“I’d be happy to host weekly meetings in my room,” Lithios offered.

  Danielle nearly choked. “Um, I don’t think I’m comfortable entering your room,” she said.

  “A bedroom is way too small, anyway,” Cassy opined. “There must be somewhere better we can meet. What about those little buildings between the odds and evens? Can one of those be keyed to the town council for meetings?”

  “Huh. Do they have a bigger room inside?” Ember asked. “I’ve never paid much attention to it.”

  “It’s a possibility, yes,” Ranger Bernard said. “The original was an office that managed the Rooms buildings on either side of it. They aren’t used much anymore, but we can open one to the town council. The office space inside is about twice as big as the bed area of your rooms, and it has a restroom.”

  “That sounds perfect,” Arabella said. “It will give the council a place to keep things like records or, I don’t know, city-wide supplies. Like emergency supplies and things.”

  “Hm. We might need two,” Danielle said. “One for town council and one to be the courthouse.”

  “Courthouse? Why do we need a courthouse?” Jason jeered. “We’ve only got one law, and it doesn’t require a court for its enforcement, remember?”

  “Yeah, well, I’m thinking that should change,” Danielle said. “There’s a reason civilization invented courts and juries. It would be smart for us to skip a few steps in the progress from ‘kill anybody you think is a murderer’ to ‘fair trial with witnesses and more than one person involved in deciding if you’re guilty.’ Not to mention, there are a few more things we might want to outlaw, but maybe not kill people over – like theft. Or maybe lying about other people to make third parties mad at them. I’m pretty sure that’s slander or something, Inside.”

  Lithios leveled a deep glare at Danielle. “It’s only slander if it’s not true,” he said.

  Danielle gave him a puzzled look in turn. “I’m confused here, are you of all people suggesting that I can actually work miracles?” she asked.

  Lithios closed his eyes and knit his brows. “What are you talking about?” he asked.

  “I’m talking about this guy trying to convince you that I made a bunch of claims I never made,” Danielle said, gesturing to Jason. “What are you talking about?”

  “I was – you weren’t talking about the thing with my dad and - ?” Lithios looked slightly less confused and little embarrassed.

  Zephyr stifled a suspicious cough, but said, “You know, people our age outside our circle of friends-of-parents don’t necessarily follow the news all that closely. And they especially didn’t three years ago.”

  Lithios gave Zephyr an unamused look. “If you’re making some sort of point, just make it,” he said.

  Zephyr gestured to Danielle. “She’s never heard of either of our dads, Lithios. She literally can’t tweak you about your dad, because she never heard any of that gossip, or the news about the court case, or anything.”

  “Was he acquitted?” Danielle asked.

  “They settled out of court, actually,” Zephyr told her. “Both of them still hate each other, and the media is about evenly split between claiming it was slander and claiming it was true. Attendance at temples of the elements in our city dropped 25% short term and 10% long term, even the ones they didn’t preside at, and it’s a whole thing to this day.”

  “Ah. So one of your dads may or may not have slandered the other, and then the media may or may not have slandered both of them, and nobody got properly held up to justice in the end?” Danielle asked.

  “Is it slander if you call something slander but it wasn’t?” Lithios asked.

  Danielle shrugged. “I don’t know the official legal definition, but if someone told a falsehood designed to cause public backlash against the person lied about, it should be some kind of illegal.”

  “I can agree to that,” Ember said grimly.

  “Not that I don’t agree with you in general, but do we really want to write a law that risks getting us involved in a bunch of three-way roommate disputes?” Marc said.

  “No, this should be for spreading information more widely than that,” Danielle said. “Also, it probably shouldn’t be the biggest thing we debate tonight. I admit, I’m mad at the Wolf Pack for getting the whole camp riled up over this, but let’s not forget that they also tried to kill me. Or have me killed. By our current lack-of-laws, I can’t do anything about that because they failed. We might want to outlaw attempted murder, and/or hiring or inciting others to murder. My basic five rules I presented to the Society and building six are meant to be foundational, and have related laws like that built on them.”

  “I still say it should be six,” Ember said.

  “All right, fair enough then,” Danielle said, “permit me to propose a basic six:

  ? Do not murder,

  ? Do not rape,

  ? Do not steal, destroy or damage the property of others,

  ? Do not present false evidence against others in court or the court of public opinion,

  ? Do not restrain or imprison others,

  ? Do not maim or injure others.

  Six main areas of personal safety. We can make another six for how the town is run – council term length, council term limits, voting regulations, court organization – uh, that’s only three or four, but you get the idea.”

  “Wait, I’m not sure I followed all of that,” Sirocco said. “Can we get a chalkboard or something in here?”

  “Sorry, I can get you space, but you have to provide your own materials,” Ranger Bernard said.

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  “Can you write it against the tent somewhere, Danielle?” Zephyr asked. “It’s a good solid background, it should be plenty readable.”

  “Do what now?” Ranger Bernard asked, even as Vanessa said, “No! Danielle is not going to control our blackboard!” The Ranger gave her an odd look. “You’re not allowed to mark on the tent walls regardless,” he said.

  “Well, Danielle has a light Skill she can write with,” Zephyr said. “I have a Skill for Fire writing, which might theoretically work, but it’s probably not safe in a space this small. I’m guessing hers will be more practical.”

  Vanessa folded her arms and glared at Danielle. “No!” she insisted stubbornly.

  “Yes,” Lithios said. “Let’s see this infamous light Skill.”

  “Infamous?” Ember asked, giving him a skeptical look.

  “What part of 'no' don’t you understand?” Vanessa asked.

  “The usual resolution to this sort of thing is to put it to a vote,” Ranger Bernard said. “All in favor of permitting councilor Falconer to attempt a text display using Light Writing, raise your hands.”

  Everyone except the Ranger, Vanessa, and Jason raised their hands.

  “Motion carries by overwhelming majority,” the Ranger said. “How much text can you – “

  He broke off as Danielle activated her Skill, turned, and created an illusion of a presenter’s slide on the wall behind herself, with her six suggested laws as bullet points.

  “Oh. That’s not just Light Writing,” Ranger Bernard said in surprised.

  “It’s a stinking illusion!” Vanessa said, and tried to disrupt it. The Skill felt noisy and pointy, but it splashed off of Danielle’s own Skill like a drop of water against a solid surface.

  “Really, Vanessa? Come on. We’re not ten anymore, and I was specifically requested to do this,” Danielle said, rubbing her head tiredly. Trust Vanessa to remind her of her headache.

  “He said Light Writing, not an illusion!” Vanessa said smugly.

  “Yeah, well I didn’t take Light Writing, because Illusions can already do nearly everything Light Writing does,” Danielle said crossly. Zephyr gave her a strange look, and she suddenly remembered that she’d only unlocked Skill: Light Writing that afternoon, and probably shouldn’t be talking about it so familiarly. “This is the communication Skill I have, so this is what you get.”

  “No! You don’t get to pretend you have a digital projector out here in the Outside!” Vanessa said, her voice rising.

  “I’m not pretending to have a projector, everyone knows this is a Skill and will go away when the Skill ends,” Danielle said. “It’s just to help everyone visualize the rules while we work on them.”

  “Wait, can you change stuff like that?” Peter asked. “Like, what if we wanted to go back to using Thou Shalt Not?”

  Danielle quietly added another line at the bottom of the slide, her fingers flying down at her side. The new text read, “Thou shalt not write modern laws in archaic language,” in an unnecessarily fancy font.

  Peter laughed. “OK, sure, I was just seeing if you can update it on the fly.”

  Vanessa made a frustrated noise and tried to disrupt the illusion again; again, her Skill splashed off like a raindrop off a poncho. Danielle almost said something, then decided it would be better to just ignore it. The wasted mana would be penalty enough for her pettiness.

  “All right, I like the six-fold structure,” Sirocco said, “but I think we need each law to have a few more parts. Probably a formal definition, and a penalty, don’t you think? We want to distinguish ‘murder’ from lawful killing and accidental killing. I think Inside law does that by defining a different word for each one, right?” He looked to the Ranger for confirmation.

  “Sure, but they understand that the laws of Outside towns are going to be different, and especially for this town, it’s important to define things in language that is understandable to your residents,” Ranger Bernard said.

  Danielle changed the first law from “Do not murder,” to “Do not kill a person on purpose unless another law permits you to do so.”

  “If we don’t want to add laws for all the exceptions, and mess up the sixfold structure, we need to include the exceptions here,” Zephyr said. “It should say it’s illegal to kill a person unless they’ve attacked you first – that way we don’t accidentally outlaw self defense.”

  Danielle updated the screen again, this time to “It is illegal to intentionally kill a person who has not attacked you with a hostile Skill or Weapon, unless they are liable to death due to another law.”

  “Are you trying to make this compatible with the law we already have, about killing people with Outlaw tags?” Sarah asked, half turned on her pillow seat to see the wall of the tent. Danielle and Cassy were also turned sideways, Danielle with her back to the tent flaps, and Cassy and Sarah more-or-less facing her.

  “Trying to allow for the idea that murderers themselves are going to get killed, and that will not be a violation of this law,” Danielle said.

  “We should replace the original murder law altogether,” Gideon opined. “If we’re adding penalties, go ahead and put that in here, too. The penalty for murder shall be death. The penalty for theft shall be, um, it’s threefold return right?”

  “I think it depends on what’s stolen, in the Bible, but three seems like a reasonable base number here,” Peter opined. “First give back the thing you stole, then pay back again for the time and effort you made your victim and the court waste putting you on trial, then again for the damage you did to the community by reducing the sense of safety and trust. Don’t have three copies? Well then you get to make it, work for it, or in the worst case scenario, the judge will assign an equivalent value.”

  Danielle kept updating the slide as the entries got longer, eventually copying it into her Planner by parts as it got too long to display all at once. Playing secretary, she didn’t have time to put a lot into the discussion, but that was actually fine; she was tired, and most of the things she thought of also occurred to others on her side of the circle. They also thought of a lot of things that hadn’t occurred to her yet. Arabella and Sirocco made sure that every section of the new charter had its definitions and penalties clearly spelled out. Zephyr and Marc helped make sure the laws didn’t get written too tightly, so that they left no room for the judges to recognize and deal with edge cases.

  Jason was mostly a nuisance, but could at least be trusted to bring people down to earth if they got too puffed up and started overreaching. He also kept advocating for fewer laws and rules and penalties, but to Danielle’s secret delight, the Systemists insisted that they were only writing six laws, which really wasn’t too many for an entire town. That was pretty hard to argue with.

  Danielle did accidentally cause a stir when she absentmindedly took out her belt knife to cut up the summer sausage in the dinner bags; Brooke in particular had some kind of panic attack, and Vanessa capitalized on it. Sarah didn’t seem too comfortable with it either, but once the Ranger calmed them down, Ember and most of the boys got out knives and did more or less the same for their meat. Jason, somewhat ironically, didn’t bother; he seemed to be enjoying just biting into the sausage and waving it around like a half-eaten apple, and generally playing the unmannered savage. Danielle wasn’t sure if it was part of his ‘too cool for this stuffy council’ act or if it was supposed to be more of a Wolf thing. Marc frankly made him look petty either way, simply by using his knife as if it was a part of him, casually cutting meat and apple slices as he went for the next hour and a half. Danielle sliced the apple and sausage all at once, instead, so she could eat slices without really looking, in between “slide” changes.

  Vanessa contributed sporadically to the conversation, but distracted herself quite a bit with continued efforts to disrupt Danielle’s illusions. Once, she made her attempt so close to the Skill timeout that Danielle just ended the Skill when it happened, which had the unintended but pleasant (for Danielle) side-effect of inciting Lithios to tear a metaphorical strip off her hide for petty interference. Ranger Bernard interrupted before it got too out of hand, and had Lithios work out most of the nit-picky little changes he’d been having Danielle make before she re-activating the illusion, which Danielle was also grateful for; she was running low on mana.

  tried to punch anyone yet!"

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