“I kind of like this idea,” Cassy said, “but I don’t think we’ll get all of that done today.”

  “OK, probably not, especially if the rain lets up and we decide to pick tomatoes before we set the snares,” Danielle admitted. “We can get through a couple people’s turns though, and next time it’s bad weather, or we have waiting time around the fish trap or whatever, we can keep going.”

  “I shouldn’t go first, though,” Akari said. “We don’t have any practice swords. When it’s my turn, we have to go out in the rain so we can spread out enough to practice with our real swords.”

  “When it’s dry enough to deal with hatchets and stuff, we really need to get wood and stuff for some projects,” Cassy said. “Practice swords, a flute, more drying rack frames, plus enough grass or whatever for Sadie to teach us cord twisting, maybe tanning stuff, lots of things. If we get a few days ahead on food, we might want to focus a day on that.”

  “Maybe we can do that when we go look for the Access Point,” Sadie said.

  “Do what now?” Cassy asked.

  “Danielle needs the Access Point as soon as possible, and we’ll all need it eventually,” Sadie said. “Plus, I’m curious to see if a few days of new-Sent-ness is enough to unlock new stuff. We should go with Danielle to find the Access Point that’s north of here, like the Rangers said.”

  “Why do you need an Access Point already?” Cassy asked.

  “I have some mana from a certain Skill the Rangers got all excited about,” Danielle said. “Um, because I traded the results of the Skill to one of them. She said it was awesome, but only if I survived to level it up and keep using it for people, so she paid me enough mana for a new Skill and suggested a defensive Skill I should get with that mana. I need the access point to get the Skill.”

  “Now who’s being paranoid?” Sadie asked.

  “Um, I mean – “ Danielle stammered, blushing. “OK, fine, but this is super secret, for now. I have a Trait called Skill Sharer that gives me a token template for Skill tokens. I can make a token of any Skill I can use. It costs the same as taking the Skill, so 100 mana for tier 1, 150 for tier 2. You can take the token to the Access Point and get the Skill, though, even if it’s not unlocked for you. I also got that Combat Medic Skill from the mana burst, and when I told the Rangers they got all excited and said I should see someone with Skill Sharer at a high level, so they could make tokens from my Skill; so I told them I had Skill Sharer myself and they absolutely flipped.”

  “Well yeah,” Cassy said, sounding half awed and half amused. “Skill Sharer is one of the big ones. If you have that, you’re a VIP with the government. Nobody knows how to unlock it properly. You can do any job you want during the day, even volunteer all day, and make money hand over fist just making Skill tokens for the government for an hour in the evening. You think you’re gonna be rich for a Sent? Just wait until you take Skill Sharer back Inside – you’re gonna be just plain filthy rich!”

  “Um, sure, if I survive to level 10,” Danielle said. “Same as everyone, except with jealousy in play.”

  “Oh. When you put it that way, I can see why you’re feeling paranoid,” Cassy admitted.

  “She would’ve told you in a day or three anyway,” Sadie said. “Think about it: any Skill Danielle gets, the rest of us can buy from her. It’s important for Party members to know for planning, and it’s also important for us to help her get Skills! That’s probably half the reason she wants everyone to teach each other stuff, too.”

  “Actually, I wasn’t thinking about it that way,” Danielle said. “I just think it could be important for us to be able to take over from each other when our specialist in a given area is sick or hurting or whatever. You do kind of have a point, though. Traits are still personal, but Skills are fair game, at least for loyal and trusted Party members. You can see why the Ranger wants me to get a defense Skill, though.”

  “And she bought a token from you, as an excuse to give you the mana?” Cassy asked.

  “Well, that, and she really wanted Combat Medic,” Danielle said. “Apparently they know how to unlock that one, but it’s still not easy.”

  “She said it had three Skill or Trait prerequisites, and something you have to do,” Heather reported. “I’m still trying to figure out what the third one is!”

  “I think it’s Speed Improvement, actually,” Danielle said, “or at least, I think Speed Improvement is the thing I have that meets that requirement. It sounds like it’s a Skill or Trait from each of three categories – remember, she knew I had to have some kind of fighting Skill, but she still asked which specific Skill it was. I think it’s a healing or medic Skill, a combat related Skill, and a speed related Skill or Trait, and you have to use them all at the same time.”

  “You think there’s a Skill that only unlocks when you use three other Skills at the same time?” Cassy asked.

  “Well, yeah. Except obviously Traits work too. I think the idea is, some people were desperately trying to activate three Skills together in emergency conditions, on a regular basis, and the System made a Skill for them that let them do it all in one go.” Danielle shrugged uncomfortably. “I mean, I don’t exactly have proof, but it makes sense with what the Skill does.”

  “OK, but how many people can there really be who would need to use their medical type Skills and their combat Skills at the same time?” Heather asked skeptically.

  “I’m guessing, as many as realized that some medical Skills make you a better fighter,” Danielle said soberly. “Because seriously, when we were fighting the vine thing, and I activated Combat Medic? All of a sudden, I was way more aware of the anatomy of a vine monster, and I knew I needed to change where I hit it. I didn’t have Medic’s Diagnostics active, but it felt just a little bit like how that Skill helps me know what to look at to figure out what needs done for first aid. Imagine if some actual army field medic had a straight up anatomy lore Skill, and he got interrupted using it like I did, and it kept going and telling him about stuff during the fight like my Skill did, but even more, um. I’m not sure what word I want here. It’s somewhere between useful and horrifying. If it was use it and survive or skip it and get killed, though, I can see an army guy starting to use it all the time – fighting, healing, diagnostics, triage, in his sleep – you get what I’m saying?”

  You might be reading a stolen copy. Visit Royal Road for the authentic version.

  “No offense, Danielle, but I think I’m glad my Skills can’t be used that way,” Heather said.

  “Yeah, I get that,” Danielle said. “The more I think about it, the more creeped out I want to be, but at the same time, I also want to survive the next attack, whether it’s vines or people or giant fanged rabbits or whatever.”

  “Please tell me giant fanged rabbits aren’t really a thing,” Heather said.

  “It’s from a book. I doubt it’s real,” Danielle admitted. “Anyway, we’re way off topic. We’re not going to the Access Point today, we’re training each other in useful skills today. Mundanely, I mean, getting System Skills out of it would be a nice bonus, but learning to do things is its own reward.”

  “We should put in some time to practice our existing Skills,” Cassy said. “I seem to recall that someone here is supposed to be making boti bags, for one thing. The first ones probably won’t be much bigger on the inside, but you’ve got to start somewhere.”

  “Oh, right. I need to see if one of the books has more information about that,” Danielles said.

  “Have you even put down those first four books you picked and read the rest of the titles yet?” Cassy asked.

  “We’re still getting useful information out of the ones we started with,” Sadie told her. “Why switch?”

  “Well for one thing, because the second shelf has a book on mana enhancement Skills that probably answers all the obvious questions about Expand Volume,” Cassy said. “And one specifically on food preservation that you guys – that our party – will probably find useful sooner than most other people, and an actual book on anatomy for Healers.”

  “What? I didn’t – I’m not even sure I want to know that stuff, now,” Heather said.

  “Oh, don’t start that,” Akari told Heather. “You can’t make yourself a better Healer by not knowing anything about what kills people. It’s like knowing your enemy, except your enemy is anything deadly to your patient. You have to learn the stuff, and then choose to use the knowledge for good and not evil.”

  “But what if the Skill starts telling me how to kill things, like Danielle’s?” Heather fretted.

  “Then you’ll be better at keeping vine monsters from strangling party members,” Akari said dryly. “Remember, not everything out here trying to kill us is a person.”

  “Yeah, if people aren’t careful about burying trash and stuff, we’ll end up with wildcats and coyotes and maybe even bears around camp,” Cassy said. “The Rangers don’t take it out for us unless it’s at least three levels higher than most of the group.”

  Danielle felt the hairs on the back of her neck standing up. “When you say wildcats, is there any chance you mean like the cat that was trying to steal my, um, whatever-it-was from the snare? Like, normal Inside cats except wild and probably with more System stuff?”

  “No, I mean like mountain lions. They like rabbits too,” Cassy said.

  “Mountain lions? Like, lion-lions, but living in the mountains?” Heather quavered.

  “Same size, different species. They don’t hunt in prides, at least, so that’s something,” Cassy said. “Hopefully we won’t see one for a long time. That’s part of what I wanted to teach in my hour though; moving your trap lines around and not leaving them too long between checks can help prevent them from attracting wild predators that we couldn’t deal with. Danielle’s thief-cat was probably small enough that we could take it even if it had some tricky Skills, but if a mountain lion and a human with equal Systems face off, the mountain lion has a pretty big advantage in weight and claws and instincts; we don’t want to mess with that if we can avoid it.”

  “Cassy,” Danielle said. “1200 people who mostly don’t know this are trying to trap food within convenience distance of this building. How worried should we be, here?”

  “Oh.” Cassy looked like she hadn’t thought of that yet, and didn’t much like the thought. “Um, very? Except they don’t like being around big noisy groups of people, so maybe not. Do we know if Hostility Sense recognizes hungry animals that aren’t afraid to try and eat you as hostile?”

  Akari and Heather both focused their eyes on the outwardly invisible text of their Systems, presumably pulling up their Skill descriptions.

  “It says ‘hostile creatures,’ so I think it should be people and animals both,” Akari said.

  “Mine says ‘hostile System users,’ but I think animals with Systems count,” Heather agreed.

  “I guess we’re safe as long as you don’t see any hostiles prowling the tree line, then,” Cassy said, sounding relieved. “I’m really glad I found a group to go around with, though.”

  “Let’s go ahead and start with you, for teaching each other stuff,” Danielle said to Cassy. “Let’s warm up with those spear drills, then you can tell us more about how to not attract giant cats and real live bears, and then we’ll do swords with Akari, and then we can have a personal Skill work hour before lunch while I wring out and dry everyone’s denim as best I can before I start reading that book that maybe tells how best to level my new Skill.”

  Despite the unnerving start, the plan actually made for a fairly relaxed morning. They managed to do the spear drills in the room by having only two people do each exercise at a time, one next to each pair of beds. It would have been inefficient, except that everyone was so new to it that Cassy had to be watching and correcting them constantly, and she couldn’t do that for four people at once anyway.

  Once everyone had managed to get through Cassy’s “newbie drills” for spear, they were indeed warmer, and they sat down with their notebooks and a pan of cherry tomatoes to snack and listen to Cassy talk about how to manage traps. Most of it was a lot less frightening than her comment about attracting other predators. It had to do with things like not trapping all the animals in a given area because they needed to leave some to breed, not killing the biggest and strongest before they could breed more big strong animals of their kind, and other considerations that mostly had to do with making sure they didn’t run out of food to catch.

  Danielle thought the whole base needed to learn this stuff, and soon; it was yet another example of things she felt someone should have mentioned to the group before dumping them in the Rooms and leaving them to figure it all out on their own. Cassy pointed out that there was another second-shelf book that would have some of the same information. It was called Ecology and Sustainability: Survival For The Long Haul. Danielle quietly resolved to read it; Heather told Cassy that if the Sending Authority wanted it to get read, they should have said something, or possibly given it a title that didn’t start with two big, academic sound words that “just scream, This Book Is Boring.”

  When Cassy started to look frustrated, Akari decided it was time for her turn, and made everyone get their ponchos and sword belts on and head outside. For once, they went around the walkway to the stairs, and came up to ground level near the paved area between buildings. They went out on the pavement, which wasn’t exactly dry but at least wasn’t soggy either, and Akari asked them to start with the usual drills they did in gym class, only to be reminded that Cassy hadn’t studied sword at all. Sadie, Heather and Danielle ended up doing an exercise routine that would have looked almost entirely normal on sword day back in the school gym, while Akari basically gave Cassy a private lesson on how to handle a sword. Lacking a blunt practice weapon, that lesson went even slower than the spear lessons had.

  The exercise kept everyone pretty warm, even out in the rain, but Danielle still paid attention to the time and let everyone know when it had been an hour. Everyone was happy enough to head back inside when she said time was up, and they didn’t hesitate to give her their wet things to dry off, either. (As Sadie reminded her, “You literally asked for it, no backing out now!”) While Danielle was sluicing as much water as possible off everyone else’s ponchos, Cassy went back to her room for some jerky, then rejoined the Party to eat jerky and tomatoes. Danielle sat in the kitchen while she dried off swords, participating in the conversation before she took as many pairs of wet-legged blue jeans as people were willing to give (three, in the end) into the bathroom to wring out as thoroughly as she could figure out how, then hang over the shower curtain bar and fan a bit. She considered finding some way to put them over a heat source, muttering to the System, but eventually decided they couldn’t afford the fuel and could even less afford to risk catching their only long pants on fire.

  Having dried as much as she could dry, Danielle finally got her own portion of Necessities Store jerky and cherry tomatoes and looked around to see what everyone else was doing.