“Infravision!” Danielle immediately said. “I know I won’t be able to get it today, but it is so on my list! Our rooms are pitch black with the lights out, and what if the generator ever goes out? I want to be able to see in the room at night, not to mention the woods, and I think infravision is the best option – it lets you see colors that represent heat! They say some animals have it. I really want to see what it looks like – maybe ultravision someday too, but I have no idea how to even go about that, and I have some ideas for infravision. Besides, I don’t think ultravision will help with the seeing at night issue.”

  “She always brings that up when we talk Skills,” Sadie said. “We’re working on System Tanning too, though – at least three of us.”

  “It’s one of those Skills where you reluctantly do the thing and hope the System gives you the Skill soon, so you’ll never have to do it again,” Cassy said. “Brain tanning is disgusting.”

  “I’m working on unlocks for the Herbalist class,” Heather said. “It will work well alongside Healer, and it doesn’t require me to mash brains in a pit. Yech.”

  “That’s really how you tan hides, though?” Tom asked. “What’s the step between ‘mash the brains’ and ‘tanned hides’ then?”

  “You kind of make brain soup and soak the hide in it,” Cassy said. “Then you stretch it a lot while it’s drying, and then you have to smoke it. Supposedly you can use eggs instead of brains, but who has eggs out here? Every animal comes with free brains, though.”

  “If we did have eggs, we’d eat them,” Sadie added.

  “Are brains not edible?” Zephyr asked. Danielle thought he was teasing, but she wasn’t sure.

  “Don’t know, don’t want to find out,” Sadie replied, and just about everyone in hearing offered a few words of agreement with that.

  The conversation continued around Danielle, lingering on the subject of Skills that would make it easier to clean and make use of animal parts, but she started paying more attention to her wider surroundings. The four people immediately behind the SHAD party and their new conversation partners were Nathan, Cynthia, and the two Reggies from the Lemonade party – Dana had apparently hung back with Lauren. Behind them were Lucy, Angela, and their roommates, and beyond that Danielle couldn’t see easily. The forest to either side was quiet, probably because the column of chattering Sent was anything but; a lot of people were talking loudly to be heard by those before and behind them in the column, since almost everyone was with a group of four or more, and they were only walking one or two abreast.

  The path ahead continued with its sort of unmaintained cobblestone look, occasionally meandering back and forth around larger trees or other obstacles. About an hour in they reached a fork in the path; the cobblestones continued in both directions around a large pond. The forest opened up a bit around it, but not much; the path itself seemed to be what held the trees back from marching right up to the edge of the water. (Danielle wasn’t sure if that was coincidence or truth.) Gonzo and Marc decided to split up and follow both paths for a ways before reporting back and deciding which way to go. Zephyr volunteered to go too, so they wouldn’t both have to go alone, and Danielle volunteered to go with the other one on grounds that she had proven she would be able to keep up.

  Danielle ended up with Gonzo. They followed the path to the right, while Marc and Zephyr went left. Their path followed the curve of the pond, then split off again with one branch bearing more to the right, and the other continuing to curve around to the left. Gonzo nodded to the right, and Danielle nodded back in agreement, so they took the right fork and followed it back into the woods. A few minutes later, Marc called to them from behind. “Gonzo! Danielle! We’re on the same path – it’s a loop.”

  They went back to find the column bunched up at the first branch, and passed the word back to keep to the right. Lauren and Dana had taken the opportunity to get to the front and rejoin their party. Zephyr tried to fall into line next to Danielle again, telling her, “Between you and me, I feel like we missed something, but I haven’t been able to put a finger on why I feel that way – it’s driving me a little bit crazy.”

  “Come up here and march vanguard with me, then,” Marc called back. “Gonzo thinks so too, so he’s going off the trail to see if he can figure it out, and I need a partner!”

  Zephyr’s smile went a little fixed, but he still said, “Sure, I can do that,” and moved up.

  That freed Jordan to move up again, and he looked like he had something serious on his mind, but Danielle remembered that voices carried along the column and immediately sidetracked him by asking, “What’s the wildest Skill you ever heard of that you honestly think might be real?” That got the whole column, or at least the near section, all talking about something safely theoretical for the next hour or so. Marc and Zephyr set a slightly slower pace than Gonzo had, but Danielle thought they were still making pretty good time.

  It was a little concerning that the path continued at the angle it had taken when it branched off near the pond, because it seemed to be trending quite a bit more east than she’d expected, but eventually it started curving back west. Aside from the occasionally rocky outcropping or small stream they had to cross, there wasn’t much of interest – well, aside from edible plants here and there, which a number of people were watching out for, but the consensus seemed to be that finding the access point was more important than picking food, at least on the way out. The reason for the bend never became clear, though, and time was ticking on; Danielle had expected to make the three miles in rather closer to two hours than three, considering the well marked and mostly clear path. It wasn’t even particularly hilly. Nonetheless, they hadn’t reached a destination yet, and it was past the three hour mark.

  The group pressed on, not without some grumbling, because the narrow path offered nowhere for such a large group to stop easily. Finally, just before noon, they reached the end of the path – but it was not the Access Point. Danielle stepped out into the semi-clear area with a sense of wonder. It wasn’t what they’d been looking for, but it certainly was fascinating. They’d found some sort of ruined village.

  It wasn’t like the ruins that Camp Constanza had been built among. Instead of concrete and the occasional bricks, this place had fieldstone foundations, reminiscent of the pathway that had brought them to it. The remnants of wooden walls still stood here and there, and they were logs – sometimes split, sometimes whole. The forest fought to reclaim patches of hard-packed earth that had been floors in some of the buildings. As the rest of the group spread out and examined the village, they found other points of interest. There had been outhouses, and some of the pits were still open – a few even still had toilet seats! The wooden buildings were gone, but fieldstone and clay ‘thrones’ with ceramic seats still made the original purpose obvious.

  A couple of parties hung rain ponchos around a couple of the better-preserved latrines, and everyone took a break to use them, pick through the ruined buildings, and eat lunch. Danielle ended up wandering the site, eating her jerky, saving her tomatoes for supper. Sadie and Jordan came with her, while the rest of the party sat along a low stone wall that had probably been the foundation of a house, or at least some kind of hut.

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  “Does it look to you like this one had a fenced-in yard?” Danielle asked Sadie.

  “Yeah. Big house too,” Sadie said, “and the stone parts are higher.”

  “I’m wondering if it wasn’t a barn,” Danielle said. “Like, for animals, you know?”

  “Oh – yeah, that makes sense,” Jordan said. “Bigger building, stronger because the animals weren’t gonna be careful with it, and a fence to keep them in the part with grass when it’s sunny. What do you think they had? Do you think there are wild cows out here?”

  “I dunno, but whatever it was, I hope it’s still around,” Danielle said. “I mean, this place has to have been built by the last group of Sent, right? It’s too close to Firmitatem to be anything else, especially with that sorta-paved path leading right to the roads like that.”

  “If it was Sent, why not just stay in the Rooms though?” Jordan asked.

  “The animals,” Sadie said. “Can’t keep cows in the Rooms.”

  “Yeah, and you can’t dig tanning pits in the Rooms’ yards either, or make proper fireplaces inside the rooms for that matter. Lots of options open up if you have your own place.” She looked around again. Surely some of the trees here were too old to have grown up just since the last Sending? They must have kept some trees between the buildings. She could imagine it being beautiful, in a way the Inside could never match – not that the Inside didn’t have its own places of beauty. “I wonder if there’s anything useful left here besides the foundations?” she mused.

  Sadie looked at her. “The foundations are useful?” she asked.

  “If anyone wanted to build a summer-home or hunting camp for themselves, sure,” Danielle said. “The other thing I was thinking, though, was flint.”

  “Oh. Let me see what my Skill says,” Sadie said, her eyes widening in understanding. She looked around. “Over there,” she said, pointing to one of the buildings with logs still standing along two walls.

  The three of them went in, and Sadie started digging away leaf mulch from one corner. Danielle looked around carefully, and spotted something that glinted in the dappled light. She went over and dug out a round tin, like a cookie tin, but painted Ranger-brown. It rattled when she picked it up, with the shuss of many small pieces sliding before hitting the side wall. She opened it to see small pieces of stone, a handle-shaped piece of wood, a larger rock with a concave side, and what looked like a length of rough cord. She poked at the cord, and it immediately broke, too old and brittle to be moved. Danielle closed the tin as Sadie announced, “Found it! Look at this, Danielle!”

  Danielle came over, still holding the tin. Sadie was holding up what could only be a stone axe-head. “Now that’s a beautiful sight,” Danielle told her with a grin.

  “Wasn’t quite finished when they left, I think,” Sadie said. “There’s more flint here too, just rocks, maybe a stash for future projects.”

  “Now it’s our stash for future projects, then,” Danielle said. “I found the leftover flakes from past projects, by the way.” She rattled the tin.

  “The container’ll be useful, anyway,” Sadie said.

  “Let me rephrase,” Danielle said with a grin. “I found this guy’s bow-drill kit, missing nothing but the bow part. We’ll have to remake the string, but the flint chips will definitely be useful.”

  “Oh! Yeah. Here, can you carry this rock?” Sadie said, handing Danielle a large flattish flint rock. Danielle grimaced but loaded it into one of her bags without complaint. Sadie put a smaller chunk into her own bag along with a roundish rock of another type entirely, more tan/white than gray. Then she handed a third rock to Jordan. “You helping?” she asked him.

  “I don’t know how far I can carry that,” Jordan said uneasily.

  “You’ll be sore the day after, but you’ll get stronger,” Sadie said. “That’s how our Party did it – we carried a whole bunch of heavy stuff the very first day. Then we needed a day off to rest, but it was Sunday and our religious members were taking the day off anyway. Day of hard exercise, day of rest and recovery, repeat until strong.”

  “So you don’t think you’ll be sore from carrying these rocks?” Jordan asked skeptically.

  “We might be, but we’ll do it anyway and be stronger after that,” Danielle said. She glanced at Sadie, who was staring off into the distance. “Do you see another deposit?” she asked. “We might need to get the others if we’re taking any more.”

  “No, just thinking,” Sadie said. “I’m going to have to start taking that rest day stuff more seriously.”

  “When have we not taken it seriously?” Danielle asked.

  “You have, I haven’t,” Sadie said. “I always said religion was just people fooling themselves into believing in something imaginary, and if some god wanted people to worship him he’d make it obvious. That was easy to say before, but yesterday I watched a miracle happen.”

  “Oh. Well, yes, and it was unusually obvious,” Danielle said. “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “No.” Sadie shook her head and stood up. “Um, need to, probably, but later. Anyway, no flint at all in these walls. I guess they didn’t waste good tool-making material on that.”

  “Makes sense,” Danielle said easily. Sadie had never been a big talker, and Danielle could be patient. “If any of them had Detect Materials, and there must have been crafters involved in all this, they could easily end up prying out any flint that made it into the walls and just pushing a less useful rock in, instead.”

  “I don’t think it works like that,” Jordan said. “Easy enough to check before they piled the rocks all up, though, if they had the Skill.”

  They searched the next building as well, but didn’t find anything usable, though they did take note of the remains of what had to have been furniture. Before they could move on to a third spot, Lauren was calling for everyone’s attention again.

  “Our scouts have found and followed down the other path into this place,” Lauren announced. “We think it heads straight south, quite possibly to the Access Point. The info the room guides gave us about distance and the amount of time we’ve been walking, along with the fact that they paved a path south from here and not north, both suggest that we missed a branch somewhere and passed the Access Point, so we’re going to follow the path we hope will lead us back to it now!”

  There was some minor grumbling about the short stop, but everyone got up and moving. The SHAD party regrouped and followed the Lemonade party to the second path, which led south again with no bend to the east or west. Behind them, the column formed up again. This path was a little narrower, so a lot more people ended up going single file. Fortunately it only took about half an hour of walking to reach their proper destination: the wild Access Point.

  There was one tapered pillar standing in the middle of a wide circular clearing, and every plant in the clearing or around its periphery was mana-lavender from root to tip. Purple flowers danced on soft purple stems in a breeze filtering through the deep purple bark of lavender-leafed trees. The trees reached arching branches overhead, but they stayed clear of the open space around the pillar, creating a sort of dome for the site. The pillar itself was exactly like the one Danielle had seen in the Dome of Decision – the same gray stone as the mountain tunnels, about three feet high with a rounded top and a token-shaped depression at the top center. This one stood on a round foundation of the same stone, or perhaps that was simply a part of the pillar; Danielle couldn’t see a seam.

  As she stepped beyond the tree line, System text greeted her, as it had in the Dome of Decision; but here, there was no mention of Firmitatem. Instead, the greeting read, "Welcome to this open Access Point. Location Name: Constanza North. Please do not fight inside the circle; penalties are active. Place your hands on the access point to activate System Access features. If you want to use a token, place it in the top of the access point.”

  Everyone filed into the circle, quietly aside from a few low-voiced exclamations at the unexpectedness of it all. Danielle found herself gradually moving counter-clockwise around the outer edge of the circle as more people arrived, making room. It just didn’t seem right to crowd the pillar, and she didn’t want to rush up and start while everyone was still walking in, either. It was a beautiful sight, majestic but also surreal in its mana-purple monochrome.

  Someone who was moving around the circle in the other direction suddenly announced, “Hey, there’s another clearing over here. It looks like a regular green meadow, but with maybe a well off to one side? Do you think we should camp in there?”

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