more intimidating than a bunch of people sitting around reading, if anyone got any funny ideas.

  With four of them in the line, however, they were taking up part of the walkway; so when a chattering group came around the end of the building, the SHAD Party girls stepped back out of the walkway proper and stood with their staves casually at their sides to let the group pass. The approaching group went quiet and wary, presumably not expecting to see people doing weapons exercises around the brazier. They grouped up in a defensive formation around two people, one of which was a girl carrying what looked like a foil pan, similar to Cassy’s Necessities-store ‘cookware’ pick. The other was a boy Danielle recognized from school, named Nathan, who was carrying his canvas satchel and his staff. A glance at the back row of their group confirmed that half of them were boys – it might have been a two-room group, one room of girls and one of boys.

  At first, Danielle was relieved to see the foil pan – the girl was carrying it like it had some mass to it, so there must be something in it. That gave her good hope that they wouldn’t be after her room’s rabbit meat. Then the other party came abreast of the brazier and stopped anyway, staring at the scene in dismay, and she was briefly worried again. Finally, the girl in the lead spoke up.

  “Um, hi. I don’t want any trouble or anything, but we kind of need a fire to cook on ourselves, and the building seven boys already chased us off,” she started.

  “Oh, of course,” Danielle blurted in relief. “We can handle that!”

  “This place really is making me paranoid,” Sadie muttered. Danielle wasn’t sure if that was meant for the other party’s ears or not, but the girl heard it.

  “Yeah, it’s doing a number on everyone’s heads,” she agreed. “If you don’t mind us sharing the fire, though – it looks like all your stuff’s on that side anyway, so maybe we can just take this side, rearrange the benches a little?”

  “Yeah, no problem,” Heather said, standing up and pulling her bench around so it faced north towards the other group rather than east toward the fire.

  Akari just nodded and helped move benches for the others, making a south-facing line of seats to match the SHAD Party’s north-facing line. Danielle was quietly glad their party had the seats with their backs to the wall, rather than the seats with their backs to the walkway, but she supposed as long as nothing crazy happened, it wouldn’t matter much.

  The foil pan turned out to be full of fish, and they slid it over the edge of the brazier to cook. That done, the group arranged themselves across their three benches, with a couple of people half sitting on the arm rests of the two benches on their side that had them.

  “So! I guess introductions are in order!”

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