Juan and Anita moved back to their group, and Danielle turned toward the fire to check on their rabbits.

  “You don’t really think it’s possible, though,” Dana said quietly, nodding to Juan’s back.

  “To just go back to normal, after spending at least a year Outside and killing enough stuff to get level 10?” Danielle said. “I don’t think we’ll be able to be ‘normal’ by then – not by the definition of normal he’s trying to get back to. Those of us who have Survivor on our Career list will always be Survivors deep inside. We’ll always be seven levels or more above practically everyone else, too. Oh, and I don’t know about you, but I already feel more normal and safe wearing a sword in a crowd of people also wearing swords than I would unarmed. I don’t know if that’s normal even for Sent, but unless something extreme happens to the Wolf Pack, I’m guessing it’s going to be normal around here for a long time.”

  “Mm.” Dana stared thoughtfully in the direction of her party’s spit, but Danielle didn’t think she was really seeing the meat. “Lauren and the rest of us were doing the math last night,” she said after a while. “We know level 2 is 1200, and level 3 is 1800. If the rule about what it costs to level is that you add 600 each time, then it’ll cost 6,000 mana to get level ten. If the rule is that you take half of the old level’s cost and add it on to get the new level’s cost, then it’ll cost more than 30,000. If you’re still getting levels by hunting rabbits by then, it’ll take anywhere from four months to two years just to get from level 9 to level 10. You know, depending on the rule.”

  “Ah. So it’s also not possible to get inside in a year, because the last two or three levels might take more than a year all by themselves?” Danielle said. “I think there’s bigger stuff to hunt across the river, though. By the time we’re, say, level 5, we might not think anything of hunting a cougar or two every month.”

  “Are there enough cougars out here for everyone in the Sending to hunt like that, though?” Akari asked.

  “I don’t know. What do I know about cougars?” Danielle asked rhetorically. “I’ll worry about level 5 in, oh, let’s say about two or three months. Maybe by then I’ll have a clue whether hunting cougars is a realistic leveling plan. In the meantime, let’s make sure our rabbits don’t burn. If we’re going to get three meals out of these, we need them to be meat, not charcoal.”

  Dana laughed and went to properly check on her party’s meat. Akari stepped forward to do the same, and Danielle was just about to activate Deflect Notice and maybe slip away to the room for a few minutes to have a belated panic attack in private, when Peter practically scared her out of her skin by speaking up from where he was sitting, several yards away.

  “Just taking it one day at a time, huh?” he asked.

  Danielle walked closer to Peter so they wouldn’t be audible to the whole crowd, and said, “I like to think I’m doing a decent job of planning out to about three days, mostly,” she said. “Life-threatening emergencies do tend to change the plans, though.”

  “So if I wanted to discuss next week’s service – or prayer meeting, if you want to keep calling it that – should I come back on Wednesday?” Peter asked in a joking tone.

  “I’m pretty sure we’ve got people here who won’t consider it a church service unless an ordained priest is leading it, so yes, prayer meeting,” Danielle said. “Maybe Bible study, if you prefer. Do you actually have a Bible?”

  Peter shook his head. “Necessities stores don’t really offer a lot of books,” he said. “The best anyone in my group could find were some ‘religious’ greeting cards. We had access to the library at school that night, though, and Lucas here copied the gospel of Mark and the book of Romans and some Psalms into a journal he got from the store, and they allowed that.”

  “Whoah. In one night? Did you sleep?” Danielle asked.

  “Not until I got to the Rooms,” the boy next to Peter said.

  “Honestly, I’m embarrassed I didn’t think of something like that myself,” Peter admitted.

  “I wish I’d thought of it too, but I’m honestly not sure I could have handled the hike on no sleep,” Danielle said. “Do you think if I brought an empty journal and a pen next week, you’d be willing to let me copy what you managed to get? Or someone – I have a friend with the Transcribe Skill, she might do a better job.”

  “I, um, might not want to take it out to the river, but if you have the empty notebook, I’m sure we can figure something out,” Lucas said.

  “Most of us Booker CYC-ers are praying the Catalog has notebooks in it,” Peter added. “Or Bibles! I doubt the Sending Authority would understand why we see the Bible as survival equipment, though.”

  “The real trade fairs might have stuff that’s a little less pure survival oriented,” Danielle said. “I don’t have much hope for the catalog, but I do have some for the Fall Fair.”

  “If they sell Bibles, they’ll probably have to sell tons of Systemist junk too,” Lucas said. “Equal access to resources and all.”

  You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

  “Yeah, well, the Systemists can buy that stuff if they want to, I don’t have to spend money – or mana, I guess – on their junk,” Danielle said. “As long as I can get what I need, I’m fine with it.”

  “You’re not worried about them coming after us?” Lucas asked.

  “Have you had problems with that?” Danielle asked. “The ones at my school pretty much kept it to their interest group.”

  “Not the ones at our school,” Peter said. “They were always coming at us in the cafeteria and places like that and trying to have loud arguments about stuff we supposedly believed but really don’t. Like they’d shout, ‘why do you Christians think the System is evil?’ and I’d be like, ‘I don’t know anyone who thinks the System is evil,’ but they’d just shout about evading the question and stuff. I think the girl that led their interest group for our year was reading some weird netsites.”

  “Ah. And since she is in your year, she is here in town somewhere,” Danielle said.

  “It’s another good reason to move the meeting out of town,” Lucas said. “We lose the chance to be seen and heard by random curious people, but we also get out of easy arguing range of Belle, and leave her without the big audience she always seems to look for.”

  “Well, if she shows up this afternoon, I’m letting you deal with her,” Danielle said. “As far as next Sunday, if Lucas wants to keep his manuscript safe – and I don’t blame you a bit, but can I ask one of you to copy out just one chapter to read aloud? I don’t think we’ll have to worry about denominational differences if we’re just reading it, and if we’re lucky, some of the picnickers will ask about it during the lunch phase.”

  “I like the way you think!” Peter said. “Sure. I’ll plan on reading a chapter of Mark every week until we get through it. That should get us through the summer, and give us a chance to get to know everyone better.”

  “That sounds good,” Danielle said. “Any other planning can wait until Wednesday, I think. My party’s got plans for tomorrow to finalize, and anyway, this is supposed to be our day off. We’ve mostly convinced the non-religious ones that they should have one rest day in seven even though they don’t believe in dedicating it to God.”

  “Tell us your room number, then, so we can find you,” Peter said.

  “Oh – um, well, my roommates might not like that much. Can you promise to keep it secret if I do tell you?” Danielle asked.

  “I can,” Peter said. “I have a solid Memorize skill, so I won’t even have to write it down. I’d actually appreciate it if you can offer the same promise to me; I don’t exactly know all your roommates, after all.”

  “All right. I’m not great at remembering random numbers, but I have a trait called Planner that lets me write stuff into this virtual notebook thing in my System; I’ll keep it there, if that’s OK. I don’t think most System-reading Skills will be able to read that stuff at any reasonable level,” Danielle said.

  “I’m good with that,” Peter said. “My room number is – ”

  “Wait, let me get my privacy Skill up,” Danielle said. Peter paused in surprise and she activated Bubble of Silence, doing her best to exclude everyone but Peter and Lucas. One of the other CYC guys sitting with them ended up inside, but everyone else was far enough away that she could keep the boundary from popping around them. “OK, go,” Danielle said.

  “I’m in 3311,” Peter said. “Why’d you take a privacy Skill out here in survival territory?”

  “For sneaking up on wild animals,” Danielle told him. “I was imagining doing more bow-hunting and less snaring. Anyway, I’m in 6024, the bottom corner. Um, my Planner interface is still mostly verbal, bear with me a second.” She opened the ‘Friend Directory’ list in her planner, and added Peter’s name and room number. “Close Planner,” she concluded. “By the way, do you have a hunting party or anything? I wasn’t clear on whether your CYC group was doing that or not.”

  “We’re basically hunting in pairs,” Peter said. “Well, snaring in pairs, really. I don’t know if that counts as hunting, per se.”

  “How are you coming with figuring out how to preserve food? Any good ideas to share?” Danielle asked.

  “Well, no?” Peter said, sounding confused. “We cook meat and put it in the cold box.”

  “Ah. You should read Food Preservation For Your First Winter from your bookshelf,” Danielle said. “My hunting party is having some luck drying stuff. Well, we’re obviously just starting, but we think it’s going OK. We had to make tools for it, though, and we’re going to need to buy more salt from the catalog.”

  “What kind of tools?” Lucas asked.

  “Drying racks, basically. Something to hold the stuff and move it out into the sun or near a fire,” Danielle said. “A System Skill for it exists, but so far all we know about it is that it’s a Class Skill for Herbalists. I’m hoping I can get it without having to take the Class, though.”

  “Is your crafter taking commissions?” Peter asked bemusedly.

  “Commissions? I, um, not yet?” Danielle said. “There are only five of us, we’re still keeping each other super busy without trying to go beyond the party. Do you not have any crafters in your group?”

  “We haven’t been trying to work as a group like that,” Peter said. “The ten of us are in four different Rooms. We got together on Wednesday like we would have back in school, but we’re not hanging out together all the time.”

  “What, and you haven’t even talked about what Classes you all took?” Danielle asked.

  “It didn’t really seem relevant to the Bible study,” Peter said ironically.

  “Well, maybe not, but still. We’re supposed to help one another and stuff,” Danielle said. “My roommates and I actually wrote that into our org charter! How can you do that if nobody knows what anyone else can do?”

  “I’m a Basic Healer, and so is one of Lucy’s roommates,” Lucas said. “Most of us kind of got stuck with a pretty lame choice of Classes, though; it was academic or office flavored Classes, or else Basic Weapon Fighter. Nobody wanted to be out here as a Clerk, so we have a lot of embarrassed fighters.”

  “Oh, I get it,” Danielle said. “No need to be embarrassed on my account. The Rangers said it’s worth making a trip to the Access Point before you level up, though, because we’re all probably unlocking a lot of new stuff in these first few weeks. You might have more Skill options when you level up if you hit the Access Point first; or you might unlock a better Class and have a goal worth saving up for in your Payment Plan.”

  “You seem to have talked to the Rangers a lot,” Lucas said.

  “Well, we had two conversations, and neither was incredibly long, so I wouldn’t say we talk to them a lot,” Danielle countered. “We did learn a lot from those two conversations, though; and I figure right now, the best thing I can do to help others is share that stuff I learned.”

  “You come off kinda bossy, though,” Peter said.

  Danielle cringed. “I’m sorry, I – ” she stopped because Lucas had burst out laughing.

  “What?” Peter exclaimed.

  “Why Mr. Black Pot, have you finally met a kettle?” Lucas asked.

  https://discord.gg/u5dtzpShv2