Maybe half an hour after they first moved on from the snare area, they found a tool belt with the hatchet and knife still in it, as well as one of the Decision Day lamps and its heavy flask of oil. Sadie picked up the lot and stashed them in her Decision Day satchel, with the oil flask right in the pocket where her own had been the day before. A few hundred feet later, they found a large metal flashlight and an even larger package of batteries. “Oof, no surprise these seemed like the best choice to lighten the load,” Danielle said as she picked them up and stashed them in her backpack.

  Past the flashlight, they went another 20 minutes and reached the base of the hill without finding anything else man-made, but they did find a patch of wild mint. Heather harvested some, and cut a notch into a tree branch above it to help find the patch again. “Mint supposedly spreads like crazy,” she said, “we should bring some back to the neighborhoods around the tomato area and plant a few of the tomato-less yards with some mint plants, and see if it doesn’t improve our tea situation.”

  “Is tea something we need?” said Sadie skeptically.

  “Definitely,” said Akari. “We need to boil water for safety if it isn’t coming from the camp’s well, and in winter we’ll want hot drinks. And chocolate doesn’t grow in this area.”

  “Oh, I see what you mean,” Sadie said. “Well, good idea about moving it to the neighborhoods, then. It’ll be closer, but not so close everyone else is bound to find it too.”

  “It should be a good plant to practice drying, too,” said Heather. “The book said it was. I gather it’s harder to mess it up than it is with some plants.”

  “We’ll come back in a few days, then,” Danielle said, “once it’s had a chance to heal and regrow some from this cutting. You can work on drying this bunch in the meantime.”

  Heather nodded, and they started up the hill. Other than some more mint, they found very little on the bottom half of the slope. “I wonder if we should just push for the top,” Danielle said. “Not many people probably tossed stuff on the way down, after all, when gravity was with them.”

  “Good point,” Akari said. “Let’s get up there and get on the side where gravity’s with us, and there’s a better chance of finding stuff.”

  Just before the crest of the hill, Sadie pointed into the woods. “Look, there’s some more of the vines we want,” she said. The four stepped off the road willingly, and everyone else got a short break while Sadie chopped and pulled down the vines and rolled them up for Heather, who sat down to rest.

  When the vines were all in Heather’s bag, she got up and they continued on, slanting back towards the road. A hundred yards further on, they began to hear voices, and they moved onto the road proper in case they should need to run, but they continued on cautiously until they found themselves staring into a hollow on the south side of the road, where a half-dozen surprised Rangers stared back up at them in shock. At their feet and in a small handcart to one side were a veritable treasure trove of what could only be dropped gear from the Sent.

  After a long moment, one of the Rangers finally found a voice. “Good morning, girls. I’m sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but if you’re headed for the gate, they won’t let you in.”

  Another Ranger added, “And if you’re looking for stuff you dropped, we’re not supposed to help you.”

  “Um, Hi,” Danielle said. “Actually, we’re kind of looking for stuff other people dropped. The area right around the Rooms already has people fighting over who gets to put snares where, so we thought we’d put ours out by the road, and see if anyone dropped any manufactured tools or anything that we could scavenge.”

  The second Ranger raised her eyebrows at them. “Seriously? You hiked all the way back up the hill just to see if anyone dropped something useful? Not for something you dropped yourself?”

  “These guys didn’t drop anything,” a third Ranger said, and Danielle belatedly recognized their guide. “They were incredible. The girl with the really long wavy hair was already half done-in, and the rest had three bags each already, but they just put her second bag on someone else and gave her a shoulder to lean on and kept going. Not one of them tossed a single thing, on the hill or anywhere else, and they didn’t try to stop or demand rest breaks or even whine about the pace. I’m amazed they’re all up and walking today, though!”

  “Really?” The first Ranger scanned their faces, and Danielle felt a frission of mana, hinting at some kind of Skill. “And after hiking up and down the hill yesterday with three bags each, you decided to come back up the hill this morning, and see if you could find some weight to carry so you could do it again?”

  Danielle nodded. “I don’t know what’s going to be in the catalog at Summer Fair, but I bet it won’t be the same kind of stuff we found in the Necessities Stores. Not to mention, on the off chance whoever snagged the last pack of fishing line ended up tossing it, it would be really nice to have it sooner than four weeks. They must’ve run out really fast – none of us found any. No hooks, either, we had to settle for sewing needles and hope we can bend ‘em right.”

  “There’s a diagram for that in the guidebook,” one of the other Rangers commented, sounding bemused.

  “Oh, really? I’ll look for it tonight,” Sadie said. “Thanks for the heads-up.”

  “Um, is it OK for us to look through that stuff, too?” Heather asked nervously, nodding to the gear on the ground.

  The Rangers looked at each other, and a subtle conversation of facial expressions and gestures and shrugs followed. After nearly a minute of it, the first Ranger finally said, “Well, if Miriam says you didn’t drop anything, then the rules about picking up what you dropped don’t apply. And I’ve never heard a rule against scavenging what other people dropped. It might be a bad idea to show it off too much, of course, but it’s not against the actual rules. Besides, I’m impressed with your grit – most Sent don’t even want to think about the hill for a month afterward.”

  “Or more!” another Ranger put in.

  “Or more,” the first Ranger agreed. “So I’ll make you a deal. We’ll just put our cleanup patrol on pause. You can take away whatever you can carry away today. Tomorrow morning, though, we’re coming back at first light, and whatever we touch is gone, even if you come too. Got it? You get one day. And for the love of sanity, don’t advertise it! I do not want to deal with that kind of fighting.”

  The girls nodded. “I propose we make it a secret of the Party,” Akari said.

  “I’ll put it to a system vote so it registers,” Heather said. A moment later, Danielle was voting “Yes” to make “Information about the SHAD Party’s deal with the Ranger anti-pollution patrol” a council secret.

  “Oh? Got a little system org going, do you?” asked Miriam.

  “Yeah, we decided to call our room group the SHAD Party – like a hunting party,” said Sadie. “The rules allow for more people to join, but for now it’s just the four of us.”

  “Right, so now we have to keep the secret, because of the Party rules,” Heather said. “So you won’t have to deal with anyone else if we can help it.”

  “Well, all right then,” said the first Ranger. “Slide that cart out from under that stuff,” she said, turning to the Ranger nearest the handcart, who grinned and gently tipped the collected gear out of the cart.

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

  “Let’s get up on the road, ladies and gentlemen,” the first Ranger continued. “We’re off road cleanup until tomorrow morning. Good luck finding what you need, ladies,” she added to the SHAD girls. The rangers rolled the cart up onto the pavement, and jogged off, leaving the four of them alone with their prizes.

  “Which direction do you think they started from?” Sadie said, watching them go.

  “Does it matter? Look at all this!” Danielle exclaimed. “It looks like some people dumped whole entire bags!” She slide-stepped down the steep embankment, and picked up a Decision Day satchel. “Look at this! It’s got everything from the tables at the dome! The fur cloak even! The lamp oil, another canteen, another tinder box!”

  “No weapons at all, though,” Sadie pointed out. “And I’m wondering if there will be different stuff if, for example, none of this is from that one spot where the guides would tell people to drop stuff before the hill got bad.”

  “Do you really want to spend time looking for another stash when they might have already brought it up here for us?” Heather asked dubiously. “There’s already way too much here for just one trip. We’re going to have to be super picky and, well, what time is it Danielle?”

  Danielle looked at her watch. “Ten am.”

  “That early??” Heather exclaimed.

  “Well, we got up at 5:30, remember? And I think the discussion after breakfast was a lot shorter than they expected and, yeah, it took us almost two hours to get out here, but that’s because we were wandering all over the ruin and picking tomatoes and mint and vines. We can probably make at least,” she paused doing some quick mental calculations. “I think at least four trips if we actually focus on it.”

  “We definitely want to do the sneaking in and out the back side of the building thing, though, if we’re going to make four trips with as much as we can carry,” Akari said.

  “Agreed, but seriously, look at all this. There are more tents here. There’s a proper hammer to help bend fishhooks! There are a whole bunch more bottles of lamp oil, that’s huge right there.” Danielle pointed to the more obvious treasures as she spoke.

  “No one’s arguing about whether we should take what we can,” Sadie said. “You guys go ahead and start sorting out what we want, OK? I’m just going to take a quick jog down the hill, and see if there’s another pile or not, and if so, whether it’s got a different mix of stuff. Or anything that I can’t bear to leave. I agree there’s no need to make Heather do it, or Danielle and her blisters, but I can make it quick and come right back.”

  “All right, if you’re sure,” Akari said. “But stay on the road until you get to that spot, and keep your head in the here and now – listen to what’s around you, look where you’re going, all that good stuff, all right? Be safe.”

  “Right. I promise,” Sadie said seriously. “And seriously, you guys start organizing stuff here into packs for each of us while I’m gone. If there are enough bags in there – and I think there probably are, just from first glance – we won’t even have to bring back empty bags for the next trip. We can run with no weight at all coming out, grab new bags, and hike straight back. If we’re real efficient, we might even manage five trips.”

  With that, Sadie got back up on the pavement and jogged down the east side of the hill. Danielle shrugged and turned back to the pile. “All right, so here’s what I’m thinking. We prioritize anything with quartz on it, because eventually people with mana enhancement Skills are going to need stuff to practice on. Any kind of food at all – unless it’s already spoiled by being left on the ground overnight – any tools, lamp oil and batteries, consumables generally. You get what I’m saying?”

  “I get it,” Heather said. “And let’s not forget to seriously look for fishing line!”

  Danielle and Akari laughed. “Definitely fishing line,” Akari agreed, and the three of them got to work.

  Heather started by taking all of the Decision Day satchels and lining them up on one side of the hollow, where she knelt down and started checking through them to see what was still inside. Danielle started gathering a motley collection of other bags of various kinds on the other side, while Akari sorted the loose items into category piles in the middle.

  Sadie’s quick jaunt ended up taking a bit more than half an hour before she came back up the hill, predictably quite a bit slower than she had gone down it.

  “Well, you were right,” she said. “I found the place, and there wasn’t so much as a broken rubber band down there – they must have started at the bottom, or maybe even all the way back at the gate, and loaded everything they found into the cart as they went along. I think the whole hill’s already clean, all the way up to here.”

  “We got really close to missing out on this altogether, then,” Heather said soberly. “There wasn’t much to find on the other side of the hill, so if they’d have gotten done with this batch before we got here, we never would’ve seen them at all. The side of the road just would’ve been mysteriously clean.”

  “We got real lucky,” Sadie said. “At least, if you found anything good, we did! So what’s the score?”

  “Well, we have 42 of the leather satchels,” Heather said. “Danielle wants to take them all, but they’re a load all by themselves.”

  “They have the crystals, though,” Danielle said. “I want them to practice mana enhancement on when I get the Skill for it. I want everything else with quartz on it too, because between us, we can probably figure out a bunch of different enhancements after a while, you know?”

  “That makes sense, but it sounds like a lot. I kind of can’t believe 42 people threw away their bags like that.”

  “Well, everyone planned what was in their school bags, so I guess they felt more valuable,” Heather guessed. “Plus, we have to remember, it’s 42 out of over a thousand. So it’s only, um, 4 percent, right? I think that’s right. Anyway, they weren’t all full. We only got eight winter cloaks, and three rain cloaks, because it’s obvious how we’d use those. There are well over a hundred bottles of lamp oil, though, and even more of those crazy lamps, and almost a hundred tent sets, but only 18 tinder boxes. About 30 radios, I think.”

  “Any fishing line?” Sadie asked.

  “Not so far,” Akari said. “I did find a lot more twine and a couple coils of thin rope, a portable solar panel setup that seems like they’d have to have been cheating to get it in their gear bag in the first place, a couple pieces of jewelry, and two alarm clocks.”

  “Alarm clocks?” Sadie came down the embankment to join the other three.

  “One battery operated, and one windup, believe it or not,” Danielle said. “I want them – there is absolutely no way to tell what time it is outside when we’re in the room. I can’t believe they didn’t give us windows or peep holes or anything.”

  “I wonder if they’ve had trouble before, with Sent people breaking them, so they just gave up?” Akari speculated. “Anyway, I agree, the alarm clocks are already in Danielle’s bag to go back on the first trip.”

  “I’ve got a bunch of reusable shopping bags,” Danielle said. “The kind that you’re supposed to stuff in the little pouch in your purse when you’re not using them. A couple of school satchels that were dumped full, like the leather ones – only three of those, though. Those people must have really been ready to give up. I don’t know, I feel bad scavenging them, but it sounds like the Rangers aren’t even allowed to give stuff back to the people who drop it. I can’t help those people just by not using the stuff, right?”

  “The winter cloaks some people left here might be more important in the end,” Heather said. “Denim really isn’t good for staying warm, you know?”

  “Yeah. So anyway, I found a two-pack of pliers to go with that hammer, so those are also already packed. I pulled out a few notebooks, too, because it turns out we’ve got note taking to do, and not a lot of paper. We have a fair amount of jerky, and I’ve been sorting that all into one bag. There’s another bag of mostly junk food. It’s not exactly healthy, but it’s got a long shelf life and, you know, it’s calories in a pinch or comfort in a different kind of pinch. Oh, and there’s two of those cannisters of salt I didn’t think we’d need, and a few of those pre-loaded salt, pepper, and herb shaker sets! So that’s another whole bag. Part of me thought there’d be more, but even with 1200 people, not too many felt like tossing food, which makes sense. I’ve been passing batteries to Heather to stuff into the leather bags, because we did get a lot of those. They’re heavy, so we want to spread them out. I also found one good bracelet that matches mine,” Danielle gestured to her left arm, “and a lot of office supply type stuff that I’m not sure about.”

  “Just before you got here, though, I pulled these out of a bag.” Danielle held up a shrink-wrapped white box. “I think someone stole these from under the jewelry counter of one of the Necessities Stores, because it’s a whole unopened commercial display box of cubic zirconia rings in different colors.”

  Heather whistled. “Well there’s your wish for crystals to practice enhancing on!”

  Danielle nodded. “I don’t know what we have to do to attach the ring crystals to other things, or how you enhance rings, or anything. What I do know is, there are three of these. And the label says, “R’bow cu zirc, rings, mens/womens/sets, 1 gross.”

  “Well, that’s first-load material for sure,” Akari said. “Wow.”

  “We’ll be making use of the alarm clocks sooner,” Sadie said. “Still an incredible find, though.”

  “No kidding,” Heather said. “I wonder what the Rangers would think about us scavenging this stuff that probably wasn’t supposed to be in anyone’s bags at all, though?”

  “I’m not leaving the solar panel behind for what-if,” Akari said fiercely.

  “No, of course not. I just wonder,” Heather said.

  “I still think it’s small enough that it might have been in the camping section of a different Necessities Store,” Danielle said. “Anyway, help us finish sorting, Sadie.”

  “Sure,” Sadie agreed. “I’ll help Akari with the loose stuff.”

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