“I get it,” Ranger Juliette told Heather, sliding another entire Decision Day satchel into her own satchel. Danielle wondered how high she would have to get her new Skill before she could make a satchel that big inside. Tins of hard tack followed it, then tubes of pemmican. Ranger Richard was sorting something while she pulled out the obviously generic gear. “I was Sent once myself, and I won’t lie, I saw way too many of my classmates go out this way. I’ve been Ranger to a couple of rounds of Sent too. I’m older than I look – high Body will do that. I’m more used to this than is really healthy. You’re not, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I love the fact that you’re still willing to help just because it’s right! Just, take my advice, and make sure people pay you for your services, starting right away. Otherwise, they’ll end up taking advantage of you, and that can get really bad too.”
The Rangers finished their sorting, and another school satchel went into Ranger Juliette’s boti bag. Ranger Richard brought a basketball-team-themed reusable shopping bag over to the counter and set it down next to Arny’s diary.
“Don’t worry, I’ll pay you back like I said,” Tom promised. “It was, uh, five for your stash and five for the medic’s token and an extra for fifteen total, right?”
“The stash was a ten-point token,” Heather corrected. “And I spent five points of my own mana besides the two Skill activations, so that plus Medic Falconer’s token makes twenty plus the extra five, twenty five in total.”
“Oh. Ouch. Well, it’ll take all week to make that. Uh, how do you even make a ten point token?” Tom asked.
“There’s a special Trait for it,” Heather said. “I traded fives to someone with the Trait, so my stash token could be bigger. Don’t worry about that, though, you can pay it back as five fives.”
“You can have one day off to rebuild your mana before you start, too,” Danielle put in. “Just in case you need an emergency Skill activation during the week.”
“OK. Um, do you want to just come back and knock on my door in six or seven days, then?” Tom said. “I mean, you know where I am, heh.”
“That works for me,” Heather said. “No offense, but I’m not sure how I feel about too many people figuring out where to find me.”
“Cool. I’m just as glad not to be the one walking around the Rooms with 25 mana in tokens,” Tom said. “It may not be huge compared to a level or a Class or whatever, but it’s still a lot of tokens to carry around while everyone’s all – ” he trailed off. “Well, like that,” he said, gesturing to Arny’s body. “Uh, hostile I mean, not dead!” he hastily clarified.
“We get it, believe me,” Danielle said.
“Hence my concern about people wanting to come find me,” Heather added.
“And also hence the reason why I’m walking you home, while Richard calls the cleanup crew and keeps Tom company,” Ranger Juliette said. She slid an entire Decision Day staff into her boti bag, then looked around for something else.
“Oh, if you’re looking for Harv’s staff, it’s by the door with mine,” Tom said. “Don’t forget their swords, too. Oh, and Arny’s bow. I don’t think Harv took a bow, though.”
“I’ve got the bow,” Ranger Juliette assured him. “I don’t see either sword, though.”
“One’s under Tom’s bed, and the other one’s under Harv,” Ranger Richard said grimly.
“Ooh. Uh, let’s just take the one for now?” Ranger Juliette suggested.
“That’s fine,” Danielle said. “Of all the things we might take, the swords are the ones I can least easily think of ways to use, considering we already have our own. You can give the extra one back to the Sending Authority for all I care.”
“Now you’re talking sense,” Heather muttered.
Ranger Juliette nodded, and crouched down to slide the sword out from under the bed. “You’re sure this isn’t yours?” she asked Tom.
“I put his under the counter when the Healer got here,” Richard reminded her.
“Oh, right. OK, and which of these is yours?” she asked, walking to the door and pointing to the staves leaning in the odd alcove that all rooms seemed to have opposite the bathrooms.
“Mine’s kind of on top?” Tom said.
“Got it,” the Ranger said, tilting back the staff that was leaning over the other one, and putting the staff that was ‘underneath’ into her boti bag.
“That’s so weird to watch,” Tom said.
“I think that’s everything. Let’s head out, girls,” Ranger Juliette said.
Danielle and Heather followed her out the door. It had barely closed behind them when Danielle heard the crackle of a radio, and Ranger Richard’s voice coming over it.
“Ranger Rick updating on the emergency call to Camp Constanza building one,” he said. “Two Sent dead, fortunately including the instigator of the incident. Survivor is fully healed thanks to Sent Healer Orellana. General equipment and supply belonging to the dead were surrendered to Healer Orellana and Medic Falconer, both of 6024, in payment for their efforts – there’s a 25-point mana debt outstanding, follow-up on that is set for one week. Full incident report forthcoming. Please send cleanup specialists to 1019, we’ve got two bodies and way too much blood.”
“Base One acknowledges. Cleanup specialist is en route with the Healer – you did warn us about the blood issue ahead of time,” came back the reply. Ranger Juliette gestured to them to start walking, and they headed for the nearest stairs and came up on the walkway near the road between the pairs of buildings.
A third voice came on, saying “We’re actually in sight of the Rooms now. Do we need to delay a little to avoid setting people off from the pure irony?”
“Nah, keep coming,” Ranger Richard’s voice came back. “We’ve already settled payments, cleaned out footlockers, and sent the Healer and Medic home. You’re not just barely too late, you’re solid, normal, too late. And also, too late just like we all predicted.”
“Well then why am I here?” The third voice asked in exasperation.
“Ah, well, the one the medic was working on might’ve had a chance, but he decided to start the fight back up, with us in the room,” Ranger Richard explained. “I think the Medic that was trying to stabilize him when he lost his head got a Deadly Avenger for her trouble. It was more of a defense of the innocent thing than a vengeance thing, but you know. He had Outlaw active, and he wasn’t technically attacking her – although I guess he did shove her pretty hard earlier in the fight, maybe with a Skill, so maybe it’ll be Deadly Defender after all? Anyway. Yeah. That death wasn’t strictly a time problem.”
Danielle stopped in her tracks and brought up her System. Sure enough, there was a Deadly Defender tag, staring her in the face, drawing her attention away from everything else.
“Oh, no,” she said. “I didn’t even think of that. Oh, no.”
“Hey, it’s OK,” Ranger Juliette told her softly. “You did what you had to. I’m sorry I didn’t keep track of the battlefield better, so you wouldn’t have to, but given the situation we had at that moment, you did the best you could. You weren’t trying to kill, I know that, but he was. He got himself into a bad situation by trying to do the wrong thing; and he took a bad fall when you did the right thing. It’s as much his fault as yours.”
“R-right. Yes. I, I agree, I did the right thing,” Danielle said. “The rightest thing I could, every moment I was in there, I did. I just,” she paused and swallowed. “I killed someone. I don’t think it quite – I don’t know, you’d think the mana burst would be when it hit me, but somehow it wasn’t and seeing the tag, that’s when it hit.”
“Which tag did it come up as?” Ranger Juliette asked quietly.
“Defender,” Danielle said. “Your partner’s right, when he hit me, there was supposed to be a Skill in that. It probably counted as a hostile Skill.”
“Plus he hit you!” Heather exclaimed. “With a weapon! With that weapon!” She pointed to the sword, still out in Ranger Juliette’s hand.
“R-right, and that,” Danielle stuttered.
“Speaking of, let’s clean this off a little,” Ranger Juliette said. She stepped aside to the grassy area and thrust the sword into the ground, then pulled it out, and wiped both sides of the blade on the grass. “There,” she said, “Not perfect but much better.”
“We’ll have to let Sadie practice crafting a scabbard for it,” Heather said. “The old one was – I don’t want something that’s soaked in that much blood.”
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“Yeah, I noticed that too,” Ranger Juliette said. She glanced down the road toward the ruined town.
It was clearly evening, but the sun wasn’t quite down yet. It was almost jarring, coming back out into the sunny evening, long shadows notwithstanding; the sky was still blue overhead. Down the road, three more Rangers were coming, jogging along with an empty cart like the one the SHAD Party girls had seen with the Rangers’ clean-up party when they went scavenging. Two Rangers had the pull handles, while the one in the middle was walking a bit ahead with a bicycle; she waved at Ranger Juliette. Juliette waved back.
“That’s our Healer,” she told Heather and Danielle. “Let’s wait a minute, and she can join us on the walk back to your room, while the cleanup crew does their thing. You can tell each other about what you got from the mana bursts while we wait.”
Danielle looked at Heather. “Oh, did you get something after all?” she asked.
“Um, well, yeah. I got 20 mana and a Skill from each burst,” Heather admitted. “Focus and Resist Blisters. And when he went down and I grabbed my staff, I got a notification that a mana crystal in my possession had gained an enhancement. I haven’t read the details yet.”
“Well, if we’re waiting, you can go ahead and read yours and I’ll read mine,” Danielle offered.
Heather nodded and focused on her System interface. Danielle likewise brought up her recent notifications and chose the first option to check on mana crystal details.
“You have very subtle System tells,” Ranger Juliette commented.
“Who, me?” Danielle said. “I, um. I’ve actually worked hard on trying to make the System respond to thoughts, or at least, really subtle cues. It started when my fifth-grade roommate got all jealous of my early Youth level and decided to keep me from ever using my Skills by throwing stuff at me whenever I seemed to be looking at my System; but it’s also because everyone says the System can’t read your mind, but then there are lore Skills that obviously do interface with your mind, and the written Interface has been proven not to be projecting actual light, so if it’s not a psychic thing it’s at least a nerves level thing, right? Anyway. Let me read?”
“Sure, sorry,” the Ranger said.
“Hold this a sec,” Heather interrupted, handing Danielle her staff. “Um, but lightly. I want to see if I can make this work.”
“Make what work?” Danielle asked in confusion, taking the staff. A moment later, though, it started tugging against her hand, and when she opened her grip, it flew back to Heather.
“It’s a Returning Enhancement!” Heather said. “That’s so cool! I – I totally get why that’s what I, um, got. I wanted my staff so bad when they were fighting, but I was afraid to reach over for it. I never should have left it against the counter like that, but I didn’t want it in the way while I was healing.”
“You get that with mana bursts,” Ranger Juliette said with a nod. “When you’re not involved in the fight at all, your System works even harder to shield you, which lowers your risk of mutation but also keeps you from using it to grow. The mana still has to go somewhere, though. This time, most of it went to the people that were actually fighting, including Tom since he apparently gave Arny that gut wound; but I got ten percent of the numbered mana even though I was strictly defending, and I don’t doubt that every enhancement-capable crystal in the room got a smidge. It takes an active System to shape the mana on the crystal, though; otherwise it just stores plain mana (which has its uses, admittedly, but not so much for you guys) or else releases it, like a barrel with the spigot left open.”
“Huh. Could you defend from mutations by carrying around a lot of crystals, then?” Heather asked.
“Eh, it can help. A lot of Outsiders think it can, anyway. They say empty crystals that just bleed off the mana over time are a good way of taking the edge off of big bursts. Having a structure to anchor lets the crystal absorb more, though, and mana doesn’t form enhancement structures unless the crystal gets associated with a living thing and the System has an idea what that living thing wants or needs. That’s why you wear your crystal item, even if it ended up being something kinda stupid, you hear me? You need to have it on you and let your System get a structure worked into it, and then it’ll absorb mana from you to activate that structure.”
“From us?” Danielle asked. “Not just the mana around us?”
“Nope, only from System users,” Ranger Juliette confirmed. “Well, and mana bursts, obviously – don’t think about that one too hard. The point is, if you put jewels on a dog collar, they can enhance, but only if you actually keep it on the dog, because it’s the dog’s System that does it. A jeweled necklace in a jewelry box will never enhance; you have to wear it a lot of hours, or during a mana burst. The Healer here probably got her hand on her staff just in time, honestly; mana bursts feel like they take forever to go through you, but they go through the air like a shockwave – fast and invisible, except for the results. If she hadn’t had the staff in hand by the time that second shockwave hit her, the mana wouldn’t have had the structure to latch onto.”
“Weird. Is it actually a part of me now, rather than the staff?” Heather asked.
“No, now that it’s activated, it’s actually part of the crystal,” Ranger Juliette corrected. “If you pried the stone out from whichever end of your staff it was, you could set it on a different staff and it would enhance the new staff. Depending on how specific the structure is, it might even work on other weapons. The structure still comes from you, though – even enhancements that get the same name can be just slightly different, depending on who they came from. Skill-generated enhancements are a little more uniform, but you can still see variations. It’s kind of cool how different people’s understandings of different enhancements can result in versions that work just a little bit different.”
By this time the Rangers with the cart had almost reached them. “Hey, Juliette,” the lead Ranger called. “What’s the plan?”
“Richard’s inside keeping the survivor company while they wait for cleanup,” Juliette called back. “I’m doing Healer debrief. You care to join me?”
The Rangers at the cart conferred a moment, then the two that were pulling it turned off the road and started lining it up how they wanted, right next to the stairs. The first woman parked her bicycle next to the cart, then came over and joined the trio in the road. “Thank you so much, Juliette, I can’t tell you how much I hate it when Healer calls turn into corpse patrols.”
“I know,” Ranger Juliette said with a nod. “You should probably stop in before you leave and hit the survivor with a good Disinfect, I don’t think healer Oral – uh, blast it. Say your name for me one more time?”
“Orellana,” Heather said.
“Right, healer Orellana here doesn’t seem to have picked that for one of her level 1 Skills. I saw Align Wounds and Close Wounds both used, and used well at that, but that’s two of two.” Ranger Juliette shrugged. “Nothing for it, you know?”
“Mana-free disinfectants are a thing,” the other Ranger said, and turned to Heather. “I know it’s easy to get overwhelmed in an emergency, and out here you might not always have a lot of supplies to work with, but try to keep it in mind in the future. Well, and keep an eye out for the Skill when next you get the chance. It is tier 1, so you can save up tokens for it if you have it unlocked. Which you should.”
“I’ll keep that in mind, but I’m a long way from having that many tokens,” Heather said.
“You’ll be a quarter of the way there when Tom pays you back,” Ranger Juliette said encouragingly. “Let’s walk – we’ll go the long way around building two so we have an extra minute or three, but it’ll be harder to eavesdrop.”
“OK, but I can’t keep the whole twenty five,” Heather objected, though she and Danielle started walking with the two Rangers. “Five of that is Danielle’s, and another ten belongs to the SHAD Party.”
“The what now?” asked the new Ranger.
“It’s a System org we made to help with paranoia reduction and stuff,” Danielle explained. “It comes from the initials of the girls in our room.”
“Oh, sure, you get a lot of those in school-draft Sending groups,” the other Ranger said with a nod of understanding. “Not so much with volunteers, but volunteer groups are different in so many ways it almost doesn’t make sense to compare them.”
“I didn’t even know Sent could be volunteers,” Heather said.
“Oh, yeah, much smaller groups, no horrified families that can’t believe it happened to them – way less drama,” the other Ranger said. “They don’t make the news the way school drafts do.”
“And they get more than three days’ notice, so they do their research in advance, get out to the campgrounds and practice things before they turn in their application, and generally come with all kinds of preparation that school kids don’t get,” Ranger Juliette added. “Anyway, we were talking about you two. They just went through two back-to-back mana bursts, Flo.”
“Oh, wow. Did you get a chance to use a blooding pin?” Ranger Flo asked. “Or, wait. You just came out this weekend. Do you even have a blooding pin yet?”
“Ranger Juliette lent me hers to work on the, um, the guy that He- Healer Orellana here wasn’t working on,” Danielle said. “She didn’t exactly explain how it was supposed to work in advance, though, she just told us to use it.”
“Juliette!” Ranger Flo said angrily. “That is not something a person should find out the hard way!”
“Well, no, I guess not,” Ranger Juliette admitted. “Sorry about that part. In my defense, though, I had already had a few words with the instigator of the whole deadly fight before I went out to find a Healer, and I knew how he was likely to react if he caught on to what it was for. Medic Falcon here – “
“Falconer. Like the bird handler, not the bird,” Danielle interrupted.
“ – right, Medic Falconer was already working on a hostile patient who was about to pick up Outlaw at any moment. I didn’t think it’d be a great idea to rub his nose in the fact that I was promising his mana to someone who’d make better use of it,” Juliette finished.
“Yeesh. But then he decided to start the fight back up as soon as he was Healed enough to do it?” Ranger Flo asked.
“Hah! He didn’t wait that long,” Ranger Juliette said, sounding faintly bitter. “I tried to get Healer Orelllllana – did I get it right that time? – to use the pin on the one who was bleeding out, before the mad boy could level up and lose it, but then he went and asked what the deal with it was, and, well, I’m partnered with Richard today.”
“Oof. He’s great at his specialties, but tact is not one of them,” Ranger Flo said.
“Right. So there was Healer Orellana, pushing through some kind of mana resistance Trait I think?” Ranger Juliette paused and looked to Heather, who nodded, “Right, and there was Medic Falconer, trying to torso-wrap a gut wound that would’ve taken you about four Skill activations and half your mana to heal; and she isn’t even done, and the guy starts trying to get up and attack me and the Healer and her patient. First try, he gets jerked back by the bandage. Second try, he’s high on unintegrated mana, and he tries to knock the medic out of the fight first thing – blunt attack, so even he must have realized he still needed her to finish up, or re-bandage him after or something, but he fought me out of position a bit and turned to go for the Healer, and fwack!” She sliced her hand sideways through the air, imitating Danielle’s staff. “The Medic says no, and down he goes!”
“You tackled him?” Flo said, raising her eyebrows at Danielle.
“I hit his ankles with my staff,” Danielle explained. “I was still on the floor from when he knocked me down, so I was trying to knock him down too, but he hit his head.”
“Oh, wow. So you got the killing-stroke share of the fight mana, and a tag you probably didn’t really want, on top of your efforts wasted,” Ranger Flo said thoughtfully. “That’ll probably haunt you for a while – the first one always does. Did you get anything good out of the mana burst, though?”
“Well, I got a Skill called Combat Medic,” Danielle said in an ironic tone.
Both Rangers stopped in their tracks and turned to stare at her in astonishment. “Really? That’s the exact title – Skill: Combat Medic??” Ranger Flo asked.
will get Heather's name right when she writes up her incident report. Not because she's finally going to remember it, but because Ranger Miriam will remind her of their room number and she'll look it up!
https://discord.gg/u5dtzpShv2
