June 13th, 2337 – Wednesday

  Dear Diary,

  It’s been 10 days since I levelled up – I’m presumably a third of the way to being able to level safely again. I took a risk today, when we went hunting with the Lemonade party and the other people they invited along. Did I write about that yesterday? I just checked, and I didn’t write a thing about this yesterday. I guess that’s understandable, I was a little stressed yesterday from Sadie and Akari being all infected in the thorn thrasher slashes, even though Heather and I tried so hard to take care of them. Since the Ranger Healers did get us healed all the way up, though, we were free to hear out the Lemonade party when they asked us if we’d like to go hunting.

  Lauren and I are both level 2 and way too close to our last level-up to want (let alone need) a lot of mana right now. (I have mentioned Lauren before, right? She’s the leader of the Lemonade party.) We both have whole parties full of other people that still do need to level, even though we’re on cooldown! Besides that, the Rangers told me/us that we’d be safer with extra mana channels, like more Careers to drop Career Skills when there are mana bursts, and an extra Class to take our main absorption when it’s not safe to set the pointer to our base level. Also, it can be good to update your unlocked Skills list before you level or need a Career Skill or whatever, and you need the Access Point for that. Therefore, we both wanted to go to the Access Point soon (both parties, I mean). Therefore-therefore, we needed some extra food, so we could take a day off from hunting our own food and go to the Access Point to update our Systems and especially for Lauren and I to run the Access Point version of the new-Career search. It costs mana, but it’s a lot faster than the free version.

  Anyway, Lauren’s party found some deer and they invited a whole bunch of people to go hunt the deer with them, for meat and mana. The plan was for Lauren and I to drive the deer toward everyone else, making sure that we would get assist mana but definitely not killing-share mana, because we’d be shooting our arrows at non-lethal spots, but everyone else would be shooting to kill. It mostly worked! It turns out deer have more mana than you’d think though, and I got an assist on one and bystander mana for two of them, so my Class is actually about to level up to 2. That’d be exciting if it wasn’t Basic Sneak, which I’m not sure was a good idea anymore. Worse, that’s my cushion to avoid levelling my base level, and if the base level goes too soon, I could get a mutation and never be able to go Inside! That’s not OK (and it would probably make this family diary pointless) so now I urgently need the Access Point.

  I keep reminding myself, the Class can keep absorbing mana until it’s ready to go to level 3; then it will just cap out until my base level goes up, but it’s still that much more safety mana. My base level isn’t actually full yet either, so I shouldn’t be panicking over mana just yet, especially since we do have a plan to go to the access point tomorrow! It’s going to be fine; I’ll pick a better Class to be my main Class from here on out. I have the mana for it because of Skill Sharer (which I still can’t believe I didn’t realize what it was when I first took it, it’s such a big deal, and most people seem to have figured it out right away).

  ANYway. You’d think the deer hunt and nearly maxing out my Class would have been the big deal thing today, but IT WASN’T because an actual miracle happened! First of all, I heard the voice of God this morning telling me to go on the hunt when we were thinking of pulling out (because one of the four evil roommates turned out to be going, and we were nervous about her – that turned out to be a big fat nothing-burst). He said, “Go as you promised; I will protect you all. No one will die on this hunting trip.”

  We really did promise. Some of the other people were really nervous about the deer with horns antlers (Marc insists that there’s a difference between horns and antlers and kept telling us to get it right). Lauren got them to come by promising there would be three Healers and a Medic there. I’m not really a classed Medic, but I have some Medic Skills, and with Nathan from the Lemonade Party, Heather from our party, and a Healer from one of the other parties, we had enough System-based medical support to shut down the panic. If Heather and I both pulled out at the last minute, though, the whole trip might have gone down the drain.

  Since God said to go, and Melanie said she was willing to just leave us alone, we went, and like I said, the hunting mostly went pretty well. Most people managed to get at least an assist, and several people also got in good Skill practice or training for Skill unlocks. I think everyone got a mana-burst Career Skill, too, from the bystander effect from whichever deer they hadn’t managed to shoot. Part of the Skill stuff was, one deer got away injured, and Akari used her tracking Skill to find it. That’s when IT HAPPENED.

  Since I really didn’t want any more mana, I was supposed to be the one to scare the deer into running towards the people with their bows out again. Not everyone even came, and the group that did all really wanted to get a shot in. That meant I was nearly alone while they were getting set up. We were just about ready, when someone grabbed me from behind and put a knife to my throat!

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  He was as scared as I was; I could feel him trembling. I could feel it in the knife – I hope I never have to deal with that feeling ever again. But. The point is, he was scared and didn’t really want to be there, but stinking Vince from the Wolf Pack party had gone and got him all wound up about how he was going to starve and die if he didn’t kill someone who wasn’t a wild animal because wild animals supposedly have better survival Skills in their Systems than people, so they’re harder to kill. There was more to the whole thing, but the point is, Vince talked this guy into believing that he had to kill a person or he’d die. I’ve written about Vince’s whole thing with killing me because I embarrassed him and threw his sword off a balcony – I figure he was trying to get Jordan (that’s the new guy’s name) to do his dirty work, and then he could kill Jordan while the Murder tag’s whole “temporary Trait: Outlaw” thing was in effect, so he (Vince) wouldn’t have to get a Murder tag of his own, and get hit with the Outlaw thing and have to hide out in the woods for three days. Jerk.

  I tried to talk Jordan down, but he was all in panic mode, especially when Marc and Sadie and Akari came to see why I wasn’t joining them after scaring the deer. They were yelling at each other, and that’s when I yelled out a prayer for help, and Impossible Things Happened.

  I’m a little afraid to write down all of it, but Mom and Dad, if you’re really reading this someday, ask me and I’ll read you the crazy System Messages I got. It was like God reached down and said “You know what? You have a fully Advanced System, and you’re free to add as many System Abilities as you like, now that you’re Sent, so have a System ability that will not only solve this but keep it from happening again!” He gave me a tier 3 Skill! I’m only level 2! Impossible? It should be, but apparently not impossible for God! I also have a new org in my org list, and it’s called “Servants of the Creator” and it says I’m a “Wakeful Saint.” (As an org status, I mean.) That’s pretty awesome, except I’m worried about Systemists deciding I’m a saint of the System – plus my new friend Cassy, I know I told you about her already, I think she might be Catholic and I don’t think I’m her kind of saint either, so I don’t know if that’s going to be a problem for her. I told her already, along with the rest of my hunting party; at least it's a Party Secret for all of them! It reminds me that it could be annoying even with other Christians, though, if people jump to conclusions. Hopefully Jordan won’t tell anyone.

  So the Skill activated as if on its own and threw him back, but threw his knife and hatchet forward, so I didn’t get hurt. I saw it knock down Vince, too, but he got away while everyone else was being all shocked at impossible stuff happening. I think Jordan thought he was going to die right there and then, but I decided if God went to all that trouble but left him alive, then it must be on purpose, and who am I to kill someone that God wants alive? Besides, Jordan really just wanted a way to survive and not starve. I talked him into coming back to the clearing with us and taught him to make the fish trap our party has been using (I wrote about that before too, the one where you put sticks into the mud on the river bottom to make the trap.)

  Sadie saw it happen, so she’s reconsidering her ideas about whether God exists or not. Jordan caught a bunch of fish while we were roasting the deer, and decided to come to the Access Point with us tomorrow, too. Heather’s being a little annoying, refusing to believe it was a real miracle, even though Sadie of all people says it looked like a miracle to her. Akari and Cassy are just really excited, because they believe (and remember, Akari saw it too, and Marc). As for me, I spent the whole afternoon kind of in shock, but the tier 3 Skill is still there. I can even use it! It’s expensive, but it’s the normal price for its tier and level, and it works, even though it should be impossible for my level 2 System to even have a Skill of that tier, let alone use it. It’s called Shield Burst and it pushes everything away from me, really hard. I tried it in the river, and almost did a miniature rendition of the parting of the Red Sea! (Not for very long though – just half a second, and then the water came right back.)

  It was a wild day. Oh, and I was close enough for the mana bursts from both of the deer I didn’t shoot, so I got two bystander Career Skills too – not counting the miracle one, that didn’t come from the mana bursts. Oh, and there’s a Trait from the miracle, too. Its tier has a question mark in it! What does that even mean? Hopefully the Access Point will fix it tomorrow.

  I have to go to bed; we’re getting an early start on a four-mile hike tomorrow – and that’s if we don’t have any problems following the trail. Nobody in the Sending has actually been to the Access Point yet, so who knows? The plan is kind of cool – we’re going to camp overnight, mostly just to practice camping, and come back to camp with new abilities unlocked exactly two weeks after the first time we came to camp with new abilities unlocked (which was Decision Day, to be clear, when we Advanced our Systems for the Sending and became adults for legal and System purposes and all that stuff).

  Hopefully it will be a lower-key kind of exciting than today was!

  Anyway, I guess that’s all for tonight. Thank you for the miracle, God! Thank you for praying for me, Mom and Dad.

  Signed, Danielle Falconer, June 13, 2337.

  finally heading for the Access Point. If you'd like to read it all right now, that's an option on .

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  I have completed the new word-count for the Writathon with 2 hours to spare, at 55,584 words. I'm in the middle of a chapter, so obviously I'm not done with anything but the word-count goal :P I still feel accomplished, though!