“That could get old real quick,” Danielle said. “I just got a Now Hear This message to me, personally, right after one directed to just the three council members from this building. They counted fast – there must be a trick to it.”

  “Something inside the balls, I think,” Sadie said. “They felt different from each other. Might be an electronic counting system, even though the booth privacy stuff was System-system.”

  “That makes sense,” Danielle said. “They could double-check with the physical balls if they had to, but if two boxes are overflowing, two are just kinda-fullish, and the rest barely have enough to cover the bottom, it wouldn’t take much to confirm the electronic count was good enough.”

  “So who are the other two councilors for our building?” Heather asked eagerly.

  Danielle chuckled. “It’s Ember and Cassy,” she said. “Too bad we missed out on Lauren, but not a terrible outcome. Except for the personal aspect, where I have to deal with town council stuff, and all the legal headaches involved in getting in line with Firmitatem law are, in fact, my headaches now. Not to mention the headaches of probably dealing with five or six Systemists who think my existence is a slap in their faces or something.”

  “How big a problem do you think Ember will be?” Sadie asked.

  “I’m not sure,” Danielle said. “That angry Ranger lady actually apologized to me in her hearing a minute ago, and I think she might be rethinking her attitude a little in light of that. We’ll see about the rest at 5, I guess – oh, right, that was the actual message. Ranger Flo wants me to come to the Catalog Questions tent for “urgent business” as soon as I get my care package, and I’m also supposed to go there for dinner and the first council meeting at 5pm.”

  She paused to take a long drink from her refreshed canteen. “So, have you cracked open the catalogs yet? Got any questions I should look into while I’m there?”

  “They’re unexpectedly big,” Akari said. “I think we’re all going to have to start eating mana tomatoes at every meal and conserving Skills and stuff.”

  “Danielle, about that Skill you were saying you wanted to share with me before,” Heather said, almost shyly. “Um, do you think if you get a lot of mana today, you could loan me, um, a hundred in the form of a Skill token?”

  “Seems reasonable, under the circumstances,” Danielle said. “Which Skill were you thinking of, though?”

  “Um, the one that you thought would help me unlock the mana Traits,” Heather said. “I want to be able to spend my mana and know I can save it up again fast, like you.”

  “Yeah, I can do that,” Danielle said. “Depending on how things go, I might start quietly doing the same for other Healers in the Shade Tree Society, too. I might make it a level-up gift for them, though, so it’s not so obvious they’re getting new Skills at odd times. I dunno, maybe that’s excessively paranoid; if I start giving tokens to people in the Society it can’t stay secret long. It’s too big. Healers need mana, though.”

  “Ask if the deliveries will be discreet enough for those of us with purple tomato access not to get robbed by those of us without,” Sadie requested.

  “Ask if there’s a known safe limit on that kind of stuff,” Akari added. “We’ve been guessing, but if we’re wrong, we should probably find that out before we do two solid weeks of obsessive mana-tomato collection.”

  “Ask them what a ruana is,” Heather put in.

  Danielle blinked at her bemusedly. “A what now?”

  “It’s in the clothing section – look, on page 10, right after ‘wool cloak’ it lists ‘wool ruana.’ I don’t know what that is,” Heather said. “It costs the same as the cloak and the robe, though.”

  Danielle opened up the catalog and looked. “Huh. More uniform stuff, but also Ranger uniform stuff? And then wool winter gear. No pictures, though. I guess I’ll ask a few questions about all that.”

  “Check out the last page,” Akari said.

  Danielle flipped back to the inside of the back cover. “Whoah. They’re selling tier 3 boti bags? What happened to not cutting out Sent crafters and enhancers?”

  “Maybe it gets more crucial than we’ve been thinking before the end of the year,” Sadie said.

  Danielle frowned. “Maybe. Or maybe it’s just because there’s a custom boti bag for the big filter system above that is supposed to only be sold with the filter, and they added this so people won’t buy the filters just for the bags.”

  “Maybe. It’s still the most expensive single item in the catalog,” Akari said. “Like, a lot more expensive than the next most expensive thing, I think.”

  Danielle flipped through the other pages. “Ooh – frying pans! And proper stew kettles! I should ask how big those actually are.”

  “There’s a whole section just for crafting tools,” Sadie said. “We’re going to want several of those – as a room, I mean. There’s properly clear enhancing crystals in the materials section on the next page, too.”

  “Ooh. I bet those are small, discreet investments,” Danielle said with a grin.

  “I want the enhanceable game bags,” Akari said. “Up in hunting equipment, see? They’re like the satchels, they come with a crystal but no enhancement, so they’re cheap and you can work on them after another level-up or two.”

  “Maybe if Light Shaping or light-themed enhancing really do have something to do with insulation I’ll even be able to make them stay cool,” Danielle said thoughtfully.

  “Why would Light have anything to do with insulation?” Sadie asked.

  “Eh, it might not, except like we were talking about with Thermal Sight and Infrasight, heat can be related to light, and keeping heat out is therefore not entirely unrelated to keeping light out, so it’s possible,” Danielle said. “It’s a guess. It’s in a field I’m going to be experimenting in anyway, though, so it’s worth a try. Improving our cold storage volume would be huge.”

  “Heh, could you turn a room into a walk-in freezer?” Akari asked.

  Danielle chuckled. “That might be a bit much, but if Sadie can make a bunch of boxes, I might be able to make a room full of regular box freezers,” Danielle said. “Or cold boxes, anyway, like our counter-sized one but bigger.”

  “How about barrels?” Sadie asked. “Barrels are in the catalog.”

  “Ooh, yeah, that might work,” Danielle said. “If I can figure out the setting details for the crystals, anyway.” She sat thinking for a long minute. “You know, the Rangers said people tend to get more stuff later in the year, and split into pairs or solo rooms after Fall Fair, when they have mana for it.”

  “Yeah?” Sadie said. “You’re already getting a room for the party, right? The hunting party, I mean.”

  “Yeah, that’s the plan,” Danielle said. “I’m just wondering if I should reserve a room for us to split into, too, if I get enough mana. I mean, maybe I’m getting ahead of myself, but even with a level one, lower priority Skill, if I sell one for every Ranger in camp today, we’re talking about thousands of mana. It might be worth it to guarantee we have first claim on the room next door; but we also might need to pre-decide who moves into it. For the ward setup thing, you know?”

  “I’m used to rooming with Sadie,” Heather said. “And having you next door across the pod. I kinda think we could stick with that?”

  “So Sadie and Heather stay in 6024, Danielle and I move next door after Fall Fair?” Akari asked.

  “I can live with that plan,” Sadie said.

  “OK. I have a plan I can run with if it comes up, then,” Danielle said with some relief.

  She went back to the catalog. As catalogs go, it wasn’t a very exciting presentation; just a list of items on white paper. Still, the list was exciting enough after two weeks Outside. “Crafter sized cauldron,” for example, sounded like it might be big enough to tan hides in, or store clay. She would have rather had a regular plastic bucket for either task, but plain buckets didn’t seem to be on the list. Some of the items were achingly mundane – hot pads, for example. Bath towels! Extra T-shirts, socks, and underwear.

  Then there were clearly Sending-specific items, like the crafting tool sets for various crafts, or smoking racks, or “water bath canning kits.” There was even a listing for machetes of all things, labeled “At crafter’s insistence, this item will not be sold to anyone with a murder tag.” The description suggested that they were intended for clearing brush, light wood splitting, and the coarser stages of dividing up a large carcass like a deer – taking off the hooves, for example. Danielle made a note to ask for more information on that entry.

  There were more food items available than she had expected, and someone named Ranger Gretel had gone to the trouble of writing up advice on how to choose food to buy – including the advice that dairy should be considered an optional luxury the first year, even though one of the early items on the actual list was “Ranger Gretel’s Goat Cheese.” It was an expensive item, for the food list; but the description said it was a mana-food, like the purple tomatoes. Danielle resolved to pick up a wheel of that.

  She was sliding into full-focus planning mode when she was interrupted by a knock at the door. “I’ve got Hostility Sense!” Heather called. “No hostiles.”

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  Sadie laughed. “Listen to you – are you divvying up chances to check for hostility like they were a resource now?”

  Akari got up and went to the door. “Hey, if it helps level it or increases the likelihood of unlocking related Skills – ” she opened the door “Good morning. Afternoon? Hi. Are you the care package team?”

  Danielle stretched to see around the corner, but couldn’t get an angle on the door from her bed. The voice outside the door sounded like an adult man. “That’s right. May we come in?”

  “I respectfully request that you do not,” Akari said. “People have been throwing rocks at my roommate today, and that Wolf Pack guy has been stalking her; we take our room security very seriously.”

  “Well, um, you have to sign individually for the packages, so if I can’t come in you’ll each have to come out,” the guy said.

  “I’m coming!” Danielle said. “I never actually let go of my staff, so the shield Skill is still good.”

  “Weren’t you reading the catalog in both hands?” Heather asked.

  “The crook of my arm seems to be good enough,” Danielle said. “I may never actually put down my staff again,” she added in a lower voice.

  Everyone crowded into the entryway, where they could see a man in Inside-style green service coveralls with a luggage cart – not just something like a luggage cart, Danielle realized, but an actual school luggage cart from Tree of Knowledge, with the school crest on the top bar, and a paper sign reading “move-in/move-out ONLY” still taped to one end. It held four sturdy-looking canvas duffel bags in patriotic green and white, with blue pockets on the ends. Behind the man was a Ranger in the usual brown uniform, looking in at them curiously. Danielle felt the brush of a Skill against her Mana Deflector, and saw his face twitch, but he suppressed the reaction and she decided to ignore it – it was probably just See System Info or something.

  “The care packages are luggage?” Sadie asked.

  “Uh, well, the stuff had to go in something, so we decided to go with containers that would actually be useful to you,” the man said awkwardly. “The, um, the Returned Citizens involved said flag green was too bright, but they, um, got outvoted. A-anyway, they’re enhanced bags; spatial and weight reduction too, so they should be useful. Um, when you’re camping or carrying lots of hides or coming and going to the seasonal fairs, they said.”

  “Official spiel?” the Ranger reminded him.

  “Oh! Right.” The man in coveralls pulled a delivery driver’s data pad off his belt and read from it. “Um, on behalf of the citizens of Firmitatem, we offer you these entirely inadequate gifts in hope that they’ll help you out a little now that you’re inappropriately stuck out here. (Seriously, I still can’t believe they thought they could just get away with this rot, like nobody was even going to question it.) Anyway, um, the selection committee is aware that not all the things in the care packages are of equally immediate usefulness, but everyone has tried to come up with a set of helps that will make life just that much more survivable and bearable this first year. At the request of the Sending Authority, I advise you to get the token caddy out of the top of the bag and into your secure footlocker as soon as possible. At the request of the Rangers, I advise you to set aside the books until winter, except maybe the shield manual. Finally, at the request of all the parents of Sent students, I advise you to take your provided vitamins, one per day for the next year, to make sure you don’t grow up puny from vitamin and mineral deficiencies. Um, and personally, I just want to point out that there’s a lunch box in there, so I advise you to get the food out right away even if you’re not too worked up about the rest – it’s, um, it's for lunch because we kind of made you stay inside, it’ll go bad if you just leave it.”

  The man looked back up from his data pad and shifted his feet nervously. “Do you girls always go around wearing swords?” he asked.

  “Yeah, there’s people out here who think half the camp has to die so the other half can get back Inside,” Akari said. “It’s not smart to go unarmed, and we were out in crowds this morning for the election thing.”

  “Yeesh. I guess I see why people were so worked up about shields, if you all got swords already,” the man said, looking back to his pad. “Um, anyway, this is building six, room 6024, right?”

  “That’s what it says on the door,” Heather joked to him.

  “She means, Yes,” Sadie said.

  The man nodded. “OK, first bag goes to Danielle Falconer,” he said. “Alphabetical by last name, you know.”

  Danielle stepped forward, and he placed a green duffel at her feet. “Sign here,” he said, holding out the data pad and stylus.

  Danielle scrawled a half-illegible signature (delivery data pads never seemed to have good stylus tracking, somehow) and took her care package back to her bed. “Akari Lang next,” the man said, then “Heather Orel – Oreya – how do you pronounce this?”

  “Orellana, with the short E and anglicized Ls,” Heather said. “There’s supposedly a surviving branch of the family down in the Andes somewhere that actually says it with the y sound, but our branch has been saying it the other way since before mana. We’ve got to be, like, tenth cousins or something by now.”

  The delivery man and the Ranger laughed. “All right, and last but not least, Sadie Weaver.” Sadie stepped up and signed for her duffel bag. Behind the delivery man, the cart was left empty except for a flat wooden crate that had been hidden by the bags.

  “Why are you here? You’re not doing anything,” Sadie asked the Ranger.

  “Mostly, I’m guarding this guy from crazies with swords and animal-based org names,” the Ranger said dryly.

  “Oh – that makes sense,” Sadie said. “I wish you good fortune and success in the endeavor,” she added, which made the Ranger laugh again.

  “Thank you, miss, and the same to you,” he said. “Actually, I do have one more task, though. Having heard you confirm your names, and having seen your signatures, I hereby deliver the promised meat portion that the SHAD Party earned from the cougar kill on Wednesday the 6th. Are you sure you don’t want me to bring it in? It’s almost 30 pounds.”

  “Oh, uh. Akari! Help me get this?” Sadie said, moving her care package behind her, out of the way. Akari came out and the two of them hefted the crate into the room and popped the lid off. It proved to contain 16 waxed tubes of pemmican and 12 of the same thing but in tins instead of wax.

  “Thank you,” Danielle told him, “The SHAD party acknowledges delivery of the promised substitute meat. Please thank Ranger Helm for us.”

  “Will do!” the Ranger said, giving her a polite nod. “Have a nice day! All right, let’s go refill the cart. It’s all full rooms on this floor, so – “

  The door closed before Danielle could hear what else the Ranger had to say about that, but he was talking to the delivery man anyway. Akari slid the pemmican down to a back corner of the counter, and the girls turned their attention to the new bags.

  They were a bit odd to open; the expansion enhancement was significant enough to make things look oddly shrunken inside. On top were a small, six-slot cardboard holder for tokens, with all the slots full, and next to it a paper lunch box like the ones they’d found in the cold box when they first arrived at the rooms; Danielle lifted the box out and peeked inside to find it densely packed this time – there was a ham and cheese sandwich on soft bread, which she immediately took out and got started on, but also a tube of crackers and little glass jars of peanut butter and honey. The odd waxed paper condiment packets were included again (mustard went straight onto the sandwich), as were the waxed paper bags of potato chips and apple chips, and the loosely wrapped cookie. There was a fresh apple as well, and another juice box. Under those, there was a complete layer of overlapping instant oatmeal packets, six in total, in place of the cardboard divider from the previous boxed meals; and under that more seed packets.

  Potatoes were included again, a different type than before, with smaller seed potatoes; similarly, there were a different variety of garlic bulbs on the other end, but a quartet of “walking onion” bulbs were new. There were a different packet of carrot seeds, promising multiple colors from the one packet, and a different type of mint. Basil was new, and oregano, and a packet of mixed melon seeds – honeydew, cantaloupe, and galia. Pumpkins and gourd seeds were in the new batch, one apparently for eating and the other for making bottles, going by the fancy names of the varieties. There were more seeds for both sandwich tomatoes and cherry tomatoes – Danielle rather thought she had a better variety available for the cherry tomatoes, but then, she didn’t need to plant those at the moment – there were sunflower seeds, salad lettuce mixes, beets and cucumbers, beans and peas, broccoli and spinach. There were seeds for full sized onions this time instead of green onions. There were dill and cilantro, parsley and chives, a new variety of echinacea, and fennel, which Danielle wasn’t even familiar with.

  “The cafeteria ladies still think we have gardens,” Danielle said. “Though they sent us doubles of everything this time, too – well, except the big stuff. Maybe it’d be worth finding someplace to try some of these out? Maybe by our fishing spot. Oh! There’s a note in the very bottom.” She paused to take a bite of her sandwich and fish it out. “Hah! Planting guidelines – what can go into the ground right now, what should wait, stuff like that.”

  “That will be useful whether we use it this year or next,” Heather said.

  “There are pots,” Sadie added. “Figure out grow lights, Danielle. We can garden all winter.”

  Everyone else laughed at that. Sadie looked offended for a moment, then reluctantly smiled. “OK, that did sound weird. I was serious, though.”

  “I know. I’ll work on the grow-light thing,” Danielle said. “Who knows, maybe the Light Shaper Class will help. I might be able to get a Skill that can do it, and help with the enhancement unlock.”

  “You guys should really look past the lunch boxes, too,” Akari said.

  “I put away my token caddy, like he said,” Heather said defensively. “The fresh food is just the next most urgent thing!”

  “Did you look at the tokens?” Akari asked. “They gave us 400 mana! Not that I’m complaining, but what do you think they’re thinking – catalog money? A do-over on starting Skills?”

  “A do-over on starting Classes is my bet,” Danielle said, finishing her sandwich. “How many people have we met lately that said something like, ‘I didn’t have any good Classes for Outside so I took Basic Weapon Fighter because it was less dumb for a Sent than Basic Clerk’ or something?”

  “Oh, that’s a good point,” Sadie said. “I expected there to be more Basic Crafters, but it seems like less people actually unlocked it than I thought.”

  Danielle nodded. “And I was the minimum age when I took my first aid class last summer break; most of the students there were starting high school or even college. I bet a normal sending would have more people with the Medic Skill tree than we do – if that training was a requirement, then there can’t be more than 3 of us in our year, I don’t think. All well and good if we have lots and lots of Healers instead, but if we’re also low on Healers?” she shook her head. “What are the rest of them?”

  “It’s four 100-mana tokens, one Skill token, and one Career token,” Sadie said, flipping a token over to read the other side even as she spoke.

  “The Skill is Shield Apprentice, which explains what the delivery guy meant when he said people were worked up about shields,” Akari said. “I’m not sure what I think about the actual shield though. Does this look like a trash can lid to you?” She held up a round object, painted a dark forest green, that wouldn’t have fit into the bag without the enhancement.

  Heather giggled. “It really does. It’s the same size, and it’s got that dimple in the middle where the handle should be. The rim is smaller, though, and it’s got two enhancement crystals inside, just like everything the Sending Authority gave us.”

  Sadie held up the Career token. "Food Processing," she said. "Never heard of that Career. It sounds like an appliance."

  "I guess Danielle can ask about that, too," Akari suggested.

  Danielle moved her apple, juice box, and cookie into the paper bag from breakfast. “All right, I’ve had something to eat, I’ve got the non-perishable stuff out of my bag, and I have some questions to ask and a basic plan for the mana. I’m heading for the tent now, to see what the ‘urgent business’ is. You guys can tell me all about the rest later.”

  Danielle put the caddy with the tokens into her footlocker, along with the seeds and non-perishable (or at least, less-perishable) food. Then she put the paper bag with her apples and juice in her satchel, and refilled her canteen on her way out the door.

  “Do we need to wait for you?” Sadie called out as she was stepping out of the room.

  “No, do whatever,” Danielle said. “Maybe go pick purple tomatoes while we’ve got an excuse for not involving the guys. We can share that location with them maybe next week. I don’t know if I’ll be back before the council meeting – maybe, but I can’t guarantee anything. If I am, I’ll look through the care package and the catalog and make plans and do Skill training. Or take a nap. At least one of those things!”

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