After a while, the conversation shifted from who they thought had a chance to get the council positions, and who would be worth having, to more general thoughts about what kind of laws they hoped the council would lay out for everyone. It got louder and started to involve people from more than one fire circle. Everyone agreed that the “don’t commit murder in camp, or anyone at all can kill you” law needed some revising, but what it should become was harder to agree on, let alone what else they needed. The rule about not keeping trash in camp was brought up again; but even there, opinions varied – should the camp have a communal trash burn-pile? Should burning trash in town also be forbidden?

  “It doesn’t sound like we’re actually much further along on this than we were two weeks ago,” Cassy said glumly, as the SHAD Party girls returned to their own fire.

  “Well, of course we’re not,” Akari said. “Anyone out here for the Access Point has probably spent the last two weeks frantically trying to open new Skills and figure out food and clothing and food and tools and food, except maybe Tom and Jordan, and then only because they were already on the verge of giving up, not because they felt like they had it figured out well enough to spend time thinking about politics instead. I thought they were giving us time to settle in; they said they wouldn’t be back for a whole month. Why are they forcing this now?”

  “Maybe the Inside politics behind those ‘care packages’ that had the Now Hear This guy so worked up is also behind the forced council vote,” Danielle said.

  “Maybe they just realized they forgot to put anything in the charter about how we elect councilors,” Sadie said in counterpoint.

  “Didn’t they? They put in the whole thing about how many councilors each building gets,” someone from the next campfire over said.

  Someone else around that fire answered, “Yeah, but they didn’t say how elections happen. Who besides the Rangers can call an election? What are we even supposed to use for ballots? How do we pick candidates, and what happens if none of them gets a majority?”

  “Besides,” Zephyr said, “Without the Now Hear This guy, how could we even tell everyone the election is happening and be sure they’d actually get the message? We don’t have System Skills or mundane tools for running government stuff. The Rangers can call an election easy; we weren’t even close to town, and we still know when it’s happening so we can be there. Nobody from the town itself has an ability to do that.”

  “The Rangers can also protect people from the Wolf Pack while they vote, and of course they’re delivering the care packages basically at the same time. They probably planned to do something kind of like this when they did the Catalog Un-Fair, and then the care packages became a thing and they decided to take advantage of it to let us have some time to plan with the catalogs,” Danielle said. “Whether the vote thing was forced by the Inside or whether they just realized we couldn’t do it ourselves and decided to combine it, what’s for sure is they’re trying to turn two or three events into one.”

  “Their stupid rules,” Heather said darkly. “They’re not supposed to interact with us this much, but we’re not supposed to be this clueless either. Someone’s trying to figure out how to fix the messed up parts of this so we can be a ‘normal’ Sending; and someone else is trying to figure out how to keep the fix itself from totally breaking the normal way they interact with Sent.”

  Brooke snorted. “That sounds like a government project all right. Too bad we’re the people who have to live with the results, good or bad, and not the people with the voting power that the government has to make happy.”

  “I’ll bet you a hundred mana that’s why the care packages are ‘weird,’ like Now Here This guy said,” Danielle guessed. “The government is probably trying to spin it to the Insiders like it was their idea, and that’s the part he refused to read; the thing he said instead, that was the truth, is that stuff was donated by the Inside citizens – not the government, or the Sending Authority, or even the Rangers.”

  “Oh, boy. You’re saying, the weirdness will be that the stuff was donated by people who have no idea what we really need out here, aren’t you?” a girl at Brooke’s fire said. “Because the voters they have to make happy want to help us more than the government wants to help us, but they don’t actually know how to help us; they just want to feel like they did something, so the government’s humoring them.”

  “That’s my guess,” Danielle said with a sigh.

  Cassy patted her on the shoulder. “Don’t get too depressed about it before we even see it,” she said. “After all, there are Returned Citizens in there; they would have a clue. I bet there are enough of them to make sure that at least some of the stuff in the packages is stuff we’ll actually, heh, care about.”

  “That’s true,” Danielle said. “And Now Hear This guy did say we would actually want them, even though he also said they were weird.”

  “Maybe they’ll actually have textbooks,” Nathan suggested. Half the campsite tried to talk over each other, in general tones of objection. “HEY! We’re missing lots of information they expect us to have because normal Sent have gone through high school and we haven’t, and they keep forgetting about that little detail,” Nathan said loudly. “Giving us the textbooks for the relevant classes would help. It wouldn’t be the same as actually taking the class with a teacher, but it would give us a chance of figuring out what they think is common knowledge that we don’t actually know!”

  “My parents seemed to think we’d be able to buy textbooks meant for home-study students at the fairs,” Cassy said loud enough for everyone to hear. “Even some college-level stuff! They also told me not to waste time on it the first year unless I was snowed in with nothing else to do, but it’s easy to imagine our old teachers and people who don’t camp much thinking some more reference books would be super good for us. If they already have it as stuff suitable for selling to Sent, it’d be easy to say ‘fine, we’ll give it to this group for free’ and pretend that made it OK.”

  “That would be one way to make sure we’re not horribly uneducated when we get back inside,” Danielle admitted quietly. “If we spread out the curriculum over six or eight years instead of three or four, do a solid job of the studying without letting it take over our time – “

  “That would require staying out here for six or eight years, though,” Tom said.

  Danielle sighed again. “OK, brace yourself, I’m about to say something radical,” Danielle said. Her party members shifted, muttering things like “oh boy, here we go” and “so what’s new.” Danielle waited until they quieted down, and said, “I’ve said before that I think if most Sent return in five-to-ten years, there’s probably a darn good reason why that’s the normal range. What I’m adding on now is: if I have a choice between going back in three years, super fast but completely unprepared for the life I need to pick up back Inside, or else eight years, kind of on the slow side but much closer to normal for a Returned Citizen and therefore able to use the small-s systems that they have set up to help Sent settle back in? I’m willing to at least consider the possibility that those would be years well-spent.”

  Her party members looked around or at each other, uncomfortably avoiding her gaze. “Don’t get me wrong,” Danielle continued, “I’m committed to helping us all advance as fast as is safe and healthy; but think about this: if we were Inside, we’d still be in school 42 out of 52 weeks of the year. Yes, we’d get to be with our families the other ten weeks – sort of, keeping in mind the daycamp requirement for Awakened youths – but mostly we’d be at school. Graduate high school, you get apprenticeships or college for at least another two years, so that’s a minimum of five years for the older Sent in our group if they did two-year apprenticeships or a maximum of eight years for younger Sent if they did four-year college. Five to eight years was already the spread from now to the point where we would’ve been moving out to regular neighborhoods as full, proper adults. I’m saying, maybe it still is.”

  “Oh, I see,” Sadie said. “When we Return, they’re going to want us to be adults, just like they want us to be high school graduates now. If we get back too early, and we aren’t ready to be adults, we’ll just have a whole other round of these crazy problems.”

  “Right – because legally, we’re already adults; they Advanced us. Say we actually got to level 10 in ten months; we’d still be 14 to 16 year olds, but also adults. There’s no way to make that normal if we go back Inside,” Danielle said.

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  “Is normal a goal now?” Zephyr asked, raising an eyebrow at her.

  Danielle shrugged. “Normal enough for life not to be an endless series of people who don’t know what to do with me, expect me to know stuff I don’t, look down on me for not being what they expect, and possibly worst of all, expect me to act like a kid whenever they want power over me and an adult whenever they want me to be out of their way. Maybe it’s not everyone’s goal, but I think it might be my – not my only goal, but one of my goals.”

  “Hm. Defined that way, I can see what you’re getting at, but I’m not sure normal is the right word for it.” Zephyr sat back, then seemed to awkwardly realize he didn’t have a chair back to lean against, and sat forward again, bracing his elbows on his knees. “Look at me, I’m having to relearn how to sit,” he complained. “When we go back Inside, even if it is just ten months from now, we’re going to be so far from everyone we know in terms of – what is the word I want? Just, how we do things and what feels normal day to day. I’m going to sit differently, you know? I’m going to be weird one way or the other, so I figure I need to be so weird they can’t find a box to shove me into, and just have to accept me as eccentric.”

  “It’s culture,” Jordan said.

  Zepher looked at him. “What is?”

  “The word you were looking for. Those of us who are ‘preserving less common bloodlines’ (as if there weren’t hundreds of thousands of black people still in actual Africa), we hear about it all the time – how we’re supposed to remain culturally distinct, preserve the memories of our unique cultures, blah blah blah. It’s a bunch of people who want to live in the past, and insist that I should want it too. I bet the actual African sanctuary-states aren’t trying to keep a ‘normal’ that may or may not have existed like 350 years ago, or whenever it was supposed to be.”

  “Yeah, I dunno, I get that stuff too,” Sadie said. “Except from closer by. My dad’s tribe is only a few hours south of here by train, so my grandparents visit and harass us every year. They want me to do all the tribal-culture stuff. At least with them, they have their own nation, so they feel like they can grow as a group and not have to make everything about staying the same as they were before mana, but they still spent too much time thinking about what they want to not-be, if you ask me.”

  “Wait, if you’re tribal, why are you even in Firmitatem?” Tom asked.

  Sadie shrugged. “Dad’s tribal; Mom’s background is super mixed but she counts as ‘white’ for purposes of the tribe, so it wasn’t exactly an approved match. When my leg came out bad, the shaman said the spirits were punishing Dad for marrying a whitey, and they put me so low on the priority list for healthcare stuff it was obvious they were never going to fix me. Dad has one of the big Skills – you probably haven’t heard of it. There’s this older-than-mana weaving thing they only teach within the tribe, but the tribal skill is one thing and the System Skill you unlock with it is a whole other thing. Big deal for industrial stuff. He advertised himself around, and basically said the nation or state that would give his daughter proper healthcare would get him and his Skill. We immigrated when I was still little; now we’re citizens of Firmitatem, my leg is fixed, and my Dad’s work-around for the tribe’s non-disclosure thing is going just fine.”

  “Wait, are you saying you unlocked one of the big Skills today?” Heather asked.

  “No, I need more fiber to do the weaving,” Sadie said. “But I got Basic Crafter as an option at the dome, when a lot of people pretty much only had academic, clerk, and weapon fighter stuff. I took fiber twisting for my level 1 Skill, too, so I can work on the material problem. Oh, and I’m not under any stupid coerced non-disclosure contract.”

  “Ooh.” Akari said. “Let me guess: your dad was allowed to teach his own kids, but nobody else. Because it’s cultural.”

  “Exactly. They forgot that the half-breed they refused to heal up might not have a ton of loyalty to the tribe,” Sadie said. “Or that Dad just might not try to do anything about that lack of loyalty, considering he left them behind for how they mistreated his family.”

  “And you know how to do it? The special weaving that unlocks the special Skill?” Danielle asked.

  Sadie nodded seriously. “So that’s for the future, but in the meantime, I get what Jordan’s saying, and what Zephyr’s saying. From now on, we’re Sent culture, or maybe Returned culture when we go back in. We’re never going to have normal Insider culture again, really, and that’s fine. We just don’t want our culture to be, um, how’d Mom put it – belligerently ignorant? We don’t want to be like that. If they sell self-study stuff to Sent, fine, we’ll save up some mana for it, and study up during winter or something.”

  “And we’ll also get ten levels of Career abilities, five different high-value low-incidence Skills each, and all the tools and know-how we need to hunt threat-to-the-state level mana monsters for fun and profit,” Danielle said. “And when we have all that, no level 3 Insider bureaucrat will try to tell us we need social worker oversight because our adult/minor status is unclear. I say, if it takes me an extra two, three years to accomplish all that? It’ll be worth it. Your opinions may vary, and that’s fine; we don’t all have to have the same goals. Maybe some people will get Inside before me. I’m not obsessed with being first. I’m obsessed with making sure all my friends get there, and when I do show up, I want to be too strong to push around.”

  Zephyr gave Danielle a complicated look. "What if I want to be a single-classed Scout with no mana Skills better than party tricks in any element at all? But I insist on hanging around you anyway?"

  Danielle looked him in the eye and told him, "Then you'll definitely survive, you’ll be the best Scout since the days of the Spread, your System will be full of rare high-tier scouting Skills, and your parties will be legendary!"

  For a moment, Zephyr's face took on a priceless look of pure mind-boggled disbelief; Danielle wished she still had her digipad so she could take a picture. Then he started chuckling. Then he gave up resisting and absolutely roared with laughter.

  "I don't think that was a joke," Tom said. He looked like he might be torn between being impressed or terrified.

  "I know!" Zephyr gasped out. "That's what's so great!"

  It took him several more minutes to get proper control of his breathing, which was just as well, since it gave everyone else time to get bored of watching the outburst - or at least, most of the people at other campfires. Danielle could tell that Brooke and some of the other Systemists were still eavesdropping, even if there wasn't much to hear. For their parts, the newly expanded SHAD Party waited quietly for Zephyr to calm down. It wasn't just for Zephyr, perhaps; Danielle thought Tom, at least, was seriously thinking about whether he wanted a goal that big.

  Finally, Zephyr said, "You know, Danielle, I've had a lot of people in my life – like, a lot of people, more people than should actually have any business telling me this kind of stuff – I've had a lot of people tell me that they wouldn't let me "waste my potential this way." Some of them were slapping down a dumb "what if I just want to slack off" crack like I made just now, some of them were trying to "encourage" me to do what they wanted more. Some of them had different ideas of the specific way I was wasting my potential or how they were going to stop me.

  “One way or the other, I've heard a lot of "you could be great and I'm going to make you do it" things, from snappy one-liners to whole speeches. That one that you just gave? That was the most awesome response to one of my "what if I want to waste it" cracks that I have ever, ever heard. I wasn't even serious, but you almost make me want to actually do it!"

  "Do you want to hear a serious goal suggestion?" Danielle asked. "Based on what you actually told me you wanted, earlier?"

  "Sure, let's hear it!" Zephyr said. "If that’s how you thought about the joke, I'd love to hear your take on the end game of what I said earlier."

  "All right. This is obviously just a starting goal, subject to change along the way; but here's my suggestion: Aim to go back Inside with base level 10, Scout level 9, and all six primary element shaping Classes at level 2 or 3."

  The next campfire north hissed as someone did a spit-take. So much for pretending not to eavesdrop. "Do you have any idea how much mana that would cost?" Brooke asked, no longer even pretending. Danielle could tell who else at her fire had been listening, because the listeners were all looking at her like she was crazy, and the others were all looking confused and poking the listeners to tell them what they'd missed.

  "It looks to me like level costs will keep going up," Danielle said. "Taking six extra Classes and leveling them once each should actually be cheaper in the end than taking one extra Class and leveling it eight or nine times, even if you never set any of them to absorption. Which you seriously might not, since you'd save that for the primary Class you're actually trying to get to level 9 or 10. So yeah. Think about it, Zephyr."

  "I'm thinking about it, all right," Zephyr breathed.

  "What six Classes are you going to take?" Gideon asked Danielle.

  "Oh, my plan (so far, pending confirmation that it won't ruin my Return-ability) is to stack up as many mana-generation bonus Traits as the System will let me, take at least four Classes I seriously intend to use, and level them all to at least level 7," Danielle said. "Right now, I'm honestly pretty happy being a classed Medic, but I think I'm prepared to commit to Light Shaper when I have mana for it, and quite possibly Basic Crafter once I unlock it - which I haven't yet, but give me another couple weeks, and I definitely will."

  "What's the fourth one?" Cassy asked. "Basic Mana Caster? Or maybe straight to Freecaster?"

  Danielle laughed. "That would make five, but I haven't added it to the priority list for research yet. I was thinking General Enhancer, actually; I know the path for that, and I'm pretty confident I can unlock that by, oh, this time next year, let's say. Soon enough to make it one of my serious four." Privately, Danielle thought it was very unlikely to take a full year, especially if the Rangers kept buying a few Skill tokens every week or two.

  "Oh, I get it," Ezra said. "You can use Light Shaper Skills to plan stuff, Crafter Skills to build the stuff you planned, and Enhancer Skills to enhance the stuff you built."

  "And Medic skills to make sure my party stays alive long enough to use the stuff I enhanced," Danielle said.

  “I knew I joined the right party,” Zephyr said with conviction. “Sign me up for the ten year plan, Danielle. My parties are going to be epic!”

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