The question Akari wanted to put to the group turned out to be, “How many rabbits are we cooking, and do you want to show the tomatoes?”

  “Surely just one?” Danielle said.

  “What about two, so we can each have a rabbit quarter for lunch, and for dinner we cut the meat off the other three quarters and make rabbit hot-pot with tomatoes and onions?” Cassy said.

  “I guess that makes sense, too,” Danielle conceded. “We need to use up the last of the tomatoes from the first picking day anyway, so we should go kind of tomato heavy this evening.”

  “We can put in the last of the purple ones for added flavor!” Sadie said with a grin.

  “OK, so two rabbits on the skewer to roast right now, and leave the tomatoes inside?” Akari confirmed.

  “Sounds good to me,” Heather agreed. “There’s a lot of people out there now. So far, everyone seems friendly, but you never know.”

  “True, and we don’t want to have to deal with questions about where we found them,” Akari agreed, pulling out the skewer. “Speaking of purple tomatoes, Sadie, will you purify these? I know you’re doing that a lot for us, but I think we can make up the mana expenditure in purple tomatoes, right?”

  The others nodded. “Sure, no problem. I don’t exactly want food poisoning either,” Sadie joked, then frowned. “Hm. These took an extra point to purify, each. I better do the other one, to keep stuff from building up.”

  Sadie purified the third rabbit carcass, then (washed her hands and) ate three purple tomatoes. “You all owe me three more tonight,” she said.

  “While we’re at it,” Danielle said, “Do you want me to convert a five to a ten in the party healing stash, Heather? Today’s a good day for it.”

  “Oh, yes please,” Heather said.

  Danielle made the ten-point mana token and added another ten points to her Payment Plan while she was at it. Heather got the five-point token out of her first aid kit, and they traded. Danielle stashed the smaller token in her footlocker with her catalog savings.

  “It feels good to have the first aid kit up to sixty,” Heather said. “That would’ve been enough to heal Miriel the other day.”

  “Agreed. Knowing you could heal a pretty serious injury if I got one makes me feel better about the world,” Danielle said.

  “Do you want a few tomatoes?” Akari asked her. “I know you’re probably not running low on mana, exactly, but I’m kind of hoping you’ll be doing bags for the rest of us, you know, for practice?”

  “Oh, um. I’ll need a few if I’m going to be able to do another bag in the morning, yeah,” Danielle admitted. “Also, we should talk about who gets the next one, and so on – but in the morning.”

  “Go ahead and eat some,” Heather said. “Having you level up your Skill will benefit all of us eventually, not to mention that the faster you get around to enhancing each bag, the faster we get to the point where we all have enhanced bags.”

  “True that,” Cassy said. “If you can learn to do it more efficiently, so much the better, but for that you have to practice, right?”

  “Practice, and get more ‘familiar with the mana form,’ according to the book,” Danielle said. “Seems like it might be something you could help me with?”

  “Ooh. Maybe? I’ll probably have to watch you do it once to have any chance of being helpful. Um, once while paying attention to the right thing, that is,” Cassy corrected herself.

  “It sounds like we’re looking at a crafting day tomorrow?” Sadie asked hopefully.

  “Probably while fishing,” Danielle said. “If we’re going to build up food, we have to keep hunting and gathering even when we’ve got some in stock.”

  “But it takes forever to walk out to the fish trap and back,” Sadie argued. “We need time to work on stuff besides food, too.”

  “What if we tried it as an overnight?” Heather suggested. “Take our tents and the water distillers we got on Decision Day and everything, and practice camping while it’s warm, like our guide told us to?”

  “That might have possibilities,” Sadie admitted.

  “I like it,” Akari said. “It’ll be heavy, carrying all the camping stuff, but it won’t be worse than scavenging day, and we still want to keep getting stronger anyway, right?”

  “I’m having second thoughts,” Heather joked.

  “We’ll have to take our ibuprofen, but it’s still a good idea. It’ll give us all a chance to practice archery and slinging, too,” Cassy said. “We can tie our snares overnight there, and with any luck our hunting for Tuesday will be done first thing in the morning, and we can take all afternoon and evening on Tuesday to work on stuff back at camp, here.”

  “I think we have a great plan coming together,” Danielle said, “but if we’re going to do that, we need to roast all three rabbits today, after all – we can’t leave meat that’s threatening to go bad to just sit for two days. Let’s cook them all now and make enough rabbit hot-pot to have it for dinner tonight and breakfast tomorrow.”

  “Good thing I already purified the last one, then,” Sadie said.

  “Yeah, let’s get it on the skewer,” Cassy said. “And find some more forked sticks.”

  “I kept the ones from last time, they’re under my bed,” Sadie told her.

  Sadie got out the sticks, Akari got the third rabbit on the skewer, and they went back out to the fire. It hadn’t been more than 20 minutes since Danielle’s public service announcement at the end of the prayer meeting, but already the fire had been enlarged – spread out along the concrete walkway, Danielle thought, and more wood added. She could see the ABCs toasting some kind of small game at one end, and the Lemonade party had a spit stretched across the center with more birds like the one they’d had on their spit on Friday. They were kind of small, but there were four of them on the stick, which seemed about right for eight people. Peter and three of his friends were already eating what looked like leftover rabbit off to one side – not a room group, Danielle noted, since two of them were girls. Tom was crouched near the Lemonade party, talking to Nathan.

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  Around all of these known and expected people, there were at least a dozen others. Danielle recognized a couple of the girls who had been cooking on the top floor fire corner, now seated as a trio on a blanket, eating some kind of stew out of mugs. A pair of nervous-looking girls used a pair of sticks to hold a rabbit over the opposite end of the fire from the ABCs. A co-ed hunting party of six was taking turns stirring two small pots of familiar design – more necessities store camping gear, like Danielle and her roommates used. A Decision Day distiller pitcher was left nestled into the coals without its lid, steaming; Danielle couldn’t easily tell who it belonged to.

  As Sadie and Cassy were setting up their spit for the rabbits, a sudden quiet fell over the lawn. Danielle turned to see a trio of boys swaggering around the end of building six, swords out in their hands. “Wolf Pack,” she heard people muttering. She distinctly heard the faint smack of Heather’s staff flying to her hand. Danielle picked up her own staff from the ground, keeping an eye on the three new arrivals.

  They were slowing down, muttering to each other, as more and more weapons appeared in hands all across the stretch of grass. Danielle wondered what they were thinking – had they expected so many people to be entirely unarmed? It was a bit unnerving to realize how quickly she had gotten used to everyone being armed, herself. Danielle looked out over the group again, paying attention to different details this time. The ABCs had swords and bows; most of the Lemonade party had all three of their weapons, and both Reggies had bows and arrows in hand. Peter and his friends had swords and staves. The nervous girls were armed only with their knives and hatchets, but the party of six were all stringing bows, and the girls from the third floor had set down their stew and were all standing up with staves in their hands.

  The leader of the three new arrivals took in the same scene with what Danielle could only describe as a predatory smile. Behind him, another boy Danielle didn’t know frowned at the scene, while the third boy was – actually, he was Vince. Also, he was carrying a sword with a distinctly bent point, and there was something about the way he stood – he was the Wolf who had attacked her at building seven. She was amazed she hadn’t realized that the last time she saw him, but then, that time he’d basically been hiding.

  “Look at this!” The lead Wolf called out. “Not quite the welcome I was expecting from a bunch of religious saps!”

  “The prayer meeting’s been over for a while,” Danielle called back. “This is just a bunch of hunting parties sharing a cooking fire.”

  “Is that so? Well then, we may as well share it too, don’t you think?” the lead Wolf said.

  Behind him, Danielle could see Vince saying something; she wasn’t much of a lip reader, but it was brief, and from the way the third Wolf’s eyes were suddenly on her and the lead Wolf gave a tiny nod, she guessed it was something like “That’s her.” Deliver us from evil, she thought, fighting to keep her face impassive. The Wolf Pack wanted to be seen as big and powerful and scary, but they were severely outnumbered here, and they hadn’t brought ranged weapons. She activated Detect Mana Source and scanned around the tree line under guise of inspecting the fire; no unexpected sources out there – at least, no human-sized ones. A small, relatively bright, moving source near the ground might be something like a marmot or that small cat. She turned back to the Wolf trio.

  “Frankly, I think the fire’s kind of overcrowded at this point,” she called to them. “It looks like you might have forgotten your actual food, too.” A few people chuckled at that.

  “We’re the rulers of this town,” the lead Wolf proclaimed. “You owe us a tax in rabbits!”

  Danielle couldn’t stop herself; the active visual imagination that had given her Illusions for a youth Skill conjured an image of movie peasants in line for the tax man, each trying to control a live rabbit, half of which escaped and hopped all over the cobblestone street as they tried to hand them over. She laughed, not long, but loudly, and the lead Wolf narrowed his eyes at her. Poor timing – well, not that the idea of the so-called Wolf Pack leading the town didn’t deserve a laugh. “You know, this town doesn’t have much of a charter, but one thing it does have is a description of how leaders are chosen,” Danielle said. “I’m pretty sure you three haven’t been elected as town council representatives, so you do not in fact rule this town, nor can you impose taxes. In fact, I’m pretty confident you don’t even ‘rule’ your own building.”

  “Is it even true, like I’m hearing people say, that you’re part of the Wolf Pack?” Danielle asked.

  “I’m the alpha of the Wolf Pack,” the lead Wolf growled.

  “Well then you shouldn’t have any trouble hunting your own food,” Danielle said. “Why waste time shaking down other people for scraps?”

  A soft “ooooh,” echoed through the listeners. Not helpful. She needed him to grab some face and stalk off, not get embarrassed and decide he was backed into a corner.

  “I just saw a fat marmot run off that way,” Danielle said, gesturing south. “Or a small cat, but I think it was a marmot. They’re pretty good eating. Go hunt that, if you don’t have anything on hand, and if you need help with a fire after that, then we’ll talk.”

  “We don’t ‘need help’ with anything!” the second Wolf burst out.

  “Well then why are you here?” Danielle asked, letting exasperation color her voice. “If you don’t need our fire, go make your own already!”

  “You’re playing a dangerous game,” the alpha Wolf said. “Maybe you think you’re protecting all these sheep, but you’re just one dog, and my pack will take the whole herd from you in the end.”

  “Easy to say, but you won’t last long if you can’t hunt your own food,” Danielle said. “Though I have to admit, it’s pretty brave to stand facing maybe a dozen archers with nothing but swords, and call them sheep. These people,” she gestured to the hunting party that had been stringing their bows, now all aiming arrows at the Wolf trio, “don’t need me to protect them; they’re protecting themselves just fine. Me, I’m just trying to avoid another mana burst that might put me at risk of mutation. I still want to go back Inside someday, you know? Somewhere in the ten months to ten years range.”

  “Hah! And how many scary mana burst have you seen so far?” the alpha Wolf scoffed.

  “Four, counting the wildcat,” Danielle answered. “How many have you seen?”

  The lead wolf narrowed his eyes at her again. “That’s none of your business.”

  “Well if you don’t want to talk, then again, why are you wasting your time around here?” Danielle asked.

  “Why indeed? Let’s go, packmates,” the alpha Wolf said, suddenly turning on his heel and stalking back between the buildings. The other two followed him, though Vince threw one last glance over his shoulder at Danielle.

  Everyone stood as if frozen until they were out of line-of-sight around the buildings. Then one of the archer party took his arrow off the string with a faint creak, turned to Danielle, and said, “Lady, I don’t know if you’re the bravest person in this camp or just plain crazy, but that was awesome.”

  That broke the silence, as people across the lawn and on the balconies above laughed or whistled or cheered. Looking up, Danielle realized that the balconies were still full of people, and she had once again been “performing” in front of an audience of at least 60 people.

  “Maybe next week, we’ll gather at the river,” Danielle said. “That’s traditional, right?”

  “Oh, yeah, it’s in Acts!” one of the three girls eating stew agreed. That was interesting.

  “Argh! Now you want to drag me all the way out to the river?!” Gonzo complained.

  “Look at it this way,” Nathan told him. “Anyone who’s not there for the prayer meeting is free to fish while those of us who are there to pray do it; and afterwards, there will be lunch again.”

  “I can live with that plan,” Bethany piped up from the spot the ABCs had staked out. “There’s a pretty good spot for it too, if you just go straight west to the river and then a little south – the trees get a little further from the river, the bank is shallow enough to walk into the water easily to fish or whatever, and there’s this pebbly shore area that would be a great place to put a fire.”

  “Really?” Adrian complained. “I thought you didn’t want to do the church thing!”

  “No, but I still want to do the group picnic thing!” Bethany said.

  “You know, I was kind of annoyed earlier this morning, but now I’m thinking I could get behind that plan,” Lauren said. “This has been pretty awesome. It’ll take a little more planning to do it out there, but I think it’ll still be fun. Count us in!”

  There was a wave of laughter and a few more agreements, leaving Danielle to wonder what she’d gone and started.

  https://discord.gg/u5dtzpShv2

  Writathon Word-Count: 15,728